Amazon CEO Tells Employees To Return To Office Five Days a Week 138
Amazon is instructing corporate staffers to spend five days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo on Monday. From a report: The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon's earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy. Corporate employees will be expected to be in the office five days a week "outside of extenuating circumstances" or unless they've been granted an exception by their organization's S-team leader, Jassy said, referring to the close-knit group of executives that report to Amazon's CEO.
"Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward -- our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances," Jassy said. Amazon also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to "remove layers and flatten organizations," Jassy said. Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said. Individual contributors refers to employees who typically don't manage other staffers. It's unclear if the change will result in the elimination of some manager positions.
"Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward -- our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances," Jassy said. Amazon also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to "remove layers and flatten organizations," Jassy said. Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said. Individual contributors refers to employees who typically don't manage other staffers. It's unclear if the change will result in the elimination of some manager positions.
So brave (Score:1, Insightful)
It already sucked working FOR Amazon, and its not like that stock will see doubling in value anytime soon.. now you tell me I'll have to go to office and listen to your stupid ideas in person?
Good luck brosef
Re: So brave (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should we live like that? (Score:3, Insightful)
When companies do something anti-social there's no good reason to let them do it. We've become a bunch of little pussies. Our granddads wouldn't put up with this shit, they'd strike, and when the strikebreakers brought out weapons they'd fight back.
We just bow our heads and say "Please sir may I have another".
Re:Why should we live like that? (Score:5, Insightful)
How you can tell which company is run by idiots.
"Can I work exclusively from home?" If Yes, the people running the company are health/environment conscious. If No, the people running the company are power-mad imbeciles.
There is no reason to not work from home if there is no physical reason why your presence is required. If you work in the warehouse, then logically you can't do that remotely unless there are telepresence robots that allow for that. But people who go to the office just to sit on a computer? They can do that at home.
It's funny how these companies think that they can outsource to foreign countries where job conditions are worse and pay less, yet won't allow their company-employed staff do the same.
There's only two good arguments to not work from home:
- Military -
and
- Intelligence -
The common thing between those is secrecy. You can not have people "working from home" when things need to be secured. Amazon doesn't have any secrets that need protecting that the Chinese can't rip off from their own outsourcing. If you want to cancel all work-from-home, start by canceling all outsourcing.
They're not necessarily idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, it might seem counter productive to flood the labor market with cheap, unskilled labor and then put those people in positions that require a lot of skill and knowledge. We deal with the resulting mess every day in the form of barely functional software cobbled together by cheap H1-Bs.
But if you stop thinking about selling a product and start thinking about making overall margins on
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The problem with your conspiracy theory is that it requires smart, selfish people to act against their own interests for the collective good of fellow capitalists. Capitalism doesn't work that way.
If I run a company with a thousand employees and rent an office building and require them to come there five days per week, that will cost me a lot of money while having an infinitesimal effect on the national real estate market.
It would make no sense for me to do that unless I honestly believed that getting peopl
Re:They're not necessarily idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
"The problem with your conspiracy theory"
The fact of groups like Blackstone owning masses of office space quickly losing value, and trying to pull back business into major cities to back their investment, is not a conspiracy theory. We've been watching nearly a decade of this activity. San Francisco was pushing Twitter to bring its employees back to office only a few years ago.
The will of the ultra wealthy to devalue the worker and turn them into precariets (while threatening them with the gnashing jaws of destitution and homelessness just off-screen) is not just a conspiracy theory, it is capitalism working as intended.
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Congratulations, you just discovered solidarity (Score:2)
The 1% have class solidarity. This is why Elon Musk can commit securities fraud and the SEC backs down but Liz Holmes, who robbed rich people and made a fool of the CEO of Walgreens, is in jail.
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But you rarely see that type of response because, apparentl
Re:Why should we live like that? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no reason to not work from home if there is no physical reason why your presence is required.
I kind of disagree. There have been projects that I've worked on over the years in which working remotely would have massively slowed us down, because we were doing whiteboarding and designing new data structures and actively planning the direction of the project. That said, although there may be some teams that do a lot of this, most teams do not. In my entire 25-year career, I've had exactly two periods in which I was doing that sort of work. The first period lasted two weeks. The second period lasted probably three or four. Doing the math, that means that less than one half of one percent of my workweeks truly benefitted from being in the office.
The disconnect here between employees and employers is that in the minds of the C-suite, that sort of work is what their engineers spend 99.5% of their time doing, whereas in reality, 99.5% of employee time is spent doing solitary coding and designing code that only a single programmer at any given time is ever going to touch, with only brief periods of transition as one person leaves and another person takes over, if you're lucky enough to have an overlap at all.
From the employer's perspective, having employees in the office costs them nothing, because their real estate is a sunk cost, and the cost of the commute is borne by the employee. From the employee's perspective, if it isn't important enough for an employer to pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room, then it isn't actually important enough for the employee to be in the office. The distance between those perspectives is why companies like Amazon already have a hard time retaining the best employees [forbes.com], and that's only going to get worse over time with nonsense like this.
Meanwhile, every day I spend in the office (not at Amazon) is a day in which I get less done than when I'm at home. I average almost an entire extra hour of extra meetings on in-office days when compared with work-from-home days, and about two extra hours meetings compared with the period when we were all working remotely. So now we spend more time appearing to get work done and less time actually getting work done, and that's before you factor in the lost time from commuting. These sorts of policies benefit no one. And if Amazon's execs want to know why I've been completely ignoring their recruiters begging me to consider working there over the past decade, they need only look in the mirror. BTW, I suspect that my mom would like to politely ask you to stop emailing her with job offers for me, too.
So when a company's leadership tells you that tech employees need to be in the office five days per week, it proves beyond all doubt that they are completely out of touch with their employees, and that they have no clue what their employees are actually doing, much less what their employees' needs are or how those employees work best. These companies are going to be in trouble in the medium to long term, and possibly in the short term.
Good companies hire good managers and trust their managers to make the decisions that are best for the company. Companies that dictate in-office-day policies from on high like an elementary school principal tend to be the sorts of companies that would no longer even exist were it not for momentum, and are ripe for disruption. I would not want to be holding a lot of AMZN right now. Just saying.
I think you're overstating the benefits (Score:2)
Like the old Dilbert comic what you don't remember is the two hours spent in the shower designing circuits in your head.
Meetings are memorable but surprisingly little actual work gets done. What I find meetings most useful for is when two or more people are at an impasse and you can get them together in the same place a
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How you can tell which company is run by idiots.
"Can I work exclusively from home?" If Yes, the people running the company are health/environment conscious. If No, the people running the company are power-mad imbeciles.
Pretty much this. Of course, there are a lot of idiots running companies.
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There is no reason to not work from home if there is no physical reason why your presence is required.
There is one reason, which is at the core of such decisions as admitted by some CEOs over the last two years.
CEOs don't really care about where employees work from, as long as they do the job. But they do care if they want to fire 10% or more of their workforce, and there's a clever way to convince the required number to fire themselves, thus avoiding the need to pay them all those severance packages.
This is what "return to office" is all about.
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More people in your office makes it easier for me to break into your office.
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Our grandads wouldn't have put up with having to come into the office?
I'd sure like to know where your grandad worked!
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*Everyone's* lives is worse when WfH is eliminated. We have worse air quality, gas is more expensive and we get stuck in worse traffic jams. When companies do something anti-social there's no good reason to let them do it. We've become a bunch of little pussies. Our granddads wouldn't put up with this shit, they'd strike, and when the strikebreakers brought out weapons they'd fight back. We just bow our heads and say "Please sir may I have another".
Would you prefer a 20% loss in your 401k instead?
What, you think no company investment strategy includes propping up the multi-trillion dollar real commercial real estate market? Think again. You “own” more of that work building than you assume.
As much as we can’t stand the corrupt market of overpriced dirt we call commercial real estate (including the insane taxes), everyone would suffer if that market crashed. It’s the entire reason why all of your go-green complaints, get ignor
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Would you prefer a 20% loss in your 401k instead?
What, you think no company investment strategy includes propping up the multi-trillion dollar real commercial real estate market? Think again. You “own” more of that work building than you assume.
The SEC has a term for that: market manipulation. If companies think that real estate is going to go down, they have a fiduciary duty to sell their holdings in those companies and buy other stocks, as does your 401k fund manager.
Now if you mean that they're trying to prop up their investment in properties and not lose money on land that they have over-purchased, that might be true, but realistically, it costs them about as much for you to be in the office five days per week as three, and that doesn't chang
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Indeed. Well said. You obviously got down-modded by the pussies you describe, which just makes your point stronger.
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Working from home is "blatantly socialist"?
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Working from home is "blatantly socialist"?
Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.
When I work from home, I use my own computer, keyboard, mouse, and router.
These are owned by me, not collectively by all the employees. So, no, WFH is not socialist.
In fact, it's less socialist than working in an office since commuting requires using public roads and transportation facilities, which are socialist.
Re:Why should we live like that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying your company cannot tell you to work where they want you to work is a socialist demand.
Nope. Choosing where and how you want to work is a free market demand. If no capitalist will give you what you want, then start your own business.
Under socialism, you work where and how the central planning committee tells you.
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Demanding that you can work where you want irrespective of what the company that hired/pays you is is a demand they don't owe you. Saying your company cannot tell you to work where they want you to work is a socialist demand.
I work from home when I want to because my company allows it not because they have no right to dictate my work environment. Flipping that sentiment is a socialist demand.
Ridiculous argument! An employer and employee can negotiate the terms of the work and the remuneration. If the employer doesn't agree to the employee's demands, the employee can find a better place to work (and vice versa). That's capitalism.
Imagine if you'd said "I get paid a salary because my company allows it not because they have no right to treat me as slave labor. Flipping that sentiment is a socialist demand." Clearly daft, right?
Re: Why should we live like that? (Score:2)
Making demands of your company is not inherently socialist. The problem is that you alone have very little bargaining power.
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And since when is reducing cost and increasing efficiency "socialist"? These are _capitalist_ core values.
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Nahh, there are even things prostitutes won't do for money.
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They can in the US. In many other countries an employer cannot change the terms of employment unilaterally. So if you applied to a hybrid job, the employer cannot magically change that.
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Yep. The pathetic thing in the US is how many people are not only fine with wage-slavery, they defend and demand it.
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Where is the entitlement in the OPs post? He just said good luck getting him to work from the office. That's not entitlement, it's a red line condition of the terms of his employment. Having the self respect to quit and find another job that suits your needs doesn't make him entitled. Privileged maybe, but not entitled.
Re: So brave (Score:2)
It depends on the skill set. If the employee has a highly sought after set of skills and the experience to back it up, then the entitlement is justified because that paycheck is not exclusively available from Amazon.
If I were working for Amazon as my current role and that memo crossed my desk, I would be tossing my keycard on my desk and leaving with zero notice and be re-employed elsewhere within a matter of weeks. Plenty of other opportunities with more sensible companies not run by micromanaging tools wh
Re: So brave (Score:2)
A bit short sighted, isn't it?
"If the factory is writing the check, they can tell you how many hours to work. You can quit otherwise."
"If the mine is writing the check, they can tell you whether they'll pay for a helment. You can quit otherwise."
"If the company is writing the check, they can tell you whether you have a weekend or not. Yoh can quit otherwise." ...we've killed people that went too far on the "if writing the check" principle. Rightfully so. And enough times to establish by now that this isn't
Re: So brave (Score:2)
Americans love our kings.
Re: EXACTLY (Score:2)
That is right. Be greatful they hired you. Never negotiate with an employer. Just lick the boot and kiss the ring of your betters. You are not good enough to work from home or you would be an employer.
Their bat. Their ball. Their rules. (Score:2, Insightful)
Do I think they're right? No. Are they doing something wrong? Yes. I, personally, would welco
Re:Their bat. Their ball. Their rules. (Score:4, Insightful)
'Unless they promised that WFH would always be an option'
When does persistent expectation become a bankable promise? If WFH has proved to be a totally viable feature for a specific team within Amazon, then the imposition of this ruling from on high is a perfect example of a failure to trust lower tiers of management.
From the employee's point of view, having this change of policy enforced for apparently ideological reasons is also a vote of no confidence in them as well as in their supervisors. Unfortunately because it's become a matter of faith, any attempt to assess the impact of the decision won't be particularly welcome; all we can hope is that all the junior managers express their opinion clearly to their supervisors all the way up. Well - one's allowed to dream...
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If the employees who work there want to WFH, they can start a union so their demands are taken seriously by management.
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Agreed. We had some WFH dweebs at my "large computer company" that used to call me up and ask me to do their job because they were at home on their "working from home" day. F*ck 'em.
So, a silent layoff (Score:5, Insightful)
If they're telling you they're also reducing headcount at the same time, it's clear that return to office is a cost saving measure, not to improve efficiency. They want people to quit and they don't want to invest in a remote work strategy.
Just another reason why you should not work at Amazon. Low pay, shit work, and now also spend a good chunk of your life commuting and have less flexibility. Coolcoolcool.
Re:So, a silent layoff (Score:4, Insightful)
It's most certainly not sh&t work or sh^t pay at Amazon corporate. For that, the company is recruiting from the same pool that Google, Microsoft and Apple are going after for top-end management and technical track positions.
And, if they want to demand 5day/week in-person, that's their right. They might be missing out on some high quality people, but that's their choice. I would bet that they'll be quietly approving remote work pretty frequently, on an as-needed basis.
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>and most of the tech industry.
Do you have any facts to back that statement up?
Re:So, a silent layoff (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have any facts to back that statement up?
Remote work statistics [b2breviews.com]
In 2019, about 5% of employees were fully remote.
In 2020, it leapt to 46% because of Covid.
By 2022, it had fallen to 30%.
It is now about 20% and declining.
Women are more likely to work remotely.
Low-income people are less likely to work remotely.
Asians are most likely to work remotely. Hispanics are the least likely.
Remote work is most common in northern California, the PNW, and the northeast corridor. It is least common in the Southeast.
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This is a return to the norm at Amazon and most of the tech industry.
In my 25 years working in the tech industry in the northeast, the only time 100% WFH wasn't an option for me was when I was working in the defense industry. And even then I could have been 80% WFH if I wanted to.
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This is their corporate office, not one of their fulfillment centers. That makes a BIG difference. And, if they want to demand 5day/week in-person, that's their right. They might be missing out on some high quality people, but that's their choice. I would bet that they'll be quietly approving remote work pretty frequently, on an as-needed basis.
It's a different world as you note. But if a person is planning on going anywhere in a company, never coming to an office isn't the way to do it.
If a person is interested in being something other than a programmer, it's pretty difficult to move into management if they consider their office to be in their bedroom or basement.
If I might a somewhat similar situation. We hired some people in the same job description as me in the job I retired from. But they refused to do much of the work I did. They would
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For that, the company is recruiting from the same pool that Google, Microsoft and Apple are going after for top-end management and technical track positions.
It may speak to the bias of nerds on this site, but not every position at Google, Microsoft, or Apple are top tier tech geniuses. Microsoft has 228000 employees (no I didn't misplace a zero) there's plenty of them who are admin / assistants / one of those made up jobs like "agility coach".
Re: So, a silent layoff (Score:2)
You can say shit on Slashdot.
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If they're telling you they're also reducing headcount at the same time, it's clear that return to office is a cost saving measure, not to improve efficiency. They want people to quit and they don't want to invest in a remote work strategy.
I've long said there's benefits to being in the office, but I completely agree here.
For the networking effect I think 3 days a week is plenty. I'd even expect a bit of a productivity boost as you could do your teamwork stuff at the office then WFH on the stuff where you don't want to be disturbed.
Going full-time in-office for the Corporate employees (management? marketing? IT? software?) is basically a "get some folks to quit without giving them severance" move.
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So...while I can believe some jobs might benefit from in person interaction....I've found from my past 17+ years working remotely in VERY large IT projects, long term projects.....that I've never seen working re
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On other hand, this could be an opportunity to wait for voluntary redundancy options. From this statement, an April cull is inevitable.
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When you sell your soul to the devil, eventually the devil wants to collect.
More like Jeff Peezos (Score:2)
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What island did he send his communique from? (Score:2)
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I'll have you know that Andy Jassy commutes daily from his private island to the Amazon corporate offices, taking a solid gold reproduction of Helios's Chariot across a solid gold (and then painted) reproduction of the Rainbow Bridge from Norse mythology, both of which are hurriedly disassembled after he arrives at work, then just as hastily reassembled when he leaves two hours later.
Studies by Amazon have demonstrated that this method of commuting is cheaper and better for the environment than any other me
Layoff (Score:5, Insightful)
All of these announcements are just silent layoffs. Look at PWC recent announcement that they want more RTO followed by layoffs. This following years of underperformance.
Looks like Amazon is likely also expecting a pretty bad quarter if they need to do another silent layoff. With spending trending down across the range, it's a matter of time till companies start cutting into their ridiculously expensive cloud bills. All these amazon services basically boil down to running free software or bring-your-own-license software on absurdly overpriced 5-10 year old low performance machines. A 700 dollar per year t3.large instance has the same memory and half the CPU performance as a raspberry pi... it's really pathetic. For every single service Amazon offers there are enterprise grade cheaper and better performing offers.
The valuation of Amazon does not take into account that what they offer is a simple commodity that can pretty easily be switched to another party.
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PWC got utterly annihilated in it's massive PRC market recently. They were Evergrande's auditor when massive fraud going on within that company crashed the PRC's real estate market. Since then, Communist Party took a proper hammer to the company, absolutely shredding it. All while lawyers in Hong Kong are using its interesting laws on reporting and investment responsibilities to claw back massive losses investors took when Evergrande crashed from the auditors of Evergrande, that being PWC.
So current problem
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An no loss. I have seen PWC IT auditors in action several times These people are _incompetent_.
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I suspect this is more of a problem with IT auditing in general rather than any company in specific. IT is still a very quickly evolving field, and problem with trying to audit quickly evolving fields is that one of the functions of evolution in general is bypassing obstacles. And auditing functions as an obstacle against unwanted actions in a field. So it needs to evolve in reaction to the field itself, and so it's going to be always behind.
In most mature fields where development is fairly slow, being a bi
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I would claim that I myself are a good IT auditor and I have gotten feedback to that effect. Internal audit only, as a service. And my employer in that role is 4 auditors total. So a second data-point in support for your theory.
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All of these announcements are just silent layoffs.
Well, if employees refuse to do what they signed up for, then it's more than a silent layoff - it's a firing.
I know this is Slashdot, where the party line is that the very best, most proficient and valuable employees have the ability to never walk into an office again, and are chased by prospective employers to pay them the highest salaries as befits their talents.
They can now prove their worth. I mean, I get it. No commute, you can live in Bumfuk, North Dakota where the average house costs 15K, and wo
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But if they told me to come to work every day, I would.
Your employer must be thrilled to have you. You know your employer is trying to bully your coworkers into quitting and you blame your coworkers. Not that it would affect you, it's mostly just a great way to get rid of women and minorities as for women it's more important to be home in time for dinner and minorities tend to live further. It's just saving a dime on a severance check. But don't worry, next savings round they might find some reason to bully you out of a severance check and you can tell the bore
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But if they told me to come to work every day, I would.
Your employer must be thrilled to have you.
While I understand you are being sarcastic, to be certain, two years ago I got a 50 percent pay raise, and earlier this year it was doubled again. Anyhow, I feel so used and abused.
As far as the next severance round, where I am working at the moment is a solitary position with some serious authority, so I'm doubting they will can me. They went through several people who couldn't handle it before me, either from lack of technical knowledge, or the inability to interact with stressed people or just became
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But if you are good enough, the good ones will find you.
I think the likely fact is you have a good employer and you won't get this call to get 'back to work five days a week'. You are in a good situation and many people are of course. However if you had to re-enter the job market now you may find that the current hiring situation is very different from what you or I were able to work with. Jobs like yours are filled and the available jobs are at places unable to retain employees - for good reason.
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But if you are good enough, the good ones will find you.
I think the likely fact is you have a good employer and you won't get this call to get 'back to work five days a week'. You are in a good situation and many people are of course. However if you had to re-enter the job market now you may find that the current hiring situation is very different from what you or I were able to work with. Jobs like yours are filled and the available jobs are at places unable to retain employees - for good reason.
The big thing to remember is that luck favors the prepared.
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All of these announcements are just silent layoffs. Look at PWC recent announcement that they want more RTO followed by layoffs. This following years of underperformance.
But ... but ... with this great economy, why would all these companies want layoffs?
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This seems like a counterproductive way to do a layoff, though. The good employees can and will find alternative jobs, leaving behind a team that is overworked and have reduced capabilities and morale. Of course on the other hand the good employees who quit were probably highly paid too, so maybe the short term savings is higher.
Very counterproductive. The loss of institutional knowledge makes it even more so.
Amazon shouldn't be trying to cut people right now. Amazon's site is rapidly bordering on unusable these days, with me often having to spend longer to find things on there than it would take me to drive to a local store if the store actually had what I needed, because their search returns such a high rate of poor matches for the search terms. The sponsored results make this even more miserable. They're seriously ripe for d
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Product search just isn't that hard. Amazon has a lot of smart people working for them. I'm sure they could figure it out if they wanted to. The fact that they haven't suggests they don't want to.
The vast majority of my purchases from Amazon involve searching on Google with "site:amazon.com" because I just plain can't find what I need by searching on Amazon's website at all. There have been multiple times that I've just given up entirely and bought elsewhere (e.g. AliExpress, Walmart) because Amazon's search was so bad. They're literally leaving money on the table.
I mean, in a way, you're right, because if search worked correctly, people would search for the best prices, and their margins would be
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Indeed. From a leadership performance side, this is about the most stupid way to get rid of people. Long-term, this ruins a company.
So, more stealth layoffs, then. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is amazing that our species regularly produces people who can treat others like shit and sleep well at night.
This will be about reducing payroll without severance packages, or simple exercise of power just because.
What it is not about is efficiency and performance, or Amazon would have been suffering since 2020 and it clearly has not.
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I don't understand. Is there an expectation that when you hire an employee that this job will continue to exist forever?
Actually, yes. From an unemployment insurance perspective, there's an expectation that when you hire an employee, that role will be largely permanent unless it is explicitly advertised as a temp job. So the expectation is that if the employee doesn't underperform, you will keep that person employed, and will work to move that employee to another position if you no longer need them in that specific role, to the maximum extent possible. Layoffs, whether explicit or implicit (massively changing the rules su
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>It is amazing that our species regularly produces people who can treat others like shit and sleep well at night.
They are an essential part of the system. We need leaders to function, but we lack good methods for selecting those leaders, so we settle for flawed methods. As long as that remains true, the people who are who are the best ... at getting the job (*not* the people who would be best at it) ... will continue be our leaders.
Figure out how to tell a board which CEO to pick without picking the bo
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Right, but the problem is that the board are themselves borderline psychopaths.
No, the problem is that the board is so completely isolated from the employees that they have no idea what the impact of their actions is. Some of them probably are borderline psychopaths too, but even when that isn't the case, the same sorts of decisions tend to be made. This is why the law should be changed to require that a significant percentage of every public company's board of directors be made up of current employees, and chosen by the employees. (Obviously, they could still be voted out by share
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It is amazing that our species regularly produces people who can treat others like shit and sleep well at night.
This will be about reducing payroll without severance packages, or simple exercise of power just because.
What it is not about is efficiency and performance, or Amazon would have been suffering since 2020 and it clearly has not.
Wouldn't someone then just go to the office, and allow themselves to be laid off and collect unemployment? Seems like there were alternatives, and if this is a layoff in disguise, it will happen anyhow.
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S-Team (Score:3)
Any random guesses about what "S" stands for?
I'd start, but I think slashdot has a censorbot.
Re:S-Team (Score:4, Insightful)
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https://www.aboutamazon.com/ne... [aboutamazon.com]
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Any random guesses about what "S" stands for?
I'm guessing, not for anything. The name is probably a play on "esteem."
Culture of being bad place to work (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think their warehouses and delivery jobs have that reputation. I was not aware that the corporate work environment was derided.
Re: (Score:3)
I think their warehouses and delivery jobs have that reputation. I was not aware that the corporate work environment was derided.
From what others have told me, I get the impression that it is stack ranking hell, where they deliberately try to get rid of the bottom 10% of workers every year, replacing them with newer workers that they can burn out and eventually let go. Still better than the gaming industry, probably, but I've known enough people who have worked there with negative opinions of the place to not seriously consider them as a future employer even before this announcement.
Employment Contracts and At-will employment (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of the developed world requires employment contracts which can be used to nail down things like work from home upfront.
In the United States only unions and C-level management work under a contract; the rest of us work under employment-at-will.
This is a stealth layoff. They're doing it to get rid of undesirable employees, and also to avoid having their unemployment insurance rate increased.
In the USA if you resign, you don't typically get unemployment insurance payments unless it can be proven it is constructive dismissal. This is a very high bar.
Employment at will means that the employer can "alter the deal" (Apologies to Darth Vader) at any time or eliminate the position at any time and for
any reason. One way to combat employment-at-will is having a large emergency savings account (so-called "fuck-you" money).
When you are an at-will employee, the only option you have when the terms are unilaterally changed and you don't like them or can't accept them is to quit on the spot.
Given where the economy is at this point in time if you are a so-so performer with little savings a lot of debt, you won't have much option but to accept the new terms.
If you are a good performer and have connections into other companies with more accommodating work from home rules, and are relatively debt-free and can live on savings for a few years, you might have some options.
Before handing in your resignation letter:
1. You could try pushing back to see if they will make an accommodation for you. The problem with this is since you're at-will they could try to remove the accommodation at any time.
2. You could try asking to be put on a contract, but most US employers will not do this. They like having most of their employees "at-will".
Finally, you could just say "fuck-you" and hand in your resignation letter. You might bee seen as a quitter in the eyes of some of the management, and you might not be able to work for that company ever again, but if you know that you can find work elsewhere then you might be better off. Just don't do it for silly reasons though.
Re:Employment Contracts and At-will employment (Score:5, Informative)
"In the USA if you resign, you don't typically get unemployment insurance payments unless it can be proven it is constructive dismissal. This is a very high bar."
It varies by state. In WA the unemployment site says,
You may qualify for unemployment benefits if we decide you quit for the following good-cause reasons: ... ...
Your employer changed the location of your job so your commute is longer or harder.
That would seem to qualify. If you were hired for remote work, but now there is no remote work that is definitely a longer commute.
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot the option if finding employment while working, and instead of saying fuck-you, come up with some fluff excuse of better pay, better support, and a one or two work-from-home days. They usually care more about an employee quiting when some other company enticed them with better perks (how dare they) than they do about a pissed off employee that quits. Lie if you have to, but make them look like other companies are lining up to steal their talent away.
Hey (Score:1)
Mr. Jassy? Since you're not taking publishing, books, audiobooks, comics or ebooks seriously, could you tell readers and authors up front instead of wasting everyone's time and money?
P.S. Nothin' but love for you for spiking 800,000 words of my work.
Re: (Score:2)
I think we can consider Amazon certainly cannot be taking seriously book publishing. No company can do groceries, a market place for prestigious brands, an importer of crap, an appliance manufacturer, book publishing, and put all of that on a single search interface. They can't be dedicating the necessary level of seriousness to all of that. Asian conglomerates make plenty of things, e.g. Mitsubishi makes fountain pens, motorcycles and nuclear power plants, but they're separate divisions.
Book publishing is
A cloud company saying this is ridiculous... (Score:1)
This is the BS part (Score:3)
Happy I am no more with them (Score:4, Interesting)
I was in AWS and was posted in one of their newest buildings, and when they introduced 3 days a week working from office, we realized that there weren't enough conference rooms. Taking a remote meeting over phone from your cube is hardly better than WfH. Long lines in canteen despite the fact that there is minimal service (touch screen order with zero customization and barely enough choices, not enough chairs to sit and not enough empty space to make any further changes). The parking was horrible (and no street parking available nearby), EV charging had long queues (sometimes, I got notifications at 3 pm or later that a charging slot was available). I can hardly imagine working there 5 days a week. Either they will have to move some employees to other buildings or they will have to do layoff in that building at least (Or there won't be any productivity gain). I can also imagine some of their best talent will voluntarily leave.
It will be an interesting experiment (Score:2)
I think one key issue will be whether the people who want to WFH are actually the rock stars or just think they are. The market will decide.
Don't forg
Should companies get to change this at will? (Score:2)
Wonder if any states (or the EU) are considering protection from arbitrary changes in employment terms like this. Or if Unions are the only way to...
During the interview "oh, remote work is fine." But when about to sign the paperwork "oh, remote work is allowed on case by case basis... talk with your manager after you start." Which is when they slowly change the terms on us after the fact.
Or you join when remote work is fine, and next year it's magically not. Should there be a reasonable limit to chang
Jan 2nd? They're actually pretty good (Score:2)
It's Amazon's choice. Their money and their rules. If you don't like it, then you can go somewhere else.
Giving employees a full 3 months to find another remote jobs is pretty generous. That's not sarcastic either.
wfh (Score:2)
Amazon says it's ok for them to work from home for the other 2 days of the week, though, so not all bad.