Stupid, stupid Amazon. How did they not see this coming? It’s been a trend lately.
Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate
Submitted 1 year ago by reddig33@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2024/09/29/amazon-employees-angry-andy-jassy-rto-mandate/
Comments
Etterra@lemmy.world 1 year ago
IMALlama@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They did see it coming, this was the goal.
grepe@lemmy.world 1 year ago
yup. how is that not obvious to anyone is beyond me… some of those workers have contracts that would require amazon paying severance in case they would just fire them like so many other companies do. better make them leave on their own.
EndOfLine@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I hope a significant number of them get new jobs and quiet quit to get that double paycheck for as long as they can.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I hope so too. Although the IT job market isn’t great right now, so I doubt the departures will reach a critical mass.
VantaBrandon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
RTO = free layoffs
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 1 year ago
That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.
It’s also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Idk about the whole talk of having an excuse to shareholders, I don’t think shareholders look into hey these offices are sitting unused I demand an explanation I think they care how much profit the company making and what are future predictions of profit.
chakan2@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s a feature, not a bug.
The best and brightest will challenge leadership. The shitty barely competent value engineer will say yes until they fuck up so bad they get promoted.
AAA@feddit.org 1 year ago
The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Yes. But some of them are also the most expensive ones, so when they leave costs go down. And you “numbers must go up” (=cost must go down).
GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Just as planned - Amazon Execs who aren’t planning to rehire them anyway.
They do this shit to cull you.
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It’s sort of a strange approach, because this will leave you with the workers who can’t find employment elsewhere.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Executives do not see workers as people with skillsets. They’re numbers on a spreadsheet. And having ten highly paid workers quit “voluntarily” makes the numbers do good things.
Actually, they’re not even numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re data points in a graph. Executives don’t have time to understand numbers, let alone people.
exanime@lemmy.world 1 year ago
By the time that negative effect kicks in, the execs already cashed in their bonuses and are on their way out of the sinking ship
DrDickHandler@lemmy.world 1 year ago
People exaggerate this claim. Amazon already accounted for some talent leaving and the benefits obviously outweighs the con. There is nothing strange.
chakan2@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Exactly…they won’t be picky about raises or working conditions.
nutsack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
sounds cool i am unemployed and fucked
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I know some tech workers who really want to return to office full time along with everyone else. They miss the old way. It’s not everyone, and it’s definitely not me, but it’s a legitimate position. I guess now they know where they can go.
ccunix@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My company announced RTO the same day Amazon did. The Union is up in arms, but honestly the powers that be are handling it pretty well. My boss is happily going to the office for a couple of days a week. She’s a million miles from enforcing it on us though. Exceptions are already in place for people like me (3 hour TGV ride from the nearest office) and even a few people who just said “I really don’t want to”.
I’m sure a few people will leave and not be replaced, but perhaps they were just dead weight anyway. I couple that I know about definitely are.
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
I love going to the office. I started renting a place nearby to do just that.
But I don’t want my coworkers to be forced to show up. That’s silly.
Scolding7300@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I would guess the principal reason here is to socialize, and there’s probably other solutions to this. I would also guess that for some the socializing during the day doesn’t havehave to be with the same company’s coworkers
socsa@piefed.social 1 year ago
I legitimately do not understand how people can spend that much time at home and not go stir crazy. That doesn't mean I want to force people into a situation because of my preferences, but gaddamn, having no context switch between work and home feels way more dystopian to me.
Banik2008@infosec.pub 1 year ago
The context switch is what you make it. My switch is a daily ritual whereby I sit in a specific place and read for an hour with a little background music and a drink (if so inclined). That symbolically “closes the door” to the office, even though my flat isn’t big enough for separate work/rest spaces.
BlueMacaw@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you have an extra bedroom that you can use exclusively as an office, it’s pretty great. When you’re in your office, that’s “work”, and the rest of your house is “not work”.
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I honestly don’t see an issue with the people going back to the office because they want to work from there. I just want others to stop trying to force me to do the same.
This sort of thing seems to have always been a plague with a set of the extroverted sort. They seem to feel the whole world should for whatever reason cater to what makes them happy and us introverted types that do not like the social activities that they do should should be made to enjoy it. For our own good.
The older I get the less patience I have for those sorts of games. Which could become an issue for me professionally I suppose.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Exactly, which is why I really like my current setup, which is 2x in office, 3x WFH. I think being in-person has advantages, but I also feel much more productive when I WFH because I don’t have all of the little interactions at the office (i.e. coworker wanting to get coffee together, quick question from a team member about something irrelevant, etc). I get into better flow at home, but being available is also important for others on the team.
Honestly, I would hesitate to take a full-remote position, but I am definitely not interested in full-on-prem either. I need at least 1-2 days at home to get actual work done, ideally 3.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
I personally prefer to work in the office, but when there’s no-one else on it. When offices started opening up again, going to the office and having the floor to myself was fantastic. It’s felt like in my college years studying late in the library. I had all the resources I needed and there were no chit-chat in the background or people coming in to talk to me.
dan@upvote.au 1 year ago
I can focus a lot better when I’m at the office. I guess part of it is that I’m surrounded by people who are also working. There’s too many distractions at home.
Having said that, my employer only requires us to go into the office three days per week, which I think is a good compromise.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I know some people like this too.
To be fair, a nontrivial number of them are middle/upper management, but it’s not the entirety of the people I know who want this.
The answer isn’t work-from-home, nor is it return-to-office. The answer is: give people a choice.
If you want to work from home, cool, we don’t need to maintain your cubicle, and/or, we can hire more people without needing more office space. If you want to return to office, cool, your space is waiting for you.
A few will retain the ability to switch back and forth, but the majority of people I’ve talked to about it, either want office or home exclusively. Very few want hybrid.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Here’s the problem though. When everybody is allowed to choose what they want, people who prefer remote get remote. And people who prefer the office get a ghost town. So by definition, personal choice precludes one group from having access to the thing they would choose.
People who want to work in the office want to work with other people. It’s not just about having a desk in a high rise. People learn from other people and are energized by being around them. There are efficiencies to being able to talk without zoom lag and all. Someone else characterized this as extroverted people and their annoying needs. But I think it’s more than that. Working with others in person certainly has real benefits.
Remote work means no one gets those, ever.
I’m a remote guy myself and hope never to go back. But I can see another side to it.
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I don’t think these people are typically pro-choice.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I’m one that prefers being in the office. My productivity goes to shit when I’m at home because there’s too much other stuff I can do. I also like talking to my coworkers face to face just in general because people are usually more empathetic in person. That being said I don’t think it should be forced on anyone if it’s not necessary to work in the office. The rest of my team works from home without issue as far as I can tell. We are fortunate in that our employer does not have an issue with WFH.
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Hey I can relate. I miss the office too. I was far more productive there and the cooperation and mental space was better there too. But this is a new world we live in, and if you want me to drive to an office, you had better be ready to pay me a fair salary for it.
Oh, you won’t? Guess I’ll go elsewhere.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Amazon tech workers are well paid. What I find is the real cost of in-office is the commute time. I’m almost an hour away door-to-door and while I always enjoy seeing people in person, and our office is quite nice, I just can’t convince myself that it’s worth two hours a day of wasted time, plus the costs. I pay $12 in train tickets any day I go in.
sjh@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
[deleted]SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Sure, but workplaces that force return-to-office can go fuck themselves. Let people choose whether or not to pay the cost of commute.
OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 1 year ago
5 day RTO is a stealth layoff. This is a feature, not a bug.
Scribbd@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Quiet firing, if you will.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If Amazon don’t think that remote work is productive, then they don’t think they’re losing anything. I don’t even know how “stealth” this is at all. They must believe that those individuals could be productive, because they are trying to keep them working in office. I’m not sure why anyone thinks a company like Amazon would try to be “stealth” about a layoff anyway. They don’t need to.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You don’t have to fund severance if people leave on their own.
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I am pretty sure working from home has proven to be more productive, so I think other factors are at play here. I worry that returning to the office might be the only way to keep the capitalists from trying to send our jobs over to poorer nations. If the tapeworms think the job needs to be done face to face then it is much hardet to send those jobs to India or S. America.
zbyte64@awful.systems 1 year ago
So they don’t have to pay severance or other state penalties for doing an actual layoff. They aren’t thinking of talent with this move.
Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Like many companies, they overhired in the last 4 years. Some of these people are due years of severance (my offer listed 2months for every year after 1 year), not to mention the vested stocks and other bonuses granted during this insane hot hire period.
So how do you remove people not loyal to the company? The most hated mandate ever. Amazon is a company that doesn’t need people in the office. This is nothing more than screwing people over.
aaron@lemm.ee 1 year ago
So they’re not paying severance to employees they fire?
foofy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No rank and file US-based employees at Amazon are getting years of severance. They don’t do that.
jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
It’s like reverse stack ranking. They’ll be left with the people that couldn’t find another job.
DrDickHandler@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is false.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Brain drain is the perfect way to end monopolies.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
and the people who know exactly how to waste time in an office.
Snapz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
A.k.a. Twitter and the elon filtering moment
kameecoding@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yep this has been the modus operandi for businesses who want to reduce workforce without having to pay for layoffs.
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I am glad this is happening. Fuck these people. Fuck em’ hard.
normalexit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
These tech workers are not Bezos. They are just developers and technical people that thought they had a good job with competitive salaries. It sucks they have to uproot their lives because management is being shitty.
They may work for a company without ethics, but that’s kind of the corporate landscape these days.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m not a big fan of overpaid tech workers either. Upper middle class SDE tech bros are not as bad as upper upper class tech CEOs, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Let me reword what I wrote since I think I wasn’t clear.
When I said I am glad this is happening, I mean I am glad that the workers are standing up to Amazon by quitting and heading to a different company. And by ‘fuck em’’ I was referring to Amazon and other employers who want undue influence on the lives of their employees.
I am 100% on the side of the workers here. Always have and always will be.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
If it’s anything like my work and their RTO a few things.
- hR is well aware of attrition rates and I bet they’re through the roof
- Any new hires are probably not the best or brightest they could expect to hire
So expect quality at Amazon to decline. It may not be outwardly visible but mark my words for those that are still there it will devolve into a chaotic shit show of overworked employees that are left backfilling work for those who left and the incompetence that came in.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
expect quality at Amazon to decline.
They’ll have to dig a new basement for it to get any lower.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I canceled my Prime membership earlier this year because of that decline in quality. I wish everyone could, but thanks to the loss of retail throughout the country many can’t afford not to have it.
aStonedSanta@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yeah. The rise of a monopoly until it starts to enshitify is interesting to watch eh? Reminds me of Walmart in the physical space. All the local options got pushed out and everyone’s quality was forced to drop due to their economic strong arming.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Prime is not a money saver. It’s a money waster that tricks you into buying more stuff just because “the shipping is free” but you can often get free shipping without Prime or Amazon. Just wait until you need enough stuff to meet the store’s free shipping threshold to make an order.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My relatively poor experience with Prime I attribute to deliberate bad choices rather than lack of workers. It probably doesn’t help to be sure, but even with the most awesome staff, I think Prime was going to suck no matter what. The whole economy is particularly “screw the customers over, get us money now, no need to attract or retain customers now”
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I have a feeling the big impact is going to be in other services, namely AWS. Makes me wonder if some new global outages are coming, which are always fun to deal with.
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I really do wonder if Amazon will run out of people willing to work for them someday. Their approach assumes there is an infinite supply of workers to burn through. Given everything I’ve witnessed from the company, I’d never work there. Do they at some point poison the labor pool against them?
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I never understood why anyone works for them at all. And I’m not even talking about warehouse workers. I’m talking about the tech staff. Amazon is known as a cutthroat workplace that drives people like a hammer drives nails. I would never choose to go there.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
FAANG looks good on the resume so people go there with intention to eventually leave for another company willing to pay for FAANG experience. unless you work in a very focused team (e. g Occulus) youre better off jumping companies for higher pay.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We’re constantly producing new people that don’t know any better
EnderMB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
When I joined Amazon, I was told that for some roles in the US Amazon received more applications than corporate employees worldwide - so I assume 1M+.
That number has probably reduced significantly, given we’ve now had two rounds of RTO. I know some recruiters are really struggling to find external candidates to join, and rightly so, but I don’t doubt that Amazon can find someone to fill these roles, or can find someone outside of North America or Europe to take that role.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
(FWIW, I’ve been at Amazon as a software engineer for close to four years now, and I’ve noticed zero improvement in opportunities afforded to me)
Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
daddy32@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of bright eyed optimistic people out of school every year.
spicystraw@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Common theory l, that I have heard is that if business owns their office space then it’s value is inherently tied to profit margins. If office goes unused, value will drop, which affect bottom line, which affects boards willingness to pay out large CEO bonuses. So getting employees back into the office becomes vital for the leadership.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
IMO it’s worse than this. It’s likely to do with Seattle real estate only, because Amazon has their HQ in Seattle, most of the STeam is in Seattle, and it’s where most of the big decisions are focused. There is an acronym that has existed at Amazon for decades, NEWS (Not Everyone Works in Seattle). Sadly, like many Amazonian things, they’re not really a thing any more…
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Even if they don’t own it, there is cost associated with downsizing an office. Selling off furniture is impossible at the moment. Leases are down. Subletting is much harder. But there places are, paying plant, hvac and cleaning, maintenance on virtually unused office space.
Most places just need a conference room, some temp offices and a bathroom.
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Burn, baby, burn!
vga@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
That might’ve been the plan all along.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Amazing.
They order people to work in different offices than before, far away from before, or in offices that did not even exist before. They order people to work in offices who have only worked at home before.
And they call it “return”, and everybody seems to accept the audacity.
Nobody laughs out loud into their faces and calls them the dirty liars that they are.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Now this is a good point. During the time of remote work, everything became organized around it. In fact my employer just closed the local office I belong to, because everyone is remote and it just isn’t getting used. If they suddenly decided on RTO and asked me to work at an office 60 miles away that would not be a “return” nor practical in any way. I’m sure Amazon know this but are just saying “oh well,” because really they can’t do kick to solve it. It’s going to be a painful transition but I guess they’ve decided they are ready.
pseudonym@monyet.cc 1 year ago
We should refer to this instead as Go To Faraway Office
geography082@lemm.ee 1 year ago
that’s actually what those pieces of dump wanted lol
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To literally no one’s surprised, least of all the leadership at Amazon. No unemployment when you quit.
paddirn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That was probably the intent. It works as a soft layoff. Do something wildly unpopular, knowing that a bunch of employees will quit. The ones left will pick up the slack, because obviously if they had anywhere else to go they would’ve left with the first group.
MajorHavoc@programming.dev 1 year ago
pop culture stock picker Jim Cramer points while looking cranky
There’s a sell cue, for any shareholders reading along.
omarfw@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
sjh@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Wow, it seems like the return-to-office mandate is causing quite the shake-up! Totally get why folks are jumping ship—flexibility has become such a big deal, especially after getting used to working from home. I read that 65% of workers now say they’d consider quitting if they couldn’t work remotely! It’s all about finding that work-life balance in a job that respects our needs. Hang in there, tech friends—plenty of companies out there understand the power of flexibility and trust!
itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Google, Microsoft, hell even Netflix and Capital One, will be bending over backwards for this tech talent.
Look at that Amazon east coast HQ in Virginia, just down the road from Capital One’s HQ. One of AWS’s biggest customers will bendfit from this.