Amazon warns workers to come back into the office::This week, a reminder email was sent to employees who didn’t work on-site at least three times a week.
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Source: Work at Amazon
Most employees think this is just a form of layoff without severance, and many people are openly calling out the fact that the STeam are openly showing their contempt for their own workers with these actions, in a way that few companies have demonstrated.
Despite this… it’s Amazon. They’ve always shown contempt for their own workers through a culture that promotes stack ranking. The difference this time around is that it’s affecting a lot of people at once.
Lots of people are going to leave, and Amazon don’t give a fuck. They want them gone, they want costs to be reduced, and they will replace who they need to with people that will support these changes.
Not that it’s hurting them, but they’re permanently on my list of places I won’t even think about working. Everything I hear about their culture is just awful. It’s hard to imagine fellow tech professionals being browbeaten in all the ways I hear about, whipped like cattle. Just terrible. As long as I have other choices I’ll just steer miles around them, thank you very much.
Who the fuck even wants to work there anymore. It sounds like hell but people still sign up.
Three reasons, from what I understand:
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Amazon used to be a good place to move teams, and that includes locations/countries. A year ago, if I wanted to move from San Francisco to Berlin, all I needed to do was go through an informal transfer process, and Amazon would often handle everything.
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The pay is pretty good.
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Most importantly, a lot of people just assume that all the horror stories they hear won’t happen to them, or that the people that get PIP’d out “deserve it”. It’s ultimately a lack of empathy, in a system that’s designed to get people in and out after about 28 months. Some people might be lucky and not experience it, but ultimately Focus/Pivot comes for all - and sometimes it’s the most surprising choices…
And, frankly, people need jobs and a lot of them will take what they can get, especially with your second point.
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I haven’t looked into why they’re doing this, so maybe this insight is obvious and well known, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that they spend a shitton of money on these spaces/leases that they can’t easily get out of, so their way of dealing with it is by forcing employees to use it. My company is going through a similar situation, but they’re accepting the responsibility of eating the cost of the office space lease with several years left on the contract and don’t even try to entice people to use it. “Come in if you want, it’s going to be here for awhile!” is about as far as it goes, haha. Fuck Amazon.
I know people who work in IT at places they have installed surveillance on wfh machines and the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.
I’ve been wfh with optional in-office work for over a decade and I know it can be done well. But I know there are a lot of people that you have to stay on top of who would be fine in an office.
So I don’t think these companies are going back into the office for no reason.
That said, I think this will backfire because the best employees will find work at places where they can work remote unless compensated far better than they can get at remote shops.
It’s a good thing it’s impossible to goof off at the office!
No one said it wasn’t. I said they have evidence that people don’t work as much when they work from home.
Care to show that evidence?
I think there’s some critical information they’re missing. They need to establish a control group by using that same surveillance software for in office employees. And it’s pretty easy to tell when people are inattentive from home, but not as much when they’re in the office. You still need to find a way quantify that data though. Otherwise it really isn’t a fair comparison.
They did use it during wfh and after work from home. So it didn’t inform their decisions to call people back, but it did validate it.
the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.
Are they still getting done what needs to be done in an appropriate amount of time? Because that should be the only metric that matters for WFH employees as far as I can tell. “You aren’t working hard enough” is “Protestant Work Ethic” capitalist bullshit.
Determining what people should be able to get done is not simple and will always be imprecise. In a lot of professional jobs, you aren’t paid to get x done. You’re paid to get as much s as you reasonably can during working hours and that’s nearly impossible to determine when everyone is remote.
So when everyone who works for you works remote, there are some tough situations that come up. The biggest one is if someone isn’t getting many tasks completed over a free weeks. Is it because they aren’t working or because a lot of roadblocks really did come up or is it because they aren’t really working? It’s easier to give that person the benefit of the doubt if they’ve been at the office and you can see them working.
I’ve worked remote for over a decade so I know it’s possible for a team to get work done, but it would definitely be easier and more effective to manage people in office. And some people who have fallen behind may have been given more leniency in office than they get while wfh. So I get why some businesses don’t want to deal with that. I think they’ll lose out on the best workers unless they’re willing to pay significantly more for them to work in office though. But we’ll see how it goes.
What drives me nuts about my job, although it’s better than no WFH at all so I stick with it, is that I have a hybrid home/office schedule when there’s zero need for me to ever come in and the space will be used anyway because I’m in the office part of an industrial facility. In fact, if they got rid of the office, they could put in more machinery. Seems like a win-win. But they don’t see it that way for some reason.
I’m not certain, but I remember hearing companies like that get tax incentives to move to certain areas to boost jobs. I wonder if maybe that affects it? Landlords want their rent, and local businesses sell stuff to commuters. But I think we should just turn all the commercial not being used into residential
Nothing like a cloud provider being part of the problem rather than the solution
