If the cloud is so great why can’t you work remote?
Do not give Bezos ideas about uploading brains to the cloud. He would make AWS CloudEmployee, an employee-as-a-service product that lets you scale your business up or down, without expensive layoffs and bad PR.
He totally would. Tech bros reinventing the concept of a temp agency. How revolutionary and disruptive! /s I worked at a company once that would hire temps to work alongside the regular employees when attrition was too bad to meet headcount. We direct employees were getting $10-15/hr for a $25-35/hr job (higher for some roles) and the temps were getting even less, usually because they were desperate or unemployable in the mainstream for whatever reason. I more than doubled my salary when I left there.
I lean more and more towards us all being guilty for every time we’ve put up with this shit as employees, tolerated other employees being treated poorly, or done business with a company that mistreats its employees. Exploiting your employees should elicit the same response as a fraud scandal. We watched them build these prisons and took money to put our smiling faces at the face of their customer experience. We all tell ourselves we can’t do anything alone but we are so disconnected socially that only the already unionized few can truly demand their employers compliance.
Yet another thinly veiled stealth lay-off by a technology company. Amazon’s cloud boss Matt “The Prat” Garman will indeed see some departures, as intended and desired. However, that first wave will be of their most talented, who feel confident they will land on their feet elsewhere, leaving those that simply cannot leave (yet) or those that will cozily under perform. When Amazon applies the inevitable followup reductions (subjectively based on their internal review process) to remove the latter, and the former buckle under the load or also leave, Amazon will be left with lower-middle talent at best.
The more I see of business “strategy” among this layer of “leadership”, the more I’m convinced it is just a game of Jenga with talent, resources, infrastructure, security, quality, etc; pulling out as many pieces as possible in the drive for short term/sighted gains until a company collapses under its own dysfunctional “efficiency” and “success”.
It’s the culmination of “next quarter is someone else’s problem”.
The mentality that the future is always someone else’s problem is proving to be the biggest weakness of capitalism and our species.
This is absolutely it. The C-suite and senior management are made up of sharp people. They absolutely know this will trigger an exodus and a large bag of fire-able workers. They don’t care that they’re likely to lose a bunch of talented, hardworking staff. Its all been accounted for. At worst the results of a mass exodus will only impact their bottom line in a few years. They just need this years numbers to look good and line to go up.
You mean Amazon is bad to their workers?
“Amazon employees says cloud boss can eat shit”
Why quit when you could get paid to sabotage the company from inside and maybe get a swipe at performing a bezonian head removal ?
Naw you just wait to get fired and then submit unemployment for the job changing past what was agreed with
although it’d be nice, that’s how you end up in prison.
never fuck with a rich assholes money.
This makes zero sense… If you’re a cloud company why can’t employees be in the cloud
Because real-estate is physical money.
But that’s something I don’t actually understand, since real estate would fall under the sunk cost fallacy. Ie, if you’ve invested in real estate, the cost is spent already, right? Whether someone comes in that building is irrelevant. The costs spent to maintain, heat, clean, power the buildings, on the other hand… It’s just not really obvious to me. Seems like fewer people would cost cheaper, no?
The deals they had with various governments to get tax breaks if they built the office in their city are still a consideration. Amazon put governments of municipalities into a bidding war so they could have highly paid software engineers working in their city. They probably aren’t going to get those tax breaks any more if most of those offices are empty.
If you’re using that real estate as collateral for loans, it needs to maintain its value, or you’ll have to put up more collateral
The cost is spent, but the offices are still assets on the balance sheet.
If demand for offices is lower then all companies that own offices will have to revalue theirs downwards. These impairments have a direct impact on the P&L of the company accounts. Better to force employees to use these assets (and pay their own costs to do so) than show a (greater) accounting loss.
If a company has a lot of money in assets and those assets are worth less than before, the valuation of the company drops. This should mean lower share prices, which is basically the only thing a company cares about.
as a client this this tells me they aren’t all that confident in their product
Them fixating on nerd asses in seats wasn’t creepy enough to sway you yet?
No they purport to sell cloud services, but require their cloud employees to be onsite.
He pointed to Amazon’s principle of “disagree and commit,” which is the idea that employees should debate and push back on each others ideas respectfully
That’s all fine and dandy for ending debate about a stupid roadmap feature, but “disagree and commit” is a different story when you’re asking people to spend 3 hours unpaid in a car everyday.
As a long time Amazon employee, disagree and commit essentially works like this:
Employee: “I’m not convinced this is the best way to do something”
Manager: “Noted, now stfu and do what I say”
At the all-hands meeting, Garman said he’s been speaking with employees and “nine out of 10 people are actually quite excited by this change.”
Just imagine the conversation between the CEO of AWS and some random employee.
„What do you think about the return-to-office policy I propose, Cog #18574?“ „Great idea Mr. Garman sir, really smart move from your team. Incredible thinking and leadership from you Mr. Garman.“
continues to tell people that 9/10 employees he talks to are excited to return to office.
The other 1/10 gets fired for not being a team player.
He has to be straight up lying. There’s no way 9/10 are excited to be ordered back into the office. If that were the case, they’d have been in the office already.
The ten surveyed were already in the office voluntarily.
It’s not like there’s any meaningful consequence if he is lying.
That’s a very good point that I’ve never really thought of. It’s not like anybody was keeping them from going back into the office. If they wanted five days a week, they would already have been there five days a week.
If 9/10 were already voluntarily coming into the office every day, I could see it. Of course it would only be 9/10 of the people he bothered to speak to it about, and maybe he only spoke to people that were already there.
As to why they would care if they were already there, well one guy in my team goes in every day of his own accord. He applies pressure to everyone on my team to be there with him every day, in spite of the stated WFH policy. So everyone but me goes in every day because I’m the only one that is willing to disappoint him. I’m reasonably certain that guy would love a forced into the office every day mandate, to force me to be there too. Then he could stop making passive aggressive comments about how people who didn’t come in must not care about the work as much as they should at every opportunity.
The “anonymous” survey asked this question with two choices: I agree or I’m looking for opportunities elsewhere
9 out of the 10 he talked to are brown nosers and tell him what he wants to hear.
Unless they were preselected micromanagers who like to bully their employees.
Nobody I’ve EVER talked to wants 5 days in the office anymore. 2-3 tops. Even 3 levels above me don’t.
Well, yeah. Isn’t the whole point of these foolish office mandates to get people to quit? That way they can reduce their workforce without the cost and negative press of another round of layoffs.
Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”
I hate that that’s the case.
I’ve been trying to lose weight, so I chopped off my leg just below the knee. I’m several pounds down, and I didn’t have to stop eating even a calorie. It’s amazing.
The only issue is that now I don’t have a leg and exercise may be difficult….
Yeah but that’s FUTURE you’s problem, not current you, so it’s totally fine!
And you’re still alive right? /s. Akin to the people who said Musk’s firing of twitter employees was a genius move because the site was “still running” after all that.
Yup! And anyone can cauterize a wound, so you don’t even need the extra expense of a hospital trip!
I’m sure the other leg can make up for it, and it should be grateful for the extra work.
Just sell the body to some other rube and move into a new one that still has both legs. It’s easy. What are you, poor?
This is true, and it’s weird because these same companies used to hire like crazy because only growth mattered. Finally real financial discipline is being applied. The tech company I work for is open about the fact that revenue-per-employee is something like half of FAANG companies and they want that to change.
Go into the office and waste every resource you can.
Plug in a fan + heater + aquarium + massage pad at your desk and leave everything on constantly even when you leave
Print every email and throw it in the trash.
Make coffee 50x a day and pour it down the sink
Flush a whole roll of TP every hour
Leave sinks on in the bathroom
Use entire tubs of soap to wash your hands
Turn on the microwave for hours at a time
Heat/cool office thermometer to force HVAC into overdrive
Open new browser windows until your computer crashes and repeat until the network goes down
Company wide meme emails that everyone participates in (team building) that crash servers and dominate inboxes
Pour sugar/crumbs everywhere so there’s pest problems
FORM A UNION
(nuclear option) introduce bedbugs to all your bosses offices
FORM A UNION
Ok Tyler Durden, that’s about the only reasonable proposal.
Ok waste paper, mhmm, coffee, yep, microwave, good thinking—
FORM A UNION
Woah, woah calm down Satan.
You forgot the most important one: deliver just enough to not get fired, but way less than you did before RTO. Then point to the stats and show the massive productivity drop after RTO.
This guy RTOs.
All that stuff together is probably only one salary per team, except for the Union. I think the Union is the winning idea.
Bedbugs in executive offices is best. Make them feel the pain.
negative press
pretty fucked up that quiet firing via RTO bullshit is less negative press than just laying people off
It’s just less visible/explicit. It’s still bad press when it gets noticed and called out like in this thread, it’s just sneakier.
Probably. But this way you have no control on who quit, with a good probability that are the better ones.
True, but execs see statistics, not people. And maybe it’s cheaper to rehire the good ones with a higher salary than deal with severance packages.
I asked our CTO at a town hall if there were plans to improve the office my team got moved to because they moved us from the nice office to the city and the back to the previous area but a crappy office. Nope.
Did they take your stapler too?
Friend, you have no idea how nervous I was during that exchange lol. I think I’m reasonably comfortable with public speaking in smaller crowds but this was a huge group of people and a bunch over Zoom too. I’m so conflict adverse. I typically just ignore problems. I’m rarely even passive aggressive. All that to say, I’m worried I sounded like that guy while I was talking lol.
Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.
Depending on your country, that is the norm. Engineers here have at least 2 national unions to choose from, finance have a couple of unions, same with teachers, admin staff, etc. etc.
As usual, this is probably just US being victim of 'merican exceptionlism.
And they are smart enough to put us at the very bottom of the management ladder, even though we’re not actually management. That way we can’t legally unionize. In the U.S. at least.
That way we can’t legally unionize. In the U.S. at least.
This must vary state-by-state, or have exceptions, because I could name examples of them (but I would rather not dox myself).
It’s not every company, but that is what mine did. We’re “management” but we don’t manage anyone.
Classifying employees as management without having actual management duties is a violation of federal labor law. You might be owed back wages/overtime. Could be worth looking into. A class action lawsuit against a previous employer I had led to hundreds of employees getting checks for thousands of dollars, even after lawyers took their fee.
Some technical jobs can be legally classified exempt from overtime. That is different than being classified as management.
They just give us the PM title and call it a day. No court is going to take that seriously and allow a massive lawsuit.
Given how “business-friendly” the US has become, I imagine there are all sorts of loopholes that only work in favor of the corporation.
There doesn’t need to be loopholes anymore. The SC will just blatantly rule in favor of companies.
In case anyone has missed it, they’re done with loopholes, done with being sly and coy. They are saying the quiet parts, they are marching proudly, they are confident and unafraid. We need to make them afraid again.
The right wing and its corporate masters are done hiding in shadow. Loopholes and subterfuge are for chumps when you can just change the rules without consequence.
“Skilled labor” is such a bullshit concept
There are jobs that take weeks to learn, jobs that take years to learn, and there are even jobs that take a decade+ to learn. You ain’t putting the three-week old newbie in the latter two roles.
That’s true, but it devalues other labor which can be similarly/more difficult or skilled. I skimmed this article, but it seems to convey what I mean:
https://www.shrm.org/executive-network/insights/reshaping-narrative-time-retire-term-unskilled-laborI understand what people mean when they say “skilled labor” and I don’t think it’s intended negatively normally fwiw
I agree. I’m in pre-sales working at an AWS partner and honestly our whole team is treated as dispensable.
At Amazon literally every employee is dispensable. They have a firing quota.
Edit: to be clear I’m talking about the Amazon divisions outside the warehouse. They make managers fire a certain percentage of people on a regular basis.
I have been laid off from every job (5 in total) since the pandemic. We are a subhuman commodity. Companies that are hiring now are exploiting the market by offering lower salaries.
Meta and Amazon are in their hiring season and they’ll start their layoffs again next spring or summer. And somehow, everyone forgets this fucked up cycle keeps happening in perpetuum.
We need to stop being afraid of mentioning the U word. We need better protection and rights as employees.
Funniest to me in this kind of debate is having my N+1 manage us from across the country, having two team members in another town, and somehow, my ass being at home 15km from the office makes any difference at all to the daily life of the team? It doesn’t. My actual manager, the dude giving us our marching orders, doesn’t care. Shit, our N+1 doesn’t care either, since he’s almost always remote himself!
Only people I’ve seen actually care seem to be HR, for whatever reason.
I don’t even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.
HR only cares because they’re told to make a policy and it’s their job to enforce it.
I don’t even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.
Companies like Amazon got major tax breaks and free land from governments to build these office sites. Governments gave these incentives with the expectation that it would generate economic activity around those sites. But if everyone is working from home those offices aren’t delivering on the promised economic activity.
And also they spent a lot of money on those offices and so want them to be used. It’s hard for whoever decided to build that office and the government officials that gave all the tax incentives towards it to admit that conditions have changes and all of that was for no significant benefit. It sucks to realize something you put in a lot of work into had no real benefit. Most people just have to accept that. But if you’re in a position of power you can make people do things that will make your project look like it had a successful outcome.
“It sucks to realize something you put in a lot of work into had no real benefit”
Everyone who worked for Amazon has this thought.
aren’t delivering on the promised economic activity
There doesn’t exist a company that gives a flying turd fuck about a government’s revenue. Particularly not if they took tax breaks to reduce that revenue in the first place.
Depending on the agreements they made, they might lose those tax breaks… and they do care about that.
What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?
What if 37,000 employees sign union cards same day?
this sounds dangerously like communism, friend. Freedom is where you do what the corporate bosses want.
Hopefully, they would start a rival company. That would be fascinating to see.
The organizers would soon learn why we invented the undetectable heart attack gun.
Watch Amazon sue them or something lmao
Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?
Do it during holiday season. Do it.
I’m a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn’t have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.
We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It’s not a big deal personally - I live close and I’m older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don’t see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.
That’s the problem. And I worry for your job getting complex as the most capable people leave abruptly*.
- If they can fire people abruptly, the Golden Rule says they should expect blindsides.
