Amazon warns workers to come back into the office

www.bbc.com 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.

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.

71 comments

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:
  
  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.
  
  The pay is pretty good.
  
  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...
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.
- Why would Amazon want to pay for office space when its entire business model is being cheap as fuck with spending money?
  
  The last company I worked for intelligently renewed their leases during the pandemic after sending everyome home "temporarily". Three years later and they are requiring everyone go back into the office a minimum of two days a month. This applied to everyone who was within 50miles of an office regardless if they were hired as remote or if none of the rest of their team was even in the same state. The only reason to make this mandate is to make use of the office space they stupidly continued the lease on.
  
  In less than a month I had a better paying permanently remote job. I'll go back to an office in a coffin.
- Our place agreed with the landlord that if they did the legwork to find a new tenant they could teminate the lease early.
  
  Even the smaller place (barely a cupboard) they rented afterwards to give a business address/phone is going away quite soon.. there's just no need for our company to have physical presence at all.
  
  The unspoken bit is the reason the productivity is up so much is there isn't a manager wandering into the office and saying 'I had a great idea!'. Now they send an email, and those of us with the seniority to get away with it tell him to GTFO so by the time most people read it it's history. But the advantage of working with peoples lives can't be understated.. You can schedule your work around your life, parents can pick their kids up from school, you can have an 'off' day without feeling you have to stare uselessly at a screen for 8 hours (and, a tad more controversially, you can work whilst ill, which we've caught a few people doing.. no risk of spreading disease any more but it's not healthy).
  
  But if you all are happy at home, who am I going to micro manage? And when I'm lonely, who will listen to me in an enforced (and useless) meeting?
  
  Do you even think of the shareholders?
  
  ^^
- 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
- 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 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.
  
  A lot of the complaints about people "being lazy" while working from home comes from managers that don't know how to deal with WFH.
  
  Management and team leads don't need to unduly spy on people or micromanage them. They need to figure out a reasonable measure of productivity and track it, i.e. "What did an employee get done today/this week/etc?" The employees would probably be happy to help figure it out if it means they don't have to come back in to the office.
  
  From there, basic management skills apply. If it looks like someone is slacking off verify that's actually the case, then go from there.
  
  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.
  
  It's a good thing it's impossible to goof off at the office!
  
  Ah the old "let's measure our workers", I'm a programmer and I have seen them all or at least a whole bunch of stupid ways to try to measure our "effectiveness". None that works.
  
  Spoiler alert: hitting away on a keyboard for 9h straight per day is not productive.
  
  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.
Love how I'm getting emails from Amazon recruiters while seeing all the news about them forcing people back into the office. No thanks.
Nothing like a cloud provider being part of the problem rather than the solution
- If companies like Amazon and Zoom are pushing people back into the office, maybe they are finding issues with full remote work.
  
  It's got to be on a spreadsheet somewhere, but whoever's got it isn't showing it to us.
  
  That's assuming rational leadership. That's pretty rare.
  
  Amazon is doing this to reduce headcount. They know a lot of people will resign over this.
  
  Shame they never actually produce the supposed evidence of this. Just vague statements and platitudes that wax poetic about years gone by.
  
  There are zero things I need in the office to do my job and I get everything done when I WFH in a timely and efficient manner. So what if I also get to watch old movies while I do it? I get it done and I do it well. Bosses just want to monitor your life because they think if you take so much as a minute off, you're costing them money and it's utter bullshit.
Return to office is another round of layoffs. They are doing this to make people leave.
- I doubt it. When companies lay people off, they want to be able to choose who they let go. They don't have that choice here. No well-managed company will value "works in the office" over "gets shit done".
  
  Have you ever experienced a layoff? I have. They are usually very random. Higher ups rarely have any idea who should be kept and who should be let go.
  
  The rule is in place so that they have a leg to stand on for letting people go with cause. When good workers don’t show up, they might get a performance improvement plan, but their managers will find a way to not enforce it. When the rest of the workforce doesn’t show up, those folks will be let go.
Workers give Amazon their two-week notice
- And Amazon wins, because that's exactly what the S-Team wants.

You've viewed 71 comments.