“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 ?
although it’d be nice, that’s how you end up in prison.
never fuck with a rich assholes money.
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”
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”.
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.
It’s the culmination of “next quarter is someone else’s problem”.
Do it during holiday season. Do it.
Alexa, tell me what “dead sea effect” means.
Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?
Why don’t they just keep working from home and get fired? Instead of having to quit themselves?
Getting fired with cause doesn’t come with severance and looks bad on a resume.
Constructive dismissal says what?
You don’t put that you were fired on your resume though…
HR departments aren’t that lazy…
No, but it’s illegal for them to do much of anything except confirm employment periods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consequences aside, he has a totally valid point. They own the business, they are the boss, and they can decide. People might not like it, but in the end, it is their problem and people are free to change their job. People got a bit to comfortable lately and every single employee expects the company to be run just as they prefer. Even when you work fully remote, there are still people who find it really hard and stupid as they never get to see their collegues and spend the entire day just staring at the monitor. You will never make everyone happy, so why bother complaining. The decision has been made, take it or leave it.
Nobody is saying what they are doing is illegal. And complaining is what people do to vent, you don’t have to read it.
It’s seems par the course for Amazon to just treat employees as disposable, and they’ve burned so many regions’ working populations’ proverbial bridges that I recall LTT highlighting an article saying Amazon can’t find people to employ because they’ve already cycled through everyone.
Anecdotally, I’m suddenly getting recruiters from AWS asking to interview me, and it all makes sense now. They want to replace the remote workers with new people who don’t complain. Fuck that, and fuck them if they think people should be apathetic to this strategy.
The capitalist sits and laughs on their piles of gold while enjoying their immense power, one day in a not so distant future they will hold no power and their wealth will not save them from the righteous anger of the workers they once oppressed
What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?
What if 37,000 employees sign union cards same day?
Hopefully, they would start a rival company. That would be fascinating to see.
this sounds dangerously like communism, friend. Freedom is where you do what the corporate bosses want.
Watch Amazon sue them or something lmao
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 “anonymous” survey asked this question with two choices: I agree or I’m looking for opportunities elsewhere
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.
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.
