- cross-posted to:
- unions@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- unions@sh.itjust.works
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I work for Amazon. People are NOT happy.
Sadly, this is exactly what Jassy wants. Amazon are desperate for people to leave, and this is another push towards this.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but given that I’m unable to go to the office more than 3x a week due to having a young family to look after, my time.here is clearly limited - unless I’m able to work something out.
There is a strong remote advocacy group at Amazon, but the best that was mustered last time was a one hour protest during lunch. This might be the catalyst for people to say “fuck it, let’s unionize”, but I’m not confident.
Why do they want to get rid of people?
Amazon gets rid of around 5-8% of their staff every year through unregretted attrition, where they’ll fire “underperforming” people, with maybe 10-15% of people being threatened with underperformance "
Alongside this, to cut a long story short Amazon grew huge during COVID, and despite tens of thousands of layoffs the company has been trying to shrink everywhere possible, cutting fat wherever they can. IMO, leadership made lots of really stupid decisions, and the CEO has set Amazon on a course where irreparable damage has been made.
I don’t think this is going to be just cutting fat though. They’re going to have their desperate and least-talented employees working in the office while their most talented employees will end up finding remote employment elsewhere. That’s how RTO always goes.
Oh, 1000%. I could write a book on how monumentally stupid the whole process is (and most Amazonians agree), but the fundamental points are:
- The people that stay are of a certain mindset, where you don’t pick up “hard” tasks, and you are quick to establish blame/ownership elsewhere.
- Data is king, but you can lie a lot with data.
- Employees are customers also, and when you piss off employees you piss off customers and their families.
- You spend a huge sum of money on hiring and training talent, only to send them to your competitors.
- You spend money to give severance to active employees. That is still, to be, the dumbest thing ever. SO many people don’t resign, they just down tools or do a bad job to get the extra pay. PIP is called Paid Interview Prep for a reason.
- Amazon’s Focus/Pivot has such a bad reputation that being fired used to mean that other big companies would happily tell you “if you have any trouble at Amazon, let me know and we’ll start an interview loop”.
Most fundamentally of all…very few companies do this. It died with Jack Welch/GM and Gates/Microsoft, after they saw the same downfalls. Amazon is yet to learn their lesson, and it shows in how poorly the “Amazon Management School” under Bezos are performing. The other big tech companies also now do this, although less severe, and surprise surprise, they’re all going downhill - making awful decisions, delivering nothing of value, and ignoring customers over leadership.
5-8% of their staff every year
I’m aware of this policy but I didn’t realise the number was that large.
It’s a great strategy to have your employees backstabbing each other instead of working together too. “Oh, Jim is struggling? Good, one more person below me in the ranks”.
It feels the exact same way in the USPS.
Non-Amazon related answer: every company does this at some point, usually for cost cutting. They want people to quit vs letting people go. They basically introduce less-than-ideal working conditions knowing some people will leave because of it. I haven’t looked at the job market personally but friends have said it’s not great so basically people have to put up with it or take their chances not finding another job for a while.
It also depends on where you live. Where I live, if you are working a fully remote job, and your employment contract doesn’t specify that you need to work in the office, if they try to force you back into the office then you can quit and go on employment insurance since it would be considered a constructive dismissal.
Rampant over hiring.
I’m assuming new people are less likely to complain about no raises and bad conditions.
True, paired with Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.
With that said, a lot of people (like myself) joined Amazon when remote working was encouraged, only to then be told to go in 3 days a week. We lost loads of really great engineers that didn’t have opportunities in their local area. We’ll likely lose a LOT of people again, myself included, unless opportunities open elsewhere where I can transfer to a new area. Amazon are tricky, though, and they’ll preempt this by reducing transfers or laying people off soon to ensure that those that cannot adhere to 5 days a week are considered to have “resigned voluntarily”.
That’s all to say that a lot of bad faith on Amazon’s part will likely scare people away from joining. After the NYT article dropped almost a decade ago, Amazon got around it being hard to hire by having great transfer opportunities and high salaries. Neither of those exist now, and with all the anti-worker rhetoric and lies about internal AI performance “saving x hours on upgrades” I don’t see Amazon ever getting top talent again. Amazon will slip into boomer tech soon enough.
Just to give an outsider perspective to anyone reading this. I live in the Seattle Metro, have worked for Microsoft, and now work at a unicorn. I have a list of skill and experience that any ops department would drool over. Amazon is is one of the companies I won’t even apply to unless I’m desperate for a job (and even then I’m not planning to stay).
And I know I’m not the only one.
Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.
This really happening? What sort of roles are they moving?
This quarter’s top line might not be looking great, so gotta improve the bottom line to impress the Wall Street analysts.
Yeah, that’s a constant. I was wondering if there’s more to it. :D
They must really need another round of layoffs without severance.
Exactly this.
The announcement also includes a statement about reducing management to IC ratio by 15%.
This is 100% voluntary layoffs.
A friend of mine who works there said that there is a non-zero chance a number of managers will be told to go back to being an IC or take a severance.
My team already had a manager switch to IC because we couldn’t get any more HC. On our side I don’t know how much more blood they’re getting from the stone.
Board and executives must be crying for more yachts and avocado toast.
Emboldened oligarch in a plutocracy.
But also kleptocracy and really a kakistocracy disguised outwardly as an aristocracy or neo-monarchy as Raskin said.
Outside of just saying “America” or “Capitalism” How do we combine all of this into one satisfying, effective term?
I like the term neofeudalism.
Amazon shares ticked lower in afternoon trading.
I’m gonna have a really great laugh if/when the share price nose dives because office personnel start bugging out.
This whole “I want us to operate like the world’s largest startup” crap is just infantile for the CEO of a multi-national conglomerate to be spouting and making into corporate policy. No one wants to work for a multimillion dollar “startup” with over a million and a half employees.
Working for startups is stressful as fuck and the incentives are to get a piece of the pie once the startup goes big. Amazon is already massive and the pie has already been eaten by those who came before. All they have left is corporate stability and he’s just kicked the legs out from under that.
It’s weird, it’s like he’s relying on the fact that “Everyone wants to work at Amazon” to always be there for them. Even though the very reason people wanted to work at Amazon were all the perks that no longer exist.
Fuck… I was doing coffee badging recently. 5 days is a lot to just drive to the office and back. I need to look for other dev jobs in Seattle that actually respect their employees, but the market is gonna be so cold after this announcement.
I have until January 2nd apparently.
At least they still haven’t said a minimum time in the office yet…
There are some excellent employers out there - I wish you the best of luck.
Your employer should respect you and the time you put in to producing for the company - sadly many currently don’t.
My team and managers have been awesome with respecting my time. It’s ironic that Jassy wants to “operate like a startup” but won’t trust his management to make the best decisions so we work quickly.
“operate like a startup” usually means they want 60+ hour weeks
Start ups give significant equity
I’m somewhere else but have kept Amazon in the back of my mind as a possible next place, partly out of curiosity to see what it’s like from the inside. The culture has some fun elements. No longer. This moves them out of the 2nd tier and into the 3rd, and honestly I’d wonder about anyone there who’s not chained to a visa.
I’m waiting to see how the industry shakes out in a few months and see where things land.
100% though I’m pissed. The way they’ve handled RTO has been abysmal.
Do you imagine you can wait out layoffs and people quitting, then go back to remote once their quiet quota is reached?
They didn’t do that for the past 3 years. They hired 15% more in 2023.
what happens january 2nd?
Quiet-quitting.
Nah, that happens today. January 2nd is double secret quiet quitting. Or as it should be said, acting your wage.
Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
Amazon is also flattening its corporate structure by having fewer managers in each organization.
Ah I see. Forcing out workers under false pretenses. Par for course, Amazon and Bezos are shit eating bottom dwellers.
That’s called effective dismissal in Canada. It is going to cost them real money if it happens here.
People need to stand firm against the needless RTOs and demands to be present in a workplace where your work consists largely of things you can do safely from the privacy of your own home.
Without more mass resignations when companies start to roll out RTOs like this; they will never learn. If you work at such a company; start looking for another job, even if you are willing to work in the office a few days a week. Punish them harshly for enforcing RTOs.
Those resignations are layoffs without having to call them that, there’s no downside for the company
There’s one important difference: with layoffs, Amazon gets to selectively lay off their worse performers. With mass-quitting, the quitters will be the people who will have the easiest time finding a new job, which I bet is mostly the high-performers, not the low ones
The higher paid high performers… They’re not interested in reducing head count as far as reducing staff costs.
So they can boost “value” of office space.
Mass resignations are worthless. Announce a strike. Make them fire you.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup”
Yeah, that’s not how it works when you get over 1000 people. And it’s definitely not how it works when you get over a million people.
Startups work because the product is small and everyone can be consulted and looped in with ease. Massive companies need thoughtful processes and communication practices to work.
This is hard to do well, and any time someone says they’re going to work like a “large startup,” you’re putting yourself in company with a number of other stupid leaders who have received some dumb advice from 20 year olds at McKensey or Deloitte.
I work for a startup…and we’re all remote…lol
Asked my buddy who is an L7/Principal at AWS with years of experience if this would affect him. He laughed. Said he had already decided to quit in January. This just clinched it. Said they kept hiring entry-level L4s. Lots more senior people going to leave.
I’m not buying anything on Amazon for the next 90 days. Who is with me? I could quit Twitter but I don’t know about a permanent quit of Amazon…
Not that it matters but this change will mostly affect AWS employees which has basically nothing to do with Amazon web store.
It’s literally impossible to fully boycott Amazon, I’ve been trying for years. Even if you buy elsewhere, often you’ll find out after the fact that Amazon does the shipping or payment processing.
We should nationalize their monopoly or break it up.
I haven’t bought anything from Amazon in 10 years. It’s full of crap now, and the legit stuff is just thrown in to a bin in their warehouse for scanning by UPC, so it’s 50/50 if it’s an untraceable counterfeit. And the counterfeiters are good, so you probably won’t notice it’s fake until a couple years later.
It’s like trying to boycott Doordash for takeout. Even if you don’t use the app chances are the place you’re ordering from uses their drivers without you knowing.
I don’t order garbage on amazon or pay people to bring food to my house, and have been able to survive somehow. Wild.
If you use the internet you are using AWS. It is unavoidable at this point.
What is avoidable is a subscription to their retail store, with its own very severe workplace issues.
And while it may be difficult or unrealistic to not be a cog in their web presence, people can still avoid being a direct consumer of that as well.
Haven’t used Amazon in two years. I don’t even have an account anymore. Doesn’t stop them from sending me emails 3x/day to sign up again. I try to shop local, but I do have to go to shitty corp stores for some stuff.
I haven’t bought anything via the Amazon site in years. At least three, possibly five or more. Anything I need I can get elsewhere either online or in person without supporting Amazon’s anti-union, worker-exploiting policies. I won’t even use AWS for business purposes because of how they treat their workers. Boycott away, there are plenty of Amazon options that are “good enough” if not actually better.
amazon is sadly too useful up in ak, but I’ll try to support competitors (aliexpress)
I’m not sure Aliexpress is a shining beacon of workers’ rights either.
workers? I prefer to think of it as flesh based machinery.
Pro: they don’t even need A/C to function!
How about you run your face over a belt sander.
No bathroom breaks, piss at your desk in a jug!
With one hand, because you better be typing some stuff at the same time!
Hopefully everyone else watches the fallout of this and don’t follow suit.
I’m surprised the insurance companies haven’t forced companies to walk back their RTO policies. More sick days, more injuries, more medical expenses.
On the contrary, they will let Amazon take the hit, wait for the news cycle to change, and then do the same thing. You know, for the culture!
Insurance companies can’t match real estate prices of the office buildings they own AND the tax incentives large cities are giving them to force their ppl back
tax incentives large cities are giving them to force their ppl back
I can understand some executive being out of touch and deciding that it’s worth the personnel hit to do full RTO, but tax incentives would explain a lot more of it. Reading that made me irrationally angry for a moment - because that’s super fucked
This is one of the conspiracy theories I believe in.
Most tech workers buy lunch in their local area. If they wfh, they’ll make lunch and not spend money. Meaning less commerce in the city… Makes city look bad.
Also, if you’re coming to said city, if you can choose to live 2 hours north, suddenly that choice looks terrible from a quality of life pov. You’ll likely rent/buy a place in said city. Keeping real estate values higher. (This is another value that benefits both govt and company since they so big they own the majority of buildings they use)
Source: am tech worker at a big river company
Wait. My schedule is 4x10, do I have to come in fifth day?
This is bullshit.
Thats all the days?!
you can work from home at saturdays and sundays :)
