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”.
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.
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.
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.
Constructive dismissal says what?
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.
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.
“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.
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
Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?
Do it during holiday season. Do it.
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.
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.
Watch Amazon sue them or something lmao
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.
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.
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.
Alexa, tell me what “dead sea effect” means.
I forsee an Amazon brain drain about to happen.
Another company that lays off it’s talented people first, due to the meddling of a CEO where he has no business to.
Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.
“Skilled labor” is such a bullshit concept
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.
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.
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.
