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- cross-posted to:
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cutting head count without “firing” people. standard capitalism bullshit.
stop using amazon. let it rot.
It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon. It’s hard to avoid AWS. It would be insane to try to suss out what provider everyone that I buy stuff from uses, and their third party relationships. Regulation is better.
Yep, try browsing with ublock origin blocking all Amazon domains. Lots of things break because AWS is so large.
In the old days people used to have their own servers…
And you can still buy them…
And the cloud really isn’t cheaper…
But whatever, it’s ubiquitous today. Maybe someday people will wake the F up.
Exactly. This is just more failures of govt to constrain and regulate.
It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon
I mean… Yes but also no.
Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.
What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.
As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?
The best way to do this is to correlate downtime with main providers. If a cloud provider goes down when AWS has outages on related services, it’s probably using an AWS service.
Yup. They want people to quit.
That links says only a quarter did it because they wanted people to quit, so it suggests that chances are this is not the reason Amazon is doing it…and you’re posting while claiming it factually proves this is their motivation? Pretty deceiving.
I personally read this as “one quarter admit they did it to get people to quit”. If you think these folks are always transparent and honest, think again. They’re just trying to say whatever gets them the least amount of bad PR
This is effectively a layoff without benefits.
Your position hinges on the survey not being anonymous. I clicked through and found nothing that claims it was not anonymous, and these things are normally done anonymously for exactly the reason you point out: less honesty.
Do you have anything to back this up or is it simply that holding this belief helps confirm what you already believe to be true?
Which works fine as long as you don’t mind keeping your worst employees, while all your best ones quit, which is generally the opposite of how it works during layoffs
It does also work for them that they retain employees who are more likely to put up with their bullshit. They can cull the truly lazy ones at a later date as required, either by firing them or finding a similarly bullshit change that they’re likely to be adverse to.
I enjoy how Amazon talks a big game about how great they are for the environment and their pledge to stop climate change, then they force workers to commute to the office who have been happily doing their jobs over the internet.
Yah this is literally the most basic shit any company can do to be more “green”, cut costs, have access to a larger worker base…
Nope. Because the CEOs are all more concerned with the commercial real estate market than running their company efficiently.
Because the CEOs are all more concerned with the commercial real estate market than running their company efficiently.
It’s shocking how many people have honestly bought this. I mean, I’m sure there is some truth to it and maybe somewhere, someone forced people to come back because of some real estate interests… But the CEO of Amazon almost certainly gains to benefit much more from a rise in price of Amazon stock than any real estate they might own. And even if it was the case, I dont think the board would be very happy about it.
It might be the wrong move, and maybe it is being done to get people to quit, but it’s being done because they think it means more money from Amazon.
I think they are mostly doing this as a stealth layoff. It’s been a pretty popular strategy lately.
The joke is, you get the good people to leave first this way. Be it estate or layoff, it’s a bad move either way.
So why do they do it still? Only thing i can think of is the powerplay. CEO types are sometimes as developed as a child, mentally.
Also Andy Jassey does not look like he is able to effectively groom himself, so that tracks.
Yeah and this whole agenda of RTO rolled out worldwide directly after Davos 2023 when a bunch of CEOs were tweeting about it from there. But noticing this makes you a conspiracy theorist.
They illegally fired the very employees who led the effort to pressure the company internally to do more on climate… All their climate posturing ever since has been bullshit.
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The employees hired during full remote are now going to have to change their lives around going into the office. Tech employees are especially fucked because they either have to stay or they have to attempt to join the flood of tech employees looking for remote jobs (which was caused by the execs doing layoffs at tech companies).
There should be protections against hiring someone remote and then forcing them into the office as soon as you want to lay people off by forcing them to quit so you don’t have to compensate them.
In some countries, there are already.
In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.
So yes, basically, it’s legal.
That’ll teach us plebs. We’d better start licking some serious Amazon boot so they deign to let some of us earn enough to not die.
Thats assuming those full remote employees are anywhere near an office.
The worst is those people who bought houses out of town at the top of the real estate market because they believed the propaganda about WFH being permanent. However I never trusted C-level execs or directors not to renege on this, so I didn’t do that.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
God I hate Amazon now. They’re basically Wal-Mart these days with half the results being sponsored (advertisements) - and you see that even if you pay for Prime. There are some things you can only get there, but otherwise, since all e-commerce is converging, I don’t see the point of enabling their bad behavior. But whichever global corporate enterprise you take your business to, they will likely have a similar mindset.
And the search engine is shit, with non-existent filters. So you browse for longer and buy more shit you never needed.
Fuck Amazon.
Trying to make those yearly office space rentals worth it
Aren’t they still cheaper if nobody uses them?
Maybe. Real estate is flaky game at best
Ok, but I’m still not going back to wearing pants.
They should be charged an emissions tax and worker safety tax since driving to/from work is one of the leading causes of death for working adults
Seems like covid’s overall impact on society won’t be as long lived as we thought. The whole work from home thing was almost seen as revolutionary as it would save office space and expenses. But it seems companies care far more for control than even profit.
Don’t give up so easily
We can’t really give up. But I am a shit activist…
I drive by the Boeing strike every day and I do my part and I hunk twice quickly! Do your part guys! Hunk! It matters!
It’s not your job today, but it could be you there tomorrow at 8am wet and soggy from the rain and fog that continually falls in the PNW.
Honk like you just crashed on that big barrel of stuff burning. They burn stuff to stay dry and warm. It’s cold out here…not yet but give two more months and it will be freezing temps.
Companies want profit but the people who run them want control. Sooner or later the companies will reconfigure themselves to benefit the bottom line.
Cool, glad I didn’t listen to my parents, who wanted me to work for Amazon. Yeah, I probably could’ve made a ton more, but I’m making plenty where I’m at.
I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason. It’s nice working for someone that somewhat respects me.
“Probably could’ve made a ton more” - no chance of that working for Amazon.
You dodged a lot of pain and loooong hours, 7 days a week.
I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason.
For now. Soon it’s going to be: “Well, Amazon is calling people back, maybe we should, too.”
Well, the day my boss says that is the day I submit my 2 weeks notice, and probably half of our dept. We were hired with the promise of always having 3 days at home most days, and my boss kept to that, even pushing back against company policy that tried to shift to 3 days in office.
The day your boss does that is the day they want to lay people off on the cheap, because it’s a stupid decision with no measurable benefit over the 3 day minimum most of the big tech companies seem to have settled on.
And that’s fine, if my boss changes so radically that he’d go back on years of doing uncomfortable things to keep his word, I know it’s not a company I’d feel comfortable working at anymore anyway. Some things they’ve done:
- push back on 3-days in office - we “tried” it for a month or two, then went back to 2-days because it hurt our productivity
- when a visiting exec scheduled a mandatory meeting outside of our 2-day in-office window, boss told us to WFH one of those two days and pushed the exec to schedule future meetings in that 2-day window (which they’ve done since)
- tells us before changes come from corporate, and which will actually impact us (generally speaking, he says “ignore that new policy”)
- keeps us updated about department funding, and what the plans are if funding drops; he has hired some outside teams specifically so he can drop them if funding gets cut
In other words, he has kept his word for the few years I’ve worked here, and we’ve recently been getting praise from the executive team on company-wide calls (well, basically “product X has turned into a primary focus for our org’s strategy going forward,” where X is the thing I work on and was criticized just a few years).
If my boss leaves the org, I’ll probably start looking for jobs. But until then, I’m very happy where I am, even if I know I could probably get paid a little more elsewhere (probably 10% or so). Stability and integrity matter a lot to me.
That’s gonna be a no, dawg.
Generally? That’s bad leadership.
Maybe somebody has some insight into this: why does this succeed in getting people to quit, since that’s the obvious gambit? Why do people not just refuse to come back and get fired for insubordination or whatever? Do you not get unemployment benefits for getting fired for that reason (ignoring that unemployment is a pittance compared to their salaries), or are they packaging these people out with attractive severances or something?
Because people need stable incomes and healthcare, so they start applying for jobs and get them. People aren’t quitting to be unemployed.
Honestly, IDK. My company is moving their office slightly further away from me. This will add much more commute time because of the location though. I’m already looking for a new job but if I don’t find one by then I’m certainly not going in. We worked 100% remote for over 3 years. I’ll find out what the consequences are.
My situation will be a bit different though since the office location is moving. Seems unreasonable that they’d be able to deny unemployment because of that.
Depending on the country you live in, you should check for mobility clauses in your contract. In many EU countries moving the location of your work requires an employer to come to a “reasonable” agreement with the employer or treat the request as a redundancy (with redundancy pay etc).
It’s usually just enough severance to make it worth it. It’ll be like a month of pay maybe which is worth 6-8 months of unemployment.
And honestly…if they offer a month or two of health insurance on top, you have to take to avoid the cobra fees.
It’s usually an easy choice to take severance.
They need to find their next job first
You get sign on shares when joining, but they don’t mature for 2 years. Leave/get fired before the 2 years is up, you forfeit the shares.
Staff turnover at the 2yr tenure mark was crazy. Well over 50% jumped ship as soon as they hit 2yrs.
Wasn’t there talk of a mass strike in the U.S., at some point? We should do that.
Inb4 my company follows suit. Just like they want to with IT, AI, Cloud infrastructure (we own our stack almost entirely).
