They must really need another round of layoffs without severance.
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.
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.
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.
Do you imagine you can wait out layoffs and people quitting, then go back to remote once their quiet quota is reached?
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.
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.
5-8% of their staff every year
I’m aware of this policy but I didn’t realise the number was that large.
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.
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.
This quarter’s top line might not be looking great, so gotta improve the bottom line to impress the Wall Street analysts.
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.
No bathroom breaks, piss at your desk in a jug!
