RTO = free layoffs
That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.
It’s also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Yes. But some of them are also the most expensive ones, so when they leave costs go down. And we all know “numbers must go up” (=cost must go down).
So you’re left with departments full of clock punchers who don’t have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that’s a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren’t going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.
Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.
Idk about the whole talk of having an excuse to shareholders, I don’t think shareholders look into hey these offices are sitting unused I demand an explanation I think they care how much profit the company making and what are future predictions of profit.
No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren’t using? Shouldn’t we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don’t need.
5 day RTO is a stealth layoff. This is a feature, not a bug.
It’s like reverse stack ranking. They’ll be left with the people that couldn’t find another job.
That’s literally what we all do in office. Just sit ans chat. It’s country club. Productivity went up during covid.
Like many companies, they overhired in the last 4 years. Some of these people are due years of severance (my offer listed 2months for every year after 1 year), not to mention the vested stocks and other bonuses granted during this insane hot hire period.
So how do you remove people not loyal to the company? The most hated mandate ever. Amazon is a company that doesn’t need people in the office. This is nothing more than screwing people over.
No rank and file US-based employees at Amazon are getting years of severance. They don’t do that.
Yeah, that was a typo and my experience is limited towards the AWS side which is also facing this issue. But the numbers are there, some people have been at Amazon for a decade, so 20 months (if they had MY package of 2mos per year). Amazon was throwing everything at new hires, because they were making bank on their work.
If Amazon don’t think that remote work is productive, then they don’t think they’re losing anything. I don’t even know how “stealth” this is at all. They must believe that those individuals could be productive, because they are trying to keep them working in office. I’m not sure why anyone thinks a company like Amazon would try to be “stealth” about a layoff anyway. They don’t need to.
And returning to the office probably doesn’t count as an unreasonable change to the agreement, so you probably won’t win if you sue, and the unemployment office probably won’t help.
So yeah, sucks all around.
So they don’t have to pay severance or other state penalties for doing an actual layoff. They aren’t thinking of talent with this move.
Yeah, I think they want to reduce headcount, and this is the cheapest way to do it. I’m guessing they’re getting some flack for investing so much in AI w/o enough return to justify it, so they’re culling a lot of the workforce to juice the numbers a bit until that investment starts to make sense. They’ll probably just reshuffle people around as needed within the org to fill the gaps.
I find that unconvincing. That they will give up all control in order to save what is ultimately a small amount of money. Paying severance to cut people is already a way to save and reduce budgets. To say they will give up control and take real risks with who they lose just to avoid a piddling 2 months salary per head… it doesn’t add up.
I am pretty sure working from home has proven to be more productive, so I think other factors are at play here. I worry that returning to the office might be the only way to keep the capitalists from trying to send our jobs over to poorer nations. If the tapeworms think the job needs to be done face to face then it is much hardet to send those jobs to India or S. America.
They’ve already tried to send all the jobs they can to India or South America. It ultimately didn’t work. They can send some, but the language and cultural barriers, plus the difficulty of assessing quality candidates just doesn’t make it viable at scale. They’ve already tried that game and it failed. Everything that can be outsourced to India already has been outsourced to India.
Just as planned - Amazon Execs who aren’t planning to rehire them anyway.
They do this shit to cull you.
It’s sort of a strange approach, because this will leave you with the workers who can’t find employment elsewhere.
Executives do not see workers as people with skillsets. They’re numbers on a spreadsheet. And having ten highly paid workers quit “voluntarily” makes the numbers do good things.
Actually, they’re not even numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re data points in a graph. Executives don’t have time to understand numbers, let alone people.
Most companies are satisfied with adequate workers rather than diligent and empowered workers. The latter cost too much. This is a convenient way for Amazon to cull the crew without incurring bad PR. This is why it’s often a shitshow in offices and warehouses; because the workers with self esteem and motivation either get fed up and leave or are forced out. This is just a facet of Big Capitalism.
People exaggerate this claim. Amazon already accounted for some talent leaving and the benefits obviously outweighs the con. There is nothing strange.
Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they’re in for a very rude awakening. They’ll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They’re highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.
The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They’re playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.
Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.
We’re only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We’re essentially a parasite. It’s not surprising that the most successful corporations are the most successful parasites. It’s just parasites, doing parasitic things, because they’re parasites… from the top down.
They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.
Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.
That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.
They may not want them, but with how many people are switching to things like AWS, they may find they need them.
And it will ultimately cost them more to find new people when they realize that they’re pissing off their customers with their poor new hires.
I will be happy to watch them squirm when they come to this realization. Karma is a bitch, Amazon.
An awakening would mean they would analyze and understand the situation. They won’t. Amazon has and probably always had a bullish “my way or the highway” attitude - ask people what they think, pretend you care, then ignore everything they might say. Upper managers make decisions uniquely based off costs and short term vision, and are never held accountable for the consequences. I worked there for years and you really can’t imagine how bad the work culture is there, whatever you have in mind is worse in reality
Problem is for a company like Amazon, even if the brain drain will result in obviously inferior customer experience, it could take years before that happens and for it to be recognized and for the business results suffer for it. In the meantime, bigger margins and restricted stock matures and they can get their money now.
Particularly with business clients, like AWS customers, it will take a huge amount of obvious screwups before those clients are willing to undertake the active effort of leaving.
in the long run
That’s a foreign concept for management, they only see one quarter at a time.
yeah, the only problem is that this results in the best talent leaving, you’re stuck with people who have nowhere else to go. it’s one of those short-term profits kinda things, which is why Wall St loves it so much.
I thought the same. Interesting strategy cutting the people who are good enough to get another job.
And they want people off the vesting ramp as early as possible.
Amazon does 5-15-40-40
I’ve… never heard of such a vesting schedule. Doesn’t everyone else pretty much do 25%/year ?
Amazon is super stressful and I guess a lot of people quit the first few years. Maybe the 40% is to motivate them to stay for more hellish years.
I’m very happy not to work at Amazon.
This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.
Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.
The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.
There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.
I think they do actually want to cut the high skilled talent. High skill means high pay, and now that they’ve achieved market dominance in pretty much every industry they’ve stuck their penis into they don’t need talent. Lower skilled, and therefore lower paid, employees can do just good enough to keep everything from burning down just long enough for the C-suite to get their bonuses and cash out. After that, who cares, they’re on to their next grift.
There has been a swing in the business opinion
Depends on where you read that info, it tends to be 50/50 pro/against really.
Yeah it’s 50/50 because the executives really don’t like it, but the actual data supports remote work being far more efficient. They’re working really hard to cook the books to make it look like the opposite to appease the execs but they can only do so much. Give them a few more years to cherry-pick data and bury inconvenient results and they’ll be back to the same bullshit that justified productivity destroying (but cheap) choices like hot desking and open plan offices.
To add to what others have replied, Amazon have an institutional belief that everyone who makes it through the Loop is better than 50% of existing staff.
It could be post-hoc rationalising of back-loaded share vesting, hire-to-fire, and their other many practices, but that’s the position. With that kind of thinking, it makes this behaviour, including it’s consequences, a no-brainer win:win to them.
I hope a significant number of them get new jobs and quiet quit to get that double paycheck for as long as they can.
