Wow, it seems like the return-to-office mandate is causing quite the shake-up! Totally get why folks are jumping ship - flexibility has become such a big deal, especially after getting used to working from home. I read that 65% of workers now say they’d consider quitting if they couldn’t work remotely! It’s all about finding that work-life balance in a job that respects our needs. Hang in there, tech friends—plenty of companies out there understand the power of flexibility and trust!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.
in the long run
That’s a foreign concept for management, they only see one quarter at a time.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a sell cue, for any shareholders reading along.
That was probably the intent. It works as a soft layoff. Do something wildly unpopular, knowing that a bunch of employees will quit. The ones left will pick up the slack, because obviously if they had anywhere else to go they would’ve left with the first group.
Unfortunately a dollar in cut costs is more valuable than employee talent these days.
It costs them more in the long run but those metrics are more difficult to capture and convey, and nobody would care anyway.
Which is why everyone who thinks they’re clever to call this a “soft layoff” is not as clever as they think. Amazon isn’t shy about doing layoffs and dismissing low performers. An unpopular decision like this will frequently eject the most capable employees because they are the ones who can most easily find other work. Meanwhile the dead weight employees stick around because they know they can’t find other arrangements as good. It’s a dumb way to reduce staff, and Amazon aren’t dumb.
No, I think we take Amazon at their word on this one. They are not just fucking around to try to shake 20% of their workforce loose. They genuinely don’t want to do remote anymore.
Why do you think a company like them would do a soft layoff, instead of just picking the low performers they think they should lay off and just dismissing them? What do they gain by leaving it up to chance and the decisions of employees? It could be a lot more disruptive that way, with no control over who leaves or when. If you’re going to say it’s all to save a buck by not paying severance, I’m not convinced that the lack of control and having to deal with the random effects is remotely worth it.
I’ve worked for companies that would leave it up to chance without a second thought. I’ve known people that worked there and Amazon doesn’t seem like it cares about its employees. Does it make sense? No, but there’s alot about corporate America that’s pretty dumb.
To literally no one’s surprise, least of all the leadership at Amazon. No unemployment when you quit.
The problem being that the ones moving on to other jobs are the actual talent. Unlike a targeted layoff, this leaves Amazon with the employees no one else wanted.
That’s assuming the real talent wasn’t secretly given exception to this. And in any case, what’s important isn’t having the best talent, it’s making the numbers look better for end of year. Amazon has become too big to fail, they don’t need top talent to deliver a superior customer experience. Anyone reliant on cloud offerings is stuck. Employees get laid off, prices go up, product gets worse, who cares. People are paying. Thats the stage of capitalism they’re in.
Anyone reliant on cloud offerings is stuck.
There are multiple public clouds. AWS is not the default choice a company uses for a public cloud offering anymore.
This is pessimistic nonsense.
No, Amazon is still very dependent on their software engineers, and no, it’s actually quite easy to move cloud offerings and they face stiff competition from both Azure and GCP amongst others.
Also, virtually every single internal piece of HR, management, customer service, DevOps, random internal tool to do X, is written by other software teams at Amazon. You fundamentally do not understand how big tech companies operate if you think they can afford to hemmorage engineering talent without impacting their bottom line in a multitude of ways.
And this is not even to mention the competition that Amazon faces across all its different businesses: Kobo in ebooks, Roku, Google, and Apple TV in streaming boxes; Netflix, Disney, HBO, YouTube in streaming video; Google, Apple, Spotify, Tidal, in music streaming; Shopify, PayPal, Visa, etc in payment processing; Walmart, Best Buy, Shopify, in eretail, etc. etc. etc.
