Common theory l, that I have heard is that if business owns their office space then it’s value is inherently tied to profit margins. If office goes unused, value will drop, which affect bottom line, which affects boards willingness to pay out large CEO bonuses. So getting employees back into the office becomes vital for the leadership.
IMO it’s worse than this. It’s likely to do with Seattle real estate only, because Amazon has their HQ in Seattle, most of the STeam is in Seattle, and it’s where most of the big decisions are focused. There is an acronym that has existed at Amazon for decades, NEWS (Not Everyone Works in Seattle). Sadly, like many Amazonian things, they’re not really a thing any more…
Seems right. I have a friend who works for Amazon and lives in Portland, OR. They’re asking them to relocate to Seattle to RTO. Now they’re debating if they even want to stay at the company. Supposedly they have until EOY to decide.
That’s a shame, and sadly it’s all too uncommon. Given Amazon’s history with layoffs, and the countless stories of people that moved from NYC to Seattle, only to be laid off days/weeks later, there’s no way I’d move for Amazon.
The funny thing is that many people in our Seattle team constantly complain about not being able to park at the office - and that’s without everyone at the office and more to come.
Even if they don’t own it, there is cost associated with downsizing an office. Selling off furniture is impossible at the moment. Leases are down. Subletting is much harder. But there places are, paying plant, hvac and cleaning, maintenance on virtually unused office space.
Most places just need a conference room, some temp offices and a bathroom.
Yeah but bringing people back is still more expensive because it means more maintenance, more cleaning, and in the case of Amazon paying more for the office perks.
I’m sure at some point, somewhere, someone forced people to rto because it was better for their real estate investment…but I just have not been able to make sense of the claims that this is driving factor.
I know some tech workers who really want to return to office full time along with everyone else. They miss the old way. It’s not everyone, and it’s definitely not me, but it’s a legitimate position. I guess now they know where they can go.
I would guess the principal reason here is to socialize, and there’s probably other solutions to this. I would also guess that for some the socializing during the day doesn’t havehave to be with the same company’s coworkers
I love going to the office. I started renting a place nearby to do just that.
But I don’t want my coworkers to be forced to show up. That’s silly.
I legitimately do not understand how people can spend that much time at home and not go stir crazy. That doesn’t mean I want to force people into a situation because of my preferences, but gaddamn, having no context switch between work and home feels way more dystopian to me.
I personally prefer to work in the office, but when there’s no-one else on it. When offices started opening up again, going to the office and having the floor to myself was fantastic. It’s felt like in my college years studying late in the library. I had all the resources I needed and there were no chit-chat in the background or people coming in to talk to me.
I can focus a lot better when I’m at the office. I guess part of it is that I’m surrounded by people who are also working. There’s too many distractions at home.
Having said that, my employer only requires us to go into the office three days per week, which I think is a good compromise.
Hey I can relate. I miss the office too. I was far more productive there and the cooperation and mental space was better there too. But this is a new world we live in, and if you want me to drive to an office, you had better be ready to pay me a fair salary for it.
Oh, you won’t? Guess I’ll go elsewhere.
Amazon tech workers are well paid. What I find is the real cost of in-office is the commute time. I’m almost an hour away door-to-door and while I always enjoy seeing people in person, and our office is quite nice, I just can’t convince myself that it’s worth two hours a day of wasted time, plus the costs. I pay $12 in train tickets any day I go in.
My company announced RTO the same day Amazon did. The Union is up in arms, but honestly the powers that be are handling it pretty well. My boss is happily going to the office for a couple of days a week. She’s a million miles from enforcing it on us though. Exceptions are already in place for people like me (3 hour TGV ride from the nearest office) and even a few people who just said “I really don’t want to”.
I’m sure a few people will leave and not be replaced, but perhaps they were just dead weight anyway. I couple that I know about definitely are.
I know some people like this too.
To be fair, a nontrivial number of them are middle/upper management, but it’s not the entirety of the people I know who want this.
The answer isn’t work-from-home, nor is it return-to-office. The answer is: give people a choice.
If you want to work from home, cool, we don’t need to maintain your cubicle, and/or, we can hire more people without needing more office space. If you want to return to office, cool, your space is waiting for you.
A few will retain the ability to switch back and forth, but the majority of people I’ve talked to about it, either want office or home exclusively. Very few want hybrid.
I’m one that prefers being in the office. My productivity goes to shit when I’m at home because there’s too much other stuff I can do. I also like talking to my coworkers face to face just in general because people are usually more empathetic in person. That being said I don’t think it should be forced on anyone if it’s not necessary to work in the office. The rest of my team works from home without issue as far as I can tell. We are fortunate in that our employer does not have an issue with WFH.
That’s the only pinch as far as I can tell. Some of the people who prefer face-to-face communication, are the bosses. So they force everyone into return to office for their own comfort/convenience/preference…
Those that prefer WFH be damned I guess.
The problem is, you can’t really say no to the boss, you either comply, or find a new job. Not everyone is in a position where they can quickly/easily find a new job that suits them better.
In my experience, the highly skilled long-tenured staff tend to lean towards WFH, but it’s not an absolute. Plenty of skilled people who prefer in-office work… My point is that a disproportionate number of long-tenured workers are finding new jobs when RTO policies are put in place. There’s a lot of highly skilled workers in the market looking for WFH positions. Easy pickings for anyone wanting to hire for remote jobs.
Obviously a lot of the people who prefer in-office aren’t really looking for anything right now, so the job market is kind of crazy. WFH jobs are snapped up and in-office jobs are posted for weeks or months… Simply by allowing people to WFH, a company can pick up some highly skilled talent pretty easily.
As an aside, WFH has saved me upwards of $5k/yr on gas, parking, wasted time on the road, maintenance on my vehicle… It’s quite remarkable.
I was a boss for a couple years. I didn’t force anyone to come in but I did find that I got along better with the couple of people who worked out of the office just because it’s easier to see someone as a person when you can sit near each other and BS all day as opposed to the ones who worked from home and I really only talked to when we were in meetings about work shit. I tried not to play favorites but that aspect did probably bleed into things a bit. We had a team chat going but only a few people used it (or they had one that I wasn’t part of so they could talk without the boss looking over their shoulder, which is fine but it’s hard to get comfortable with people you rarely interact with). I’m now on the other side of it with a boss who always works from home while I’m in the office and I’m struggling with that a little too because I have a hard time gauging if they’re upset with me or if doing well when we only talk on the phone a few times a week.
My work does a weekly “meeting” that’s specifically just a hangout for everyone in the company, just to hang out and talk about whatever.
It’s like a social hour every week, so we can get to know the boss and eachother.
I’ve worked at the place less than a year and there’s been two in person social events so far with everyone, and at least three with my team additional to that.
The culture of the company is clearly important for them, and I’m happy about it. They do what’s needed, and losing an hour of productivity every week isn’t as important as giving everyone the opportunity to connect with eachother.
I don’t think these people are typically pro-choice.
Fair enough. All the business owners I’ve met have said something to the effect of “my way or the highway” about it. So I personally just aligned myself with a job where the bosses “my way” is the way I prefer.
In my case, work from home.
My current job doesn’t even have a physical office. We’re all work from home. I like it.
I’m a bit more pro hybrid but only because I feel new people need a steady mentor and training at the start of thier careers at the company. How do you training works for new people on full remote?
I’m not new in my career, when I started, my training was a couple of days on a full-day teams call with my direct manager, where he showed me the ropes of how we do what we do with the tools we have.
I think it was 3 or 4 days for me, until I had grasped enough of the basics to properly adapt to their way of doing things.
Within a week or so, I was pretty much up to speed. Like with any job, there’s specifics that I learned as I went, but I got the broad strokes during the first week.
I imagine anyone that’s green will need more mentorship that I did. I’m fairly senior in my position, so many times I’m on the other side of mentorship. It’s been a while since I’ve been green.
Ah I remember needed 6 months of oversight. I guess full day teams calls would basically be the same.
Here’s the problem though. When everybody is allowed to choose what they want, people who prefer remote get remote. And people who prefer the office get a ghost town. So by definition, personal choice precludes one group from having access to the thing they would choose.
People who want to work in the office want to work with other people. It’s not just about having a desk in a high rise. People learn from other people and are energized by being around them. There are efficiencies to being able to talk without zoom lag and all. Someone else characterized this as extroverted people and their annoying needs. But I think it’s more than that. Working with others in person certainly has real benefits.
Remote work means no one gets those, ever.
I’m a remote guy myself and hope never to go back. But I can see another side to it.
I’m also a remote guy and I see both sides as well.
The critical assumption you’ve made in this example is that a large majority will choose to be remote, so there won’t be anyone in the office for the in-office people to work with.
I don’t believe that’s as much of a problem as you seem to imply it will be. The problem with the argument is that it’s all assumption and opinion based. To my understanding, there hasn’t been any reliable data produced on what percentage of the population wants in-office and/or remote to be permanent.
Relative to that, you’d also have to take into consideration for populated the company is, and how many people would actually be in the office, before making a determination whether it would be a ghost town or not.
Additionally to that, not everyone wants in-office work for the social aspects of it. Some people’s home life is too chaotic so they prefer in-office, to separate themselves from the chaos of home, and focus on work. It’s not a desire to connect that drives them to the office (pun might be intended here), but rather a lack of outside distraction from their home life while they try to “earn a living”.
There’s also the consideration of who is at home all the time. A homebody spouse, such as a stay-at-home mom/dad, may appreciate having space from their spouse to get things done, as they appreciate the space away. Having such separations can be very healthy and beneficial for relationships, which can also play a role IMO.
The fact is, not everyone is doing it as a social and/or company culture thing. The percentages of people who want it for company culture vs the people who want to for personal reasons, is also an unknown metric.
So in all, at present, we don’t know how many overall people want remote/in-office work, and we don’t know what their motivations for making that choice are. Without that data, it’s difficult to make a value proposition about a decision.
Company owners don’t really care about the metrics, since, during COVID and mandatory isolation, everyone was WFH, and productivity was overall increased. Whether that was because people now had 24/7 access to their work systems, or because people were overall happier about it in average, and were simply more productive due to that, is anyone’s guess.
I appreciate the comment, but there’s a lot more in play than simply socializing and company culture.
I honestly don’t see an issue with the people going back to the office because they want to work from there. I just want others to stop trying to force me to do the same.
This sort of thing seems to have always been a plague with a set of the extroverted sort. They seem to feel the whole world should for whatever reason cater to what makes them happy and us introverted types that do not like the social activities that they do should be made to partake anyway. For our own good. Yet the world is ending those those same extroverted people have to spend a large chunk of time alone or simply being quiet.
The older I get the less patience I have for those sorts of games. Which could become an issue for me professionally I suppose.
Exactly, which is why I really like my current setup, which is 2x in office, 3x WFH. I think being in-person has advantages, but I also feel much more productive when I WFH because I don’t have all of the little interactions at the office (i.e. coworker wanting to get coffee together, quick question from a team member about something irrelevant, etc). I get into better flow at home, but being available is also important for others on the team.
Honestly, I would hesitate to take a full-remote position, but I am definitely not interested in full-on-prem either. I need at least 1-2 days at home to get actual work done, ideally 3.
that’s actually what those pieces of dump wanted lol
That’s a sell cue, for any shareholders reading along.
Nah, the shareholders love this shit.
I mean, most of them. Please ignore my piles of AMZN.
Why’d you have to post a pic of that dead-eyed muppet though?
I mean, realistically it’ll juice the stock in the short term until things catch up to them in 6 to 12 months.
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!
What really gets to me is that during those two pandemic years the tech industry didn’t stop because, wait for it… everybody was working remote, and now they want to gasslight everyone into RTO with a bunch of bullshit arguments because it’s better?
I hope a significant number of them get new jobs and quiet quit to get that double paycheck for as long as they can.
I hope so too. Although the IT job market isn’t great right now, so I doubt the departures will reach a critical mass.
5 day RTO is a stealth layoff. This is a feature, not a bug.
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.
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.
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.
They’re giving up control by exercising control?
You don’t have to fund severance if people leave on their own.
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.
It definitely counts as an unreasonable change. If you quietly accept it, or quit due to it, you won’t get the help. If you set things up in your favor by replying to the mandate with language along the lines of ‘such a significant change to working conditions requires a renegotiation of my contract’ then you’re placing yourself in a good position to say that you were constructively dismissed, not that you quit.
A change from working wherever you are (which could be hours away if you were full remote) to the office is just as significant as being moved from one metropolis to another.
If you were hired as remote you have a pretty strong case for constructive dismissal.
I think you’re going to have an uphill battle if you were hired to work in a building and they allowed work from home due to a pandemic. I don’t think being slow getting back to the office is going to win you your case.
I feel like being remote for 4 years is no longer about the pandemic. It’s become a new standard and by showing financial harm by coming into the office I feel you might have a better case. Example being car insurance. My insurance went down as my car is now a “personal vehicle” vs a “commuter car”
Yep this has been the modus operandi for businesses who want to reduce workforce without having to pay for layoffs.
Quiet firing, if you will.
It’s like reverse stack ranking. They’ll be left with the people that couldn’t find another job.
and the people who know exactly how to waste time in an office.
That’s literally what we all do in office. Just sit ans chat. It’s country club. Productivity went up during covid.
Yup, I waste way more time in the office than at home, and I waste plenty of time at home. Also, the time I don’t waste is more productive at home than in the office.
I still value going to the office, but doing it everyday would just kill my soul. I need some time to myself to get stuff done.
I love being able to fold laundry or go on elliptical during calls. Plus the extra sleep and no commute means im waaay friendlier in calls. Everyone wins.
This is false.
Brain drain is the perfect way to end monopolies.
A.k.a. Twitter and the elon filtering moment
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.
So they’re not paying severance to employees they fire?
Yes, but they’re making people quit instead. They don’t need to pay severance to employees who quit because of RTO.
They are getting severance when terminated, unless for cause. My comment was, this is how they avoid it by forcing people to quit.
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.
I am glad this is happening. Fuck these people. Fuck em’ hard.
These tech workers are not Bezos. They are just developers and technical people that thought they had a good job with competitive salaries. It sucks they have to uproot their lives because management is being shitty.
They may work for a company without ethics, but that’s kind of the corporate landscape these days.
I’m not a big fan of overpaid tech workers either. Upper middle class SDE tech bros are not as bad as upper upper class tech CEOs, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.
Let me reword what I wrote since I think I wasn’t clear.
When I said I am glad this is happening, I mean I am glad that the workers are standing up to Amazon by quitting and heading to a different company. And by ‘fuck em’’ I was referring to Amazon and other employers who want undue influence on the lives of their employees.
I am 100% on the side of the workers here. Always have and always will be.
Sorry i misunderstood, thanks for clarifying!
Thank you both for a positive example of challenging someone’s post.
With all the employees back in the office, they’ll have plenty of time to hang around the water cooler and discuss all the ways to unionize. Leaving the company is great as an individual, it sends a message. Unionizing helps to restore the balance of power vs rights and is exactly what Amazon doesn’t want. This (IMHO) is how you “F them hard”. Additionally, it’d send a message to the other companies who want to flex on the people who make the company work.
I didnt think about that. Thank you for telling me that.
What makes you think they aren’t
listening togathering training data from their employees? Next Amazon initiative: an Alexa at every water cooler and break area.
Amazing.
They order people to work in different offices than before, far away from before, or in offices that did not even exist before. They order people to work in offices who have only worked at home before.
And they call it “return”, and everybody seems to accept the audacity.
Nobody laughs out loud into their faces and calls them the dirty liars that they are.
Yeah this attrition is expected by Amazon. IBM and others did this earlier. If enough people choose to RTO they will do “real” layoffs and get a pat on the back in the news for not letting as many people go as they would have had to before. Optics I guess. IIRC this is the second round for Amazon.
Some are saying companies are doing this to keep their property values up but I think that’s only one facet. What I don’t see being called out often is companies doing this are hiring replacements overseas in tax havens and/or where they can pay less for talent. Real kicker is, those hires wind up being remote anyway to the anchor offices.
Because people who suck their tits need their milk.
We should refer to this instead as Go To Faraway Office
Now this is a good point. During the time of remote work, everything became organized around it. In fact my employer just closed the local office I belong to, because everyone is remote and it just isn’t getting used. If they suddenly decided on RTO and asked me to work at an office 60 miles away that would not be a “return” nor practical in any way. I’m sure Amazon know this but are just saying “oh well,” because really they can’t do kick to solve it. It’s going to be a painful transition but I guess they’ve decided they are ready.
If it’s anything like my work and their RTO a few things.
- hR is well aware of attrition rates and I bet they’re through the roof
- Any new hires are probably not the best or brightest they could expect to hire
So expect quality at Amazon to decline. It may not be outwardly visible but mark my words for those that are still there it will devolve into a chaotic shit show of overworked employees that are left backfilling work for those who left and the incompetence that came in.
I canceled my Prime membership earlier this year because of that decline in quality. I wish everyone could, but thanks to the loss of retail throughout the country many can’t afford not to have it.
Yeah. The rise of a monopoly until it starts to enshitify is interesting to watch eh? Reminds me of Walmart in the physical space. All the local options got pushed out and everyone’s quality was forced to drop due to their economic strong arming.
Prime is not a money saver. It’s a money waster that tricks you into buying more stuff just because “the shipping is free” but you can often get free shipping without Prime or Amazon. Just wait until you need enough stuff to meet the store’s free shipping threshold to make an order.
At this point, Prime doesn’t make sense if you want to save on shipping. It made sense because it included a lot of good stuff (video before ads, some music, shipping, games) but just for shipping, there were better options.
I basically overpaid but didn’t care out of convenience - partner sometimes watched prime, I ordered occasionally, played some included games. But the changes to video were so shady that I cancelled it.
Exactly. We weren’t using the other services much (we watched a handful of shows on Prime, but that’s it), so our only reason was the faster shipping.
So we cancelled Prime and now have to wait a few more days for our package to arrive. The impact was… pretty much non-existent and we’ve since moved a lot of our shopping elsewhere since shipping times aren’t a big draw anymore. I do kind of miss the occasional same-day or next-day deliveries (we live right next to a warehouse), but not enough to justify what we were spending on it.
My relatively poor experience with Prime I attribute to deliberate bad choices rather than lack of workers. It probably doesn’t help to be sure, but even with the most awesome staff, I think Prime was going to suck no matter what. The whole economy is particularly “screw the customers over, get us money now, no need to attract or retain customers now”
I have a feeling the big impact is going to be in other services, namely AWS. Makes me wonder if some new global outages are coming, which are always fun to deal with.
Yeah, there’s going to be hilariously bad outages at AWS within like a year.
Why? Amazon seems to have built an amazing system with AWS, but does it need the same amount of staff time to maintain it that it needed to develop it?
If Amazon acknowledges that it isn’t going to be developing new products to the scale it did for the past decade, it probably doesn’t need the headcount it had before.
Enh, the tech space is very much innovate or die. So yeah, they could probably throw everything in maintenance mode and make a reduced headcount work, but if AWS goes stagnant it’s entirely likely that Amazon goes the way of IBM and Motorol. Especially when someone (likely, Microsoft or Google) comes to take a slice of the AWS market share.
Yeah… I didn’t choose it, but some of the services from my employer run there. May be a good time to make some moves, we’ll see.
Not really going to be an issue I can fix obviously, but I’ll be making even more backups than normal…
good time to make some moves
To where? Google? Azure? There’s a reason we call them Frugal and Unsure at my side job. If AWS sucks in the next year, that’ll barely bring it down to their level. Hell, if AWS sucks ALL NEXT YEAR with a clown-car style outage every week, then maybe.
Yeah, my entire project lives on AWS. Fortunately, it’s not my problem to keep things going, so I guess we’ll just roll with whatever punches come.
expect quality at Amazon to decline.
They’ll have to dig a new basement for it to get any lower.
Stupid, stupid Amazon. How did they not see this coming? It’s been a trend lately.
They did see it coming, this was the goal.
yup. how is that not obvious to anyone is beyond me… some of those workers have contracts that would require amazon paying severance in case they would just fire them like so many other companies do. better make them leave on their own.
That might’ve been the plan all along.
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.
Quality programmers
Bold of you to think that’s what they want.
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.
That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.
Well then bring it on. If feels too big to fail, but if (hypothetically) Amazon were to go under, the world would be a better place.
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 their consequences. I worked there for years and you really can’t imagine how bad the work culture is there, whatever you have in mine 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.
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.
We kicked “this quarter” thinking into high gear when Nixon permanently increased inflation.
There has been efficiency gains throughout. Capitalism is amazing for that, far better than other systems.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
That and the fact the public hate externalities and don’t want them used at all never mind aggressively.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
The only billionaire I know of that is launching rockets is Elon Musk.
That’s just evidence that capitalism is efficient. Because SpaceX has revolutionised space travel making the only reusable rocket doing something all the government agencies said was impossible. NASAs new unbuilt rocket is using tech from the 1970 that they are going to throe away into the ocean on every launch.
The rest you say is meaningless. How you expect this robotic skyscrapers to be built? Some MIT masters project or some capitalist experiment?
Bezos also has a rocket company. Plus there’s Richard Branson. And others.. And then you have private jet travel, massive mega yachts, and countless other extravagances. For a certain class of billionaire, having a private rocket company is a vanity project. These rocket companies are vanity projects by rich sci fi nerds. Yes, they’ve done some really good technical work, but they’re only possible because their founders were willing to sink billions into them even without any proof they’ll make a profit.
What you are missing is that as people’s wealth increases, their resource use just keeps going up and up and up. To the point where when people are wealthy enough, they’re using orders of magnitude more energy and resources than the average citizen of even developed countries. Billionaires have enough wealth that they can fly rockets just because they think they’re cool, even if they have no real path to profitability.
And no, the hypothetical of the robot skyscrapers is not “meaningless.” You just have a poor imagination. To have that type of world we only need one thing - a robot that can build a copy of itself from raw materials, or a series of robots that can collectively reproduce themselves from raw materials gathered in the environment. Once you have self-replicating robots, it becomes very easy to scale up to that kind of consumption on a broad scale. If you have self-replicating robots, the only real limit to the total number you can have on the planet is the total amount of sunlight available to power all of them.
The real point isn’t the specific examples I gave. The point, which you are missing entirely, is that total resource use is a function of wealth and technological capability. Raw population has very little impact on it. If our automation gets a lot better, or something else makes us much wealthier, we would see vast increases in total resource use even if our population was cut in half.
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.
100%
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.
It’s precisely because their working standards are absolutely absurd and unsustainable, so a LOT of people bail before full vesting. AMZN HR intentionally structures the vesting schedule like this because they have numbers to prove it works out in the company’s favor.
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.
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.
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.
I thought the same. Interesting strategy cutting the people who are good enough to get another job.
As long as it looks good on paper, somebody in higher management is getting a bonus for this.
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.
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.
They have a name for it: Dead Sea Effect.
Ooh, that’s good.
I really do wonder if Amazon will run out of people willing to work for them someday. Their approach assumes there is an infinite supply of workers to burn through. Given everything I’ve witnessed from the company, I’d never work there. Do they at some point poison the labor pool against them?
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of bright eyed optimistic people out of school every year.
Another company I had contact with did a few layoffs. Afterwards the recruitment department had a lot more issues finding people. Experienced people would ask a premium because of that company’s reputation in the industry and the experienced people would usually stay a short time and leave. The other option was hiring fresh graduates and put effort in training them.
And if it happens : Rebrand-Time!!
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of
bright eyed optimistic people out of schoolpeople desperate to not be homeless or starve every year.
When I joined Amazon, I was told that for some roles in the US Amazon received more applications than corporate employees worldwide - so I assume 1M+.
That number has probably reduced significantly, given we’ve now had two rounds of RTO. I know some recruiters are really struggling to find external candidates to join, and rightly so, but I don’t doubt that Amazon can find someone to fill these roles, or can find someone outside of North America or Europe to take that role.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
(FWIW, I’ve been at Amazon as a software engineer for close to four years now, and I’ve noticed zero improvement in opportunities afforded to me)
“FAANG” is interesting because it was initially only used to represent high-growth stocks that were leaders in their respective fields. It was originally just “FANG” - Apple was added later.
At some point, it changed to mean the best tech companies to work at. I’m not sure I agree with the list, though. I’d swap Netflix for Microsoft (TC is lower but it’s a more prestigious company and work-life balance is better), and I’d swap Amazon for another company. Not sure. TSMC, Nvidia, or AMD maybe?
It’s funny that Apple was added later given that it is the most valuable company by market cap … it’s seen the highest stock growth of any company on earth.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
The problem is that the clout boost is real. I never worked for a FAANG/MANGA company, but just having one relatively well-known company on my resume opened up options I never would have had. All my interviewers would mention it, even though it was almost 20 years ago.
It might have been a few years ago, but having Amazon on my CV has offered almost nothing. If anything, I get fewer legitimate interview offers than I did before.
I used to work for MapQuest so it might be nostalgia on the part of my interviewers
MANGA
MAANA. If you’re going to swap Facebook for Meta, you also need to swap Google for Alphabet.
Yeah, I’ve gotten multiple jobs in my industry based on a company I worked for like 15 years ago. Just because they’re a major player who is well respected.
It’s real and it can suck.
Any time someone has one of the ‘big names’ on their resume, they get to skip the line and call the shots. Problem is in many of these cases, they got fired from those big companies for very blatantly obvious reasons once you work with them. They will tank their new projects, and executives will just say “this can’t be right, Google is such a success” yeah, because they fired that guy…
We’re constantly producing new people that don’t know any better
This is why employers are ageist. They want naive employees.
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
They were talking about warehouse workers, not corporate employees.
Iirc, didn’t the article say that was one of many hypothetical scenarios they try to plan accordingly for? Like you said, it’s been awhile since it came out, so I could easily be wrong. I imagine it won’t be a problem any time soon, though. There are always desperate people, and simply changing policy to allow rehiring people that had previously been fired/quit would open eligible candidate pools back up.
Or, y’know, they could just make working there not be miserable.
I never understood why anyone works for them at all. And I’m not even talking about warehouse workers. I’m talking about the tech staff. Amazon is known as a cutthroat workplace that drives people like a hammer drives nails. I would never choose to go there.
Agreed and they have an average tenure of like 1.2 years, but their stock vesting schedule gives you 5% in year one, then 15%, 40%, and 40%. So you’re pretty likely to never get whatever carrot they dangle in front of you.
Their strange stock vesting schedule makes me think that they’re aware that people won’t actually want to stay for four years. A back-loaded vesting schedule never benefits the employee, only the employer.
Other companies usually have an even schedule, for example Meta vests 25% per year (actually it vests quarterly instead of yearly). Google is an outlier too, but they do the opposite of what Amazon does - 33% in year one, then 33%, 22% and 12%. I suspect Google do this so they can list a higher total compensation (since total comp is salary, stock, and benefits for one year), but getting more of your stock sooner is a good thing.
FAANG looks good on the resume so people go there with intention to eventually leave for another company willing to pay for FAANG experience. unless you work in a very focused team (e. g Occulus) youre better off jumping companies for higher pay.
if you go to tech career fairs, especially in the silicon valley, the biggest example of this is working for Cisco. they have huge turnover and youre only going to work there to have Cisco on your resume because of how ubiquitous they are at networking for companies.
It’s pretty hard to beat FAANG pay though. Probably there are other factors involved as well. Like maybe they can command 90% of the pay but have 2x better work-life balance or something. But people do stay at these companies for long periods. I’m sure some are there to stamp their passport but not all.
Burn, baby, burn!
