Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
From my experience (only one of the FAANGs, so far)... It seems to me that FAANGs are the new banks. Like, today's equivalent of 40 years ago's bank job (cushy, well-paying soul-draining job).
So far I'm done with FAANGs. I can get a nice salary, albeit lower, elsewere and still live comfortably.
FAANGs are just not worth it anymore in my opinion.
The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.
When I started at Amazon during the pandemic, I asked for something in writing saying my job was "work from home". They told me not to worry about it, because I'd be in the system as remote and they would never return to the office anyway.
Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules.
I don't work there anymore because I wouldn't go back to the office.
exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
I was hired as remote at Amazon in 2005 (I left in 2010). I have a friend who was part of an all-remote Amazon team formed more than a decade ago. Everyone on the team left after the RTO mandate came down last year, without severance. In my friend's case, it meant a choice between her job and her husband's in-office job 1,500 miles away from her would-be Amazon office. They chose to stay in the place they wanted to live, near his job and their friends and family.
In a company the size of Amazon, there are exceptions to many things, including exclusive in-office work pre-2020. This is more than a revert.
The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
Amazon has one of the lowest average tenures in the industry. The number of engineers and teams that existed pre-2020 under those working conditions is tiny (except maybe the leadership teams).
Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
I post this every time this topic comes up. But WFH and remote work ability are an exception to the rule in almost every industry/job type other than tech (and sales). Effectively everybody else goes someplace other than home to do their job.
I love it, I prefer it, but I recognize that I am lucky to have a career that can offer it. If my company demanded RTO, I would have to weigh the option and perhaps choose to separate from the organization if I couldn’t make the pros/cons work for me.
In the US employment is effectively always “at will” for the employee. The employer has some regulation that protects the employee, but if they are essentially willing to pay you, and are providing a safe environment to you, what is so wrong with that? They aren’t torturing you.
Tech workers who complain and demand some sort of regulation/intervention against RTO need to realize that those complaints fall on deaf ears to literally everybody other than that tech worker audience. If you want to effect change, quit and deprive the company of your labor.
That's the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's a way that spreads divisiveness and has an unstated pro-business bias.
I think of it as tech workers tend to get treated as people in some ways instead of cattle, and we should work to ensure that everyone gets those benefits. In other words, it's not a privilege that should be shamed or guilted, it's that tech workers are able to demand basic respect on some things.
This happened to my company a couple of months ago, and this was in Europe. As anecdata the managers implementing this forced RTO with "just quit if you don't like it" as an option were all Amazon alumni.
No one is making the working conditions unpleasant. The company which pays you to do work wants its employees to be in the office. If you don’t like it. Don’t work there.
Looks like all the employees about to lose their work from home jobs are upset and downvoting.
I wonder which tech company will be the first to take this too far and implode because of some easily-avoidable cataclysm. I think in some ways you could say Twitter / X already did although they are still limping along for now...
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that stuck with me, I don't remember the title of the post or who wrote it but it was essentially along the lines of "beware when companies start to take away the free snacks". It made a pretty convincing argument about how even seemingly minor changes like that start to signal a greater shift in the companies attitude toward how they want to treat and be perceived by their staff.
I think a lot of Amazonians, even those who choose to stay, will look back on this as their "no more free snacks" moment (I also think there are probably many Amazonians who are already past that point, but that is a different topic).
> I remember reading a blog post many years ago that stuck with me, I don't remember the title of the post or who wrote it but it was essentially along the lines of "beware when companies start to take away the free snacks".
It’s a fairly calculated move, as they know market for engineers isn’t in the best shape, so a significant chunk will keep working with no complaints. They also ramped up hiring heavily, if the number of messages I get from Amazon’s recruiters is an indicator.
Amazon is mostly known for burning out their engineers, right? It is a shame if they are doing these back door layoffs because it means more people will have to get churned through. Burning out can have some pretty negative long term effects, hopefully not too much human potential is sacrifices to the altar of slightly faster shipping.
> It’s a fairly calculated move, as they know market for engineers isn’t in the best shape, so a significant chunk will keep working with no complaints.
Of course, that's the sort of thing that tends to be true right up until it abruptly isn't.
Thing is, if you are the CEO of AWS, you are fantastically well-compensated to be in meetings with people who suck up to you. Of course you think the office is a great place to do your work.
I doubt that has anything to do with anything. It’s far more likely they want to encourage people to move on without having to pay severance. I read on some news site there’s some employee chat channel with thousands of members advocating for flexible work.
Well, one way to make people to something they don't want to is by forcing them. "Do X, or quit".
However, doing this will only breed deep seated resentment. That can only be bad for the company and Amazon as a whole.
If the figures here are correct, 90% are unhappy with the decision and ~70% are considering switching jobs, it could become quite entertaining to watch this company implode from a distance. It will be the top talent who leave first, instantly creating a weaker company.
Its not even a good decision from an innovation/productivity perspective, studies are mixed and many that claim a productivity improvement in the office, if you look at who was involved in funding them, were actually funded by people or entities with a vested interest in office real estate.
That’s what he is saying. Get rid of non h1bs then keep draining people until they leave and then use that as justification to expand h1b positions.
H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.
But that’s the point. Look at all these American workers who quit and we can’t find qualified candidates to fill their vacant positions, so that, Senator, is why we need your vote to expand the H1B visa program.
2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.
Banning remote work (or even just signaling the intent) is an excellent solution to ‘we effed up by hiring too many people in ZIRP/AI expectations era and now we need to get rid of them without paying severance’.
My impression as a longtime user of AWS is that they don't care to retain competent people. They seem to have a "throw more bodies at it" attitude toward work.
unless you know you don't actually need those higher performers (presumably an assumption the bean counters have). People who have fewer options then would necessarily not going to ask for pay rises too. Therefore, you double whammy get both cheaper workers, as well as more obedient ones.
This. The number of otherwise useless overlays upon overlays at AWS is staggering. And quite a number of these L7 (non-sales/customer facing) overlays can be pruned without much impact to overall team/BU output/Rev. Jassy seems to be correcting some of the excess from the Bezos era.
I realise this topic has been covered repeatedly but considering it from another angle:
As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?
This is something I think people are missing but which is really important.
AWS is flailing now and pissing off all the competent workers. Those who have the skill will leave for newer gen cloud companies without the baggage like Fly or Tailscale or even Oxide. Or they'll start their own thing.
So do you really want your whole company's compute environment running on infrastructure managed by burnt out and low skilled people?
This might be the start of the migrations from the first generation infrastructure focused cloud services to the new more application focused services.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I feel like you just wanted to bash amazon. If you don't care if the support people are in office, why are you concerned by the RTO news?
Readit News
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
So far I'm done with FAANGs. I can get a nice salary, albeit lower, elsewere and still live comfortably.
FAANGs are just not worth it anymore in my opinion.
I might be missing an idiom here - offered what?
Got any more?
Is there a list of these anywhere?
Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules.
I don't work there anymore because I wouldn't go back to the office.
exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
Circumventing severance here seems like quite an overstatement.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
In a company the size of Amazon, there are exceptions to many things, including exclusive in-office work pre-2020. This is more than a revert.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
I love it, I prefer it, but I recognize that I am lucky to have a career that can offer it. If my company demanded RTO, I would have to weigh the option and perhaps choose to separate from the organization if I couldn’t make the pros/cons work for me.
In the US employment is effectively always “at will” for the employee. The employer has some regulation that protects the employee, but if they are essentially willing to pay you, and are providing a safe environment to you, what is so wrong with that? They aren’t torturing you.
Tech workers who complain and demand some sort of regulation/intervention against RTO need to realize that those complaints fall on deaf ears to literally everybody other than that tech worker audience. If you want to effect change, quit and deprive the company of your labor.
I think of it as tech workers tend to get treated as people in some ways instead of cattle, and we should work to ensure that everyone gets those benefits. In other words, it's not a privilege that should be shamed or guilted, it's that tech workers are able to demand basic respect on some things.
Looks like all the employees about to lose their work from home jobs are upset and downvoting.
I think a lot of Amazonians, even those who choose to stay, will look back on this as their "no more free snacks" moment (I also think there are probably many Amazonians who are already past that point, but that is a different topic).
Most don't even have them... but ok
Of course, that's the sort of thing that tends to be true right up until it abruptly isn't.
Dead Comment
But that’s not what 95% of AWS workers do.
However, doing this will only breed deep seated resentment. That can only be bad for the company and Amazon as a whole.
If the figures here are correct, 90% are unhappy with the decision and ~70% are considering switching jobs, it could become quite entertaining to watch this company implode from a distance. It will be the top talent who leave first, instantly creating a weaker company.
Its not even a good decision from an innovation/productivity perspective, studies are mixed and many that claim a productivity improvement in the office, if you look at who was involved in funding them, were actually funded by people or entities with a vested interest in office real estate.
H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.
2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.
You end up losing your higher performers, because they have many alternatives, and keeping the people who have fewer options.
As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?
AWS is flailing now and pissing off all the competent workers. Those who have the skill will leave for newer gen cloud companies without the baggage like Fly or Tailscale or even Oxide. Or they'll start their own thing.
So do you really want your whole company's compute environment running on infrastructure managed by burnt out and low skilled people?
This might be the start of the migrations from the first generation infrastructure focused cloud services to the new more application focused services.
The same thing it's always been: cargo cult membership for tech bros who think Amazon invented renting virtual servers.