Technology

If the cloud is so great why can't you work remote?

Yet another thinly veiled stealth lay-off by a technology company. Amazon’s cloud boss Matt "The Prat" Garman will indeed see some departures, as intended and desired. However, that first wave will be of their most talented, who feel confident they will land on their feet elsewhere, leaving those that simply cannot leave (yet) or those that will cozily under perform. When Amazon applies the inevitable followup reductions (subjectively based on their internal review process) to remove the latter, and the former buckle under the load or also leave, Amazon will be left with lower-middle talent at best.

The more I see of business "strategy" among this layer of "leadership", the more I'm convinced it is just a game of Jenga with talent, resources, infrastructure, security, quality, etc; pulling out as many pieces as possible in the drive for short term/sighted gains until a company collapses under its own dysfunctional "efficiency" and "success".

You mean Amazon is bad to their workers?

"Amazon employees says cloud boss can eat shit"

Well, yeah. Isn't the whole point of these foolish office mandates to get people to quit? That way they can reduce their workforce without the cost and negative press of another round of layoffs.

At the all-hands meeting, Garman said he’s been speaking with employees and “nine out of 10 people are actually quite excited by this change.”

Just imagine the conversation between the CEO of AWS and some random employee.

„What do you think about the return-to-office policy I propose, Cog #18574?“ „Great idea Mr. Garman sir, really smart move from your team. Incredible thinking and leadership from you Mr. Garman.“

continues to tell people that 9/10 employees he talks to are excited to return to office.

This makes zero sense.. If you're a cloud company why can't employees be in the cloud

Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.

He pointed to Amazon’s principle of “disagree and commit,” which is the idea that employees should debate and push back on each others ideas respectfully

That’s all fine and dandy for ending debate about a stupid roadmap feature, but “disagree and commit” is a different story when you’re asking people to spend 3 hours unpaid in a car everyday.

I asked our CTO at a town hall if there were plans to improve the office my team got moved to because they moved us from the nice office to the city and the back to the previous area but a crappy office. Nope.

What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?

Funniest to me in this kind of debate is having my N+1 manage us from across the country, having two team members in another town, and somehow, my ass being at home 15km from the office makes any difference at all to the daily life of the team? It doesn't. My actual manager, the dude giving us our marching orders, doesn't care. Shit, our N+1 doesn't care either, since he's almost always remote himself!

Only people I've seen actually care seem to be HR, for whatever reason.

I don't even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.

I forsee an Amazon brain drain about to happen.

I'm a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn't have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.

We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It's not a big deal personally - I live close and I'm older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don't see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.

I’m 47. I’m not a boomer (although I’m probably hella-old compared to most here) and I’d just like to say: What a bloody bunch of boomer-bosses.

“Have you tried disagreeing on a call! It’s hard!”

Grow up man, use the hand up feature and state your case. I work in a fully remote business and we have better meetings here than any office based meeting I’ve ever been in. Calendars are public, confluence is prevalent, slack is the lifeline (thankfully very little email) for everything; with a bunch of “banter”, hobby channels etc. We start every large meeting with a “one personal and one professional highlight” before we commence. I know the people here better than I’ve ever done my office based colleagues.

They are going to regret this. I do not know any developer who would prefer 5 days in the office. None. It’s not like Amazon’s compensation was that high. I really genuinely don’t understand how they expect to recruit.

Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?

Do it during holiday season. Do it.

Never quit in these situations, or they win.

Do the absolute fucking minimum you can, or even less so you piss off management, until they have to fire you, which they can't outright as after a certain number of years they have to give warnings and trainings first.

Why don't they just keep working from home and get fired? Instead of having to quit themselves?

Another company that lays off it's talented people first, due to the meddling of a CEO where he has no business to.

So admitting that it's constructive dismissal?

Alexa, tell me what "dead sea effect" means.

I don't know about everyone else, but if that were my boss, they'd be severely underestimating my capacity for petty behavior.