Amazon CEO Tells Employees To Return To Office Five Days a Week
- Reference: 0175008283
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/09/16/1845223/amazon-ceo-tells-employees-to-return-to-office-five-days-a-week
- Source link:
> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon's earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy. Corporate employees will be expected to be in the office five days a week "outside of extenuating circumstances" or unless they've been granted an exception by their organization's S-team leader, Jassy said, referring to the close-knit group of executives that report to Amazon's CEO.
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> "Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward -- our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances," Jassy said. Amazon also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to "remove layers and flatten organizations," Jassy said. Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said. Individual contributors refers to employees who typically don't manage other staffers. It's unclear if the change will result in the elimination of some manager positions.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazon-jassy-tells-employees-to-return-to-office-five-days-a-week.html
So, a silent layoff (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're telling you they're also reducing headcount at the same time, it's clear that return to office is a cost saving measure, not to improve efficiency. They want people to quit and they don't want to invest in a remote work strategy.
Just another reason why you should not work at Amazon. Low pay, shit work, and now also spend a good chunk of your life commuting and have less flexibility. Coolcoolcool.
Re:So, a silent layoff (Score:4, Insightful)
This is their corporate office, not one of their fulfillment centers. That makes a BIG difference.
It's most certainly not sh&t work or sh^t pay at Amazon corporate. For that, the company is recruiting from the same pool that Google, Microsoft and Apple are going after for top-end management and technical track positions.
And, if they want to demand 5day/week in-person, that's their right. They might be missing out on some high quality people, but that's their choice. I would bet that they'll be quietly approving remote work pretty frequently, on an as-needed basis.
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From someone that knows folks at Amazon: Corporate workers report into physical fulfillment centers (if in the retail business) or any office near by. This will impact all Amazon corporate folks. They have already got rid of the all the pure remote workers hired during the pandemic when the 3 day rule was announced. This is a return to the norm at Amazon and most of the tech industry.
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> and most of the tech industry.
Do you have any facts to back that statement up?
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> Do you have any facts to back that statement up?
[1]Remote work statistics [b2breviews.com]
In 2019, about 5% of employees were fully remote.
In 2020, it leapt to 46% because of Covid.
By 2022, it had fallen to 30%.
It is now about 20% and declining.
Women are more likely to work remotely.
Low-income people are less likely to work remotely.
Asians are most likely to work remotely. Hispanics are the least likely.
Remote work is most common in northern California, the PNW, and the northeast corridor. It is least common in the Southeast.
[1] https://www.b2breviews.com/remote-work-statistics/
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> This is their corporate office, not one of their fulfillment centers. That makes a BIG difference. And, if they want to demand 5day/week in-person, that's their right. They might be missing out on some high quality people, but that's their choice. I would bet that they'll be quietly approving remote work pretty frequently, on an as-needed basis.
It's a different world as you note. But if a person is planning on going anywhere in a company, never coming to an office isn't the way to do it.
If a person is interested in being something other than a programmer, it's pretty difficult to move into management if they consider their office to be in their bedroom or basement.
If I might a somewhat similar situation. We hired some people in the same job description as me in the job I retired from. But they refused to do much of the work I did. They would
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> If they're telling you they're also reducing headcount at the same time, it's clear that return to office is a cost saving measure, not to improve efficiency. They want people to quit and they don't want to invest in a remote work strategy.
I've long said there's benefits to being in the office, but I completely agree here.
For the networking effect I think 3 days a week is plenty. I'd even expect a bit of a productivity boost as you could do your teamwork stuff at the office then WFH on the stuff where you don't want to be disturbed.
Going full-time in-office for the Corporate employees (management? marketing? IT? software?) is basically a "get some folks to quit without giving them severance" move.
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> i've long said there's benefits to being in the office, but I completely agree here.
> For the networking effect I think 3 days a week is plenty. I'd even expect a bit of a productivity boost as you could do your teamwork stuff at the office then WFH on the stuff where you don't want to be disturbed.
So...while I can believe some jobs might benefit from in person interaction....I've found from my past 17+ years working remotely in VERY large IT projects, long term projects.....that I've never seen working re
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What's silent about it? "Amazon also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to remove layers and flatten organizations" is perfectly clear.
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You should be happy that these corporations even give you a job at all. You should bow down to these C-suite executives for not taking all the profit for themselves and giving you a pittance. Those guys are geniuses and should be worshiped as the deities they are.
More like Jeff Peezos (Score:2)
Shit, how am I gonna ship these thousand gallon jars of pee from my home office to my cubicle at Amazon, or store them when I get there?
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You may have missed the memo: He dont work there anymore. He enjoying life with his mistress traveling the world.
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Ugh, fine. More like Andy Pissy, then. Or Andy Pessary?
What island did he send his communique from? (Score:2)
Certainly not in town when he sent that, I bet!
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I'll have you know that Andy Jassy commutes daily from his private island to the Amazon corporate offices, taking a solid gold reproduction of Helios's Chariot across a solid gold (and then painted) reproduction of the Rainbow Bridge from Norse mythology, both of which are hurriedly disassembled after he arrives at work, then just as hastily reassembled when he leaves two hours later.
Studies by Amazon have demonstrated that this method of commuting is cheaper and better for the environment than any other me
Layoff (Score:5, Insightful)
All of these announcements are just silent layoffs. Look at PWC recent announcement that they want more RTO followed by layoffs. This following years of underperformance.
Looks like Amazon is likely also expecting a pretty bad quarter if they need to do another silent layoff. With spending trending down across the range, it's a matter of time till companies start cutting into their ridiculously expensive cloud bills. All these amazon services basically boil down to running free software or bring-your-own-license software on absurdly overpriced 5-10 year old low performance machines. A 700 dollar per year t3.large instance has the same memory and half the CPU performance as a raspberry pi... it's really pathetic. For every single service Amazon offers there are enterprise grade cheaper and better performing offers.
The valuation of Amazon does not take into account that what they offer is a simple commodity that can pretty easily be switched to another party.
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PWC got utterly annihilated in it's massive PRC market recently. They were Evergrande's auditor when massive fraud going on within that company crashed the PRC's real estate market. Since then, Communist Party took a proper hammer to the company, absolutely shredding it. All while lawyers in Hong Kong are using its interesting laws on reporting and investment responsibilities to claw back massive losses investors took when Evergrande crashed from the auditors of Evergrande, that being PWC.
So current problem
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> All of these announcements are just silent layoffs.
Well, if employees refuse to do what they signed up for, then it's more than a silent layoff - it's a firing.
I know this is Slashdot, where the party line is that the very best, most proficient and valuable employees have the ability to never walk into an office again, and are chased by prospective employers to pay them the highest salaries as befits their talents.
They can now prove their worth. I mean, I get it. No commute, you can live in Bumfuk, North Dakota where the average house costs 15K, and wo
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> But if they told me to come to work every day, I would.
Your employer must be thrilled to have you. You know your employer is trying to bully your coworkers into quitting and you blame your coworkers. Not that it would affect you, it's mostly just a great way to get rid of women and minorities as for women it's more important to be home in time for dinner and minorities tend to live further. It's just saving a dime on a severance check. But don't worry, next savings round they might find some reason to bully you out of a severance check and you can tell the bore
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>> But if they told me to come to work every day, I would.
> Your employer must be thrilled to have you.
While I understand you are being sarcastic, to be certain, two years ago I got a 50 percent pay raise, and earlier this year it was doubled again. Anyhow, I feel so used and abused.
As far as the next severance round, where I am working at the moment is a solitary position with some serious authority, so I'm doubting they will can me. They went through several people who couldn't handle it before me, either from lack of technical knowledge, or the inability to interact with stressed people or just became
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This seems like a counterproductive way to do a layoff, though. The good employees can and will find alternative jobs, leaving behind a team that is overworked and have reduced capabilities and morale. Of course on the other hand the good employees who quit were probably highly paid too, so maybe the short term savings is higher.
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> This seems like a counterproductive way to do a layoff, though. The good employees can and will find alternative jobs, leaving behind a team that is overworked and have reduced capabilities and morale. Of course on the other hand the good employees who quit were probably highly paid too, so maybe the short term savings is higher.
Very counterproductive. The loss of institutional knowledge makes it even more so.
Amazon shouldn't be trying to cut people right now. Amazon's site is rapidly bordering on unusable these days, with me often having to spend longer to find things on there than it would take me to drive to a local store if the store actually had what I needed, because their search returns such a high rate of poor matches for the search terms. The sponsored results make this even more miserable. They're seriously ripe for d
So, more stealth layoffs, then. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is amazing that our species regularly produces people who can treat others like shit and sleep well at night.
This will be about reducing payroll without severance packages, or simple exercise of power just because.
What it is not about is efficiency and performance, or Amazon would have been suffering since 2020 and it clearly has not.
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I don't understand. Is there an expectation that when you hire an employee that this job will continue to exist forever? Having to work from home because of a global pandemic is a lot different than "I want to keep this paid time off."
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> I don't understand. Is there an expectation that when you hire an employee that this job will continue to exist forever?
Actually, yes. From an unemployment insurance perspective, there's an expectation that when you hire an employee, that role will be largely permanent unless it is explicitly advertised as a temp job. So the expectation is that if the employee doesn't underperform, you will keep that person employed, and will work to move that employee to another position if you no longer need them in that specific role, to the maximum extent possible. Layoffs, whether explicit or implicit (massively changing the rules su
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> It is amazing that our species regularly produces people who can treat others like shit and sleep well at night.
They are an essential part of the system. We need leaders to function, but we lack good methods for selecting those leaders, so we settle for flawed methods. As long as that remains true, the people who are who are the best ... at getting the job (*not* the people who would be best at it) ... will continue be our leaders.
Figure out how to tell a board which CEO to pick without picking the bo
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Right, but the problem is that the board are themselves borderline psychopaths.
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> It is amazing that our species regularly produces people who can treat others like shit and sleep well at night.
> This will be about reducing payroll without severance packages, or simple exercise of power just because.
> What it is not about is efficiency and performance, or Amazon would have been suffering since 2020 and it clearly has not.
Wouldn't someone then just go to the office, and allow themselves to be laid off and collect unemployment? Seems like there were alternatives, and if this is a layoff in disguise, it will happen anyhow.
S-Team (Score:3)
Any random guesses about what "S" stands for?
I'd start, but I think slashdot has a censorbot.
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Sycophant comes to mind
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Haha! I was wondering how much more streamlined their operations would be if they just called employees "employees"? Individual contributors?? I guess that's like "associates" at Walmart. How silly we've become.
Culture of being bad place to work (Score:3)
It looks like Amazon's culture of being a poor place to work is going to get worse. I am sure that the effects of this will be felt by customers.
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Yep. I've known a few people who went to work there and I think one lasted more than two years. Their recruiters were all over me back in 2020 through about mid 2022 I think, when they started hitting the brakes on a lot of their hiring. Money was very good and it would have made a good resume item but I turned them down every time due to everything I hear about working there. Sounds like I made the right choice.
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I think their warehouses and delivery jobs have that reputation. I was not aware that the corporate work environment was derided.
Employment Contracts and At-will employment (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of the developed world requires employment contracts which can be used to nail down things like work from home upfront.
In the United States only unions and C-level management work under a contract; the rest of us work under employment-at-will.
This is a stealth layoff. They're doing it to get rid of undesirable employees, and also to avoid having their unemployment insurance rate increased.
In the USA if you resign, you don't typically get unemployment insurance payments unless it can be proven it is constructive dismissal. This is a very high bar.
Employment at will means that the employer can "alter the deal" (Apologies to Darth Vader) at any time or eliminate the position at any time and for
any reason. One way to combat employment-at-will is having a large emergency savings account (so-called "fuck-you" money).
When you are an at-will employee, the only option you have when the terms are unilaterally changed and you don't like them or can't accept them is to quit on the spot.
Given where the economy is at this point in time if you are a so-so performer with little savings a lot of debt, you won't have much option but to accept the new terms.
If you are a good performer and have connections into other companies with more accommodating work from home rules, and are relatively debt-free and can live on savings for a few years, you might have some options.
Before handing in your resignation letter:
1. You could try pushing back to see if they will make an accommodation for you. The problem with this is since you're at-will they could try to remove the accommodation at any time.
2. You could try asking to be put on a contract, but most US employers will not do this. They like having most of their employees "at-will".
Finally, you could just say "fuck-you" and hand in your resignation letter. You might bee seen as a quitter in the eyes of some of the management, and you might not be able to work for that company ever again, but if you know that you can find work elsewhere then you might be better off. Just don't do it for silly reasons though.
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"In the USA if you resign, you don't typically get unemployment insurance payments unless it can be proven it is constructive dismissal. This is a very high bar."
It varies by state. In WA the unemployment site says,
You may qualify for unemployment benefits if we decide you quit for the following good-cause reasons: ...
Your employer changed the location of your job so your commute is longer or harder. ...
That would seem to qualify. If you were hired for remote work, but now there is no remote work that is de
Hey (Score:1)
Mr. Jassy? Since you're not taking publishing, books, audiobooks, comics or ebooks seriously, could you tell readers and authors up front instead of wasting everyone's time and money?
P.S. Nothin' but love for you for spiking 800,000 words of my work.
This is the BS part (Score:2)
"Jassy wrote in a lengthy missive to staffers that Amazon is making the changes to strengthen its corporate culture..." Culture has nothing to do with the space and everything to do with the people and how a company is managed. This call to "strengthen its corporate culture" is the biggest load of BS that comes out of any CEO's mouth. BS. Show me demonstrable, repeatable, concrete evidence this is the case when there are numerous studies showing exactly the opposite. BS. Like others have said, this is just
It will be an interesting experiment (Score:2)
Some companies want their employees back in the office, others allow WFH. its a competitive marketplace, and employees are free to leave, companies free to fire employees. Likely companies who want employees to work mostly or entirely from the office will have to pay more. We'll see over the next few years how their productivity and costs compare.
I think one key issue will be whether the people who want to WFH are actually the rock stars or just think they are. The market will decide.
Don't forg
Re: So brave (Score:5, Insightful)
The entitlement is strong with this one. I hate that company as much as anyone but if Amazon is writing the check, they can tell you where they want you to work, or you can quit.
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How you can tell which company is run by idiots.
"Can I work exclusively from home?" If Yes, the people running the company are health/environment conscious. If No, the people running the company are power-mad imbeciles.
There is no reason to not work from home if there is no physical reason why your presence is required. If you work in the warehouse, then logically you can't do that remotely unless there are telepresence robots that allow for that. But people who go to the office just to sit on a computer? T
They're not necessarily idiots (Score:1)
It's just that their interest don't align with yours, so much so that their actions seem bizarre and alien.
For example, it might seem counter productive to flood the labor market with cheap, unskilled labor and then put those people in positions that require a lot of skill and knowledge. We deal with the resulting mess every day in the form of barely functional software cobbled together by cheap H1-Bs.
But if you stop thinking about selling a product and start thinking about making overall margins on
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The problem with your conspiracy theory is that it requires smart, selfish people to act against their own interests for the collective good of fellow capitalists. Capitalism doesn't work that way.
If I run a company with a thousand employees and rent an office building and require them to come there five days per week, that will cost me a lot of money while having an infinitesimal effect on the national real estate market.
It would make no sense for me to do that unless I honestly believed that getting peopl
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> There is no reason to not work from home if there is no physical reason why your presence is required.
I kind of disagree. There have been projects that I've worked on over the years in which working remotely would have massively slowed us down, because we were doing whiteboarding and designing new data structures and actively planning the direction of the project. That said, although there may be some teams that do a lot of this, most teams do not. In my entire 25-year career, I've had exactly two periods in which I was doing that sort of work. The first period lasted two weeks. The second period laste
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Working from home is "blatantly socialist"?
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> Working from home is "blatantly socialist"?
Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production.
When I work from home, I use my own computer, keyboard, mouse, and router.
These are owned by me, not collectively by all the employees. So, no, WFH is not socialist.
In fact, it's less socialist than working in an office since commuting requires using public roads and transportation facilities, which are socialist.
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Demanding that you can work where you want irrespective of what the company that hired/pays you is is a demand they don't owe you. Saying your company cannot tell you to work where they want you to work is a socialist demand.
I work from home when I want to because my company allows it not because they have no right to dictate my work environment. Flipping that sentiment is a socialist demand.
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> Saying your company cannot tell you to work where they want you to work is a socialist demand.
Nope. Choosing where and how you want to work is a free market demand. If no capitalist will give you what you want, then start your own business.
Under socialism, you work where and how the central planning committee tells you.
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> Demanding that you can work where you want irrespective of what the company that hired/pays you is is a demand they don't owe you. Saying your company cannot tell you to work where they want you to work is a socialist demand.
> I work from home when I want to because my company allows it not because they have no right to dictate my work environment. Flipping that sentiment is a socialist demand.
Ridiculous argument! An employer and employee can negotiate the terms of the work and the remuneration. If the employer doesn't agree to the employee's demands, the employee can find a better place to work (and vice versa). That's capitalism .
Imagine if you'd said "I get paid a salary because my company allows it not because they have no right to treat me as slave labor. Flipping that sentiment is a socialist demand." Clearly daft, right?
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Demanding that your company permit WFH when it was not contractual obligation is a socialist demand. The employee does not own the means of production in a capitalist society. They can strike and do other means of arbitration to achieve it, but it is not owed to them, and what rsilvergun is stating (who I replied to) is to not let them make mandates about work environment.
Re: Why should we live like that? (Score:2)
Making demands of your company is not inherently socialist. The problem is that you alone have very little bargaining power.
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Our grandads wouldn't have put up with having to come into the office?
I'd sure like to know where your grandad worked!
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> *Everyone's* lives is worse when WfH is eliminated. We have worse air quality, gas is more expensive and we get stuck in worse traffic jams. When companies do something anti-social there's no good reason to let them do it. We've become a bunch of little pussies. Our granddads wouldn't put up with this shit, they'd strike, and when the strikebreakers brought out weapons they'd fight back. We just bow our heads and say "Please sir may I have another".
Would you prefer a 20% loss in your 401k instead?
What, you think no company investment strategy includes propping up the multi-trillion dollar real commercial real estate market? Think again. You “own” more of that work building than you assume.
As much as we can’t stand the corrupt market of overpriced dirt we call commercial real estate (including the insane taxes), everyone would suffer if that market crashed. It’s the entire reason why all of your go-green complaints, get ignor
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> Would you prefer a 20% loss in your 401k instead?
> What, you think no company investment strategy includes propping up the multi-trillion dollar real commercial real estate market? Think again. You “own” more of that work building than you assume.
The SEC has a term for that: market manipulation. If companies think that real estate is going to go down, they have a fiduciary duty to sell their holdings in those companies and buy other stocks, as does your 401k fund manager.
Now if you mean that they're trying to prop up their investment in properties and not lose money on land that they have over-purchased, that might be true, but realistically, it costs them about as much for you to be in the office five days per week as three, and that doesn't chang
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Nahh, there are even things prostitutes won't do for money.
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They can in the US. In many other countries an employer cannot change the terms of employment unilaterally. So if you applied to a hybrid job, the employer cannot magically change that.
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You can come work for me. You seem to be just the kind of rube I'm looking for.
Their bat. Their ball. Their rules. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless they promised that WFH would always be an option, I don't see the problem here. If Amazon is getting caught in some big lie, they need to be called out. Otherwise, they spent huge amounts of money building and equipping those workspaces and even then it was understood and tacitly accepted that we had VPN's that were just like being there, but there's nothing exactly like being there except being there.
Do I think they're right? No. Are they doing something wrong? Yes. I, personally, would welco