Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warns remote workers: 'It's probably not going to work out for you'
3 years ago by L4sBot to c/technology
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warns remote workers: 'It's probably not going to work out for you'::Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees who defy his edict to return to the office three days a week that "it's probably not going to work out for you."
In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.
Workers should unionize. I don't know if its better but I know it's something they hate
CEOs can get bent through a videocall
Found my new email signature ✨
Nah, we're still high on our own farts to realise they can turn foul rather quickly.
It's not looking good for programers in particular.
The reason why the can get paid as much as they want is 100% based on you being able to jump ship form company to company without having to wait for a company to find common ground between you and them through a union.
Sure, they'll still be hugely compensated but tech companies will keep abusing interns, freelancers. Obviously outsourcing will explode even more than it already has in the last 10 years.
True, but that's why you do a trade union instead of a company union. And programmers have a lot to gain. These companies, shareholders, and CEOs rake in billions that could be going to employees.
A programmer will make a feature that saves the company a million dollars and they'll get paid $100,000 to build it.
Now is the best time for programmers to unionize. Do it when you already have leverage to make sure the good times stay good. Otherwise, we'll eventually be as replaceable as drafters are now.
And AWS profits are dropping each quarter recently...
Software engineer is a stupid term akin to calling the guy at Subway a "sandwich engineer". Which even if stupid doesn't really affect me. But now, half the time anyone says "engineer" it's for you programmer dudes, and not real engineers. You've destroyed job boards and listings.
I don't buy it. This isn't the only mechanism, probably not even the most important one, for why salaries are where they are. Shortage of and especially of highly competent programmers is. In fact this actually underpins why jumping ship is even as easy as it is. Uninionization will provide additional leverage, while not diminishing the shortage pressure. Part of the point is that this leverage can substitute the leverage we have due to the current shortage, if and when it diminishes.
The reason why the can get paid as much as they want is 100% based on you being able to jump ship form company to company without having to wait for a company to find common ground between you and them through a union.
How strange, were I live there are Unions but when I jump ship I get paid what I want, without waiting for the Union, what do you think a Union is for ?
The real power of a Union is to let workers to negotiate for a minimum wage level (for example, I cannot be employed for less than a certain wage because it would be illegal to do so) that are reasonable and some basic rights the workers have (for example, no at will employment, a minimum PTO days which are enforced and thing like this).
True, this has some consequences, mainly companies try to go for the legal minimum, but I would say that it is positive overall
Obviously not, 450k here is out of market where I live but on the other hand I have not the living cost of the Silicon Valley (or the US in general). I suspect that at the end of the month I save much more than the average Silicon Valley worker even if he earn, let's say, 10 times what I earn.
But my point was that a Union does not stop you to ask what you want to be paid and if you are worth it you get it, nothing else.
Too many libertarians in tech. Will never happen.
Source. In tech. Not libertarian.
Nothing incompatible about libertarianism and unions. It's a free market construct, a free association of people formed to put a check on the power of wealth. With a long history of acting as a check on one of the forces that seek to destabilize a free market in favor of state control, one might add (corps love to team up with the state to gain power).
Though, caveat, libertarians might have a word against unions of state employees due to the mechanics of unions bartering against politicians who only stand to lose someone else's funds (the public), through state mechanisms which libertarians may oppose. Obviously this is more problematic with police unions than teacher's unions.
Of course, there's the FOX News "libertarians" who aren't thinking any of this through and are just rehashing whatever FOX News is slinging. Basically indistinguishable from year 2000 "conservatives" plus all the culture war and 4chan talking points of the last 20 years. (edit: They would most likely be anti-union across the board, of course).
Libertarianism aligns perfectly well with fighting against big corporations. Anything in favor of freedom from a ruling class, whether it be governmental or corporate in nature, should be okay with libertarians.
Why can't the world be a meritocracy bro?! Do you hold crypto?! To the moon amiright?! Hey I pull constant on calls and work weekends from the comfort of my chair in my home office I know what hard labour is these union workers have no idea what hard work is bro.
FML.
Jesus forgot one.
It's easy to just make 6 figures bro I don't see why everyone says it's so hard. Just change jobs bro.
It's the commercial real estate mortgage backed securities market. If everyone doesn't pay office rent the collateralized debt of those places goes kaput, the security implodes like 2008 and the banking industry goes under.
These CEOs are all invested. They don't care about productivity, it's all about saving their investments.
Aww darn. Thoughts and prayers for the banks and the investors. /s
It's not. I really hate it when Marx fans and Rand fans find something in common, and one of such rare things is thinking that preventing big trees from falling is somehow connected to normal economics.
Naturally it's the other way around, the more painful it is to make such mistakes, the more optimized the market is.
Other than that, gambling on the assumption that regulators are going to save you is the same as cheating, stealing etc.
It's like the suicide joke again - "more suicide jumpers means fewer suicide jumpers". Market economy is about evolution. If you impede evolution (say, with preventing somebody from failing or with copyright and patent laws), then it loses its main advantage over anything else.
Maybe they should be better business men and should have foreseen this.
This. I've been saying and seeing it since Covid. Offices are half empty. Main street footfall is shrinking. These zones are high premiun rents, owned by REITs and other comercial founds. If they are not occupied and ppl is not consuming on the next door shops, assets value is gone down. More colateral is going to be asked from their lenders. Also, municipalities don't want to lose population as this can result on less budget from government.. Of course they are going to put pressure on their CEO buddies to have spenders back to office.
Considering that the US has a almost nonexistent social system, the state is actively accelerating the gap between poor and rich by supporting onesidedly.
The loans for all the commercial real estate are also problematic. The banks don't have liquidity to cover them it's that simple. Hence the recent downgrade of banks which is a shot over the bow..
and the banking industry goes under.
Which translates to the banking industry learning some lessons and becoming more efficient. Yes, please.
Other than that, some drop in realty prices is welcome.
Will not happen. Too big to fail, ydda yadda.
Despite the banks not having implement the promised mechanisms to avoid another crash.
It's all the same families. The American Oligarchy.
Always has been. Since we abolished slavery (some restrictions apply) the US has been working to continue the grift by any means, whether sharecropping, the truck system, exploiting immigants, exploiting children, anti-union legislation and so on.
Despite our promises of liberty and equality, the US really wants to be a feudal hegemony.
Amazon employees who refused to relocate near main offices of their teams were told they either have to find a new job internally or leave the company through a “voluntary resignation.”
How dumb does he think people are? This just makes me angry because they're probably going to get away with it too.
Why would you quit? Continue working from home while lining up a new job. Or, if they don't specify how long you have to be in on those 3 days, just clock in and go back home an hour later. Game the system, make it work for you. They do.
They don't "game" the system, the make it, and it will always work on their favor.
!Only attempt to game the system if you are a man, preferably white, masc appearing, not that poor, not visually disabled. Other rules may apply, please read your manual. Complaints to deities are accepted but always ignored. If you think you qualify for game the system consult your favorite TikTok cashcow influencer and quote Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos/Bill Gates/Steve Jobs for credibility and social leverage. We are no responsible for predictable consequences if you take game the system while not meeting the aforementioned criteria.!<
If you're 10+ hours away clocking in for 2 minutes isn't possible.
If you're ever in this situation, look up constructive dismissal. Basically its better to stay home and be "fired" and refuse the voluntarily resignation. That being said, the USA has a lot less protections for employees then Canada or Europe but it's good to be informed anyway.
We were specifically told that it doesn't count if you're not at an office the majority of the day. Everybody was joking about doing that at first.
lmao, "voluntary resignation" is hilarious. If you plan to purge everyone who won't relocate, you're gonna have to do a layoff. This isn't one of those layoffs that will impress investors, because it won't represent efficiency or cost savings, but instead corporate dysfunction.
If your workers aren't voluntarily relocating to return to the office, they're certainly not going to voluntarily forfeit their unemployment benefits by quitting. They'll just stop working and wait for the pink slip.
Unless they plan to attach a severance more valuable that unemployment benefits to the resignation, they're fucking dreaming. Even so, that would be a hilarious misstep to offer Amazon employees a voluntary paid exit, because it would undoubtedly result in an unsustainable wave of resignations across the org.
voluntary resignation
I'm not a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, offer not valid in Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico, no warranty, either express or implied, is offered, do not pass go, do not collect $200
With all that out of the way: This "voluntary resignation" garbage is their way of getting out of paying unemployment. If you're ever in a situation like this where they change job requirements and tell you that if you don't meet the new requirements you've "voluntarily resigned" call them on it. Keep doing the job as you did it before the change and make them fire you. For purposes of collecting unemployment, making broad unilateral changes to job requirements is called "constructive dismissal" and you'd still qualify to collect, but if you just don't show up at all, turn in your 2 weeks or sign a letter of voluntary resignation then for unemployment purposes you're considered to have quit rather than been fired and you can't collect. If they tell you you have to come back to the office and you're ready to quit about it just keep working from home til they fire you.
Basically (very basically, laws vary state by state and this isn't a perfect summary of any one state's laws) the law says that employers are free to ask something different of employees after hire, but that after a certain point changes to the job requirements effectively mean that the employee is now working an entirely different job than what they were hired for. When changes are enough to constitute constructive dismissal the state is essentially treating it as though the employer fired the employee from the original job and simultaneously offered them a new one. Turning down that new job does not disqualify them from collecting unemployment for the old one. This concept was originally implemented to stop employers from avoiding unemployment charges by cutting an employee down to one hour per week or forcing them to work shifts opposite what they signed on for, then hoping they'll quit rather than be fired. I haven't seen whether return to office mandates constitute constructive dismissal, and I imagine it will be highly dependent on location and facts (were you hired remote or did you transition to remote from in-office and was the remote status communicated as temporary or permanent/a perk of the job are two that leap to mind). This is why I only recommend following this strategy if you intended to quit anyway. If you want to keep your job do what they tell you to do.
For some reason, I read this as
Get bendy, Andy.
Get some pussy, Andussy.
More likely that it doesn't work out for Jassy. Certain Amazon units are underperforming under his leadership, and I wouldn't be shocked if his time at Amazon didn't last that much longer.
That's actually against the law known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (also known as Sox or Sarbox Act).
AFAIK the act is meant to hold corporations accountable to fair and accurate reporting as not to artificially inflate their own value or the value of their assets or stocks.
That's a really nice way of threatening to take away the livelihood and health insurance of people doing work for you.
Today's workers are too nice...
Well see, we're kinda trapped right now. We can go chopping heads off, get thrown in the news cycle for a few days, and then continue losing everything we got trapped in anyways.
Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You'd think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.
Amazon had $220 billion in first party online retail revenue in 2022 $117 billion from 3rd party online retail $80 billion from AWS $37 billion from advertising.
Retail is amazons primary source of revenue.
Historically Amazon has used revenue from other segments to fund new ventures. AWS is profitable now, but it only came to be from the huge numbers that retail posts.
If it was truly the case that retail has no value, it would have been ditched ages ago, but in reality, the retail segment of the company enables other segments to be profitable. High revenue gives you liquidity, and Amazon's vast infrastructure network provides lots of other opportunities for the business.
Just ignore the other two paragraphs then.
It's not weird when you consider the average real estate lease for companies of this size is probably 10 years or more, so they are sitting on an inventory of empty or more empty than full offices, paying rent on them, but not having anyone in there. Also, many cities/states incentivize "butts in chairs" based tax breaks for companies that hire staff in their cities, and you don't have butts in the chairs, you don't have the tax breaks.
Not to mention the fact that said real estate is all in extremely expensive locales (Bellevue, WA for starters), so that's a lot of money they're blowing on unoccupied buildings.
Is it? Would be nice if it's the case but I imagine they have some numbers making them feel content with this policy.
They think they're trimming the fat, but in reality all they're going to have left is gristle. There was a massive brain-drain during and after the layoff craze & project cancellation frenzy, and this is just going to lead to another wave. Andy's just trying to coast with AWS running on the shoulders of people who simply can't get hired anywhere else, or are just planning to be comfortable in their rut until they retire.
I mean it's technically possible. AWS works. Generally maintaining a well working system requires a helluvalot less talent than building it anew. So you might be right. At the same time, they could be counting on new grads not knowing the company's internal history so they could lure the top with high salaries when they decide they need to fill up the brain. Top grads armed with decent documentation and stale brain support can get to from zero to high competency in a few years. Also they might be bending the rules in parts of the company where they see strategic advantage to keeping talent.
Yeah, you've got the idea. Oh, and don't forget about offshoring entire product lines.
I keep telling them I'm not interested, only to have someone new reach out. It's frustrating. They don't even pay that well.
I guess if your desperate in the software development/DevOps industries, but even the smaller companies pay as much as they do.
When I worked in an office I had to pay for parking in addition to paying for gas and wear and tear, ALLLLLLLL so I could have the very valuable experience of working in an open concept office that is perpetually loud and distracting
But yeah… wfh is totally bad for productivity… give me a fucking break
If a company expects me to come in multiple times a week to do their work, they should be paying for that time and money by an increase in salary which covers that expense.
If I can do the same job without incurring that expense, and have been, why should I? All that means is I lose more money from my salary.
That's still not ok. It's just normalized.
If you pay my commute.
Gonna need a hot lunch provided, laundry on-site, dog walkers, child care, a gym and a space where I can play guitar when I'm on a break
Oooh you wanted me to give all that up for nothing? In that case you can get bent, get fucked, roll over and get fucked again. I left three jobs over RTO mandates. Every time I left it was for more money. Now I'm at a place that doesn't even have an office, just Google meet and a PO box for physical mail.
We also used to have paid lunches and breaks. We lost those in the 1980s.
It would be remiss of me to neglect mentioning covering and mandating OSHA required breaks (and otherwise recognizing your worker are human beings) can improve their productivity to exceed the time and expense cost, so it's not just being a good boss but economically sound.
The failures of top-down management to even keep their own businesses working optimally is an indictment of capitalism at its core.
We also used to have paid lunches and breaks. We lost those in the 1980s.
What country? :-( Here in the UK that's a basic given, like, super basic. How did your country lose that without an immediate huge general strike?
I would never work somewhere that doesn't give paid breaks, it's not like it's my actual free time, I can't just go home and do whatever, etc. Wild.
Honestly, come live here, or in the EU, you'll be treated far better. If you don't even get paid breaks, what about other basic human rights like paid sick leave, a minimum of a month of holiday days per year, can't be sacked on the spot or without a valid reason (unfair dismissal), must be given reasonable (paid) notice as per contract, etc?
If you are lacking any of those, then come here! Some countries don't have free healthcare and cheap high quality public transport, we have those too! :-)
You're going to need to take a look at your country's immigration policies before you go ahead telling people to come
In US workers pay for commuting to work ?
Yup. If you're lucky you can get pre taxed commuter benefits but that's not much. My monthly bus pass is more than my credits and that doesn't included parking or subways
I was looking at some of the Amazon postings near me, but they're all down in Irvine.
Pretty much the entire talents pool of LA is off limits to Amazon now.
As the planet burns down they think it's a great idea to force more fossil fuels usage so they can feel important
I’m not an expert in Amazon but I thought Jassy was CEO of AWS, which would be amazon web services. For the uninitiated, AWS is basically a hosting company - they don’t just provide web services for amazon.com.
Being the CEO of a company that specializes in using the internet and making those workers come into an office is especially ghoulish.
Can we also change his wiki to have his middle name be Hugh?
Nah, I'm fine at home.
I kinda hate this shit tbh, what they are doing is paying us less and forcing us to move to more and more high cost areas to work "in the office". I kinda honestly think back to the office is a way to lay off a ton of people with unemployment.
Andy Sassy
What would happen to him?
Well, personally I'm voting for a fall off of something that lasts long enough for him to be terrified and feel helplessness before he hits the ground.
But a team of ravenous wolverines would be ok too.
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