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.
Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”
This is true, and it’s weird because these same companies used to hire like crazy because only growth mattered. Finally real financial discipline is being applied. The tech company I work for is open about the fact that revenue-per-employee is something like half of FAANG companies and they want that to change.
Go into the office and waste every resource you can.
Plug in a fan + heater + aquarium + massage pad at your desk and leave everything on constantly even when you leave
Print every email and throw it in the trash.
Make coffee 50x a day and pour it down the sink
Flush a whole roll of TP every hour
Leave sinks on in the bathroom
Use entire tubs of soap to wash your hands
Turn on the microwave for hours at a time
Heat/cool office thermometer to force HVAC into overdrive
Open new browser windows until your computer crashes and repeat until the network goes down
Company wide meme emails that everyone participates in (team building) that crash servers and dominate inboxes
Pour sugar/crumbs everywhere so there’s pest problems
FORM A UNION
(nuclear option) introduce bedbugs to all your bosses offices
You forgot the most important one: deliver just enough to not get fired, but way less than you did before RTO. Then point to the stats and show the massive productivity drop after RTO.
All that stuff together is probably only one salary per team, except for the Union. I think the Union is the winning idea.
Bedbugs in executive offices is best. Make them feel the pain.
Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.
And they are smart enough to put us at the very bottom of the management ladder, even though we’re not actually management. That way we can’t legally unionize. In the U.S. at least.
Depending on your country, that is the norm. Engineers here have at least 2 national unions to choose from, finance have a couple of unions, same with teachers, admin staff, etc. etc.
As usual, this is probably just US being victim of 'merican exceptionlism.
“Skilled labor” is such a bullshit concept
There are jobs that take weeks to learn, jobs that take years to learn, and there are even jobs that take a decade+ to learn. You ain’t putting the three-week old newbie in the latter two roles.
That’s true, but it devalues other labor which can be similarly/more difficult or skilled. I skimmed this article, but it seems to convey what I mean:
https://www.shrm.org/executive-network/insights/reshaping-narrative-time-retire-term-unskilled-laborI understand what people mean when they say “skilled labor” and I don’t think it’s intended negatively normally fwiw
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.
which they can’t outright as after a certain number of years they have to give warnings and trainings first.
I mean, says who? There’s currently only one state in the union that requires cause before you can fire someone. The real issue with firing people is that without a documented cause, that person can collect state unemployment, and the number of people who go on state unemployment from a single company has a financial impact on that company.
That only works in places with actual worker protection and labor laws, which disqualifies pretty much all of the USA.
There are two ways to quit: How management wants you to or because you’re forming a union.
There are many at-will states that can fire you on demand (if done carefully) and there’s nothing you can do about it.
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.
I think you might be surprised. There’s literally dozens of us gen-x’ers on here. (I’m 53).
Luckily I work for a university and the hybrid thing is still going strong. Honestly I tend to get more done when I’m at home because the social aspect of being at work is very distracting for someone with ADHD like me.
And I hope they do regret it. The only managers I’ve seen that push for the RTO thing are the micromanagers who think they are necessary for productivity. News flash, they aren’t. The best managers set expectations, shield their employees from the bullshit above them, give them the appropriate tools and work environments to be successful, and trust them to do what is necessary.
And yes I’d never work for a Google or an Amazon. You’re a cog, a disposable piece of machinery.
They are going to regret this.
I really hope they do. But now is a good time to put the squeeze on devs. Lots of people are having a hard time finding a software job and they’ll be extra reluctant to do a mass exodus.
Yup. We recently had a complaint that a collaborative meeting was difficult for people on call, so our solution was to make it 100% remote. The meeting is still collaborative, but now everyone has an equal opportunity to participate.
We do 2x in office, 3x WFH, and it’s the perfect ratio IMO. Value of in-person time:
- questions get answered quickly - easy to tell if someone is available for a quick question, and faster response than Slack
- in-person collaboration - screen sharing works, but actually being able to point and type has a ton of value
- casual discussions - chat about upcoming projects over lunch or a coffee break long before they’re actually important, which can make future meetings smoother
All of that can be done remotely, and we certainly do a fair amount of that, but it’s nice to have a little in-person time. That said, my WFH days are sacred because that’s when I actually get work done.
The worst meetings are the ones with people in a meeting room and people online. All in person or all dialled in (even if from an office desk).
Yep the 2 in 3 out is what we do. We do have one day where we all try to be in (Tuesday) to just get the face to face time. Seems to working for us. Plus since most of the conversations are on slack, I can go back and verify what I thought was said. That’s SO convenient.
We do TW in office, MThF WFH. I don’t see a point in coming in on different days, so if you have to miss Tuesday or Wednesday for some reason, you don’t have to make it up later. We occasionally have a company meeting on one of the other days, in which case we’ll often agree on which other day is optional (or we just come in 3 days that week).
And yeah, it is super nice.
Absolutely right. But the thing is that many so-called leaders will no longer have a raison d’être if there are no more unnecessary meetings and all that fuss. Many of them do nothing all day but sit in meetings, achieve nothing and still feel very important. That’s the misery of the world of work: it’s not usually the best who get into management positions, it’s not the most qualified and certainly not the ones who work the hardest. It’s the most unscrupulous, those who pass off the work of others as their own, people who would never achieve anything on their own or in a small company that can’t afford to waste salaries on froth-mongers. LinkedIn makes it clear how this all works, I think: there, too, it is not the competent people who really understand their work who have the most success, it is the busybodies, the networkers and narcissists. If the competent people set the tone, there would be no discussion about office duties in an IT company. It’s only held on to so that managers can live out their fantasies of omnipotence and post nonsense on LinkedIn.
These people aren’t interested in hearing dissenting opinions. I’m sure they’ve already heard arguments for it. They just don’t care. They’d rather cut costs by doing something many people won’t tolerate so that they leave and then figuring it out after the fact.
I don’t know about everyone else, but if that were my boss, they’d be severely underestimating my capacity for petty behavior.
This is the part not being reported in the news.
Many of us are simply working half as much as we did when we were remote. It’s not worth trying to impress these people. They hate us.
Continue starving the beast. It’s how these people treat the government.
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”.
It’s the culmination of “next quarter is someone else’s problem”.
This is absolutely it. The C-suite and senior management are made up of sharp people. They absolutely know this will trigger an exodus and a large bag of fire-able workers. They don’t care that they’re likely to lose a bunch of talented, hardworking staff. Its all been accounted for. At worst the results of a mass exodus will only impact their bottom line in a few years. They just need this years numbers to look good and line to go up.
I forsee an Amazon brain drain about to happen.
If the cloud is so great why can’t you work remote?
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.
He has to be straight up lying. There’s no way 9/10 are excited to be ordered back into the office. If that were the case, they’d have been in the office already.
It’s not like there’s any meaningful consequence if he is lying.
That’s a very good point that I’ve never really thought of. It’s not like anybody was keeping them from going back into the office. If they wanted five days a week, they would already have been there five days a week.
If 9/10 were already voluntarily coming into the office every day, I could see it. Of course it would only be 9/10 of the people he bothered to speak to it about, and maybe he only spoke to people that were already there.
As to why they would care if they were already there, well one guy in my team goes in every day of his own accord. He applies pressure to everyone on my team to be there with him every day, in spite of the stated WFH policy. So everyone but me goes in every day because I’m the only one that is willing to disappoint him. I’m reasonably certain that guy would love a forced into the office every day mandate, to force me to be there too. Then he could stop making passive aggressive comments about how people who didn’t come in must not care about the work as much as they should at every opportunity.
9 out of the 10 he talked to are brown nosers and tell him what he wants to hear.
Unless they were preselected micromanagers who like to bully their employees.
Nobody I’ve EVER talked to wants 5 days in the office anymore. 2-3 tops. Even 3 levels above me don’t.
The “anonymous” survey asked this question with two choices: I agree or I’m looking for opportunities elsewhere
Don’t worry. They will.
That’s the intention behind that back to work decision.
That’s what I don’t get though, these people seem to be delusional in that they think that they’re a hard worker and looooove in person, so therefore every hard worker loves in person and the chaff will quit. Then they act shocked when their high performers largely leave to pursue remote or hybrid options. It’s such a glaring inability to see people different from them as having any value.
Yep. The best people will leave first because they have options. It’s called the dead sea effect
I appreciate that they clarified that “bad” employees aren’t always bad. I very firmly fit into the fourth category listed (avoids looking for jobs because it’s the worst) and would definitely get trapped pretty easily.
I mean that’s a relief. Could they not leave before?
What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?
this sounds dangerously like communism, friend. Freedom is where you do what the corporate bosses want.
Hopefully, they would start a rival company. That would be fascinating to see.
Watch Amazon sue them or something lmao
The organizers would soon learn why we invented the undetectable heart attack gun.
This makes zero sense… If you’re a cloud company why can’t employees be in the cloud
Because real-estate is physical money.
But that’s something I don’t actually understand, since real estate would fall under the sunk cost fallacy. Ie, if you’ve invested in real estate, the cost is spent already, right? Whether someone comes in that building is irrelevant. The costs spent to maintain, heat, clean, power the buildings, on the other hand… It’s just not really obvious to me. Seems like fewer people would cost cheaper, no?
The cost is spent, but the offices are still assets on the balance sheet.
If demand for offices is lower then all companies that own offices will have to revalue theirs downwards. These impairments have a direct impact on the P&L of the company accounts. Better to force employees to use these assets (and pay their own costs to do so) than show a (greater) accounting loss.
as a client this this tells me they aren’t all that confident in their product
or they could fuck up key services with delayed code breaks before leaving. Programmers working for amazon should consider adding bullshit in the software and saying it was chatgpt
Go into the office and clog all the toilets.
Don’t clog the toilets. It’s not the c-suites who have to clean that up.
Don’t clog the toilets. It’s not the c-suites who have to clean that up.
Nah, use cement, let the C-Staff pay for the plumbers/construction, they’d be more than happy to help out.
If you do, leave a tip with a note apologizing that they got caught in the crossfire.
The toilets should be being cleaned regularly anyway, if they’re not you’ve just highlighted a major sanitation issue for the building.
Another company that lays off it’s talented people first, due to the meddling of a CEO where he has no business to.
