sounds cool i am unemployed and fucked
RTO = free layoffs
That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.
It’s also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Idk about the whole talk of having an excuse to shareholders, I don’t think shareholders look into hey these offices are sitting unused I demand an explanation I think they care how much profit the company making and what are future predictions of profit.
No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren’t using? Shouldn’t we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don’t need.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
The best and brightest will challenge leadership. The shitty barely competent value engineer will say yes until they fuck up so bad they get promoted.
The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Yes. But some of them are also the most expensive ones, so when they leave costs go down. And we all know “numbers must go up” (=cost must go down).
So you’re left with departments full of clock punchers who don’t have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that’s a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren’t going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.
Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.
In my experience: the higher up the management chain, the higher the chance that they are just in for the bonuses - not for the company / industry. And those bonuses are always bound to these numbers which need to go up. When the numbers go down, these people are long gone.
You nailed it. look at their more recent announcements about execs not taking bonuses— they’re giving up bonuses for the coming year. I expect most of them to ‘pursue other interests’ but they’ll keep their bonuses, whatever team gets brought in to right the ship will then get screwed.
Might also be ass covering- with a pre-emptive promise of no bonuses it may be harder to replace them…
Amazing.
They order people to work in different offices than before, far away from before, or in offices that did not even exist before. They order people to work in offices who have only worked at home before.
And they call it “return”, and everybody seems to accept the audacity.
Nobody laughs out loud into their faces and calls them the dirty liars that they are.
Now this is a good point. During the time of remote work, everything became organized around it. In fact my employer just closed the local office I belong to, because everyone is remote and it just isn’t getting used. If they suddenly decided on RTO and asked me to work at an office 60 miles away that would not be a “return” nor practical in any way. I’m sure Amazon know this but are just saying “oh well,” because really they can’t do kick to solve it. It’s going to be a painful transition but I guess they’ve decided they are ready.
Because people who suck their tits need their milk.
Yeah this attrition is expected by Amazon. IBM and others did this earlier. If enough people choose to RTO they will do “real” layoffs and get a pat on the back in the news for not letting as many people go as they would have had to before. Optics I guess. IIRC this is the second round for Amazon.
Some are saying companies are doing this to keep their property values up but I think that’s only one facet. What I don’t see being called out often is companies doing this are hiring replacements overseas in tax havens and/or where they can pay less for talent. Real kicker is, those hires wind up being remote anyway to the anchor offices.
We should refer to this instead as Go To Faraway Office
I really do wonder if Amazon will run out of people willing to work for them someday. Their approach assumes there is an infinite supply of workers to burn through. Given everything I’ve witnessed from the company, I’d never work there. Do they at some point poison the labor pool against them?
We’re constantly producing new people that don’t know any better
This is why employers are ageist. They want naive employees.
I never understood why anyone works for them at all. And I’m not even talking about warehouse workers. I’m talking about the tech staff. Amazon is known as a cutthroat workplace that drives people like a hammer drives nails. I would never choose to go there.
Agreed and they have an average tenure of like 1.2 years, but their stock vesting schedule gives you 5% in year one, then 15%, 40%, and 40%. So you’re pretty likely to never get whatever carrot they dangle in front of you.
Their strange stock vesting schedule makes me think that they’re aware that people won’t actually want to stay for four years. A back-loaded vesting schedule never benefits the employee, only the employer.
Other companies usually have an even schedule, for example Meta vests 25% per year (actually it vests quarterly instead of yearly). Google is an outlier too, but they do the opposite of what Amazon does - 33% in year one, then 33%, 22% and 12%. I suspect Google do this so they can list a higher total compensation (since initial total comp is salary, stock, and benefits for the first year), but getting more of your stock sooner is a good thing.
FAANG looks good on the resume so people go there with intention to eventually leave for another company willing to pay for FAANG experience. unless you work in a very focused team (e. g Occulus) youre better off jumping companies for higher pay.
if you go to tech career fairs, especially in the silicon valley, the biggest example of this is working for Cisco. they have huge turnover and youre only going to work there to have Cisco on your resume because of how ubiquitous they are at networking for companies.
It’s pretty hard to beat FAANG pay though. Probably there are other factors involved as well. Like maybe they can command 90% of the pay but have 2x better work-life balance or something. But people do stay at these companies for long periods. I’m sure some are there to stamp their passport but not all.
theres definitely people in there for the long haul, but most people are just job hoppers jumping onto companies paying more till they land into one with the perfect work/life balance for their preferences. Part of the reason why unionization int he programming sector is hard, because most of the people already willingly leave jobs for higher paying ones.
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of bright eyed optimistic people out of school every year.
You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there’s a fresh batch of
bright eyed optimistic people out of schoolpeople desperate to not be homeless or starve every year.Another company I had contact with did a few layoffs. Afterwards the recruitment department had a lot more issues finding people. Experienced people would ask a premium because of that company’s reputation in the industry and the experienced people would usually stay a short time and leave. The other option was hiring fresh graduates and put effort in training them.
Also a sea of people looking to put in a respectable time at a recognizable employer to dress up their resume.
And if it happens : Rebrand-Time!!
When I joined Amazon, I was told that for some roles in the US Amazon received more applications than corporate employees worldwide - so I assume 1M+.
That number has probably reduced significantly, given we’ve now had two rounds of RTO. I know some recruiters are really struggling to find external candidates to join, and rightly so, but I don’t doubt that Amazon can find someone to fill these roles, or can find someone outside of North America or Europe to take that role.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
(FWIW, I’ve been at Amazon as a software engineer for close to four years now, and I’ve noticed zero improvement in opportunities afforded to me)
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say “I worked for FAANG”. Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they’ll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
The problem is that the clout boost is real. I never worked for a FAANG/MANGA company, but just having one relatively well-known company on my resume opened up options I never would have had. All my interviewers would mention it, even though it was almost 20 years ago.
Yeah, I’ve gotten multiple jobs in my industry based on a company I worked for like 15 years ago. Just because they’re a major player who is well respected.
It’s real and it can suck.
Any time someone has one of the ‘big names’ on their resume, they get to skip the line and call the shots. Problem is in many of these cases, they got fired from those big companies for very blatantly obvious reasons once you work with them. They will tank their new projects, and executives will just say “this can’t be right, Google is such a success” yeah, because they fired that guy…
It might have been a few years ago, but having Amazon on my CV has offered almost nothing. If anything, I get fewer legitimate interview offers than I did before.
I used to work for MapQuest so it might be nostalgia on the part of my interviewers
MANGA
MANAA. If you’re going to swap Facebook for Meta, you also need to swap Google for Alphabet.
“FAANG” is interesting because it was initially only used to represent high-growth stocks that were leaders in their respective fields. It was originally just “FANG” - Apple was added later.
At some point, it changed to mean the best tech companies to work at. I’m not sure I agree with the list, though. I’d swap Netflix for Microsoft (TC is lower but it’s a more prestigious company and work-life balance is better), and I’d swap Amazon for another company. Not sure. TSMC, Nvidia, or AMD maybe?
It’s funny that Apple was added later given that it is the most valuable company by market cap … it’s seen the highest stock growth of any company on earth.
Apple’s stock wasn’t growing a lot a decade ago when the FANG term was coined.
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
They were talking about warehouse workers, not corporate employees.
Iirc, didn’t the article say that was one of many hypothetical scenarios they try to plan accordingly for? Like you said, it’s been awhile since it came out, so I could easily be wrong. I imagine it won’t be a problem any time soon, though. There are always desperate people, and simply changing policy to allow rehiring people that had previously been fired/quit would open eligible candidate pools back up.
Or, y’know, they could just make working there not be miserable.
Common theory l, that I have heard is that if business owns their office space then it’s value is inherently tied to profit margins. If office goes unused, value will drop, which affect bottom line, which affects boards willingness to pay out large CEO bonuses. So getting employees back into the office becomes vital for the leadership.
IMO it’s worse than this. It’s likely to do with Seattle real estate only, because Amazon has their HQ in Seattle, most of the STeam is in Seattle, and it’s where most of the big decisions are focused. There is an acronym that has existed at Amazon for decades, NEWS (Not Everyone Works in Seattle). Sadly, like many Amazonian things, they’re not really a thing any more…
Seems right. I have a friend who works for Amazon and lives in Portland, OR. They’re asking them to relocate to Seattle to RTO. Now they’re debating if they even want to stay at the company. Supposedly they have until EOY to decide.
That’s a shame, and sadly it’s all too uncommon. Given Amazon’s history with layoffs, and the countless stories of people that moved from NYC to Seattle, only to be laid off days/weeks later, there’s no way I’d move for Amazon.
The funny thing is that many people in our Seattle team constantly complain about not being able to park at the office - and that’s without everyone at the office and more to come.
Even if they don’t own it, there is cost associated with downsizing an office. Selling off furniture is impossible at the moment. Leases are down. Subletting is much harder. But there places are, paying plant, hvac and cleaning, maintenance on virtually unused office space.
Most places just need a conference room, some temp offices and a bathroom.
Yeah but bringing people back is still more expensive because it means more maintenance, more cleaning, and in the case of Amazon paying more for the office perks.
I’m sure at some point, somewhere, someone forced people to rto because it was better for their real estate investment…but I just have not been able to make sense of the claims that this is driving factor.
Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they’re in for a very rude awakening. They’ll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They’re highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.
Problem is for a company like Amazon, even if the brain drain will result in obviously inferior customer experience, it could take years before that happens and for it to be recognized and for the business results suffer for it. In the meantime, bigger margins and restricted stock matures and they can get their money now.
Particularly with business clients, like AWS customers, it will take a huge amount of obvious screwups before those clients are willing to undertake the active effort of leaving.
The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They’re playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.
They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.
Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.
100%
Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.
We’re only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We’re essentially a parasite. It’s not surprising that the most successful corporations are the most successful parasites. It’s just parasites, doing parasitic things, because they’re parasites… from the top down.
There has been efficiency gains throughout. Capitalism is amazing for that, far better than other systems.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
That and the fact the public hate externalities and don’t want them used at all never mind aggressively.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
