Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.
When I started at Amazon during the pandemic, I asked for something in writing saying my job was "work from home". They told me not to worry about it, because I'd be in the system as remote and they would never return to the office anyway.
Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules.
I don't work there anymore because I wouldn't go back to the office.
exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
No company will put this in an employment contract unless they are desperate to hire you, and if they are that desperate to hire you, you're in a whole other league than the people this news applies to.
Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
I don't see how the realization could've happened if they're moving back to the office.
I'm not surprised btw, every remote first company I've been in is stuck. I'm not saying it's inherent, but making it work is extremely hard. Imho it makes perfect sense that a company doesn't want to invest into it - it's not a lifestyle business.
Amazon has one of the lowest average tenures in the industry. The number of engineers and teams that existed pre-2020 under those working conditions is tiny (except maybe the leadership teams).
Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
No one is making the working conditions unpleasant. The company which pays you to do work wants its employees to be in the office. If you don’t like it. Don’t work there.
Looks like all the employees about to lose their work from home jobs are upset and downvoting.
That’s a contract. The vast majority of people currently working from home do not have a contract explicitly stating it’s a work from home position permanently.
Those people who went from office to home during covid will have to go back to the office or they will be fired and receive nothing because they did not fill their role.
Thing is, if you are the CEO of AWS, you are fantastically well-compensated to be in meetings with people who suck up to you. Of course you think the office is a great place to do your work.
I doubt that has anything to do with anything. It’s far more likely they want to encourage people to move on without having to pay severance. I read on some news site there’s some employee chat channel with thousands of members advocating for flexible work.
I wonder which tech company will be the first to take this too far and implode because of some easily-avoidable cataclysm. I think in some ways you could say Twitter / X already did although they are still limping along for now...
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that stuck with me, I don't remember the title of the post or who wrote it but it was essentially along the lines of "beware when companies start to take away the free snacks". It made a pretty convincing argument about how even seemingly minor changes like that start to signal a greater shift in the companies attitude toward how they want to treat and be perceived by their staff.
I think a lot of Amazonians, even those who choose to stay, will look back on this as their "no more free snacks" moment (I also think there are probably many Amazonians who are already past that point, but that is a different topic).
It’s a fairly calculated move, as they know market for engineers isn’t in the best shape, so a significant chunk will keep working with no complaints. They also ramped up hiring heavily, if the number of messages I get from Amazon’s recruiters is an indicator.
Amazon is mostly known for burning out their engineers, right? It is a shame if they are doing these back door layoffs because it means more people will have to get churned through. Burning out can have some pretty negative long term effects, hopefully not too much human potential is sacrifices to the altar of slightly faster shipping.
That’s what he is saying. Get rid of non h1bs then keep draining people until they leave and then use that as justification to expand h1b positions.
H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.
> They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down.
This is true in outsourcing companies (such as Wipro, Infosys, etc.), who account for the lions share of H1B visas, but their entire value prop is outsourcing. I think FAANG pay H1Bs pretty well. I have known several who make above the median of their salary band because the comp systems reward good performance.
2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.
Banning remote work (or even just signaling the intent) is an excellent solution to ‘we effed up by hiring too many people in ZIRP/AI expectations era and now we need to get rid of them without paying severance’.
unless you know you don't actually need those higher performers (presumably an assumption the bean counters have). People who have fewer options then would necessarily not going to ask for pay rises too. Therefore, you double whammy get both cheaper workers, as well as more obedient ones.
My impression as a longtime user of AWS is that they don't care to retain competent people. They seem to have a "throw more bodies at it" attitude toward work.
This. The number of otherwise useless overlays upon overlays at AWS is staggering. And quite a number of these L7 (non-sales/customer facing) overlays can be pruned without much impact to overall team/BU output/Rev. Jassy seems to be correcting some of the excess from the Bezos era.
Does this apply to Amazon operations in the EU and UK as well. I could imagine that it might be possible to fight such an edict under UK employment law. I'm pretty sure that they would not be able to do it quite so easily here in Norway.
We have stronger worker entitlements here in Europe but WFH is often just a positive remnant from the COVID era and not something specified in our contracts. For example I work fewer hours and from home on Fridays but nowhere in my contract does it say I'm allowed to do that.
I realise this topic has been covered repeatedly but considering it from another angle:
As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?
I'm not sure what your argument is. I feel like you just wanted to bash amazon. If you don't care if the support people are in office, why are you concerned by the RTO news?
Also set working times from 9 to 9. Also there is some strange perks there like food. Do you really need that much better than say some starving African?
Well, one way to make people to something they don't want to is by forcing them. "Do X, or quit".
However, doing this will only breed deep seated resentment. That can only be bad for the company and Amazon as a whole.
If the figures here are correct, 90% are unhappy with the decision and ~70% are considering switching jobs, it could become quite entertaining to watch this company implode from a distance. It will be the top talent who leave first, instantly creating a weaker company.
Its not even a good decision from an innovation/productivity perspective, studies are mixed and many that claim a productivity improvement in the office, if you look at who was involved in funding them, were actually funded by people or entities with a vested interest in office real estate.
> But compliance to the hybrid work order was fiercely enforced, with some employees who did not adhere to the policy told they were "voluntarily resigning" and were locked out of company systems.
I wonder how this will play out.
Previously the perception seems to have been that WFH was OK. So it seems like a pretty big change to their working conditions. Just making a massive change to somebody’s working conditions and then shutting off access if they don’t comply… I mean, how long will they pay them to do nothing?
It seems like they are just being fired to me?
We have shit worker protections in the US generally, but at least I hope some folks file for unemployment.
Entitled to what? Control over their own lives? I hope you didn't have any choice in your job, or take holiday or weekends, or even get paid or sleep. Otherwise you might feel entitled to these things.
Quit, and you have full control over your life again. Stop being so childish. Comparing holidays, sick leave, pay and nightly sleep to physical presence is simply laughable. The pandemic was an exceptional situation. Holding onto that special status is plain entitlement.
Standards change. Before paid sick leave was common, people would've laughed you out of the room for even suggesting it - "you're saying I should be paying you for doing nothing just because you got sick? I didn't make you sick, how is that my problem?". But now we all (hopefully) agree it's one of the basic worker's rights.
If all I do is press buttons on a keyboard all day, there is no reason I should have to be in the office for that. Entitlement would mean expecting something unreasonable - WFH for programmers etc. is reasonable. People have been asking for it for years and companies refused. They were forced into it and the world didn't end. Why shouldn't we keep it? The only people forced return to office benefits are the middle managers "overseeing" the people doing the actual work.
Wait until the next global epidemic, and you'll see the dirty bosses come back with their tails between their legs and beg our forgiveness. Then all you have to do is stay unemployed by refusing their job offers for a few years and their company will close. Serves them right.
I don't think Amazon is making a good decision here, but what makes you think the existing workers who are happy to work from the office would not be willing to work from home during a crisis if asked?
A global crisis necessitating a transition to working from home should not immediately result in a company like Amazon needing to substantially hire more staff, in fact, that is probably a big part of what got them into this situation.
You're full of negative energy. Precondition for your rant being yet another pandemic, which is... diabolic to say the least. Please take a deep breath, and try to get the hate out of your system.
I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
> I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
At the time we didn't have enough information to know locking down outdoor activities was unnecessary. All we knew is it is more contagious than other infectious diseases, like the flu. Given what we knew, it was a reasonable policy, even if in hindsight we know it wasn't necessary.
It's funny how the same people who kept saying we don't have enough information about if masks work, because we didn't test them enough specifically with covid, are now the ones who say we should have known that outdoor activities could have been left open.
> Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
"Front line" workers like warehouse workers and delivery drivers also profit from limiting vectors of infection by office workers staying home. Nothing "ironic" about it.
Work from home is good for people who have to work in-person, because it lessens the spread.
Also, just because I have a job that has some level of risk does not mean I would expect others to have a similar level of risk. Especially if it can be easily mitigated.
At least they're still allowing working from home on Saturday and Sunday.
SEV 1's don't care if you're at home!
Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
> Literally every engineer was offered
I might be missing an idiom here - offered what?
Overworked* oops
Presumably a job.
Being overworked is a choice you make.
The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.
When I started at Amazon during the pandemic, I asked for something in writing saying my job was "work from home". They told me not to worry about it, because I'd be in the system as remote and they would never return to the office anyway.
Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules.
I don't work there anymore because I wouldn't go back to the office.
> they would never return to the office anyway.
exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
No company will put this in an employment contract unless they are desperate to hire you, and if they are that desperate to hire you, you're in a whole other league than the people this news applies to.
Aren’t they just reverting to the same working conditions they had from the time they were founded until sometime in 2020?
Circumventing severance here seems like quite an overstatement.
Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
I don't see how the realization could've happened if they're moving back to the office.
I'm not surprised btw, every remote first company I've been in is stuck. I'm not saying it's inherent, but making it work is extremely hard. Imho it makes perfect sense that a company doesn't want to invest into it - it's not a lifestyle business.
Amazon has one of the lowest average tenures in the industry. The number of engineers and teams that existed pre-2020 under those working conditions is tiny (except maybe the leadership teams).
Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
Well, then put a different genie into the bottle, and let the cranky one go.
The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
Even in countries with strong labor laws this would still be perfectly allowed if the original contract didn’t say remote.
Is severance guaranteed by law? I don’t think it is in California at least
No one is making the working conditions unpleasant. The company which pays you to do work wants its employees to be in the office. If you don’t like it. Don’t work there.
Looks like all the employees about to lose their work from home jobs are upset and downvoting.
If your work contract and agreement has remote office, guess what? That's a breach of contract.
That’s a contract. The vast majority of people currently working from home do not have a contract explicitly stating it’s a work from home position permanently.
Those people who went from office to home during covid will have to go back to the office or they will be fired and receive nothing because they did not fill their role.
I suspect Amazon know that and their contracts are worded accordingly.
Does Amazon even do contracts?
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Thing is, if you are the CEO of AWS, you are fantastically well-compensated to be in meetings with people who suck up to you. Of course you think the office is a great place to do your work.
But that’s not what 95% of AWS workers do.
I doubt that has anything to do with anything. It’s far more likely they want to encourage people to move on without having to pay severance. I read on some news site there’s some employee chat channel with thousands of members advocating for flexible work.
I wonder which tech company will be the first to take this too far and implode because of some easily-avoidable cataclysm. I think in some ways you could say Twitter / X already did although they are still limping along for now...
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that stuck with me, I don't remember the title of the post or who wrote it but it was essentially along the lines of "beware when companies start to take away the free snacks". It made a pretty convincing argument about how even seemingly minor changes like that start to signal a greater shift in the companies attitude toward how they want to treat and be perceived by their staff.
I think a lot of Amazonians, even those who choose to stay, will look back on this as their "no more free snacks" moment (I also think there are probably many Amazonians who are already past that point, but that is a different topic).
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
That is the one, thank you!
I've heard a similar story from someone who was at HP when the donut carts ended, it signaled a significant culture change.
It’s a fairly calculated move, as they know market for engineers isn’t in the best shape, so a significant chunk will keep working with no complaints. They also ramped up hiring heavily, if the number of messages I get from Amazon’s recruiters is an indicator.
Amazon is mostly known for burning out their engineers, right? It is a shame if they are doing these back door layoffs because it means more people will have to get churned through. Burning out can have some pretty negative long term effects, hopefully not too much human potential is sacrifices to the altar of slightly faster shipping.
Their recruiters basically never stopped sending out messages even during the mass layoffs of the past few years, from my experience
This is a strategy to get rid of non H1B workers. It’s pure discrimination
Aren't H1B workers the most likely to comply?
That’s what he is saying. Get rid of non h1bs then keep draining people until they leave and then use that as justification to expand h1b positions.
H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.
> They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down.
This is true in outsourcing companies (such as Wipro, Infosys, etc.), who account for the lions share of H1B visas, but their entire value prop is outsourcing. I think FAANG pay H1Bs pretty well. I have known several who make above the median of their salary band because the comp systems reward good performance.
The H1B workers have to comply.
Highly doubt it. It is increasingly becoming difficult to get (or renew) H1B visa.
1. Impossible to prove this in court.
2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.
Banning remote work (or even just signaling the intent) is an excellent solution to ‘we effed up by hiring too many people in ZIRP/AI expectations era and now we need to get rid of them without paying severance’.
It's a really bad solution to that: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to...
You end up losing your higher performers, because they have many alternatives, and keeping the people who have fewer options.
unless you know you don't actually need those higher performers (presumably an assumption the bean counters have). People who have fewer options then would necessarily not going to ask for pay rises too. Therefore, you double whammy get both cheaper workers, as well as more obedient ones.
My impression as a longtime user of AWS is that they don't care to retain competent people. They seem to have a "throw more bodies at it" attitude toward work.
This. The number of otherwise useless overlays upon overlays at AWS is staggering. And quite a number of these L7 (non-sales/customer facing) overlays can be pruned without much impact to overall team/BU output/Rev. Jassy seems to be correcting some of the excess from the Bezos era.
Does this apply to Amazon operations in the EU and UK as well. I could imagine that it might be possible to fight such an edict under UK employment law. I'm pretty sure that they would not be able to do it quite so easily here in Norway.
We have stronger worker entitlements here in Europe but WFH is often just a positive remnant from the COVID era and not something specified in our contracts. For example I work fewer hours and from home on Fridays but nowhere in my contract does it say I'm allowed to do that.
If you want to do a mass layoff, be honest about it.
I realise this topic has been covered repeatedly but considering it from another angle:
As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?
I'm not sure what your argument is. I feel like you just wanted to bash amazon. If you don't care if the support people are in office, why are you concerned by the RTO news?
This is a pretty strained framing. The parent didn't say anything ambiguous or illogical.
rto causes the competent people to jump ship and keeps the script readers who won't/can't complain
Sounds more like a layoff strategy now.
They should be bold and make it six days a week.
Also set working times from 9 to 9. Also there is some strange perks there like food. Do you really need that much better than say some starving African?
Taking dogfooding to a new level.
The only free food is bananas from what I hear. Fits the starving African theme!
Any statistics on the kind of people that stick to office work. A, B, or C players? Introverts vs extroverts, programmers vs project managers..
I heard Amazon employees were told 9 out of 10 Amazonians were looking forward to returning to the office.
I guess they asked ten employees this question. Nine were on H1B visas, and the tenth was already on Focus/PIP.
beware of any survey where management asks the questions, answers the questions and then analyses the responses and frames the presentation.
Well, one way to make people to something they don't want to is by forcing them. "Do X, or quit".
However, doing this will only breed deep seated resentment. That can only be bad for the company and Amazon as a whole.
If the figures here are correct, 90% are unhappy with the decision and ~70% are considering switching jobs, it could become quite entertaining to watch this company implode from a distance. It will be the top talent who leave first, instantly creating a weaker company.
Its not even a good decision from an innovation/productivity perspective, studies are mixed and many that claim a productivity improvement in the office, if you look at who was involved in funding them, were actually funded by people or entities with a vested interest in office real estate.
> But compliance to the hybrid work order was fiercely enforced, with some employees who did not adhere to the policy told they were "voluntarily resigning" and were locked out of company systems.
I wonder how this will play out.
Previously the perception seems to have been that WFH was OK. So it seems like a pretty big change to their working conditions. Just making a massive change to somebody’s working conditions and then shutting off access if they don’t comply… I mean, how long will they pay them to do nothing?
It seems like they are just being fired to me?
We have shit worker protections in the US generally, but at least I hope some folks file for unemployment.
Doesn’t this open them up for wrongful termination suits..
And what difference does that make?
Hire and retain only the best
It seems now is the time to start asking for a private office, some furniture, a massage chair ;)
That way, if performance drops, you can blame it on the inferior office at work :)
Hahaha, well said! Lets see how the entitled workforce takes this clear statement.
Entitled to what? Control over their own lives? I hope you didn't have any choice in your job, or take holiday or weekends, or even get paid or sleep. Otherwise you might feel entitled to these things.
Quit, and you have full control over your life again. Stop being so childish. Comparing holidays, sick leave, pay and nightly sleep to physical presence is simply laughable. The pandemic was an exceptional situation. Holding onto that special status is plain entitlement.
Standards change. Before paid sick leave was common, people would've laughed you out of the room for even suggesting it - "you're saying I should be paying you for doing nothing just because you got sick? I didn't make you sick, how is that my problem?". But now we all (hopefully) agree it's one of the basic worker's rights.
If all I do is press buttons on a keyboard all day, there is no reason I should have to be in the office for that. Entitlement would mean expecting something unreasonable - WFH for programmers etc. is reasonable. People have been asking for it for years and companies refused. They were forced into it and the world didn't end. Why shouldn't we keep it? The only people forced return to office benefits are the middle managers "overseeing" the people doing the actual work.
Wait until the next global epidemic, and you'll see the dirty bosses come back with their tails between their legs and beg our forgiveness. Then all you have to do is stay unemployed by refusing their job offers for a few years and their company will close. Serves them right.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
I don't think Amazon is making a good decision here, but what makes you think the existing workers who are happy to work from the office would not be willing to work from home during a crisis if asked?
A global crisis necessitating a transition to working from home should not immediately result in a company like Amazon needing to substantially hire more staff, in fact, that is probably a big part of what got them into this situation.
They hired because there was demand. People had Prime and were scared to go out so they ordered.
You're full of negative energy. Precondition for your rant being yet another pandemic, which is... diabolic to say the least. Please take a deep breath, and try to get the hate out of your system.
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I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
> I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
At the time we didn't have enough information to know locking down outdoor activities was unnecessary. All we knew is it is more contagious than other infectious diseases, like the flu. Given what we knew, it was a reasonable policy, even if in hindsight we know it wasn't necessary.
It's funny how the same people who kept saying we don't have enough information about if masks work, because we didn't test them enough specifically with covid, are now the ones who say we should have known that outdoor activities could have been left open.
> Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
"Front line" workers like warehouse workers and delivery drivers also profit from limiting vectors of infection by office workers staying home. Nothing "ironic" about it.
Work from home is good for people who have to work in-person, because it lessens the spread.
Also, just because I have a job that has some level of risk does not mean I would expect others to have a similar level of risk. Especially if it can be easily mitigated.