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.”
Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office.
CEOs try not to think they’re the center of the world, the challenge.
“Should workers be subjected to pointless and dehumanizing drudgery that serves no practical purpose? Find out what this panel of five overpaid CEOs think, after the break.”
In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.
In similar fashion, an unprecedented unanimous vote was casted by all the worm hunting birds: worms should not live underground.
Workers should unionize. I don’t know if its better but I know it’s something they hate
Don’t want to seem like I’m shitting on unions, but in many cases the established unions themselves are a barrier to real change, as they themselves have been corrupted and/or hamstrung by anti union laws rendering them extremely weak. Ive been in 2 now and was completely surprised by how they actually work these days.
It’s sad
I spoke with virtually all of the workers, and none of them want to pay rent. Yet here we are.
CEOs can get bent through a videocall
CEOs can get bent through a videocall
Found my new email signature ✨
To be fair, they largely are the center of our world, and that’s the problem.
Maybe tech workers will finally unionize
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.
Yeah like AWS was Bezos’ own invention, right? It’s the only thing that brings money in. His idea of the webshop failed miserably and was financed by friends
Yeah we get paid well, but relative to the value we produce we’re getting robbed.
And AWS profits are dropping each quarter recently…
Did you mean software engineers? A professional degree is not required but it is mostly software engineers taking the positions. The job title is also software engineer.
I know, I am one. Try not to split hairs
It’s pretty clear you are not part of the industry. Your preference for trade like titles shows you don’t have real world experience in this industry and are just sharing opinions based on your political beliefs with no real basis on reality.
And if you really are in the industry it’s difficult to believe that you failed to realize that 95%+ are not tradesmen and have profesional degrees in software engineering or something similar.
Did he ever say they were Trade Workers? The only time he mentioned Trade that I saw was talking about Trade Unions, which don’t specifically have anything to do with Trade Workers
He described workers as programmers. Only a neophyte would do that.
When called out he doubled down instead of explaining why he doesn’t use the normal title
Lmao
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
Do you get paid $450k with only 5 years of experience? Cuz that’s industry standard rn.
You, within my union, can get paid more than the minimum. There’s nothing against it in the bylaws. Shockingly, very few people are able to individually negotiate higher wages than the minimum. I wonder why that might be?
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.
Yeah i used to get hammered with downvotes whenever id bring up unionizing at ycombinator.
Yeah it blows
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.
Tech Twitter be like
I wish. A union could have easily prevented this.
The mentality of these people are like slave owners.
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.
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.
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.!<
Nah, if you’re visibly disabled you’ve got a leg up. Just claim wrongful termination and go for a jury trial.
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.
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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.
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.
You can only artificially raise the price of real estate for so long.
But if you can only see as far as the next quarterly report who cares?
That’s actually against the law known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (also known as Sox or Sarbox Act).
I don’t see anything like that in the article. Can you explain?
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.
I don’t think that would outlaw forcing employees back to work. Especially if they keep quiet about the true reason.
I believe I misunderstood the context. My mistake.
Get bent, Andy.
For some reason, I read this as
Get bendy, Andy.
Get swifty, Andifty
Take off your pants and shit on the floor
Get some pussy, Andussy.
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.
used Amazon to order stuff to work from home
Amazon makes almost no money on retail sales. They make their money from AWS and from advertisers.
Even better then. With people WFH companies move their on-prem servers and applications to the Cloud like AWS!
No matter how you dice this Amazon is fucking itself
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.
retail revenue
At almost zero profit
Just ignore the other two paragraphs then.
Nobody’s denying that retail enabled Amazon to get where they are today and continues to be an important aspect of the business. But the notion that increased retail demand due to remote work would be a major boon for the company’s bottom line is fundamentally flawed. If anything, sudden surges in demand tend to be costly, since their distribution network is tuned to be able to just barely meet expected demand.
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.
Can you point to one of the butts in chairs breaks? I have never heard of that specific requirement
It’d be buried in a contract somewhere. I only know about it because my company had that deal with a major city in the east coast.
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.
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A voluntary resignation? Good luck with that!
“Yes, I assure you they voluntarily resigned. They tried to resist it but we forced it on them.”
The brain drain is real. Wonder how long before this boomer policy hurts Andy’s precious shareholders.
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.
AWS works sometimes. It’s a horrible hodgepodge of half baked stuff that doesn’t make sense. Source: I was fighting with it for two years. Now I’m in an even worse place with Azure. I’m pushing for moving everything in house.
AWS is painful, but slightly less painful than rolling your own. It’s their main selling point
It’s good for developing PoC where you don’t need to pay much to get going. But when you’re taking on a production level load it’ll be better to start thinking about having an on premise setup. BUT, if you’re scaling up to the point where you need to have your own data center with all of its baggage, you’re better off rolling with one of the cloud providers.
It’s quite possible. That said, I’ve done DevOps in a large, in-house DC with OpenStack, another one with VMware, then Azure, AWS, as well as bare metal at mom-and-pop DCs. AWS has been the best of the bunch by far.
This is way more true than people realize.
AWS sounds amazing on paper and their marketing material is great. Once you get into the nitty gritty though things start to feel like everything is held together with string and chewing gum. Documentation is sparse, and often outright wrong. New services are implemented constantly but there is no one to talk to who can support them or knows anything about them. Features they claim are there simply…aren’t.
It does indeed work, but it’s a frustrating service to use and it’s extremely expensive to boot.
Yup. The core aws services are solid and fucking impressive, but the only reason most of their value added stuff gets any customers is because they use the core stuff.theye mostly horrible and expensive.
Souce:worked for aws
Aws was amazing at first and the consistent UI makes it look clean, but it is a confusing mess imo.
Azure came in and fixed some of the pain points but it is just as confusing and frustrating now. I think outsourcing the cloud still makes sense in a lot of cases but they really are nothing special these days.
Serverless was a good step forward but had the same issues now that it is up and running.
There are a ton of small competitors now that can have the same availability so the big players can gouge you less I think too.
Yeah, you’ve got the idea. Oh, and don’t forget about offshoring entire product lines.
Amazon has a big moat. They could probably fuck up for another 20 years and make a profit.
I’ve gotten so much recruitment crap from Amazon. This kind of crap is why none of those worked out for them.
Same. I just ignore them now.
Schedule meetings with them and then don’t show.
Actually a great idea.
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.
I think my favorite part of the Amazon RTO is the fact that there are many offices that charge you to park there
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
This is common in dense urban locations; parking is expensive, and getting free parking just for working somewhere is not expected at all.
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.
One thing that would nip this ‘return to office’ bullshit in the bud would be paid travel time to the office.
If they had to pay us for sitting in traffic instead of our paying to go to work their constant mewling would evaporate as they rush to reduce costs and increase productivity by having us WFH
Uh, maybe, but it is also typical in healthcare and hospitals regardless of their location so your point while technically true is not valid here.
Source: i worked for 10 years at 4 suburban hospital locations with their own parking lots and i always paid for parking, every. fucking. day.
That’s still not ok. It’s just normalized.
I’m confused, my comment is not valid because amazon is a hospital now?
Remote Workers warn Amazon CEO Any Jassy: 'Working for a tyrant is probably not going to work out for us."
If you pay my commute.
And also start the compensated-hours clock the moment I step into the car. We’re giving you eight hours a day, not 12 now.
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
True. The UK has downgraded as a country since leaving the EU. You guys have only mildly better benefits than the US and a lot of things are more expensive.
You’re a freaking island. Why would you leave the best trade agreement you’ll ever get??? For a different colored passport?!?
The US, EU, China, India, etc. are all sending you the back of the line for trade negotiations. If you’re lucky, you might get the same terms as Mexico.
This is the United States. And yeah, 80%+ of us would have a hard time getting into the EU. I’m pretty sure the UK immigration policies are even more limited.
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
