Amazon cloud boss says employees unhappy with 5-day office mandate can leave

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.

Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.

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.

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 don't know about everyone else, but if that were my boss, they'd be severely underestimating my capacity for petty behavior.

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".

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.

If the cloud is so great why can't you work remote?

I mean that's a relief. Could they not leave before?

I forsee an Amazon brain drain about to happen.

So admitting that it's constructive dismissal?

Don't worry. They will.

What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?

I asked our CTO at a town hall if there were plans to improve the office my team got moved to because they moved us from the nice office to the city and the back to the previous area but a crappy office. Nope.

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.

This makes zero sense.. If you're a cloud company why can't employees be in the cloud

Another company that lays off it's talented people first, due to the meddling of a CEO where he has no business to.

Funniest to me in this kind of debate is having my N+1 manage us from across the country, having two team members in another town, and somehow, my ass being at home 15km from the office makes any difference at all to the daily life of the team? It doesn't. My actual manager, the dude giving us our marching orders, doesn't care. Shit, our N+1 doesn't care either, since he's almost always remote himself!

Only people I've seen actually care seem to be HR, for whatever reason.

I don't even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.

BuT nO OnE WaNtS tO WoRk AnYmOrE1

Yeah, when you're having fun pissing off people, people are pissed off.

Who would have guessed?

"Amazon employees says cloud boss can eat shit"

I'm a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn't have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.

We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It's not a big deal personally - I live close and I'm older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don't see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.

He pointed to Amazon’s principle of “disagree and commit,” which is the idea that employees should debate and push back on each others ideas respectfully

That’s all fine and dandy for ending debate about a stupid roadmap feature, but “disagree and commit” is a different story when you’re asking people to spend 3 hours unpaid in a car everyday.

You mean Amazon is bad to their workers?

Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?

Why don't they just keep working from home and get fired? Instead of having to quit themselves?

Do it during holiday season. Do it.

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

Accept every phishing email

Put USB sticks found on the ground into your work computer

Open the door for strangers who want to get in the building without a badge

FORM A UNION

(nuclear option) introduce bedbugs to all your bosses offices

Nice window behind him there. Good and high up.

Alexa, tell me what "dead sea effect" means.

Permanently Deleted

Shocker.

All of these jobs will be replaced with outsourced workers in areas where they can hire cheaper labor. The RTO mandate is just a farce. Then those jobs will be taken over by AI as it gets more mature. Some companies are more transparent about it internally than you’d expect. HR is hit first usually. Then technical staff. Management staff will be last.

Quality and innovation will gradually disappear just like the old steel factories did. Why invest in quality when everyone dies from cancer before they can appreciate it. Late stage capitalism at its finest.

Consequences aside, he has a totally valid point. They own the business, they are the boss, and they can decide. People might not like it, but in the end, it is their problem and people are free to change their job. People got a bit to comfortable lately and every single employee expects the company to be run just as they prefer. Even when you work fully remote, there are still people who find it really hard and stupid as they never get to see their collegues and spend the entire day just staring at the monitor. You will never make everyone happy, so why bother complaining. The decision has been made, take it or leave it.