This feels like a way to layoff people without any of the headaches of organizing a layoff. Employees will quit voluntarily and your workforce may shrink by 5-10%.
And in all states, you don't have to have a lawyer to bring a case. These are civil cases, and you can represent yourself. You're trading time for money in that situation, of course, and there's a learning curve you need to mount.
> Many employees accepted offers from Amazon with the understanding that their position will be full remote.
It's made very clear when hired so anyone saying otherwise missed a subtle detail.
That's an oxymoron, either it was made very clear or it was subtle and therefore not very clear at all.
I believe the commenter you’re replying to is willingly overlooking things hoping for a different reality. It’s a pretty human thing to do ;)
Some chose to interpret that as WFH forever, some chose to buy homes hours away from their assigned office location. Now some are acting confused and feel slighted when in reality, they ignored or conflated the hiring and the WFH-covid guidance into a single thing.
If you want something to be true, get it in writing.
'Yeah, we're technically based in Seattle, but everyone is working from home anyway' is not a legal contract.
Sucks and the employees aren't to blame, just warning anyone else out there.
If it's not in writing, it doesn't exist. What you were told verbally means nothing. (Yes, technically a verbal contract is a binding contract, but if you can't prove in court that something was said, it doesn't matter.)
I assume that remote workers had an employment contract, though, and surely where and when they are expected to work was included in that.
Employees either had a remote contract or they didn't. Their income taxes were paid accordingly. This really isn't or shouldn't be a surprise to anyone
Where did you get this from though?
That said, if your entire team is back in the office, you will be a burden and at a disadvantage relative to the rest of the team. So your circumstances are yours but you should consider how you can best be successful and remain agile to the changing world pre, during and post-covid.
My boss told me to go back to office, and I said no f'ing way--fire me! And they did.
Probably not a great conversation to have on your next interview.
It's also fine if you're interviewing for a company local to you, there's no Amazon location anywhere nearby, and you were fired for refusing to relocate.
This would reinforce my suspicion that big tech companies don’t really believe in the concept of engineer quality. They just hire quantity and convince them all that they’re exceptional.
No, because a huge percentage of the best employees are on H1Bs and have no choice but to stay.
Big tech might have some issues when the carpet gets pulled on H1B rules XOR H1B allocations during the next administration. I'm like 99.9% sure that the status quo will end one way or the other (I'm hoping it'll be rules but scared that it'll be allocations).
Agree with work-a-day code slinging, but that profession is a few years away from becoming 99.9% product management anyways. In tech, if a job is in danger of outsourcing, it's either data annotation work or is probably cheaper and easier to automate sans product design/management.
Also: if we're talking actual top-tier talent -- mostly O1, not H1B, btw -- you can get very top tier talent for not much more in rural Colorado/Missouri compared to Delhi / Hong Kong / São Paulo. And without the risk of a state actor saying "fuck you this belongs to me now".
That said I agree about the availability of top tier talent for relatively cheep in rural Colorado/Missouri but I don't think that'll stay the case for very long with the increasing move to remote teams (even with companies like amazon refusing to be remote).
What they don't consider, or don't care about, is that this will select-out the best people, the ones who have the most readily available options, and it will select-in those who are least capable.
This means that the managers really don't GAF about any kind of quality, or their real strategy is merely to throw warm bodies at their problems and hope they can wrangle some kind of productivity from them, evidently while soothing their own egos while "managing by walking around" and hovering over everyone's cubicles trying to enforce butts-in-seats indicia of work that actually have near-zero correlation with actual productivity.