Amazon starting to track and penalize workers who work from home too much
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
- Leadership explicitly told people that their managers were responsible for ensuring the RTO is enforced and that badges were not being tracked
- The tracking did not consider PTO, sick days, or exceptions granted to individuals with medical conditions, etc
- Managers all the way up to VP level were not aware this tracking was occurring nor that an email would be sent out
- The response to the outcry was a simple canned answer that was basically "contact your HR". In some cases senior managers contacted HR only to be told they can't help and that it's up to manager discretion to enforce the policy.
It was an unbelievably irresponsible and hostile move on Amazon's part and it's left a nasty taste amongst the most loyal employees.
EDIT: Also it appears that some managers are warning their employees (out of consideration, not malintent) that there may be stronger effort coming to not only force RTO, but to force people to central hubs. This includes all fully virtual employees (who will allegedly lose this designation) and those on hybrid. So if you work for AWS for example out of an office in California, they might force you to relocate to Seattle. There was already some news around this last month I believe, but it sounded like a bigger wave of it is coming.
Throwaway because who knows what they are monitoring.
We had an all-hands this week and the VP was pretty clear that they will force people to relocate at some point, saying that it made no sense for some people to be in New York if the rest of their team was in Seattle because it negatively impacted collaboration and "working on hard technical problems".
So I don't know what their timeline is, but at this point they are not really pretending that this will be between you and your manager/director. They will absolutely push this as a top-down policy.
Meanwhile, most of their business runs on Linux…
Managers, VPs, "leadership" all work for Amazon. Just like individual contributors. No one is above the RTO policy, everyone had a clear understanding of their responsibilities. And there's no BS-ing from managers that will save certain employees, certain roles, over others. Instead, managers are tasked with doing their jobs, i.e., ensuring their team(s) adheres to RTO policy. This includes badge etiquette. Quite clear cut.
If you didn't think you were being tracked, you are delusional. You work for FAANG. And your company is not performing well right now. Further WEF shows Amazon is an early adopter of equipment used to track workplace performance.
As for the "loyalty" comment, this screams "I happily agreed to treat certain current and former employees really shitty, because I am so loyal to Amazon's workplace culture. And now Amazon is treating me the same way, and that's not fair." Loyalty is from Amazon to shareholders, private investors and partners. You know, business. Never forget that.
At the same time it’s just business. Either go back to the office or find a new job.
All I care about is that AMZN stock goes up - I don’t work there.
Now, almost four years after leaving my job at AWS, it's finally catching up with me, too -- I'm finding myself with a growing sense that I'm going to be fired out of the blue. It's only two weeks since I had my mid-year review with my manager, where I was told I'm performing fine; and yet, I'm inexplicably and irrationally worried that he was lying and that I'm going to find myself on whatever our equivalent of a PIP is.
There's a reason I caution young engineers to avoid Amazon. Don't get me wrong, Amazon catapulted me from a my job as a one-man IT department to an incredibly comfortable life as a senior engineer -- but it was the only tech company willing to make me an offer back then. If you have other choices, don't choose Amazon.
The companies enacting these policies are on my permanent "do not work for" list and I coach every report I have to steer clear of companies that want to own you and put the executives' "feels" over worker's mental health and productivity.
Any advice? You seem to have answers.
Any recommendations for places I can move to?
I'll just pack up my family of four and move to a bachelor apartment to save the commute.
I choose to have a family, and I choose to work too, I suppose.
Maybe $JOB will provide me a raise to do so.
It’s not that bad.
Buy a new place next to the new employer?
Your halfway-house "build your life around your career" mentality appealed to me in my early 20s when I was on starter salaries and was unmarried and childless. That is no longer the case and you couldn't - as I've had the pleasure of telling several interviewers - pay me to return to it.
I assume this is the thing that's called a "traffic jam" where I live?
Which is exactly what I'm doing and advocating for others to do.
"How Amazon Crushes Unions" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-...
"Amazon intensifies 'severe' effort to discourage first-ever US warehouse union" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/amazon-in...
"Corporations like Amazon pay big bucks for "union avoidance" — and it all happens in the dark" - https://www.salon.com/2021/06/24/corporations-like-amazon-pa...
"Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/amazon-...
Just you, alone, vs the trillion dollar company, its lobbyists, its influence over local and federal government, its PR machine, its full-time, well-funded teams of people who are against you, and its constant fight to stop you combining forces with other individuals to fight back.
Anyway, throwaway account clearly shilling for companies. Interesting :)
I am certain that trolling is not allowed here.
As for pay, I’m of the opinion that workers create the vast majority of value at companies, while the c-suites are largely sociopathic parasites, chasing whatever fads they heard about on the golf course, in between doing Game of Thrones shit to one another. So, even if tech workers at Amazon make more than people at small companies, I still think more of that money should be going to them than people saying “bow to my authority and show up in the office.”
> No one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance.
Already highly paid actors and sports figures have unions. It's not just about negotiating pay.
Morality doesn't have to come with a price tag.
Amazon is not known for paying top of market.
> You get more money in exchange for less freedom
Why would this be the case when less freedom leads to worse business results? High churn, less access to top talent and worse productivity. Freedom and trust are the easiest ways to start getting better results from your team.
> high expectations for how work is being done.
They may have high expectations for how the work is being done but they'd be better off worrying about what work gets done.
When considering a change, I was told by multiple layers of management that they would be totally fine with me moving away from the office and becoming permanently remote.
But none of them would put that in an email, or ask HR for formal approval. It was always "as far as I'm concerned, it's completely fine". It was never "yes, this is something that we will stand by if it comes under pressure".
I chose to leave in the end, mostly due to the weakness of this promise. And with each new article covering their RTO debacle, I become more convinced it was the right decision. I had great teammates, and a great direct manager. But the macro situation at Amazon is a mess.
Amazon is just a loose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. This is partially why the employee experience there can vary so much depending on the org. And HR at Amazon is just another org that acts mostly autonomously from the other orgs.
Shameful.
Great, that will come in handy when it comes time to break them into separate companies.
It has been that way for a long time.
Amazon is frugal . . . especially when it comes to quality of life for employees and their families.
It shows in how many employees have worked there for more than five years and how happy most employees are.
If you don't get it in writing/email then its not approved.
These large corporations aren't making decisions without the data. In fact, they tried this experiment for years and the results are in: full-remote is less productive.
That's not to say specific people shouldn't be remote. There's probably an optimal distribution that allows some slack for these ICs who are bad at being in the office.
Now they want us back in a few days a month, which isn't too bad I guess. But it really has nothing to do with productivity.
We do less work when we commute, socialise more, don't accept early or late meetings, etc. Our teams are distributed across India, the UK, the EU and the US. Most of our actual work takes place on webex calls, even pre pandemic.
Now, it may be that the leadership value intangible things like culture and have decided that those are also important things. But at least for our company, productivity is not the reason they want us back sometimes.
Personally I find myself thinking “I need to discuss this thing with this person, but I don’t feel like booking in a meeting and having a video call, I’ll just wait until we see each other in the office some time”
Companies built giant campuses and signed long term leases. Now we're in a world where that is no longer a rational choice. Adapt. They're always talking about innovation. Where's the innovation here forcing people back into offices?
It's just money. Deal with it.
The fixed costs don't change either way.
What protective measures do you want to see? The aggregate risk here has not changed significantly at this point vs. before remote policies were implemented.
Full remote is more productive. Enough people seem to think so based off of various surveys.
Also, fewer people commuting leads to better/safer driving for those who must commute, such as nurses.
Surprise, I haven't heard back about it ever since.
I think many exec-class managers believe this to be true. Even after the layoff, they might see the company moving forward on momentum alone and believe it even more strongly. But an airplane will still glide a great distance after you turn its engine off. Companies like Twitter that cut deep are still in that "Wile E. Coyote running-on-air-after-running-off-the-cliff" phase. They're eventually going to hit the ground.
Badges aren't important if you have a PC to yourself.
(And you don't need to install spyware to accomplish this, the network can trivially be setup to track the data)
Citation: I currently work at Amazon.
<!-- Hello there, HTML enthusiast! -->Edit: Is there something offensive about what I’m saying here? Why am I being downvoted for this comment?
Now should a question be what is a "fair" standard of living everyone should have?
I'm a Bay Area resident in a crappy 76 y/o house worth > 2M. And surprisingly happy about it.
Who knows what could be revealed when people have to be in-office? Perhaps that you are not as skilled as you and your manager(s) assert, and you've taking others' work as your own? Hmm...
And yeah, GitHub tracks everyone’s activity and it’s pretty clear who’s “WFH” and who’s working from home.
This is slavery with a lot of complicated language to convince Jeff Bezos otherwise.
Slavery in the sense that Amazon engineers are paid so much that they can't financially take a 50% pay cut to work at a small remote-first company.
I think a better characterization would be that many people are a slave to the lifestyle they've been able to obtain through very high salaries at top 20 tech firms.
That's a tough position to be in. But obviously not slavery by any stretch of the imagination (sell your $3m house, move to a cheaper neighborhood, get a cheaper car, and get a 100% remote job that pays 50% less). Or keep the lifestyle and drive to the office 3 times a week.
I think that such hyperbole makes it easier for people to dismiss legitimate criticisms of employer-employee relations, so is counterproductive.
Pretty amazing definition