Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

This was a pretty big deal for several reasons:

- 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.

> So if you work for AWS for example out of an office in California, they might force you to relocate to Seattle.

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.

> negatively impacted collaboration and "working on hard technical problems".

Meanwhile, most of their business runs on Linux…

I wonder why this argument is not publicized more.

Damn I dont know what to say to this. Should I pissed off on all this backtracking and BS arguments for RTO? Or should I "pleasantly" surprised that instead of playing the "talk to your manager/hr" ping pong game leadership (remember Robert California episode in the Office with Andy stuck in between RC and his Wife for an office job??) is actually owning up to their BS policies?

Sounds very much like a method to reduce head count without saying so.

Pretty crazy, because AWS has had fully-remote employees for a decade plus. I worked closely with a team who had two remote employees, one in NYC and one in CA, despite the rest of the team being in-office in Seattle. And you know what? They got along fine. The guy in NYC got promoted to L6 while I was there, so I can only assume they were happy with his work.

Makes me cringe to hear that people are “loyal” to trillion dollar market cap companies. As if they’re owed something or have some stake that people there will lose sleep over losing them.

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.

I think many of those people justify it in their heads thinking the ones getting laid off just didn't work hard enough. The loyalty is extremely cringe-worthy at times though. The concept of loyalty to employer has never sat well with me, regardless of market cap. The great recession solidified my feelings on that even more. When you watch people that put in 100 hour weeks for 10 years get let go without so much as an apology, the idea of loyalty ceases to exist.

I wonder if loyalty to employers is like Stockholm Syndrome, a way of coping with emotional trauma.

It’s golden handcuffs.

On the other hand, it shows that there is a power dynamic reinforced:

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.

I know there was active tracking going on and warned people about it months ago. I also believe there is click-tracking and screenshots going on to monitor people. Many of the people working at FAANG companies are young and fresh out of college or just easily encouraged to drink the kool-aid. That's not me, but that's what my loyalty comment was about. I agree with your sentiments on that.

The extent of individual tracking is borderline unconstitutional. We're talking serious breach of individual privacy. If enough people knew and gathered evidence (which I'm happy to describe how to do this), there would be class action law suits. No doubt.

What does the constitution have to do with it? That document relates to the government’s relationship with the populace.

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