A cherry on top, HR scripts don't properly account for partial vacation weeks, so if you have 3 vacation days in a week, you are still supposed to be in office 3 days a week, or else your VP gets notified.
If you’re wondering why I stay, it’s cause Amazon was my first real Software job, I started as an intern in 2020 and was always remote. I’m on a team that rapidly grew during covid and I happen to have been on the team the longest so it’s hard for me to find a position with an equivalent staff level scope with my level of experience.
The final straw was when we got the word that we would be required to move so that we would be co-located with our management in the HQ2 offices, or we would have to find alternative employment elsewhere.
We weren’t given a timeframe on when that was going to happen, but based on the timeframe I saw from the announcement of RTO to the enforcement of RTO, I knew it wouldn’t be long. So, I chose to leave as quickly as possible.
I gave my manager early warning that I was actively looking for alternative employment, and I kept him appraised of how the interview process was going, and then how the decision process was going, and then how the hiring paperwork process was going. When everything was finalized, he then got my official two weeks notice.
That was also when I told a few people inside the company that I was leaving and where I was going, but my official notification to the team wasn’t made until my actual final day — my manager requested that he be the one to make that announcement.
During my final two weeks, my manager also told me that he decided to also leave, and move back to India. I don’t know if he was forced out because too many people had left the team within the past year, or if it was truly a personal decision. But I do know we lost a lot of good people.
So, RTO is not the worst thing that can be done to you by your employer. Wait until they force you to move to be co-located with your manager and the rest of whatever team remains. And all without any kind of assistance with the moving costs, because you’re just that damn lucky to still have a job at all.
But that’s the Amazon way. RTO, forced co-location, stack ranking, unregretted attrition, the whole nine yards. Humans really are one hundred percent disposable if you work at Amazon.
This tracking is reported all the way down to your immediate manager on a weekly basis. Or, at least it was back when I worked at Amazon.
So far, they do seem to be the only company I’ve heard of so far that is doing the forced co-location with your management, specifically for people who were hired as remote and promised that they could stay remote.
I’m sure they have some other practices that may be common amongst other companies, and probably some that are not common amongst other companies. But in terms of the main ones I mentioned, there is a great deal of overlap.