Aren’t they just reverting to the same working conditions they had from the time they were founded until sometime in 2020?
Circumventing severance here seems like quite an overstatement.
Circumventing severance here seems like quite an overstatement.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
I'm not surprised btw, every remote first company I've been in is stuck. I'm not saying it's inherent, but making it work is extremely hard. Imho it makes perfect sense that a company doesn't want to invest into it - it's not a lifestyle business.
In a company the size of Amazon, there are exceptions to many things, including exclusive in-office work pre-2020. This is more than a revert.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
She did not last much and eventually jumped to another big company. Sure the job was challenging in AWS, but what she was complaining the most about was the speed at which people were leaving and being replaced.
She told me that she often had to schedule meetings with people from other teams/departments, sometimes 2-3 weeks in advance to find a free calendar slot, and when it was finally the date for the meeting, it often occurred that one of the invitees did not show up, without any prior notice, only for her to discover that the person resigned.
So very often she had to reschedule the meeting with different people and wait another couple of weeks for them to be available. This made it very frustrating and difficult for her to get things going, as she was a product manager for a product that required a lot of cross-team collaboration.