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%.
Employees who were hired remote and have no office within a reasonable distance should absolutely force Amazon to terminate their employment so they can collect unemployment. Amazon is the one forcing the significant change in employment terms, so employees shouldn't do them a favor and resign if they don't have another job lined up yet.
Employees who were hired remote can remain remote. Not all employees hired during covid were classified as such. Employees were also able to request exemption from the return to office policy.
So glad I bailed on Amazon. I interviewed during COVID and got weird vibes about BTO plans. I live near some existing AWS offices, but nobody would/could give me any assurance that I could remain remote, or work from those offices (vs those offices being colidated into the HQ2 in Arlington VA). It was all pretty silly as the VP was in Seattle and the rest of my peers would have been scattered (though I would have hired a “local” team, maybe).
I work at Amazon. I have a full remote contract. My SDM askordered me to go to the office. He said he can't force me to go to the office, but I have to go to the office. He is fully aware I have a full remote contract.
You should discuss with your leadership/skip-level. I'm not speaking for the entire company, strictly sharing how things happened during covid and what I know from my team/peers.
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.
You communicate using assertions and vocabulary that positively connotates acquiescence to employer demands and very-nearly implies that such acquiescence is the only reasonable course of action. This is an approach that is typically used to persuade rather than to inform - it feels out of place here, and the I predict that concealed nature of the persuasion renders this comment stronly harmful on net.
Care to be specific? Using big words with vague generalizations is out of place here. Sharing my experience here for other's to garner and use for their own decision making is far from out of place.
I am curious where this is coming from because TFA implies that this policy applies to people who were hired remote. What is the actual distinction between those who have to RTO and those that do not?
> Many employees accepted offers from Amazon with the understanding that their position will be full remote.
Some employees hired during covid were explicitly classified as virtual. Some were given a location and said you don't have to come to office but if you did have an office it would be in <city>.
It's made very clear when hired so anyone saying otherwise missed a subtle detail.
Employees were hired with a specific location or they weren't. There isn't an in-between. However, employees during covid were also hired and told to remain out of office until guidance changes.
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.
Yes, but that's not the point I was arguing with. Either it was made very clear (and people choose to overlook it despite it being hard to miss) or it was a subtle detail (that people easily missed, quite possibly unintentionally). Both can't be true at the same time.
Gergely Orosz is a hack. He can show a scan of a contract with personal information redacted if he'd like to. He creates "facts" by using vague words like 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
Ah ok, so I have an extended family member who was hired by AWS during the pandemic. This person was explicitly hired as remote so I assume that they do not have to RTO since it is in writing. I can’t really ask them for complicated family reasons also seems kinda rude to just ask haha. But I have been curious. I am glad to know they won’t have to move across the country again.
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.
If you have a job lined up no. If you're going to be job hunting wouldn't you get backdated unemployment even if you had the savings to live without it?
For context, depending on the state, unemployment can be a few hundred dollars per week. So you might cover the costs of your lawyer. No idea of the answer to your question as there's also an assumption you're looking for employment while unemployed and may be ongoing documentation requirements.
Depending on your state, hiring a lawyer might not be necessary. In at least one state, the employment division takes violations of employment contracts very seriously and will go to court on your behalf if the violation is egregious enough.
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.
It seems fine if the new job you're interviewing for is remote-only.
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.
Doesn’t this effectively target all the best employees? Those that can walk away like that.
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.
> Doesn’t this effectively target all the best employees?
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).
Data and IP sovereignty makes this increasingly difficult, and in many cases the internationality of the talent simply doesn't buy you any savings (eg any model beyond 100b params or so, anything where you need 9 9s, etc.). Source: been in c-level convos on exactly this topic.
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".
Kind of funny seeing Hong Kong listed with Delhi and Sao Paulo considering the fact that rent in Hong Kong is roughly similar in San Francisco (I pay 3800 usd a month for 520 square feet) and salaries reflect that.
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).
Amazon does not, as I understand it, worry all that much about high employee attrition. It's also probably not a coincidence that they're doing this when a lot of other big tech employers are having layoffs, since it probably makes this factor, if not zero, at least less than it otherwise would be.
If this happens to anyone - look up the laws of your jurisdiction in regards to "constructive dismissal". Being required to go back into an office after being fully remote for 3 years may well qualify, and then (as far as employment law is concerned) you were fired, you didn't quit.
Yes, it is a great strategy for sociopathic managers
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.
