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> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangement
by mamonster 4y ago
> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office.
One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit.
Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute."
Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.
- eckza 4y ago> Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management. Is that really the takeaway, here?
- xwdv 4y agoWhat else is there to takeaway? They knew they weren’t working for a remote-first company. They knew what their contract said. They played a dangerous game and now they’re finally burned. You cannot collect an Amazon salary living out in Idaho or Nebraska.
- Adraghast 4y agoWhy not?
- brk 4y agoCapitalism?
- xwdv 4y agoBecause developers in those regions can tolerate less salary due to their lower expenses, as a competitive advantage.
- Adraghast 4y agoWhat if the dev in Boise and the dev in Seattle and the dev in Butte got together and agreed none of them would work for less than a certain salary?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brk 4y agoIt's a version of the prisoner's dilemma. They could do that, and they arguably should do that. But it won't scale to everyone doing that, and so it breaks down to a remote person with lower cost of living volunteering work for a bit less, in order to secure a desired position for themselves.
- wilsynet 4y agoThose developers should definitely try it.
- aketchum 4y agowhat if you had wheels instead of feet? there is zero mechanism for this and tech workers have shown again and again that there is not interest in a professional union.
- bluGill 4y agoUnions in the US have policies that tech people do not want. Often they are backed up by law, so you cannot legally form a union that gives you the good without the bad.
- sundaeofshock 4y agoThat would require forming a union and tech workers tend to be somewhat hostile towards unions.
- wilsynet 4y agoOstensibly because Amazon won’t allow you to because RTO policy. I guess if you don’t show up, they’ll eventually fire you.
- ilikecakeandpie 4y agoI'm with you. The quality and value of my work does not change with regards to my physical location
- bluGill 4y agoWhile you cannot collect an Amazon salary out there - because Amazon won't pay you if you live there, you can collect a similar salary out there from other companies that just need good people and pay them well. Of course you will need to wade through the companies that figure since cost of living is less out there they should pay you less. However wages are competitive for full remote companies, so companies that allow full remote tend to not care where you live, they just pay enough to get the people they need. Note, such companies do count what country you live in. You will make different amounts in US, India, Germany, and Mexico. For legal reasons people who live in a different country are not equivalent to each others.
- granshaw 4y ago"similar salary"? Be realistic – a random startup is not going to give total comp similar to Amazon... you need to find another remote-friendly FAANG to get that, and I don't know if any of them are even hiring right now, let alone hiring full-remote
- cultureswitch 4y agoI suppose an overly optimistic employee could have thought that remote work is supported by the data, therefore it would be likely for Amazon to adopt it.
- mamonster 4y agoAt least part of the takeaway here has to be that employees themselves bit as hard on the "Covid=new paradigm" idea as the employers themselves, and that now they are getting burned for it, just like the employers themselves.
- parthianshotgun 4y agoLowest resolution takeaway perhaps
- knorker 4y ago"what do you mean i can't collect silicon valley salary while working from Montana?"
- ilovecaching 4y agoI don't think they are asking to not take a cost of living adjustment. I think they are asking to be able to work somewhere in the world other than Seattle.
- flerchin 4y agoWhy would that be unreasonable when making Silicon Valley profits for my employer?
- ddalex 4y agoBecause salary is not determined by how much profit you make but by the demand of your labour in the market.
- ppg677 4y agoNewsflash-- the "market" is becoming less constrained by geography.
- pc86 4y agoPointless snark aside, this is correct. But it is still constrained by geography and it's not all that surprising that employers would like to constrain it a bit more than it is. So this move makes total sense, and pretending that there is no correlation between your location and what you can command in salary is farcical.
- rrdharan 4y agoWhy would you think that puts upward rather than downward pressure on wages?
- brianwawok 4y ago
- otikik 4y agoYes, they should have expected shitty behavior from Bezos and Co. My take is that this is a cover mass layoff. Amazon is enforcing this now in the hopes that people like these folks resign voluntarily. Another mass layoff would make their share price drop again.
- eternalban 4y agoMy impression has been (since Musk’s public shitting on Twitter employees, including hinting at not honoring severance agreements) that the collective C-suite has arrived at a “managerial” solution to a variety of HR related matter, including extracting even more value from technical workers. This may have been an emergent phenomena but imo Musk definitely fired the starting gun from a very public platform and with a very magnified voice (since twitter issues were being painted as ‘political’ and not ‘political economy’).
- ubermonkey 4y ago>mass layoff Yeah, could be. They know there will be attrition because of this; the labor market is still really favorable to workers, and there's plenty of remote work. I remember years ago when Garmin relocated its dev team from San Jose to Overland Park, Kansas -- paid relo! -- and lost a ton of devs in the process. Not many folks in San Jose are going to jump at the chance to move to Kansas, so they mostly ended up hiring locals in Kansas. And, shockingly!, the software quality in Garmin devices started plummeting soon after. Weird.
- chollida1 4y ago> And, shockingly!, the software quality in Garmin devices started plummeting soon after. Weird Long time Garmin user here Have not noticed a drop j on n software quality. What specific metrics would you put forward to back up your assertion? As the saying goes extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- ubermonkey 4y agoGot Garmin stock? I'm not in the habit of accepting homework assignments from randos on forums, but: Garmin bike head units went from rock solid and reliable to deeply sketchy and prone to losing sync, losing rides, and just flaking out around the same time (roughly the evolution from the x00 series of devices to the x10, e.g. 500 to 510, 800 to 810, etc). This was well documented in industry press, and a super common observation to make in the cycling groups I ride with. Ten years ago, it was nearly a Garmin monoculture on the rides I'd do. One by one, my pals got pissed off about how flaky the devices were getting, and that led to a drastically reduced Garmin footprint. Now, Wahoo has a demonstrably bigger presence, and Karoo/Hammerhead is creeping in, too. If Garmin had kept their quality up, that wouldn't have happened. GPS tech was theirs to lose.
- pc86 4y agoYou really have to go out of your way to lease at 16k - they default to 12 and they'll really push you for 10 - not to mention that 15 is the default so you have to ask them to do pricing specifically for that number. I commuted 5 days/week with a 12k/yr lease and still had plenty of miles left over. This person will definitely need to move closer to get rid of the lease.
- moronicQ 4y ago[dead]
- belval 4y ago> In October, Jassy said Amazon would leave it up to individual managers to decide how often workers would be required to come into the office, which marked a sharp reversal from its earlier goal of returning to an “office-centric culture.” [1] Risk management perhaps, but if your leaderships says it will be up to your manager and your entire org up to L8 (base SDE is L4) is working remotely then it seems like a reasonable assumption. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
- coliveira 4y agoThe big question is: will Amazon afford to pay those people Silicon Valley wages? Because the bar moved from 2019 to now. In the past the salary paid by Amazon could cover the high expenses, not anymore. Especially because their stock is dropping like a rock, and a large part of their compensation is stock based. Amazon compensation was already known to be on the lower scale compared to other FAANG. People will even accept working for a bad company if they're making enough money. But they will hardly do this if the salary makes no sense.
- dgb23 4y agoThere might also be an additional effect here. When people start to leave because of this policy, the salaries almost _have_ to go up to retain people and get new hires.