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Amazon starting to track and penalize workers who work from home too much
- aquir 3y agoNotice sent to employees who were not in office at least three times a week, after other tech firms’ efforts to get workers back on site
- bluefishinit 3y agoNo one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance. The companies enacting these policies are on my permanent "do not work for" list and I coach every report I have to steer clear of companies that want to own you and put the executives' "feels" over worker's mental health and productivity.
- gowld 3y agoWhy was it OK to be required to work at an office 4 years ago?
- bluefishinit 3y agoIt was never ok. I've been working remote for over 10 years, it's always been superior to being in the office. Post-pandemic the leverage went to the worker to demand better working conditions.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoWhenever I'm sat in a four mile tailback at 6pm, I often look at everyone in the cars around me and, if they make eye contact, I give them a little nod and a smile, as though to say, "We chose this. This was a great choice".
- nostrebored 3y agoMaybe you should live closer to work. The choice to live in sprawling cities and partaking in dystopian car culture _is a choice_.
- happytoexplain 3y agoMoving is a burden of a highly varying degree. The implication that it is a non-factor points to a fundamental absence of shared experience between you and the people you are criticizing.
- nostrebored 3y agoI have moved significantly more than the average person to do exactly what I’m talking about here. Without money, with money, without kids, with kids. I feel like I have a pretty reasonable amount of experience. It’s not that bad.
- skyyler 3y agoI don't make enough money to afford a place within an hour of where I work. Any advice? You seem to have answers.
- nostrebored 3y agoTake advantage of the fact that you can change companies to somewhere that provides you with enough compensation to live near your work. This might require a move. People have moved for work for centuries.
- skyyler 3y agoI actually had to move to take my current job. Any recommendations for places I can move to?
- doubled112 3y agoSure, simple. I'll just pack up my family of four and move to a bachelor apartment to save the commute. I choose to have a family, and I choose to work too, I suppose. Maybe $JOB will provide me a raise to do so.
- adversaryIdiot 3y agowe always needed this. Covid was the catalyst for change, which I am eternally grateful for, but we cant let this change revert
- happytoexplain 3y agoIt wasn't. Virtually everybody I know was miserable. Now they aren't.
- fourseventy 3y agoNobody is being forced to do anything. It's at will employment. If the employees don't want to work in the office then they can find work elsewhere.
- hiddencost 3y agoOr they could organize and negotiate their own terms with Amazon.
- jdhendrickson 3y agoCould you imagine the colors bezos would turn if they unionized in response to this? I would buy that pay per view.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoI really hope they do! I bet in 100 years we will look back at what is happening now in a similar way as we look back at 19th century capitalism and people fighting for a 40-hour week.
- bluefishinit 3y ago> If the employees don't want to work in the office then they can find work elsewhere. Which is exactly what I'm doing and advocating for others to do.
- jpatt 3y agoThe person you were replying to is directly advocating for finding work elsewhere?
- jodrellblank 3y agoFree choice in the land of the free! "How Amazon Crushes Unions" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-... "Amazon intensifies 'severe' effort to discourage first-ever US warehouse union" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/amazon-intensifies-severe-effort-discourage-first-warehouse-union https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/amazon-in... "Corporations like Amazon pay big bucks for "union avoidance" — and it all happens in the dark" - https://www.salon.com/2021/06/24/corporations-like-amazon-pay-big-bucks-for-union-avoidance--and-it-all-happens-in-the-dark/ https://www.salon.com/2021/06/24/corporations-like-amazon-pa... "Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/amazon-union-retaliation-allegations/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/amazon-... Just you, alone, vs the trillion dollar company, its lobbyists, its influence over local and federal government, its PR machine, its full-time, well-funded teams of people who are against you, and its constant fight to stop you combining forces with other individuals to fight back.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoWe can have all the morals we can afford.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago…or we could unionize.
- throwaway5959 3y agoWhy? For pay? SDEs at Amazon make more than a lot of C-level employees at smaller companies. Working conditions? Oh no, you have to show up to an air conditioned office three days a week (not even five!). The amount of entitlement is insane.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoYes it is. But there is a reason. I'm being paid a lot of money because the company finds value in what I do. If they play dirty tricks, I can either fight - and unionizing is one of the ways to do that - or just quit. There is nothing in unions that makes them somehow exclusive to low-wage jobs. FAANG, on the other hand, will vehemently fight against unions - and that's telling.
- aaomidi 3y agoYou unionize when you have "power", not when you're out of power tbh. Anyway, throwaway account clearly shilling for companies. Interesting :)
- throwaway5959 3y agoIt’s not a throwaway account, I just like watching people get twisted about a name instead of content.
- joquarky 3y ago> I just like watching people get twisted I am certain that trolling is not allowed here.
- 0xB31B1B 3y agothats great, but amazon pays top of market, so they have more power. You get more money in exchange for less freedom, its not completely explicit, but its also not a secret and its not like they're abusing their workforce by paying them well and having specific and high expectations for how work is being done.
- bluefishinit 3y ago> thats great, but amazon pays top of market Amazon is not known for paying top of market. > You get more money in exchange for less freedom Why would this be the case when less freedom leads to worse business results? High churn, less access to top talent and worse productivity. Freedom and trust are the easiest ways to start getting better results from your team. > high expectations for how work is being done. They may have high expectations for how the work is being done but they'd be better off worrying about what work gets done.
- GiorgioG 3y agoGlad I never believed their recruiters about fully remote employees. I don’t live near an Amazon office and I expect Amazon would have forced me to either quit or move to somewhere near an office.
- gowld 3y agoOK, I'll work less.
- eschneider 3y agoRemember, your BADGE has to go to the office, not YOU.
- pcan77 3y agoThey can track when you get in, but not when you leave ;)
- eschneider 3y agoBadging in a Service will become a thing, with all the attendant problems.
- Guvante 3y agoLet's be real your work PC gives them all the tracking capabilities they need. Badges aren't important if you have a PC to yourself. (And you don't need to install spyware to accomplish this, the network can trivially be setup to track the data)
- schott12521 3y agoThey do in fact track when we leave, we need to badge in and badge out.
- ChadMoran 3y agoYes they can. You have to badge out of offices as well. Citation: I currently work at Amazon.
- pcan77 3y agoI am still absolutely baffled at how they don't realize how much more productive most people are at home. Where I work we have to go in 2x a week and those days are just PACKED with meetings, or on campus activities planned by management, etc. Barely any work gets done by anyone, it's ridiculous.
- mistrial9 3y ago.. because the work you accomplish is not the only factor, not even close.
- neon_electro 3y agosay more
- oblio 3y agoIt's about the work you convince others, especially higher ups, that you've done, and its value to them personally and to the org and company.
- neon_electro 3y agothank you for saying more
- x86x87 3y agoNobody cares. Forcing people into the office does not have anything to do with productivity.
- beepboopboop 3y agoYour baffled that less work gets done on days that are full of meetings?
- throwaway5959 3y agoIt’s wild to me that people don’t consider meetings work. Does everyone else work at a place where they’re told exactly what to build and they never have to talk to anyone else about what they’re building?
- y-c-o-m-b 3y agoThis 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.
- throwaway63492 3y ago> 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.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago> negatively impacted collaboration and "working on hard technical problems". Meanwhile, most of their business runs on Linux…
- jsnell 3y agoYesterday's discussion on the original FT article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37076500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37076500
- youarelabor 3y agoThey think they own you. They think that you're their property. This is slavery with a lot of complicated language to convince Jeff Bezos otherwise.
- DoneWithAllThat 3y agoThis kind of hyperbole is silly.
- youarelabor 3y agoWake up: these organizations pay indentured servants from overseas less money and ruthlessly exploit the power of the fact that they can be deported if they lose their jobs.
- cj 3y ago> This is slavery Slavery in the sense that Amazon engineers are paid so much that they can't financially take a 50% pay cut to work at a small remote-first company. I think a better characterization would be that many people are a slave to the lifestyle they've been able to obtain through very high salaries at top 20 tech firms. That's a tough position to be in. But obviously not slavery by any stretch of the imagination (sell your $3m house, move to a cheaper neighborhood, get a cheaper car, and get a 100% remote job that pays 50% less). Or keep the lifestyle and drive to the office 3 times a week.
- youarelabor 3y agoAs I said, a lot of complicated language. Stay in denial, it's what they want.
- JohnFen 3y agoA slave can't leave. Employees can. I'm not saying that these relationships aren't unhealthy and unbalanced, but it's not slavery. I think that such hyperbole makes it easier for people to dismiss legitimate criticisms of employer-employee relations, so is counterproductive.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoI worked for quite a long time at Amazon. All of the horror stories are true. With tenure, you learn that other tenured employees are the most toxic. The longer someone has lasted at Amazon, the more focussed they are on performance documentation, pushing work onto others, blaming others for project failures, and protecting all of their deliverables. Any sort of innovation or quality of work comes second. This is why the company is stagnating. Many many people sitting in the same organization/same level for a decade.
- scrum-treats 3y agoWholeheartedly agree. Anyone talking about "most loyal employees" having a "bad taste" from Amazon's latest email and RTO policy enforcement, as if that's supposed to mean something, is very much describing the class of employee your comment addresses.
- fumar 3y agoImportantly, the Amazonians who follow the toxic promotion path know it is morally wrong. They will tell you and explain to you in a few minutes how it is the only way to operate at Amazon. If you want to be an L8 or higher, then you sacrifice yourself and everyone around you. Source: I work there. Also actively searching for new roles.
- hotpotamus 3y agoHonestly this sounds like every other large for-profit (and I wouldn't be surprised if you removed the profit qualification) organization. I can't imagine going back to a large company at this point.
- jwestbury 3y agoI honestly thought I'd gotten away with it. Not being immoral, just working at Amazon. Everyone else I knew who had left Amazon was left with some sort of ex-Amazonian PTSD, constantly worried about falling below a performance threshold and being fired, or struggling to rid themselves of Amazon's toxicity (many of them grew increasingly toxic at Amazon, and left because they didn't like feeling that way). Now, almost four years after leaving my job at AWS, it's finally catching up with me, too -- I'm finding myself with a growing sense that I'm going to be fired out of the blue. It's only two weeks since I had my mid-year review with my manager, where I was told I'm performing fine; and yet, I'm inexplicably and irrationally worried that he was lying and that I'm going to find myself on whatever our equivalent of a PIP is. There's a reason I caution young engineers to avoid Amazon. Don't get me wrong, Amazon catapulted me from a my job as a one-man IT department to an incredibly comfortable life as a senior engineer -- but it was the only tech company willing to make me an offer back then. If you have other choices, don't choose Amazon.
- crooked-v 3y agoSo when are they forming a union?
- agentultra 3y agoIt's really unfair to enforce these RTO policies and simultaneously not enforce proper protective measures to safeguard the health of employees. Let alone the environmental damage caused by forced commuting. Companies built giant campuses and signed long term leases. Now we're in a world where that is no longer a rational choice. Adapt. They're always talking about innovation. Where's the innovation here forcing people back into offices? It's just money. Deal with it.
- nostrebored 3y agoThis line of reasoning makes no sense. If full remote were more productive, companies would continue to do it. The fixed costs don't change either way. What protective measures do you want to see? The aggregate risk here has not changed significantly at this point vs. before remote policies were implemented.
- agentultra 3y agoMandated masking, up-to-date vaccines, exceptions for at-risk employees would be a good start... but I'm not a doctor or epidemiologist. The point is that COVID-19 pandemic is not over and there should be policies followed to protect at-risk and differently-abled employees. They shouldn't have to expose themselves to health risks in order to comply with an RTO policy due to local conditions allowing people to be in public spaces unmasked and with no vaccination. Full remote is more productive. Enough people seem to think so based off of various surveys.
- jdhendrickson 3y agoIf productivity were the only factor and companies behaved logically sure, but you know that's not the only factor and they often make decisions that aren't logical. Yet you argue as if it is. Why?
- nostrebored 3y agoWhat decisions do you think they're basing RTO on that don't boil down to the production and costs of the business?
- paxys 3y agoMy company pulled the same bullshit over a year ago. Mandatory RTO, badge tracking, quotas. I was pulled into a conversation with my manager about it, and my response was simply – I'm going to keep doing my thing. If you think my performance is sub par then fire me. Surprise, I haven't heard back about it ever since.
- flashgordon 3y agoOh man. This is the stuff of dreams - I am guessing you dont have Visa issues? Good on ya for sticking it up!
- paxys 3y agoIt's less about visa status and more how dispensable you are in the company/org. Many people here won't admit it but most companies will run perfectly fine (sometimes better than before) after firing 10/20/50% or more of their staff (and that includes managers and executives). It's really on you to ensure that you have leverage in your current position, otherwise you will spend your entire career at the mercy of incompetent managers and power tripping execs.
- ryandrake 3y ago> Many people here won't admit it but most companies will run perfectly fine (sometimes better than before) after firing 10/20/50% or more of their staff (and that includes managers and executives). I think many exec-class managers believe this to be true. Even after the layoff, they might see the company moving forward on momentum alone and believe it even more strongly. But an airplane will still glide a great distance after you turn its engine off. Companies like Twitter that cut deep are still in that "Wile E. Coyote running-on-air-after-running-off-the-cliff" phase. They're eventually going to hit the ground.
- x86x87 3y agoWhat if your performance was fine but they invented some bs reason why it's not and fired you anyway? What if your manager didn't have a say in the decision to fire you based on attendance?
- fortylove 3y agoPrevious Amazon engineer here. When considering a change, I was told by multiple layers of management that they would be totally fine with me moving away from the office and becoming permanently remote. But none of them would put that in an email, or ask HR for formal approval. It was always "as far as I'm concerned, it's completely fine". It was never "yes, this is something that we will stand by if it comes under pressure". I chose to leave in the end, mostly due to the weakness of this promise. And with each new article covering their RTO debacle, I become more convinced it was the right decision. I had great teammates, and a great direct manager. But the macro situation at Amazon is a mess. Amazon is just a loose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. This is partially why the employee experience there can vary so much depending on the org. And HR at Amazon is just another org that acts mostly autonomously from the other orgs. Shameful.
- philipov 3y ago> Amazon is just a lose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. Great, that will come in handy when it comes time to break them into separate companies.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y ago>> the macro situation at Amazon is a mess It has been that way for a long time. Amazon is frugal . . . especially when it comes to quality of life for employees and their families. It shows in how many employees have worked there for more than five years and how happy most employees are.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoA tech company is nothing special in this regard, this is how most large companies operate. If you don't get it in writing/email then its not approved.
- ryandrake 3y agoEven if you get something in writing, it's not permanent or even relevant when it comes to being let go. Almost all of us are at-will. In the USA we can be fired for either no reason or any reason besides a very small list of forbidden reasons enumerated by law. If my company doesn't like my orange shirt, they can fire me over it. It doesn't matter that I have remote work in writing.
- throwaway5959 3y agoAn L5 (SDE II) at Amazon makes $251k a year total comp according to Levels.fyi. That’s more than directors make at some companies and double the total comp of a principal engineer at other companies. Barring a medical reason which absolutely should be accommodating, asking employees to show up is not an unreasonable request at that compensation level. Edit: Is there something offensive about what I’m saying here? Why am I being downvoted for this comment?
- flashgordon 3y agoOk - what is the location? What is the CoL? In the bay area a crappy 60 y/o house costs north of 2M. Are you sure the "directors" you are comparing with are living in comparable neighborhoods buying houses at the same time or living off an inherited property or something they lucked into in the early 2010?
- throwaway5959 3y agoI knew I’d regret not adding the SF asterisk. How much do you think the median person makes in SF and still manages to survive? Quick Google shows $96k/year. Less than half of an SDE2.
- flashgordon 3y agoNo I understand. SF is huge. I dont know what is the level (or quality) of home ownership for folks on that median salary. Or even the location and how "indentured" they are. I do agree that as techies we have the luxury of upward mobility which most of the median salary folks may not have the good fortune of. Just that 250k while sounds great on paper - when your crappy home to house a family (at say southbay) is 2M+ (and this is very very low end) being 3x median while something is not quite eye popping. Yes you could always chose to live a 2hour drive away in a more constrained place - but at this point your "eye popping" TC is not looking that great anymore is it? Now should a question be what is a "fair" standard of living everyone should have?
- 3y ago
- tennisflyi 3y agoThinking tech is/was immune to having leadership keep their thumb on employees was asinine.
- Tommstein 3y agoCompletely unrelated to the story, but I got a chuckle from this comment near the top of that page's source: <!-- Hello there, HTML enthusiast! -->