7 ms·

Amazon to managers: You can now sack employees who won't come 3 times a week

52 points by rainhacker 3y ago

onetokeoverthe 3y ago
[dead]
theduder99 3y ago
Perhaps the idea here is for the high performers to leave and be replaced with obedient cult members at a cheaper price?
- Bendy 3y ago
  That’s precisely the idea, and they don’t even need to be cheaper. You can’t put a price on controlling other people’s lives, and even if the ship sinks what matters is that the ones in charge did it all their way (or the highway).
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Or AI, where/when possible.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  I thought you could pretty much fire someone in America anytime as long as it wasn't for discriminatory reasons
- gosub100 3y ago
  and not have to pay the RSUs or whatever carrot was dangled before them after they made it past the leetcode interview gauntlet.
ReflectedImage 3y ago
Hear that managers, you now have an excuse to shrink your own teams and future promotion prospects!
- humanrebar 3y ago
  Yeah, Anderson over in Accounts has the same concerns but seemed to make the new arrangement work without missing our Q1 KPIs.
- mrits 3y ago
  "Successfully fired my entire team over several weeks"
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    "Pushed remaining engineers to the extreme to finish tasks. Pipped when they couldn't." The management grift continues and at no point is one asking if the presence of that manager helped the engineering services they were responsible for.
- baz00 3y ago
  I can't wait for every narcissist copycat bastard CEO to read these stories and start wondering if they should do the same.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    Honestly if you are a CEO and you are overstaffed why wouldn’t you entertain something like this? Do you really want employees that are willfully insubordinate and disregard company policy?
notwhereyouare 3y ago
>This conversation will 1) reinforce that return to office 3+ days a week is a requirement of their job wonder if there are any employees who have a remote work provision in their contract. I would be surprised, but I would imagine a few were smart when they got hied on
- sakopov 3y ago
  A close friend of mine still works remote for one of the orgs at Amazon from a city which doesn't have an office. Last I heard none of this stuff impacts his particular org and everyone is allowed to work 100% remote.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Give it time.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > wonder if there are any employees who have a remote work provision in their contract. EDIT: I'm getting severely downvoted, so I'll try to add some context: Amazon is a big company with corporate counsel. I guarantee their corporate counsel reviewed offer letters and employment agreements that guaranteed working locations or restricted their own ability to change working locations. Avoiding language in offer letters that guarantees things is a basic principal of writing offer letters and employment agreements (Example: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how-to-guides/pages/howtocreateanofferletter.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how... ) A remote work provision in a contract would require some sort of consequence for breaking that provision: For example, "Amazon agrees to pay 12 months of compensation if employee is required to relocate in the future". I guarantee you that corporate counsel wouldn't let this happen for the average Amazon employee, or else we'd be hearing a lot more about Amazon breaking contracts. --- Employees generally don't have contracts that work like that. The company can change things like where and how you work. Contractors have contracts (obviously), but employees don't have contracts that guarantee things like remote work in most places. This is why employers can lay people off, change their job title, alter their pay, etc. Even if you are hired remote at a company and remote is listed in your offer letter, an offer letter is not a contract. The employer can change the nature of the job. It's analogous to being relocated: The company has changed the location of the job. You can come to the new location or you can leave the job, but you can't force the employer to let you work where you want. For Amazon specifically: I know a couple people who work remotely for Amazon still with no word about RTO. They were hired remote and continue to work remote.
Spivak 3y ago
This is so unbelievably stupid. Making it three days a week but not specifying which three days is a full-on admission that remote work is fine. Every meeting will be partially remote, all your team conversations still have to be in chat for someone on the team, you're just turning your physical offices into WeWorks and pretending that means something. Even when we were still in-office the thing you thought might benefit from physical presence, pairing, we did over teams because it made it easier to share screens. The fact that you need the line managers to track and enforce the rule is the real kicker because it means you can't actually tell who's just on their two days or someone who doesn't show up at all. And no manager would be stupid enough to enforce this rule because they already have so little to offer their reports for retention that letting them break the rules a bit for QoL is basically a golden ticket.
- humanrebar 3y ago
  There's no real way to measure productivity to start with. There's no logic underpinning any of this. It's all instinct and bias, and nobody want to say that out loud.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    * at the margins, which is what we're talking about really. I wouldn't go so far as to say you can't measure productivity at all. You could probably tell if I just up and stopped working.
  - cj 3y ago
    (Devil's advocate) if someone is in a physical office, you know there's at least a possibility that they're working. If someone is fully remote, they can do chores around the house, watch TV, run errands, work 3 jobs - you can even schedule "focus time" on the calendar to guarantee you look productive. Faking productivity is a lot easier when remote. Yes, you can also fake being productive in an office, but in an office not being productive usually means reading HN, or whatever. When remote, it means you're probably not even at a computer. Having managers enforce the rule encourages the transition to appear as though it's a org-wide culture shift rather than a blanket executive decree. FWIW I run a 100% remote 20 person team (remote before covid)... personally I believe in remote work. At the same time, I can easily see why companies would want employees to go back.
askonomm 3y ago
After a decade in this industry, I'm still not entirely sure what managers actually do.
- syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  http://pnewman.org/engineering_mgmt_checklist.txt http://pnewman.org/engineering_mgmt_checklist.txt This is the best write-up I've read for what a manager should be doing.
- changoplatanero 3y ago
  I, for one, hate working on projects where there is no clear leader. One thing that managers do is be the clear leader for the people under them.
  - askonomm 3y ago
    I usually get this with team leads. But team leads are usually also programmers, who work with the rest of the team closely every day and know our issues intimately. Managers are always very far removed from that, more concerned with the C levels wants and needs, with who the team lead always has to fight with to not let the product turn into a big pile of garbage because refactors never get priority, architectural plannings never get priority.
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    > I, for one, hate working on projects where there is no clear leader. One thing that managers do is be the clear leader for the people under them. In my experience, the one thing managers don't like to do is take responsibility for projects. They are extremely averse to technical stuff.
- axpy906 3y ago
  Mostly pip at Amazon.
spandextwins 3y ago
I, for one, can’t wait to see all those startups created in the near future. All that talent leveraged without any accountability to a manager.
- mempko 3y ago
  That would be a very positive outcome.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  Monopolies are immune to startups in well defined roles. Amazon isn't a taxi service.
baz00 3y ago
Is that AWS as well? Because half the AWS ancillary services are run by three guys in India who are out of the office 4 days a week from experience.
- malfist 3y ago
  Amazon wide.
  - baz00 3y ago
    Suppose I better start learning about Azure.
scarface_74 3y ago
The best thing that ever happen for my career (and finances) was to work (remotely) at AWS ProServe for three years. The best thing that ever happened for my mental health was to get PIPd with a nice severance and forced me to look for another job (I found one in three weeks). I knew from reputation and second hand experience that eventually Amazon is going to Amazon before I accepted the offer. There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to work at Amazon. I initially turned down a chance to even interview for an “eventually on prem” role as an SDE. The only reason I interviewed was because the department I was interviewing for was remote pre-Covid
- malfist 3y ago
  > the department I was interviewing for was remote pre-Covid If only that mattered. My org, 200+ employees, was very remote friendly pre-covid with lots of remote roles. Got 3 exceptions from RTO to hand out. Congrats on getting promoted to customer, I'm glad that all worked out for you!
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Yes never meet your heroes..
mempko 3y ago
This is why employees should run companies. Each board needs to be run by employees. It's funny we accept fiefdoms in our every day life.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Have an upvote to counter the downvotes. Everyone loves to crow about "democratizing" so-and-so as a positive development, but look at you like you've got two heads when you propose democratizing our feudalistic corporations. Employee-owned companies are a thing, and before anyone asks, no, that's not what communism is.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Putting aside complaints about not understanding Feudalism the main issue with the concept that they also tend to scale worse, and for better or worse scale has been king since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The most common form of a co-op are small agriculture related.
    - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
      Yeah. Amazon wouldn't be Amazon if it started as a co-op. If you're okay with way less profitability and all the other issues of "employee democracy", go start/join a co-op. You just won't find many of them. And, if you start one, you'll probably start questioning your decision once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital. :p
      - kibwen 3y ago
        > once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital Except that the whole point here is that the employees have a proportionate share in the company, so it's not "your own" capital. This sort of misunderstanding reinforces my point above about people seemingly being unable to wrap their heads around a non-dictatorial corporate structure.
    - 3y ago
FigurativeVoid 3y ago
I typically don't respond to recruiters, but now I do all the time. If one reaches out for in-office job. I make sure to tell them I am not interest in non-remote work, but I could be convinced for a wild amount of money. I used to have a pretty bad commute (2 hours total). I can safely say that finding a fully remote gig was the single best thing that happened for me in terms of improving my quality of life. My relationships are better. My health is better. I am happier.

52 points by rainhacker 3y ago

[dead]

Perhaps the idea here is for the high performers to leave and be replaced with obedient cult members at a cheaper price?

Bendy 3y ago
That’s precisely the idea, and they don’t even need to be cheaper. You can’t put a price on controlling other people’s lives, and even if the ship sinks what matters is that the ones in charge did it all their way (or the highway).
squarefoot 3y ago
Or AI, where/when possible.
willsmith72 3y ago
I thought you could pretty much fire someone in America anytime as long as it wasn't for discriminatory reasons
gosub100 3y ago
and not have to pay the RSUs or whatever carrot was dangled before them after they made it past the leetcode interview gauntlet.

ReflectedImage 3y ago

Hear that managers, you now have an excuse to shrink your own teams and future promotion prospects!

humanrebar 3y ago
Yeah, Anderson over in Accounts has the same concerns but seemed to make the new arrangement work without missing our Q1 KPIs.
mrits 3y ago
"Successfully fired my entire team over several weeks"
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  "Pushed remaining engineers to the extreme to finish tasks. Pipped when they couldn't." The management grift continues and at no point is one asking if the presence of that manager helped the engineering services they were responsible for.
baz00 3y ago
I can't wait for every narcissist copycat bastard CEO to read these stories and start wondering if they should do the same.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Honestly if you are a CEO and you are overstaffed why wouldn’t you entertain something like this? Do you really want employees that are willfully insubordinate and disregard company policy?

notwhereyouare 3y ago

>This conversation will 1) reinforce that return to office 3+ days a week is a requirement of their job wonder if there are any employees who have a remote work provision in their contract. I would be surprised, but I would imagine a few were smart when they got hied on

sakopov 3y ago
A close friend of mine still works remote for one of the orgs at Amazon from a city which doesn't have an office. Last I heard none of this stuff impacts his particular org and everyone is allowed to work 100% remote.
- oblio 3y ago
  Give it time.
Aurornis 3y ago
> wonder if there are any employees who have a remote work provision in their contract. EDIT: I'm getting severely downvoted, so I'll try to add some context: Amazon is a big company with corporate counsel. I guarantee their corporate counsel reviewed offer letters and employment agreements that guaranteed working locations or restricted their own ability to change working locations. Avoiding language in offer letters that guarantees things is a basic principal of writing offer letters and employment agreements (Example: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how-to-guides/pages/howtocreateanofferletter.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how... ) A remote work provision in a contract would require some sort of consequence for breaking that provision: For example, "Amazon agrees to pay 12 months of compensation if employee is required to relocate in the future". I guarantee you that corporate counsel wouldn't let this happen for the average Amazon employee, or else we'd be hearing a lot more about Amazon breaking contracts. --- Employees generally don't have contracts that work like that. The company can change things like where and how you work. Contractors have contracts (obviously), but employees don't have contracts that guarantee things like remote work in most places. This is why employers can lay people off, change their job title, alter their pay, etc. Even if you are hired remote at a company and remote is listed in your offer letter, an offer letter is not a contract. The employer can change the nature of the job. It's analogous to being relocated: The company has changed the location of the job. You can come to the new location or you can leave the job, but you can't force the employer to let you work where you want. For Amazon specifically: I know a couple people who work remotely for Amazon still with no word about RTO. They were hired remote and continue to work remote.

Spivak 3y ago

This is so unbelievably stupid. Making it three days a week but not specifying which three days is a full-on admission that remote work is fine. Every meeting will be partially remote, all your team conversations still have to be in chat for someone on the team, you're just turning your physical offices into WeWorks and pretending that means something. Even when we were still in-office the thing you thought might benefit from physical presence, pairing, we did over teams because it made it easier to share screens. The fact that you need the line managers to track and enforce the rule is the real kicker because it means you can't actually tell who's just on their two days or someone who doesn't show up at all. And no manager would be stupid enough to enforce this rule because they already have so little to offer their reports for retention that letting them break the rules a bit for QoL is basically a golden ticket.

humanrebar 3y ago
There's no real way to measure productivity to start with. There's no logic underpinning any of this. It's all instinct and bias, and nobody want to say that out loud.
- Spivak 3y ago
  * at the margins, which is what we're talking about really. I wouldn't go so far as to say you can't measure productivity at all. You could probably tell if I just up and stopped working.
- cj 3y ago
  (Devil's advocate) if someone is in a physical office, you know there's at least a possibility that they're working. If someone is fully remote, they can do chores around the house, watch TV, run errands, work 3 jobs - you can even schedule "focus time" on the calendar to guarantee you look productive. Faking productivity is a lot easier when remote. Yes, you can also fake being productive in an office, but in an office not being productive usually means reading HN, or whatever. When remote, it means you're probably not even at a computer. Having managers enforce the rule encourages the transition to appear as though it's a org-wide culture shift rather than a blanket executive decree. FWIW I run a 100% remote 20 person team (remote before covid)... personally I believe in remote work. At the same time, I can easily see why companies would want employees to go back.

askonomm 3y ago

After a decade in this industry, I'm still not entirely sure what managers actually do.

syndicatedjelly 3y ago
http://pnewman.org/engineering_mgmt_checklist.txt http://pnewman.org/engineering_mgmt_checklist.txt This is the best write-up I've read for what a manager should be doing.
changoplatanero 3y ago
I, for one, hate working on projects where there is no clear leader. One thing that managers do is be the clear leader for the people under them.
- askonomm 3y ago
  I usually get this with team leads. But team leads are usually also programmers, who work with the rest of the team closely every day and know our issues intimately. Managers are always very far removed from that, more concerned with the C levels wants and needs, with who the team lead always has to fight with to not let the product turn into a big pile of garbage because refactors never get priority, architectural plannings never get priority.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > I, for one, hate working on projects where there is no clear leader. One thing that managers do is be the clear leader for the people under them. In my experience, the one thing managers don't like to do is take responsibility for projects. They are extremely averse to technical stuff.
axpy906 3y ago
Mostly pip at Amazon.

spandextwins 3y ago

I, for one, can’t wait to see all those startups created in the near future. All that talent leveraged without any accountability to a manager.

mempko 3y ago
That would be a very positive outcome.
cyanydeez 3y ago
Monopolies are immune to startups in well defined roles. Amazon isn't a taxi service.

baz00 3y ago

Is that AWS as well? Because half the AWS ancillary services are run by three guys in India who are out of the office 4 days a week from experience.

malfist 3y ago
Amazon wide.
- baz00 3y ago
  Suppose I better start learning about Azure.

scarface_74 3y ago

The best thing that ever happen for my career (and finances) was to work (remotely) at AWS ProServe for three years. The best thing that ever happened for my mental health was to get PIPd with a nice severance and forced me to look for another job (I found one in three weeks). I knew from reputation and second hand experience that eventually Amazon is going to Amazon before I accepted the offer. There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to work at Amazon. I initially turned down a chance to even interview for an “eventually on prem” role as an SDE. The only reason I interviewed was because the department I was interviewing for was remote pre-Covid

malfist 3y ago
> the department I was interviewing for was remote pre-Covid If only that mattered. My org, 200+ employees, was very remote friendly pre-covid with lots of remote roles. Got 3 exceptions from RTO to hand out. Congrats on getting promoted to customer, I'm glad that all worked out for you!
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Yes never meet your heroes..

mempko 3y ago

This is why employees should run companies. Each board needs to be run by employees. It's funny we accept fiefdoms in our every day life.

kibwen 3y ago
Have an upvote to counter the downvotes. Everyone loves to crow about "democratizing" so-and-so as a positive development, but look at you like you've got two heads when you propose democratizing our feudalistic corporations. Employee-owned companies are a thing, and before anyone asks, no, that's not what communism is.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Putting aside complaints about not understanding Feudalism the main issue with the concept that they also tend to scale worse, and for better or worse scale has been king since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The most common form of a co-op are small agriculture related.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Yeah. Amazon wouldn't be Amazon if it started as a co-op. If you're okay with way less profitability and all the other issues of "employee democracy", go start/join a co-op. You just won't find many of them. And, if you start one, you'll probably start questioning your decision once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital. :p
    - kibwen 3y ago
      > once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital Except that the whole point here is that the employees have a proportionate share in the company, so it's not "your own" capital. This sort of misunderstanding reinforces my point above about people seemingly being unable to wrap their heads around a non-dictatorial corporate structure.
  - 3y ago

FigurativeVoid 3y ago

I typically don't respond to recruiters, but now I do all the time. If one reaches out for in-office job. I make sure to tell them I am not interest in non-remote work, but I could be convinced for a wild amount of money. I used to have a pretty bad commute (2 hours total). I can safely say that finding a fully remote gig was the single best thing that happened for me in terms of improving my quality of life. My relationships are better. My health is better. I am happier.