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I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a diffe

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to the office. A few of my coworkers (3 out of ~15 people team) have/had left when RTO mandate was announced, and I know at least 4 people are thinking of leaving as soon as they have a chance. Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Before RTO, they would be working until 6-7 pm and will be logging in around 8 am. Sometimes, coworkers would even log in late because they were commuting. I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Based on my observation, I would bet that the activity/productivity drops significantly more. Glad I left Amazon. I have been programming for 15+ years (have been in a managerial role for 6+ years), and I firmly believe I am (and my team are) more productive working remotely. I will never work for a non-remote companies even if they are big names.

datadrivenangel 3y ago
Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.
- diob 3y ago
  Honestly pretty smart. Sit around, collect paycheck, maybe work on resume / side hustles. And of course, marvel when you still get high performance marks.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  > just do their jobs and risk the pip Absolutely bonkers that doing the job you were hired to do can get you canned
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    When I interviewed roughly 10 years ago, I asked every person I met on the team roughly how many hours a week they worked. Every single person deflected and answered a question I hadn't actually asked. For that team at least, the job you were hired to do was to get results. I imagine OP was referring to people simply putting time on the clock and being just present enough to avoid notice, without actually caring whether they were getting the same results a full level of effort would achieve.
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      The issue is that the expected results are often unrealistic, demanding significant amounts of effort & time to meet.
- y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
  wave. I've been doing this for the last two years, but really dialed it in to the extreme over the last year. I don't give a shit if I get PIP'd at this point. If a company is willing to screw me over at every turn with no remorse and not an ounce of compassion, then this is how I'll fight back. Fuck em!
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    This applies to every company, without exception. Even at the best run companies, if the financial situation changes, you'll be gone through no fault of your own. People that get emotionally and psychologically invested in someone else's company do themselves a disservice, typically only learned the hard way.
    - y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
      I don't think I agree. There are small shops (<500 employees) that really do treat people well. I've worked at smaller places that have given decent salaries, no-cap PTO (and actually let you use it without fuss), no overtime, yearly bonuses, shutting down for two weeks during the holidays, and actually listen to employee requests/concerns. When you work at a FAANG, you know you'll be sacrificing some of those benefits and taking on more stress for much higher pay. The current climate is much worse than that though. It's a complete no-empathy/give-no-fucks environment, and that's not ok. Garbage in, garbage out. I'm not looking for a hand-out, I just want to be treated as a human being. In return, you'll have a productive employee.
dpflan 3y ago
> "Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto" In office workers have more defined working schedules? Is that what this means? That seems healthy for the worker. -- UPDATE -- Must consider the commute factor for time-demand on employee.
- Clubber 3y ago
  To me it says that working in an office+commute is much more draining than working at home. So much so that they work only the required amount. When they worked at home, they worked more because it was more enjoyable.
- swasheck 3y ago
  i agree with the sentiment of your comment, but the pervasive RTO narrative from c-levels is not about restoring their employees' collective, holistic health. rather, it's couched in a narrative of productivity and community, the former being what i believe was being countered in the comment. there's also the push/pull of the health benefits and disadvantages of commutes and other external factors that go into office-based dynamics. additionally, as i've mentioned in another comment on a similar thread, RTO mandates are not accompanied by corporate commitments to restore the cultures and environments that were present in the pre-remote migration which only intensifies the skepticism and recalcitrance of the workers. edit: changed "ramps up" to "intensifies"
  - bdw5204 3y ago
    Employees working exactly 9 to 5 is absolutely the opposite of what employers doing RTOs for "productivity" want. They want them putting in unpaid overtime and are suspicious that they aren't when they're at home because they can't see them. In a healthy work environment where there's high morale and trust, the exact work hours are going to be off somewhat on a day to day basis in either direction based on logical stopping points. In a toxic environment, workers will pretend to work towards the end of the day then go home exactly when the clock hits 5. Once they can, workers in such an environment will probably leave.
- 3y ago
twojobsoneboss 3y ago
How much of a TC cut did you have to take between Amazon and your current employer?
- smrtinsert 3y ago
  Almost any value is worth it. On your death bed you will never say I'm glad I spent those years of my life commuting for Amazon instead of everything else I could have been doing.
  - abadpoli 3y ago
    It’s not so clear cut. If I stay at my RTO job for a few more years, I can probably retire at 35-40, versus taking a pay cut and retiring sometime in my late 50s. I’d say that’s worth the commute.
    - hshsh667 3y ago
      No, it's not. Just think about your stress levels commuting, people infecting you with all kinds of diseases at work that lower your quality of life and have the chance to impair you to a great extend.
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        There are plenty of stressful jobs you can find yourself in, and having kids exposes you to far more diseases than working in an office. Nothing is guaranteed, and if you're young having a few stressful years now then retiring is certainly easier than working dead end jobs for another 20.
      - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        What if you don't find commuting (I have a 12 minutes commute against the flow of traffic, I kind of like getting out and seeing the city and I enjoy driving), and aren't too worried about "all kinds of diseases at work" (i.e. Covid, Flu, and colds)? To be honest, you seem very paranoid about the risk of impairment by disease caught from coworker at your presumably white-collar tech job. This is minuscule. Does it surprise you that other's might not find your example to "just think" about not compelling at all?
Atrine 3y ago
> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. I would be surprised if they did this, and if they did, use it for implementing any sort of meaningful change. Plus I would not put faith in leadership to being able to interpret what this really means because they are so out of touch with how things are going. Discussions with upper leadership is heavily reviewed and curated as a means to avoid getting called out and stay under the radar. They all have a skewed view of what's going on with the teams that build and this data wouldn't feed into it in a way that would be meaningful. Likely what they will do is keep track of stuff like regretted attrition, hiring numbers (once they get back to hiring), Connections results, project/goal delays (the well established orgs are all aggressive about tracking dates along with goals to see how things are going). > a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto I think this is a great thing. This is long overdue there. It's too common for employee's personalities to be all Amazon all the time. I've been to many social events over the years where I'm told to not bring/invite anyone from my Amazon circle because all they can do is talk about Amazon.
foma-roje 3y ago
Even if they analysed slack+chime log activity. I guess they’ll explain it away with something like “working from office significantly reduces the need for online chatter”.
- vanviegen 3y ago
  .. and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  That is, after all, the entire point of RTO mandates. (I am pro-remote and fortunate to work at a company that isn't RTO, but I will say that it is a breath of fresh air and notably higher-bandwidth conversations that are enabled on the few times per year that we get together in-person in an office.)
- programmertote 3y ago
  The important caveat is that we ALMOST ALWAYS need to do Chime meetings/Slack chats because our team is split across three cities -- Seattle, Arlington and Chicago. 2/5 of the team is stationed in Seattle office; 2/5 in Arlington; and 1/5 in Chicago. Not to mention that a bunch of folks from Hyderabad in India that we have to continuously work with. On top of all that, folks who are returning to the office can pick one of any weekday to go into the office (the other two days are agreed upon as Tuesday and Wednesday), so some folks are in the office on Monday, some on Friday (nobody choose to go in on Thursday from my limited observation).
godelski 3y ago
> started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Isn't this 7-7.5 hrs? Are you not required to take at least a 30 minute break within that period? Or does Amazon pay for lunch? I thought 9-5 was a myth/thing of the past.
- hazmazlaz 3y ago
  Required breaks are only for non-exempt roles (typically hourly FTEs with a set schedule).
  - godelski 3y ago
    I've had required breaks at part time jobs and minimum wage jobs (which will never give you >35hrs/wk and your schedule is definitely not consistent). My understanding is it is state law and the 3 west coast states all have unpaid 30min breaks (if you aren't on call during break) for >5hrs work.
    - hazmazlaz 3y ago
      I am guessing that all of those previous jobs were non-exempt roles (non-exempt meaning Not exempt from regulations about overtime pay and mandatory breaks). It's worded weird and it took me a long time to even understand what the heck it meant. It is Federal US law, but there are also state laws that apply. I am not a Lawyer, I am just a guy who has had a lot of jobs before so take that for what it's worth.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  I work 9-5 almost exactly (sometimes a little less) but I think that's just because we have a relaxed team when it comes to this. I usually end up making up some hours one or two evenings per week at my choosing. It's a really nice situation, but most of y'all would laugh at my TC. Everything in life's a tradeoff.
- mesh 3y ago
  Generally salaried positions, at least in tech on west coast include lunch, breaks, etc...
andyjohnson0 3y ago
> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Unlikely. Nobody wants evidence that potentially contradicts The Edict.
jedberg 3y ago
I used to work at Amazon too. I also refused to go in (even though the office was only a 15 minute drive) because I signed up for a remote role and I wanted to keep that flexibility. > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah. Their data shows their decision was wrong from a productivity standpoint. But that's not why they did it. They did it so they wouldn't loose their tax breaks from all the cities that were threatening to pull their subsidies if they couldn't show enough butts in seats in the downtown areas. Also they over-hired in the pandemic and need people to leave because their attrition numbers were too low for 2022 and 2023.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  > > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. > They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah. Respectfully, do you know this because you yourself have seen the data, because a person you know saw this data and told you about it, or are you speculating that this is probably the case?
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Because in a meeting with the CEO (which was publicly leaked so this isn't internal information I got it from outside sources myself I wasn't in the meeting) someone called out that the data doesn't support this decision and that was his response. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-return-to-office-rto-aws-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
    - rsanek 3y ago
      I don't see any claims in that article about productivity going up or down after the mandate, however? Just that data was not used to inform the decision in the first place. Would love to hear knowledge of internal data on this either way but it sounds like we're still just guessing.
CodeNest 3y ago
Totally agree with your move!
ryanSrich 3y ago
Sounds like a PR-friendly way to do layoffs. Force people back into the office knowing 30%+ are going to quit.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  Yeah, sometimes these are soft-layoffs, but even under that logic it's a bad idea: your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company. If you do a traditional layoff you get to decide who stays and who goes and have at least the chance to try and retain your top players. If you do a soft-layoff someone else does the choosing, and the more employable the employee is on the outside the more likely they are to leave. Just ass-backwards decision-making no matter how one slices it.
  - ryanSrich 3y ago
    > your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company Aren't these employees the most likely to get exceptions though?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      The best 3%? Probably. The best 30%? Probably not.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.

diob 3y ago
Honestly pretty smart. Sit around, collect paycheck, maybe work on resume / side hustles. And of course, marvel when you still get high performance marks.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
> just do their jobs and risk the pip Absolutely bonkers that doing the job you were hired to do can get you canned
- zdragnar 3y ago
  When I interviewed roughly 10 years ago, I asked every person I met on the team roughly how many hours a week they worked. Every single person deflected and answered a question I hadn't actually asked. For that team at least, the job you were hired to do was to get results. I imagine OP was referring to people simply putting time on the clock and being just present enough to avoid notice, without actually caring whether they were getting the same results a full level of effort would achieve.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    The issue is that the expected results are often unrealistic, demanding significant amounts of effort & time to meet.
y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
wave. I've been doing this for the last two years, but really dialed it in to the extreme over the last year. I don't give a shit if I get PIP'd at this point. If a company is willing to screw me over at every turn with no remorse and not an ounce of compassion, then this is how I'll fight back. Fuck em!
- infamouscow 3y ago
  This applies to every company, without exception. Even at the best run companies, if the financial situation changes, you'll be gone through no fault of your own. People that get emotionally and psychologically invested in someone else's company do themselves a disservice, typically only learned the hard way.
  - y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
    I don't think I agree. There are small shops (<500 employees) that really do treat people well. I've worked at smaller places that have given decent salaries, no-cap PTO (and actually let you use it without fuss), no overtime, yearly bonuses, shutting down for two weeks during the holidays, and actually listen to employee requests/concerns. When you work at a FAANG, you know you'll be sacrificing some of those benefits and taking on more stress for much higher pay. The current climate is much worse than that though. It's a complete no-empathy/give-no-fucks environment, and that's not ok. Garbage in, garbage out. I'm not looking for a hand-out, I just want to be treated as a human being. In return, you'll have a productive employee.

dpflan 3y ago

> "Since the RTO, a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto" In office workers have more defined working schedules? Is that what this means? That seems healthy for the worker. -- UPDATE -- Must consider the commute factor for time-demand on employee.

Clubber 3y ago
To me it says that working in an office+commute is much more draining than working at home. So much so that they work only the required amount. When they worked at home, they worked more because it was more enjoyable.
swasheck 3y ago
i agree with the sentiment of your comment, but the pervasive RTO narrative from c-levels is not about restoring their employees' collective, holistic health. rather, it's couched in a narrative of productivity and community, the former being what i believe was being countered in the comment. there's also the push/pull of the health benefits and disadvantages of commutes and other external factors that go into office-based dynamics. additionally, as i've mentioned in another comment on a similar thread, RTO mandates are not accompanied by corporate commitments to restore the cultures and environments that were present in the pre-remote migration which only intensifies the skepticism and recalcitrance of the workers. edit: changed "ramps up" to "intensifies"
- bdw5204 3y ago
  Employees working exactly 9 to 5 is absolutely the opposite of what employers doing RTOs for "productivity" want. They want them putting in unpaid overtime and are suspicious that they aren't when they're at home because they can't see them. In a healthy work environment where there's high morale and trust, the exact work hours are going to be off somewhat on a day to day basis in either direction based on logical stopping points. In a toxic environment, workers will pretend to work towards the end of the day then go home exactly when the clock hits 5. Once they can, workers in such an environment will probably leave.
3y ago

twojobsoneboss 3y ago

How much of a TC cut did you have to take between Amazon and your current employer?

smrtinsert 3y ago
Almost any value is worth it. On your death bed you will never say I'm glad I spent those years of my life commuting for Amazon instead of everything else I could have been doing.
- abadpoli 3y ago
  It’s not so clear cut. If I stay at my RTO job for a few more years, I can probably retire at 35-40, versus taking a pay cut and retiring sometime in my late 50s. I’d say that’s worth the commute.
  - hshsh667 3y ago
    No, it's not. Just think about your stress levels commuting, people infecting you with all kinds of diseases at work that lower your quality of life and have the chance to impair you to a great extend.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      There are plenty of stressful jobs you can find yourself in, and having kids exposes you to far more diseases than working in an office. Nothing is guaranteed, and if you're young having a few stressful years now then retiring is certainly easier than working dead end jobs for another 20.
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      What if you don't find commuting (I have a 12 minutes commute against the flow of traffic, I kind of like getting out and seeing the city and I enjoy driving), and aren't too worried about "all kinds of diseases at work" (i.e. Covid, Flu, and colds)? To be honest, you seem very paranoid about the risk of impairment by disease caught from coworker at your presumably white-collar tech job. This is minuscule. Does it surprise you that other's might not find your example to "just think" about not compelling at all?

Atrine 3y ago

> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. I would be surprised if they did this, and if they did, use it for implementing any sort of meaningful change. Plus I would not put faith in leadership to being able to interpret what this really means because they are so out of touch with how things are going. Discussions with upper leadership is heavily reviewed and curated as a means to avoid getting called out and stay under the radar. They all have a skewed view of what's going on with the teams that build and this data wouldn't feed into it in a way that would be meaningful. Likely what they will do is keep track of stuff like regretted attrition, hiring numbers (once they get back to hiring), Connections results, project/goal delays (the well established orgs are all aggressive about tracking dates along with goals to see how things are going). > a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto I think this is a great thing. This is long overdue there. It's too common for employee's personalities to be all Amazon all the time. I've been to many social events over the years where I'm told to not bring/invite anyone from my Amazon circle because all they can do is talk about Amazon.

foma-roje 3y ago

Even if they analysed slack+chime log activity. I guess they’ll explain it away with something like “working from office significantly reduces the need for online chatter”.

vanviegen 3y ago
.. and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong.
sokoloff 3y ago
That is, after all, the entire point of RTO mandates. (I am pro-remote and fortunate to work at a company that isn't RTO, but I will say that it is a breath of fresh air and notably higher-bandwidth conversations that are enabled on the few times per year that we get together in-person in an office.)
programmertote 3y ago
The important caveat is that we ALMOST ALWAYS need to do Chime meetings/Slack chats because our team is split across three cities -- Seattle, Arlington and Chicago. 2/5 of the team is stationed in Seattle office; 2/5 in Arlington; and 1/5 in Chicago. Not to mention that a bunch of folks from Hyderabad in India that we have to continuously work with. On top of all that, folks who are returning to the office can pick one of any weekday to go into the office (the other two days are agreed upon as Tuesday and Wednesday), so some folks are in the office on Monday, some on Friday (nobody choose to go in on Thursday from my limited observation).

godelski 3y ago

> started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto. Isn't this 7-7.5 hrs? Are you not required to take at least a 30 minute break within that period? Or does Amazon pay for lunch? I thought 9-5 was a myth/thing of the past.

hazmazlaz 3y ago
Required breaks are only for non-exempt roles (typically hourly FTEs with a set schedule).
- godelski 3y ago
  I've had required breaks at part time jobs and minimum wage jobs (which will never give you >35hrs/wk and your schedule is definitely not consistent). My understanding is it is state law and the 3 west coast states all have unpaid 30min breaks (if you aren't on call during break) for >5hrs work.
  - hazmazlaz 3y ago
    I am guessing that all of those previous jobs were non-exempt roles (non-exempt meaning Not exempt from regulations about overtime pay and mandatory breaks). It's worded weird and it took me a long time to even understand what the heck it meant. It is Federal US law, but there are also state laws that apply. I am not a Lawyer, I am just a guy who has had a lot of jobs before so take that for what it's worth.
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
I work 9-5 almost exactly (sometimes a little less) but I think that's just because we have a relaxed team when it comes to this. I usually end up making up some hours one or two evenings per week at my choosing. It's a really nice situation, but most of y'all would laugh at my TC. Everything in life's a tradeoff.
mesh 3y ago
Generally salaried positions, at least in tech on west coast include lunch, breaks, etc...

andyjohnson0 3y ago

> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. Unlikely. Nobody wants evidence that potentially contradicts The Edict.

jedberg 3y ago

I used to work at Amazon too. I also refused to go in (even though the office was only a 15 minute drive) because I signed up for a remote role and I wanted to keep that flexibility. > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah. Their data shows their decision was wrong from a productivity standpoint. But that's not why they did it. They did it so they wouldn't loose their tax breaks from all the cities that were threatening to pull their subsidies if they couldn't show enough butts in seats in the downtown areas. Also they over-hired in the pandemic and need people to leave because their attrition numbers were too low for 2022 and 2023.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago
> > I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate. > They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah. Respectfully, do you know this because you yourself have seen the data, because a person you know saw this data and told you about it, or are you speculating that this is probably the case?
- jedberg 3y ago
  Because in a meeting with the CEO (which was publicly leaked so this isn't internal information I got it from outside sources myself I wasn't in the meeting) someone called out that the data doesn't support this decision and that was his response. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-return-to-office-rto-aws-2023-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
  - rsanek 3y ago
    I don't see any claims in that article about productivity going up or down after the mandate, however? Just that data was not used to inform the decision in the first place. Would love to hear knowledge of internal data on this either way but it sounds like we're still just guessing.

CodeNest 3y ago

Totally agree with your move!

ryanSrich 3y ago

Sounds like a PR-friendly way to do layoffs. Force people back into the office knowing 30%+ are going to quit.

potatolicious 3y ago
Yeah, sometimes these are soft-layoffs, but even under that logic it's a bad idea: your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company. If you do a traditional layoff you get to decide who stays and who goes and have at least the chance to try and retain your top players. If you do a soft-layoff someone else does the choosing, and the more employable the employee is on the outside the more likely they are to leave. Just ass-backwards decision-making no matter how one slices it.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  > your best employees are the ones who have the most options outside of your company Aren't these employees the most likely to get exceptions though?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    The best 3%? Probably. The best 30%? Probably not.