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Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

283 points by belter 2y ago

Ancalagon 2y ago
The Worst Employer on Earth
- StressedDev 2y ago
  Not even close. If you think Amazon is awful, you have no idea how bad things can get. Amazon is probably a difficult place to work because of its high expectations and demanding culture. This (or requiring people to work at the office), do not come close to making it the worst employer.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  there are thousands of smaller businesses treating employees the same or worse - the difference is that it doesn't make the news.
no_wizard 2y ago
For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1]. I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?) [0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-workers-decry-non-data-driven-logic-for-5-day-rto-policy/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-... [1]: https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-office-decisions-echo-chamber-ceo-feelings-work-gleb-tsipursky/ https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-o...
- ChumpGPT 2y ago
  1000's of H1B's from India will work, sleep, and live at AMZN 24x7x365. Most folks are competing with this and it is happening across the industry. Junk away...
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    No need to be racist when you could have just said that it's a competitive hiring market.
    - ChumpGPT 2y ago
      Not at all, just stating the facts.
      - AbstractH24 2y ago
        How does return to office solve this? Particularly for anything not customer facing. We’ve proven that large amounts of work can be shifted to companies with lower COL, so why not do it? The question of if those workers work from their homes or offices is secondary at that point.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - wagiecoder 2y ago
    This is why they can force people back in
- changoplatanero 2y ago
  How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    Sure you can. Why can't you? Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times. For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are. Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.
    - changoplatanero 2y ago
      > For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are. I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
      - no_wizard 2y ago
        Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds. Secondly, you're saying this >In my mind... There's still no objective metric being cited? >the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc. Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating. >Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later. So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be. What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home. Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?
- roughly 2y ago
  Open office floor plans are sufficient evidence that "data driven" is bullshit when it comes to management, corporate aesthetics, and cost saving. Obviously there's no data to back RTO.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago
  Unless you can spin an alternate universe, some complex-dynamic things like corporate culture can't be data driven. A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost. Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office. No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies. Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them
  - gagik_co 2y ago
    Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.
    - meta_x_ai 2y ago
      Do you have data to prove that? If not, then leaders have every right to go with their gut instincts. Give me an example of a company that is immensely successful (massive growth) like say OpenAI that are fully remote
      - ElevenLathe 2y ago
        You're arguing on capital's terms. The company isn't owed massive growth. They are allowed to have it if labor is willing to work under the conditions they provide and if the state continues to allow their incorporation and its related benefits (and they get lucky, presumably).
- tpurves 2y ago
  They'll have plenty of data to support the primary motivation: that enforcing arbitrary RTO policies will absolutely aid in generating staff turnover and voluntary attrition without having to payout severance costs. The policy gives them less direct control over who they lose, but I'm sure the data also points to any critical replacement employees being willing to work for less on average. That's the data they are looking at.
  - regularfry 2y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more straightforward than that. They've got some very expensive office space that's extremely under-utilised, and they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      If you have way-underutilized office space that you can sell or not renew leases on, you can shed it like a former employer was doing when I left. Otherwise, there's basically no value in how many or few people are filling the space unless they're actually delivering some business value to the entity paying for the lease. (Unless, maybe, it relates to promises made to some local jurisdiction that gave you tax breaks.)
      - regularfry 2y ago
        A lot might depend on how long a lease was signed, and what penalties there might be for breaking it.
        ghaff 2y ago
        Sure. Breaking leases have costs. But the cases I have some direct experience with are generally simply not renewing them.
        galleywest200 2y ago
- flappyeagle 2y ago
  There’s absolutely no way that Amazon employees are more efficient at home. Nothing about the company’s organizational structure or resources are set up to be optimized for this. It’s like asking someone to play tennis, but you gave them a baseball bat.
  - devjab 2y ago
    I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home. The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild. You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted. Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy. I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  [dead]
- thegrim33 2y ago
  Amazon has existed for 30 years. For 26 of those years it was primarily an in office job, only temporarily shifting to WFH, where applicable, in response to a full blown global pandemic. Now that the global pandemic is sufficiently wrapped up, they're trying to go back to business as they're used to. You, a random internet person, are claiming you know what's better for their business than they do. You claim that the CEO and all the Presidents and VPs and everyone involved in the decision have no data backing them? They're all just making this decision with no logical basis or internal data? You really claim you know better than them what's good for their business? It's not their job to provide data to you, random internet person, about their internal functioning and what they think is best for their company. Linking to literally .032% of their workforce signing a letter saying that it just isn't fair to go back into the office, while once again not providing a single piece of data to bolster that opinion, is not evidence that your opinion is right. I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment. The fact that I'm already downvoted to negative karma really highlights the strength of the echo chamber involved.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment. It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger. This is Hacker News, after all.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      Hackers are lazy at the core otherwise we wouldn't spend writing a program once so we never have to do it again. Someone could do all of those things you list or form an opinion based on the title. Which way do you think a hacker would take?
      - anigbrowl 2y ago
        It would be foolish to do all the things when one is sufficient. It's also foolish to rely on superficial things like titles (which are written by editors, not the writer).
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  It's simpler - how will you have an affair if the secretary is not in the office? Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal
- paulddraper 2y ago
  > about control and/or backdoor layoffs Sure. I don't think anyone would honestly (i.e. outside of PR) disagree.
- cj 2y ago
  I think it’s simpler than this. Managing people remotely is hard. Most managers still aren’t good at managing remote employees. When managers aren’t managing well, “productivity” goes down (however you measure it). So managers internally advocate for RTO because it’s easier to manage people when they’re in person. (Many people also miss the office, but that group tends to be way less vocal on HN) And since the company already has the office space, RTO is “free” to do. And if they’re already looking to cut head count, attrition as a result would be icing on the cake making the decision even more appealing to upper management. In other words, I think RTO would have still happened 4 years after Covid regardless of whether companies are trying to reduce staff or not. “They’re secretly using RTO to fire us” doesn’t make much sense - companies are very capable of doing layoffs. Hiding or disguising the layoff is more work than just flat out laying people off. If there’s a leaked memo, I wouldn’t be surprised if
  - hackable_sand 2y ago
    If you can't manage people remotely then you cannot manage people.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Yeah but remote management is definitely way harder. That's not to say that management isn't hard anyway, but remote makes it even harder.
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      Good managers are few and far between so we need to make the best of mediocre ones
      - hackable_sand 2y ago
        Fair enough
    - HDThoreaun 2y ago
      A good manager is hard to find
- tomcam 2y ago
  With respect, I'd like to suggest that they don't need to prove their preference to you. And I am genuinely trying to discuss a policy, not to be argumentative. I am also not assuming it's any better than remote. Maybe it is, I have no clue. If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone. Put another way: why would Amazon need data for this? What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in? If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?
  - bestcoder69 2y ago
    permitted to force RTO without any data != ought to force RTO without any data
    - tomcam 2y ago
      Why though?
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    They’re legally allowed to do this already. We’re questioning why they’re doing it because it could still be an action driven by bad motivations, which would inform us more as to the nature of amazon and its leadership.
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    > If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone. This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board. If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it. Not doing so makes you an ass.
- pointkn2 2y ago
  [dead]
- vondur 2y ago
  This is simply layoffs without having to do layoffs. Much cleaner. I work for a state institution, due to budget cuts, layoffs are Coming. However, almost everyone hired the last few years are temporary employees. So we aren’t laying people off, we are simply not renewing positions. No messy uniom notifications needed.
- eutropia 2y ago
  My favorite recently acquired pet theory about the amazon RTO is that it's driven by real estate occupancy rates in their incredibly expensive new hub offices, several of which also received massive government tax grants with strings attached(0): > "Now consider that Amazon spent $4-5B to build its two headquarters buildings in Seattle in 2015/16. Almost certainly it will need to refinance those loans in the next couple of years. > When that refinancing window opens, two things will determine Amazon’s real estate bill. Interest rates, and the value placed on the buildings. The latter will be driven almost entirely by occupancy rates. > So the answer to “why does Amazon care about occupancy rates” is that by driving those rates up, it can maximize the valuation of its properties, decrease to loan-to-value ratio of its financing, and secure the best interest rate possible. > The size of the prize is massive. > One point of difference in the interest rate attached to a commercial loan across a 10-year term equates to $100M in interest payments. Given Amazon will need to refinance several billion in commercial real estate over the next few years, the stakes of increasing occupancy could have a billion dollar price tag. Way more than the cost of pissing off employees. Way more than hiring to replace those who quit." [0] - https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  > I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?) Amazon is famous for a short email retention policy and laughably small storage space to make as much past communication disappear. They also do what all big tech companies do, hiding incriminating things behind privilege labels on communications.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I dunno. I don't like the idea of companies holding inquisitions on just how disabled people are, but if we're going to hold the expansive view of disabilities the article takes for granted it seems inevitable. When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  I would assume stress disorders is a blanket that includes things like bipolar disorder, which has real proven sometimes-catastrophic health impacts PTSD is serious too.
  - kayodelycaon 2y ago
    Bipolar is a mood disorder. So is depression.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  It’s unfortunate for people that have legit disabilities that the system is abused in this way :(
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    I think the worry around any of the system being abused is louder than the actual instances of abuse. I'm sure it happens, but people get all up in arms about the potential for abuse without even looking at how often it might even happen to begin with.
    - mathgeek 2y ago
      One needs only look at the recent political weaponization of the small number of transgender kids playing sports to see another example of a small number of instances being generalized for outrage. Doesn’t make the needs less important, but it does happen.
adamredwoods 2y ago
Sadly, zero repercussions. Who will sue them? Individuals cannot, the process of law is long and requires substantial money. Government is difficult enough to get involved, and will soon lack resources to intervene or impose fines.
- perihelions 2y ago
  I'm not sure if that's the right take: the Americans with Disabilities Act is maybe the most plaintiff-friendly tort law in the US. There's whole law firms specializing in finding viable plaintiffs to take on contingency (i.e at no cost).
  - some_furry 2y ago
    That might matter if it weren't for forced arbitration clauses.
  - lthornberry 2y ago
    There are tort firms doing that in every area of tort law. ADA cases are not easy wins and don’t often produce significant awards.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      Amazon is big enough that they might even be able to get a class action lawsuit going, to be honest. If enough people started coming forward about disability discrimination.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    It seems to me that the payout for the employee would need to be enough that they never have to work again because of the risk that they won't be able to find a new jobs after having a lawsuit on their record.
    - lepus 2y ago
      Which record that most employers would check includes lawsuits against former employers?
karaterobot 2y ago
> “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant." I presume that's believe in the sense of faith, rather than believe in the sense of drawing reasonable conclusions from evidence. In other words, what are those advantages, and how do you know they exist at all, let alone their significance? As I recall, Amazon did pretty good during Work From Home, so why not start with the hypothesis that WFH is actually good for Amazon, then try disproving that with evidence. If their Return to Office plan is itself a secret experiment to do just that, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that they are making decisions under a combination of the sunk cost fallacy with respect to their commercial real estate, and the insane impulse to satisfy their management layer, while simultaneously shrinking their overall workforce size.
- slibhb 2y ago
  It seems obvious why companies want employees in the office. Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote. If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.
  - Liquix 2y ago
    The way to get employees to not shirk their duties is to incentivize them with what they want: $$$, increased leisure/family time, opportunities for career advancement. Either the hiring process or the company culture are at fault if someone can't be trusted to deliver without a middle manager staring at them. If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.
    - slibhb 2y ago
      I doubt giving someone who isn't doing a lot of work more money/leisure/status is going to motive them.
jmyeet 2y ago
RTO is nothing to do with efficiency. It's about suppressing wages. People who quit over RTO are cheaper than severance. You then distribute their work to the remaining employees who work harder for the same money. Layoffs and departures help keep wages down because the employees there are in fear of losing their job. If disabled employees are more likely to quit because of RTO, that's a win for Amazon because those people are harder to fire or layoff, being a protected class. The tides have shifted in tech. It's no longer a seller's market. Now that it's a buyer's (employer's) market, you're seeing the true colors of these companies. You are a cost. They will do everything to pay you less and/or get you to work more. To extract more profits. Nobody should be surprised by this.
- gotoeleven 2y ago
  Ohh the dastardliness of a mutually agreed upon contract!
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  This makes sense and is also highlighted by the fact that promotions at Amazon have been becoming harder and harder, and new arbitrary requirements are added literally every quarter by every org leader.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I think you overestimate the amount of people who even have severance clauses. That's pretty much silicon valley and C level stuff. The vast majority of office workers get fuck all if they are laid off or fired.
alfalfasprout 2y ago
At this point, Amazon doesn't care about bad press. I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline that they kill puppies. Nor do they care about their labor in the slightest. Amazon has earned their reputation as a bottom of the barrel meatgrinder for people looking to work at a larger tech company.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  "Amazon to reduce carbon emissions by shrinking excess puppy headcount (Washington Post)"
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
I just don't understand why Amazon hates its employees so much. These are the people making you billions and billions of dollars. And their jobs very clearly do not require them to work in an office, nor does it sap productivity, as years of experience and multiple studies confirm. And people could previously work in the office if they wanted to, so it's not like anyone was alienated before. It's like the execs are just sadists. There's no upside.
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  Employees are a resource to extract the value from in the most cost efficient method possible.
  - iLoveOncall 2y ago
    Yes but even from this point of view, 5 days of RTO doesn't make any sense: it's much cheaper and much more efficient to have people working their own home than from an expensive office, and people are massively more productive at home overall.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      The only thing that trumps good decision making is ego. I suspect a non zero amount of this is ego driven, be it either from middle management to upper management or c-suite need to exert some control. I can't for the life of me figure out why otherwise. Especially organizations that are clearly still demonstrating success. They don't have the supporting metrics for this and they know, and the employees know it, and by some extension, the public knows it now too.
- doitLP 2y ago
  It takes a certain kind of person to rise to the top of a company like this. almost every single person here above L8 has been here for at least a decade or more.
- ilamont 2y ago
  "Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking." It should be pretty clear where employees, suppliers, and partners stand in the Amazon hierarchy.
cebert 2y ago
Is this what striving to be the world’s best employer looks like?
- 93po 2y ago
  Sounds like they're being a great employer for the upper crust that wants this while also getting to vacation on their $20 million yachts whenever they want
nelblu 2y ago
https://archive.is/zPADI https://archive.is/zPADI
linotype 2y ago
Why do people keep working there? Like why not as a software engineer just refuse to work there?
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  1. Money 2. Future job prospects 3. Some teams aren't bad 4. Some people can tolerate the stress 5. Money
- nfRfqX5n 2y ago
  Big vests coming up from the hiring boom in ‘20/21 I think people won’t start leaving until 2026 unless they change the policy
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    And of course Amazon announced at the beginning of the year that anyone receiving a lot of equity is getting their cash bonus cut because the value of the equity grew faster than they anticipated.
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      Isn't that an old policy? I've always heard that if your stock appreciated a lot then you'd get smaller vests in the future to offset that.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        This isn't vesting adjustments, it's not getting raises and bonuses because of appreciation. It wasn't reported as an old policy: https://fortune.com/2024/03/27/amazon-no-cash-base-pay-raises-l6/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/27/amazon-no-cash-base-pay-raise...
        lesuorac 2y ago
        Sure but it's long standing that Amazon considers stock appreciation as part of your compensation and if it exceeds the targeted appreciation they'll decrease your future compensation so it even outs. To avoid doing any real math. Assume you get $100 and a targeted appreciation of 15% and the stock appreciated 30%. Then they're going to drop future compensation by $15 to even things out. This may feel unfair but its pretty well stated ahead of time (although who really understands RSUs out of college). (2018) https://www.teamblind.com/post/BZhGVek5 https://www.teamblind.com/post/BZhGVek5 (2022) https://old.reddit.com/r/FASCAmazon/comments/vdti7y/comment/lny7it4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/FASCAmazon/comments/vdti7y/comment/... (2024) https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1d6w01h/amazon_drastically_changed_my_rsu_grants/ https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1d6w01h/am...
whatitdo82 2y ago
I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions. If companies demand we be in office, they can be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.
- mannanj 2y ago
  Any ideas of violations? I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers. I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home. Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
whatitdo82 2y ago
I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions. If companies demand we be in-office, they should be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.
- mannanj 2y ago
  Any ideas of violations? I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers. I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home. Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    When companies switch to LEDs they seldom make sure they met Lumen requirements. Might be a start: https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1926/1926.56 https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
  - whaaaaat 2y ago
    I mean, you reasonably could be autistic. Talk to a provider. One symptom/anxiety isn't sufficient to diagnose, obviously. We're not doctors, but your experience doesn't sound typical.
anothernewdude 2y ago
Selecting for things other than performance means you're selecting against performance. This harms the quality of their workforce, and is a bad business decision. It's ideological, and therefore inefficient.
from-nibly 2y ago
Guys, calm down. It's a layoff. They are just lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report. Executives at Amazon aren't incorrectly drawing conclusions, and they aren't dumb as rocks They're LYING.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report They're lying to employees, not investors. They don't want to pay severance.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Laying off disabled people seems pretty illegal. I don’t know.
  - whaaaaat 2y ago
    Amazon is not known for obeying labor laws with any sort of regularity.
  - pxc 2y ago
    Workplace discrimination against disabled people is as at least as commonplace as it is illegal. The question is more how easy it would be to make the case against this kind of thing, rather than whether such a maneuver would be illegal in principle or in spirit.
  - rishav_sharan 2y ago
    Laying off people via wfh, irrespective of their disability seems to be pretty much in the vogue right now
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Hence the lying
mannanj 2y ago
I have a hypothesis that is a large controversy and inner circle secret waiting to unfold but not able to change anything after it’s been discovered: training data. Gather as much data as possible for new AI and ML models to replace the engineer, which we know management wants. Secret (or not so secret cameras) and microphones are more easily able to gather this data for entities when you’re actually in their vicinity. These offices hide these devices at scale legally and beneficially.
kadomony 2y ago
They want these people to quit. In a company that basically selects for survival of the fittest and operates on constant evolution of talent and speed, do you really think they honestly care about disabled employees?
- erikerikson 2y ago
  Ability to endure is very different than general fitness for a role
o10449366 2y ago
I used to work at amazon and had a medical exception for working from home. While obtaining the exception, the HR person in charge of my case would repeatedly call my personal cell phone to ask me questions about my disability. They did this 4-5 times despite my insistence that we keep all correspondence written and over email and despite me fulfilling all listed documentation requirements. Once my exception for my chronic condition was approved, they noted that I would need to renew every 6 months, because I guess lifelong conditions you're born with warrant constant validation.
- guax 2y ago
  What if a leg regrows in the time? You never know when a Messiah might cure your employees chronic pain over the weekend.
- geodel 2y ago
  It seems to me companies share these processes far and wide on this. I've had very similar experience and my work is nowhere near Amazon offices.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  Why not just...hang up the phone?
sirsinsalot 2y ago
I'd be tempted to RTO if offices weren't open plan distraction hell holes. My home office is quiet and I don't need to fight the open plan over stimulation.
smeej 2y ago
When RTO becomes mandatory, working from home also necessarily becomes more difficult in its own right. The lower the percentage of employee hours worked at home, the worse the company is at working with employees who work from home, regardless of their reason. Not only is applying for an exemption getting harder, being successful even once you have it is going to become darn near impossible. I think it's safe to say Amazon is openly creating a work environment hostile to people who have disabilities that prevent them from working in an office. If you're one of those, make your plans to get out, and go somewhere that realizes they're lucky to have you. This is only going to get worse, not better.
advisedwang 2y ago
RTO won't be effective because teams aren't located together any more. During WFH, lots of reorgs happened that pushed together people in different locations into a single team, responsibilities were moved around, work was outsourced etc etc etc. Now RTO means coming into the office to spend the day in chime meetings with people in other offices. Just like during WFH, but with the time and expense of a commute.
- WhoSevenCow 2y ago
  That's exactly what happened at my company. They said return to office three days a week, then half the devs quit. They frantically put together new smaller teams based on who had which skills. But I live in an expensive city that everyone moved away from when they could work from home. Therefore all the other devs had no choice but to quit as they couldn't come in, and the people I'd handed stuff over to recently were all in different offices. So I ended up coming into the office three days a week just to sit on Microsoft Teams. And then the managing director had the cheek to tell me that wasn't in the spirit of coming back to the office. What was I supposed to do, ignore productive meetings and never communicate with my team, but instead talk face-to-face with Janet about her daughter's nativity play for the twentieth time?
pointkn2 2y ago
[dead]
gepardi 2y ago
Amazon suuuuuuuucks.
nielsbot 2y ago
Maybe relevant: "Workers at Bethesda parent company strike over remote work policies" https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295556/video-game-developer-strike-zenimax-microsoft https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295556/video-game-deve...
whaaaaat 2y ago
Tech workers need to realize, and soon, that they can form unions that only argue for the things the workers want. You don't want seniority based unions? Fine! But Amazon has absolutely draconian IP restrictions on workers, RTO, limited benefits, and honestly mediocre comp (compared to peer companies). To say nothing of oncall burden. Like, Amazon engineers could have a union that fought for hybrid or remote. Fought for oncall pay, etc.
ryanmcbride 2y ago
Still reminds me of when rivian announced a 100% RTO for their Palo Alto offices in between their first and second round of layoffs, despite not even having enough chairs for everybody if they actually showed up. It'd be rad if we were able to bargain as some sort of collective in order to prevent companies from doing this exact thing that every company has been doing for the last 5 years. Like if we could unite and organize in some way that would make it harder for companies to pull obvious stuff like this without consequences. Oh well.
grahamj 2y ago
> seen by some employees as a way to get people to quit and shrink the workforce. ding ding ding
sitzkrieg 2y ago
exactly zero companies care about their employees

283 points by belter 2y ago

Ancalagon 2y ago

The Worst Employer on Earth

StressedDev 2y ago
Not even close. If you think Amazon is awful, you have no idea how bad things can get. Amazon is probably a difficult place to work because of its high expectations and demanding culture. This (or requiring people to work at the office), do not come close to making it the worst employer.
ycombinatrix 2y ago
there are thousands of smaller businesses treating employees the same or worse - the difference is that it doesn't make the news.

no_wizard 2y ago

For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1]. I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?) [0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-workers-decry-non-data-driven-logic-for-5-day-rto-policy/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-... [1]: https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-office-decisions-echo-chamber-ceo-feelings-work-gleb-tsipursky/ https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-o...

ChumpGPT 2y ago
1000's of H1B's from India will work, sleep, and live at AMZN 24x7x365. Most folks are competing with this and it is happening across the industry. Junk away...
- alephnerd 2y ago
  No need to be racist when you could have just said that it's a competitive hiring market.
  - ChumpGPT 2y ago
    Not at all, just stating the facts.
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      How does return to office solve this? Particularly for anything not customer facing. We’ve proven that large amounts of work can be shifted to companies with lower COL, so why not do it? The question of if those workers work from their homes or offices is secondary at that point.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- wagiecoder 2y ago
  This is why they can force people back in
changoplatanero 2y ago
How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Sure you can. Why can't you? Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times. For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are. Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.
  - changoplatanero 2y ago
    > For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are. I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds. Secondly, you're saying this >In my mind... There's still no objective metric being cited? >the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc. Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating. >Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later. So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be. What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home. Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?
roughly 2y ago
Open office floor plans are sufficient evidence that "data driven" is bullshit when it comes to management, corporate aesthetics, and cost saving. Obviously there's no data to back RTO.
meta_x_ai 2y ago
Unless you can spin an alternate universe, some complex-dynamic things like corporate culture can't be data driven. A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost. Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office. No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies. Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them
- gagik_co 2y ago
  Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.
  - meta_x_ai 2y ago
    Do you have data to prove that? If not, then leaders have every right to go with their gut instincts. Give me an example of a company that is immensely successful (massive growth) like say OpenAI that are fully remote
    - ElevenLathe 2y ago
      You're arguing on capital's terms. The company isn't owed massive growth. They are allowed to have it if labor is willing to work under the conditions they provide and if the state continues to allow their incorporation and its related benefits (and they get lucky, presumably).
tpurves 2y ago
They'll have plenty of data to support the primary motivation: that enforcing arbitrary RTO policies will absolutely aid in generating staff turnover and voluntary attrition without having to payout severance costs. The policy gives them less direct control over who they lose, but I'm sure the data also points to any critical replacement employees being willing to work for less on average. That's the data they are looking at.
- regularfry 2y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more straightforward than that. They've got some very expensive office space that's extremely under-utilised, and they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    If you have way-underutilized office space that you can sell or not renew leases on, you can shed it like a former employer was doing when I left. Otherwise, there's basically no value in how many or few people are filling the space unless they're actually delivering some business value to the entity paying for the lease. (Unless, maybe, it relates to promises made to some local jurisdiction that gave you tax breaks.)
    - regularfry 2y ago
      A lot might depend on how long a lease was signed, and what penalties there might be for breaking it.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Sure. Breaking leases have costs. But the cases I have some direct experience with are generally simply not renewing them.
        galleywest200 2y ago
flappyeagle 2y ago
There’s absolutely no way that Amazon employees are more efficient at home. Nothing about the company’s organizational structure or resources are set up to be optimized for this. It’s like asking someone to play tennis, but you gave them a baseball bat.
- devjab 2y ago
  I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home. The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild. You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted. Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy. I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
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thegrim33 2y ago
Amazon has existed for 30 years. For 26 of those years it was primarily an in office job, only temporarily shifting to WFH, where applicable, in response to a full blown global pandemic. Now that the global pandemic is sufficiently wrapped up, they're trying to go back to business as they're used to. You, a random internet person, are claiming you know what's better for their business than they do. You claim that the CEO and all the Presidents and VPs and everyone involved in the decision have no data backing them? They're all just making this decision with no logical basis or internal data? You really claim you know better than them what's good for their business? It's not their job to provide data to you, random internet person, about their internal functioning and what they think is best for their company. Linking to literally .032% of their workforce signing a letter saying that it just isn't fair to go back into the office, while once again not providing a single piece of data to bolster that opinion, is not evidence that your opinion is right. I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment. The fact that I'm already downvoted to negative karma really highlights the strength of the echo chamber involved.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment. It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger. This is Hacker News, after all.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    Hackers are lazy at the core otherwise we wouldn't spend writing a program once so we never have to do it again. Someone could do all of those things you list or form an opinion based on the title. Which way do you think a hacker would take?
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      It would be foolish to do all the things when one is sufficient. It's also foolish to rely on superficial things like titles (which are written by editors, not the writer).
ClumsyPilot 2y ago
It's simpler - how will you have an affair if the secretary is not in the office? Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal
paulddraper 2y ago
> about control and/or backdoor layoffs Sure. I don't think anyone would honestly (i.e. outside of PR) disagree.
cj 2y ago
I think it’s simpler than this. Managing people remotely is hard. Most managers still aren’t good at managing remote employees. When managers aren’t managing well, “productivity” goes down (however you measure it). So managers internally advocate for RTO because it’s easier to manage people when they’re in person. (Many people also miss the office, but that group tends to be way less vocal on HN) And since the company already has the office space, RTO is “free” to do. And if they’re already looking to cut head count, attrition as a result would be icing on the cake making the decision even more appealing to upper management. In other words, I think RTO would have still happened 4 years after Covid regardless of whether companies are trying to reduce staff or not. “They’re secretly using RTO to fire us” doesn’t make much sense - companies are very capable of doing layoffs. Hiding or disguising the layoff is more work than just flat out laying people off. If there’s a leaked memo, I wouldn’t be surprised if
- hackable_sand 2y ago
  If you can't manage people remotely then you cannot manage people.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Yeah but remote management is definitely way harder. That's not to say that management isn't hard anyway, but remote makes it even harder.
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    Good managers are few and far between so we need to make the best of mediocre ones
    - hackable_sand 2y ago
      Fair enough
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    A good manager is hard to find
tomcam 2y ago
With respect, I'd like to suggest that they don't need to prove their preference to you. And I am genuinely trying to discuss a policy, not to be argumentative. I am also not assuming it's any better than remote. Maybe it is, I have no clue. If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone. Put another way: why would Amazon need data for this? What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in? If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?
- bestcoder69 2y ago
  permitted to force RTO without any data != ought to force RTO without any data
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Why though?
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  They’re legally allowed to do this already. We’re questioning why they’re doing it because it could still be an action driven by bad motivations, which would inform us more as to the nature of amazon and its leadership.
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone. This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board. If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it. Not doing so makes you an ass.
pointkn2 2y ago
[dead]
vondur 2y ago
This is simply layoffs without having to do layoffs. Much cleaner. I work for a state institution, due to budget cuts, layoffs are Coming. However, almost everyone hired the last few years are temporary employees. So we aren’t laying people off, we are simply not renewing positions. No messy uniom notifications needed.
eutropia 2y ago
My favorite recently acquired pet theory about the amazon RTO is that it's driven by real estate occupancy rates in their incredibly expensive new hub offices, several of which also received massive government tax grants with strings attached(0): > "Now consider that Amazon spent $4-5B to build its two headquarters buildings in Seattle in 2015/16. Almost certainly it will need to refinance those loans in the next couple of years. > When that refinancing window opens, two things will determine Amazon’s real estate bill. Interest rates, and the value placed on the buildings. The latter will be driven almost entirely by occupancy rates. > So the answer to “why does Amazon care about occupancy rates” is that by driving those rates up, it can maximize the valuation of its properties, decrease to loan-to-value ratio of its financing, and secure the best interest rate possible. > The size of the prize is massive. > One point of difference in the interest rate attached to a commercial loan across a 10-year term equates to $100M in interest payments. Given Amazon will need to refinance several billion in commercial real estate over the next few years, the stakes of increasing occupancy could have a billion dollar price tag. Way more than the cost of pissing off employees. Way more than hiring to replace those who quit." [0] - https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
> I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?) Amazon is famous for a short email retention policy and laughably small storage space to make as much past communication disappear. They also do what all big tech companies do, hiding incriminating things behind privilege labels on communications.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

I dunno. I don't like the idea of companies holding inquisitions on just how disabled people are, but if we're going to hold the expansive view of disabilities the article takes for granted it seems inevitable. When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.

kevingadd 2y ago
I would assume stress disorders is a blanket that includes things like bipolar disorder, which has real proven sometimes-catastrophic health impacts PTSD is serious too.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  Bipolar is a mood disorder. So is depression.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
It’s unfortunate for people that have legit disabilities that the system is abused in this way :(
- no_wizard 2y ago
  I think the worry around any of the system being abused is louder than the actual instances of abuse. I'm sure it happens, but people get all up in arms about the potential for abuse without even looking at how often it might even happen to begin with.
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    One needs only look at the recent political weaponization of the small number of transgender kids playing sports to see another example of a small number of instances being generalized for outrage. Doesn’t make the needs less important, but it does happen.

adamredwoods 2y ago

Sadly, zero repercussions. Who will sue them? Individuals cannot, the process of law is long and requires substantial money. Government is difficult enough to get involved, and will soon lack resources to intervene or impose fines.

perihelions 2y ago
I'm not sure if that's the right take: the Americans with Disabilities Act is maybe the most plaintiff-friendly tort law in the US. There's whole law firms specializing in finding viable plaintiffs to take on contingency (i.e at no cost).
- some_furry 2y ago
  That might matter if it weren't for forced arbitration clauses.
- lthornberry 2y ago
  There are tort firms doing that in every area of tort law. ADA cases are not easy wins and don’t often produce significant awards.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    Amazon is big enough that they might even be able to get a class action lawsuit going, to be honest. If enough people started coming forward about disability discrimination.
- harimau777 2y ago
  It seems to me that the payout for the employee would need to be enough that they never have to work again because of the risk that they won't be able to find a new jobs after having a lawsuit on their record.
  - lepus 2y ago
    Which record that most employers would check includes lawsuits against former employers?

karaterobot 2y ago

> “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant." I presume that's believe in the sense of faith, rather than believe in the sense of drawing reasonable conclusions from evidence. In other words, what are those advantages, and how do you know they exist at all, let alone their significance? As I recall, Amazon did pretty good during Work From Home, so why not start with the hypothesis that WFH is actually good for Amazon, then try disproving that with evidence. If their Return to Office plan is itself a secret experiment to do just that, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that they are making decisions under a combination of the sunk cost fallacy with respect to their commercial real estate, and the insane impulse to satisfy their management layer, while simultaneously shrinking their overall workforce size.

slibhb 2y ago
It seems obvious why companies want employees in the office. Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote. If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.
- Liquix 2y ago
  The way to get employees to not shirk their duties is to incentivize them with what they want: $$$, increased leisure/family time, opportunities for career advancement. Either the hiring process or the company culture are at fault if someone can't be trusted to deliver without a middle manager staring at them. If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.
  - slibhb 2y ago
    I doubt giving someone who isn't doing a lot of work more money/leisure/status is going to motive them.

jmyeet 2y ago

RTO is nothing to do with efficiency. It's about suppressing wages. People who quit over RTO are cheaper than severance. You then distribute their work to the remaining employees who work harder for the same money. Layoffs and departures help keep wages down because the employees there are in fear of losing their job. If disabled employees are more likely to quit because of RTO, that's a win for Amazon because those people are harder to fire or layoff, being a protected class. The tides have shifted in tech. It's no longer a seller's market. Now that it's a buyer's (employer's) market, you're seeing the true colors of these companies. You are a cost. They will do everything to pay you less and/or get you to work more. To extract more profits. Nobody should be surprised by this.

gotoeleven 2y ago
Ohh the dastardliness of a mutually agreed upon contract!
iLoveOncall 2y ago
This makes sense and is also highlighted by the fact that promotions at Amazon have been becoming harder and harder, and new arbitrary requirements are added literally every quarter by every org leader.
bongodongobob 2y ago
I think you overestimate the amount of people who even have severance clauses. That's pretty much silicon valley and C level stuff. The vast majority of office workers get fuck all if they are laid off or fired.

alfalfasprout 2y ago

At this point, Amazon doesn't care about bad press. I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline that they kill puppies. Nor do they care about their labor in the slightest. Amazon has earned their reputation as a bottom of the barrel meatgrinder for people looking to work at a larger tech company.

0xbadcafebee 2y ago
"Amazon to reduce carbon emissions by shrinking excess puppy headcount (Washington Post)"

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

I just don't understand why Amazon hates its employees so much. These are the people making you billions and billions of dollars. And their jobs very clearly do not require them to work in an office, nor does it sap productivity, as years of experience and multiple studies confirm. And people could previously work in the office if they wanted to, so it's not like anyone was alienated before. It's like the execs are just sadists. There's no upside.

bitmasher9 2y ago
Employees are a resource to extract the value from in the most cost efficient method possible.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  Yes but even from this point of view, 5 days of RTO doesn't make any sense: it's much cheaper and much more efficient to have people working their own home than from an expensive office, and people are massively more productive at home overall.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    The only thing that trumps good decision making is ego. I suspect a non zero amount of this is ego driven, be it either from middle management to upper management or c-suite need to exert some control. I can't for the life of me figure out why otherwise. Especially organizations that are clearly still demonstrating success. They don't have the supporting metrics for this and they know, and the employees know it, and by some extension, the public knows it now too.
doitLP 2y ago
It takes a certain kind of person to rise to the top of a company like this. almost every single person here above L8 has been here for at least a decade or more.
ilamont 2y ago
"Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking." It should be pretty clear where employees, suppliers, and partners stand in the Amazon hierarchy.

cebert 2y ago

Is this what striving to be the world’s best employer looks like?

93po 2y ago
Sounds like they're being a great employer for the upper crust that wants this while also getting to vacation on their $20 million yachts whenever they want

nelblu 2y ago

https://archive.is/zPADI https://archive.is/zPADI

linotype 2y ago

Why do people keep working there? Like why not as a software engineer just refuse to work there?

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
1. Money 2. Future job prospects 3. Some teams aren't bad 4. Some people can tolerate the stress 5. Money
nfRfqX5n 2y ago
Big vests coming up from the hiring boom in ‘20/21 I think people won’t start leaving until 2026 unless they change the policy
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  And of course Amazon announced at the beginning of the year that anyone receiving a lot of equity is getting their cash bonus cut because the value of the equity grew faster than they anticipated.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Isn't that an old policy? I've always heard that if your stock appreciated a lot then you'd get smaller vests in the future to offset that.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      This isn't vesting adjustments, it's not getting raises and bonuses because of appreciation. It wasn't reported as an old policy: https://fortune.com/2024/03/27/amazon-no-cash-base-pay-raises-l6/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/27/amazon-no-cash-base-pay-raise...
      - lesuorac 2y ago
        Sure but it's long standing that Amazon considers stock appreciation as part of your compensation and if it exceeds the targeted appreciation they'll decrease your future compensation so it even outs. To avoid doing any real math. Assume you get $100 and a targeted appreciation of 15% and the stock appreciated 30%. Then they're going to drop future compensation by $15 to even things out. This may feel unfair but its pretty well stated ahead of time (although who really understands RSUs out of college). (2018) https://www.teamblind.com/post/BZhGVek5 https://www.teamblind.com/post/BZhGVek5 (2022) https://old.reddit.com/r/FASCAmazon/comments/vdti7y/comment/lny7it4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/FASCAmazon/comments/vdti7y/comment/... (2024) https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1d6w01h/amazon_drastically_changed_my_rsu_grants/ https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1d6w01h/am...

whatitdo82 2y ago

I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions. If companies demand we be in office, they can be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.

mannanj 2y ago
Any ideas of violations? I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers. I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home. Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?

whatitdo82 2y ago

I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions. If companies demand we be in-office, they should be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.

mannanj 2y ago
Any ideas of violations? I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers. I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home. Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  When companies switch to LEDs they seldom make sure they met Lumen requirements. Might be a start: https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1926/1926.56 https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
- whaaaaat 2y ago
  I mean, you reasonably could be autistic. Talk to a provider. One symptom/anxiety isn't sufficient to diagnose, obviously. We're not doctors, but your experience doesn't sound typical.

anothernewdude 2y ago

Selecting for things other than performance means you're selecting against performance. This harms the quality of their workforce, and is a bad business decision. It's ideological, and therefore inefficient.

from-nibly 2y ago

Guys, calm down. It's a layoff. They are just lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report. Executives at Amazon aren't incorrectly drawing conclusions, and they aren't dumb as rocks They're LYING.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report They're lying to employees, not investors. They don't want to pay severance.
janalsncm 2y ago
Laying off disabled people seems pretty illegal. I don’t know.
- whaaaaat 2y ago
  Amazon is not known for obeying labor laws with any sort of regularity.
- pxc 2y ago
  Workplace discrimination against disabled people is as at least as commonplace as it is illegal. The question is more how easy it would be to make the case against this kind of thing, rather than whether such a maneuver would be illegal in principle or in spirit.
- rishav_sharan 2y ago
  Laying off people via wfh, irrespective of their disability seems to be pretty much in the vogue right now
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Hence the lying

mannanj 2y ago

I have a hypothesis that is a large controversy and inner circle secret waiting to unfold but not able to change anything after it’s been discovered: training data. Gather as much data as possible for new AI and ML models to replace the engineer, which we know management wants. Secret (or not so secret cameras) and microphones are more easily able to gather this data for entities when you’re actually in their vicinity. These offices hide these devices at scale legally and beneficially.

kadomony 2y ago

They want these people to quit. In a company that basically selects for survival of the fittest and operates on constant evolution of talent and speed, do you really think they honestly care about disabled employees?

erikerikson 2y ago
Ability to endure is very different than general fitness for a role

o10449366 2y ago

I used to work at amazon and had a medical exception for working from home. While obtaining the exception, the HR person in charge of my case would repeatedly call my personal cell phone to ask me questions about my disability. They did this 4-5 times despite my insistence that we keep all correspondence written and over email and despite me fulfilling all listed documentation requirements. Once my exception for my chronic condition was approved, they noted that I would need to renew every 6 months, because I guess lifelong conditions you're born with warrant constant validation.

guax 2y ago
What if a leg regrows in the time? You never know when a Messiah might cure your employees chronic pain over the weekend.
geodel 2y ago
It seems to me companies share these processes far and wide on this. I've had very similar experience and my work is nowhere near Amazon offices.
ycombinatrix 2y ago
Why not just...hang up the phone?

sirsinsalot 2y ago

I'd be tempted to RTO if offices weren't open plan distraction hell holes. My home office is quiet and I don't need to fight the open plan over stimulation.

smeej 2y ago

When RTO becomes mandatory, working from home also necessarily becomes more difficult in its own right. The lower the percentage of employee hours worked at home, the worse the company is at working with employees who work from home, regardless of their reason. Not only is applying for an exemption getting harder, being successful even once you have it is going to become darn near impossible. I think it's safe to say Amazon is openly creating a work environment hostile to people who have disabilities that prevent them from working in an office. If you're one of those, make your plans to get out, and go somewhere that realizes they're lucky to have you. This is only going to get worse, not better.

advisedwang 2y ago

RTO won't be effective because teams aren't located together any more. During WFH, lots of reorgs happened that pushed together people in different locations into a single team, responsibilities were moved around, work was outsourced etc etc etc. Now RTO means coming into the office to spend the day in chime meetings with people in other offices. Just like during WFH, but with the time and expense of a commute.

WhoSevenCow 2y ago
That's exactly what happened at my company. They said return to office three days a week, then half the devs quit. They frantically put together new smaller teams based on who had which skills. But I live in an expensive city that everyone moved away from when they could work from home. Therefore all the other devs had no choice but to quit as they couldn't come in, and the people I'd handed stuff over to recently were all in different offices. So I ended up coming into the office three days a week just to sit on Microsoft Teams. And then the managing director had the cheek to tell me that wasn't in the spirit of coming back to the office. What was I supposed to do, ignore productive meetings and never communicate with my team, but instead talk face-to-face with Janet about her daughter's nativity play for the twentieth time?

pointkn2 2y ago

[dead]

gepardi 2y ago

Amazon suuuuuuuucks.

nielsbot 2y ago

Maybe relevant: "Workers at Bethesda parent company strike over remote work policies" https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295556/video-game-developer-strike-zenimax-microsoft https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295556/video-game-deve...

whaaaaat 2y ago

Tech workers need to realize, and soon, that they can form unions that only argue for the things the workers want. You don't want seniority based unions? Fine! But Amazon has absolutely draconian IP restrictions on workers, RTO, limited benefits, and honestly mediocre comp (compared to peer companies). To say nothing of oncall burden. Like, Amazon engineers could have a union that fought for hybrid or remote. Fought for oncall pay, etc.

ryanmcbride 2y ago

Still reminds me of when rivian announced a 100% RTO for their Palo Alto offices in between their first and second round of layoffs, despite not even having enough chairs for everybody if they actually showed up. It'd be rad if we were able to bargain as some sort of collective in order to prevent companies from doing this exact thing that every company has been doing for the last 5 years. Like if we could unite and organize in some way that would make it harder for companies to pull obvious stuff like this without consequences. Oh well.

grahamj 2y ago

> seen by some employees as a way to get people to quit and shrink the workforce. ding ding ding

sitzkrieg 2y ago

exactly zero companies care about their employees