6 ms·

Amazon employees send AWS chief an letter against RTO policy

53 points by cebert 2y ago

cibyr 2y ago
The really upsetting thing here is that Garman apparently thinks we have cubicles
fred_is_fred 2y ago
There's almost zero chance they backtrack on this. Amazon is looking to reduce costs, this is fairly cheap since people will quit. Anyone who is irreplaceable will be exempted.
- tdb7893 2y ago
  It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management. When I worked at Google everyone always said their favorite thing about work was their coworkers but when push came to shove they aren't willing to organize to help them. I get why many people don't want to organize but it made me happy to be gone, without cooperation they've just continued to be yanked around by management. I loved my coworkers, when management was shitty to them I wanted to fight!
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    For computer scientist, unionizing is seen akin to selling your soul to the devil if you were Christian Well, until layoffs are announced
  - fred_is_fred 2y ago
    Hard to give up a 700k/year job to organize, especially hard in today's hiring environment.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management. Some employees are like the Boxer character from Animal Farm[1]. I vividly recall Amazon employees complaining about Amazon's new leadership principle "strive to be Earth's best employer", and once the job cuts started to hit home there were employees attacking fellow employees with jabs such as "being the Earth's best employer means those who do not like it should just leave", and "you're whining here but 10 would eagerly take your place". One of the biggest scams is making you believe that your fellow employees are looking out for your best interests, as there were no backstabbers around. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm)
- chipdart 2y ago
  > There's almost zero chance they backtrack on this. Amazon is looking to reduce costs, this is fairly cheap since people will quit. Anyone who is irreplaceable will be exempted. This was very clear from the start, even the timing of mandating RTO while announcing mass layoffs. I don't know what compells anyone within Amazon to focus on the red herring.
jey 2y ago
http://archive.today/ORpFu http://archive.today/ORpFu The actual letter is available at the end of https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-open-letter-aws-ceo-office-return-rto-2024-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-open-letter...
m463 2y ago
I wonder if AWS customers can learn from this and RTO their servers? :)
- bubaumba 2y ago
  No, as long as it works they don't care. I.e. even if Amazon stops development but continues to support existing infrastructure most customers will stay. It's expensive and may take many months to move back on premises or another cloud.
wannacboatmovie 2y ago
Truncated headline leaves out "distraught" which really changes the tone of the article. They are distraught about having to go to work? Every company is doing this now, and the rest are following suit. I fully support WFH but have no illusions that it was going to last forever. The sense of entitlement among Amazon employees is unbelievable, they don't seem to understand how at-will employment works. I attribute this to them likely being in their 20s and never having worked a real job before - and more importantly, never having been fired before. It takes that first firing to truly understand how insignificant on a human level you are to these large companies. You are literally numbers in a spreadsheet. If they don't like it they can form a union and put it in a contract - but that is fundamentally incompatible with how that roller coaster of a company operates. Good luck with your soft layoffs.
- potamic 2y ago
  I think you're making some assumptions about the people who may have signed this. I don't know if you've read the letter or Amazon's leadership principles that they tout loudly, but the letter was very much in line with that. I would also not read too much into headlines. When you read op-ed, you must understand that you're reading the author's perspective on things and that might not necessarily align with the subjects' view.
- horns4lyfe 2y ago
  Are you suggesting employees shouldn’t ask for the conditions they want from their employers? Just accept whatever drudgery is thrust upon them because they’re “insignificant”?
  - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
    Conditions? You make it sound like going into the office is heading into the coal pits without PPE in the 1930s. As I said, if they don't like it they can unionize and demand guaranteed WFH. Until that happens, this is shouting into the void.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  [flagged]
blinded 2y ago
Commendable, but not in this economy.
JSDevOps 2y ago
All the best engineers will leave for Netflix, Facebook, heck even Oracle are progressive on the remote working policy and others.
- burnt-resistor 2y ago
  Meta (Facebook) went RTO / "hybrid" RTO, and mandates relocation near an office for newhires and rehires.
Dunedan 2y ago
> "When we want to innovate. When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we're not in person," Garman said. I have the suspicion that this is not caused by remote versus in person, but rather by not giving engineers enough space for innovation. All you hear is that teams are understaffed at AWS. Also a high turnover rate caused by regularly firing a certain percentage of your employees certainly isn't beneficial either to solve understaffing and foster an environment where people innovate.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  The assumption of stack ranking is that the good people will survive each round of purging. But we all know, you can have a relative get cancer, a bad new boss, reorgs, a bad run of bugs, a nonsensically-missioned new project, etc, and BAM you have a bad review. Also, to beat the system merely requires a collusion between a group of people and hiring/firing a sucker. And reviews are always manipulatable stats that can be juked. There can be vast productivity lost if people spend their time defending their position rather than cooperating and doing their jobs. I haven't even gotten into backstabbing and sabotage. Inevitably, a dead pool effect forms.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
    Poetry.
  - burnt-resistor 2y ago
    Yep. And the highly-rated people will be the ones who act the most arrogantly, and they will be paid $650-1.8M-3.7M+ USD/year. They will be big fish in small pods but not as smart, clever, or as irreplaceable as they believe themselves to be. But they will shoot down everyone else's ideas, be disinterested in learning anything new, refuse meetings, take credit for others' work, and tell other people what to do and how to do it.
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > The assumption of stack ranking is that the good people will survive each round of purging. It's my understanding that Amazon does not do stack ranking. What they do is more insidious. They force people out in a process that consists of promoting people as a pretext to apply harsher performance evaluation criteria while comparing your performance directly with veteran, well established engineers. To make matters worse, you have a limited influence over your career. You are evaluated based on your performance in your role which is dictated by the project you are assigned to. SDE1s are de-facto barred from switching teams, SDE2s can switch teams but can be a liability, SDE3s are few and far in between and have limited career options, and on top of that there's only principal engineer, which is already a role that needs full support and commitment from executives. The rule of survival was move up to SDE2 as fast as you could, and afterwards judiciously switch teams each year or so to a) avoid being held liable for your past work, b) ensure you were working on a team thay was unlikely to be subjected to cuts, and most of all c) do your best to not be considered for a promotion to SDE3 as that would mean you would be held personally responsible for each and every single failure and short-coming of the projects you'd be assigned to. In short, they push people up and out. The average tenure is shorter than 3 years. Let that sink in.
CapeTheory 2y ago
Amazon culture was on a downward trajectory for a while before this, but the decay really accelerated in 2022 and has only gotten worse. No amount of face-to-face contact will fix it, as there are now too few people (outside an elite group in Seattle) who really know what "Amazon's peculiar culture" really means.
- k99x55 2y ago
  "Corporate culture" has had a downward history everywhere since companies started weaponizing "culture" to demand a one-way loyalty from employees so as to extract more unpaid labor from them.
  - pylua 2y ago
    Exactly. Company values, when it comes to those high up are essentially rules for thee and not for me.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- bubaumba 2y ago
  Unlike Google Amazon was never known for its great culture. "decay" looks to be a global trend when managers finally "win" and start optimizing for short sited money making to please investors right now. Usually this happens after first generation of founders an visionaries leaves. Amazon, after short books selling startup period, was just a money making machine.
OfficeChad 2y ago
[dead]
iosguyryan 2y ago
Is parking free?
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Earlier: Over 500 Amazon workers decry "non-data-driven" logic for 5-day RTO policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009552

53 points by cebert 2y ago

The really upsetting thing here is that Garman apparently thinks we have cubicles

There's almost zero chance they backtrack on this. Amazon is looking to reduce costs, this is fairly cheap since people will quit. Anyone who is irreplaceable will be exempted.

tdb7893 2y ago
It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management. When I worked at Google everyone always said their favorite thing about work was their coworkers but when push came to shove they aren't willing to organize to help them. I get why many people don't want to organize but it made me happy to be gone, without cooperation they've just continued to be yanked around by management. I loved my coworkers, when management was shitty to them I wanted to fight!
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  For computer scientist, unionizing is seen akin to selling your soul to the devil if you were Christian Well, until layoffs are announced
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  Hard to give up a 700k/year job to organize, especially hard in today's hiring environment.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management. Some employees are like the Boxer character from Animal Farm[1]. I vividly recall Amazon employees complaining about Amazon's new leadership principle "strive to be Earth's best employer", and once the job cuts started to hit home there were employees attacking fellow employees with jabs such as "being the Earth's best employer means those who do not like it should just leave", and "you're whining here but 10 would eagerly take your place". One of the biggest scams is making you believe that your fellow employees are looking out for your best interests, as there were no backstabbers around. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm)
chipdart 2y ago
> There's almost zero chance they backtrack on this. Amazon is looking to reduce costs, this is fairly cheap since people will quit. Anyone who is irreplaceable will be exempted. This was very clear from the start, even the timing of mandating RTO while announcing mass layoffs. I don't know what compells anyone within Amazon to focus on the red herring.

jey 2y ago

http://archive.today/ORpFu http://archive.today/ORpFu The actual letter is available at the end of https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-open-letter-aws-ceo-office-return-rto-2024-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-open-letter...

m463 2y ago

I wonder if AWS customers can learn from this and RTO their servers? :)

bubaumba 2y ago
No, as long as it works they don't care. I.e. even if Amazon stops development but continues to support existing infrastructure most customers will stay. It's expensive and may take many months to move back on premises or another cloud.

wannacboatmovie 2y ago

Truncated headline leaves out "distraught" which really changes the tone of the article. They are distraught about having to go to work? Every company is doing this now, and the rest are following suit. I fully support WFH but have no illusions that it was going to last forever. The sense of entitlement among Amazon employees is unbelievable, they don't seem to understand how at-will employment works. I attribute this to them likely being in their 20s and never having worked a real job before - and more importantly, never having been fired before. It takes that first firing to truly understand how insignificant on a human level you are to these large companies. You are literally numbers in a spreadsheet. If they don't like it they can form a union and put it in a contract - but that is fundamentally incompatible with how that roller coaster of a company operates. Good luck with your soft layoffs.

potamic 2y ago
I think you're making some assumptions about the people who may have signed this. I don't know if you've read the letter or Amazon's leadership principles that they tout loudly, but the letter was very much in line with that. I would also not read too much into headlines. When you read op-ed, you must understand that you're reading the author's perspective on things and that might not necessarily align with the subjects' view.
horns4lyfe 2y ago
Are you suggesting employees shouldn’t ask for the conditions they want from their employers? Just accept whatever drudgery is thrust upon them because they’re “insignificant”?
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  Conditions? You make it sound like going into the office is heading into the coal pits without PPE in the 1930s. As I said, if they don't like it they can unionize and demand guaranteed WFH. Until that happens, this is shouting into the void.
marxisttemp 2y ago
[flagged]

blinded 2y ago

Commendable, but not in this economy.

JSDevOps 2y ago

All the best engineers will leave for Netflix, Facebook, heck even Oracle are progressive on the remote working policy and others.

burnt-resistor 2y ago
Meta (Facebook) went RTO / "hybrid" RTO, and mandates relocation near an office for newhires and rehires.

Dunedan 2y ago

> "When we want to innovate. When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we're not in person," Garman said. I have the suspicion that this is not caused by remote versus in person, but rather by not giving engineers enough space for innovation. All you hear is that teams are understaffed at AWS. Also a high turnover rate caused by regularly firing a certain percentage of your employees certainly isn't beneficial either to solve understaffing and foster an environment where people innovate.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
The assumption of stack ranking is that the good people will survive each round of purging. But we all know, you can have a relative get cancer, a bad new boss, reorgs, a bad run of bugs, a nonsensically-missioned new project, etc, and BAM you have a bad review. Also, to beat the system merely requires a collusion between a group of people and hiring/firing a sucker. And reviews are always manipulatable stats that can be juked. There can be vast productivity lost if people spend their time defending their position rather than cooperating and doing their jobs. I haven't even gotten into backstabbing and sabotage. Inevitably, a dead pool effect forms.
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
  Poetry.
- burnt-resistor 2y ago
  Yep. And the highly-rated people will be the ones who act the most arrogantly, and they will be paid $650-1.8M-3.7M+ USD/year. They will be big fish in small pods but not as smart, clever, or as irreplaceable as they believe themselves to be. But they will shoot down everyone else's ideas, be disinterested in learning anything new, refuse meetings, take credit for others' work, and tell other people what to do and how to do it.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > The assumption of stack ranking is that the good people will survive each round of purging. It's my understanding that Amazon does not do stack ranking. What they do is more insidious. They force people out in a process that consists of promoting people as a pretext to apply harsher performance evaluation criteria while comparing your performance directly with veteran, well established engineers. To make matters worse, you have a limited influence over your career. You are evaluated based on your performance in your role which is dictated by the project you are assigned to. SDE1s are de-facto barred from switching teams, SDE2s can switch teams but can be a liability, SDE3s are few and far in between and have limited career options, and on top of that there's only principal engineer, which is already a role that needs full support and commitment from executives. The rule of survival was move up to SDE2 as fast as you could, and afterwards judiciously switch teams each year or so to a) avoid being held liable for your past work, b) ensure you were working on a team thay was unlikely to be subjected to cuts, and most of all c) do your best to not be considered for a promotion to SDE3 as that would mean you would be held personally responsible for each and every single failure and short-coming of the projects you'd be assigned to. In short, they push people up and out. The average tenure is shorter than 3 years. Let that sink in.

CapeTheory 2y ago

Amazon culture was on a downward trajectory for a while before this, but the decay really accelerated in 2022 and has only gotten worse. No amount of face-to-face contact will fix it, as there are now too few people (outside an elite group in Seattle) who really know what "Amazon's peculiar culture" really means.

k99x55 2y ago
"Corporate culture" has had a downward history everywhere since companies started weaponizing "culture" to demand a one-way loyalty from employees so as to extract more unpaid labor from them.
- pylua 2y ago
  Exactly. Company values, when it comes to those high up are essentially rules for thee and not for me.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
bubaumba 2y ago
Unlike Google Amazon was never known for its great culture. "decay" looks to be a global trend when managers finally "win" and start optimizing for short sited money making to please investors right now. Usually this happens after first generation of founders an visionaries leaves. Amazon, after short books selling startup period, was just a money making machine.

OfficeChad 2y ago

[dead]

iosguyryan 2y ago

Is parking free?

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Earlier: Over 500 Amazon workers decry "non-data-driven" logic for 5-day RTO policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009552