Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
I thought the same. Interesting strategy cutting the people who are good enough to get another job.
As long as it looks good on paper, somebody in higher management is getting a bonus for this.
To add to what others have replied, Amazon have an institutional belief that everyone who makes it through the Loop is better than 50% of existing staff.
It could be post-hoc rationalising of back-loaded share vesting, hire-to-fire, and their other many practices, but that’s the position. With that kind of thinking, it makes this behaviour, including it’s consequences, a no-brainer win:win to them.
Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they’re in for a very rude awakening. They’ll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They’re highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.
Problem is for a company like Amazon, even if the brain drain will result in obviously inferior customer experience, it could take years before that happens and for it to be recognized and for the business results suffer for it. In the meantime, bigger margins and restricted stock matures and they can get their money now.
Particularly with business clients, like AWS customers, it will take a huge amount of obvious screwups before those clients are willing to undertake the active effort of leaving.
Quality programmers
Bold of you to think that’s what they want.
They may not want them, but with how many people are switching to things like AWS, they may find they need them.
And it will ultimately cost them more to find new people when they realize that they’re pissing off their customers with their poor new hires.
I will be happy to watch them squirm when they come to this realization. Karma is a bitch, Amazon.
The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They’re playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.
They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.
Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.
100%
Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.
We’re only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We’re essentially a parasite. It’s not surprising that the most successful corporations are the most successful parasites. It’s just parasites, doing parasitic things, because they’re parasites… from the top down.
There has been efficiency gains throughout. Capitalism is amazing for that, far better than other systems.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
That and the fact the public hate externalities and don’t want them used at all never mind aggressively.
The problem is too many people. If standard of living is to increase then the resource requirement is due to massive unsustainable population growth.
They’re both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
The only billionaire I know of that is launching rockets is Elon Musk.
That’s just evidence that capitalism is efficient. Because SpaceX has revolutionised space travel making the only reusable rocket doing something all the government agencies said was impossible. NASAs new unbuilt rocket is using tech from the 1970 that they are going to throe away into the ocean on every launch.
The rest you say is meaningless. How you expect this robotic skyscrapers to be built? Some MIT masters project or some capitalist experiment?
Bezos also has a rocket company. Plus there’s Richard Branson. And others.. And then you have private jet travel, massive mega yachts, and countless other extravagances. For a certain class of billionaire, having a private rocket company is a vanity project. These rocket companies are vanity projects by rich sci fi nerds. Yes, they’ve done some really good technical work, but they’re only possible because their founders were willing to sink billions into them even without any proof they’ll make a profit.
What you are missing is that as people’s wealth increases, their resource use just keeps going up and up and up. To the point where when people are wealthy enough, they’re using orders of magnitude more energy and resources than the average citizen of even developed countries. Billionaires have enough wealth that they can fly rockets just because they think they’re cool, even if they have no real path to profitability.
And no, the hypothetical of the robot skyscrapers is not “meaningless.” You just have a poor imagination. To have that type of world we only need one thing - a robot that can build a copy of itself from raw materials, or a series of robots that can collectively reproduce themselves from raw materials gathered in the environment. Once you have self-replicating robots, it becomes very easy to scale up to that kind of consumption on a broad scale. If you have self-replicating robots, the only real limit to the total number you can have on the planet is the total amount of sunlight available to power all of them.
The real point isn’t the specific examples I gave. The point, which you are missing entirely, is that total resource use is a function of wealth and technological capability. Raw population has very little impact on it. If our automation gets a lot better, or something else makes us much wealthier, we would see vast increases in total resource use even if our population was cut in half.
We kicked “this quarter” thinking into high gear when Nixon permanently increased inflation.
in the long run
That’s a foreign concept for management, they only see one quarter at a time.
No, they see further than that. Sometimes their restricted stock takes a whole year to be released!
That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.
Well then bring it on. If feels too big to fail, but if (hypothetically) Amazon were to go under, the world would be a better place.
An awakening would mean they would analyze and understand the situation. They won’t. Amazon has and probably always had a bullish “my way or the highway” attitude - ask people what they think, pretend you care, then ignore everything they might say. Upper managers make decisions uniquely based off costs and short term vision, and are never held accountable for the consequences. I worked there for years and you really can’t imagine how bad the work culture is there, whatever you have in mind is worse in reality
This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.
Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.
The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.
There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.
There has been a swing in the business opinion
Depends on where you read that info, it tends to be 50/50 pro/against really.
Yeah it’s 50/50 because the executives really don’t like it, but the actual data supports remote work being far more efficient. They’re working really hard to cook the books to make it look like the opposite to appease the execs but they can only do so much. Give them a few more years to cherry-pick data and bury inconvenient results and they’ll be back to the same bullshit that justified productivity destroying (but cheap) choices like hot desking and open plan offices.
I think they do actually want to cut the high skilled talent. High skill means high pay, and now that they’ve achieved market dominance in pretty much every industry they’ve stuck their penis into they don’t need talent. Lower skilled, and therefore lower paid, employees can do just good enough to keep everything from burning down just long enough for the C-suite to get their bonuses and cash out. After that, who cares, they’re on to their next grift.
And they want people off the vesting ramp as early as possible.
Amazon does 5-15-40-40
I’ve… never heard of such a vesting schedule. Doesn’t everyone else pretty much do 25%/year ?
It’s precisely because their working standards are absolutely absurd and unsustainable, so a LOT of people bail before full vesting. AMZN HR intentionally structures the vesting schedule like this because they have numbers to prove it works out in the company’s favor.
Amazon is super stressful and I guess a lot of people quit the first few years. Maybe the 40% is to motivate them to stay for more hellish years.
I’m very happy not to work at Amazon.
Oh I get why they do it. I’m just surprised they can get away with it. Also they pay pretty damn well so I guess that helps.
yeah, the only problem is that this results in the best talent leaving, you’re stuck with people who have nowhere else to go. it’s one of those short-term profits kinda things, which is why Wall St loves it so much.
They have a name for it: Dead Sea Effect.
Ooh, that’s good.
Burn, baby, burn!
I know some tech workers who really want to return to office full time along with everyone else. They miss the old way. It’s not everyone, and it’s definitely not me, but it’s a legitimate position. I guess now they know where they can go.
I honestly don’t see an issue with the people going back to the office because they want to work from there. I just want others to stop trying to force me to do the same.
This sort of thing seems to have always been a plague with a set of the extroverted sort. They seem to feel the whole world should for whatever reason cater to what makes them happy and us introverted types that do not like the social activities that they do should be made to partake anyway. For our own good. Yet the world is ending when those same extroverted people have to spend a large chunk of time alone or simply being quiet.
The older I get the less patience I have for those sorts of games. Which could become an issue for me professionally I suppose.
Exactly, which is why I really like my current setup, which is 2x in office, 3x WFH. I think being in-person has advantages, but I also feel much more productive when I WFH because I don’t have all of the little interactions at the office (i.e. coworker wanting to get coffee together, quick question from a team member about something irrelevant, etc). I get into better flow at home, but being available is also important for others on the team.
Honestly, I would hesitate to take a full-remote position, but I am definitely not interested in full-on-prem either. I need at least 1-2 days at home to get actual work done, ideally 3.
I can focus a lot better when I’m at the office. I guess part of it is that I’m surrounded by people who are also working. There’s too many distractions at home.
Having said that, my employer only requires us to go into the office three days per week, which I think is a good compromise.
I would guess the principal reason here is to socialize, and there’s probably other solutions to this. I would also guess that for some the socializing during the day doesn’t havehave to be with the same company’s coworkers
I legitimately do not understand how people can spend that much time at home and not go stir crazy. That doesn’t mean I want to force people into a situation because of my preferences, but gaddamn, having no context switch between work and home feels way more dystopian to me.
If you have an extra bedroom that you can use exclusively as an office, it’s pretty great. When you’re in your office, that’s “work”, and the rest of your house is “not work”.
The context switch is what you make it. My switch is a daily ritual whereby I sit in a specific place and read for an hour with a little background music and a drink (if so inclined). That symbolically “closes the door” to the office, even though my flat isn’t big enough for separate work/rest spaces.
My company announced RTO the same day Amazon did. The Union is up in arms, but honestly the powers that be are handling it pretty well. My boss is happily going to the office for a couple of days a week. She’s a million miles from enforcing it on us though. Exceptions are already in place for people like me (3 hour TGV ride from the nearest office) and even a few people who just said “I really don’t want to”.
I’m sure a few people will leave and not be replaced, but perhaps they were just dead weight anyway. I couple that I know about definitely are.
I love going to the office. I started renting a place nearby to do just that.
But I don’t want my coworkers to be forced to show up. That’s silly.
I know some people like this too.
To be fair, a nontrivial number of them are middle/upper management, but it’s not the entirety of the people I know who want this.
The answer isn’t work-from-home, nor is it return-to-office. The answer is: give people a choice.
If you want to work from home, cool, we don’t need to maintain your cubicle, and/or, we can hire more people without needing more office space. If you want to return to office, cool, your space is waiting for you.
A few will retain the ability to switch back and forth, but the majority of people I’ve talked to about it, either want office or home exclusively. Very few want hybrid.
Here’s the problem though. When everybody is allowed to choose what they want, people who prefer remote get remote. And people who prefer the office get a ghost town. So by definition, personal choice precludes one group from having access to the thing they would choose.
People who want to work in the office want to work with other people. It’s not just about having a desk in a high rise. People learn from other people and are energized by being around them. There are efficiencies to being able to talk without zoom lag and all. Someone else characterized this as extroverted people and their annoying needs. But I think it’s more than that. Working with others in person certainly has real benefits.
Remote work means no one gets those, ever.
I’m a remote guy myself and hope never to go back. But I can see another side to it.
I’m also a remote guy and I see both sides as well.
The critical assumption you’ve made in this example is that a large majority will choose to be remote, so there won’t be anyone in the office for the in-office people to work with.
I don’t believe that’s as much of a problem as you seem to imply it will be. The problem with the argument is that it’s all assumption and opinion based. To my understanding, there hasn’t been any reliable data produced on what percentage of the population wants in-office and/or remote to be permanent.
Relative to that, you’d also have to take into consideration for populated the company is, and how many people would actually be in the office, before making a determination whether it would be a ghost town or not.
Additionally to that, not everyone wants in-office work for the social aspects of it. Some people’s home life is too chaotic so they prefer in-office, to separate themselves from the chaos of home, and focus on work. It’s not a desire to connect that drives them to the office (pun might be intended here), but rather a lack of outside distraction from their home life while they try to “earn a living”.
There’s also the consideration of who is at home all the time. A homebody spouse, such as a stay-at-home mom/dad, may appreciate having space from their spouse to get things done, as they appreciate the space away. Having such separations can be very healthy and beneficial for relationships, which can also play a role IMO.
The fact is, not everyone is doing it as a social and/or company culture thing. The percentages of people who want it for company culture vs the people who want to for personal reasons, is also an unknown metric.
So in all, at present, we don’t know how many overall people want remote/in-office work, and we don’t know what their motivations for making that choice are. Without that data, it’s difficult to make a value proposition about a decision.
Company owners don’t really care about the metrics, since, during COVID and mandatory isolation, everyone was WFH, and productivity was overall increased. Whether that was because people now had 24/7 access to their work systems, or because people were overall happier about it in average, and were simply more productive due to that, is anyone’s guess.
I appreciate the comment, but there’s a lot more in play than simply socializing and company culture.
I don’t think these people are typically pro-choice.
Fair enough. All the business owners I’ve met have said something to the effect of “my way or the highway” about it. So I personally just aligned myself with a job where the bosses “my way” is the way I prefer.
In my case, work from home.
My current job doesn’t even have a physical office. We’re all work from home. I like it.
I’m a bit more pro hybrid but only because I feel new people need a steady mentor and training at the start of thier careers at the company. How do you training works for new people on full remote?
