- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20972735
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Well, yeah. Isn’t the whole point of these foolish office mandates to get people to quit? That way they can reduce their workforce without the cost and negative press of another round of layoffs.
Probably. But this way you have no control on who quit, with a good probability that are the better ones.
True, but execs see statistics, not people. And maybe it’s cheaper to rehire the good ones with a higher salary than deal with severance packages.
Layoffs are not bad press. Not to the shareholders, the only ones who matter to these types. I used to think “oh, layoffs mean the company isn’t doing so good,” but shareholders see “they reduced cost but lost no customers, thus increasing value of the company should it be sold.”
This is true, and it’s weird because these same companies used to hire like crazy because only growth mattered. Finally real financial discipline is being applied. The tech company I work for is open about the fact that revenue-per-employee is something like half of FAANG companies and they want that to change.
I hate that that’s the case.
I’ve been trying to lose weight, so I chopped off my leg just below the knee. I’m several pounds down, and I didn’t have to stop eating even a calorie. It’s amazing.
The only issue is that now I don’t have a leg and exercise may be difficult….
Just sell the body to some other rube and move into a new one that still has both legs. It’s easy. What are you, poor?
I’m sure the other leg can make up for it, and it should be grateful for the extra work.
Yeah but that’s FUTURE you’s problem, not current you, so it’s totally fine!
And you’re still alive right? /s. Akin to the people who said Musk’s firing of twitter employees was a genius move because the site was “still running” after all that.
Yup! And anyone can cauterize a wound, so you don’t even need the extra expense of a hospital trip!
Go into the office and waste every resource you can.
Plug in a fan + heater + aquarium + massage pad at your desk and leave everything on constantly even when you leave
Print every email and throw it in the trash.
Make coffee 50x a day and pour it down the sink
Flush a whole roll of TP every hour
Leave sinks on in the bathroom
Use entire tubs of soap to wash your hands
Turn on the microwave for hours at a time
Heat/cool office thermometer to force HVAC into overdrive
Open new browser windows until your computer crashes and repeat until the network goes down
Company wide meme emails that everyone participates in (team building) that crash servers and dominate inboxes
Pour sugar/crumbs everywhere so there’s pest problems
FORM A UNION
(nuclear option) introduce bedbugs to all your bosses offices
FORM A UNION
Ok Tyler Durden, that’s about the only reasonable proposal.
All that stuff together is probably only one salary per team, except for the Union. I think the Union is the winning idea.
Bedbugs in executive offices is best. Make them feel the pain.
You forgot the most important one: deliver just enough to not get fired, but way less than you did before RTO. Then point to the stats and show the massive productivity drop after RTO.
Ok waste paper, mhmm, coffee, yep, microwave, good thinking—
FORM A UNION
Woah, woah calm down Satan.
This guy RTOs.
negative press
pretty fucked up that quiet firing via RTO bullshit is less negative press than just laying people off
It’s just less visible/explicit. It’s still bad press when it gets noticed and called out like in this thread, it’s just sneakier.
For this kind of thing to stop, people need to get real. We need someone to take it for the team and crowbar this guy’s knees.
Words don’t have meaning to these people. Logic, Reasoning is beyond comprehension.
Aren’t we at a point finally where maybe after so much debating, arguing, compromising and negotiating that has fallen through that maybe a lick of violence is the answer?
I can tell you if we took a crowbar to at least 10 Executives, throw 5 CEOs out from the highest windows and entrap 20 middle managing power-tripping pricks. I’m sure this would be a huge U-Turn for these people.
Why commute to work when you can just become a terrorist and spend all your time in prison?
Do you get off work for Labor Day?
If you do… Maybe next year you should take that time to read up on the history of all of those luxuries (yes, luxuries. And when they’re gone you’ll realize how many you did have), and how we were able to obtain them.
Do you like weekends? Do you like the concept of the 8 hour work day? The concept of a minimum wage? People literally died for us to have these things enshrined in law.
If you don’t get off Labor Day, well…
If you want to look outside the US, have you heard of May Day (AKA International Workers Day)? Or even fucking Bastille Day if you want to really go back? Take a look at the bloody histories of these holidays when you have a chance.
This was literally the only way we got to where we are. And now those things people literally died for are being stripped away from us and we are doing nothing.
Boiling the entire worker’s rights movement down to bashing some CEO’s kneecaps in a parking garage
Sounds to me like you’re the one oversimplifying things here…
True, the post I responded to called for at least 10 execs:
I can tell you if we took a crowbar to at least 10 Executives, throw 5 CEOs out from the highest windows and entrap 20 middle managing power-tripping pricks. I’m sure this would be a huge U-Turn for these people.
Personally i think there’s a bit more to worker’s rights movements
I did not make that original comment, did I? Maybe you interpreted it as a call for violence, but my interpretation was using hyperbole to make a point. Though I would not have made it that way.
I named several holidays that exist to commemorate various worker’s rights movements (all of which have bloody histories). I’m not going to do the work for you and explain every single one of them, but you can easily go to the wiki pages and learn a ton of shit about it.
It is not the job of internet strangers to educate people. But if someone who wasn’t aware of the history of Labor Day decides to check out the wiki because I mentioned it in a comment, then that’s a win in my book.
As you can see, I responded to that comment. You seem to have at least some acknowledgement that maybe it wasn’t quite what you were going for and must therefore have been hyperbole. I took a more pessimistic view.
But yes, I’m aware some movements have violent elements to them. The ones we remember with reverence have other elements to them as well.
People literally died for us to have these things enshrined in law.
How many of those people were bosses?
Well I guess in your world view, it’s okay for them to steal everything out from you both physically and mentally even if it’s illegal. But to do anything back, then it’s just unfair. Pffft…
You say that but that’s literally how we got all the ‘good’ stuff we enjoy as employees now, in the US at least. Guys wbacj then literally went to war against the bosses and physically forced them to the metaphorical table.
or they could fuck up key services with delayed code breaks before leaving. Programmers working for amazon should consider adding bullshit in the software and saying it was chatgpt
Go into the office and clog all the toilets.
Don’t clog the toilets. It’s not the c-suites who have to clean that up.
If you do, leave a tip with a note apologizing that they got caught in the crossfire.
Don’t clog the toilets. It’s not the c-suites who have to clean that up.
Nah, use cement, let the C-Staff pay for the plumbers/construction, they’d be more than happy to help out.
The toilets should be being cleaned regularly anyway, if they’re not you’ve just highlighted a major sanitation issue for the building.
What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?
The organizers would soon learn why we invented the undetectable heart attack gun.
Hopefully, they would start a rival company. That would be fascinating to see.
this sounds dangerously like communism, friend. Freedom is where you do what the corporate bosses want.
What if 37,000 employees sign union cards same day?
Watch Amazon sue them or something lmao
Nice window behind him there. Good and high up.
Rich fucks are pushing for Russia, why not take the most Russian thing and put it to use. Good call.
He pointed to Amazon’s principle of “disagree and commit,” which is the idea that employees should debate and push back on each others ideas respectfully
That’s all fine and dandy for ending debate about a stupid roadmap feature, but “disagree and commit” is a different story when you’re asking people to spend 3 hours unpaid in a car everyday.
As a long time Amazon employee, disagree and commit essentially works like this:
Employee: “I’m not convinced this is the best way to do something”
Manager: “Noted, now stfu and do what I say”
I’m 47. I’m not a boomer (although I’m probably hella-old compared to most here) and I’d just like to say: What a bloody bunch of boomer-bosses.
“Have you tried disagreeing on a call! It’s hard!”
Grow up man, use the hand up feature and state your case. I work in a fully remote business and we have better meetings here than any office based meeting I’ve ever been in. Calendars are public, confluence is prevalent, slack is the lifeline (thankfully very little email) for everything; with a bunch of “banter”, hobby channels etc. We start every large meeting with a “one personal and one professional highlight” before we commence. I know the people here better than I’ve ever done my office based colleagues.
They are going to regret this. I do not know any developer who would prefer 5 days in the office. None. It’s not like Amazon’s compensation was that high. I really genuinely don’t understand how they expect to recruit.
They are going to regret this.
I really hope they do. But now is a good time to put the squeeze on devs. Lots of people are having a hard time finding a software job and they’ll be extra reluctant to do a mass exodus.
They are going to regret this?
A company doesn’t remember, and the people who are actually responsible don’t have regrets cuz the other option was to hand over control to someone else (hopefully more qualified).
Myeah I know what you mean, but the people that get associated with a bad decision at the highest level will usually end up being told by the board before they’re let go. It’s all in private, but in my experience those discussions are reasonably frank.
The board doesn’t “let go” of people willing to do a hatchet job, they hire them into their other companies to do the same. “Failing upwards” is a term that comes to mind.
Is that an opinion or backed by facts? I’ve never seen someone fired from a C-level role only to be hired into an investor’s other investment.
The point is they don’t get fired for laying off staff.
Yup. We recently had a complaint that a collaborative meeting was difficult for people on call, so our solution was to make it 100% remote. The meeting is still collaborative, but now everyone has an equal opportunity to participate.
We do 2x in office, 3x WFH, and it’s the perfect ratio IMO. Value of in-person time:
- questions get answered quickly - easy to tell if someone is available for a quick question, and faster response than Slack
- in-person collaboration - screen sharing works, but actually being able to point and type has a ton of value
- casual discussions - chat about upcoming projects over lunch or a coffee break long before they’re actually important, which can make future meetings smoother
All of that can be done remotely, and we certainly do a fair amount of that, but it’s nice to have a little in-person time. That said, my WFH days are sacred because that’s when I actually get work done.
Yep the 2 in 3 out is what we do. We do have one day where we all try to be in (Tuesday) to just get the face to face time. Seems to working for us. Plus since most of the conversations are on slack, I can go back and verify what I thought was said. That’s SO convenient.
We do TW in office, MThF WFH. I don’t see a point in coming in on different days, so if you have to miss Tuesday or Wednesday for some reason, you don’t have to make it up later. We occasionally have a company meeting on one of the other days, in which case we’ll often agree on which other day is optional (or we just come in 3 days that week).
And yeah, it is super nice.
The worst meetings are the ones with people in a meeting room and people online. All in person or all dialled in (even if from an office desk).
These people aren’t interested in hearing dissenting opinions. I’m sure they’ve already heard arguments for it. They just don’t care. They’d rather cut costs by doing something many people won’t tolerate so that they leave and then figuring it out after the fact.
Ironically I’ve found it’s harder for people to run away in remote, people don’t disappear from their desks and you don’t have to chase them down. If they don’t message back and it’s urgent, you call and if they don’t pick up a call and haven’t marked themselves as such something’s up. People are extremely dilligent about making sure they use status’ due to the knowledge that people will assume that way.
Yeah I’m way more available when working from home, since I can get my nicotine fix at my desk and I can’t do that in the office. I need to get up and walk around to get the blood flowing, in the office I think it would be weird to walk a few laps around the cubicle to do this, so I end up being further from my desk more. At home I’m basically always close enough to hear my computer make a ding when I get a message. And if there’s an urgent issues that requires attention off hours… sorry not much I can do to help you when I’m on a bus transiting to and from work.
An office is also a great place to hide away as “busy”; shuffling around, a bit of time at desk, join a meeting and say nothing, coffee, lunch, shuffling, another meeting with low contribution and you’re gone. Doing nothing is just as easy, and less assailable, in an office.
Almost as if there’s a reason that C-suite level people are so adamant about returning to office…
This line of reasoning is baffling anyway. Amazon is spread out over multiple geographical locations, it’s not like remote meeting will go away
I do know a few devs who prefer 5 days in the office. But they’re absolutely the minority.
Personally, I try to go once a week, but I usually don’t because I dread having a day with 50% my normal productivity.
It’s just so noisy all the time in there. Open space and really high ceilings for “collaboration”…
Yeah and for that minority, they could still go into the office 5 days a week.
My previous boss that found family members too distracting at home so he came in 5 days. But he was cool and told us "yeah don’t worry about coming in the days HR is telling you to, I come in every day and hardly anybody is here any way. " Oddly enough, most of the time we actually did come in on the days HR said because we didn’t want to get him into trouble for it.
It’s almost like if the bosses aren’t complete assholes, people will actually want to come into the office more.
I think you might be surprised. There’s literally dozens of us gen-x’ers on here. (I’m 53).
Luckily I work for a university and the hybrid thing is still going strong. Honestly I tend to get more done when I’m at home because the social aspect of being at work is very distracting for someone with ADHD like me.
And I hope they do regret it. The only managers I’ve seen that push for the RTO thing are the micromanagers who think they are necessary for productivity. News flash, they aren’t. The best managers set expectations, shield their employees from the bullshit above them, give them the appropriate tools and work environments to be successful, and trust them to do what is necessary.
And yes I’d never work for a Google or an Amazon. You’re a cog, a disposable piece of machinery.
“Have you tried disagreeing on a call! It’s hard!”
When it’s an online meeting, they’re worried about it potentially being recorded. So what they’re really saying is that they can’t verbally abuse employees without there potentially being evidence of it.
That strikes me as a bit of a leap.
The CEO of Zoom explictily stated that he felt in zoom meetings people were being too “friendly” and not willing to have “debate”.
Why would it be bad for employees to be friendly? What employees want to have unfriendly debates in meetings? I think it’s just managers that want that. What kind of “debate” do managers want? Why do they not want meetings to be “friendly”? Methinks they just want to yell at employees and don’t feel comfortable doing it in zoom meetings for some reason…
But the leap you’re making is between a single statement from one CEO and the nebulous “they”.
I’ve been pretty close to billionaire CEOs in my career and certainly the ones I’ve come across have been well equipped to handle the job, well adjusted and well meaning.
Now you’re talking about CEOs as a nebulous they.
I’m talking about a CEO that said things similar to what an amazon exec said under an article about what that amazon exec said.
Also I work in software development. There has been a clear uptick in negativity towards developers where I work, which happens to be in a similar field to the one in the article.
I’ve also worked with AWS, and I can tell you for sure, they can’t afford to lose their best talent. Their system is pretty janky in many places and their boss should be putting more effort in making better software instead of playing games about forcing people to sit in a specific chair 5 days per week.
I said “the ones I’ve come across”. Thats as “leap free” as I can make that statement.
I agree re AWS; they’ve already got super disgruntled staff and they definitely cannot afford to lose good staff from this.
It’s tripping me up you had to point out you’re not a boomer instead of just saying you’re from Gen X.
On Lemmy, anything above 30 is a boomer, so I thought I’d start by pointing it out :)
Absolutely right. But the thing is that many so-called leaders will no longer have a raison d’être if there are no more unnecessary meetings and all that fuss. Many of them do nothing all day but sit in meetings, achieve nothing and still feel very important. That’s the misery of the world of work: it’s not usually the best who get into management positions, it’s not the most qualified and certainly not the ones who work the hardest. It’s the most unscrupulous, those who pass off the work of others as their own, people who would never achieve anything on their own or in a small company that can’t afford to waste salaries on froth-mongers. LinkedIn makes it clear how this all works, I think: there, too, it is not the competent people who really understand their work who have the most success, it is the busybodies, the networkers and narcissists. If the competent people set the tone, there would be no discussion about office duties in an IT company. It’s only held on to so that managers can live out their fantasies of omnipotence and post nonsense on LinkedIn.
At the all-hands meeting, Garman said he’s been speaking with employees and “nine out of 10 people are actually quite excited by this change.”
Just imagine the conversation between the CEO of AWS and some random employee.
„What do you think about the return-to-office policy I propose, Cog #18574?“ „Great idea Mr. Garman sir, really smart move from your team. Incredible thinking and leadership from you Mr. Garman.“
continues to tell people that 9/10 employees he talks to are excited to return to office.
He has to be straight up lying. There’s no way 9/10 are excited to be ordered back into the office. If that were the case, they’d have been in the office already.
It’s not like there’s any meaningful consequence if he is lying.
The ten surveyed were already in the office voluntarily.
That’s a very good point that I’ve never really thought of. It’s not like anybody was keeping them from going back into the office. If they wanted five days a week, they would already have been there five days a week.
If 9/10 were already voluntarily coming into the office every day, I could see it. Of course it would only be 9/10 of the people he bothered to speak to it about, and maybe he only spoke to people that were already there.
As to why they would care if they were already there, well one guy in my team goes in every day of his own accord. He applies pressure to everyone on my team to be there with him every day, in spite of the stated WFH policy. So everyone but me goes in every day because I’m the only one that is willing to disappoint him. I’m reasonably certain that guy would love a forced into the office every day mandate, to force me to be there too. Then he could stop making passive aggressive comments about how people who didn’t come in must not care about the work as much as they should at every opportunity.
The “anonymous” survey asked this question with two choices: I agree or I’m looking for opportunities elsewhere
9 out of the 10 he talked to are brown nosers and tell him what he wants to hear.
Unless they were preselected micromanagers who like to bully their employees.
Nobody I’ve EVER talked to wants 5 days in the office anymore. 2-3 tops. Even 3 levels above me don’t.
The other 1/10 gets fired for not being a team player.
Yet another thinly veiled stealth lay-off by a technology company. Amazon’s cloud boss Matt “The Prat” Garman will indeed see some departures, as intended and desired. However, that first wave will be of their most talented, who feel confident they will land on their feet elsewhere, leaving those that simply cannot leave (yet) or those that will cozily under perform. When Amazon applies the inevitable followup reductions (subjectively based on their internal review process) to remove the latter, and the former buckle under the load or also leave, Amazon will be left with lower-middle talent at best.
The more I see of business “strategy” among this layer of “leadership”, the more I’m convinced it is just a game of Jenga with talent, resources, infrastructure, security, quality, etc; pulling out as many pieces as possible in the drive for short term/sighted gains until a company collapses under its own dysfunctional “efficiency” and “success”.
This is absolutely it. The C-suite and senior management are made up of sharp people. They absolutely know this will trigger an exodus and a large bag of fire-able workers. They don’t care that they’re likely to lose a bunch of talented, hardworking staff. Its all been accounted for. At worst the results of a mass exodus will only impact their bottom line in a few years. They just need this years numbers to look good and line to go up.
It’s the culmination of “next quarter is someone else’s problem”.
The mentality that the future is always someone else’s problem is proving to be the biggest weakness of capitalism and our species.
Shocker.
Funniest to me in this kind of debate is having my N+1 manage us from across the country, having two team members in another town, and somehow, my ass being at home 15km from the office makes any difference at all to the daily life of the team? It doesn’t. My actual manager, the dude giving us our marching orders, doesn’t care. Shit, our N+1 doesn’t care either, since he’s almost always remote himself!
Only people I’ve seen actually care seem to be HR, for whatever reason.
I don’t even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.
HR only cares because they’re told to make a policy and it’s their job to enforce it.
I don’t even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.
Companies like Amazon got major tax breaks and free land from governments to build these office sites. Governments gave these incentives with the expectation that it would generate economic activity around those sites. But if everyone is working from home those offices aren’t delivering on the promised economic activity.
And also they spent a lot of money on those offices and so want them to be used. It’s hard for whoever decided to build that office and the government officials that gave all the tax incentives towards it to admit that conditions have changes and all of that was for no significant benefit. It sucks to realize something you put in a lot of work into had no real benefit. Most people just have to accept that. But if you’re in a position of power you can make people do things that will make your project look like it had a successful outcome.
aren’t delivering on the promised economic activity
There doesn’t exist a company that gives a flying turd fuck about a government’s revenue. Particularly not if they took tax breaks to reduce that revenue in the first place.
Depending on the agreements they made, they might lose those tax breaks… and they do care about that.
“It sucks to realize something you put in a lot of work into had no real benefit”
Everyone who worked for Amazon has this thought.
Consequences aside, he has a totally valid point. They own the business, they are the boss, and they can decide. People might not like it, but in the end, it is their problem and people are free to change their job. People got a bit to comfortable lately and every single employee expects the company to be run just as they prefer. Even when you work fully remote, there are still people who find it really hard and stupid as they never get to see their collegues and spend the entire day just staring at the monitor. You will never make everyone happy, so why bother complaining. The decision has been made, take it or leave it.
The capitalist sits and laughs on their piles of gold while enjoying their immense power, one day in a not so distant future they will hold no power and their wealth will not save them from the righteous anger of the workers they once oppressed
What immense power? You can hand in your resignation and all that power, money and piles of gold suddenly mean nothing when you don’t have the basic component that makes the gears turn. Workers are also not oppressed, because workers can quit if it’s not fitting for them. Staying there by free will to take the shit in is not oppression… We already have very mobile workforce that basically does job jumping every 2 years, and people are having less and less issue with simply quitting. So what is exactly the problem for the worker, expect that they want to work in a company, but on THEIR terms, and not the company terms?
Not defending Amazon in any way, but I think the playing field is quite level right now between the employer and employees. Both are free to make decisions, both are free to work together or part ways. So I am not seeing an issue other than the worker wanting to control how the company is run.
Mmm boot. Tell me your opinions on the French or American revolutions next. No one was oppressed under a monarchy were they?
Guess we should all be unemployed not to be oppressed.
Nobody is saying what they are doing is illegal. And complaining is what people do to vent, you don’t have to read it.
It’s seems par the course for Amazon to just treat employees as disposable, and they’ve burned so many regions’ working populations’ proverbial bridges that I recall LTT highlighting an article saying Amazon can’t find people to employ because they’ve already cycled through everyone.
Anecdotally, I’m suddenly getting recruiters from AWS asking to interview me, and it all makes sense now. They want to replace the remote workers with new people who don’t complain. Fuck that, and fuck them if they think people should be apathetic to this strategy.
Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.
I agree. I’m in pre-sales working at an AWS partner and honestly our whole team is treated as dispensable.
I have been laid off from every job (5 in total) since the pandemic. We are a subhuman commodity. Companies that are hiring now are exploiting the market by offering lower salaries.
Meta and Amazon are in their hiring season and they’ll start their layoffs again next spring or summer. And somehow, everyone forgets this fucked up cycle keeps happening in perpetuum.
We need to stop being afraid of mentioning the U word. We need better protection and rights as employees.
At Amazon literally every employee is dispensable. They have a firing quota.
Edit: to be clear I’m talking about the Amazon divisions outside the warehouse. They make managers fire a certain percentage of people on a regular basis.
“Skilled labor” is such a bullshit concept
There are jobs that take weeks to learn, jobs that take years to learn, and there are even jobs that take a decade+ to learn. You ain’t putting the three-week old newbie in the latter two roles.
That’s true, but it devalues other labor which can be similarly/more difficult or skilled. I skimmed this article, but it seems to convey what I mean:
https://www.shrm.org/executive-network/insights/reshaping-narrative-time-retire-term-unskilled-laborI understand what people mean when they say “skilled labor” and I don’t think it’s intended negatively normally fwiw
Depending on your country, that is the norm. Engineers here have at least 2 national unions to choose from, finance have a couple of unions, same with teachers, admin staff, etc. etc.
As usual, this is probably just US being victim of 'merican exceptionlism.
And they are smart enough to put us at the very bottom of the management ladder, even though we’re not actually management. That way we can’t legally unionize. In the U.S. at least.
That way we can’t legally unionize. In the U.S. at least.
This must vary state-by-state, or have exceptions, because I could name examples of them (but I would rather not dox myself).
It’s not every company, but that is what mine did. We’re “management” but we don’t manage anyone.
Classifying employees as management without having actual management duties is a violation of federal labor law. You might be owed back wages/overtime. Could be worth looking into. A class action lawsuit against a previous employer I had led to hundreds of employees getting checks for thousands of dollars, even after lawyers took their fee.
Some technical jobs can be legally classified exempt from overtime. That is different than being classified as management.
They just give us the PM title and call it a day. No court is going to take that seriously and allow a massive lawsuit.
Given how “business-friendly” the US has become, I imagine there are all sorts of loopholes that only work in favor of the corporation.
There doesn’t need to be loopholes anymore. The SC will just blatantly rule in favor of companies.
In case anyone has missed it, they’re done with loopholes, done with being sly and coy. They are saying the quiet parts, they are marching proudly, they are confident and unafraid. We need to make them afraid again.
The right wing and its corporate masters are done hiding in shadow. Loopholes and subterfuge are for chumps when you can just change the rules without consequence.
BuT nO OnE WaNtS tO WoRk AnYmOrE1
Yeah, when you’re having fun pissing off people, people are pissed off.
Who would have guessed?
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Why quit when you could get paid to sabotage the company from inside and maybe get a swipe at performing a bezonian head removal ?
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Naw you just wait to get fired and then submit unemployment for the job changing past what was agreed with
