RTO = free layoffs
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.
It's also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren't going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
That's a feature, not a bug.
The best and brightest will challenge leadership. The shitty barely competent value engineer will say yes until they fuck up so bad they get promoted.
The first people to leave aren't going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
Yes. But some of them are also the most expensive ones, so when they leave costs go down. And we all know "numbers must go up" (=cost must go down).
So you're left with departments full of clock punchers who don't have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that's a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren't going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.
Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.
In my experience: the higher up the management chain, the higher the chance that they are just in for the bonuses - not for the company / industry. And those bonuses are always bound to these numbers which need to go up. When the numbers go down, these people are long gone.
Idk about the whole talk of having an excuse to shareholders, I don't think shareholders look into hey these offices are sitting unused I demand an explanation I think they care how much profit the company making and what are future predictions of profit.
No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren't using? Shouldn't we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don't need.
I hope a significant number of them get new jobs and quiet quit to get that double paycheck for as long as they can.
I hope so too. Although the IT job market isn't great right now, so I doubt the departures will reach a critical mass.
5 day RTO is a stealth layoff. This is a feature, not a bug.
It's like reverse stack ranking. They'll be left with the people that couldn't find another job.
and the people who know exactly how to waste time in an office.
That's literally what we all do in office. Just sit ans chat. It's country club. Productivity went up during covid.
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A.k.a. Twitter and the elon filtering moment
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Quiet firing, if you will.
Yep this has been the modus operandi for businesses who want to reduce workforce without having to pay for layoffs.
Like many companies, they overhired in the last 4 years. Some of these people are due years of severance (my offer listed 2months for every year after 1 year), not to mention the vested stocks and other bonuses granted during this insane hot hire period.
So how do you remove people not loyal to the company? The most hated mandate ever. Amazon is a company that doesn’t need people in the office. This is nothing more than screwing people over.
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Just as planned - Amazon Execs who aren't planning to rehire them anyway.
They do this shit to cull you.
It's sort of a strange approach, because this will leave you with the workers who can't find employment elsewhere.
Executives do not see workers as people with skillsets. They're numbers on a spreadsheet. And having ten highly paid workers quit "voluntarily" makes the numbers do good things.
Actually, they're not even numbers on a spreadsheet. They're data points in a graph. Executives don't have time to understand numbers, let alone people.
Executives do not see workers as people with skillsets.
Ain't that the truth. My company is thinking about replacing all of their technical staff with AI. That's going to be utterly hilarious to watch from the sidelines.
By the time that negative effect kicks in, the execs already cashed in their bonuses and are on their way out of the sinking ship
Exactly...they won't be picky about raises or working conditions.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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If it's anything like my work and their RTO a few things.
- hR is well aware of attrition rates and I bet they're through the roof
- Any new hires are probably not the best or brightest they could expect to hire
So expect quality at Amazon to decline. It may not be outwardly visible but mark my words for those that are still there it will devolve into a chaotic shit show of overworked employees that are left backfilling work for those who left and the incompetence that came in.
expect quality at Amazon to decline.
They'll have to dig a new basement for it to get any lower.
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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.
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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.
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Amazing.
They order people to work in different offices than before, far away from before, or in offices that did not even exist before. They order people to work in offices who have only worked at home before.
And they call it "return", and everybody seems to accept the audacity.
Nobody laughs out loud into their faces and calls them the dirty liars that they are.
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I really do wonder if Amazon will run out of people willing to work for them someday. Their approach assumes there is an infinite supply of workers to burn through. Given everything I’ve witnessed from the company, I’d never work there. Do they at some point poison the labor pool against them?
When I joined Amazon, I was told that for some roles in the US Amazon received more applications than corporate employees worldwide - so I assume 1M+.
That number has probably reduced significantly, given we've now had two rounds of RTO. I know some recruiters are really struggling to find external candidates to join, and rightly so, but I don't doubt that Amazon can find someone to fill these roles, or can find someone outside of North America or Europe to take that role.
The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say "I worked for FAANG". Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they'll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.
(FWIW, I've been at Amazon as a software engineer for close to four years now, and I've noticed zero improvement in opportunities afforded to me)
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That was probably the intent. It works as a soft layoff. Do something wildly unpopular, knowing that a bunch of employees will quit. The ones left will pick up the slack, because obviously if they had anywhere else to go they would’ve left with the first group.
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