- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20972735
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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”.
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.
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.
If the cloud is so great why can’t you work remote?
Do not give Bezos ideas about uploading brains to the cloud. He would make AWS CloudEmployee, an employee-as-a-service product that lets you scale your business up or down, without expensive layoffs and bad PR.
He totally would. Tech bros reinventing the concept of a temp agency. How revolutionary and disruptive! /s I worked at a company once that would hire temps to work alongside the regular employees when attrition was too bad to meet headcount. We direct employees were getting $10-15/hr for a $25-35/hr job (higher for some roles) and the temps were getting even less, usually because they were desperate or unemployable in the mainstream for whatever reason. I more than doubled my salary when I left there.
I lean more and more towards us all being guilty for every time we’ve put up with this shit as employees, tolerated other employees being treated poorly, or done business with a company that mistreats its employees. Exploiting your employees should elicit the same response as a fraud scandal. We watched them build these prisons and took money to put our smiling faces at the face of their customer experience. We all tell ourselves we can’t do anything alone but we are so disconnected socially that only the already unionized few can truly demand their employers compliance.
You mean Amazon is bad to their workers?
“Amazon employees says cloud boss can eat shit”
Why quit when you could get paid to sabotage the company from inside and maybe get a swipe at performing a bezonian head removal ?
although it’d be nice, that’s how you end up in prison.
never fuck with a rich assholes money.
Naw you just wait to get fired and then submit unemployment for the job changing past what was agreed with
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.
“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.
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.
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 a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn’t have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.
We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It’s not a big deal personally - I live close and I’m older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don’t see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.
That’s the problem. And I worry for your job getting complex as the most capable people leave abruptly*.
- If they can fire people abruptly, the Golden Rule says they should expect blindsides.
Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?
Do it during holiday season. Do it.
Why don’t they just keep working from home and get fired? Instead of having to quit themselves?
Getting fired with cause doesn’t come with severance and looks bad on a resume.
You don’t put that you were fired on your resume though…
HR departments aren’t that lazy…
No, but it’s illegal for them to do much of anything except confirm employment periods.
Sort of like how it is illegal for companies to fire or mistreat workers for trying to unionize?
The uncomfortable truth is that our laws protect the rich (including their companies), but rarely bind them and bind workers, but rarely protect us.
Getting fired with cause doesn’t come with severance
Yea this is fucked and needs to be fixed.
Constructive dismissal says what?
Ya, sure. Have fun with that legal battle versus amazon.
It’s the US, they get fired on a whim…
Alexa, tell me what “dead sea effect” means.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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….
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!
I’m sure the other leg can make up for it, and it should be grateful for the extra work.
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?
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.
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.
Ok waste paper, mhmm, coffee, yep, microwave, good thinking—
FORM A UNION
Woah, woah calm down Satan.
This guy RTOs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.
“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
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.
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.
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.
