Amazon tells managers they can now fire employees who won’t come into the office 3 times a week::Amazon shared new guidelines that give managers a template for terminating employees over RTO.
2020 - 2023 has really revealed just how little business leaders really have a clue about anything. They are all high-performers who push and push but don’t really have any idea what is important or not. What we really need is a ban on business bros lol.
Have you considered that lowering headcount via rto firings increases profits, which leads to short-term growth in the stock market, so bonuses? Sure, some people will lose their homes, but someone else got a new boat. When God closes a door, he opens a window 🙏
An anecdote:
My high-paying tech job wants us back 2 days a week. I intentionally bought a house near a train that will get me to the downtown office in about 15 minutes while many of my coworkers live in the distant suburbs where commuting will require a lot more time and effort.
Despite this, I STILL don’t go into the office. The biggest reasons:
- Nobody is there - it’s a ghost town.
- I’m far less productive while I’m there because I have to leave early to pick up my kids from school.
- My boss doesn’t go in at all - ever - due to extremely valid health reasons (his wife is undergoing cancer treatment).
- His boss moved out of state. Like way, way out of state. He’s got a nice office with a beautiful view. He doesn’t and can’t use it.
- My boss’s boss’s boss - (the CTO) moved to Florida and, rumor has it, lives full-time on his yacht.
I mean… at some point we just have to acknowledge that our giant, empty office space would be much better suited as housing.
It’s a punishment in the class war. The upper class think the peasants have it too good. You literally have the rich going on the news saying “a nice little recession” will straighten out workers.
business leaders are not high performers… The only people who do anything at all are direct team leaders - because they’re usually doing the same work as the team itself plus all the administrative bullshit.
Seriously I want leaders to go after any business that doesn’t understand how emissions work. And I don’t mean just fine them. I mean shut that shit down and then fine them.or shut them down til they can push out a business model showing they are saving emissions.
And if a number of ex employees end up on unemployment insurance if there’s repetitive reports of the same bad management the business gets hefty fines to support unemployment in general. Bad management is way out of hand and it’s time for that shit to foot the bill of the cost of making an unworkable environment and impacting entire neighborhoods that cannot work within a local company
High performers??? They don’t do shit
It’s all about unused office space and it’s value.
I seriously doubt this is the case, mostly because it doesn’t actually pencil out money-wise.
More likely, it’s a stealthy way to be able to lay people off without calling it a layoff.
Also, in-office employees are easier to control and monitor for bad managers.
I’d reckon it’s probably a bit of pile A a bit of pile B depending on the company location of the offices
Yeah, I bet it’ll be selectively enforced. The high performers (or people whose managers like them, anyway) can do whatever, but low performers or those whose managers dislike them get fired. Incidentally, that will surely have lots of bias, as selective enforcement always does.
I keep hearing people making this argument.
Is the assumption that Amazon is ignoring their finance dept and that this is driven by the sunk cost fallacy? “We dumped a bunch of money into this, therefore we should continue to move forward with it.”
I ask because the appraised value of property is based on what other’s will likely pay for it. If no one else is wants to pay a lot of money for my office space, it doesn’t matter if I have 1 employees or 10,000 employees in that building.
I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn’t.
Edited to add: these properties may become a liability on their books which would impact their ability to apply for or pay for loans, as well as other negatives for the company.
No company likes to have liabilities on the books, but to think that they would force an RTO for that reason alone doesn’t pass the smell check. It’s a more economical option to write off the loss and try your best to sublease the space, or attempt to get out of your lease early. That way, you’re no longer stuck with the costs once it’s done, and can make more money long-term.
We can also observe this happening in the real world: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/20/dropbox-hands-over-25percent-of-san-francisco-headquarters-back-to-landlord-.html
I doubt it’s just a singular reason they are forcing return to office.
It’s likely property value, micro managing , reducing head count and so on all play a role in jt
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I am not saying they are whole valid reasons. I am just giving examples of some of the reasons they might want people back in.
I love remote work and hope I can stay in it
Fuck these scum. End the monopoly and make wfh an environmental policy
This is a tangent, but you ever think about how arbitrary the week structure is? Like, if weeks were 6 or 8 days long, it would be a big shift in work-life balance regardless of how you split the days up. But thousands of years ago we decided on 7 and it just kind of stuck.
Assuming 8 hour days, here are some different splits for on and off:
- 3 on 1 off: working 25% of the time
- 5 on, 2 off: working 23.8% of the time
- 4 on, 2 off: working 22.2% of the time
- 5 on 3 off: working 20.8% of the time
- 4 on 3 off: working 19.0% of the time
This is, perhaps naively, assuming that employers wouldn’t just increase the number of days you’re working. Weeks are now 10 days long, and you work for 7 of them.
I tried to pick ratios that wouldn’t cause riots in the streets, haha. Interestingly, 7-3 is still less work overall than the current standard 5-2. I could get behind a 3-1-4-2 system.
It was because they saw 7 objects in the sky.
While this is totally shitty. What does this have to do with technology?
We are talking about Amazon corporate decisions, not Amazon technology solutions or anything, why is this here?
Amazon is a company in the technology sector. They might be a retailer but they are also a part of big tech and the foundation of much of the Internet. A large portion of their workforce are tech workers.
Articles like this are not focused on warehouse employees, they have to go into the office to do their jobs at all. This article is talking about people who don’t have to go into work to perform their job… Like tech workers.
So like it or not, this is tech news.
I’m afraid I simply don’t agree, Technology news, and news about people who have tech jobs are not exclusively the same thing. I get your point of view but it just doesn’t feel like it belongs here.
I think this community needs to have clear cut rules on what is and isn’t technology (as far as the admins decide.), and whatever they is ill shut up and follow it. Otherwise people like. E will continue to downvote this stuff as it simply doesn’t seem appropriate.
Yeah this community is just internet adjacent business news. Nothing to do with actual news about tech
Ok so cancel Amazon Prime. Got it.
Amazon died for me when they started to send out obviously used products as new and bitched during the refund process. Also that the portfolio of products is now even worse than ebay. It’s a bit like the seemingly unregulated play store
Where’s the non paywall version of this?
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I’ve been back in the office since June 2020. Not by choice either.
I envy these people
Every single time you go to that job, it was your choice.
3 times? My work will soon start making us come in 4 days a week and before the pandemic that was never an expectation. If it was a tough week to go in I had the freedom to work at home a few days and nobody but my manager gave a damn when I was there and when I wasn’t.
It’s a punishment in the class war. The upper class think the peasants have it too good. You literally have the rich going on the news saying “a nice little recession” will straighten out workers.
paywall
