• lilja@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    148
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Punkie@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      48
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.”

      • scarabic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      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

  • the_radness@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    75
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.

    • Lexam@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • kyle@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      2 months ago

      I agree. I’m in pre-sales working at an AWS partner and honestly our whole team is treated as dispensable.

      • roofuskit@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        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.

      • the_radness@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        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.

    • dufkm@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • _sideffect@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    57
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    2 months ago

    Never quit in these situations, or they win.

    Do the absolute fucking minimum you can, or even less so you piss off management, until they have to fire you, which they can’t outright as after a certain number of years they have to give warnings and trainings first.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      50
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      That’s stupid. Don’t get fired for cause, that only hurts you. Spend your time looking for a new job, then quit and leave ASAP.

      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        42
        ·
        2 months ago

        Split the difference, spend as much of your time on the clock job hunting and doing the bare minimum. Then quit without notice mid shift for the new job.

      • _sideffect@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        It’s not stupid as you put it. If you know the laws of where you live, it makes perfect sense.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      which they can’t outright as after a certain number of years they have to give warnings and trainings first.

      I mean, says who? There’s currently only one state in the union that requires cause before you can fire someone. The real issue with firing people is that without a documented cause, that person can collect state unemployment, and the number of people who go on state unemployment from a single company has a financial impact on that company.

    • rtxn@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      That only works in places with actual worker protection and labor laws, which disqualifies pretty much all of the USA.

      • GBU_28@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        I work with several European tech teams and when staffing issues happen the other devs absolutely have to carry the slack.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      There are many at-will states that can fire you on demand (if done carefully) and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      There are two ways to quit: How management wants you to or because you’re forming a union.

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    52
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    I don’t know about everyone else, but if that were my boss, they’d be severely underestimating my capacity for petty behavior.

    • Odelay42@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      37
      ·
      2 months ago

      This is the part not being reported in the news.

      Many of us are simply working half as much as we did when we were remote. It’s not worth trying to impress these people. They hate us.

      • travysh@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        2 months ago

        I don’t work for Amazon, but when my employer announced mandatory RTO I simply included travel time in my day. At home I could do 8 hours of pure work. RTO days were about 6 hours of work and 2 hours of commute.

  • Mystech@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    2 months ago

    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”.

    • Shard@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • Dayroom7485@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • evilcultist@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • billwashere@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 months ago

          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.

    • billwashere@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      2 months ago

      The “anonymous” survey asked this question with two choices: I agree or I’m looking for opportunities elsewhere

    • Trailblazing Braille Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • njordomir@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        2 months ago

        That’s what I don’t get though, these people seem to be delusional in that they think that they’re a hard worker and looooove in person, so therefore every hard worker loves in person and the chaff will quit. Then they act shocked when their high performers largely leave to pursue remote or hybrid options. It’s such a glaring inability to see people different from them as having any value.

  • buzz86us@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    2 months ago

    This makes zero sense… If you’re a cloud company why can’t employees be in the cloud

      • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        2 months ago

        But that’s something I don’t actually understand, since real estate would fall under the sunk cost fallacy. Ie, if you’ve invested in real estate, the cost is spent already, right? Whether someone comes in that building is irrelevant. The costs spent to maintain, heat, clean, power the buildings, on the other hand… It’s just not really obvious to me. Seems like fewer people would cost cheaper, no?

        • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          If a company has a lot of money in assets and those assets are worth less than before, the valuation of the company drops. This should mean lower share prices, which is basically the only thing a company cares about.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          The cost is spent, but the offices are still assets on the balance sheet.

          If demand for offices is lower then all companies that own offices will have to revalue theirs downwards. These impairments have a direct impact on the P&L of the company accounts. Better to force employees to use these assets (and pay their own costs to do so) than show a (greater) accounting loss.

      • buzz86us@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        as a client this this tells me they aren’t all that confident in their product

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    2 months ago

    Another company that lays off it’s talented people first, due to the meddling of a CEO where he has no business to.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    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.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        The toilets should be being cleaned regularly anyway, if they’re not you’ve just highlighted a major sanitation issue for the building.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      Why quit when you could get paid to sabotage the company from inside and maybe get a swipe at performing a bezonian head removal ?

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        Naw you just wait to get fired and then submit unemployment for the job changing past what was agreed with