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Do it during holiday season. Do it.
Alexa, tell me what "dead sea effect" means.
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.
Can the Amazon prime boss leave instead?
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”.
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.
Constructive dismissal says what?
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.
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.
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.
This makes zero sense.. If you're a cloud company why can't employees be in the cloud
Because real-estate is physical money.
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?
If you're using that real estate as collateral for loans, it needs to maintain its value, or you'll have to put up more collateral
The deals they had with various governments to get tax breaks if they built the office in their city are still a consideration. Amazon put governments of municipalities into a bidding war so they could have highly paid software engineers working in their city. They probably aren't going to get those tax breaks any more if most of those offices are empty.
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.
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.
as a client this this tells me they aren't all that confident in their product
I asked our CTO at a town hall if there were plans to improve the office my team got moved to because they moved us from the nice office to the city and the back to the previous area but a crappy office. Nope.
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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