Amazon warns workers to come back into the office::This week, a reminder email was sent to employees who didn’t work on-site at least three times a week.
Source: Work at Amazon
Most employees think this is just a form of layoff without severance, and many people are openly calling out the fact that the STeam are openly showing their contempt for their own workers with these actions, in a way that few companies have demonstrated.
Despite this… it’s Amazon. They’ve always shown contempt for their own workers through a culture that promotes stack ranking. The difference this time around is that it’s affecting a lot of people at once.
Lots of people are going to leave, and Amazon don’t give a fuck. They want them gone, they want costs to be reduced, and they will replace who they need to with people that will support these changes.
Not that it’s hurting them, but they’re permanently on my list of places I won’t even think about working. Everything I hear about their culture is just awful. It’s hard to imagine fellow tech professionals being browbeaten in all the ways I hear about, whipped like cattle. Just terrible. As long as I have other choices I’ll just steer miles around them, thank you very much.
Who the fuck even wants to work there anymore. It sounds like hell but people still sign up.
Three reasons, from what I understand:
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Amazon used to be a good place to move teams, and that includes locations/countries. A year ago, if I wanted to move from San Francisco to Berlin, all I needed to do was go through an informal transfer process, and Amazon would often handle everything.
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The pay is pretty good.
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Most importantly, a lot of people just assume that all the horror stories they hear won’t happen to them, or that the people that get PIP’d out “deserve it”. It’s ultimately a lack of empathy, in a system that’s designed to get people in and out after about 28 months. Some people might be lucky and not experience it, but ultimately Focus/Pivot comes for all - and sometimes it’s the most surprising choices…
