this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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(page 2) 44 comments
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Generally? That's bad leadership.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Trying to make those yearly office space rentals worth it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Aren't they still cheaper if nobody uses them?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Maybe. Real estate is flaky game at best

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Inb4 my company follows suit. Just like they want to with IT, AI, Cloud infrastructure (we own our stack almost entirely).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Good guy Amazon: Makes employees return in-person to prevent them from using proprietary remote work software.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Maybe somebody has some insight into this: why does this succeed in getting people to quit, since that's the obvious gambit? Why do people not just refuse to come back and get fired for insubordination or whatever? Do you not get unemployment benefits for getting fired for that reason (ignoring that unemployment is a pittance compared to their salaries), or are they packaging these people out with attractive severances or something?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They need to find their next job first

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago

Because people need stable incomes and healthcare, so they start applying for jobs and get them. People aren't quitting to be unemployed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's usually just enough severance to make it worth it. It'll be like a month of pay maybe which is worth 6-8 months of unemployment.

And honestly...if they offer a month or two of health insurance on top, you have to take to avoid the cobra fees.

It's usually an easy choice to take severance.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Honestly, IDK. My company is moving their office slightly further away from me. This will add much more commute time because of the location though. I'm already looking for a new job but if I don't find one by then I'm certainly not going in. We worked 100% remote for over 3 years. I'll find out what the consequences are.

My situation will be a bit different though since the office location is moving. Seems unreasonable that they'd be able to deny unemployment because of that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Depending on the country you live in, you should check for mobility clauses in your contract. In many EU countries moving the location of your work requires an employer to come to a “reasonable” agreement with the employer or treat the request as a redundancy (with redundancy pay etc).

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago

Ok, but I'm still not going back to wearing pants.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago

That's gonna be a no, dawg.

[–] [email protected] 129 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

I enjoy how Amazon talks a big game about how great they are for the environment and their pledge to stop climate change, then they force workers to commute to the office who have been happily doing their jobs over the internet.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yah this is literally the most basic shit any company can do to be more "green", cut costs, have access to a larger worker base...

Nope. Because the CEOs are all more concerned with the commercial real estate market than running their company efficiently.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Because the CEOs are all more concerned with the commercial real estate market than running their company efficiently.

It's shocking how many people have honestly bought this. I mean, I'm sure there is some truth to it and maybe somewhere, someone forced people to come back because of some real estate interests... But the CEO of Amazon almost certainly gains to benefit much more from a rise in price of Amazon stock than any real estate they might own. And even if it was the case, I dont think the board would be very happy about it.

It might be the wrong move, and maybe it is being done to get people to quit, but it's being done because they think it means more money from Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I think they are mostly doing this as a stealth layoff. It's been a pretty popular strategy lately.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

The joke is, you get the good people to leave first this way. Be it estate or layoff, it's a bad move either way.

So why do they do it still? Only thing i can think of is the powerplay. CEO types are sometimes as developed as a child, mentally.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago

Because from you run a mega corp, you don't care about talent. You need complaint slaves!

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[–] [email protected] 229 points 1 month ago (2 children)

cutting head count without “firing” people. standard capitalism bullshit.

stop using amazon. let it rot.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 month ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

That links says only a quarter did it because they wanted people to quit, so it suggests that chances are this is not the reason Amazon is doing it...and you're posting while claiming it factually proves this is their motivation? Pretty deceiving.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I personally read this as "one quarter admit they did it to get people to quit". If you think these folks are always transparent and honest, think again. They're just trying to say whatever gets them the least amount of bad PR

This is effectively a layoff without benefits.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 month ago

Your position hinges on the survey not being anonymous. I clicked through and found nothing that claims it was not anonymous, and these things are normally done anonymously for exactly the reason you point out: less honesty.

Do you have anything to back this up or is it simply that holding this belief helps confirm what you already believe to be true?

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It's easy to avoid buying things from Amazon. It's hard to avoid AWS. It would be insane to try to suss out what provider everyone that I buy stuff from uses, and their third party relationships. Regulation is better.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 month ago

The best way to do this is to correlate downtime with main providers. If a cloud provider goes down when AWS has outages on related services, it's probably using an AWS service.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Exactly. This is just more failures of govt to constrain and regulate.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago

Yep, try browsing with ublock origin blocking all Amazon domains. Lots of things break because AWS is so large.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 month ago

Fuck Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 month ago (4 children)

The employees hired during full remote are now going to have to change their lives around going into the office. Tech employees are especially fucked because they either have to stay or they have to attempt to join the flood of tech employees looking for remote jobs (which was caused by the execs doing layoffs at tech companies).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Thats assuming those full remote employees are anywhere near an office.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There should be protections against hiring someone remote and then forcing them into the office as soon as you want to lay people off by forcing them to quit so you don't have to compensate them.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago

In some countries, there are already.

In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

So yes, basically, it's legal.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

That’ll teach us plebs. We’d better start licking some serious Amazon boot so they deign to let some of us earn enough to not die.

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