AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.

Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically

The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.

I wonder which tech company will be the first to take this too far and implode because of some easily-avoidable cataclysm. I think in some ways you could say Twitter / X already did although they are still limping along for now...

Thing is, if you are the CEO of AWS, you are fantastically well-compensated to be in meetings with people who suck up to you. Of course you think the office is a great place to do your work.

But that’s not what 95% of AWS workers do.

Well, one way to make people to something they don't want to is by forcing them. "Do X, or quit".

However, doing this will only breed deep seated resentment. That can only be bad for the company and Amazon as a whole.

If the figures here are correct, 90% are unhappy with the decision and ~70% are considering switching jobs, it could become quite entertaining to watch this company implode from a distance. It will be the top talent who leave first, instantly creating a weaker company.

Its not even a good decision from an innovation/productivity perspective, studies are mixed and many that claim a productivity improvement in the office, if you look at who was involved in funding them, were actually funded by people or entities with a vested interest in office real estate.

This is a strategy to get rid of non H1B workers. It’s pure discrimination

Banning remote work (or even just signaling the intent) is an excellent solution to ‘we effed up by hiring too many people in ZIRP/AI expectations era and now we need to get rid of them without paying severance’.

I realise this topic has been covered repeatedly but considering it from another angle:

As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?

Sounds more like a layoff strategy now.

If you want to do a mass layoff, be honest about it.

Does this apply to Amazon operations in the EU and UK as well. I could imagine that it might be possible to fight such an edict under UK employment law. I'm pretty sure that they would not be able to do it quite so easily here in Norway.

They should be bold and make it six days a week.

I don't understand. Why would they tell you to quit? What's in that for you? Just keep going until they tell you to work from the office or they'll fire you, and then you can make a decision.

Any statistics on the kind of people that stick to office work. A, B, or C players? Introverts vs extroverts, programmers vs project managers..

Presumably A lot of great engineers are going to quit, and AWS is going to lose a lot of people. That is going to have an impact on their business. Is there a way we can measure this impact?

It would be an interesting study to look back over the last five years at the company's performance, and then compare it moving forward now that they are going back to the office fully.

If AWS has such a high turnover of staff how does this affect the suite of new services that companies build their infra around?

If there are this many workers unhappy and about to quit, I wonder if this is a watershed moment for Amazon as a company and its investors.

AWS is a huge part of their revenue isn't it? This also affects pretty much every tech company since they all use AWS to some extent.

[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41874178

Doesn’t this open them up for wrongful termination suits..

To borrow from the freelancer's creed:

Fuck you, fire me.

No, I don't work there, but I'd rather be fired than quit myself. At a minimum, I can get unemployment, and the job market is so saturated that the extra time to find a replacement job will be welcome.

And what difference does that make?

Hire and retain only the best

> But compliance to the hybrid work order was fiercely enforced, with some employees who did not adhere to the policy told they were "voluntarily resigning" and were locked out of company systems.

I wonder how this will play out.

Previously the perception seems to have been that WFH was OK. So it seems like a pretty big change to their working conditions. Just making a massive change to somebody’s working conditions and then shutting off access if they don’t comply… I mean, how long will they pay them to do nothing?

It seems like they are just being fired to me?

We have shit worker protections in the US generally, but at least I hope some folks file for unemployment.

It seems now is the time to start asking for a private office, some furniture, a massage chair ;)

That way, if performance drops, you can blame it on the inferior office at work :)

everybody here all gangsta about making big $$$ until they are on the receiving end all flabbergasted having to realize that companies like amz are hypercapitalist companies which also only care about making big $$$.

Now if only he can also write the resignation letters for us :yawn:

At least they're still allowing working from home on Saturday and Sunday.