Talk about saying the quiet part out loud - this is a severance-free layoff, nothing more and nothing less.
It is constructive dismissal. Really it is a layoff but they want to get people to quit first because that is better for the company. But the American legalized labor system is very employer-friendly when it comes to enforcement. Often an employer can just lie, even when documentation contradicts them, and a judge or other official will simply side with the employer’s narrative.
At the end of the day, labor power is always about material leverage. Don’t believe the companies or the caoitakist government system that say it is based on the rules they state.
Employees know that and plenty of them will leave. They will also find tons of companies that don’t implement archaic policies that only exist to justify real estate investments. Amazon is going to hit a point where the pool of available talent is thin because no one wants to work there, or already has and left because of how toxic it is.
I’ve never heard a single positive comment about being a dev at Amazon. Not one. Every dev I know that has worked there said it was a hellscape.
It’s actually still baffling to see companies like AWS and Zoom, who arguably are all about enabling remote work, go with mandates like that. But yeah, it’s probably a stealth layoff, except they’re going to lose their best employees.
They will lose their most expensive employees who have the most economic security such that they can quit or find other jobs.
Under capitalism, proletarian wage labor is a commodity, this makes its cost minimizable. Tech workers have been spared some of this due to petty bourgeous aspects of their economic relations, part of which was just that they were in short supply and could demand upwardly mobile career paths plus the fact that your direct work really just requires a laptop. Amazon would like its employees to be proletarianized, to be more precarious, to be replaceable, so that they can pay them less and have greater capacity to discipline them. This is also why there was and is a large push for “STEM” education by the FAANGs. Their “labor shortage” arguments are really just a reframing of “we wish we could pay you less and treat you worse by increasing the size of your labor pool”.
They’ll find tons of companies with better work from home policies but which don’t pay as well.
And the whole thing about being a dev at Amazon being awful is largely untrue. I live in Seattle. I work in tech. My spouse and friend group work in tech. Some have worked at Amazon or still do.
Amazon largely treats their devs pretty well, but it depends on whether or not you have a good manager, just like any other company.
It’s just popular to shit on Amazon.
Yeah, that’s fair. Amazon is a large company so I’m sure people’s mileage varies. The pay is the sacrifice there. I get paid really well, but not nearly as well as I would at a FAANG. I’m okay with that because I value work/life balance and others things more than the pay, but I completely understand why folks work at those places.
Also, for what it’s worth, my experience is that Amazon does not have worse work/life balance than your average tech company. Some of the managers even push you to take your time off. You might work longer hours some days or weeks when a big thing is coming due or a big problem erupts, but that’s true everywhere.
This will just be the way layoffs go from now on. Don’t quit. Just keep working from home while looking for another job until they fire you.
Ironic that a company which only exists because it offers remote access to computer servers is forcing employees to physically go to the office.
