Amazon to managers: You can now sack employees who won't come 3 times a week(timesofindia.indiatimes.com) |
Amazon to managers: You can now sack employees who won't come 3 times a week(timesofindia.indiatimes.com) |
The best thing that ever happened for my mental health was to get PIPd with a nice severance and forced me to look for another job (I found one in three weeks).
I knew from reputation and second hand experience that eventually Amazon is going to Amazon before I accepted the offer.
There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to work at Amazon. I initially turned down a chance to even interview for an “eventually on prem” role as an SDE.
The only reason I interviewed was because the department I was interviewing for was remote pre-Covid
If only that mattered. My org, 200+ employees, was very remote friendly pre-covid with lots of remote roles. Got 3 exceptions from RTO to hand out.
Congrats on getting promoted to customer, I'm glad that all worked out for you!
The fact that you need the line managers to track and enforce the rule is the real kicker because it means you can't actually tell who's just on their two days or someone who doesn't show up at all. And no manager would be stupid enough to enforce this rule because they already have so little to offer their reports for retention that letting them break the rules a bit for QoL is basically a golden ticket.
Faking productivity is a lot easier when remote.
Yes, you can also fake being productive in an office, but in an office not being productive usually means reading HN, or whatever. When remote, it means you're probably not even at a computer.
Having managers enforce the rule encourages the transition to appear as though it's a org-wide culture shift rather than a blanket executive decree.
FWIW I run a 100% remote 20 person team (remote before covid)... personally I believe in remote work. At the same time, I can easily see why companies would want employees to go back.
I've worked hybrid for a while. It's not that hard to coordinate when everyone is going to be in the office for certain meetings.
Giving teams flexibility is better. If someone is maliciously changing their WFH schedule all the time to avoid meetings, it's obvious. You deal with that person individually.
But like also a person is allowed to not like in person meetings. Feels weird to force it. Honestly the live captions, running transcript, side chat, multi-screen share, and hand raise feature alone make remote meetings better than in-person for actual work.
The management grift continues and at no point is one asking if the presence of that manager helped the engineering services they were responsible for.
wonder if there are any employees who have a remote work provision in their contract. I would be surprised, but I would imagine a few were smart when they got hied on
In my experience, the one thing managers don't like to do is take responsibility for projects. They are extremely averse to technical stuff.
This is the best write-up I've read for what a manager should be doing.
I used to have a pretty bad commute (2 hours total).
I can safely say that finding a fully remote gig was the single best thing that happened for me in terms of improving my quality of life. My relationships are better. My health is better. I am happier.
Doesn't matter to our CEO. With very few exceptions, those folks have been told to move, often cross country, to wherever their team is concentrated. My team was forced to relocate some of the folks from CA, TX, NY, and UT to Seattle. Mind you, these folks have always worked from the location they were hired in until our CEO decided to change the rules.
Meanwhile, our genius of a Mayor is crowing about how "vibrant" downtown is without mentioning any of the consequences like housing getting even more expensive and being on foot or bike is even more dangerous and public transit reliability taking a nosedive.
This is working out so great; he's gonna get reelected for life by the downtown chamber of commerce just for convincing Amazon that WFH is silly.
EDIT: I'm getting severely downvoted, so I'll try to add some context: Amazon is a big company with corporate counsel. I guarantee their corporate counsel reviewed offer letters and employment agreements that guaranteed working locations or restricted their own ability to change working locations. Avoiding language in offer letters that guarantees things is a basic principal of writing offer letters and employment agreements (Example: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how... )
A remote work provision in a contract would require some sort of consequence for breaking that provision: For example, "Amazon agrees to pay 12 months of compensation if employee is required to relocate in the future". I guarantee you that corporate counsel wouldn't let this happen for the average Amazon employee, or else we'd be hearing a lot more about Amazon breaking contracts.
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Employees generally don't have contracts that work like that. The company can change things like where and how you work.
Contractors have contracts (obviously), but employees don't have contracts that guarantee things like remote work in most places. This is why employers can lay people off, change their job title, alter their pay, etc.
Even if you are hired remote at a company and remote is listed in your offer letter, an offer letter is not a contract. The employer can change the nature of the job.
It's analogous to being relocated: The company has changed the location of the job. You can come to the new location or you can leave the job, but you can't force the employer to let you work where you want.
For Amazon specifically: I know a couple people who work remotely for Amazon still with no word about RTO. They were hired remote and continue to work remote.
Every tech company I've ever worked for in the US except very small one, I had an explicit contract with. Had to negotiate the language in one, actually.
But in the US, it's not generally around the nature of the job or the ability to fire you (since employment is at-will), but involves things like who owns the intellectual property you produce (your employer), vacation policy (e.g. whether you'll be paid for unused days when you leave the company), reimbursement for relocation, possibly arbitration, and so forth.
Quick edit: And it's also not generally for a specific position, for specific work, in a specific location, or anything like that -- since all of that is expected to potentially change over your course of employment with them. So it's unlikely that there would be a remote work provision either way. Remote work is just something that usually falls under regular company policy, not contractual guarantee.
(paid the employment attorney to send this letter for the person I had have this baked into their offer letter when HR said "we don't do that" and had to do it when they said they'll just walk, n=1)
Everyone I know signed one. It’s just one that can be terminated by either party at any time…
https://www.rosenberglaw.com/blog/2021/08/constructive-disch...
That's why salaries don't change at random, week-to-week. It's also why when one accepts a raise or promotion, both parties sign a new contract. The same goes in the opposite direction - if an employer wants to cut salaries, both parties have to sign new contracts.
The contract has very few stipulations, and a lot of it benefits the employer, but still, this:
> Employees generally don't have contracts.
is false.
A ton of these people are powertripping goofs and they can't power trip nearly as effectively when their employees are remote. And, even to the degree they can, it isn't nearly as enjoyable for them outside of real exchanges when they get to enforce their presence and authority in person in uncomfortable ways.
I absolutely loathe this garbage. As a general rule I work odd hours, some days I work for barely an hour, other days I work from sunup to sundown. "Am I really working" changes drastically depending on the work day it happens to be, and my remote managers know this. I remain accessible for meetings during office hours but "am I working" at any given point in the day? Who fucking knows.
You know what they do know? My assignments are completed on time, usually early, my work is excellent, and I show up when needed. If you need to know more than that, you're a meddling manager and I wouldn't work for you if I could possibly avoid it.
Having a true employment contract that guaranteed a duration of work with full remote work could only happen if such a contract stipulated consequences for breaking that deal.
The contract would have to say something like "If employer changes the nature of this agreement, employer agrees to pay 100% of owed salary for 12 months". Those employment contracts do exist but they're generally only for key employees, not your average remote worker.
If you're okay with way less profitability and all the other issues of "employee democracy", go start/join a co-op. You just won't find many of them. And, if you start one, you'll probably start questioning your decision once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital. :p
Except that the whole point here is that the employees have a proportionate share in the company, so it's not "your own" capital. This sort of misunderstanding reinforces my point above about people seemingly being unable to wrap their heads around a non-dictatorial corporate structure.
If I'm so worried about employees sneaking hours off work, I probably need to either hire better or stop worrying about the wrong things.
Absolutely no possibility that work is being done by remote employees?
The reason employers don't change salaries "at random" is because that's ridiculous and employees would leave.
Companies can and do change people's salaries. There are news stories of companies giving people 10% pay cuts across the board lately. Do you really think they're going around and kindly asking everyone permission to reduce their salary?
> It's also why when one accepts a raise or promotion, both parties sign a new contract.
I have never once signed any papers when receiving a raise, promotion, or title change.
Companies have done more ridiculous things. You don't think some bright HR intern hasn't thought about pro-rating people's salaries based on some arbitrary periodic "performance" criteria? They can't, the pay rate is in the contract.
> Do you really think they're going around and kindly asking everyone permission to reduce their salary?
Yes. The deal is, accept 10% less and be happy you're not fired, or accept 100% less and you no longer work here. Some people will do the latter. That's how at-will employment works. Is it fair? That's a separate discussion.
> I have never once signed any papers when receiving a raise, promotion, or title change.
I don't know how you managed to get employed as a (full-time, salaried, with benefits) employee in the US without signing a contract, but that's a huge "code smell". You should listen to everyone replying about how the vast majority of people who are legally employed sign contracts with their employer.
FYI you're getting "downvoted" (this isn't Reddit) because your original comment was wildly inaccurate. Now that you've edited it, it sounds a bit more correct. Write with more precision next time so you don't get grayed out.
Since you're spending so much time defending this bizarre assertion, I have to ask - are you an attorney?
Obviously, you don't have to sign anything to receive a payrise or bonus because the employee isn't going to turn it down (1), but you will be informed in writing of any payrise or bonus and if the employer reneges on it, you have proof they promised it to you. (1: of course, there are extremely rare situations where you might not want a payrise, e.g. if it pushes you out of a beneficial means tested situation, but these are generally rare because minimum wage usually means a full time job pays slightly more than benefits.)
OTOH, if you are given a promotion there will definitely be a new contract to sign - it's not left to chance by the company, because without doing so they have no way of proving that you have agreed to do more work in exchange for the new title and payrise.
Similarly, if the company wants to reduce your pay or change something about the terms of the contract which you don't want, e.g. forcing you to change from remote to in-office, you can refuse the change. If they attempt to fire you after that, it's fairly easy to bring a constructive dismissal case - you show the tribunal your contract showing your requirements, they will see you length of service, and the fact you were terminated just after refusing to accept a change to your contract. Of course, it's usually in both parties' interest to negotiate an exit package in such a situation or for employer to back down if that actually works out cheaper.
I have had friends that have worked in companies during the financial crisis ~2008 that gave employees the choice to collectively agree to a 10% pay-cut for a year with no redundancies and then reverting to the original pay, or somebody would have to be let go assuming nobody wanted to volunteer to leave (in this case they didn't). It's interesting, because they still had to get everybody to sign the new contract with the agreed terms, and while it would have been hard for someone to stand up to the peer pressure somebody could in theory have agreed publicly in the meeting but later refused to sign.
Another weird edge case is that if your contract requires you to work in a specific location, unless your contract also specifically has a clause that allows the company to require you to work elsewhere, it's possible to refuse to accept gardening leave and require the company to provide an office for you to work in while you serve your notice period. This weird legal rule is because spending time at home may require you to use lights and heating that you wouldn't need if you were in the office, and so it's financially disadvantaging you to take gardening leave. Of course, by that point most people are only too keen to get away from the job as quickly as they can, that they willing accept gardening leave.
Where? Did it say anything about being guaranteed to work in a specific location, lest the company pay penalties for breach of contract?
Your offer letter isn't an employment contract. All of the paperwork you sign during onboarding is a type of contract, but companies are careful to avoid guaranteeing things in those contracts.
Employment contracts have a very specific legal definition. An offer letter is not an employment contract, even though it might state your starting compensation and work location.
It's very different to believe that your onboarding papers guarantee you anything: Compensation, where you work, your title can all be changed in at-will employment.
I agree most people don’t have “employment contracts” with defined timelines and places of work. I don’t have this.
That was the entire point I was trying to make. The thread derailed into pedantry immediately afterward. Sorry for any confusion.
You are right, though: People generally do not have employment contracts that guarantee things like remote work. This would imply penalties to the company if they changed their remote work policy.
No corporate counsel is going to accidentally let that language into contracts. That's my point.
Constructive dismissal doesn't mean the company has to continue employing you remotely, even if you could win.
> Haven't tried it with Amazon though, they aren't one to really care about employment laws or regulation.
Don't you think somebody would have tried this already? Amazon has a lot of employees
If you think you have a novel legal case against a company with over a million employees and scores of lawyers, by all means go for it.
But I guarantee you are wasting your time.
> If that's genuinely the case, doesn't hurt to pull out all the stops to try to get some agency against corporate psychopathy.
Maybe in a world where legal services are free, lawyers will take any case, and you have infinite time to spend fighting losing battles in court.
In the real world, suing a giant corporation like Amazon for something that has already been proven to be legal for decades is just wasting your time and money.
Also, do you really think nobody has thought of this before and tried it?
The very day I got a my ultimatum of “do this monkey dance and you might have a chance of staying or take this big ass check and leave”. I didn’t even let the manager list out all of the things I would need to do. I asked how much money I would get if I leave, said OK where do I sign and started looking for a job the same day.
After 25+ years in the industry, I stay prepared.
Why would I waste time and energy to stay at Amazon? It served its purpose. I added to my resume, I made my money and I had a job within three weeks still working remotely with a lot less bullshit.
It was actually two weeks after my last day and even before my paid out 10 days of PTO was over let alone severance
I already said it above: Low to zero odds of winning
Most importantly: Attorneys don't work for free.
I know this is this internet where armchair legal advice is to sue everyone, but in the real world attorneys like to get paid. Some of them will happily take cases you have no chance of winning as long as you pay up front.
If you have infinite time and money, go for it.
But it did give a reasonable explanation better than I could express it.
“The overall sentiment of the phrase might be to focus on the present and what’s attainable now, rather than longing for or pursuing things from the past that might not yield positive outcomes. ”
Old women doesn’t mean physically old. It meant past relationships