Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion Amazon is warning employees they risk undermining their own promotion prospects unless they return to the office (RTO) for three days a week, as was mandated by CEO Andy Jassy months ago. The tweak to the promotions policy, spotted by Insider, means that corporate workers must get VP level approval if they can't come into the …
"Managers own the promotion process, which means it is their responsibility to support your growth through regular conversations and stretch assignments, m and to complete all required inputs for promotion,"
So managers are unable to discharge their responsibilities by picking the phone up or having regular zoom/teams sessions etc.
If a manager is unable to build and manage a distributed team then they need to be looking for an alternative career.
Come on, it's not about that.
It's about protecting shareholder investment in the property.
Managers are given this hokey cokey to do, to come up with meaningless conversations and create sense of fear in the workers that they can't miss coming to the office.
To be fair this practice should be illegal, because workers are being used to prop up property value, but are not getting paid for it.
I am sure this is not in their employment contract.
Likewise, ""If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware" implies that managers can't even keep track of their own staff and need some computer to do it for them and trigger an alarm under some conditions. Shirley the bare minimum of a managers job is to know what their staff are doing and where they are working? Those "promotion gaining conversations" clearly aren't happening if the manager doesn't even know from personal knowledge who is in the office!
Our plan to improve our company culture and morale is to fill our office with people who don't want to be there.
Yes, this is really how dumb it sounds. If you are doing this, stop it at once before you completely destroy what's left of your workforce morale.
The company I work for has mandated RTO 3 days a week. We have been told that non-compliance 'could affect your annual performance review'. But here is the problem, I don't care about promotions, they are extremely rare anyway. I only need to work a few more years, I'm not concerned about those shitty 2% annual raises, that you might not get anyway because HR decided this year you are 'top of market'. I'd hate to see my annual bonus cut, but doing that will only make morale worse. And they can cut a lot before it offsets commuting costs.
If I am expected to be able to perform my job remotely while on-call 24x7, I see no reason to go into an office and sit on zoom calls. The only thing they are accomplishing is I'm re-evaluating my financing and wondering if that nest egg I have been building for decades might just be ready, and there are a lot better uses of my time than cowering like a wage slave. You want to run another round of lay-offs? Sign me up for the standard severance package and I'll start playing video games and sleeping late.
Reminds me of a guy at DEC I worked with during the Greasy Bob years. Well, I say "worked" with; he got so demoralised and fed up with what was very much the same style of endless pissing about that he just stopped turning up. I think they continued to pay him his full salary even though he didn't set foot in the office for years and wasn't even pretending to work from home. Could be his manager didn't care either, though by that point the reporting tangle was so complex that it's likely nobody knew whose responsibility he was, or even who he was for that matter. Other people still got made redundant completely at random: I think the managers' means of choosing someone was that anybody they saw a lot (because they spent their whole time "networking" rather than actually working) must be important, and people they didn't see at all were an unknown quantity and therefore risky to their own career prospects if they arsed it up, but people they saw a bit couldn't be that important and so were expendable and went into the weekly redundancy lottery.
A lot of us admired him being decisive and just deciding to cut the crap out of his life. It did him good and evidently did his career no harm.
《A lot of us admired him being decisive and just deciding to cut the crap out of his life. It did him good and evidently did his career no harm.》
DEC could have done worse (and indeed did) than to appoint this chap as their CEO and board chairman.
Clearly highly developed ability for making effective decisions and excising crap which is what every enterprise desperately needs and of which is almost always utterly deficient.
I think it's a common theme for senior techies. Most of us have been promoted as far as we can go in a technical role and have zero urge to join management. No promotion is a bonus, not a threat. I have an old colleague who was railroaded into taking on a management, and then senior management role and now longs to get back to working projects and tickets instead of endless meetings. The pay increase was meagre for the increase in workload and responsibility.
I wouldn't take a 'promotion' into management. I'm too hands-on and it frustrates me to manage others through a process I could handle myself in a few minutes. OTOH, Agile has taken all the fun out of development. At least where I work, there are more spreadsheet PMs than coders. And what the coders get are narrowly focused, assembly line stories for code monkeys. The only people who have the big picture of the projects are PMs and they don't understand it, not the business process or the coding.
Seriously, if you are early in your career and competent at what you do, stick with smaller employers. You'll likely be happier and build a more rounded skillset.
Promoted? Hell, I'm about to be demoted, at least nominally, as job titles are "harmonized" by our new Benevolent Overlords. Kumbaya.
I loathe the idea of going back on the job market (so tiresome), but it's looking more and more likely.
On the other hand, I am reminded more or less weekly by stories like this that I was right to turn down that call from the Amazon headhunter. So there's that.
Some folks work better in the office. Let them.
Some folks work better at home. Let them.
Some folks work better with music in their headphones. Let them.
Some folks work better in a quiet setting. Let them.
Some folks work better with mice. Let them.
Some folks work better with trackballs. Let them.
In other words, let your workers work how they work best instead of attempting to enforce arbitrary rules... isn't this just common sense?
Sheesh!
Except it's considered constructive dismissal, which is illegal. You can hope the turd in the punchbowl who is related to someone on the Board will leave of their own accord, but to do anything to try to encourage that is where you start getting into legal trouble. Not that it stops a lot of companies from rolling the dice, but that doesn't make it any less legal.
This is all bollocks.
Amazon is owned by big investment funds who also happen to be invested in commercial property.
If workers are not coming to offices, then the value of offices drops and Amazon shareholders lose money.
"Invention is often sloppy. It wanders and meanders and marinates. Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in-person than virtually," he said at the time.
Why lie to people? Why would you work for organisation who can't be straight and engages in green washing?
How much pollution will be created by dragging people to offices where they don't need to be? Just to satisfy shareholders?
LOL
Having seen the mountains of paperwork, evidence and collateral colleagues have gathered to go for Principal roles at AWS (just to be knocked back for circumstances outside of their control), pushing for a promotion is the last thing on my mind. It's literally easier to leave and apply externally for a Principal role than it is to try and get promoted to it internally. Add into that the mediocre payrises and the compensation structure that runs out of steam after four years and there's really not much financial incentive for people to try and develop a career here.
It's painfully obvious this RTO drive is just a way to drive staff attrition. I'm curious as to how long AWS can keep attracting staff given how quickly it burns through (median tenure of an employee is about 12 months). From the outside there seems to be this mythical status being attached to a "FAANG" job, but having seen AWS from the inside there's nothing mythical about it. It's like working for HP or IBM - 15-20 years ago.
Amazon promotion process can be summed up in one sentence. "What have you done for me lately?". Doesn't matter if you are wowing the customer. If you haven't done required Cinderella housekeeping things that managers in any other company would be responsible for, you aren't getting promoted. And if you aren't getting promoted you will be pushed out the door in any number of ways both active and passive.
They just found a new way to push you out the door. Ironic how you can be pushed out the door they want you to come back in to.
Human Resources nothing to do with Croatia :)
《If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required,》
These nongs are incapable of expressing a straightforward active idea in plain English.
For a bloody start - "roles" don't do any actual work - roles are abstract slot which a person might fill - then that person does the work (if you are lucky) not the role. As for "are not in compliance" oblique bullshit for "do not comply."
My first draft might be: "If you are required, in your current role, to work from the office for three or more days per week and do not comply with this requirement we will notify your manager. Any exemption will require you and your manager seeking the approval of the vice president of your division."
As the original stands its not entirely clear what it is the VP is to approve.
>” As the original stands it’s not entirely clear what it is the VP is to approve.”
Nothing until HR have sent a formal letter to the employee spelling out the change…
From the information presented here and the way Amazon are going about this, it looks like (in the UK at least), there are going to be hundreds if not thousands of constructive dismissal cases…
I've WFH for the better part of 15 years. Every time I'm in an office environment I hate it, not for being in the office, but for the morons who have no respect for others' need for at least a reasonable amount of quiet space. One lady was on the phone all day and used the speaker phone and was loud enough to be heard halfway across the building.
My productivity is much higher because when I have a brain block I can go do something else, think about the problem and come back. Last night I worked for 4 hours on a problem and not only solved it but knocked out a fairly large story when I could do so when I was most productive.
Managers who insist that you absolutely must be in the office for them to see who's working are either clueless, useless middle managers, or aren't actually looking at the work being done. (And are usually the cause of endless meetings that could have been an email) If they need someone to cut to lower head count, start with those folks and leave us productive WFH people alone.
Promotions usually mean like a 10% pay bump for a 50% (at least) workload increase. To me, that seems like a very equitable tradeoff for being able to work from home. If all I got were COL raises for the rest of my working career, I'd be completely fine with that if I could work remotely the entire time. Maybe go into an office once or twice a year for some kind of special event. I don't want to be in a bunch of endless meetings that come with promotions. I don't want to manage other people. I don't give two shits if I have "Sr." or "Jr." in my job title. I just want to do my job and get paid, the end. If I become friendly with some coworkers, bonus, but it's not why I'm there. I don't care about why the Accounting department is at odds with the Logistics department because two managers who left the company years ago had a beef with one another or any of the other stupid internal politics issues. Just let me do the job I was hired to do.
The thing I hate most about working in an office, is that invariably there are going to be times when you're just sitting around twiddling your thumbs with nothing to do because you're waiting on someone else or things are just slow for whatever reason. If I'm working from home I can turn on the TV or something and just check every 5-10 minutes to see if anything came in that I need to take care of. If I'm in an office and I'm dicking around on my phone because there's nothing for me to do, people tend to assume I'm lazy or shirking my work. Then there's also the many joys of working in an office, like when some inconsiderate jackass microwaves fish, or engages in biological warfare in the restroom. The people who talk loudly... all. day. long.
I've said it before, and will say it again. I bet most Fortune 500 CEOs wouldn't be able to last a week if they had to work like the rest of us. No palatial office with a private entrance, no driver to take them around everywhere, no secretary/PA to help juggle your calendar, you have to fight for conference rooms as opposed to everyone coming to you for meetings. If they had to work in the same conditions as everyone else, I'm betting they'd have a very different opinion on the value of being in the office every day.
Not inadvertently or implicitly, but directly, in response to the direct question.
Which is a shame, because that's exactly the sort of directness I would otherwise crave. So I'm very grateful they were open in advance.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
