Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently told employees that those who do not want to return to the office at least three days a week should consider finding employment elsewhere. According to a recording obtained by Insider, Jassy stated “It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” adding that if employees cannot commit to the new hybrid work model, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.” He characterized the decision to have employees return to the office part-time as a “judgment call.” Notably, Jassy said employees are free to leave if they do not want to comply with the hybrid work requirement. This makes clear that Amazon has not changed its stance on returning to office work despite some employees preferring full remote arrangements.
When COVID hit and the company I was with at the time went 100% remote, upper management discovered our productivity went up. That same company started forcing people back into the office as soon as they could. Watching a team of executives intentionally harm their company and try to justify it was wild. It wasn’t about being profitable, it was about control for controls sake.
It probably wouldn’t work, but I’ve been wondering whether it would be possible to use the shareholders of publicly traded companies against them in these situations.
I’ve seen people mention that companies are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders (might not be true everywhere, and my knowledge on the subject is extremely limited).
If there was data available for a given company that showed that profits were increased during a period where a substantial part (or all) of the employees worked from home, and then the company starts forcing the employees back to the office, could the board not be called upon to force the company to keep people in work-from-home-mode? Would the company not be obliged to do that, to maximize the profits? It seems to me that this would be in the best interest of the shareholders.
Nope, because the biggest shareholders in the vast majority of companies are financial institutions like Blackrock, that coincidentally have large commercial real estate portfolios as well.
Individual shareholders are a drop in the ocean next to that immense amount of centralized wealth. When you think of shareholders, it’s not even the 1%, it’s a couple hundred people who own everything.
Thanks, that makes perfect sense, and gels perfectly with my knowledge on the subject being ridiculously limited 😅
Are there any really big companies that don’t have shareholders? Just curious if it’s even possible to get really big without selling stock. Guess it’s probably a thing that even if there are any that don’t, they probably still have investors. Would be fun to know if there are companies out there that managed everything just on their product, growing organically I guess.
edit: to partially answer my own question, here is Wikipedia’s list of the largest private non-governmental companies by revenue.
You can get reasonably big, but in most Western markets public companies who are owned by the same few institutions have a controlling anticompetitive share.
And real estate. Don’t forget real estate.
A company I worked for went full on into a corporate workspace refresh to open concept during COVID. Writing was on the wall and they tried to recall people 3 months into COVID-which failed spectacularly. I found a remote job shortly after and while I do go in from time to time on my own account, I don’t really miss traffic or open office plans.
productivity went up
I suspect this is partially a result of change, not that work from home was implemented. Shaking up a work environment (for something more desirable to the employee) is always a morale and productivity boost. Move everyone from a bull pen to offices, or move to a new facility where there are fewer distractions and new equipment, or simply change the work schedule to a 9x9 or 4x10 and you’ll see short term gains. .
Regardless of the cause of the productivity boost, full time WFH will come at the expense of training young (or new to the field) employees. Ironically, part of the cost of training new employees comes out of the billable hours of the experienced ones. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 20%-25% reduction in output of an employee who is given an intern or new hire to mentor. That won’t happen when you’re remote because the new hire can’t constantly bug you for simple requests, ask for more work, or require active review and monitoring of their work process. But in a couple of years, you’ll have two people at 100% (nominal) output in return for the loss in productivity of the mentor.
It’s said that it takes 150% of the annual salary in costs to a company to replace someone. Having mentored young engineers, most cost me far more in the first year than I billed, and it took close to 3 years to break even - and that’s at a relatively low salary. To have mentored someone remotely for the first year would have likely taken even longer to get them up to speed and profitable. In the short term, moving your office of independently competent individuals remote should absolutely produce a boost in productivity.
Anyway, it’s this long view that is the actual, actionably logic behind the return to the office. That isn’t to excuse the micromanagers who’s only job was to walk around and remind people to put covers on their TPS reports - they are no more than overpaid hall monitors and a relic that should die. It also doesn’t excuse the upper managers who never understood the concept of sunk cost in college and feel that they need to fill the seats in the building where they have another 8 years on their lease.
Easy layoffs without having to pay severance, can just claim they refused to move.
Amazon built up half the property in south lake union and Bellevue and now they’re trying to justify why they did that. God knows they could have saved a ton of money if they hadn’t.
If I were predisposed toward conspiracies I would definitely be convinced by now that every medium-to-large business owner in the country was part of a secret cabal who made a pact to demand return to office for whatever terrible reason sounded good to them.
My own workplace is mandating a hybrid model for any employees within 30 miles of an office after “much research, discussion, and debate with employees.” They’ve typically been very reasonable and generous to their workforce, and I just don’t understand what they’re thinking, honestly.
Hilariously, the data don’t back them up, my wife does research on this very topic for a company. The dollar signs do though, they have to justify the property expenditures.
Hilariously, the data don’t back them up, my wife does research on this very topic for a company. The dollar signs do though, they have to justify the property expenditures.
No. That’s sunk cost fallacy.
If they’ve already bought and paid for the buildings, they are not losing more money by not using them.
In fact, they probably save money on things like maintenance, overhead, security on physical sites when they’re not being used. They could also be renting those spaces out, or straight up selling.
Smart company would be selling the property before the prices crash
Sell it to who?
Don’t most companies have Blackrock on their board, who had been buying real estate for the better part of the last 5 years.
It’s amazing how for a culture that fetishizes “freedom” we’re willing to accept a reality where you have to give it up for half your waking life just to live and provide for your family.
I wish we would stop.
What really amazes me as a european is that while I still think we have to work too much for our modern times we only do a fraction of your average work hours and that cases no issues whatsoever.
It’s almost as if working more is not necessarily more productive
“Disagree and commit” = do what I say or quit. Worker exploitation has many douchey buzz phrases.
Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in action in the land of the free
This is your friendly reminder to not use Amazon. Give up a small convenience so that you can vote with your wallet.
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Jepp, for me it is barely a convenience so I don’t even have an amazon account. I’m not American; seems like it’s pretty important for a lot of people over there, unfortunately.
So this applies to those like me and others, if you can, stop using it. But I also believe these kind of boycotts don’t make much of a dent without some serious organization.
I think it’s less about boycotting Amazon and more about supporting other (hopefully better) companies. It is not realistic for us to get Amazon to shut down, but it is realistic for us to support competitors and keep them at least surviving.  Better to have other companies with their own store fronts then everybody consolidated on Amazon.
There is a lot to criticize Amazon for, but this wouldn’t be anywhere near my top pick.
Maybe it’s time to consider alternative cloud providers at work. AWS is pretty good but they’re going to alienate a ton of talented engineers by doing this.
This is an important point. What cloud providers are flexible on engineer working conditions? I’d imagine they’d all be smaller scale providers?
I know from a friend that works for GCP that they are up his ass to get back into the office and have been for a while. Not sure on Azure but I think you’re right that it’s probably going to be small cap places.
Brain drain is terminal for a technology product (most of the time). In the short term I’ll focus on making our products portable (migrating ec2 init scripts to docker, using frameworks for server less instead of using direct apis etc…). And when the time comes switch to whatever is best.
The mentality of these people are exactly like slave owners.
Time for unionized office work
Hilarious that the company that pioneered cloud solutions and made working from home for a ton of people ridiculously easier decides that their employees don’t deserve to work from home. Something something corporate office real estate crisis.
Wait until you hear about Zoom: https://www.businessinsider.com/zoom-ceo-employees-return-to-office-2023-8?op=1
Tbf this is the same guy that absolutely raked his own company’s flagship software over the coals while telling them it’s time to come back to the office
guys come work for my company we have embraced the work remote life style.
Alright I’m in. What do we do for the world?
Honestly as long as it’s not “Accrue money for bezos so he can shoot his phallic rockets into space” it’s probably better for the world.
I’m in
“You’re coming into the office too, right?”
. . .
“You’ll be in the office too?”
Startups wringing their hands in anticipation
I’m lucky in that my employer went the opposite direction. Downsizing our local office and just letting us all be 100% remote. We’re a geographically distributed group so it doesn’t make sense to enforce office requirements.
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Thousands of workers signed a petition against the mandate and staged a walkout in response.
In a recording of the meeting obtained by Insider, Jassy told workers, “It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” adding that “if you can’t disagree and commit… it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week.”
The Verge reached out to Amazon with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.
On top of ongoing layoffs, Amazon has been cracking down on employees who refuse to return to the office.
In July, leaked messages seen by Insider suggested that Amazon would force a “voluntary resignation” on employees who don’t relocate to the in-person hubs where their teams work while others just began quitting on their own.
The company has also started sending warnings to workers about their in-person attendance, according to Insider.
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