Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they're in for a very rude awakening. They'll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They're highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.

yeah, the only problem is that this results in the best talent leaving, you're stuck with people who have nowhere else to go. it's one of those short-term profits kinda things, which is why Wall St loves it so much.

I thought the same. Interesting strategy cutting the people who are good enough to get another job.

This isn't what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn't the goal or objective.

Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they'll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don't get to decide who they're cutting. They don't want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they're effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn't as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.

It's like reverse stack ranking. They'll be left with the people that couldn't find another job.

Yep this has been the modus operandi for businesses who want to reduce workforce without having to pay for layoffs.

Like many companies, they overhired in the last 4 years. Some of these people are due years of severance (my offer listed 2months for every year after 1 year), not to mention the vested stocks and other bonuses granted during this insane hot hire period.

So how do you remove people not loyal to the company? The most hated mandate ever. Amazon is a company that doesn’t need people in the office. This is nothing more than screwing people over.

It's sort of a strange approach, because this will leave you with the workers who can't find employment elsewhere.

expect quality at Amazon to decline.

They'll have to dig a new basement for it to get any lower.

I canceled my Prime membership earlier this year because of that decline in quality. I wish everyone could, but thanks to the loss of retail throughout the country many can't afford not to have it.

We're constantly producing new people that don't know any better

When I joined Amazon, I was told that for some roles in the US Amazon received more applications than corporate employees worldwide - so I assume 1M+.

That number has probably reduced significantly, given we've now had two rounds of RTO. I know some recruiters are really struggling to find external candidates to join, and rightly so, but I don't doubt that Amazon can find someone to fill these roles, or can find someone outside of North America or Europe to take that role.

The FAANG acronym was the worst thing to happen to tech, because people will flock to Amazon to say "I worked for FAANG". Prestige is a powerful thing to some, and they'll deal with some insane shit for the clout that comes from being here.

(FWIW, I've been at Amazon as a software engineer for close to four years now, and I've noticed zero improvement in opportunities afforded to me)

You could also think this applies to all corporations in some degree. But no, there's a fresh batch of bright eyed optimistic people out of school every year.

I honestly don't see an issue with the people going back to the office because they want to work from there. I just want others to stop trying to force me to do the same.

This sort of thing seems to have always been a plague with a set of the extroverted sort. They seem to feel the whole world should for whatever reason cater to what makes them happy and us introverted types that do not like the social activities that they do should be made to partake anyway. For our own good. Yet the world is ending when those same extroverted people have to spend a large chunk of time alone or simply being quiet.

The older I get the less patience I have for those sorts of games. Which could become an issue for me professionally I suppose.

I know some people like this too.

To be fair, a nontrivial number of them are middle/upper management, but it's not the entirety of the people I know who want this.

The answer isn't work-from-home, nor is it return-to-office. The answer is: give people a choice.

If you want to work from home, cool, we don't need to maintain your cubicle, and/or, we can hire more people without needing more office space. If you want to return to office, cool, your space is waiting for you.

A few will retain the ability to switch back and forth, but the majority of people I've talked to about it, either want office or home exclusively. Very few want hybrid.

Hey I can relate. I miss the office too. I was far more productive there and the cooperation and mental space was better there too. But this is a new world we live in, and if you want me to drive to an office, you had better be ready to pay me a fair salary for it.

Oh, you won't? Guess I'll go elsewhere.

Nah, the shareholders love this shit.

I mean, most of them. Please ignore my piles of AMZN.

The problem being that the ones moving on to other jobs are the actual talent. Unlike a targeted layoff, this leaves Amazon with the employees no one else wanted.

These tech workers are not Bezos. They are just developers and technical people that thought they had a good job with competitive salaries. It sucks they have to uproot their lives because management is being shitty.

They may work for a company without ethics, but that's kind of the corporate landscape these days.