Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warns remote workers: 'It's probably not going to work out for you'

Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office.

CEOs try not to think they're the center of the world, the challenge.

"Should workers be subjected to pointless and dehumanizing drudgery that serves no practical purpose? Find out what this panel of five overpaid CEOs think, after the break."
In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.
- In similar fashion, an unprecedented unanimous vote was casted by all the worm hunting birds: worms should not live underground.
Workers should unionize. I don't know if its better but I know it's something they hate
I spoke with virtually all of the workers, and none of them want to pay rent. Yet here we are.

CEOs can get bent through a videocall
- CEOs can get bent through a videocall
  
  Found my new email signature ✨
To be fair, they largely are the center of our world, and that's the problem.

Maybe tech workers will finally unionize

Nah, we're still high on our own farts to realise they can turn foul rather quickly.
It's not looking good for programers in particular.

The reason why the can get paid as much as they want is 100% based on you being able to jump ship form company to company without having to wait for a company to find common ground between you and them through a union.

Sure, they'll still be hugely compensated but tech companies will keep abusing interns, freelancers. Obviously outsourcing will explode even more than it already has in the last 10 years.
- True, but that's why you do a trade union instead of a company union. And programmers have a lot to gain. These companies, shareholders, and CEOs rake in billions that could be going to employees.
  
  A programmer will make a feature that saves the company a million dollars and they'll get paid $100,000 to build it.
  
  Now is the best time for programmers to unionize. Do it when you already have leverage to make sure the good times stay good. Otherwise, we'll eventually be as replaceable as drafters are now.
- I don't buy it. This isn't the only mechanism, probably not even the most important one, for why salaries are where they are. Shortage of and especially of highly competent programmers is. In fact this actually underpins why jumping ship is even as easy as it is. Uninionization will provide additional leverage, while not diminishing the shortage pressure. Part of the point is that this leverage can substitute the leverage we have due to the current shortage, if and when it diminishes.
- The reason why the can get paid as much as they want is 100% based on you being able to jump ship form company to company without having to wait for a company to find common ground between you and them through a union.
  
  How strange, were I live there are Unions but when I jump ship I get paid what I want, without waiting for the Union, what do you think a Union is for ?
  
  The real power of a Union is to let workers to negotiate for a minimum wage level (for example, I cannot be employed for less than a certain wage because it would be illegal to do so) that are reasonable and some basic rights the workers have (for example, no at will employment, a minimum PTO days which are enforced and thing like this).
  
  True, this has some consequences, mainly companies try to go for the legal minimum, but I would say that it is positive overall
Too many libertarians in tech. Will never happen.

Source. In tech. Not libertarian.
- Nothing incompatible about libertarianism and unions. It's a free market construct, a free association of people formed to put a check on the power of wealth. With a long history of acting as a check on one of the forces that seek to destabilize a free market in favor of state control, one might add (corps love to team up with the state to gain power).
  
  Though, caveat, libertarians might have a word against unions of state employees due to the mechanics of unions bartering against politicians who only stand to lose someone else's funds (the public), through state mechanisms which libertarians may oppose. Obviously this is more problematic with police unions than teacher's unions.
  
  Of course, there's the FOX News "libertarians" who aren't thinking any of this through and are just rehashing whatever FOX News is slinging. Basically indistinguishable from year 2000 "conservatives" plus all the culture war and 4chan talking points of the last 20 years. (edit: They would most likely be anti-union across the board, of course).
- Yeah it blows
I wish. A union could have easily prevented this.

It's the commercial real estate mortgage backed securities market. If everyone doesn't pay office rent the collateralized debt of those places goes kaput, the security implodes like 2008 and the banking industry goes under.

These CEOs are all invested. They don't care about productivity, it's all about saving their investments.

Aww darn. Thoughts and prayers for the banks and the investors. /s
- I Say they should get fucked. I don't see why somebody 's bad investment is my problem.
Maybe they should be better business men and should have foreseen this.
This. I've been saying and seeing it since Covid. Offices are half empty. Main street footfall is shrinking. These zones are high premiun rents, owned by REITs and other comercial founds. If they are not occupied and ppl is not consuming on the next door shops, assets value is gone down. More colateral is going to be asked from their lenders. Also, municipalities don't want to lose population as this can result on less budget from government.. Of course they are going to put pressure on their CEO buddies to have spenders back to office.
- The loans for all the commercial real estate are also problematic. The banks don't have liquidity to cover them it's that simple. Hence the recent downgrade of banks which is a shot over the bow..
- Considering that the US has a almost nonexistent social system, the state is actively accelerating the gap between poor and rich by supporting onesidedly.
and the banking industry goes under.

Which translates to the banking industry learning some lessons and becoming more efficient. Yes, please.

Other than that, some drop in realty prices is welcome.
- The only thing they'll learn is the date their next rubberstamped bailout check from the government is going to come.
- Will not happen. Too big to fail, ydda yadda.
  
  Despite the banks not having implement the promised mechanisms to avoid another crash.
Made a bad investment, reap the loss. Free market for you.
- Convert to housing. Kill two birds with one stone.

The mentality of these people are like slave owners.

It's all the same families. The American Oligarchy.
Always has been. Since we abolished slavery (some restrictions apply) the US has been working to continue the grift by any means, whether sharecropping, the truck system, exploiting immigants, exploiting children, anti-union legislation and so on.

Despite our promises of liberty and equality, the US really wants to be a feudal hegemony.

Amazon employees who refused to relocate near main offices of their teams were told they either have to find a new job internally or leave the company through a “voluntary resignation.”

How dumb does he think people are? This just makes me angry because they're probably going to get away with it too.

Why would you quit? Continue working from home while lining up a new job. Or, if they don't specify how long you have to be in on those 3 days, just clock in and go back home an hour later. Game the system, make it work for you. They do.
- If you're 10+ hours away clocking in for 2 minutes isn't possible.
  
  If you're ever in this situation, look up constructive dismissal. Basically its better to stay home and be "fired" and refuse the voluntarily resignation. That being said, the USA has a lot less protections for employees then Canada or Europe but it's good to be informed anyway.
- They don't "game" the system, the make it, and it will always work on their favor.
  
  !Only attempt to game the system if you are a man, preferably white, masc appearing, not that poor, not visually disabled. Other rules may apply, please read your manual. Complaints to deities are accepted but always ignored. If you think you qualify for game the system consult your favorite TikTok cashcow influencer and quote Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos/Bill Gates/Steve Jobs for credibility and social leverage. We are no responsible for predictable consequences if you take game the system while not meeting the aforementioned criteria.!<
- We were specifically told that it doesn't count if you're not at an office the majority of the day. Everybody was joking about doing that at first.
lmao, "voluntary resignation" is hilarious. If you plan to purge everyone who won't relocate, you're gonna have to do a layoff. This isn't one of those layoffs that will impress investors, because it won't represent efficiency or cost savings, but instead corporate dysfunction.

If your workers aren't voluntarily relocating to return to the office, they're certainly not going to voluntarily forfeit their unemployment benefits by quitting. They'll just stop working and wait for the pink slip.

Unless they plan to attach a severance more valuable that unemployment benefits to the resignation, they're fucking dreaming. Even so, that would be a hilarious misstep to offer Amazon employees a voluntary paid exit, because it would undoubtedly result in an unsustainable wave of resignations across the org.
voluntary resignation

I'm not a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, offer not valid in Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico, no warranty, either express or implied, is offered, do not pass go, do not collect $200

With all that out of the way: This "voluntary resignation" garbage is their way of getting out of paying unemployment. If you're ever in a situation like this where they change job requirements and tell you that if you don't meet the new requirements you've "voluntarily resigned" call them on it. Keep doing the job as you did it before the change and make them fire you. For purposes of collecting unemployment, making broad unilateral changes to job requirements is called "constructive dismissal" and you'd still qualify to collect, but if you just don't show up at all, turn in your 2 weeks or sign a letter of voluntary resignation then for unemployment purposes you're considered to have quit rather than been fired and you can't collect. If they tell you you have to come back to the office and you're ready to quit about it just keep working from home til they fire you.

Basically (very basically, laws vary state by state and this isn't a perfect summary of any one state's laws) the law says that employers are free to ask something different of employees after hire, but that after a certain point changes to the job requirements effectively mean that the employee is now working an entirely different job than what they were hired for. When changes are enough to constitute constructive dismissal the state is essentially treating it as though the employer fired the employee from the original job and simultaneously offered them a new one. Turning down that new job does not disqualify them from collecting unemployment for the old one. This concept was originally implemented to stop employers from avoiding unemployment charges by cutting an employee down to one hour per week or forcing them to work shifts opposite what they signed on for, then hoping they'll quit rather than be fired. I haven't seen whether return to office mandates constitute constructive dismissal, and I imagine it will be highly dependent on location and facts (were you hired remote or did you transition to remote from in-office and was the remote status communicated as temporary or permanent/a perk of the job are two that leap to mind). This is why I only recommend following this strategy if you intended to quit anyway. If you want to keep your job do what they tell you to do.

Get bent, Andy.

For some reason, I read this as

Get bendy, Andy.
- Get swifty, Andifty

More likely that it doesn't work out for Jassy. Certain Amazon units are underperforming under his leadership, and I wouldn't be shocked if his time at Amazon didn't last that much longer.

You can only artificially raise the price of real estate for so long.
- That's actually against the law known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (also known as Sox or Sarbox Act).
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes–Oxley_Act

That's a really nice way of threatening to take away the livelihood and health insurance of people doing work for you.

Today's workers are too nice...
- Well see, we're kinda trapped right now. We can go chopping heads off, get thrown in the news cycle for a few days, and then continue losing everything we got trapped in anyways.

Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You'd think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.

used Amazon to order stuff to work from home

Amazon makes almost no money on retail sales. They make their money from AWS and from advertisers.
- Even better then. With people WFH companies move their on-prem servers and applications to the Cloud like AWS!
  
  No matter how you dice this Amazon is fucking itself
- Amazon had $220 billion in first party online retail revenue in 2022 $117 billion from 3rd party online retail $80 billion from AWS $37 billion from advertising.
  
  Retail is amazons primary source of revenue.
  
  Historically Amazon has used revenue from other segments to fund new ventures. AWS is profitable now, but it only came to be from the huge numbers that retail posts.
  
  If it was truly the case that retail has no value, it would have been ditched ages ago, but in reality, the retail segment of the company enables other segments to be profitable. High revenue gives you liquidity, and Amazon's vast infrastructure network provides lots of other opportunities for the business.
It's not weird when you consider the average real estate lease for companies of this size is probably 10 years or more, so they are sitting on an inventory of empty or more empty than full offices, paying rent on them, but not having anyone in there. Also, many cities/states incentivize "butts in chairs" based tax breaks for companies that hire staff in their cities, and you don't have butts in the chairs, you don't have the tax breaks.
- Can you point to one of the butts in chairs breaks? I have never heard of that specific requirement
- Not to mention the fact that said real estate is all in extremely expensive locales (Bellevue, WA for starters), so that's a lot of money they're blowing on unoccupied buildings.

A voluntary resignation? Good luck with that!

“Yes, I assure you they voluntarily resigned. They tried to resist it but we forced it on them.”

The brain drain is real. Wonder how long before this boomer policy hurts Andy's precious shareholders.

Is it? Would be nice if it's the case but I imagine they have some numbers making them feel content with this policy.
- They think they're trimming the fat, but in reality all they're going to have left is gristle. There was a massive brain-drain during and after the layoff craze & project cancellation frenzy, and this is just going to lead to another wave. Andy's just trying to coast with AWS running on the shoulders of people who simply can't get hired anywhere else, or are just planning to be comfortable in their rut until they retire.
Amazon has a big moat. They could probably fuck up for another 20 years and make a profit.

I've gotten so much recruitment crap from Amazon. This kind of crap is why none of those worked out for them.

Same. I just ignore them now.
- Schedule meetings with them and then don't show.
I keep telling them I'm not interested, only to have someone new reach out. It's frustrating. They don't even pay that well.

I guess if your desperate in the software development/DevOps industries, but even the smaller companies pay as much as they do.

I think my favorite part of the Amazon RTO is the fact that there are many offices that charge you to park there

When I worked in an office I had to pay for parking in addition to paying for gas and wear and tear, ALLLLLLLL so I could have the very valuable experience of working in an open concept office that is perpetually loud and distracting

But yeah… wfh is totally bad for productivity… give me a fucking break
This is common in dense urban locations; parking is expensive, and getting free parking just for working somewhere is not expected at all.
- If a company expects me to come in multiple times a week to do their work, they should be paying for that time and money by an increase in salary which covers that expense.
  
  If I can do the same job without incurring that expense, and have been, why should I? All that means is I lose more money from my salary.

Remote Workers warn Amazon CEO Any Jassy: 'Working for a tyrant is probably not going to work out for us."

If you pay my commute.

And also start the compensated-hours clock the moment I step into the car. We're giving you eight hours a day, not 12 now.
- Gonna need a hot lunch provided, laundry on-site, dog walkers, child care, a gym and a space where I can play guitar when I'm on a break
  
  Oooh you wanted me to give all that up for nothing? In that case you can get bent, get fucked, roll over and get fucked again. I left three jobs over RTO mandates. Every time I left it was for more money. Now I'm at a place that doesn't even have an office, just Google meet and a PO box for physical mail.
- We also used to have paid lunches and breaks. We lost those in the 1980s.
  
  It would be remiss of me to neglect mentioning covering and mandating OSHA required breaks (and otherwise recognizing your worker are human beings) can improve their productivity to exceed the time and expense cost, so it's not just being a good boss but economically sound.
  
  The failures of top-down management to even keep their own businesses working optimally is an indictment of capitalism at its core.
In US workers pay for commuting to work ?
- Yup. If you're lucky you can get pre taxed commuter benefits but that's not much. My monthly bus pass is more than my credits and that doesn't included parking or subways

This is readily admitting he's about to do what's called Constructive Dismissal!

Which means he will owe all remote workers their severance pay.

I was looking at some of the Amazon postings near me, but they're all down in Irvine.

Pretty much the entire talents pool of LA is off limits to Amazon now.

Prick

As the planet burns down they think it's a great idea to force more fossil fuels usage so they can feel important

A large portion of their business relies on rapid manufacturing and delivery. They're not concerned about the environment
- I’m not an expert in Amazon but I thought Jassy was CEO of AWS, which would be amazon web services. For the uninitiated, AWS is basically a hosting company - they don’t just provide web services for amazon.com.
  
  Being the CEO of a company that specializes in using the internet and making those workers come into an office is especially ghoulish.

You know what's probably not going to work out for you, Andy Jassy? The next proletariat uprising.

That's never going to happen.

What really won't work out for him is retention of top talent that values WFH.
- Can we also change his wiki to have his middle name be Hugh?
I think civilization will end way before americans grow a pair of balls and stand up against this breed of assholes

Nah, I'm fine at home.

I kinda hate this shit tbh, what they are doing is paying us less and forcing us to move to more and more high cost areas to work "in the office". I kinda honestly think back to the office is a way to lay off a ton of people with unemployment.

Anybody own a guillotine?

Andy Sassy

Lol, Andy ain't gonna work for me

Who tf would even work for Amazon?

Says the man with skin the same color tone as Elmer's glue

Dude is an asshole but what does the quote have to do with his pale skin?
- That he doesn't leave home and work from home? So the sun doesn't gets to him...Idk....

This won't change until there is a shortage of work and a surplus of workers.

This won’t change until there is a shortage of work and a surplus of workers.

I think you've got that backwards. What you described would give workers less power, not more.