I enjoy how Amazon talks a big game about how great they are for the environment and their pledge to stop climate change, then they force workers to commute to the office who have been happily doing their jobs over the internet.
Yah this is literally the most basic shit any company can do to be more “green”, cut costs, have access to a larger worker base…
Nope. Because the CEOs are all more concerned with the commercial real estate market than running their company efficiently.
They illegally fired the very employees who led the effort to pressure the company internally to do more on climate… All their climate posturing ever since has been bullshit.
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The employees hired during full remote are now going to have to change their lives around going into the office. Tech employees are especially fucked because they either have to stay or they have to attempt to join the flood of tech employees looking for remote jobs (which was caused by the execs doing layoffs at tech companies).
There should be protections against hiring someone remote and then forcing them into the office as soon as you want to lay people off by forcing them to quit so you don’t have to compensate them.
In some countries, there are already.
In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.
So yes, basically, it’s legal.
That’ll teach us plebs. We’d better start licking some serious Amazon boot so they deign to let some of us earn enough to not die.
Thats assuming those full remote employees are anywhere near an office.
The worst is those people who bought houses out of town at the top of the real estate market because they believed the propaganda about WFH being permanent. However I never trusted C-level execs or directors not to renege on this, so I didn’t do that.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
God I hate Amazon now. They’re basically Wal-Mart these days with half the results being sponsored (advertisements) - and you see that even if you pay for Prime. There are some things you can only get there, but otherwise, since all e-commerce is converging, I don’t see the point of enabling their bad behavior. But whichever global corporate enterprise you take your business to, they will likely have a similar mindset.
And the search engine is shit, with non-existent filters. So you browse for longer and buy more shit you never needed.
Fuck Amazon.
Trying to make those yearly office space rentals worth it
Aren’t they still cheaper if nobody uses them?
Maybe. Real estate is flaky game at best
Ok, but I’m still not going back to wearing pants.
They should be charged an emissions tax and worker safety tax since driving to/from work is one of the leading causes of death for working adults
Seems like covid’s overall impact on society won’t be as long lived as we thought. The whole work from home thing was almost seen as revolutionary as it would save office space and expenses. But it seems companies care far more for control than even profit.
Don’t give up so easily
I drive by the Boeing strike every day and I do my part and I hunk twice quickly! Do your part guys! Hunk! It matters!
It’s not your job today, but it could be you there tomorrow at 8am wet and soggy from the rain and fog that continually falls in the PNW.
Honk like you just crashed on that big barrel of stuff burning. They burn stuff to stay dry and warm. It’s cold out here…not yet but give two more months and it will be freezing temps.
We can’t really give up. But I am a shit activist…
Companies want profit but the people who run them want control. Sooner or later the companies will reconfigure themselves to benefit the bottom line.
Cool, glad I didn’t listen to my parents, who wanted me to work for Amazon. Yeah, I probably could’ve made a ton more, but I’m making plenty where I’m at.
I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason. It’s nice working for someone that somewhat respects me.
“Probably could’ve made a ton more” - no chance of that working for Amazon.
You dodged a lot of pain and loooong hours, 7 days a week.
I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason.
For now. Soon it’s going to be: “Well, Amazon is calling people back, maybe we should, too.”
Well, the day my boss says that is the day I submit my 2 weeks notice, and probably half of our dept. We were hired with the promise of always having 3 days at home most days, and my boss kept to that, even pushing back against company policy that tried to shift to 3 days in office.
The day your boss does that is the day they want to lay people off on the cheap, because it’s a stupid decision with no measurable benefit over the 3 day minimum most of the big tech companies seem to have settled on.
And that’s fine, if my boss changes so radically that he’d go back on years of doing uncomfortable things to keep his word, I know it’s not a company I’d feel comfortable working at anymore anyway. Some things they’ve done:
- push back on 3-days in office - we “tried” it for a month or two, then went back to 2-days because it hurt our productivity
- when a visiting exec scheduled a mandatory meeting outside of our 2-day in-office window, boss told us to WFH one of those two days and pushed the exec to schedule future meetings in that 2-day window (which they’ve done since)
- tells us before changes come from corporate, and which will actually impact us (generally speaking, he says “ignore that new policy”)
- keeps us updated about department funding, and what the plans are if funding drops; he has hired some outside teams specifically so he can drop them if funding gets cut
In other words, he has kept his word for the few years I’ve worked here, and we’ve recently been getting praise from the executive team on company-wide calls (well, basically “product X has turned into a primary focus for our org’s strategy going forward,” where X is the thing I work on and was criticized just a few years).
If my boss leaves the org, I’ll probably start looking for jobs. But until then, I’m very happy where I am, even if I know I could probably get paid a little more elsewhere (probably 10% or so). Stability and integrity matter a lot to me.
That’s gonna be a no, dawg.
Generally? That’s bad leadership.
Maybe somebody has some insight into this: why does this succeed in getting people to quit, since that’s the obvious gambit? Why do people not just refuse to come back and get fired for insubordination or whatever? Do you not get unemployment benefits for getting fired for that reason (ignoring that unemployment is a pittance compared to their salaries), or are they packaging these people out with attractive severances or something?
Because people need stable incomes and healthcare, so they start applying for jobs and get them. People aren’t quitting to be unemployed.
Honestly, IDK. My company is moving their office slightly further away from me. This will add much more commute time because of the location though. I’m already looking for a new job but if I don’t find one by then I’m certainly not going in. We worked 100% remote for over 3 years. I’ll find out what the consequences are.
My situation will be a bit different though since the office location is moving. Seems unreasonable that they’d be able to deny unemployment because of that.
Depending on the country you live in, you should check for mobility clauses in your contract. In many EU countries moving the location of your work requires an employer to come to a “reasonable” agreement with the employer or treat the request as a redundancy (with redundancy pay etc).
They need to find their next job first
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It’s usually just enough severance to make it worth it. It’ll be like a month of pay maybe which is worth 6-8 months of unemployment.
And honestly…if they offer a month or two of health insurance on top, you have to take to avoid the cobra fees.
It’s usually an easy choice to take severance.
You get sign on shares when joining, but they don’t mature for 2 years. Leave/get fired before the 2 years is up, you forfeit the shares.
Staff turnover at the 2yr tenure mark was crazy. Well over 50% jumped ship as soon as they hit 2yrs.
Wasn’t there talk of a mass strike in the U.S., at some point? We should do that.
I really love to work from home. But I also understand IT security is dramatically complicated by user’s working on their private network connection or even private client devices. Teamwork also suffers noticably in some professions.
But I also understand IT security is dramatically complicated by user’s working on their private network connection.
It really isn’t.
Confident. I like that.
I work in telecomms, major strategic projects. I dont have an office to return to, for 9 years I have had no office. My computer can be wiped remotely amd requires 2fa to connect to the vpn.
We have never had a security incident that wasnt someone’s laptop being stolen.
Dont boot lick. This is not rocket science.
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So how did those laptops get stolen? Would that have been possible if their users worked on a local client at the office?
Rocket science is a fucking joke compared to secure IT practices. You saying that, proves that you know neither well enough to participate in this discourse. Most users would operate more securely if their client device was also physically restricted. If you don’t understand that, that’s the reason you are not making decisions. I’m sorry to be so blunt.
There are highly capable technical people that can securely work from home, but this is not the average user. If you don’t recognize that, you are probably just cheering for your own personal comfort right now. I get comfort, but don’t be blind to reality
So how did those laptops get stolen? Would that have been possible if their users worked on a local client at the office?
Yes laptops can be stolen from offices. It would be pretty trivial to do so in fact in most cases. In an all on site office it’d be a juicy target too because now all these laptops are in the same place.
Rocket science is a fucking joke compared to secure IT practices. You saying that, proves that you know neither well enough to participate in this discourse.
It is abundantly clear that you have little to no knowledge or experience in modern IT security practices. And before you ask, no, having watched Mr. Robot all the way through does not count.
There are highly capable technical people that can securely work from home, but this is not the average user.
You absolutely do not have to be highly technical to work securely from home. That’s just silly. You only need highly technical people to ensure the people who work from home can do so securely.
pretty trivial to do so
Yup. We have to “badge in” to our office, but the secretary will buzz you in if you ask nicely. Also, if you walk in with confidence as someone is entering/leaving, they’ll hold the door for you. Or go in around the EOD when the cleaning staff are there and they’ll let you in. All it takes is a very small amount of social engineering and you could steal a ton of stuff from my company.
But most people don’t lose stuff like laptops at home or in their office, they lose them when traveling. Maybe you drop by a coffee shop on the way to work and someone filches your bag, or maybe you take a flight for work and someone swipes it while you’re throwing something in the trash. They’re not going to break into your home or your office, they’ll snatch it while you’re out in public and not paying particularly close attention.
Lad just stop you are talking nonsense, everyone worked from home for 2 years and nothing happened
Nothing you know about maybe
It’s the type of confidence that comes with years of experience in IT security and compliance for global enterprises.
Likewise :) Sad to learn you are one of those that act confidentially while being blind. I’m the guy that cleans up after you.
Oh no you don’t, not likewise. There’s zero chance you have any real world experience under your belt, that much you’ve made very clear. You’ve already let it slip that you’re just a consultant lol. A glorified salesman playing around in SMB land no doubt. At best, maybe an old fart who actually dipped his toes into IT generalism two decades ago before getting out of the game and into consulting? I know the type lol.
It’s probably best if you were to stay in your lane and let the professionals worry about security.
Exactly. We use a VPN to connect to anything somewhat important, and anything truly important requires manual access and approvals. I’m in a pretty senior dev position, and if I lost my laptop:
- they’d have to break my password or biometric login (disk is encrypted) - with this they get access to most of our code, but no secrets
- they’d need to hack my phone to access any internal documentation or test environments due to 2FA
- they’d need to hack my password manager to access anything non-documentation - code repos, prod logs, etc
- they’d need to hack someone else’s machine to get access to actual prod data, which is probably what they really want
And I’m not doing anything special here (and I’m certainly not a security professional), that’s everyone’s machines due to company policy. We also don’t handle anything particularly sensitive, the most sensitive thing I have is proprietary algorithms, and we’d sue anyone if we suspected they stole our code.
Oh, and if they try to run something sus, it’ll send a report to our IT dept. I actually got contacted by our IT dept because I ran something unfamiliar (I really like my CLI tools), so they added an exception after personally verifying with me that it’s not a hack.
We have teams across the globe, both inside the org and outside, and we haven’t had any issues with security, and we do regular audits. Our security team isn’t particularly special either, I’m sure many other companies have much tighter security than we do.
I wish you knew how stupid you look for writing that
Oh brother read the room why don’t ya. It’s not too late to delete this lmao.
Maybe you should pay attention then.
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Just because you can perform a job from home, doesn’t mean it’s ideal for performance. With jobs like surgeons or bus drivers it’s more obvious, but the cut is not as clear as people like it to be.
I would hope it doesn’t take you long to imagine someone who has access to information about you where you would prefer it not be open on their laptop on their kitchen table at home while guests are around.
I’m not trying to defend Amazon. This is an active subject at many companies.
Security starts at the developer, you have to be deluded to think otherwise.
NDA, bulletproof’ed laptops, kernel-level-oversight, VPNs are just mitigations.
Everything is just mitigations. There is no zero risk.
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I work in consulting. I don’t have to make up anything. Be angry, but some people are trying to play their role in capitalism successfully.
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I’m not talking about myself in your last quote. I consult clients on their operational and technological challenges. I see a lot. Of course, you might also consult similar amounts of clients and you can see that their largest deficit contributor is that people aren’t taking their work home, but that’s not what I’m getting from you.
You just seem angry, because you can’t stomach that there are valid reasons for you to move out of your comfort zone. Sorry.
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Inb4 my company follows suit. Just like they want to with IT, AI, Cloud infrastructure (we own our stack almost entirely).
