Had an interview for an amazon fulfilment center desk job. It went great, I was a perfect fit, except they wanted me to work in the office 4 out of 5 days a week. (It wasn’t clear in the job listing)
When I asked which part of the job requires a physical presence it turned out none of it. Zero. Nada. They told me an employee must be an exceptional asset to get authorization for full remote work.
I got an offer, but refused as it was too much commuting. The recruiter contacted me afterwards if I would give it another thought, but refused again.
I got a new job that has no remote possibilities because we run a defense SaaS thing that’s cut off from the internet, so, a real reason for it
I’m paid 2.5x my old wage for it and everyone keeps leaving despite the insane pay. We’re about to hire a software guy that didn’t know what grep or curl was
Granted there’s a few more hurdles (applicants must speak english fluently and make as few mistakes as possible writing in a country that’s hardly bilingual, top of the chain tech stack that might give people the feeling that they’re not qualified, …) but 2.5x the pay? I’m gonna get enough to straight up buy a house with cash in like two years
If I made 2.5x my current salary, which would be almost 400,000 a year, I would seriously consider returning to the office. Then I would retire in something like 10 years which is way earlier than I’m currently looking at. For that, RTO would actually be worth it.
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Return to the office so we can all jump on Zoom calls with people in other offices? What a fucking joke. “Return to office” is just a giant grift.
“Jassey deflected questions on what data or information led him to make this decision. Jassey, seemingly losing patience, eventually warned employees that if they don’t return to the office, they may have to find employment elsewhere.”
So he doesn’t have a good reason, and when asked about it he started to “lose patience”? How dare anyone question the all mighty CEOs plans /s
I really wish they’d give a real reason for it. Just say “When we built our offices we negotiated with the city to have lower taxes and if you don’t come back we’ll lose that.” Or “We don’t want the value of our commercial real estate holdings to go down.”
At the very least the workers could be mad at the right thing. Instead Amazon is going to lose its best folks to fully remote jobs first, then backfill with people who aren’t able to get a WFH job or have to pay people a huge premium to attract remote workers back to the office.
That will hurt them worse than the taxes or real estate devaluation, but that will happen over years instead of by next quarter, so they don’t care.
