Technology

"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.

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

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.

Too many libertarians in tech. Will never happen.

Source. In tech. Not libertarian.

I wish. A union could have easily prevented this.

It's all the same families. The American Oligarchy.

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.

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.

You can only artificially raise the price of real estate for so long.

Today's workers are too nice...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

That's never going to happen.

What really won't work out for him is retention of top talent that values WFH.