Amazon doubling down on RTO (return to office)The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead. Exclusive.
👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. We cover one out of four topics in today’s subscriber-only The Scoop issue. To get full issues twice a week, subscribe: One month ago - on 17 February - Amazon announced its new remote work policy. From 1 May, employees are expected to spend at least three days per week in the office. I shared insider details on the unprecedented pushback that this new policy has received. A big part of the pushback came because of three big reasons:
More than 10,000 employees signed a petition asking for this new RTO policy be reversed, and more than 25,000 people joined an internal Slack channel to protest against the RTO policy change. Engineers I talked with were hopeful that Amazon’s leadership team - the S-Team - would reverse the policy or at least soften it. Until now, the S-Team did not communicate further about these changes. Until today, that is. Today - on 16 March - Amazon updated their FAQs about RTO. There is no softening of the policy: Amazon is doubling down on it. The company published answers to 28 frequent questions, including these (emphasis mine):
The question about when your team is remote but you are not:
Sales and Customer Support will probably be exempt from the RTO requirement: however, employees do not yet have details on exactly what teams. For people outside Sales and Customer Support - such as Engineering - exceptions need to be requested to work remotely. If the exception is not related to a disability accommodation: this exception requires S-Team approval - which, practically, means an SVP or VP-level approval. So what is the mood like inside Amazon? Grim, talking to engineers. On Slack, people are talking about resigning, and the topic of unionizing is coming up more frequently. Amazon is known for being a company that wants to stop unionization by every means possible - so bringing up unionization - or, as engineers, I talked to called it: ‘the forbidden U word’ is an unusually strong response. The same engineers upset about the RTO policy here to stay are also talking about canceling their Prime memberships or boycotting Amazon. What I hear from all of this is that many engineers find their situation hopeless: I am talking about people living too far from an office to make their commute practical. These people have no other option than to apply for a remote work exception - and hope they get it from the S-Team. Failing that: it will be a very long commute from May or having to find another job and resign. What does Amazon’s approach signal for other companies? I consistently pay attention to what Amazon does, as the company has read the market well for the past decades: both from a business perspective, and also from how to attract and retain software engineers - doing this in a frugal way. The fact that Amazon’s S-Team did not blink, and refuses to soften the return to work policy signals that they either don’t expect much attrition, or have calculated with additional attrition. Given that the company is in the middle of cutting 18,000 positions, there’s a fair chance that this RTO policy is a way to further increase attrition. At the same time, looking at the market, it’s hard not to ask the question: if people want to leave, where will they leave to? Meta just announced more cuts - and closing all 5,000 open positions. Dozens of tech companies have put similar, 3-day return to office policies in place starting from December, when an RTO wave started, as we covered in The Scoop #34. There are, of course, still companies out there that are hiring for either full-remote or remote-friendly roles: a large number of startups and scaleups, and some better-known tech companies like Shopify, Spotify, GitLab our Automatic. Still, I cannot help but observe that we have passed “peak remote work,” and workplaces that have been office-first before the pandemic: most of them are reverting to a hybrid setup of 3 days per week in the office. Just like Meta has hinted of doing exactly this, likely preparing for a policy change, also to target three days per week in the office. This was one out of the five topics covered in this week’s The Scoop. A lot of what I share in The Scoop is exclusive to this publication, meaning it’s not been covered in any other media outlet before and you’re the first to read about it. The full The Scoop edition additionally covers:
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Thursday, March 16, 2023
Amazon doubling down on RTO (return to office)
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