Always makes me wonder if it's just to feel that they have more control over people or quiet firing after uncontrolled growth fuelled by the last hype.
Always makes me wonder if it's just to feel that they have more control over people or quiet firing after uncontrolled growth fuelled by the last hype.
Stealth layoff. Amazon is now in the less than 7% of tech companies that have full in-office mandates. They're more strict than pre-COVID with detailed badge tracking reports. They also secretly...
Stealth layoff. Amazon is now in the less than 7% of tech companies that have full in-office mandates. They're more strict than pre-COVID with detailed badge tracking reports. They also secretly killed the option for employees to temporarily work from anywhere in the world, effective immediately. Just in time to ruin the holidays for people that wanted to see family.
You see this more often, people applied for remote jobs and a year and a half down the line they're now mandated to be in office. Can't do it because you live halfway around the world? Tough luck,...
You see this more often, people applied for remote jobs and a year and a half down the line they're now mandated to be in office. Can't do it because you live halfway around the world? Tough luck, seek fortune elsewhere.
It's induced layoffs, but with "reasonable" firing cause.
It could be as much PR as the actual money (it's not a layoff, don't blame us investors!), although that depends on the terms of the employment contracts. That said, there's a legal difference...
It could be as much PR as the actual money (it's not a layoff, don't blame us investors!), although that depends on the terms of the employment contracts. That said, there's a legal difference between remote jobs and jobs with the option for remote, even if the latter is offering 100% remote at start - it's not guaranteed remote, and the contract would usually include the option to call the employee back in. They could then argue "It's not our fault the employee engaged in risky behavior by moving away from their workplace when their employment contract clearly stated they could be asked to come back in at any time."
That usually seems to be the most logical explanation to me but surely they would disproportionately lose the most high-value employees, and have little ability to dictate how much of which...
That usually seems to be the most logical explanation to me but surely they would disproportionately lose the most high-value employees, and have little ability to dictate how much of which departments will quit. Seems like a fairly disruptive way to do it.
I always just assumed (based on my time in an MBA program) that it's a pure numbers game. Labor costs are simply a line item to be tweaked for maximizing shareholder value. Maybe some of the...
I always just assumed (based on my time in an MBA program) that it's a pure numbers game. Labor costs are simply a line item to be tweaked for maximizing shareholder value. Maybe some of the better members of leadership pay closer attention to the less tangible parts of what drive the numbers, but I would bet that most are just balancing a spreadsheet.
That exactly mirrors my experience in HR analytics and budgeting with executives. Once they all agree they turn around and protect their most productive team members but anyone else could be at...
That exactly mirrors my experience in HR analytics and budgeting with executives. Once they all agree they turn around and protect their most productive team members but anyone else could be at risk to meet the number.
They do not value people over there whatsoever, at any level of the company. They know that their name holds enough weight that they can continue to churn through human capital (their phrase)....
They do not value people over there whatsoever, at any level of the company. They know that their name holds enough weight that they can continue to churn through human capital (their phrase). Upper Management there are so disconnected from their humanity that their behavior is predictable.
They're somewhat aware of the Dead Sea Effect, but the C suite honestly believe those that stick around care about the culture rather than their visa or salary.
They're somewhat aware of the Dead Sea Effect, but the C suite honestly believe those that stick around care about the culture rather than their visa or salary.
I don't really see how it could be anything else. Pulling back from remote work is little more than saying "we don't trust our employees and we need to extert more control." And since the pull...
I don't really see how it could be anything else. Pulling back from remote work is little more than saying "we don't trust our employees and we need to extert more control."
And since the pull back into the office isn't going to make people magically more productive, they'll be making new excuses about employees slacking off and upping the level of surveillance.
Two of the more interesting theories I've read about why big companies order people back to the office are: They want to lay off people without the political and PR damage. Some employees are...
Two of the more interesting theories I've read about why big companies order people back to the office are:
They want to lay off people without the political and PR damage.
Some employees are genuinely remote and not inclined to move. Some employees love remote work and would rather look for a new position.
3. The people making these decisions are management that sit in meetings all day every day who feel energized by spending all day in rooms with other people. So as the people making the decision...
3. The people making these decisions are management that sit in meetings all day every day who feel energized by spending all day in rooms with other people. So as the people making the decision they prioritize their own job satisfaction and convenience over everyone else.
4. Good managers, who manage by outcomes and supporting their people, can work with remote teams just fine. Bad or merely incompetent managers need "butts in seats" as a proxy for actual...
4. Good managers, who manage by outcomes and supporting their people, can work with remote teams just fine. Bad or merely incompetent managers need "butts in seats" as a proxy for actual management skills, and they feel lost when they are not lording their power over someone.
Eh it's not black and white. There's plenty of people like you describe, but there are teams and people who just work better in person. Obviously in the tech circle you're much more likely to have...
Eh it's not black and white. There's plenty of people like you describe, but there are teams and people who just work better in person.
Obviously in the tech circle you're much more likely to have a group of people who can manage their workload remotely and communicate effectively through systems like slack/teams/email/whatever, but at the end of the day tech literacy outside of IT (and arguably even within) is abhorrent. You can in theory do screen shares and what not, but it can feel like pulling teeth.
There's also issues with now formalizing edge cases that break procedure. If someone from HR says "hey i can't get this to work", and you quickly look over their shoulder, seeing nothing but their desktop, and then say "oh yeah just do this" that could technically violate procedures/require extra clearance, but it also isn't going to be reported by anyone.
Companies RUN on edge cases like these, and the moment you start logging it with "why did you screen share with HR", you start creating even more work.
And to be clear, I think remote is absolutely the future. The money saved on not having a physical building is just too much of an advantage for it not to be. I just expect that all companies built before remote was shown to be quite easy (thanks covid), are going to revert because they weren't built with it in mind and too much of the company doesn't get it.
Personally I find that working remotely removes the intangibles of work that are so critical to learning how to be an engineer. When you look over and see your coworker using a reversible debugger...
Personally I find that working remotely removes the intangibles of work that are so critical to learning how to be an engineer. When you look over and see your coworker using a reversible debugger for the first time and discover a new tool. Or you might gain an intuition for how much time different roles spend in meetings vs. coding vs. slacking off. I don’t want to interact with coworkers through their commits, final designs, etc. It would be miserable to formally require all of the little intermediary check ins and reviews when remote that you can get for free by sitting next to someone.
I’ve really loved being in a pod of designers, PMs, front end, and back end engineers in the pre pandemic days. I’m not there to get paid as much as I am there to learn.
I have frequent one-on-one screen sharing sessions with my coworkers, and have even done development of a complex component with a team of four (all remote) doing team programming, and it was very...
I have frequent one-on-one screen sharing sessions with my coworkers, and have even done development of a complex component with a team of four (all remote) doing team programming, and it was very effective. You still get a lot of the same benefits, and in some ways better because each person has a comfortable spot to sit and perfect view of the display, unlike when multiple people are trying to look at the same monitor.
Seriously. I don't get some of the comments above yours. Where I work has 2 easy ways to do screen shares. It is a lot nicer than standing over someone trying to see what they are typing on their...
Seriously.
I don't get some of the comments above yours. Where I work has 2 easy ways to do screen shares. It is a lot nicer than standing over someone trying to see what they are typing on their screen.
I've learned about new ( to me ) tools while remote, no peaking into cubes was required. :-)
I recently met someone in person who I worked with over video meetings for most of a year. It didn't feel like "meeting" her. It felt like getting together with someone I already knew.
Yeah there's certainly a balance to be struck. I do think that hybrid is going to be the majority of the future for reasons like this. Being able to just tap someone on the shoulder and say "show...
Yeah there's certainly a balance to be struck. I do think that hybrid is going to be the majority of the future for reasons like this. Being able to just tap someone on the shoulder and say "show me" is still faster than trying to get a screen share going (and lets you easier assess if now's a good time than their supposedly correct status).
I personally work in an environment where I think I should be in the office every day, if not for a full day, just so I can quickly touch base with people who aren't technical and hash out details and discussions. I have team members however who mostly work on backend architecture who probably don't need to be in the office other than for the occasional touch base meeting.
Yeah. I personally like 4 days a week in the office, but also not necessarily for all 8 hours (if 8 are even required, which i don’t think is generally true).
Yeah. I personally like 4 days a week in the office, but also not necessarily for all 8 hours (if 8 are even required, which i don’t think is generally true).
Another plausible one I've heard is that the tax breaks for those office buildings only applies to the extent they are occupied. If so, that's money the company planned to receive and has been...
Another plausible one I've heard is that the tax breaks for those office buildings only applies to the extent they are occupied. If so, that's money the company planned to receive and has been bleeding.
We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the advantage of returning to office. Those of us in the US are not smarter than our counterparts in the rest of the world, but we do cost significantly more....
We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the advantage of returning to office. Those of us in the US are not smarter than our counterparts in the rest of the world, but we do cost significantly more. The more that we shift to remote work, the more that employers question why they don't hire our less expensive colleagues.
The difference between the failed attempts at offshoring before and now is that, in the past, they tried to offshore to too different of a timezone. Today, South American countries have very developed IT sectors and are not in a different timezone. Furthermore, the same tools that exist today that enable a better remote working environment for you in America also enables better working environments to your colleagues outside of America. The game has changed and will continue to change, so the last advantage you'll ever hold is your vaunted ability to walk into an office on command. Don't fight to remove that, or at least give it some consideration that on a macro level it helps.
I am currently a remote employee with no expectations that I will always be allowed to be remote.
While you're right that South America doesn't have the huge timezone difference, they completely lack India's advantage of widespread English fluency. It's not trivial to offshore systems to other...
While you're right that South America doesn't have the huge timezone difference, they completely lack India's advantage of widespread English fluency. It's not trivial to offshore systems to other countries. I'm sure we'll continue to see companies make stupid decisions around offshoring, and I'm confident there'll still be plenty of work in the Anglosphere.
I see a lot of folks talk about how they will lose their best people, but I don't think that will be the case. They will lose some, of course, but Amazon, or at least the parts I have friends and...
I see a lot of folks talk about how they will lose their best people, but I don't think that will be the case. They will lose some, of course, but Amazon, or at least the parts I have friends and colleagues in, has good stock incentives. Every review period, top performers are allocated more stock with a three year or so vesting period. So all of their top performs probably have five figures of stock waiting to vest over the next few years, and they will keep getting more if they keep up the work.
Most of the people I know are annoyed by the in office requirements, but are going to stay because that stock represents their FIRE strategy and early retirement nest egg.
There will still be managerial discretion, just like there was before and is now. They just have a few more processes to manage at the moment. But those might go away once they re-establish the in office norm.
Most people don't understand how Amazon stock compensation works and think they'll make more money if they stick around. They've been wrong about that for about 5 years now. Amazon has a "total...
Most people don't understand how Amazon stock compensation works and think they'll make more money if they stick around. They've been wrong about that for about 5 years now.
Amazon has a "total compensation target" for every employee, and they assign salary and stocks each year to meet that number. However, if the employee's previous stock grants push them over their target, they get nothing. What's truly insidious is Amazon RSUs are given out with the expectation they'll grow 15% every year. If someone is supposed to earn $100k in stocks, they'll only give $87k. If the stock doesn't grow 15%, they simply earn less money than expected and Amazon gives no fucks.
Employee comp only overshoots compensation targets if the stock consistently grows more than 15% every year which hasn't happened in a long time. Everyone else is getting the exact same amount in stocks as they did in cash with their sign-on bonuses, by design.
That's true, the 15% haircut is a uniquely Amazon cop out. That said, when I was dealing with compensation for an offer that I ultimately turned down, they let me more or less set the proportion...
That's true, the 15% haircut is a uniquely Amazon cop out. That said, when I was dealing with compensation for an offer that I ultimately turned down, they let me more or less set the proportion of compensation I wanted as salary vs stock. So it is a bit complicated. But I still expect most top talent to stick around for their stock to vest even if just to get that last 40% in November from a prior grant. And if Amazon starts to see to people leave, they can entice them with additional stock, which conveniently vests four years later.
The stock grants are always portioned out funny, but the comp is much the same year to year unless pay bands get bumped a significant amount. The stock shouldn't be a real incentive since comp is...
The stock grants are always portioned out funny, but the comp is much the same year to year unless pay bands get bumped a significant amount. The stock shouldn't be a real incentive since comp is the same every year. Still, people see a big number in their accounts and stick around till it's theirs. Regardless, I expect a fair number of people to leave after the next vest because many were already on their way out (especially parents).
For reference, when I was at Google a coworker mentioned how during the pandemic he and his wife (Amazon) both asked their employers to go part time because they couldn’t get daycare for their...
For reference, when I was at Google a coworker mentioned how during the pandemic he and his wife (Amazon) both asked their employers to go part time because they couldn’t get daycare for their kid. Google told the father he could go half time with no reduction in pay for a year. Amazon laughed the mother out of the room.
It seems like, even for someone who understands all that, the deal might be good enough to stay, depending on what that ‘total compensation target’ is?
It seems like, even for someone who understands all that, the deal might be good enough to stay, depending on what that ‘total compensation target’ is?
Of course, the pay package is highly competitive and that's one of the main reasons anyone is willing to deal with the current CEO's nonsense. Levels.fyi is accurate. No one is happy about any of...
Of course, the pay package is highly competitive and that's one of the main reasons anyone is willing to deal with the current CEO's nonsense. Levels.fyi is accurate. No one is happy about any of the recent changes, but a better offer would require grinding leetcode.
For any selective process, there’s a question of what it selects for. Requiring people to work in the office probably selects for people who already live near an office, people who can move to be...
For any selective process, there’s a question of what it selects for. Requiring people to work in the office probably selects for people who already live near an office, people who can move to be closer to an office, people who have reasons to endure long commutes (or perhaps don’t mind them so much), and those who have enough pull to get a manager to grant an exception.
It selects against people who have better options and live far away. One reason they might see other options as better is because they don’t particularly care about working at Amazon or actively dislike it.
Perhaps a process that looks like it selects for people who are more dedicated looks good to a CEO?
I don’t think it’s easy to predict which of these many possible reasons is more important. We don’t have that data.
It also hurts working parents that want to save on childcare expenses. COVID numbers show that remote and hybrid were fantastic for working moms. It's no surprise Amazon's C suite is dominated by men.
It also hurts working parents that want to save on childcare expenses. COVID numbers show that remote and hybrid were fantastic for working moms. It's no surprise Amazon's C suite is dominated by men.
Always makes me wonder if it's just to feel that they have more control over people or quiet firing after uncontrolled growth fuelled by the last hype.
Stealth layoff. Amazon is now in the less than 7% of tech companies that have full in-office mandates. They're more strict than pre-COVID with detailed badge tracking reports. They also secretly killed the option for employees to temporarily work from anywhere in the world, effective immediately. Just in time to ruin the holidays for people that wanted to see family.
You see this more often, people applied for remote jobs and a year and a half down the line they're now mandated to be in office. Can't do it because you live halfway around the world? Tough luck, seek fortune elsewhere.
It's induced layoffs, but with "reasonable" firing cause.
But wouldn't that be considered constructive dismissal and still carry cause for unemployment?
It could be as much PR as the actual money (it's not a layoff, don't blame us investors!), although that depends on the terms of the employment contracts. That said, there's a legal difference between remote jobs and jobs with the option for remote, even if the latter is offering 100% remote at start - it's not guaranteed remote, and the contract would usually include the option to call the employee back in. They could then argue "It's not our fault the employee engaged in risky behavior by moving away from their workplace when their employment contract clearly stated they could be asked to come back in at any time."
That usually seems to be the most logical explanation to me but surely they would disproportionately lose the most high-value employees, and have little ability to dictate how much of which departments will quit. Seems like a fairly disruptive way to do it.
I always just assumed (based on my time in an MBA program) that it's a pure numbers game. Labor costs are simply a line item to be tweaked for maximizing shareholder value. Maybe some of the better members of leadership pay closer attention to the less tangible parts of what drive the numbers, but I would bet that most are just balancing a spreadsheet.
That exactly mirrors my experience in HR analytics and budgeting with executives. Once they all agree they turn around and protect their most productive team members but anyone else could be at risk to meet the number.
They do not value people over there whatsoever, at any level of the company. They know that their name holds enough weight that they can continue to churn through human capital (their phrase). Upper Management there are so disconnected from their humanity that their behavior is predictable.
They're somewhat aware of the Dead Sea Effect, but the C suite honestly believe those that stick around care about the culture rather than their visa or salary.
Or even worse, they're knowingly filtering out the workers who stand up for themselves, until they're left with teams that can be abused at leisure.
Intentionally or not, I've seen many teams made up exclusively visa workers. That's always a bad sign to me.
I don't really see how it could be anything else. Pulling back from remote work is little more than saying "we don't trust our employees and we need to extert more control."
And since the pull back into the office isn't going to make people magically more productive, they'll be making new excuses about employees slacking off and upping the level of surveillance.
Two of the more interesting theories I've read about why big companies order people back to the office are:
They want to lay off people without the political and PR damage.
Some employees are genuinely remote and not inclined to move. Some employees love remote work and would rather look for a new position.
Justify money spent on office buildings they own
3. The people making these decisions are management that sit in meetings all day every day who feel energized by spending all day in rooms with other people. So as the people making the decision they prioritize their own job satisfaction and convenience over everyone else.
4. Good managers, who manage by outcomes and supporting their people, can work with remote teams just fine. Bad or merely incompetent managers need "butts in seats" as a proxy for actual management skills, and they feel lost when they are not lording their power over someone.
Eh it's not black and white. There's plenty of people like you describe, but there are teams and people who just work better in person.
Obviously in the tech circle you're much more likely to have a group of people who can manage their workload remotely and communicate effectively through systems like slack/teams/email/whatever, but at the end of the day tech literacy outside of IT (and arguably even within) is abhorrent. You can in theory do screen shares and what not, but it can feel like pulling teeth.
There's also issues with now formalizing edge cases that break procedure. If someone from HR says "hey i can't get this to work", and you quickly look over their shoulder, seeing nothing but their desktop, and then say "oh yeah just do this" that could technically violate procedures/require extra clearance, but it also isn't going to be reported by anyone.
Companies RUN on edge cases like these, and the moment you start logging it with "why did you screen share with HR", you start creating even more work.
And to be clear, I think remote is absolutely the future. The money saved on not having a physical building is just too much of an advantage for it not to be. I just expect that all companies built before remote was shown to be quite easy (thanks covid), are going to revert because they weren't built with it in mind and too much of the company doesn't get it.
Personally I find that working remotely removes the intangibles of work that are so critical to learning how to be an engineer. When you look over and see your coworker using a reversible debugger for the first time and discover a new tool. Or you might gain an intuition for how much time different roles spend in meetings vs. coding vs. slacking off. I don’t want to interact with coworkers through their commits, final designs, etc. It would be miserable to formally require all of the little intermediary check ins and reviews when remote that you can get for free by sitting next to someone.
I’ve really loved being in a pod of designers, PMs, front end, and back end engineers in the pre pandemic days. I’m not there to get paid as much as I am there to learn.
I have frequent one-on-one screen sharing sessions with my coworkers, and have even done development of a complex component with a team of four (all remote) doing team programming, and it was very effective. You still get a lot of the same benefits, and in some ways better because each person has a comfortable spot to sit and perfect view of the display, unlike when multiple people are trying to look at the same monitor.
Seriously.
I don't get some of the comments above yours. Where I work has 2 easy ways to do screen shares. It is a lot nicer than standing over someone trying to see what they are typing on their screen.
I've learned about new ( to me ) tools while remote, no peaking into cubes was required. :-)
I recently met someone in person who I worked with over video meetings for most of a year. It didn't feel like "meeting" her. It felt like getting together with someone I already knew.
Yeah there's certainly a balance to be struck. I do think that hybrid is going to be the majority of the future for reasons like this. Being able to just tap someone on the shoulder and say "show me" is still faster than trying to get a screen share going (and lets you easier assess if now's a good time than their supposedly correct status).
I personally work in an environment where I think I should be in the office every day, if not for a full day, just so I can quickly touch base with people who aren't technical and hash out details and discussions. I have team members however who mostly work on backend architecture who probably don't need to be in the office other than for the occasional touch base meeting.
Yeah. I personally like 4 days a week in the office, but also not necessarily for all 8 hours (if 8 are even required, which i don’t think is generally true).
An uncommon way of looking at things.
Another plausible one I've heard is that the tax breaks for those office buildings only applies to the extent they are occupied. If so, that's money the company planned to receive and has been bleeding.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks
Great point.
We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the advantage of returning to office. Those of us in the US are not smarter than our counterparts in the rest of the world, but we do cost significantly more. The more that we shift to remote work, the more that employers question why they don't hire our less expensive colleagues.
The difference between the failed attempts at offshoring before and now is that, in the past, they tried to offshore to too different of a timezone. Today, South American countries have very developed IT sectors and are not in a different timezone. Furthermore, the same tools that exist today that enable a better remote working environment for you in America also enables better working environments to your colleagues outside of America. The game has changed and will continue to change, so the last advantage you'll ever hold is your vaunted ability to walk into an office on command. Don't fight to remove that, or at least give it some consideration that on a macro level it helps.
I am currently a remote employee with no expectations that I will always be allowed to be remote.
While you're right that South America doesn't have the huge timezone difference, they completely lack India's advantage of widespread English fluency. It's not trivial to offshore systems to other countries. I'm sure we'll continue to see companies make stupid decisions around offshoring, and I'm confident there'll still be plenty of work in the Anglosphere.
I see a lot of folks talk about how they will lose their best people, but I don't think that will be the case. They will lose some, of course, but Amazon, or at least the parts I have friends and colleagues in, has good stock incentives. Every review period, top performers are allocated more stock with a three year or so vesting period. So all of their top performs probably have five figures of stock waiting to vest over the next few years, and they will keep getting more if they keep up the work.
Most of the people I know are annoyed by the in office requirements, but are going to stay because that stock represents their FIRE strategy and early retirement nest egg.
There will still be managerial discretion, just like there was before and is now. They just have a few more processes to manage at the moment. But those might go away once they re-establish the in office norm.
Most people don't understand how Amazon stock compensation works and think they'll make more money if they stick around. They've been wrong about that for about 5 years now.
Amazon has a "total compensation target" for every employee, and they assign salary and stocks each year to meet that number. However, if the employee's previous stock grants push them over their target, they get nothing. What's truly insidious is Amazon RSUs are given out with the expectation they'll grow 15% every year. If someone is supposed to earn $100k in stocks, they'll only give $87k. If the stock doesn't grow 15%, they simply earn less money than expected and Amazon gives no fucks.
Employee comp only overshoots compensation targets if the stock consistently grows more than 15% every year which hasn't happened in a long time. Everyone else is getting the exact same amount in stocks as they did in cash with their sign-on bonuses, by design.
That's true, the 15% haircut is a uniquely Amazon cop out. That said, when I was dealing with compensation for an offer that I ultimately turned down, they let me more or less set the proportion of compensation I wanted as salary vs stock. So it is a bit complicated. But I still expect most top talent to stick around for their stock to vest even if just to get that last 40% in November from a prior grant. And if Amazon starts to see to people leave, they can entice them with additional stock, which conveniently vests four years later.
The stock grants are always portioned out funny, but the comp is much the same year to year unless pay bands get bumped a significant amount. The stock shouldn't be a real incentive since comp is the same every year. Still, people see a big number in their accounts and stick around till it's theirs. Regardless, I expect a fair number of people to leave after the next vest because many were already on their way out (especially parents).
For reference, when I was at Google a coworker mentioned how during the pandemic he and his wife (Amazon) both asked their employers to go part time because they couldn’t get daycare for their kid. Google told the father he could go half time with no reduction in pay for a year. Amazon laughed the mother out of the room.
If I recall this November I'd the next major vest period, yes? We should start to see them if folks are deciding it's time to cash out!
It seems like, even for someone who understands all that, the deal might be good enough to stay, depending on what that ‘total compensation target’ is?
Of course, the pay package is highly competitive and that's one of the main reasons anyone is willing to deal with the current CEO's nonsense. Levels.fyi is accurate. No one is happy about any of the recent changes, but a better offer would require grinding leetcode.
For any selective process, there’s a question of what it selects for. Requiring people to work in the office probably selects for people who already live near an office, people who can move to be closer to an office, people who have reasons to endure long commutes (or perhaps don’t mind them so much), and those who have enough pull to get a manager to grant an exception.
It selects against people who have better options and live far away. One reason they might see other options as better is because they don’t particularly care about working at Amazon or actively dislike it.
Perhaps a process that looks like it selects for people who are more dedicated looks good to a CEO?
I don’t think it’s easy to predict which of these many possible reasons is more important. We don’t have that data.
It also hurts working parents that want to save on childcare expenses. COVID numbers show that remote and hybrid were fantastic for working moms. It's no surprise Amazon's C suite is dominated by men.