Amazon is seeing some employees quit instead of moving to a new state as part of relocation mandate
Amazon workers hold signs during a walkout event at the company’s headquarters on May 31, 2023 in Seattle, Washington.
David Ryder | Getty Images News | Getty Images
As part of Amazon’s aggressive effort to get employees back to the office, the company is going a step further and demanding that some staffers move to a central hub to be with their team. Those who are unwilling or unable to comply are being forced to find work elsewhere, and some are choosing to quit, CNBC has learned.
Several employees spoke to CNBC about the new relocation requirement. An employee in Texas, who was hired in a remote role, said managers assured his team in March that nothing would change despite the return-to-office (RTO) mandate issued the prior month. But in July, the team was informed by management that they’d have to choose between working out of Seattle, New York, Austin, Texas, or Arlington, Virginia, according to internal correspondence.
Under the guidelines, remote workers are expected to have completed their move to a main hub by the first half of 2024, the document states. The employee, who doesn’t live near any of the designated cities, chose to leave Amazon after securing another position, in part due to uncertainty about future job security and the potential of higher living costs associated with the relocation with no guarantee of an increase in salary.
The person asked not to be named to avoid retaliation. CNBC spoke with three other employees in similar situations who all asked to remain anonymous.
Amazon spokesperson Rob Munoz confirmed the relocation policy, and said it affects a small percentage of the company’s workforce. The e-commerce giant said hub locations vary by team, and each team determines which locations are their hub. The company does provide relocation benefits to employees asked to move.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, so we decided that the best thing to do was to communicate directly with teams and individuals who are affected to ensure they’re getting accurate information that’s relevant to them,” Munoz said in a statement. “If an individual feels like they don’t have the information they need, we encourage them to talk with their HR business partner or their manager.”
The relocation requirement is escalating tensions between Amazon and some of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees over RTO plans after many employees moved away from their in-person office location during the Covid pandemic.
In May, Amazon began requiring that staffers work out of physical offices at least three days a week, shifting from a policy that left it up to individual managers to decide how often team members should be in the office. CEO Andy Jassy has extolled the benefits of in-person work, saying it leads to a stronger company culture and collaboration between employees.
Following the mandate, a group of employees walked out in protest at the company’s Seattle headquarters. Staffers also criticized how Amazon handled the decision to lay off 27,000 people as part of job cuts that began last year.
The company is slashing costs elsewhere as well. Amazon said it will end a perk next year that allows staffers to get one free drink at in-office coffee shops. The company also reduced the amount it reimburses for parking, and stopped providing free Uber rides to and from work, employees said.
Amazon said it still reimburses employees’ public transportation costs in all major metro areas, and provides free commuter shuttles and campus shuttles.
Some employees reprimanded
The return-to-office mandate has been a particularly thorny subject, and enforcement has been a challenge. Amazon sent out a notification earlier this month to some staffers informing them that they weren’t “meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week,” according to a copy of the memo viewed by CNBC. “We expect you to start coming into the office three or more days a week now.”
Some staffers who received that notice had been in compliance with the mandate, while others had taken vacation or sick leave that was approved by their manager, one staffer said. Employees expressed their frustration over the notice in comments on an internal support ticket, said the person, who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the matter.
Amazon responded to the ticket, explaining internally the notice was sent to employees who it determined had badged in fewer than three days a week for at least five of the past eight weeks or at least three of the past four weeks.
“If you believe that you received this email in error, please reach out to your manager to discuss your situation and ensure it is accurately reflected in the system,” the company said on the support site.
Amazon confirmed the authenticity of the internal correspondence. The company stressed it had called employees back to the office three days a week because it felt it would be beneficial for company culture.
“We knew that there would be some adjustment period, so we’ve worked to support people as they’ve figured out their routines,” Munoz said in a statement. “With three months under our belt, and a lot more people back in the office, we’re reiterating our expectation that people join their teammates at least three days in the office.”
Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
For employees affected by the relocation policy, Amazon is asking that they move to a designated hub, which could be Seattle, Arlington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco or another main office. Some employees see it as a stark reversal from the company’s approach during the pandemic, when Amazon ramped up its recruiting outside of Seattle and Silicon Valley, and pledged to expand its presence in markets like Phoenix, Dallas and San Diego.
The employees who spoke to CNBC said they view the relocation requirement as onerous and significantly disruptive to their personal lives. In some cases, staffers are being asked to move out of state, which would require them to break their housing lease, or transition their children to new schools.
Amazon has informed the employees individually about the change, but the company hasn’t put out any official communication to the broader workforce. In late July, managers began informing employees that they’d soon be expected to work from a main hub location, and they could choose between relocating, finding another job internally or resigning. Some were told they had 30 to 60 days to make a decision, the staffers said.
Three employees based in different locations — Colorado, Utah and California — were each asked to relocate to Seattle. They told CNBC they’ve chosen to leave Amazon because moving would burden them financially or put too much strain on their family.
The employees said the relocation requirement made little sense to them, noting they already live within walking or commuting distance of an Amazon office where they’ve been working the mandated three days a week.
The prospect of transferring to a new role within the company isn’t seen as much of an option. Amazon paused corporate hiring last November as part of wider cost-cutting efforts, which translates into fewer job openings than normal. The staffers told CNBC they weren’t able to find much, if anything, in their current office that’s relevant to their expertise.
Still, it’s a difficult decision to quit, as companies, particularly in the tech industry, have been reducing headcount over the past year to reckon with rising inflation and economic uncertainty.
The crackdown at Amazon is leading to some bending of the rules. In a story last week about some of the RTO changes, Insider reported that some employees have considered using a family member’s address near an Amazon office, or agreed to relocate and then used the time they were given to move to look for another job.
The Colorado-based employee who was asked to move said that, adding it all up, the relocation requirement and Amazon’s broader effort to get people into the office make it feel as if leadership is “trying to make it less enjoyable to work there.”
WATCH: Amazon’s operating margins were three times better than expected
Technology
In fighting AI chip trade war with China, there’s one big mistake U.S. can’t afford to make
Products at the showroom of the Nvidia Corp. offices in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2, 2023.
I-Hwa Cheng | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The U.S. government’s effort to curtail AI development in China through tightened controls of chip exports, including restrictions on the most advanced offerings from Nvidia, didn’t stop DeepSeek from creating its generative AI app efficiently, and at a level that rivals the best the U.S. has to offer from companies such as OpenAI.
While the details on just how DeepSeek did it remain incomplete, and its success doesn’t mean export controls don’t have a place in markets and national security policy, it does show that a focus on stopping the competition can’t keep pace with innovation. Now, the debate is underway over just how far the U.S. government should go in the future in blocking access to U.S. chip technology.
President Biden’s Department of Commerce issued its rules to “regulate the global diffusion” of AI chips and models in the administration’s waning days. The rules already have been heavily criticized by tech companies, including Nvidia, as well as policy experts. A Brookings analysis argues the the AI diffusion rules seek to create “a centrally planned global computing economy.”
“A decade from now, we will look back and recognize how quixotic it was for the U.S. government of the mid-2020s to attempt to limit the ability of people in 150 countries to perform fast multiplications,” wrote John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and professor of electrical engineering, law, public policy, and management at UCLA.
In any technology war, questions about what countermove the U.S. should make next inevitably run up against the awareness that any notion of controlling innovation through measures like restricting exports is not guaranteed to work – and may even backfire. Among the risks cited by Brookings: spurring the development of a global AI ecosystem anchored outside the U.S.; pushing more nations into building stronger technology ties with China; and allowing non-U.S. makers of advanced chips to grow global market share at the expense of the U.S. companies behind the original innovations.
“I worry that we will have a knee-jerk response to ratchet up controls heavily, before we fully think through the trade-offs,” said Martin Chorzempa, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
There is a 120-day comment period that ends on May 15 on the AI diffusion rules, unless Trump reverses or revises the rule before then. While the president has spoken in general about the need to protect the U.S. technological lead, he has not specifically addressed this rule. It’s unknown what stance the current administration will take – expanding, curtailing, or overturning chip export rules already in place.
Vice President JD Vance said at an AI summit in Europe on Monday that the U.S. will safeguard its AI and chips, and block efforts to “weaponize” them.
“Some authoritarian regimes have stolen and used AI to strengthen their military intelligence and surveillance capabilities, capture foreign data and create propaganda to undermine other nations’ national security,” Vance said in an address at France’s AI Action Summit in Paris. “I want to be clear, this administration will block such efforts, full stop,” Vance said. “We will safeguard American AI and chip technologies from theft and misuse, work with our allies and partners to strengthen and extend these protections and close pathways to adversaries attaining AI capabilities that threaten all of our people,” he added.
Trump’s first-day signing of an executive order to “identify and eliminate loopholes in existing export controls,” suggest he could take a hard line. It said the government will “assess and make recommendations regarding how to maintain, obtain, and enhance our Nation’s technological edge and how to identify and eliminate loopholes in existing export controls – especially those that enable the transfer of strategic goods, software, services, and technology to countries to strategic rivals and their proxies.”
The tech sector was quick to do its outreach to the new administration, with several major CEOs at the inauguration, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang meeting with President Trump at the White House in recent weeks for a discussion that included chip restrictions to China.
Trump also called Deepseek a “wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”
Particularly relevant to Deepseek in the AI diffusion rules are controls surrounding closed AI model weights, essential to the training process that develops how AI systems think and respond to queries.
“In part, DeepSeek was able to get around the speed limit imposed on chips allowed for sale to China in 2022, but banned in 2023, when the U.S. realized that the limit imposed was the wrong one,” said Chorzempa.
When the U.S. put controls on China in 2022, Chorzempa explained, they set a specific parameter concerning the speed of communication between chips. It was thought that if you control the power of an individual chip that might not be enough, because if you bring enough less powerful chips together, it’s possible to have supercomputer-like capabilities at a level the U.S. government didn’t want China to obtain. It appears from what DeepSeek described in its R1 paper that the company was able to overcome that speed limit.
“Experts in the technical community in at least early 2023 were pointing out that other restrictions were required to have an effective control as the technology evolved,” Chorzempa said.
In 2023, the U.S. government added additional layers of restriction that made the Nvidia chips DeepSeek says it trained the model on no longer legal for export. Tightened controls could be further strengthened by subsequent initiatives from the Trump administration.
But through a combination of having a limited number of advanced chips available and innovation spurred on by that limit, DeepSeek was able to build a better, and potentially cheaper, mousetrap.
“DeepSeeks seems to have optimized heavily with clever software and hardware engineering to sort of neuter the speed limit meant to hold those chips back,” Chorzempa said.
AI rivals will continue to do more with less
There are other aspects to the evolving AI race which show gaps that are narrowing for other reasons.
“The story is really about the gap being closed between open source and closed source models,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, CEO of Evident, an AI consulting firm. “Now the open source models are getting much closer to the capabilities of the closed ones, and we see the price driving down to zero,” Mousavizadeh said.
DeepSeek has already shown that you don’t need maximum computing power, and you can you use open-source as alternative when building a viable LLM, and in fact, according to Mousavizadeh, these factors can be a driver of innovation.
“We’re seeing that limits forced them to use scientific methods and systems that compress data onto a much smaller pool that uses much less power using mixed expert models,” she said. AI rivals can “do more with less,” Mousavizadeh added.
Continuation of such controls is also likely to push China in further developing its own chips.
“You can’t really gatekeep,” Mousavizadeh said, noting that there is lots of sharing that occurs in the open source environment, “regardless of governmental policy.”
If DeepSeek’s success leads to export controls on advanced chips intended to slow Chinese AI efforts that become even stricter, it should also be clear they are no silver bullet. “They’re not a way to duck the competition between the US and China,” wrote Dario Amodei, CEO of gen AI startup Anthropic, in a blog post last week. “In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. But we shouldn’t hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don’t have to.”
His issue isn’t with the AI researchers in China, but the government to which they are ultimately beholden. “In interviews they’ve done, they seem like smart, curious researchers who just want to make useful technology,” Amodei wrote about DeepSeek. “But they’re beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they’re able to match the US in AI.”
To be sure, there are many reasons to be wary of doing anything to contribute to China’s AI advances and successes like DeepSeek, from national security concerns about data sharing with the Chinese government, to ongoing hacking risks, to Chinese AI apps becoming popular enough to be used by Chinese intelligence to learn about Americans and American industries, and to sow division among the public.
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in a recent interview that “we have to run harder, run faster, have an all-country effort.”
“The second-mover can move very quickly, especially if we’ve already done the innovation,” Karp said, describing DeepSeek as derivative of U.S. models with “improvements at the margins.”
He expects a “huge policy discussion” to make sure innovations are not exported, but Karp added that in the end, “the real advantage goes to the first mover as long as the first mover is running hard. … We have the lead, we have to focus on making sure we keep it. Our adversaries are gonna copy anything they can.”
Palantir’s rise — its shares soared 340% last year to lead the S&P 500 — didn’t come by trying to stop others, and in that there may be a lesson. “We don’t focus on the competition,” Karp said. “We focus on how do we execute.”
The Google Calendar logo is displayed on a tablet.
Igor Golovniov | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google‘s popular online and mobile calendars no longer include reference to the first day of Black History Month or Women’s History month, among other holidays and events.
The company’s calendar previously had those days marked at the start of February and March, respectively, but they don’t appear for 2025.
The Verge first reported on the removals from Google Calendar late last week, which followed comments from users.
A Google spokesperson said the changes took place in the middle of last year.
“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” the spokesperson added.
Google has made numerous changes lately that align with an altered political environment in the U.S. The company recently began scrapping its diversity hiring goals, becoming the latest tech giant to change its approach to hiring and promotions following the election of President Donald Trump. One of Trump’s first acts as president after taking office in January was to sign an executive order ending the government’s DEI programs and putting federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave.
In late January, the company said it would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.” Google also said it would follow Trump and start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently called Denali.
On Google Calendar, the company has removed other events as well. It previously had Nov. 1 as the first day of Indigenous Peoples Month and June 1 as the start of LGBTQ+ Pride month.
The company spokesperson said that in mid-2024, the company “returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.” The timeanddate.com website says its company has 40 employees and is based in Norway.
Google Calendar users noticed the changes and left comments in the user support web pages and on social media. The user support site previously received comments from people upset about the company adding such observances.
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