You wrote your comment as if I am implying this is illegal or something. Of course they don't have to give me any justifications, hell they could fire me tomorrow as well. However, they do need workers and Amazon, as opposed to Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc... is not "hip", "cool" or "startup-esque". Their prestige is lower than the competition, their grind is harder, and as a consequence they bleed a lot more SDE than other companies. Most SDEs at Amazon are mercenaries, they are there for the money, stocks and resume padding with entire team being <2 years at Amazon.
In that context, unless they are certain that every other FAANG-like company will RTO at some point soon, they will bleed even more employees and it will have a serious impact on product launches.
I just find that kind of a bold and entitled attitude.
When I was hired at Amazon, it was in the early months of February 2020, before we knew what was going to happen. When I was due to start, everyone was already WFH, so they shipped me my stuff and I went on to work from home for almost 3 years. During those years, I shipped products, had meetings, built relationship with coworkers and overall was (hopefully) good at my job.
So now, when Andy Jassy says it's better if we are all in the office, I can't help but doubt it. I went to the open-floor office, it was loud and I still had to take my meetings through Chime because Amazon is global, my train was late, weird homeless dudes screamed at me at the station and ultimately the experience did not feel all that better. I am convinced we changed during those 3 years and while some people long for the coffee discussions and the face-to-face meetings, they were ultimately not what made the business move forward, only an aspect of it that some people held on to because deep down we are social animals.
The "How dare they!?" sentiment comes from the fact we had not tried "real" WFH before 2020 and it turns out for a lot of people it's simply better than going to the office. When Andy Jassy says "you have to come back" without sharing actual data to show that we had a drop in productivity, the question becomes "why?". As human we do X for Y, that's how we rationalize a ton of stuff, but for the return to office, especially in software, it's not clear what Y is and without Y then it makes no sense to do X.
All that to say, maybe I'm entitled, but I still think WFH is the best way to work in software and I won't abstain from complaining when my leadership refuses to explain decisions that go against my best interest.
I don’t have hard data as to why, but right now my best guess as an explanation for my team is that we see ourselves as more productive when we are head down and cranking, and we are. But outside of those moments, we are not as productive, but we don’t perceive that we aren’t. Unfortunately my team are only heads down about 75% of the time and the productivity losses we feel are happening in that 25% of time and we just don’t notice.
How are you doing so?
It's also likely that if the productivity losses occur only in this 25% of the time that you're not "heads-down" as you say, then they could be explained by bad company culture/process which could be worked on, for an easy productivity win across all teams at the company.
If you could provide this data it would be very helpful, as it would be the first hard data that I have ever seen showing any kind of productivity loss from being remote.
We all feel more productive, management might feel we are not. It brings me back to my original point. Management holds the cards and their “feelings” will outweigh the workers in the debate absent of hard data from either side. The workers need to provide the evidence that makes it indisputable that WFH works better. If your company is doing an RTO, you workers have failed to convince their management that WFH is measurably better for the organization.
This argument presumes that management is rational and 100% data-driven, which in some cases I’ve seen gets a big fat [citation needed] from me.
My point was really more that worker perceptions of their productivity increasing are just as subjective as management’s perception that productivity is decreasing. It’s all just a “feeling”. HN wants to stay WFH because they are more productive and want management to provide facts when they want to RTO, but the workers cannot really provide data to support their claim any more than management can.
Either way, there are probably millions of people who want to work for a FAANG and will happily go into an office if required. They'd likely be happy to move continents to be at said office.
Because they don’t have to do it. They define your work environment and have for basically forever since there were employers and employees. At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job?
You have the problem backwards. It’s not up to the employer to justify their decision to RTO to the employee, even though many do. Even if the reason is a feeling. It’s up to the employees to sell the employer in this case. If your employer hasn’t bought your justification, you have failed to persuade them.