In Amazon's case, it might not be theater.

Amazon owns around a dozen skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. Amazon has a massive number of employees in downtown Seattle, and whether those people are downtown or not makes a significant difference to the real estate values in downtown Seattle. Making their employees come into the office may in fact mean a significant financial reward to Amazon, but not because the employees are doing better work.

Also, Andrew Jassy specifically has a number of personal financial interests in the Seattle area, including the local hockey team and the nearby Key Arena. Keeping downtown expensive and full of people is in his personal interests.

Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store

It’s a good song but I’m struggling to see how it applies to the topic under discussion. Maybe if Amazon was paying their workers in Amazon gift cards I could see it.

Or maybe if Amazon owned apartments that they rented out to their employees? Afaik that’s not the case. GP said they own “skyscrapers” but really they own their own office buildings which are mostly like 4-10 stories tall and do not include apartments

It applies because Amazon itself, as well as its owners and likely executives of Amazon have personal financial interest in Seattle real estate and the downtown economy. This is the modern, more low key "company store".

I still don't understand the connection. I assume the term "company store" is being used to invoke the exploitative nature of living in a company town and being paid in scrip.

How does "a major local employer wants the local economy to thrive" lead to more exploitation than usual? If anything, I'd expect a thriving local economy to mean that there's more competition for workers, increasing their bargaining power and reducing the probability/severity of worker exploitation.

The company store was a way to earn on both ends of employees; the company made money by paying the workers to do stuff for the company, and then earned a part of that money back by selling goods to the workers at exorbitant rates.

The parallel here is that Amazon makes money off of the workers doing work, and then can also extract value by using the workers to prop up their real estate holdings.

E.g. workers may benefit from lower property values (renters), but Amazon is forcing workers to prop up those property values. Amazon makes money off paying them, and makes (or saves) money when they force them to come spend money around their offices.

It's not exactly the same, but I think there's certainly similarities.

And don't forget that downtown businesses and real estate developers are putting pressure on local governments, who in turn are putting pressure on big employers to mandate that employees commute daily and spend money in the city.

Mayor Adams in NYC is already having to walk it back.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-remote-work-eric-a...

> He pulled the plug on the idea of remote work for city employees in 2022, saying early during his tenure as mayor: "One thing that can’t happen — you can’t stay home in your pajamas all day. That’s not who we are as a city." But now it seems Adams has evolved on the subject, acknowledging this week that "we are saying to our agencies come up with creative ways of having flexibility."

> Kathryn Wylde, of the pro-business Partnership for New York City, said the numbers tell the story. "Fewer than 10 percent of office workers are back five days a week," she said. "I think the mayor is getting the message the world has changed." Wylde added that unless an employer — including City Hall — offers a work from home option, the job vacancies may remain unfilled. "We are going to have to work with employees, they are driving the bus here," said Wylde.

I don't work for Amazon, but used to live right down the street from the Amazon balls and the rest of the crap downtown.

I have since moved a bit out of the city and do work in tech. However, I can say that I would not care one iota about what financial interests Andrew Jassy or any other CEO has about their own interests.

They do not care about my mental health, time, cost of commuting. Why should I care about theirs?

I don’t think anyone’s asking you to care. It’s more about explaining the real reasons why Jassy and others are pushing for it.

doubt those two numbers (workforce payroll and real estate cost) are within the same order of magnitude

Amazon looked deep into the crystal ball, got a shit response from it, and made a colossal one-way door blunder that will ultimately sink the company as they will not remain competitive with younger hungrier actually-day-one companies and embrace modern workplace trends. If I am forced back into the office, I will simply quit and never even consider working at this place again. Everyone is replaceable and I’m no exception, but the slack channel is full of fellow PEs who feel the same way. More than enough reserves to make it to a better market or beyond if there’s nothing compelling in the short-term.

they'll make an exception for you and higher level drones.

Fwiw I work right by the spheres and walk by multiple times a day and things are generally bustling. Restaurants and food trucks have lines at lunch time, buses are crowded, etc. and there’s been a clear trend over the past year. Try grabbing a salad at evergreens at 12:30 on a weekday if you don’t believe me.

So imo this theory doesn’t pass the smell test.

> "Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)"

This wouldn't even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you.

If you are forced to come in and you weren't allowed teleconferencing, you'd literally get nothing done.

The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

Heck, even in the same city this isn't practicable. When I worked at Google we frequently had teams and their dependencies spread across building all over campus. Even if everyone involved sat in Mountain View, in an office, you still can't get away from teleconferencing since it takes half an hour for someone to commute from their building to yours!

> The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

If the world has been mostly remote well before the pandemic, what does this say about the idea that outstanding results can only be produced by the serendipity and (alleged) increased efficiency of in-person collaboration?

Oh I have many thoughts about that, especially because I ran a team that was spread over 4 cities pre-pandemic and we made it work!

There is IMO well-justified use cases for in-person collaboration. As much as technology has reduced the effects of distance, the penalty is non-zero for some things. It's unfortunately still a lot easier to do some things remotely.

The trick IMO is that there's a big gap between "sometimes we feel the need to be in-person" and "we should be in-person all the time/most of the time". I think the latter statement is incredibly poorly substantiated.

The answer to all of the above is pretty straightforward: scheduled, reserved in-person time where the entire team meets. You kind of have to do this anyway! If you have developers in New York and Chicago and San Francisco and Tokyo who are all in-office, you still need to do meetups!

Have a travel budget, set up in-person sprints on a cadence that works for your team!

So you’re saying, being remote is okay as long as that remote in another office?

Hah, that does seem to be what the companies are saying, which is entirely silly.

My personal take is that RTO mandates are sorely misguided. Let the people who want an office work in them, and let the people who want to be remote be remote! The net difference is pretty close to nil, especially at large companies where meetings are teleconferencing-by-default!

If anything productivity has increased in the remote era. You no longer burn the first 5 minutes of every meeting kicking the previous person out of the conference room. And then another 5 minutes to wait for someone who had to sprint from halfway across campus to make it to the meeting room from their previous meeting room. Plus the mad dash scramble to claim meeting rooms since there obviously aren't enough for everyone.

In the remote-first world I just... click a button to hang up. And click another button to join the next call. Everyone is on time, meetings start and end on time. People are more inclined to take minutes and notes. It just seems to... work better.

[edit] Also, again, to be clear: people who like working from offices should be allowed to do so! There is nothing wrong with making friends with your coworkers, going to lunch with them, grabbing beers after work, or anything like that.

I just shouldn't be forced to do these things with you! I have a family I want to get back to! I resent being forced to have parasocial relationships with colleagues so they can fulfill their need for social contact! They should find other people who want to do that with them, because forcing me to be there just so I can fulfill someone else's parasocial need is honestly pretty twisted.

I feel ya!

At this point I just don’t see how it’s anything other than control or sunk cost of office space.

Your perspective is flawed, it’s about further headcount reduction without severance, making good on tax break criteria, and building up a blind core of missionaries.

"It's okay as long as you willingly participate in the theater and power dynamic."

The problem isn't really remote as much as employers having the ability to grossly change working conditions on a whim with no worker recourse. C-level doesn't have any proof on site is a superior operating model, they feel it is, and they believe that's good enough to call the plebs back.

Who was the last person you knew who gave up substantial power willingly?

A large amount of EC2 team for example is in Cape Town South Africa, and the other is in Seattle.

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom

Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

Yes in theory you could. I've found it different in practice. Not everyone sits in the same building or on the same floor, and meeting rooms are limited. So you still end up on zoom calls, but now you've commuted.

I sometimes wonder if execs forget what it's like not to have an assistant, or if they've forgotten the power they have so that people _want_ to be in the same room as them. Or maybe they simply like seeing on the peons that work for them.

Disclaimer work in Amazon.

That at least doesn't work at all in my situation. I'm based in Seattle and I collaborate regularly with folks in probably 3-4 other geographic locations, ironically no one actually in Seattle.

If anything getting the video conferencing to work in a meeting room is more of a hassle/friction and a poorer experience when you still have to accommodate someone remote.

I am not at Amazon, but at another FAANG, also am in Seattle, and it is the same thing for us. If we were hit with RTO, it would make exactly zero sense for my team/org.

Out of people I work with, one of them is also in Seattle, another one is in Toronto area, the team lead is in SF, the manager is in SD, and the skip level manager is in MTV. I am not even gonna talk about people on the partner teams that we gotta work with, as they are all spread out all over the place. RTO would be an absolute net negative for every single person on my team, as we aren't going to see the people we work with in our local offices regardless.

> If everyone were in the office, you could just meet in person.

How many people in tech nowadays do day-to-day work only with people in the same city as them? At my company at least that number is close to 0. Return to office doesn't mean you can stop collaborating with employees in another part of the country or the world. It will just be all that much more painful to do because now you'll have to hunt for empty meeting rooms all day to take calls from.

Basically small early stage startups and not always even then.

really? There are only multinational corporations and early stage startups?

There are multitudes of single office corps and even more where the predominant collaboration is with people located in the same office.

My company mandated everyone back in the office but everyone still meets via Teams, even when we have offices next door to each other. Making people come is just dumb. Imagine the environmental benefits, traffic reduction and inflation hedge that would result from outlawing return-to-office mandates for jobs that can be performed remotely. Of course, that will never happen because commercial real estate would tank.

This assumes that everyone you are working with is in the same office and conveniently clustered together.

This is highly unlikely to be the case with a massive company like Amazon. Teams have been pretty distributed across buildings/offices/location even prior to the pandemic in many many companies.

So I am not sure it will be as simple as you make it.

Yes, but at FAANG scale, it's near impossible to have all the people in a meeting located in the same place. Apple might have been the company that held out the longest, but even they have now officially gone multi-site for their engineering (And de facto, even when most people were in Cupertino, meetings could still sometimes involve impracticable amounts of travel to be held physically).

Does amazon ensure that team members are all based on a physical office location? At my work for instance we have a few members on my team from a different country, so forcing us to go in office wouldn't end zoom calls.

We ended this long time ago our 70 ~ folks come into the office Tuesday- Thursday and work remote Monday and Friday. Specifically because early on we noticed when we let people choose their days we ended up in shitty half zoom half not . My feeling is the time in the office is to bond with co workers and collaboration on new ideas. It’s worked really well for our team as even just by chance bumping into someone on another team and talking shop has fixed dozens of bugs and resulted in at least one or two great features

This is my personal take, given that I work at Amazon. Here's the landscape of people I interact with:

* Supply Chain - Bellevue, Vancouver, Austin

* AWS / other businesses - Seattle, occasionally elsewhere (NYC, Boston, HQ2)

* Foreign business teams - Luxembourg (EU), occasionally elsewhere (India)

* Team members on my team - Bellevue, Seattle, Vancouver, and elsewhere

Tell me how we're going to get all of these groups together for "hallway talk". At best, you can get a team in one locality, but even that is difficult with immigration challenges.

I'm the only person from my team that works in the state of Texas. We have only one other person who works in the same timezone. We have others in Seattle and the DC area.

RTO might make sense for those in Seattle or the DC area, but not for anyone else. And we would all have to be on the same teleconference calls anyway, because we also work with a bunch of people on other teams at other places around the world.

There's no telling how this is going to work out. At least, not yet.

Yeah except half of my team is in an office in a different part of the country. How are they meant to participate, if not by calling in? Even if literally everyone across the entire company came back to their offices tomorrow majority of my meetings would still be online and in conference rooms.

Everyone I work with barr one person lives in a different country, and it would be impossible (for visa reasons, mainly) for us to move to one place. So if I was in an office, I'd still be videoconferencing as much as ever.

Hard to believe that 100% of the teams have members that live all in the same city. In all the companies I’ve worked for that wasn’t the case (and I have worked for small and medium size ones )

None of my team is in the same state as me. In fact I haven't interacted with anyone based in my state so far.

But that makes the room twice as stuffy.

Except that now teams are divided across sites, so not even sure you can make the statement that if everyone showed up in person that it wouldn't still be a Teams call.

Maybe if you work for a small company or a small department where every person is co-located. Larger companies usually have people around the world that need to communicate. That happens over teleconferencing.

Amazon is somewhat infamous for their willingness to make workers spend unpaid time getting ready to work. They're the folks that took "we don't want to pay our employees to stand in long security lines to get into or out of our warehouse" to the Supreme Court and won. Employees who stayed with Amazon after that because it was only being done to lower paid employees enjoy little of my sympathy.

> Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction

Assuming 240 work days per year. A one-hour roundtrip commute means you're spending 10 *WHOLE* days in your commute per year. Two-hour roundtrip? That's 20 whole days. Three-hour roundtrip? One whole month.

Three-hour roundtrip in congested cities like Boston or Los Angeles is not made-up or even rare occurrence.

Yes, let’s trivialize people’s very real commutes with your made up number, cmon, I’m sure you’ve got more

> Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days

I like this idea. It supports the ostensible goal and removes a real annoyance. If I have to come then I sure has hell shouldn't have to be on a call.

This is what I don't understand about return-to-office mandates for global software/services companies. Even 10 years ago when I'd visit Google HQ, I'd always end up on a conference room on a Google Meet with other Googler's from around the world. What is the point of going to an office to be on video calls all day?

Maintaining the value of commercial real estate?

> Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)

This is such a good angle and comment!

*Amazon Chime, not Zoom :D

£?

#

"just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom" this is exactly it; for a few months prior to quitting Google at the end of 2021 I made an effort to go into the office because my morale (and productivity) at home had sunk to desperate levels. I wanted RTO to be the solution for that, but when I got into the office it was just... nobody else there, or at least not reliably so, and needed to VC with everyone anyways.

And then that got piled in with commute and parking woes, which got worse ever year... why even bother? I quit, instead. Have a fully remote gig now, and while I miss in-person work - - and the Google $$ I was getting -- I don't miss spending 2 hours of my life driving.

I'm sure things have improved some with more people returning to office, but the dynamic is forever changed as a result of COVID. There's a whole generation of hires who started during remote work.

I don't like WFH, but I dislike commuting to torture-zone deadsville even more.

This was why I left my previous company. The CTO would ask me to come to work, he lived next door to the office, and I loved 90 mind away. I'd leave home at 8, be in by 10 only to get a text from him at 11 that he's going to WFH. My team members did the same. Picked it up from him. I tried my best to stay level headed but I had it and quit. Culture is respecting your colleagues' time. He and his employees had no respect for any of it.