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.