That's understandable after all. It's an advertising company, not a tech company. Small details like vacation aren't really something they can account for.

Same at Amazon, 0 teammates out of the 100+ on my product work at my office or in my timezone but I have to badge into it because they don’t allow virtual positions anymore. So now I have to spend 2.5 hours commuting, worse mood, I'm less flexible for meetings…

Pay somebody to badge in/out for you. If none of your team mates are in the office, who will notice?

So, you are asking OP to get a dupe badge or ship their badge to someone else? If latter, what if OP needs their badge? Proxy entries can be easily validated through camera. It’s all asking for a trouble for a small short term benefit

Saving 2.5 hours a day I wouldn't classify as a "small short term benefit."

Google is installing face recognition on some offices to prevent this trick.

Isn't that ID fraud?

It's not ID fraud, it's disrupting the personal location space

That connotes lawlessness unnecessarily. These are just companies trying to enforce stupid rules.

You won't be thrown into prison for it, but it's a fireable offense. Isn't that worth noting?

Being a worker is a fireable offense. Don’t do this, but also don’t pretend you have any safety whatsoever just because you follow master’s rules. Your working relationship is tenuous in perpetuity.

I know of someone who, at a different company, did this. They were discovered and fired immediately. Don’t follow this advice.

This would be a really easy way to get yourself fired. Might as well get fired for staying home and save the money paying somebody

I sure hope you are taking those 2.5 hours out of your working hours. They are the ones that are forcing you to do this. If they think it's worth it, fine - but it has to go out of the time they pay you for - not your free time.

Then you have 2.5 hours less to get work done compared to everyone else you are competing with at your performance review. This hurts you more than it hurts them.

Spending an extra 2.5 hours at work doesn't hurt you?

The RTO requirement at Amazon was the penultimate straw for me.

The final straw was when we got the word that we would be required to move so that we would be co-located with our management in the HQ2 offices, or we would have to find alternative employment elsewhere.

We weren’t given a timeframe on when that was going to happen, but based on the timeframe I saw from the announcement of RTO to the enforcement of RTO, I knew it wouldn’t be long. So, I chose to leave as quickly as possible.

I gave my manager early warning that I was actively looking for alternative employment, and I kept him appraised of how the interview process was going, and then how the decision process was going, and then how the hiring paperwork process was going. When everything was finalized, he then got my official two weeks notice.

That was also when I told a few people inside the company that I was leaving and where I was going, but my official notification to the team wasn’t made until my actual final day — my manager requested that he be the one to make that announcement.

During my final two weeks, my manager also told me that he decided to also leave, and move back to India. I don’t know if he was forced out because too many people had left the team within the past year, or if it was truly a personal decision. But I do know we lost a lot of good people.

So, RTO is not the worst thing that can be done to you by your employer. Wait until they force you to move to be co-located with your manager and the rest of whatever team remains. And all without any kind of assistance with the moving costs, because you’re just that damn lucky to still have a job at all.

But that’s the Amazon way. RTO, forced co-location, stack ranking, unregretted attrition, the whole nine yards. Humans really are one hundred percent disposable if you work at Amazon.

let them get notifications

Interview for remote roles from the office.

Create filter rule > skip inbox lol

Most teams in Europe either don't care, or can't use the badging data to affect performance because whatever local laws. I'm glad that for once they didn't fully enforce policies worldwide because some VP in the US is butthurt that their reports don't want to show up at the office.

What about the coffee-badging? That is, turning-up for one hour or so at a convenient time of those three days, maybe getting lunch with colleagues, and working the rest while in commute or at home...

They are also tracking when you badge in for the first time in the day, and when you badge out for the last time, and all the times in between. Because of course you have to badge out and back in again to go to the bathroom or the cafe.

This tracking is reported all the way down to your immediate manager on a weekly basis. Or, at least it was back when I worked at Amazon.

Ok but this is only Amazon's SOP of mistreating employees as a trauma-bonding technique, right? I don't think this is industry-wide at all.

Amazon is certainly not the only company to do RTO. Nor are they the only company to do stack ranking. Nor are they the only company to do “hire for firing”, which is what unregretted attrition is basically about.

So far, they do seem to be the only company I’ve heard of so far that is doing the forced co-location with your management, specifically for people who were hired as remote and promised that they could stay remote.

I’m sure they have some other practices that may be common amongst other companies, and probably some that are not common amongst other companies. But in terms of the main ones I mentioned, there is a great deal of overlap.