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A comment on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week. Parent comment

Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by ghaff on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @10:50AM (#41568161)
Teams that are relatively co-located geographically can coordinate to come into a location regularly on the same days. That really didn't happen where I worked and, as far as I know, the company continues to shed real estate. I'm not sure the execs especially liked the shift but, starting from the base of a fairly remote-friendly company, COVID just largely shredded whatever in-office culture there was for better or worse.

So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)

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Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by treis on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @12:11PM (#41569202)
Think this is like a lot of things that work in theory but don't work in practice. You think you'll get the best of both worlds but really you get the worst of both.
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Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week by ghaff on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @12:21PM (#41569314)
Simultaneously, when I was there, the other thing that was going on was that the company was basically not paying for off-sites any longer. So, latterly, I had immediate team Zooms but was pretty much disconnected more broadly.

There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.

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