Not that it’s hurting them, but they’re permanently on my list of places I won’t even think about working. Everything I hear about their culture is just awful. It’s hard to imagine fellow tech professionals being browbeaten in all the ways I hear about, whipped like cattle. Just terrible. As long as I have other choices I’ll just steer miles around them, thank you very much.

Who the fuck even wants to work there anymore. It sounds like hell but people still sign up.

Why would Amazon want to pay for office space when its entire business model is being cheap as fuck with spending money?

Our place agreed with the landlord that if they did the legwork to find a new tenant they could teminate the lease early.

Even the smaller place (barely a cupboard) they rented afterwards to give a business address/phone is going away quite soon.. there's just no need for our company to have physical presence at all.

The unspoken bit is the reason the productivity is up so much is there isn't a manager wandering into the office and saying 'I had a great idea!'. Now they send an email, and those of us with the seniority to get away with it tell him to GTFO so by the time most people read it it's history. But the advantage of working with peoples lives can't be understated.. You can schedule your work around your life, parents can pick their kids up from school, you can have an 'off' day without feeling you have to stare uselessly at a screen for 8 hours (and, a tad more controversially, you can work whilst ill, which we've caught a few people doing.. no risk of spreading disease any more but it's not healthy).

I'm not certain, but I remember hearing companies like that get tax incentives to move to certain areas to boost jobs. I wonder if maybe that affects it? Landlords want their rent, and local businesses sell stuff to commuters. But I think we should just turn all the commercial not being used into residential

What drives me nuts about my job, although it's better than no WFH at all so I stick with it, is that I have a hybrid home/office schedule when there's zero need for me to ever come in and the space will be used anyway because I'm in the office part of an industrial facility. In fact, if they got rid of the office, they could put in more machinery. Seems like a win-win. But they don't see it that way for some reason.

I know people who work in IT at places they have installed surveillance on wfh machines and the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.

I’ve been wfh with optional in-office work for over a decade and I know it can be done well. But I know there are a lot of people that you have to stay on top of who would be fine in an office.

So I don’t think these companies are going back into the office for no reason.

That said, I think this will backfire because the best employees will find work at places where they can work remote unless compensated far better than they can get at remote shops.

And Amazon wins, because that's exactly what the S-Team wants.