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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at Amazon through RTO I can tell you that it was effective at getting a lot of people to come in, but no one is happy about it and it has made work much less efficient and productive for everyone.

Most people are maliciously complying. They will come in at 11:45, grab lunch, and then leave. The clever ones then come back late at night to badge in and out again after 6pm so it looks like they were there all day, just outside. So far they aren't counting total time on campus, but when they do those people will have good numbers.

But it means they are now not working during those drive times. And they ones that are coming in all day waste a ton of everyone's time, including the remote people, looking for meeting rooms and setting up video calls, because every meeting still requires video, since all the teams are spread out over multiple offices.

And they also had to resort to denying promotions and raises for anyone who didn't RTO.

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Yep, that's all true. Like I said, bungled at the level of fine details, pretty questionable if it was a good decision, but largely effective at actually getting people to come in.

People do work noticeably shorter days, a handful of people come in for less than 30 minutes (huge waste of resources and time), and yeah, there is a morale problem.

One thing I have noticed is that the more co-located a team is, the more people behave like pre-Covid — in at 9:30, out at 5. Satellite workers who are coming in are the most unhappy (for obvious reasons) and are the most likely to badge in, grab a coffee and check their emails, and then leave and finish the day at home.

Amazon is moving from being a ruthlessly-efficient corporation to becoming a pennywise pound-foolish, stifling bureaucracy to make office workers miserable and drive away talent.* As Amazon's inability to do either WfH or RTO properly, it's footgunning itself with lower productivity, lower momentum, and lower competitiveness that the Target's, Costco's, and Walmart's of the world can and will exploit. If I were the Motley Fool, I would slap a "sell" rating on AMZN because the Bezos era has ended and the era of hyperdeep PHB MBA management pyramids has begun.

* They already do their best to make delivery drivers' and warehouse workers jobs as inhuman and miserable as possible.

People are so naive to think that the big tech firms don't know exactly what theyre doing. They all more or less operate the same way.

If someone is a top performer within a highly valued part of the org, then one way or another they will be able to navigate RTO without serious problems.

For everyone else, RTO is a dial for management to fine tune voluntary attrition before having to resort to more unpleasant tools like higher PIP quotas, at a time where big tech firms all still need to cut employee costs.

they have a core value of frugality, which verges on frupidity on occasion. there is a long page on the internal wiki about the latter

And Amazon really sucking lately is a reflection of all that.

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