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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

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This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.

It's the worst of all possible choices.

Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.

I agree that seems like the next step, but how will that help push salaries down? I thought remote work would do that much more, coz many employees would move to less expensive areas in the same country and new hiring would focus on lower-income countries.

This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.

Because people find out that remote work makes it hard to exercise power and control, and some people get off on exercising power and control, empirical data and fiduciary responsibility be damned.

More like fi-douchery

I went through a round of layoffs last year from a company doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local" teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two metro areas.

I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.

> It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed.

It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.

People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.

> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).

only to have all of them talk to each other on Chime*

Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built

I will gladly use anything that isn’t Zoom!

Tell me you've never used Chime without telling me you've never used Chime.

Nope, we use Quip and Slack because the Amazon equivalents were just too painful.

>every single team is distributed. Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.

Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to an Amazon office, just not the same one.

> already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team).

Not true. I work at amazon.

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