Amazon started enforcing its so-called “return-to-hub” policy in recent weeks, according to an internal email and Slack messages obtained by Insider. Hubs are the central locations assigned to each individual team — employees will have to work out of those hubs instead of any office nearest to their current city.
Amazon assigned offices for most individual employees, but not the whole team. Some employees told Insider that made office work pointless because many still had to use video calls to connect with their teammates spread across the country.
Why does Amazon even bother to do this? Why force their employees back to office if they'll going to work remotely with their distributed team anyway? Why not save money on office space by letting those employees to work from their home?
The project we were working on required all members to be available to answer questions from other team members right away and this happened a lot, so you couldn't just wander off and do something else around the house or your absence would be immediately noticeable. At the office it was easy to disappear into the bathroom for awhile or take a nap in the sick room or head down to the food court in the basement of the building.
Then places like Seattle were literally falling a part without the added cash cow of commuters stuck in bumper to bumper traffic for 16 hours of a workday.
And that commercial real estate is the backing for a LOT of corporate debt. I imagine they're afraid of the collateral against which that debt was borrowed collapsing in value.
But theres no pussyfooting about it. Shit was bad and we are still in a hard recovery from it. Almost like our cities are suffering from their own form of Long Covid.
My employer is trying to do this too and using the same logic. I’ll just have to report to an office to video chat my team. Luckily my boss and I are in agreement and until they somehow force both of us, I won’t be doing it. I will, however, be updating my resume.