Amazon CEO tells staff ‘it’s probably not going to work out’ unless they visit office three days a week

Recently left there after 5+ years. Best decision I ever made. I knew I was burnt out and unhappy there, but I didn’t realize how burnt out and unhappy I was until they were in my rear-view mirror.

That said, the experience I gained at AWS definitely made me a valuable employee in my current job.

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That has nothing to do with Amazon. Amazon very much wants to watch their workers and have control. They want to work their workers and have them quit after five years. It is why I would never work for Amazon. I do not want an employer that plans to burn me out in five years.

Bezos felt the longer you stayed, the lazier you got. That you'd work hard at first and then slowly stop working.

It's easier to track hours, etc when you're in a office.

When COVID hits, I was in a software company, ~300 people, who were there daily for years, as everyone in this kind of company around the world... Then we worked from home, I went there after 2 or 3 weeks to take a computer/monitor, there was maybe 10 people in the building, max. And it was like this for 3 years, I then quit and went there to bring back the computer/monitor, still thousands sqft of office, empty. Now work for another company 100 miles from me, remote work for life it will be for me.

I mean... it is very demoralizing. At my old job, I legitimately had responsibilities that required me to be on site (even during the height of the pandemic). And it increasingly led to me feeling like I was in a ghost town where I was getting forced to do all the charlie work because nobody else wanted to come in. Not only was I doing my job responsibilities but I was constantly being asked to do the "one or two things" that other people needed to do because they didn't want to bother to come in one or two days a month. And it genuinely felt more "lonely" to be in the office than it does to work out of my home office. I am not overly familiar with how Amazon handles their corporate offices, but I assume there are a lot of people in a similar boat for the data centers.

So you are risking pissing off the people who CAN work from home in an attempt to not lose the people who can't. Because... there is a reason that was my "old job".

And the other aspect is just planning and meetings. Completing jira tickets and filing bugs? You can do that from home. Planning major features or new products? Having co-location and the ability to just grab Susie on the UX team because you vaguely recall she worked on something like this is incredibly valuable. Because yes, you can ping them on Teams, but you have no guarantee that they are sitting at their desk or that this is a good time to pull them into a quick meeting.

And then you just have 'business meetings". Having a place where you can talk to new clients or partners goes a long way.

Personally? I think that, funny enough, the answer is those coworking spaces but heavily geared toward meetings. Basically conference rooms for rent that have high speed internet and working teleconferencing setups. But that still is a problem for the impromptu meetings and nobody is going to want to say "Look, we can't present until Tuesday because Amazon is in town and they booked out all of fifth street".

Which is why I like how my current job handles it. We are a fully remote company but we do have office space. That office space is primarily used by the c-suite and doubles as our server room. And a few times a year, the various teams head to HQ for a "planning week" where we basically iterate on and figure out what we are doing. And, depending on the goal, we might overlap two or three teams at the same time.