<story><title>Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/amazon-employees-push-ceo-andy-jassy-to-drop-return-to-office-mandate.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shmatt</author><text>The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom&lt;p&gt;Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let&amp;#x27;s see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)&lt;p&gt;And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven&amp;#x27;t heard those words in 3 years, it was nice that way</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>In Amazon&amp;#x27;s case, it might not be theater.&lt;p&gt;Amazon owns around a dozen skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. Amazon has a massive number of employees in downtown Seattle, and whether those people are downtown or not makes a significant difference to the real estate values in downtown Seattle. Making their employees come into the office may in fact mean a significant financial reward to Amazon, but not because the employees are doing better work.&lt;p&gt;Also, Andrew Jassy specifically has a number of personal financial interests in the Seattle area, including the local hockey team and the nearby Key Arena. Keeping downtown expensive and full of people is in his personal interests.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/amazon-employees-push-ceo-andy-jassy-to-drop-return-to-office-mandate.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shmatt</author><text>The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom&lt;p&gt;Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let&amp;#x27;s see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)&lt;p&gt;And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven&amp;#x27;t heard those words in 3 years, it was nice that way</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>potatolicious</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let&amp;#x27;s see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This wouldn&amp;#x27;t even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you.&lt;p&gt;If you are forced to come in &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; you weren&amp;#x27;t allowed teleconferencing, you&amp;#x27;d literally get nothing done.&lt;p&gt;The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they&amp;#x27;re all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.&lt;p&gt;Heck, even in the same &lt;i&gt;city&lt;/i&gt; this isn&amp;#x27;t practicable. When I worked at Google we frequently had teams and their dependencies spread across building all over campus. Even if &lt;i&gt;everyone involved&lt;/i&gt; sat in Mountain View, in an office, you still can&amp;#x27;t get away from teleconferencing since it takes half an hour for someone to commute from their building to yours!</text></comment>