this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Okay I can do that.
Pre-pandemic- Amazon says offices are important. Signs 25 year leases for lots of office space.
Pandemic hits. Everyone goes WFH. Data shows people work just as well from home. Company publicly announces that they are running at full productivity. Shareholders love it.
Now we're here. Employees are WFH and loving it. Middle management is chafing because they like being able to manage their employees by walking to desks. Upper management is unhappy because they like having a big corner office at the top of the building humming with workers. Workers are happier than ever.
Upper management says 'if we embrace WFH, we'll have way too much office space and leases that will cost a fortune to break. If we do that and take the hit, the shareholders will ask why we didn't have the vision to do that in the first place, before we signed for this expensive office. The managers we listen to all hate WFH too. So we'll push RTO.' And in the grand scheme of things, a few % employee productivity doesn't mean that much...
Thats plausible, but pretty complicated. I would absolutely invoke Occam's razor here tho
Okay then even simpler, management likes having workers they can physically see and thinks it makes them more productive. Amazon may relentlessly pursue efficiency, but they also make choices in how they do that based on their own culture. For example, if they paid their employees more but weeded out all but the best employees, which is the strategy Netflix uses, that might also increase efficiency more than just cycling through employees like disposable robots. But they don't do that (or even try it) because that isn't their culture.