Yet another thinly veiled stealth lay-off by a technology company. Amazon’s cloud boss Matt "The Prat" Garman will indeed see some departures, as intended and desired. However, that first wave will be of their most talented, who feel confident they will land on their feet elsewhere, leaving those that simply cannot leave (yet) or those that will cozily under perform. When Amazon applies the inevitable followup reductions (subjectively based on their internal review process) to remove the latter, and the former buckle under the load or also leave, Amazon will be left with lower-middle talent at best.

The more I see of business "strategy" among this layer of "leadership", the more I'm convinced it is just a game of Jenga with talent, resources, infrastructure, security, quality, etc; pulling out as many pieces as possible in the drive for short term/sighted gains until a company collapses under its own dysfunctional "efficiency" and "success".

Consequences aside, he has a totally valid point. They own the business, they are the boss, and they can decide. People might not like it, but in the end, it is their problem and people are free to change their job. People got a bit to comfortable lately and every single employee expects the company to be run just as they prefer. Even when you work fully remote, there are still people who find it really hard and stupid as they never get to see their collegues and spend the entire day just staring at the monitor. You will never make everyone happy, so why bother complaining. The decision has been made, take it or leave it.

Funniest to me in this kind of debate is having my N+1 manage us from across the country, having two team members in another town, and somehow, my ass being at home 15km from the office makes any difference at all to the daily life of the team? It doesn't. My actual manager, the dude giving us our marching orders, doesn't care. Shit, our N+1 doesn't care either, since he's almost always remote himself!

Only people I've seen actually care seem to be HR, for whatever reason.

I don't even get how any company with several sites has anything to stand on. Makes no fucking sense.

I'm a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn't have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.

We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It's not a big deal personally - I live close and I'm older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don't see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.

This makes zero sense.. If you're a cloud company why can't employees be in the cloud

I asked our CTO at a town hall if there were plans to improve the office my team got moved to because they moved us from the nice office to the city and the back to the previous area but a crappy office. Nope.

What if 37 000 employes leave amazon same day ?

At the all-hands meeting, Garman said he’s been speaking with employees and “nine out of 10 people are actually quite excited by this change.”

Just imagine the conversation between the CEO of AWS and some random employee.

„What do you think about the return-to-office policy I propose, Cog #18574?“ „Great idea Mr. Garman sir, really smart move from your team. Incredible thinking and leadership from you Mr. Garman.“

continues to tell people that 9/10 employees he talks to are excited to return to office.

Another company that lays off it's talented people first, due to the meddling of a CEO where he has no business to.

I forsee an Amazon brain drain about to happen.