[ignoramous]

> Heh this is coming from a company who refused to release the data from their internal survey about WFH and then made the decision to force everyone come back to the office 5 times/week.

Andy Jassy went on record during an interview at the 2020 re:Invent that hinted at this. His concerns were more around Amazon's inventiveness being lost if folks weren't in the same physical space as their peers.

Given the way Amazon operates (a lot of their processes are around "reinvent, rinse, repeat" at pace leading to "go big or go home"), I believe, the leadership concluded that it couldn't be done with a remote-first culture off the cuff. The leadership probably needs more time to figure remote-work out rather than blanket approve for all teams.

From what little I know, Amazon already has a model for "away teams" (distributed teams with some overlapping concerns across geographies) that fits processes required for remote-work within Amazon's operating model but I take it needs to be refined further for it to be applied across all of Amazon.

tldr; Amazon isn't the kind of company to resist change; and so, I am positive that for teams that can function just as well remotely would be allowed to do so eventually whilst the leadership works on improving other processes that works given Amazon's scale, culture, and needs.

Disclosure: ex-AWS.