[realmike33]

Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location. ---

I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.

[burnte]

> I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.

Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.

[supportengineer]

The executives must look out and see a bottomless supply of cheap engineers. And I doubt they plan on training anybody at all. It’s just a race to the bottom at this point.

[burnte]

They'll be gone in 3 years. This will juice the stock price as investors will be happy with gaining additional tax benefits. By the time the problems bubble up from a weakened foundation it'll be the next guy's problem.

[snoman]

Amazon already had very high turnover before Covid. Many people don’t stick around (willingly or otherwise) after the year 2 hiring bonus cliff.

[GenerocUsername]

As long as shipping in whole floors of indians is a viable strategy it will continue. As soon as they cannot shio them in, they will ship the jobs to India. We need tariffs and controls to maintain quality of living standards above the global median

[Aurornis]

> but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit.

This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.

All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.

[marcus_holmes]

The people who are there to solve interesting problems quit [0]. The people who are there for the cash stay.

The vast majority of any large organisation are in the second category, so your statement is 100% correct.

Whether the organisation loses something because the first category leaves, is open to debate. I think they would.

[0] because they now have the experience (and option at other organisations) of working from home full-time, which reduces their exposure to corporate bullshit and pointless meetings.

[srockets]

It’s a job, if you’re not there for the pay, you’re also hurting every other worker by reducing the market price for similar labor.

The people who are there to “solve interesting problems” are there to do so for pay. But, they can also get paid by other employers, who can offer more sensible employment terms.

[dnissley]

To be fair not all people who are there to solve interesting problems prefer remote, so they would only lose some subset of those folks.

[consteval]

Even if you don't "prefer" remote, the sheer cost savings of gaining an hour or two a day (or the cost savings of lower cost of living) is pretty hard to deny.

[dnissley]

My commute is ~15 mins each way fwiw. I do pay a premium to live nearby, but that is what the high compensation is for. Not even close to all of the extra compensation is eaten up by rent increase though.

[marcus_holmes]

True, but I've yet to meet one.

[trickstra]

Statistics do support it though:

- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells...

- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220523-the-workers-qu...

- https://theconversation.com/bosses-are-increasingly-forcing-...

- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/company-heads-ho...

- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/rto-m...

On the other hand, stats supporting the idea that working from office increases productivity are dubious at best, I've seen one which said 10% better productivity, but that could be offset by the lower costs of remote work. Maybe you can provide some research that convinced you otherwise?

[trickstra]

new one from today: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04mr4l90do

> Allowing flexible working and working from home creates a more productive, loyal workforce

[burnte]

Yeah, it is absolutely supported by data. Thanks for the links.

[pteraspidomorph]

It probably depends on whether there have been hundreds of thousands of severances in the industry in recent years or not... People would probably quit if they didn't have to compete with an insane amount of people to get a job at this time.

[kmonsen]

Which is why we are seeing return to office right now.

[shagie]

It's a very reasonable argument. And even if it isn't something now (where Amazon gives Seattle the bird... wait, that's San Francisco that got the bird from the bird), it is something that would impact their ability in the future to negotiate tax breaks with cities.

There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...

So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.

It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."

Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.

So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).

----

(edit / addition) - from last year, that tax revenue thing with some numbers: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/community/amazon-return-to-...

[Olreich]

I'm sure that the numbers indicate that, but it's quite a leap to pin WFH as the driving reason that the juniors not moving up and the seniors not moving into management. It's a good story, and I'm sure that's the sort of thing that top leaders in big tech are using. Except for the reporting that 60-80 CEOs got together and just decided to move, and that they aren't willing to share those concerns of low IC improvement in the communications.

If the story were true, then that'd be a reasonable thing to share in broad terms and would reduce the impact to morale as there's at least some shared, reasonable argument. Instead we get vague reasoning about energy of the workforce and spreading the corporate culture.

Everything I've seen aligns on three pillars:

* Real-estate strategy (lots of contracts and promises to commercial real-estate as well as local governments)

* Quiet layoffs (if they leave on their own, then we aren't firing!)

* Disconnection with reality (upper-management's job is harder remotely or they're bad at it, and having face-to-face conversations is really important for politics, their primary job)

[Plasmoid]

I think that's a pretty plausible idea, but it has one flaw. If it was true, then companies would be announcing this as the cause. They'd be shouting it from the rooftop if they had any data to support it.

[shagie]

There's very different metrics when dealing with a team of mostly mid and senior devs at a small shop that can carefully mentor / manage their handful of junior devs ... and one that is working on the scale that Amazon is working on.

The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.

[d0gsg0w00f]

I'm seeing this in personal experience. Interns and juniors are just totally lost between Zoom meetings. They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.

[simoncion]

> They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.

Have you had the time to do anything to assist? Have you brought this up with the folks who should be mentoring or managing these people? Mentoring is still mentoring, whether or not one happens to be breathing the same air as the fellow one is mentoring.

IME one HUGE benefit of moving what would be one-off watercooler chats to one-off chats in a '#watercooler' channel (or whatever) is that one no longer has to be on-site and socially connected in order to get most of the benefits of the rumor mill. Making all that side chatter searchable across the whole company does WONDERS for cross-team functionality and awareness.

[d0gsg0w00f]

Of course there's mentoring 2-3 times per week. The rest of the time they're just staring at their screens trying to figure out wtf is going on.

People don't feel confident jumping in to a chat stream. In real life you see a newbie standing around and a normal human tries to actively include them and explain things. Nobody looks at the thousands of idle chat handles and tries to explain what's going on to all of them.

[srockets]

That’s on the more senior workforce, and especially their managers to fix. Their incompetence to do so shouldn’t be solved by worsening the working conditions.

[d0gsg0w00f]

Yes, but it's a huge strain on senior workforce. A summer intern becomes a curse where no work gets done because you're trying to actively include digitally what's being done for free via office osmosis.

[srockets]

Part of senior engineer’s role is to lift other ICs up. It’s one of the highest ROI things you can do.

[zifpanachr23]

This is very plausible and I haven't heard it articulated quite like this before. Thanks!

[Olreich]

Usually the tax incentives are relatively minor and are long term as well. The more important thing with the real-estate strategy is that there's a lot of capital and personal clout wrapped up in these massive building projects and investments. Amazon recently had 2 shiny new buildings built in Arlington, VA. They have a bunch of buildings that were built in Seattle. There's definitely tax incentives involved, but those tax incentives are tiny compared to the billions of capital poured into the buildings.

[aprilthird2021]

If anything there are tax penalties. SF makes companies pay a tax per person in a seat working in SF, so it incentivized companies to move offices elsewhere and go remote

[grigri907]

Is this just a sunk cost fallacy then, or do they expect some other benefit?

[shusaku]

There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.

[johnnyanmac]

Do they? Even when I was in office at the tail end of COVID all my meetings were on Zoom anyway.

Regardless, such a trivial whimsy like that is a horrible way to place company wide decisions.

[immibis]

Managers like being able to see you at your desk looking busy. Otherwise they assume you're slacking off. They lack object permanence.

[ipaddr]

They wouldn't need the tax breaks if they didn't have the big office. Chicken and egg.

[dangus]

Right. They're blowing money on real estate. Getting a little bit of it back in the form of a tax rebate isn't going to reverse that fact.

You'd think that capitalists would be beyond excited to make the workers pay for their own workspace. Strange that they aren't.

[hackernewds]

Not to mention, Amazon has vested real estate that is massively depreciating along with the entire corporate real estate market

[tempestn]

Having people back in the office doesn't change that. Sounds like a bit of a sunk cost fallacy.

[Aurornis]

> The Reddit user made a claim

Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.

Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.

[shagie]

How many tax credits do you want? https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/

It isn't necessarily about the historical tax credits... but also those potential ones in the future. Notice Seattle not having tax credits for 2022, 2023, or 2024.

[raverbashing]

I doubt it, and actually, with NYC it's the exact opposite