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Notes -
My thought here is that this is a deep strategic move by Amazon.
Forecast sequence of events:
If there's only one game in town, you play with the best player. Amazon isn't hacking the system, they're altering the playing conditions of the entire market to their own benefit. This is what you expect from hyperscale corporations.
Anecdotally, a lot of the management practices at Amazon were formed around what amounted to competitive social pressure. It wasn't explicit like banking (yeah, you're gonna work 80 hour weeks) but it was just beneath the surface. Remote work kills that social pressure environment. I can see how, based on their own internal metrics, the past few years would look to Amazon like a major drop in productivity.
Added conspiracy theory:
I wonder if this may also be a reaction to the "overemployed" movement. To those not familiar, "overemployed" is a situation in which an individual is employed at two or more full time jobs, but they are white color in nature. High over-representation in tech / tech adjacent jobs. The legal status of doing this is a little murky, but if any company finds our you're doing this, you're probably getting fired one way or another. I wonder if Amazon - which is addicted to metrics - found a way to reliably identify employees who were pursuing this strategy and then discovered the only way to reliably stop it was to necessitate return-to-office policies.
An amusing and interesting theory, one that the OverEmployed subreddit has been discussing as well. Good for them: Slay, Kings; the OverEmployed give me energy.
However, based upon my impression of that subreddit, I imagine the proportion of Amazon employees who are OverEmployed is relatively small, especially among positions Amazon cares about. It’s not the $600,000 Machine Learning Researchers moonlighting at a second job, but rather the fungible redshirts who make $70,000 to $130,000 or whatever in Sys Admin or Dev Ops who take on a similar role at a different company.
So, in one respect, it’s tough for me to envision Amazon re-orchestrating their WFH operations based upon the redshirts. Although, I could totally envision Amazon punishing all their employees based upon a small segment of employees of which they barely give a fuck about. Maybe the redshirts are a large percentage of headcount.
In general, firms do appear to care a lot about their employees having passive income, secondary gigs, much less be employed elsewhere. Through their mouthpieces such as HR, they say it’s due to conflicts of interest or potential leaking of intellectual property. However, I suspect that’s but an alibi for being butthurt, just like how a wife who’s deadbedroomed her husband might get butthurt over her husband stepping out to bang other women.
The parallels are not coincidental. Just like jobs, women are more easily obtained when you already have one. My Reddit feed often provides drama from OverEmployed and subreddits like AITA/relationship_advice/etc. right near each other. An inside joke in OverEmployed is to bring-up wives and sidepieces as W1, W2, W3, just as they would J1, J2, J3, when it comes to jobs. Although, being Redditors, commenters would also be quick to bring up wife’s boyfriend(s).
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