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no_wizard ◴[] No.42130354[source]
For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1].

I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-...

[1]: https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-o...

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meta_x_ai ◴[] No.42130723[source]
Unless you can spin an alternate universe, some complex-dynamic things like corporate culture can't be data driven.

A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost.

Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.

No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies.

Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable

Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them

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1. no_wizard ◴[] No.42130905[source]
There are multiple errors in the logic here, but the biggest one is you're trying to prove causation with correlation (and implicitly at that). Which to iterate my understanding, its this:

Google was founded and everyone worked in an office together, Google is a $2.5T marketcap company, therefore Google's work culture could only be created, fostered and maintained in an office setting and therefore Google is successful because they all worked an in office together.

You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all. For instance, the article you linked t talks about the way two friends collaborated. The backdrop happens to be an office, but the office setting itself is not what made the collaboration successful. Merely, the fact they shared so much and worked collaboratively so closely is what let them to be successful, but nowhere in the article does it say "well we could only do this if we were in person with one another". The office is the backdrop to the story, its not the reason it happened.

Also, you're throwing an entire field under the bus that our entire industry definitely builds on, which is business & management theory (aka social science), but if we couldn't use social science to make informed decisions, why do so many startup founders read things like 'Zero To One'? (which is a book form of the notes that Blake Masters took while Peter Thiel was teaching CS183 at Stanford University in Spring 2012)

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2. changoplatanero ◴[] No.42130962[source]
> You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all

That was the point that they were trying to make. You can't prove such a thing with data one way or another, i.e. it's not possible to a/b test company culture.

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3. no_wizard ◴[] No.42131108[source]
Again correlation != causation.

All they said is you can't test it because 'it already happened in an office therefore its bound to office culture'. I am stating that they can't prove that assertion and it thereby does not prove it can't be A/B tested.

It absolutely can, there are entire fields of study and companies that exist simply to facilitate changes and measurements in company culture[0]

[0]: A random example of this: https://harver.com/blog/cultural-transformation/