Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

> “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."

I presume that's believe in the sense of faith, rather than believe in the sense of drawing reasonable conclusions from evidence. In other words, what are those advantages, and how do you know they exist at all, let alone their significance? As I recall, Amazon did pretty good during Work From Home, so why not start with the hypothesis that WFH is actually good for Amazon, then try disproving that with evidence.

If their Return to Office plan is itself a secret experiment to do just that, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that they are making decisions under a combination of the sunk cost fallacy with respect to their commercial real estate, and the insane impulse to satisfy their management layer, while simultaneously shrinking their overall workforce size.

It seems obvious why companies want employees in the office. Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.

If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.

> Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.

In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.

In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.

Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).

In my experience, a lot of remote empoyees not only do very little work but also are unresponsive. So when you need them, it's hours/days before you hear back. Even if people are unproductive in the office, they tend to at least be responsive.

If someone actually works well remote and is responsive then they should be allowed to continue.