Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.

For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.

I don't see how the realization could've happened if they're moving back to the office.

I'm not surprised btw, every remote first company I've been in is stuck. I'm not saying it's inherent, but making it work is extremely hard. Imho it makes perfect sense that a company doesn't want to invest into it - it's not a lifestyle business.

I was hired as remote at Amazon in 2005 (I left in 2010). I have a friend who was part of an all-remote Amazon team formed more than a decade ago. Everyone on the team left after the RTO mandate came down last year, without severance. In my friend's case, it meant a choice between her job and her husband's in-office job 1,500 miles away from her would-be Amazon office. They chose to stay in the place they wanted to live, near his job and their friends and family.

In a company the size of Amazon, there are exceptions to many things, including exclusive in-office work pre-2020. This is more than a revert.

The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.

Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.

Amazon has one of the lowest average tenures in the industry. The number of engineers and teams that existed pre-2020 under those working conditions is tiny (except maybe the leadership teams).

Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).

I have no direct experience, but apparently this is an historical problem. Way before the pandemic a friend of mine relocated to USA (from Italy) and started working for AWS as a product manager.

She did not last much and eventually jumped to another big company. Sure the job was challenging in AWS, but what she was complaining the most about was the speed at which people were leaving and being replaced.

She told me that she often had to schedule meetings with people from other teams/departments, sometimes 2-3 weeks in advance to find a free calendar slot, and when it was finally the date for the meeting, it often occurred that one of the invitees did not show up, without any prior notice, only for her to discover that the person resigned.

So very often she had to reschedule the meeting with different people and wait another couple of weeks for them to be available. This made it very frustrating and difficult for her to get things going, as she was a product manager for a product that required a lot of cross-team collaboration.