Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

RTO, Productivity, and Scale

• One side argues significant WFH works only for a minority; in large orgs many employees underperform, are harder to reach, and lose motivation, making broad WFH unworkable at scale.
• Others strongly dispute this, saying office time is full of interruptions and low-value meetings; deep work is better at home, with occasional in‑office “anchor days” for collaboration.
• Several note that poor WFH performance is a general performance-management problem, not a reason to penalize everyone with blanket RTO.
• There’s pushback against framing concern for team performance as “bootlicking”; some see it as basic professionalism, others as middle-management control obsession.

Employee Experience, Commutes, and Cost of Living

• Commuting time, parking costs, and high-rent hub cities are central complaints; people describe RTO as effectively an unpaid pay cut and quality‑of‑life hit.
• 5‑day RTO is widely seen as “beyond the pale”; 1–3 days hybrid is viewed by many as the sweet spot, though some insist any mandatory days defeat the purpose of escaping high‑cost cities.
• Workers value WFH for flexibility (appointments, childcare, home maintenance) and better sleep; pre‑COVID 5‑day office life is now described as “abusive” in retrospect.

Amazon-Specific Critiques

• RTO is described as a “final straw” on top of: back‑loaded RSUs, once‑a‑month pay, relatively low base salary caps, PIP culture, brutal unpaid on‑call, and heavy KTLO work with limited real innovation.
• Multiple anecdotes: people hired as remote later told to move to hubs or quit; several chose to leave. The hub model (random cubicles + constant video calls with dispersed teams) is seen as pointless and dystopian.
• Badge-tracking and strict RTO are perceived as a lack of trust and a way to retain “worker bees” (including visa‑dependent staff), not “top talent.”

Talent, Innovation, and Offshoring

• Some argue Amazon mostly needs commodity engineers to keep systems running; others counter that at Amazon’s scale, small optimizations by star engineers are enormously valuable.
• There’s debate over whether big companies even want “top talent” versus obedient, controllable workers.
• A key tension: if remote is fully normalized, companies can offshore more easily; some claim hybrid RTO implicitly protects US salaries, others see RTO as pure real-estate and control theater that will still not stop offshoring.