“Come back to the effing office, or else . . . !” (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos)

Photo above - courtesy of Amazon. This is what real robots look like, not the toys controlled by humans with PS5 controllers at Elon Musk's cyber-taxi reveal.

So sez Amazon. And they’ve got the robots to back up their threat. But so far the robots only toil in warehouses, where people HAVE to show up. They never had the WFH bennie scored b middle management dudes and dudettes. See link below.

What does an Amazon office worker do all day? I can only think of 2 things: write code, or patrol the product sellers for customer complaints and dangerous offerings. Except Jeff Bezos. HE doesn’t have to come back to the office. Jeff can do whatever it is that he does from the main salon of his 400 foot mega-yatch “Effu” . . . er, I mean Koru. My bad.

Why, or why won’t coders return to their cubicles? I can think of a couple reasons. They might have a SECOND PC at home on the kitchen table, alongside the official amazon on. They might operate personal business, banging out code as contract workers for someone else. You can’t do that at if you’re in an Amazon cube farm.

WFH Amazonians might have believed their bosses when given the option to stay out of the office, and pulled their kids out of expensive day care, and saving a couple thousand a month by keeping their toddlers at home with them. I betcha Amazon never told those workers, on the day they packed up and left the office tower, that they would have to come back. At any specific time, or at all. It wasn’t too long ago that all sorts of companies were salivating over the prospect of wholesale abandonment of expensive office space and having the majority of their workforce working at home and not in a building which was costing the company $50 per square foot monthly.

It's not just Amazon. Banks are ringing the bell for workers to come back, too. And some of THOSE executives have fled far, far away, and bought mini-ranches in places like Montana and Idaho. Who WOULDN’T leap at the chance to take their kids out of the NYC school system, and not have to dodge sidewalk muggers and subway thuggers on the morning commute? Jamie Dimon says “come back or else”. Or else you’re fired, that’s what.

Bezos hasn’t reached that stage yet. They’re still on the “come back or quit (please)” space on this board game. Amazon probably wants to avoid the bad PR backlash from firing thousands tens of thousands coders. There is really isn’t any such backlash when Wall Street banks fire EVPs making $413,271, plus bouses and stock options. (Estimate courtesy of Glassdoor.com)

I’m not predicting that U-Haul is going to suddenly report that it’s out of trailers need by people streaming back to Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Or that there is suddenly a shortage of contract coders building websites for Amazon sellers on the side. I am predicting that the unemployment rate is likely to go up, though.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Amazon indicates employees can quit if they don’t like its return-to-office mandate (msn.com)