Amazon: Built for the Cloud, Managed Like It’s 1999

Some business decisions age badly; others are stillborn, illustrating an organization’s inability to understand the times we live in. Amazon’s insistence on imposing increasingly rigid return-to-office policies clearly falls into this second category. Not only does it ignore decades of research on productivity, motivation and knowledge work, it also disregards the possibilities for freedom, flexibility and efficiency that technology has irreversibly opened up.

Recent articles describe an increasingly toxic climate at Amazon, where surveillance being used to track employees’ time spent at the office is rightly seen as a covert way of forcing departures without compensation. Dating back to 2023, we’ve seen reports in media such as CNBC, Quartz and Fast Company about unhappiness at Amazon at poorly explained, arbitrary management decisions. More recently, Cory Doctorow, writing in The Guardian, charted how a company that was once a symbol of operational excellence and customer care has become a bureaucratic, rigid and mediocre organization: in short, another sign of enshittification.

The problem isn’t just that Amazon is going against the grain: it’s going against the evidence. Distributed and hybrid work is not a fad, it is a direct consequence of the digitization of knowledge work. Forcing highly qualified people to commute daily to do exactly the same thing they can do better on their own terms is not management, it is institutionalized distrust. And distrust, when applied systematically, destroys organizational cultures.

The most perverse effect of these policies is that they do not lead to a “neutral” reduction in headcount: if Amazon’s strategic objective were, as many suspect, to reduce headcount without formal mass layoffs, this would probably be the worst way to do it. The least committed, the least productive, and the least valuable employees are not leaving. Instead, it’s those with the experience, reputation, networks and real options that the market demands who are walking. The best. Those who do not need to put up with absurd decisions because they know that in other companies they will be treated as responsible adults.

The result is a silent but steady decapitalization of organizational knowledge. Senior engineers, experienced product managers, people who understand complex systems because they have built or maintained them for years are replaced (if at all) by younger, less skilled employees who are less likely to question decisions. The company loses memory, criteria and quality in decision-making. And that, in an organization of Amazon’s size and complexity, is no small matter: it’s a perfect recipe for progressive deterioration.

In addition, the optics are terrible. In a global talent market, Amazon is saying loud and clear that it distrusts its employees, that it values control over results, and that it prefers 20th-century policies to manage 21st-century work. Meanwhile, smaller, more agile, or simply more organizationally savvy competitors offer the exact opposite: autonomy, flexibility, and confidence. It is no coincidence that many of the professionals who leave Amazon end up in companies where no one measures them by the time they spend sitting in a chair, but by the real impact of their work.

The irony is that Amazon, one of the companies that has done the most to build the technological infrastructure that enables distributed work on a global scale, seems incapable of applying it to itself. As if the cloud, collaborative tools and automation were only good for selling them, but not for rethinking their own management model. It is a contradiction so obvious as to be painful.

In the long term, these decisions not only deteriorate the work environment and make it difficult to attract talent, they also make the company less innovative, weaker and uncompetitive. Because the organizations that succeed are not those that force obedience, but those that know how to create contexts in which people want to give the best of themselves. Amazon’s mandatory return to office is one of the worst management decisions in recent years. And the most worrying thing is that someone within the company continues to believe that it makes some kind of sense.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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