As Amazon prepared for its workers to be back in the office five days a week, Christian Carron decided to quit.

Carron, 33, thought virtual work was here to stay. In 2022, when Amazon was still allowing employees to work entirely from home, he moved into a van, hoping to live out his dream of a nomadic lifestyle. 

He said he was more productive, even as he traveled the country, parking at ski resorts to get some runs in after work. He was energized by the flexibility, the changes of scenery and the access to nature.

In 2023, when Amazon reversed course and told employees they would have to return to the office three days a week, Carron disagreed with the decision but was willing. That willingness faded over the year and a half that followed, as Amazon leadership kept changing expectations.

At first, the requirement was three days a week from any office. Then, from a hub city. Then, from a specific building. 

Finally, in September Amazon CEO Andy Jassy dropped the hammer: Starting Thursday, Amazon will require employees to be in the office five days a week, a return to prepandemic norms and a shift from the flexibility employees had gotten used to. While Amazon, Seattle business boosters, and South Lake Union neighborhood restaurants and retailers are eager for the change, some employees are not. 

Businesses hope to see a revitalization driven by lunch runs, happy hours and shopping. Amazon hopes to foster a collaborative office environment that will spur innovation.

Employees, on the other hand, are bracing for renewed commutes, noisy offices and less-productive workdays. Some have asked the company to reconsider. Others like Carron have quit, while still others say they feel they are being laid off because they can’t relocate across the country.  

“They’re trying to say it’s just a matter of will,” said one employee who would need to relocate from the East Coast, and who asked to remain anonymous to protect future job possibilities at Amazon. “It’s just a matter of you making the decision, just walk through the door. But if this process is starting from that perspective, it’s wrong.”

An Amazon spokesperson said the return will strengthen company culture and ensure teams can deliver the best results. Jassy told employees in September that in-person work will help teammates learn from one another and help the company be more effective.

“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” he wrote in a letter.

Six employees who spoke with The Seattle Times said, after months of shifting expectations, they have lost trust in leadership.

Carron resigned in December after five years at the company. He gave his notice shortly after he had two substantial stock awards vest, meaning he didn’t leave much compensation unclaimed. But, he said he “absolutely” would have stayed at the company if not for RTO, or return to office. 

Surveys and rumors

Carron isn’t the only employee who lost trust in Amazon leadership, or decided to look for a new job. 

A rumor accusing Amazon of using RTO as an attempt to increase attrition, allowing the company to decrease head count without layoffs, gained so much traction that Jassy addressed it in an all-hands meeting. He said the return to office was not a “backdoor layoff.”

“This was not a cost play for us,” Jassy said. “This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.” 

Carron and another employee who listened to the meeting said Jassy’s remarks didn’t put them at ease.

“There hasn’t been clear direction throughout the entire process,” Carron said. “I can’t trust the messages that I hear.” 

More than 500 employees from Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, sent a letter in October to AWS CEO Matt Garman urging him to restore the flexibility of remote work. The letter came days after Garman told workers that “there are other companies around” if employees don’t want to return. 

Two surveys suggest there is a vocal contingent of employees who disagree with the mandate. Blind, a social media platform for tech workers to anonymously share complaints, conducted a September survey of 2,500 Amazon workers and found most were dissatisfied by the return to office decision. 

The Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions that has accused Amazon of prioritizing profits over worker well-being, conducted its own survey of 1,000 corporate workers in November. Nearly half said they had already applied to new jobs because of the return-to-office mandate.

Amazon has more than 350,000 corporate employees globally, mostly in the U.S. Across Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond, which Amazon considers its primary headquarters, Amazon has roughly 65,000 corporate workers.

Last year, as Amazon’s three-day requirement took effect, employees loudly disagreed and hundreds participated in a walkout in protest. This year, the cries of disapproval have been quieter but opponents say the critiques are just as widespread.

Lost “magic”

CJ Felli, an AWS employee based in Seattle, doesn’t expect the mandate will change his daily routine — he already goes to the office most days. But it will change his productivity. 

Before the pandemic, Felli said, Amazon managers often allowed employees to stay home if they needed a distraction-free day to work on a coding project. Amazon leaders said that would be still allowed in this new era but some employees are skeptical they’ll be able to easily get approval to skirt the new rules.

Now, Felli is worried about noise near his desk and other obstacles to get set up in the morning. Traffic around bike stalls and in parking garages will increase. Elevators and conference rooms will fill. 

“If it was hard to focus before, it’s going to be even worse,” Felli, 29, said. 

His plan? Come in early, set a stopwatch for four hours and then finish the rest of the workday from home.

Other employees who spoke with The Seattle Times said days in the office so far have been full of distractions. 

Carron said he spent 90% of his day in a small booth talking with vendors around the country. Meetings with his team, even those who were in the same building, still took place virtually because no one had the time to find one another in the maze of office space, he said.

Stephanie Ramos, a former Amazon employee based in Nashville, Tenn., who joined the company in 2017, said she didn’t experience Amazon’s idyllic vision of water cooler conversation following the three-day return last year.

She enjoyed the free coffee and access to an art-making space, where she once attended a lunchtime improv session. But she sat next to different people every day and had to keep her personal belongings in a locker. 

“The idea that you’re going to have these serendipitous encounters with folks in the office that really help you understand your work and help you understand Amazon, I don’t see that happening,” Ramos said. “People didn’t talk to each other.”

As part of the new return to office mandate, Amazon also plans to bring back assigned desks.

Ramos quit Amazon in October, feeling the company had changed too much from when she was first hired. After six years on the job, Ramos, who had been working as a program manager, was laid off in 2023, part of sweeping job cuts. She returned for a new role in a new city in 2024 and found the “magic” was gone. 

As an example, she compared her two orientations. In 2017, she had a two-week in-person orientation, including a visit to an Amazon warehouse. In 2024, she had a three-day virtual orientation with hundreds of other people. 

“This is not the Amazon I remember,” she said in December. “It feels like it’s sinking into bureaucracy.”

Amazon’s CEO seems to agree, telling employees in the September note announcing return to office that the company’s structure and work processes had room to improve. 

Amazon likes to think of itself as “the world’s largest startup,” Jassy said, but years of explosive growth had led to layers of bureaucracy.

“Having the right culture at Amazon is something I don’t take for granted,” Jassy said.

Ramos, Felli and Carron each said they saw the need for change at Amazon but didn’t think RTO was going to bring back the Amazon they had once joined. 

“People are going through the motions, but they don’t really understand the purpose of these mechanisms that Amazon has created,” Ramos said. “I don’t think the solution is going to address the problem.” 

Another employee, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their job, is worried RTO will be a “detriment” to the company because it will lose talent and institutional knowledge as people leave — some voluntarily and some without a choice if they can’t relocate.

That employee and another from Amazon Games, a video game subsidiary, said they were given an ultimatum two weeks before the new policy kicked in: Relocate or resign.

Up until that meeting, it hadn’t been clear if Amazon Games would enforce the mandate, the workers said. Suddenly, if they didn’t comply, Amazon would “consider this as a voluntary resignation,” one employee’s manager wrote in an email shared with The Seattle Times.

Both employees said relocation isn’t an option for them. They have children and homes and were under the impression they had been hired into a remote role. Now, they’re preparing for what may be their last day, facing what feels more like a layoff than a resignation.

Reigniting the neighborhood 

Wassef Haroun, co-owner of Mama Restaurant Group, which has locations near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, said he can tell Amazon employees are unhappy. 

One clear sign? They’re tipping less. 

Haroun, who runs the cluster of Seattle restaurants with his wife, has seen South Lake Union grow since they opened their Lebanese restaurant on Sixth Avenue in 2015. He opened a second South Lake Union location in an Amazon building in 2022.

Haroun cheered Amazon’s decision to bring workers back part time last year and full time this week, but he said Amazon alone can’t bring the neighborhood back to what it once was. 

“Amazon is taking a very strong and very courageous stand,” Haroun said. “It might make other businesses feel they can do the same.”

But, “the most positive thing that can happen is for people to start feeling really good about being with their colleagues,” he continued. “That’s not going to happen until the culture settles a little.”

Amazon’s three-day return over the last year and a half has brought in enough business that Haroun hasn’t had to raise prices — and hasn’t had to shut down. But it hasn’t been enough to turn a meaningful profit. He estimates his two South Lake Union restaurants are seeing just 60% of the weekday traffic they saw prepandemic. 

As Amazon’s Thursday deadline nears, there’s still uncertainty about how the policy will be enforced and how the return will play out as workers search for parking spots and desks.

In South Lake Union, Haroun said the neighborhood is entering a new phase. It was fun to watch Amazon create the campus as the company ballooned during the 2010s, often handpicking the restaurants and retailers that would serve employees and entice visitors to the neighborhood. 

Now, Haroun said, there’s nothing left to build. Amazon has to use a different set of tools and different mindset to figure out how to recapture that vibrancy after years of quiet sidewalks.