Maybe not, but if you have signed a massively expensive long-term lease and end up keeping the offices empty your investor will start looking cross at you. Of course that's more of a Covid era thing.

Except you can pick who to fire and the people leaving because they have better options might be slightly more valuable. Then again trusting or upper or middle management to get that right (outside of small/medium companies) is impossible.

> If Amazon (or some other company) thought they were going

This presumes that the company is fully capable of measuring and comparing the utility between RTO and working from home. That might be the case or it might be mainly due to management culture and other indirect factors but neither is self evident.

Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).

Anyway, not particularly pro or anti-RTO but I just find it bizarre that we usually assume that decisions making in large companies are always logical, rational and quantifiable and are not made to benefit specific subgroups or individuals in one way or another.

Yes, that was kind of my point.

> This one didn't break 25 years ago with the Y2K bug and it won't break in 2038 either.

Well yes but it had to be manually wound and adjusted by someone on a very regular basis to continue functioning.

It's much more efficient than a human having to look at a sundial every 15 minutes and ring the bells manually but effectively the same thing, not an automated system.

> clock will break going back and forth adjusted for DST)

So you just fix it manually twice a year? Seems like a significant improvement : D