What an awesome thread. :) Having read every single comment, I suspect some of y'all worked at Amazon with me. :P
I'm a Millennial who spent 11.5 years at Amazon (started as a warehouse temp packing boxes, then became a low-rank analyst, then a mid-rank analyst, etc) - I blogged about my retirement story (and my farewell to Amazon)
over here, if anyone is curious.
Amazon in particular was an interesting case study. It has a number of bizarre internal philosophies (such as hiring staff from outside instead of promoting from within - as the HR VP is alleged to have said, "we don't need McDonald's workers" O_o ) and one of them is the strange belief that merely being around other people in those shiny new offices will magically improve productivity. (The so-called water cooler effect.) It's also a pretty greedy company: the only reason Amazon offered WFH at all was because other tech companies (Facebook, Google, etc) had done so.
After they ever-so-reluctantly said that office workers could WFH for 6 months, they just kept sloooowly extending it to match the competitors. When Andy Jassy officially took over from Bezos a few months ago, he stated that yes, the company broke all the productivity records during the WFH year, but he also wanted everyone back at the office because magic water coolers or something. Ż\_(ツ)_/Ż By his own logic, that idiot implied that he wanted to lower the shiny new record-setting productivity. Heh.
Then he backtracked and said WFH was fine, actually. LOLOLOLOLOL - I guess they lost a few too many coders due to that nonsense. (Good coders aren't super-rare, but they're a limited resource. It's a zero-sum game in the tech world. Ditto - to a lower extent - for program managers, project managers, etc.)
That was in Seattle HQ. In regional branches (and my Canadian warehouses where I was a financial analyst), it was similar nonsense.
Personally, I left for good after I accomplished my mission: I'd obtained the Canadian permanent residency (after transferring from Seattle to Toronto), and was no longer reliant on that job to stay in the country. (If you're on a work permit, if you lose the job you have to go back to your country.) I still might have stayed on the job for a few more months because I was quite good at it, and my actual work took up maybe 10 hours per week. :) However, my management demanded I go back (for no logical reason) after 14 months of WFH, and given that another analyst got covid at the same warehouse and infected his wife and newborn child (they all survived), I declined to be their human guinea pig. (And my then-girlfriend had a bad immune system, so I didn't really feel like turning her into a human sacrifice for Amazon. I'm not a team player, I know.)
So after 11.5 years, and after seeing my portfolio rise 197% in the preceding 12 months (I was a
very good financial analyst ;) ), I politely told them to fuck off, turned in my 2-week notice, and started my lean-FIRE journey. That was almost 6 months ago, and I have zero regrets. :) I know most of my fellow Great Resignees didn't leave because they retired young, but I like to think there are quite a few others like me...