Rename home Wi-Fi, leave badge at office: Ex-Amazon employee reveals tricks used by employees to not work from office

• Amazon recently ended work from home
• A former AWS employee shared tricks people use to not return to office
• The post has gone viral

A couple of days back, tech giant Amazon was under the limelight for ending remote work forever. The company, through a memo shared by CEO Andy Jassy, announced that employees will be required to be in office for all five days. Jassy had also noted that there are various benefits of working from office - something that he has mentioned in previous memos as well - and that everything will return to the way it was before the Covid 19 pandemic.

Employees are not ready to return to office

Amazon's RTO (return to office) mandate had sparked a lot of discussion online, and various employees were seen criticising the decision. Now, a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineer, John McBride, has revealed some clever methods employees have used to dodge the company's strict return-to-office policy.

The Colorado-based software engineer, who left AWS in June 2023, shared his experiences in a viral post on X (formerly Twitter), which has now garnered over a million views. McBride called these tactics "true ingenuity and innovation," but not in the way one might expect from a tech giant like Amazon.

In the post, McBride explained that many employees were going to great lengths to avoid physically returning to the office after Amazon implemented a strict return-to-office mandate. He himself chose to resign when asked to relocate to a different city and work from the office.


McBride listed three "wild" tricks AWS employees have been using to avoid returning to the office while still appearing compliant with the company's attendance policies.

The three "wild" tricks

First, he highlighted a classic approach that employees used for weeks: badging into the office during lunch breaks, grabbing free snacks or coffee, and quickly leaving. “This worked for a few weeks until they started tracking how long employees actually stayed in the office,” McBride said.

The second trick involved employees renaming their home Wi-Fi network to match that of the office's network. The company's reporting software would then mark the employee as being “in the office” based on the network name. McBride admitted this was his favourite tactic but mentioned that it didn’t last long. “Eventually, the IT department made the system more sophisticated, checking more than just network names.”

Lastly, McBride spoke about certain "under-the-table arrangements," where employees left their security badges with colleagues who would clock them in and out of the office. “This was risky, but I knew someone who did this for months,” he remarked, amazed by how long it lasted.


Although many companies, including Amazon, have been keen to bring employees back into physical office spaces following the pandemic, the rise of remote work has sparked ongoing debates about its long-term viability. McBride’s post has sparked conversations about the necessity of office attendance for tech professionals, especially given the increasing availability of virtual collaboration tools.

It’s clear that employees are not only resourceful but also determined to maintain the flexibility that remote work offers. Whether these tricks will continue or be shut down entirely as companies tighten their policies remains to be seen. For now, McBride’s account sheds light on how some are navigating the changing landscape of post-pandemic work.

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