Amazon's Silent Sacking
Amazon's Silent Sacking
Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
This part is crazy.... What's really nuts is everyone was saying this was what RTO was all about, was actually forcing their most expensive employees (who are probably also their most valuable????) to quit. They don't want workers who know their value. It's wild how the rich are so transparent and barely even try to mask it anymore.
Amazon won’t fire me
On September 1st, 2023 I was told by my skip level manager and VP that my team and an adjacent team were being eliminated. They claimed we all did such good work that they wanted us to remain at Amazon. “We still have a job, just not a role.”
I was skeptical of how it was communicated–or rather not communicated–by management and I asked if severance was an option. I was repeatedly told it would be once we’d exhausted other options.
They told us our number one priority was to find another job. Every role we found had significant downsides. Lower pay, lower title, RTO, or various other things.
It was clear they wanted us to take a different role we could quit later. My management wanted to retain the headcount, but couldn’t do layoffs.
October 16th I asked my VP for the severance I was told would be available. He let me know HR wasn’t aware of what he was doing and he would have to get approval. It would take some time.
Every week for the next 2 1/2 months I asked for an update on my employment and severance package. I was either ghosted or given a variety of excuses. It’s now December 30th and I’m currently still employed by Amazon.
It hasn’t only been happening to my team. This has been happening in multiple areas as Amazon silently sacks people without being required to give them severance or announce layoffs. I’ve heard similar tactics being used at other companies–mostly large companies–and it’ll only continue in 2024 as they make decisions that drive short term profits over all else.
178Ugh. Seeing shit like this makes me question what the point of life even is. I don't want to partake in this bullshit. Sure I can basically boycott Amazon (unless you count AWS which half the web runs on - can't do shit about that), and it's easy to do so here in Sweden since they're particularly garbage and don't really offer anything of value.
But Amazon was never the problem. The system is broken. Amazon is just one symptom, and there's loads of companies out there operating at different levels but doing basically the same bullshit.
86Exploitation has never changed.
This isn't very different from the downsizing of the 90's, every time we go through this song and dance they find new ways to screw us, because often we've legally fought for the previous ways to be denied. They'll do anything to pay the least. They don't actually care about remote or in-office at all based on this comment over at hackernews:
They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Addendum:
Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
They're happy to replace US workers with cheaper workers from other countries, they don't care that they work remote.
Anyway, I don't disagree, it makes me want to give up and I believe the system is broken, and it's been broken since before I was born.
If these people could still own other people as slaves: They would.
I'm of the position that if we allow companies to be international, then they have to pay every employee worldwide at the same payscale just so they fucking stop doing shit like this! If a US worker is worth $100K for a position, don't pay an Indian worker $20k-$40k for the same fucking work! They have the same value, they're not worth different things because they're in a different fucking geographic location!
67
Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.
The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.
Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.
49Not enough people know about constructive dismissal.
My mother was approaching retirement at her old career, and right before COVID they dramatically changed her job and work hours to try and get her to just retire, and she did.
I convinced her to file for unemployment anyway due to constructive dismissal, and she won her case. She got full unemployment benefits PLUS the COVID bump for a long time while getting to retire early.
42If they aren't going to fire you and you aren't going to voluntarily take a worse job, what happens?
29I think you become a professional job seeker until you land a better job.
3Hilarity.
2
I saw it happen once when I was young team lead. I had a number of people that worked on my team.
One day I was asked how many people we would need if we stopped doing one task. I was to naive to put two and two together.
A short time later I heard the ops manager talking to someone about offering the people they planned to get rid of other work with the express intent of avoiding paying out unemployment.
I couldn't really do anything at that point other than warn my people, which I did. I found something else a short while later. I made sure to tell management why I was quitting, which was a long list of issues including them fucking over good people.
25Are you still getting paid but aren't working? I'm just wanting to make sure I understand your situation. There are no more morals and ethics in company policies it seems like.
20I am not the person who wrote the post, I am just quoting it. I wish I had an answer to that question, too!
9There were never morals and ethics in company policies. Ever. The only time something that seems moral and ethical happens in corporate policies is either through happenstance or a law forces them to be that way.
4
They all thought they would be so valuable that they would become the kind of rich that is capable of firing them.
They believed hook line and sinker all of the Amazon cultural bullshit and cannot understand that they too are just employees in a capitalist system that hates employees at the end of the day.
10Severance is not required by law. It’s generally given to avoid lawsuits.
Personally I’d like to see a law around severance. I think it should be expensive to lay employees off. 401k should vest. Stock options should vest and severance should be a minimum of six months.4Wait....do you have any responsibilities currently? I'd use that time a hotspot and a personal computer to apply for another gig ASAP!
2He was quoting the article, just so you're aware
2
So they got sent to the roof like Big Head?
28If only. He was getting paid enough money to buy a boat and hire a boat guy.
8
Fuck Amazon. Friend moved to Seattle and got a job at the mother shop... Told me she could all but guarantee me a job there. I'll brag...I have an impression resume and could have gotten on... Great pay, bonus etc ...Nope. That company sucks ass.
-10I'll be honest: I love this. If you have ever known anyone who works at Amazon proper, (ie not in a warehouse or delivering), they are the most insufferable people I have ever met. Basically all of them are just caricatures of people who are masters of throwing buzzwords around that only they would possibly know because its some ridiculous 'Amazon' spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
Then 5 minutes later the conversation topic shifts to them being very, very concerned about some social issue or tragedy at home are abroad, and they will always be blissfully unaware of how what Amazon does as a company usually causes the thing theyre very worried about in an indirect or sometimes pretty direct way, you know like gentrification or rising income inequality, or food deserts or collapsing economies of quaint and charming towns they want to retire to at age 42, but can't because all the local shops collapsed due to everyone ordering everything from Amazon.
God help you if you point out the technicals of how most of their 'unique and innovative' software solutions basically always boil down to stealing other people's ideas, putting a slight twist on them to make them harder for users of their services to quit or enterprise partners to migrate, that you can do basically everything they offer for far far cheaper with libre code and 5% of the money Amazon is throwing at it.
Then, in private when they think no one else is listening, they giggle about how superior they are to other people because they work at Amazon, but they do it in a very muted, posh sort of way.
Then they'll also have a bunch of hairbrained side projects for making money on the side that revolve entirely around wither exploiting the poor very directly, or being paid an absurd amount of money to develop some simple software that one of their other socialite tech bros or gals can convince their idiot boss to pay waaaay too much for because 'you know this guy works at Amazon he really knows his stuff' is sufficient to convince most boomer VPs.
I fucking hate Amazonians.
At least with most MSFT employees you can at least rather quickly tell they fall either into the 'i am so jaded from my job this company is evil but it pays well' camp or the 'i am a megalomaniacal lunatic who will scream at people about things I dont actually understand when asked about why some process or paradigm is so complicated and counter productive' camp.
-61The irony is that you obviously think you're so superior to these people who you think sound pompous for, in your opinion, thinking they're superior.
31I dont think its ironic, I think it is pretty obvious that I feel superior to every Amazonian I have ever met.
One can know how to write code and /not/ work for a giant evil corp.
One can not be a hypocrite by actually working to ameliorate the negative effects of a giant evil corp instead of working for one and then Patrick Bateman style deliver a bunch of empty rhetoric about being 'concerned for society' or whatever, whenever the opportunity arises.
-11
I’ve worked with hundreds of Amazon and AWS folks over the last 4 years and never once had an experience even close to what you’ve described. I’ve got lots of friends who do or have worked for Amazon and one and all they recognize they’re putting in time working for the devil and hold their nose while they swallow that pill.
14its some ridiculous ‘Amazon’ spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
This explains why everything in AWS is named something weird. It's not "DNS" it's "Route 53." It's not virtual servers it's EC2. Makes learning it super hard, and I imagine it makes learning other things even harder.
6The /function/ of these stupid naming schemes, despite whatever explanation is proffered as to their origin, is exactly as you have pointed out:
It takes time to learn all this lingo, which makes people tend toward 'specializing' in that ecosystem, which makes you more hesitant to migrate or attempt to interface with some other software ecosystem with its own separate lingo.
It also serves to make you feel stupid for not understanding it, basically in the same way a group of friends laughing at an in joke that you dont understand makes you feel like a lesser member of the group.
Lots and lots of programmers, db admins, etc, are basically low social skills or on the autism spectrum, so keeping people feeling low on the social pecking order makes them easier to boss around, makes them more likely to accept ludicrous and technically inefficient solutions, accept being paid far less than what they are worth, etc.
4