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  "description": "Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.",
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  "publishedAt": "2023-12-30T07:29:31.000Z",
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  "textContent": "_This is not financial advice and I am not an expert._\n\nIf you would like to listen to what happened in a podcast I did an interview for The Changelog podcast.\n<audio data-theme=\"night\" data-src=\"https://changelog.com/podcast/573/embed\" src=\"https://op3.dev/e/https://cdn.changelog.com/uploads/podcast/573/the-changelog-573.mp3\" preload=\"none\" class=\"changelog-episode\" controls></audio><p><a href=\"https://changelog.com/podcast/573\">Changelog Interviews 573: Amazon's silent sacking</a> – Listen on <a href=\"https://changelog.com/\">Changelog.com</a></p><script async src=\"//cdn.changelog.com/embed.js\"></script>\n\nAmazon has a stock problem.\nIt’s not only Amazon, but they have more to lose.\nIf you’re a customer, that’s going to be bad for your business too.\n\nIn 2023 Amazon laid off more than 27,000 people.\nWhile that’s a big number it’s a deceptively small percentage for a company with more than 1.6 million employees (1.7%).\n\nThe vast majority of those layoffs happened in retail where a majority of Amazon’s employees work.\nWhen layoffs hit AWS it was mostly areas that were not revenue generating or had lower margins.\n\nBut publicly laying off 27,000 isn’t good for business–at least not immediately.\n\n!A graph of Amazon's stock price\n\nThe low stock at the beginning of the year is before the mass layoffs when operating expenses were high.\nThen Andy announced return to office (RTO) initiatives, but nothing changed.\n\nI was told repeatedly it wouldn’t affect me or the teams I worked with.\nThen in the summer that changed.\n\nThe negative press associated with layoffs wasn’t good.\nBut the most effective way to reduce operational expenses was to get rid of all the expensive people.\nHow could they force people to leave without severance packages or en masse?\nMaking them miserable and silently sacking them.\n\nSo RTO was enforced.\nAnd people started leaving in droves.\nIf they weren’t leaving they were looking, or at minimum waiting for their next RSU payout.\n\nIn my small sphere of people there wasn’t a single person under an L7 that didn’t want out.\nFrom what I could gather this mostly came down to compensation.\n\nIndependent contributors (IC) and managers that are L7 or above generally make $400k-$800k and for that much money they’re willing to put up with some inconveniences.\nSince Amazon’s pay is roughly 40% stock, they only make that much money so long as the stock stays up.\n\nIf Amazon keeps lowering their operating costs their earnings go up and stock rises.\nAt the cost of burning out everyone doing the work.\n\nWelcome to Day 2\n\nAs customers are cutting their own costs, $1 spent on AWS is worth less than it was last year.\nEvery trend line still goes up and to the right, but growth is slowing.\n\nCustomers aren’t coming to the cloud for VMs and ludicrously expensive network anymore.\nThey want higher levels of abstraction that AWS has historically been terrible at delivering.\n\nCouple that with Amazon trailing in AI and the most effective way Amazon can grow is by reducing costs.\nThe biggest cost is people.\n\nMany teams at Amazon have been in a hiring freeze for over a year.\nAnd now they’re chasing away the people they do have.\n\nAmazon has shifted from a leader to a follower.\nFrom my perspective it’s not going well.\n\nAmazon hasn’t put in the decade of AI research Google has.\nIt doesn’t partner with external companies as good as Microsoft.\nThe high margin services AWS was built on (e.g. network egress) is being given away for free by compeditors.\n\nAmazon is good at identifying real world problems they’ve faced from running an extremely large online store and logistics.\nGenerative AI hasn’t been a problem Amazon has identified needed to be fixed (or even deeply worked on) until it was costing them business deals.\n\nNo more pizza teams\n\nWhen I started at Amazon I was impressed that service teams were independent.\nIt was the purest implementation of devops I had never seen before.\nEspecially at Amazon’s scale.\n\nThen I realized how expensive it is.\nThere are only a handful of centralized teams at Amazon.\nThose are almost all tools and compliance teams.\n\nPipelines, SDKs, and security are centralized.\nAll components of a service team are self-contained as part of that team.\nIt turns out that devops is a very expensive org chart.\n\nMany of the service teams have lost a lot of institutional knowledge as part of RTO.\nTeams were lean before 2023, now they’re emaciated.\n\nTeams can’t keep innovating when they’re just trying to keep the lights on.\nThey can’t maintain on-call schedules without the ability to take vacation or sick days.\n\nThe next logical step to reduce costs is to centralize expertise.\nIt's the reason many large companies have database administration, network engineering, or platform teams.\n\nThey’ll have to give up on autonomy to reduce duplication.\nAmazon has never had a platform engineering team or site reliability engineers (SRE).\nI suspect in 2024 they’ll start to reorg into a more centralized friendly org chart.\n\nThey won’t call the teams that because those titles come from Google, but they’ll effectively be the same.\nThey’ll centralize to create “better collaboration” but in reality it’ll be because they can’t lower margins enough to keep their earnings calls positive.\n\nOutages ahead\n\nI suspect there’ll be a major AWS outage in 2024.\nNo amount of multi-region redundancy will protect you.\n\nThere has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon, but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice.\nThis is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.\n\nAmazon isn’t incentivized to publicly share LSEs.\nOnly outages customers notice are worthy of a dashboard update, but even those are quickly swept under the “all greens” dashboard.\n\nAmazon is an operationally strong company.\nMuch stronger than any company I’ve worked for before.\n\nBut those operational practices depend on people.\nWhen people are eliminated to raise the stock price bar, operational practices suffer.\n\nAmazon won’t fire me\n\nOn September 1st, 2023 I was told by my skip level manager and VP that my team and an adjacent team were being eliminated.\nThey claimed we all did such good work that they wanted us to remain at Amazon.\n\"We still have a job, just not a role.\"\n\nI was skeptical of how it was communicated–or rather not communicated–by management and I asked if severance was an option.\nI was repeatedly told it would be once we’d exhausted other options.\n\nThey told us our number one priority was to find another job.\nEvery role we found had significant downsides.\nLower pay, lower title, RTO, or various other things.\n\nIt was clear they wanted us to take a different role we could quit later.\nMy management wanted to retain the headcount, but couldn't do layoffs.\n\nOctober 16th I asked my VP for the severance I was told would be available.\nHe let me know HR wasn't aware of what he was doing and he would have to get approval.\nIt would take some time.\n\nEvery week for the next 2 1/2 months I asked for an update on my employment and severance package.\nI was either ghosted or given a variety of excuses.\nIt's now December 30th and I'm currently still employed by Amazon.\n\nIt hasn't only been happening to my team.\nThis has been happening in multiple areas as Amazon silently sacks people without being required to give them severance or announce layoffs.\nI'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.\n\n_Update: On Jan 10th I officially quit Amazon.\nMy manager called me asking about what work I would be doing like none of this ever happened.\nI knew he would tried to put me on a PIP and I wasn't going to stick around for that._\n\nIf you'd like to read more coverage about this please see the following articles:\n\n- https://www.businessinsider.com/senior-amazon-employee-aws-quiet-firing-remote-work-severance-package-2023-12\n- https://www.itpro.com/business/senior-aws-dev-claims-amazon-is-quietly-trying-to-encourage-employees-to-quit-in-a-push-to-covertly-cut-numbers\n- https://techstory.in/amazon-web-services-under-scrutiny-for-alleged-silent-sacking-amidst-layoffs-and-remote-work-policy-changes/\n- https://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/arena/thestreet/amazon-has-allegedly-found-a-controversial-way-to-cut-its-workforce-in-silent/article_af03eea7-bf8a-5ea6-872f-129c088c296b.html\n- https://workplaceinsight.net/amazon-employee-claims-he-was-told-youve-still-got-a-job-but-not-a-role/\n\nComments on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38818319",
  "title": "Amazon's Silent Sacking"
}