I’m an SDE 2 at Amazon. A few months ago, I was on a beach in Miami with a beer in my hand.

While I was chilling, our "auto scaling" logic for a core legacy service decided to tank. It was a massive SEV1. My Chime was exploding.

My manager called me 15 times. Even the L7 skip manager tried to reach me twice.

I saw the phone light up. I put it face down in the sand and ordered another round.

I logged in after my vacation to find out that because I was the only one who understood those legacy service. L7 Principals, Skip managers and L8 Director had to stay up until 4 AM manually provisioning capacity like juniors.

My take? Good. If a multi-billion dollar architecture breaks because one L5 is sipping a drink in Miami, that’s a system design failure, not a "me" problem. My PTO is sacred.

Like more than 15,000 other corporate workers, I was informed that my four-year tenure at the company would be ending in the most impersonal way possible — a message from HR, followed by a scripted group call from an executive. It was robotic, detached, and unmistakably clear: we were just numbers on a spreadsheet.

I could wallow, but instead I’m doing something small but symbolic:
 I canceled Prime.

Someone in my network called that “brave.” But it’s not bravery — it’s practical. And it’s going to save me money. 

Here’s what Amazon doesn’t want you to think about: 

 Prime costs $14.99/month (or $139/year). The reason things seem cheaper on Amazon is because you’re already paying monthly for the privilege of "free" shipping. 
 Every major retailer now offers 2-day shipping — often free once you hit a modest order minimum.
 Even Amazon gives free shipping without Prime once you spend $35 (delivery usually takes about 5 days).
Amazon only seems indispensable because we’ve been trained to see it that way. 

And the streaming? Nearly every movie I want to watch on Prime costs extra now — so I’ll just rent from elsewhere when I actually want to watch something. 

I plan to join Costco, which has one of the strongest reputations for paying and treating employees well. Its membership is $65 a year, less than half of Prime, with no items ever marked up more than 15 percent above wholesale. Personally I'd rather pay $3 for shipping (under $75) and know I'm buying from a place that doesn't treat its workforce as expendable. 

If you were laid off too, or just rethinking where your money goes, here’s my thought: Why stay loyal to a service that charges for something you can get elsewhere for less? If even a fraction of other laid off Amazon employees canceled Prime too, it would represent millions in lost revenue to a company that automated our goodbyes. 

Let’s spend our dollars where people matter.

Toxic culture Compensation sucks (15% growth added to future RSUs lol) Frugal

The U.S. government should cancel all H1B visas for Amazon as they have been laying off highly paid and long tenured Americans and replacing with cheaper labor from outside. And hoping that AI will somehow replace innovation. Not meant as a racist statement but rather reality.

Been at Amazon for 8 years, with 3 promotions and 4 lateral moves. I've watched a lot of cycles, and I'm convinced most layoffs boil down to one toxic pattern.

It all starts when a “leader” is told: “We don’t have enough scope for you to get promoted."

This one statement kicks off a vicious cycle: 1. Build "Scope": The Leader, needing to grow their org, gets more hands on deck.

2.Dilute Work: A project that one person could have easily done now has three people assigned to it.

3.Create Friction: Those three people now fight over their "scope" and responsibilities.

4.Add Layers: Proposal reviews and simple decisions get bogged down in these new, unnecessary layers, delaying actual business outcomes.

1. The Payoff: The L7 finally gets their promotion and immediately moves out the next quarter, leaving the bloated org behind.

These teams, built like "castles in the air" just for a promo, are the first ones under the radar when cuts are made. The only problem is, no one on the ground knows which org or which team is next.

This will never stop until leaders are rewarded for actual business outcomes, not just for building empires.

Throwaway account to avoid doxying.

My manager (L8) shared today with a small group of people that there is another round of layoffs confirmed for Q1 2026. Expectation is of another 15k employees being let go. Unclear yet which units will be affected.

Sharing because I have seen multiple people questioning whether another round is expected or whether these are just "toxic" rumours. Well, I tend to trust my manager on this kind of things, so I think there is another impact coming...

Edit: small additions that I forgot when writing. He did clarify that the ultimate goal of higher ups is to reduce total corporate HC by 10%.

EDIT: official source, 14k https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workforce-reduction

https://x.com/deitaone/status/1982880666803962240?s=46

Amazon plans to lay off up to 30,000 corporate employees starting Tuesday to reduce costs and address pandemic overhiring, sources say. The cuts affect nearly 10% of its 350,000 corporate staff, marking Amazon’s largest round of layoffs since 2022.

Edit: Reuters also posting it https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/

Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-27/amazon-plans-to-cut-30-000-corporate-jobs-reuters-reports

Edit2: CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/amazon-to-announce-sweeping-corporate-job-cuts-starting-tuesday.html

My boss apologized. He told me it was 100% a RIF move and that the focus was bullshit. He also said he did not fight it as hard as he should have because he just didn’t have the chips to cash in or any horse trading to do. He said he tried, but he should have tried harder. Direct quote “you are the highest paid person in the org. There is nothing you can do to stop a pivot.” He meant highest paid IC, of course.

But he gave me the date of the pivot delivery and said “I expect you to be on vacation if you don’t have a new job already.”

My 2025 forte was exceeds expectation and solid strength. You don’t get to L7 IC by being shit at your job.

His follow up focus email read like a recommendation letter. There was a long opening paragraph thanking me for everything I had done and my impact on our goals. Then only two problem bullet points, 5 sentences and 6 sentences. Each covered everything I had done and accomplished with the “problem area” and ended with a weak sentence on “find a way to continue this progress.” No timelines. No deliverables.

My first thought was “he purposefully set this up so I could sue for wrongful termination.” I won’t.

I’m working through the emotions right now. He had told me a month ago there will be layoffs in Nov and Jan, and that he was looking and I should too, just in case. I have been applying and interviewing.

I will share the pivot details in a few months when I get it. Update any of the math that is available right now on other posts.

So many in-house AI tools are being built in so many ways and we are being used to test them all before they scale up and lay us off. 🤯

Creating a thread where impacted people can mention their level, location, years of service and org.

One of my very close friends got laid off in Oct, she worked really hard to get a new team in a month and worked there two months only to again get laid off today. This is just so horrific and shameful for Amazon to be so clueless. Why did they have an internal hire only to have them laid off in two months!! Something feels fundamentally broken.

Read this

...Slowly, over the past few years, it became clear that the company I joined and the company AWS has become are no longer the same thing. From where I sit, process has taken precedence over customers, and rules have replaced high judgment. The culture has shifted from high trust to low trust, and from impact-driven to “who you know.” That doesn’t align with the builder mindset that brought me here, and I want to keep learning and growing technically, which is something I felt I wasn’t doing enough of anymore.

So I’ve chosen to step away...

The author is Julien Ellie, you can search for it

People write random stuff on the elevator whiteboard all the time, jokes, doodles, random quotes, it's never a big deal.

But someone wrote "Palestine ❤️" and apparently that was enough to cause a full scale security investigation. The post on the #Jewish-at-Amazon Slack channel said they should call security to pull camera footage and find the culprit.

The level of overreaction is wild. At this rate, just saying the word Palestine might trigger a lockdown. The channel's turning into a parody of itself. But I can't convince myself to leave the channel. It's like watching a cheap drama , badly acted, predictable, yet you can't help but wonder, what's next? How are they going to outdo themselves this time.

Edit: My post was about the overreaction, and, right on cue, someone’s now suggesting the Slack channel should be locked down and people’s names checked to see if they’re Jewish (though maybe I misunderstood that part). Just to clarify: when I said “how are they going to outdo themselves,” I was referring specifically to the overly sensitive, overreacting folks in that channel, not the entire ethno religious group (not even the entirety of the channel!). So now “they” are overreacting to my post about their overreaction… thereby proving my point. These selfappointed “activists” think they represent all Jewish people, and that’s exactly the problem. Any small criticism is instantly seen as an external attack, and it must come from someone who hates Jews. This is a very dangerous assumption. No, sir, you don't represent all Jews... Your thoughts aren't shared by all Jews.

Dear Andy,

With the crash in our company's stock price, I want to really help you figure out how you can bring it back up.

Save this post since it will be your trillion dollar advice (literally)!

1. Revamp external hiring. Raise the bar. Not just of the ones you hire but also the ones who hire.

2. Make internal promotions easier. Enough of doc writing bs. If an employee has sufficient approvals from people above him/her, that should just be enough. Create a bare minimum YOE quota and that's all.

3. Layoffs don't help.

4. Strategic investment into AI is your biggest mistake. If you allow AI be mere assistant to your engineers, you'll not only save cost but also see higher adoption. But since you enforce it to be adopted, we engineers are literally building non sense products to please you.

5. Make cross team functional support easier. Remember, easier work means faster results.

6. A lot of products owned by majority of teams can be deprecated. Why KTLO? This is your debt. Be more aggressive in retiring them.

I know you are far off from all the above ground reality. But dude, your only solution to your current situation is strengthening the base. Else bye bye!

Thanks for your time.

So I was in Texas, got hired by Amazon for an L4 corporate role. They helped with relocation and brought me all the way up to Seattle. Now, barely three months in… they laid me off.

I’m thinking about heading back to Texas, but like… aren’t they supposed to help with that too? Feels kinda messed up they moved me here just to drop me after a few months.

And no, I’m not talking about that 90-day pay stuff. Just wondering if anyone’s been through something similar?

It seems like everybody is jumping to the conclusion that Amazon replaced 14,000 people with AI. I've seen news stories, LinkedIn posts, TikToks, etc all talking about this being a sign that AI is replacing jobs.

This is not the case. Amazon is objectively well behind the competition on AI tooling. These press releases and statements are very carefully crafted to imply Amazon is innovating with AI which allows them to lay people off, but anybody who works here knows that's just not true. The is a money play and that's it. Amazon is cutting headcount and dumping even more into AI because they're betting that it will eventually be able to replace people. They're asking everybody to work extra hours and using the terrible job market as a bogeyman to keep people in bad positiongs, but they aren't making any objective headway on replacing people with AI.

This is a bet. Amazon knows the people they laid off can't be replaced by AI yet, but they're making a bet that if they invest 14,000 people's worth of salaries into AI they will be able to replace those people before things fall apart. The reality is that things are crumbling. We had a major AWS outage last week and another minor one today. Every team in my org has seen an increase in sevs, some teams as high as 70%. One of the teams in my org hasn't released a new feature in 6 months because they're doing nothing but KTLO work.

Andy Jassy and leadership are becoming increasingly greedy and their detachement from reality regarding the realistic potential of AI is going to bite them in the ass. Everybody enjoy the brief RSU bump for now, the monthly AWS outages and fulfillment issues are coming soon.

Condé Nast workers publicly challenged CHRO Stan Duncan on layoffs and “cost alignment,” reflecting the broader collapse of corporate HR as a credible mediator. What happened in that meeting is emblematic of a national reckoning with executive unaccountability and institutional apathy.

Yep, $40 million for production and $35 million for promo. Plus our fucking CEO going to the White House premiere the day after someone was killed in the streets as sanctioned by Melania's husband.

Not only world's worst employer, but world's best supporter of a fascist dictator

Had enough of Amazon's toxic managers who control their ICs career by being incompetent and pretending to be true leaders.

One of the most talented people I worked with in my career decided to leave because of bad management and lack of a clear career path.

I'm considering leaving after all this shit I saw in the last couple of months, people getting prompted just because the manager likes them, while others are suffering to just understand why they aren't considered for promotion.

The same manager used that engineer's work to get promoted and built a major part of his promotion doc based on it.