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Amazon's Silent Sacking (justingarrison.com)

submitted 7 months ago by EnderMB to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 179 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (29 children)

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.

[–] drahardja 49 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

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