Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
- A business analyst at Amazon was laid off as part of job cuts in January.
- About a month later, the worker got the first of four inquiries about going back to the company.
- "I didn't want to go back because I just lost trust in them," the worker told Insider.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a former Amazon business analyst laid off in January as part of job cuts that hit 18,000 workers. Though this person was granted anonymity, their identity is known to Insider. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It was very quiet for most of the morning. We were made aware that we would be getting an email if we were getting laid off. I was working remotely and a couple of us were just setting up meetings and chatting.
It was hard to get any work done. I was just talking to friends occasionally. I was also obsessively refreshing my email. Even that morning, I was applying for some jobs because I had a feeling that something could happen.
I think I got the email between 11 a.m. and noon. It said something like, "As you know, we're doing a reorg and unfortunately your role has been made redundant" — or something like that.
When I got the email, I remember messaging my friend. Then she called me and I realized that her manager, who was trying to save people, also got laid off. She was blindsided by it. People were crying. They were traveling for work so that made it worse.
It was very shocking because you're working, you have a job, and then immediately it's, "OK, we're just going to pay you for the next two months, and we expect you to do nothing."
I hadn't been there super long — about a year. But I really enjoyed the role for a while there. And I really enjoyed my manager, too. But then it started getting a little bit weird where we knew there was something coming.
And so it got to be an every-man-for-himself situation pretty quick — people trying to make themselves look good, people jumping ship before it actually came to bear.
The whole situation felt out of control
Before the layoffs, I was talking to my manager who said I didn't have anything to worry about. My manager said, "There's not anybody else on the team who does what you do. So you don't need to be concerned." It turns out that wasn't the case. The direct managers had nothing to do with the layoff decisions.
There was a point a month or two before the layoffs where we were asked to fill out a document where we were to write things that we had worked on, things that we owned, and projects that we were looking to complete in the upcoming year. It was a shared doc so everyone could edit it. So people were editing other people's things and it was kind of a mess.
Some people I was working with were putting their names on my technical pieces. And so it kind of looked like I was just tagging on to these projects when, in fact, I was owning those projects. Some of the people who added their names to my projects presented it to me as like, "Oh, hey, I added my name to some of your things because we're working closely together on it." I was like, "OK, that's fine."
In hindsight, I wish I had gone back and pushed to have their names taken off. But I just felt at the time that that would be petty and I didn't want to get into those discussions because my name was still on the items. I felt like the whole situation was sort of out of control. And at that point, I was like, alright, I guess we'll just kind of go with the flow.
Management was saying this document was not a cause for concern. They said they were asking for the information because we had some newer leaders who wanted to get a better lay of the land. But we were concerned nevertheless. It didn't really help to fill in the trust that was missing there.
We actually had to do the document twice — once before the November wave of layoffs and then we got a second push for it near the time when I got laid off.
We were worried in November because we got very little information when that first round of layoffs happened. We were traveling for work and we were worried that we were gonna get laid off while we were on the road. We'd been concerned about layoffs, especially when we saw that our managers were leaving. Even though they gave us reasons as to why they were leaving, we basically understood what was happening.
I applied to close to 200 jobs
After I got laid off, I just hit the ground running the next day applying for jobs. I had my Amazon computer closed and waited for them to send me a box to ship that and the rest of my equipment back.
They were saying you can look for opportunities within Amazon if you want. And I was like absolutely not. I just felt so unappreciated. I consider myself a high-performer on the team. My manager and then their manager were always telling me that I was someone they wanted to protect and that I was someone they valued a lot. And at the end, it really didn't feel that way at all. It felt really depersonalized and almost just like a slap across the face because you give so much to them.
I probably applied to close to 200 jobs. The market was really rough because there were so many tech layoffs right in a row and everyone was getting scared. So it was really hard to find anything. We had two months' severance and then we'd get a payout at the end of that time that's relative to your tenure at Amazon.
Given that it's kind of a high-skill job and you have to go through a lot of interviews, it was rough. I definitely went through a lot of anxiety and filled out a lot of applications because of that.
After all those applications, about 10 to 15 turned into interviews if you're including phone screenings.
Amazon comes calling
I got my first outreach on LinkedIn on behalf of Amazon a little over a month after they told us we were getting laid off. It was still within the period where we had our severance payments. The message was from an external recruiter that Amazon worked with. I told them I'm not interested.
About 10 days later, my former manager — the one who'd moved to another division before the layoffs — reached out. He was like, "There's someone on my new team who's opening up a new role. I totally understand if you're done with Amazon at this point. But is that something you'd be interested in?" And I said, "No, I'm good. Thank you."
I still didn't have a job at that point but I just couldn't imagine going back if I didn't have to. There are people who got laid off with me who've gone back. One is consulting for Amazon right now because he kind of got forced to. And another one accepted a role for like a month or two before she said, "You know, I found something better."
The thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that they clearly had roles for these people. You're hiring for the same job that I had. But yet you're telling me my role is redundant. I'm like, "Which one is it?" Because now, you've reached out to me more than once for almost exactly the same job that I was just doing. You should be having a hiring freeze right now. And you should be trying to reorg internally because the whole message was, "We have too many people and we've over-hired." So why are you still hiring them? Like to the point where there's a need for three of me.
I would later find out by talking to the third person who reached out to me — a recruiter — that some companies tell them to go for people who used to work for them.
It's like you're getting covered in ants
I feel like a lot of it was sort of playing with people's livelihoods and mental health and safety for the sake of, I would say, an almost arbitrary layoff process — just to kind of look like you're doing something. It seemed very artificial to me. It kind of seemed like you're getting covered in ants and you're getting overwhelmed. Then you shake a bunch off but you let the ants keep crawling up you and it's just sort of fruitless. Like, "What are you doing?" If you don't make a structural change to address the over-hiring then it's going to keep kind of growing like a cancer.
I didn't want to go back because I just lost trust in them. I did feel like it could easily happen again because I was in a position where I felt like I was doing a really good job and I was working hard. And I was really motivated in the beginning. I felt that none of that really mattered to them at all.
I guess I'm somebody who — I guess most people are like this — where if you don't see the fruits of your labor, it's kind of demotivating to have that kind of response to your hard work. But also, the trust factor was huge. Because I felt like there was nothing I could do that would really give me any kind of security there. Especially given that I couldn't really understand why they were doing what they were doing.
Then, last month, I got another email about being an Amazon boomeranger, where you can come back within a certain amount of time without completing a full interview process. It was the fourth inquiry about coming back I'd gotten.
There was pressure when I first got reached out to about going back to Amazon. But the visceral response was just so intense that I was like, "I can't do it."
August Aldebot-Green, an Amazon spokesperson, told Insider via email: "We welcome the opportunity to hire former employees who were successful in their roles here. We already know they'll raise the bar for customers, so when appropriate and possible, we've actively prioritized placing them into available positions."
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