A Day in the Life of a Layoff

Harold Combs

So this happened.

Yep. Sixteen thousand Amazonians lost their jobs today. This follows 14k layoffs last October, for a nice, round 30k in 4 months.

Here’s a play-by-play

Tuesday

10:00pm - Notice you're a little anxious
11:00pm - Attempt to go to bed, surf Blind incessantly because there was already a leak of an email "Following-up on Beth's email"

Wednsday

12:00am - Finally fall asleep
05:00am - Wake up stark awake, check phone, notice that 0 emails have shown-up.   No text messages either
06:00am - Alarm goes off.  Stumble through morning routine, notice an email from HR.  Understand I'm not actually fired but 16,000 people are.
08:00am - head to work.
09:00am - Arrive to work, get coffee with PM.  Looks like at least some of the PM group is laid-off.  Send slack message to group saying we're all safe.

From there, it’s slowly understanding that this one hasn’t passed us by. At all. Hallway conversations ensue–a favorite QA person is gone. Several Product Managers. Some tech teams have lost SDEs, then the bombshells start.

  1. One of our most-tenured SDMs is gone, along with his whole mission. Then…
  2. Our director has been let go. All his reports now report one level above to a guy who already has 15 reports. Chaos.
  3. Our MOST TALENTED SENIOR ENGINEER who had a remote work exception is gone.

Dear reader, I’ve worked 27 years in corporate America. I can’t remember a day as increasingly bizarre as this one, aside from a couple of boondoggle junkets to Lenexa, Kansas that will remain undocumented.

At 3:45 I had a 15 minute meeting with my direct reports to take them through what I’d learned about all the changes under our Director, which I’d acquired THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE because no one would write anything down. This is not how you manage change. It’s ridiculous.

I’m exhausted.