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Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would change the world and be the source of our future growth and success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we given up on that?
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
Most SDEs have grown up in a severe labor deficit. It's so interesting seeing the idealism smack in to reality.
1. Those "employee-appreciations" were a cost-saving measure to retain talent. 20% time towards projects that benefit the employer vs getting paid 20% more, or free food at an incremental cost of $100/mo/employee instead of paying $2000/mo/employee for equivalent comp-based retention.
2. We are no longer in a severe labor demand deficit. Quality of life will converge on the American norm - treating employees like disposable cogs, under layers of brutal middle-management politics.
3. "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The only examples that come to my mind are niche companies that market based on such an ethos, like Patagonia. Of course there are stable European companies, and US union shops, but those aren't disruptive. WeWork had that ethos for a little while I guess.
Plenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including meta. Band rooms too. It’s mostly Amazon that’s an absolutely awful, terrible, horrendous company.
> ”Note the subtle shift”
It’s not subtle. It’s overt & being externally communicated.
Wall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies.
The pendulum has swung back from the years where growth was all that mattered.
It’s now back to focus on profitability.
The pendulum will swing back again at some point as well.
It’s cyclical.
and for anyone that actually believed companies cared about those things when they said them, I have a bridge in NY I'd like to sell you.
I don't know what is surprising, it's just capitalism being capitalism. There were game rooms because they thought it would be useful for making money, they don't have game room anymore because they think its' useful for making money now
Being "managed out" (as this is sometimes called) of a long term role can be very traumatic. Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management. Which then draws the process out as long as possible - max pain.
Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction.
I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.
I have never been laid off or fired*. However, for most of my adult life, a layoff would have been traumatic. I have a specialized skillset, and it takes a while to find jobs. In the meantime, I have living expenses. It's doubly hard to find a job unemployed. I don't want to be in that position.
"Managed out" would be much more humane, at least to me. If I'm put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job. Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it.").
If you want me out, stick me in a box writing test cases or documentation or something until I leave. Heck, cut my salary by 30%. I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero income and no job. It can be good for the company too. If there's someone to do the crappy work while they do the job, no one else has to.
* I've had one "it's complicated" as a founder, but that's a longer story. It didn't involve losing my salary overnight like a layoff or firing, through.
My experience
> Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management.
I've only tried this once. In the process of trying, something dawned upon me. If you think you can run a company better than your management does, go start one.
So I did! One of the best decisions of my life.
Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
If you were L8 then the responsibility for setting the culture is 100% on you.
L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s.
If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture.
If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process.
If you don't like a process, kill it.
This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".
There isn't a single large company the size of Amazon where upper management isn't a complete shitshow btw.
Between high paying job, stability, and culture, you can only pick 2.
My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices. The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming, putting everything on "performance" etc.
My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
What did you learn?
I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into. The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so the smart move would be to move the people involved into the company's AI efforts.
I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.
I've been on the other side of these decisions.
It's not the fault of the individual engineers, but there just aren't enough positions to fill.
Leadership is accountable to shareholders, the board, and other stakeholders to ensure financial viability.
It sucks, but it is what it is.
> As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into.
Timing "we need this new team" with "We don't need this team" is a challenge. It is rare that both occur at the same time, or even the existing team's skill set matches with the new challenge.
Shifting SREs to do machine learning is set up for failure.
Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses (let’s exclude warehouse/logistics in Amazons case). So why is there an order of magnitude more staff than what’s needed to run those?
There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth.
Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do.
This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it.
When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.
These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around.
Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.
Amazon is two businesses in one. AWS is a high margin technology services business. The rest is a low margin box shifting distributor.
To be competitive in distribution you need to be ruthless about costs. I've consulted for a few of these sort of companies and it's insane what they will do to save a few pennies. They are utterly miserable places to work as their frugal attitude spills over into all their interactions. It starts with using doors as desks and progresses to making staff piss in a bottle.
I suspect this culture is what makes Amazon as a whole such a difficult employer.
If they were two independent businesses then it would never make sense for them to merge, just as you wouldn't expect Microsoft to buy Walmart. It would probably be better for both sides if they divorced.
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements
Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year.
When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it.
The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error.
And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train.
Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.
>Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs
This is not really true anymore and is exactly why Google and Amazon are doing big layoffs. Money isn't free anymore. The "just grow at all costs" couldn't last forever and it's finally coming to an end
Investors are specifically expecting profitability now and not just growth of customers. The end of what you're talking about is precisely what is happening now
I worked at Amazon.
Keep The Lights On effort was typically around 10% of total capacity. The rest of the effort was because the goal is not to maintain, it’s to drive improvements to the business.
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses
This is currently false, or at least very up to debate.
>and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.
If WFH destroys long term value creation, then why didn't the stock market punish every tech company when they all announced permanent WFH?
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses
Have you used AWS before? The complexity of the site alone should tell you this side of the business would need more than a "very few" people to run it. And that's just their web services side, never mind retail.
It sounds like a bad situation at Amazon, but if my company wanted to pay me indefinitely to do nothing, I have plenty of ideas for how I could use the time…
Have been in this situation before. Sounds like fun, actually melts your brain.
I was stuck in one of these roles for a while. It's mind numbing.
While you can't work on many projects - due to IP rules - you can often improve your skills and learn. Do you have a personal improvement/education budget? Use it to take relevant courses, buy books, etc. Do you have an equipment budget? Use it to upgrade to the ergonomic keyboard.
The worst case is you still get laid off but now you have things you can take forward. A better case is that you find another role at the company with the new understanding.
Either way, follow the policy exactly. Don't screw around and give them grounds to fire you.
It wouldn’t be literally nothing - in practice it would be meetings, reviews, reports, interviews, etc.
Keep in mind you are still likely bound by an expansive intellectual property clause in your employment contract that says the company owns all work you do, even outside normal business hours.
Interesting that they feel that they are “trailing in AI”. The second that they cannot just repackage open source and integrate it in their infra, they throw hands in the air.
A friend had a similar experience. They got "benched" with no impactful work and promises of impactful project work once headcount is available. In reality, no headcount was available on their team for over 18 months, and there were no prospects in the foreseeable future. Bad performance review feedback with raise not keeping pace with inflation with some random excuse. They got the message and changed jobs, taking their decade of Amazon-internal knowledge with them.
They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Addendum:
Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
> Amazon won’t fire me
Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?
At any of these companies with monopolist market position, as the writer of this article notes, the only way to keep increasing profits is to get rid of the talent they overpaid to keep it away from competitors. And you could probably cut 25% of the engineering staff in places like Google and Amazon and actually increase efficiency. A lot of guys like this are going to find themselves having to find other employment elsewhere and having to scrape by on $250K/yr...
I'm confused. Author's team has been eliminated but he is still employed by Amazon? What's he doing now?
This is actually funny in that it reminds me of a Big Dumb Bank that I worked for post-GFC that was so screwed they were in endless cut mode. One year they basically ran out of money to severance people out by Q3. How the accounting magic of this works is beyond me, but they continued to employ these people instead of laying them off.
There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3.
Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done.
It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.
> 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.
When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.
Can’t wait for the AWS outages. Good times ahead!
> There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.
Last sentence is pure bullshit
“The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience. The word comes from Latin decem, meaning "ten." Decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.”
> Pipelines, SDKs, and security are centralized. All components of a service team are self-contained as part of that team. It turns out that devops is a very expensive org chart.
I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.
Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?
Assuming that AWS (or any tech company) was/is better due to engineering doesn't align with reality.
The reason to choose one public cloud provider over another, or over on-perm, isn't their AI strength or the technical qualities of their SaaS offering.
why silent sacking doesn't include severance package?! do you mean forcing people to quit which doesn't include severance. If there is no work, can't you start working elsewhere (or at least a side consulting job) until they fire and give severance?
Dude your VP rocks. Amazon sucks, RTO sucks, but none of that bad stuff will happen. The machine will keep chugging, and no one cares.
It's funny to see new waves of Amazon developers discover year after year after year that they work in a shit engineering culture. No, nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter. The company was always like thus. If you are feeling the heat now it just means that your org is the latest to find itself in the line of fire.
And no, the company won't cease to exist after you and your colleagues are fired or forced to quit - a new group of fresh faced recruits will take your place and the cycle will continue. There is a reason the company has among the lowest average tenures in tech. This is simply its normal operation.
People don't appreciate what a total mindfuck it is to go through this.
- You aren't told you're being targeted to be managed out when it starts. Managers often do not tell you that you're beginning phase 1 of getting managed out, whatever it's called.
- You've always known this could happen to you or anyone else, so you are always guessing if that email from your boss is just a normal email or was it the beginning of a paper trail? You sense something different, but is that just in your head?
- You might think you'd realize you're being managed out, reading the room, but that assumes there's a rational foreseeable reason to PIP you. Often there is not. Management gets PIP targets and someone has to get PIPed. It can be you for political reasons above your head that you are oblivious to.
- You are subtlely being setup to fail, and even if you don't explicitly fail, finding a reason to frame your performance as deficient is always possible.
- There is always something you could have done better, and nothing ever goes 100% perfectly. Those things will be magnified 100x. Are they being over magnified? Or were you delusional to minimize them?
- To be on the receiving end of this is totally disorienting. It's basically gas lighting. Suddenly everything you do is somehow deficient in some way, even when you thought you were doing well. How could you have not realized this? Is this proof you can't trust your own judgment? That you're incompetent?
- Your paper trails are useless. You can always be criticized for subjective reasons, like your style of communication, some 20/20 hindsight way you arguably could have done things even better, you're "not showing enough leadership", yes you're doing your core job but at your level we also expect XYZ, etc.
- This can go on for months, working 60-80 hour weeks, on little sleep, with constant stress. You start to question your ability to assess reality. What else are you missing if you didnt realize you were screwing up so badly? Are you doing this outside of work too?
- You think, wait, this has never happened to me before, but maybe it was just luck until now. Was imposter syndrome not a syndrome this whole time? Was I actually an imposter and this is what it feels like to be found out?
At the end of this gas lighting psychological manipulation marathon, you have a hard time knowing up from down and you're fired.
Who do you talk to about this to get your bearings back? You are ashamed this happened, and yet you're also not because bullshit PIPing is famous. It's not your fault. Or is it? Anyway you probably should find a way to process this right? Or maybe it's best to shove it deep into your subconscious and move on.
Isn't this what therapists are for? Sure, go explain that your mind is vaguely screwed up from getting fired from a $300k/year job for...reasons? Did you screw up? Well no, but technically yes, but in reality no? Maybe? How the hell do you even articulate this without sounding like an incoherent spoiled brat?