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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up.

Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director.

This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has passed or not, etc.

The past 3 days have probably been the least productive for all of Amazon's existence, everyone is thinking only about those layoffs (and I'm in an org that is supposed to be safe...).

So far there are reports of about 30 teams being shut down, but new ones are coming every hour or so.

Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook, Twitter, etc. but no, we're going to be living in fear for the next weeks or months.

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Nothing more demoralizing than living in fear and rumorville. I was at a big bank post 2008 and it was months of messages about did you hear so and so got the tap on the shoulder. You never knew when or why, you just didn't know everyday if it was going to be your last. Not exactly how you want to live your life.

No better point re: living in fear and rumorville. Same experience for me in 2008. I also saw the same effect post dot-com bubble.

Layoffs in our industry are simply part of the long term game, part of a playbook that folks coming into it in the last decade or so probably haven't experienced. My eyes were opened in the dot-com crash - I saw too many extremely smart, hard-working, and accomplished developers get dropped and spend a year or more getting back into programming gigs.

Hah yeah I worked in payments at once of the card processors, this happened every year like clockwork. 1-2 months just down the drain because everyone running around gossiping or sitting at their desk in terror.

It was such a joke, but I used to be of the belief that the card processors were so incredibly profitable, that they had to actually waste money to not be targeted by regulators too much (which monitored their profit levels to determine if they wanted to impose lower card fee rates). So these kinds of things were actually healthy for the business, along with insane travel and entertainment budgets - I used to routinely spend >$10,000 on plane flights back to HQ from Asia.

> Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook

Ha, at Facebook people have been complaining that they only learned at the last-minute and only thanks to leaks, saying they would have preferred a longer-term heads-up so that they could start preparing and avoid making long-term commitments (eg that guy who was laid off one day after moving his whole life from India to the USA)

I suspect that there’s actually no great win/win way of doing mass layoffs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The thing is that it's the same here. I saw a LinkedIn post from a guy at Amazon that got layed off 2 days after joining as well.

The difference is that not only you get no notice, you actually don't know when the wave of layoffs is done and when you can take a break from worrying.

CEO of Meta had been warning for months that there would be a freeze and possibly layoffs, unlike other firms that were promising "no layoffs".

The people I know that worked at Meta all started interview prepping after those announcements. It should not have come as a surprise.

It's not a dichotomy between "no layoffs, no layoffs, please leave the building and never come back" and "There maybe will be layoffs but we can't tell you if you're in them or not" - in both cases the problem is the lack of knowledge.

The company could also just give workers notice. Works fine here in Europe.

Unfortunately this is how it works at a lot of companies. Just a mess.

I was working at Best Buy when the stock price was $8/share... we had "Tornado Thursdays" where every Thursday for months you'd hear of a small amount of people getting notice they were laid off. I suspect they did this to avoid labor rules of notification/SEC?

Prior to that, we went through a LARGE layoff where they gathered everyone in a room, said "go back to your desks you'll see a 15 minute meeting on your calendar if you're impacted" and at the end of the day they gathered the remainder in a room and said "if you're here you're safe".

Usually to avoid the WARN act reporting. there's a few things that can trigger it.

> This layoff is horribly mismanaged

It's not, it's like that everywhere. Every layoff follows the same pattern that you describe.

I don't know the exact reason for it, but if every single company does the same thing, there has to be a reason I don't know, since I've never managed a mass layoff.

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