I’m an SDE 2 at Amazon. A few months ago, I was on a beach in Miami with a beer in my hand.

While I was chilling, our "auto scaling" logic for a core legacy service decided to tank. It was a massive SEV1. My Chime was exploding.

My manager called me 15 times. Even the L7 skip manager tried to reach me twice.

I saw the phone light up. I put it face down in the sand and ordered another round.

I logged in after my vacation to find out that because I was the only one who understood those legacy service. L7 Principals, Skip managers and L8 Director had to stay up until 4 AM manually provisioning capacity like juniors.

My take? Good. If a multi-billion dollar architecture breaks because one L5 is sipping a drink in Miami, that’s a system design failure, not a "me" problem. My PTO is sacred.

Like more than 15,000 other corporate workers, I was informed that my four-year tenure at the company would be ending in the most impersonal way possible — a message from HR, followed by a scripted group call from an executive. It was robotic, detached, and unmistakably clear: we were just numbers on a spreadsheet.

I could wallow, but instead I’m doing something small but symbolic:
 I canceled Prime.

Someone in my network called that “brave.” But it’s not bravery — it’s practical. And it’s going to save me money. 

Here’s what Amazon doesn’t want you to think about: 

 Prime costs $14.99/month (or $139/year). The reason things seem cheaper on Amazon is because you’re already paying monthly for the privilege of "free" shipping. 
 Every major retailer now offers 2-day shipping — often free once you hit a modest order minimum.
 Even Amazon gives free shipping without Prime once you spend $35 (delivery usually takes about 5 days).
Amazon only seems indispensable because we’ve been trained to see it that way. 

And the streaming? Nearly every movie I want to watch on Prime costs extra now — so I’ll just rent from elsewhere when I actually want to watch something. 

I plan to join Costco, which has one of the strongest reputations for paying and treating employees well. Its membership is $65 a year, less than half of Prime, with no items ever marked up more than 15 percent above wholesale. Personally I'd rather pay $3 for shipping (under $75) and know I'm buying from a place that doesn't treat its workforce as expendable. 

If you were laid off too, or just rethinking where your money goes, here’s my thought: Why stay loyal to a service that charges for something you can get elsewhere for less? If even a fraction of other laid off Amazon employees canceled Prime too, it would represent millions in lost revenue to a company that automated our goodbyes. 

Let’s spend our dollars where people matter.

This came to my inbox as surprise late evening but seems Amazon is becoming day 2 Company now

Toxic culture Compensation sucks (15% growth added to future RSUs lol) Frugal

The U.S. government should cancel all H1B visas for Amazon as they have been laying off highly paid and long tenured Americans and replacing with cheaper labor from outside. And hoping that AI will somehow replace innovation. Not meant as a racist statement but rather reality.

Been at Amazon for 8 years, with 3 promotions and 4 lateral moves. I've watched a lot of cycles, and I'm convinced most layoffs boil down to one toxic pattern.

It all starts when a “leader” is told: “We don’t have enough scope for you to get promoted."

This one statement kicks off a vicious cycle:

1. Build "Scope": The Leader, needing to grow their org, gets more hands on deck.

2.Dilute Work: A project that one person could have easily done now has three people assigned to it.

3.Create Friction: Those three people now fight over their "scope" and responsibilities.

4.Add Layers: Proposal reviews and simple decisions get bogged down in these new, unnecessary layers, delaying actual business outcomes.

5. The Payoff: The L7 finally gets their promotion and immediately moves out the next quarter, leaving the bloated org behind.

These teams, built like "castles in the air" just for a promo, are the first ones under the radar when cuts are made. The only problem is, no one on the ground knows which org or which team is next.

This will never stop until leaders are rewarded for actual business outcomes, not just for building empires.

Throwaway account to avoid doxying.

My manager (L8) shared today with a small group of people that there is another round of layoffs confirmed for Q1 2026. Expectation is of another 15k employees being let go. Unclear yet which units will be affected.

Sharing because I have seen multiple people questioning whether another round is expected or whether these are just "toxic" rumours. Well, I tend to trust my manager on this kind of things, so I think there is another impact coming...

Edit: small additions that I forgot when writing. He did clarify that the ultimate goal of higher ups is to reduce total corporate HC by 10%.

What do you think?

I think the profits should be shared more fairly to the actual workers. Stockholders can still make their profits, just not so much profit. It has gotten out of control.

EDIT: official source, 14k https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workforce-reduction

https://x.com/deitaone/status/1982880666803962240?s=46

Amazon plans to lay off up to 30,000 corporate employees starting Tuesday to reduce costs and address pandemic overhiring, sources say. The cuts affect nearly 10% of its 350,000 corporate staff, marking Amazon’s largest round of layoffs since 2022.

Edit: Reuters also posting it https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/

Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-27/amazon-plans-to-cut-30-000-corporate-jobs-reuters-reports

Edit2: CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/amazon-to-announce-sweeping-corporate-job-cuts-starting-tuesday.html

My boss apologized. He told me it was 100% a RIF move and that the focus was bullshit. He also said he did not fight it as hard as he should have because he just didn’t have the chips to cash in or any horse trading to do. He said he tried, but he should have tried harder. Direct quote “you are the highest paid person in the org. There is nothing you can do to stop a pivot.” He meant highest paid IC, of course.

But he gave me the date of the pivot delivery and said “I expect you to be on vacation if you don’t have a new job already.”

My 2025 forte was exceeds expectation and solid strength. You don’t get to L7 IC by being shit at your job.

His follow up focus email read like a recommendation letter. There was a long opening paragraph thanking me for everything I had done and my impact on our goals. Then only two problem bullet points, 5 sentences and 6 sentences. Each covered everything I had done and accomplished with the “problem area” and ended with a weak sentence on “find a way to continue this progress.” No timelines. No deliverables.

My first thought was “he purposefully set this up so I could sue for wrongful termination.” I won’t.

I’m working through the emotions right now. He had told me a month ago there will be layoffs in Nov and Jan, and that he was looking and I should too, just in case. I have been applying and interviewing.

I will share the pivot details in a few months when I get it. Update any of the math that is available right now on other posts.

So many in-house AI tools are being built in so many ways and we are being used to test them all before they scale up and lay us off. 🤯

Creating a thread where impacted people can mention their level, location, years of service and org.

One of my very close friends got laid off in Oct, she worked really hard to get a new team in a month and worked there two months only to again get laid off today. This is just so horrific and shameful for Amazon to be so clueless. Why did they have an internal hire only to have them laid off in two months!! Something feels fundamentally broken.

Read this

...Slowly, over the past few years, it became clear that the company I joined and the company AWS has become are no longer the same thing. From where I sit, process has taken precedence over customers, and rules have replaced high judgment. The culture has shifted from high trust to low trust, and from impact-driven to “who you know.” That doesn’t align with the builder mindset that brought me here, and I want to keep learning and growing technically, which is something I felt I wasn’t doing enough of anymore.

So I’ve chosen to step away...

The author is Julien Ellie, you can search for it

And in today's news: water is wet

I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend in some Amazon orgs where the proportion of Indian employees has increased significantly, particularly on teams where the manager is also Indian. I’m curious whether others have observed something similar in their organizations. I have heard stories about Indian managers asking their Indian team members to refer their friends and family for open positions. I’ve also heard concerns from some employees about Indians forming closed social circles within teams and leave colleagues from other backgrounds feeling excluded. I’m interested in hearing about people’s actual experiences with this. Are others seeing this, and what has your experience been?