Amazon Layoffs Imminent, how this could affect you and what you must do!
v5MaPb @ Amazon
Background:
Over this weekend many many layoff posts emerged in the Amazon private Blind channel. Some of which expressed anger and frustration about how much dead weight SDMs have been and should be heavily selected to be laid off.
For the uninitiated, at Amazon, Software Development Managers (or SDMs) do nothing to help their teams to hit their objectives. Their primary function is to work with HRBP to create a paper trail that makes their reports to look bad in order to PIP their own people. So if you are hired as a Software Engineer here, you are on your own. Any success you have is in spite of your SDM and their efforts against you. This is especially hard for many new hires since to get things done, you need to know many Amazon specific things. The docs are intentionally made to be garbage so that tenured people can retain some job security. If you cannot figure out how to get something done with legacy repos with no READMEs, no docs, or wikis, then your SDM will say you are "below the bar for your level" since you "cannot handle ambiguity." There are many caned lines SDMs use to gaslight and demoralize their team members, this is just one.
We all know this. But this weekend people have been posting slack messages by SDMs who have been discussing PIP quotas openly in public slack channels (some of these posts were shared in external Blind posts too), apparently our SDMs do not know how to create private slack channels. In the same way reading about a famous celebrity beating their spouse is different than seeing a video of it happening on TMZ, seeing the SDM messages caused quite an uproar given the cheerful nature of them discussing which one of their reports should lose their jobs and the frequent use of emojis.
Some SDMs made posts amounting to basically “it’s just business, nothing personal” or “you must be a low performer bro”. It was not well received. All of this to say the masses now hope that if someone should lose their jobs it should be the unproductive members of Amazon, SDMs.
What everyone else here needs to do:
First off please help all the great ICs here that has to work so hard in such bleak conditions to keep this place running. They truly deserve a helping hand given the ordeal they have been through.
Here’s the second part that is also important, we all need to work together to stop the spread of these SDMs from contaminating the workplaces within our industry. Once they have the upper hand they will sit on your backs and watch you toil and call you a “low performer.” DO NOT give them that chance. If you are on an interview panel of an Amazon SDM, SINK THEM! Make sure their careers die at Amazon.
Trust me you do not want to be under the thumb of one of these guys. Let us all work together here to make our industry more hospitable, let’s hold the line.
@blind_feed
