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This part is crazy… What’s really nuts is everyone was saying this was what RTO was all about, was actually forcing their most expensive employees (who are probably also their most valuable???) to quit. They don’t want workers who know their value. It’s wild how the rich are so transparent and barely even try to mask it anymore.
Amazon won’t fire me
On September 1st, 2023 I was told by my skip level manager and VP that my team and an adjacent team were being eliminated. They claimed we all did such good work that they wanted us to remain at Amazon. “We still have a job, just not a role.”
I was skeptical of how it was communicated–or rather not communicated–by management and I asked if severance was an option. I was repeatedly told it would be once we’d exhausted other options.
They told us our number one priority was to find another job. Every role we found had significant downsides. Lower pay, lower title, RTO, or various other things.
It was clear they wanted us to take a different role we could quit later. My management wanted to retain the headcount, but couldn’t do layoffs.
October 16th I asked my VP for the severance I was told would be available. He let me know HR wasn’t aware of what he was doing and he would have to get approval. It would take some time.
Every week for the next 2 1/2 months I asked for an update on my employment and severance package. I was either ghosted or given a variety of excuses. It’s now December 30th and I’m currently still employed by Amazon.
It hasn’t only been happening to my team. This has been happening in multiple areas as Amazon silently sacks people without being required to give them severance or announce layoffs. 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.
I saw it happen once when I was young team lead. I had a number of people that worked on my team.
One day I was asked how many people we would need if we stopped doing one task. I was to naive to put two and two together.
A short time later I heard the ops manager talking to someone about offering the people they planned to get rid of other work with the express intent of avoiding paying out unemployment.
I couldn’t really do anything at that point other than warn my people, which I did. I found something else a short while later. I made sure to tell management why I was quitting, which was a long list of issues including them fucking over good people.
If they aren’t going to fire you and you aren’t going to voluntarily take a worse job, what happens?
They all thought they would be so valuable that they would become the kind of rich that is capable of firing them.
They believed hook line and sinker all of the Amazon cultural bullshit and cannot understand that they too are just employees in a capitalist system that hates employees at the end of the day.
So they got sent to the roof like Big Head?
I’ll be honest: I love this. If you have ever known anyone who works at Amazon proper, (ie not in a warehouse or delivering), they are the most insufferable people I have ever met. Basically all of them are just caricatures of people who are masters of throwing buzzwords around that only they would possibly know because its some ridiculous ‘Amazon’ spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
Then 5 minutes later the conversation topic shifts to them being very, very concerned about some social issue or tragedy at home are abroad, and they will always be blissfully unaware of how what Amazon does as a company usually causes the thing theyre very worried about in an indirect or sometimes pretty direct way, you know like gentrification or rising income inequality, or food deserts or collapsing economies of quaint and charming towns they want to retire to at age 42, but can’t because all the local shops collapsed due to everyone ordering everything from Amazon.
God help you if you point out the technicals of how most of their ‘unique and innovative’ software solutions basically always boil down to stealing other people’s ideas, putting a slight twist on them to make them harder for users of their services to quit or enterprise partners to migrate, that you can do basically everything they offer for far far cheaper with libre code and 5% of the money Amazon is throwing at it.
Then, in private when they think no one else is listening, they giggle about how superior they are to other people because they work at Amazon, but they do it in a very muted, posh sort of way.
Then they’ll also have a bunch of hairbrained side projects for making money on the side that revolve entirely around wither exploiting the poor very directly, or being paid an absurd amount of money to develop some simple software that one of their other socialite tech bros or gals can convince their idiot boss to pay waaaay too much for because ‘you know this guy works at Amazon he really knows his stuff’ is sufficient to convince most boomer VPs.
I fucking hate Amazonians.
At least with most MSFT employees you can at least rather quickly tell they fall either into the ‘i am so jaded from my job this company is evil but it pays well’ camp or the ‘i am a megalomaniacal lunatic who will scream at people about things I dont actually understand when asked about why some process or paradigm is so complicated and counter productive’ camp.
its some ridiculous ‘Amazon’ spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
This explains why everything in AWS is named something weird. It’s not “DNS” it’s “Route 53.” It’s not virtual servers it’s EC2. Makes learning it super hard, and I imagine it makes learning other things even harder.
The /function/ of these stupid naming schemes, despite whatever explanation is proffered as to their origin, is exactly as you have pointed out:
It takes time to learn all this lingo, which makes people tend toward ‘specializing’ in that ecosystem, which makes you more hesitant to migrate or attempt to interface with some other software ecosystem with its own separate lingo.
It also serves to make you feel stupid for not understanding it, basically in the same way a group of friends laughing at an in joke that you dont understand makes you feel like a lesser member of the group.
Lots and lots of programmers, db admins, etc, are basically low social skills or on the autism spectrum, so keeping people feeling low on the social pecking order makes them easier to boss around, makes them more likely to accept ludicrous and technically inefficient solutions, accept being paid far less than what they are worth, etc.
