It's possibly going to be hard yards for many people over next few months -- but lots of successful companies were born in such periods

I hope it works out for OP and everyone else impacted -- maybe one will build the next Stripe

Anyway, if you were looking for a break from Stripe’s culture you’re not gonna be happy at AMZN.

I used to get 20 recruiting emails from Amazon a month. Now they have a complete corporate hiring freeze. The saying here in Seattle goes that if you can't find a job you could always try one of the many Amazon roles because they were always hiring. Not so anymore.

EDIT: if parent comment is referring to Amazon job postings, the all up corporate hiring freeze was just announced this morning!

For example engineers that were laid off at Stripe in Seattle ordinarily have a good chance of getting a job at Amazon, but now Amazon isn't hiring. That combination certainly causes folks to feel uneasy.

Additionally, cities like Seattle are expensive and not all companies pay equally well. If you bought a house on a single income but suddenly cannot find a new job paying enough to pay your bills, then that's a problem too. Previously there were lots of jobs of similar pay to go around. In the current economy that is no longer the case. Suddenly you will need to make some tough choices. Yes we can argue that nobody should have put themselves into such a position in the first place, but buying a house is incredibly difficult in markets like Seattle and San Francisco, and so I don't blame people who are now in this predicament.

Amazon is not the only company. There are literally millions of companies out there. They can stop being so delicate and suck it up and work somewhere else than FAANG.

>If you bought a house on a single income but suddenly cannot find a new job paying enough to pay your bills

Have you seen the tv show called x-files? Trust No One. Don't make big financial decisions by depending on someone else. Save enough to save yourself from that kind of trouble and find a job. It doesn't need to be Amazon. Suck it up and survive.

I blame people who cry after making $200k+ and not saving. I blame them for making weird financial decisions and thinking their social status depends on their job titles at certain companies. Life is fast and everchanging. You must trust no one and be self sufficient.

For most people in the job market today the unemployment rate is literally the lowest it's been in their entire lifetime.

Finding your dream job? Maybe not. Finding a job in this market? It should be cakes.

The past employer has new employees and that money needs to go to them.

Director of QA? Might be tough and you'll likely turn down 10 manager of QA roles that want you to do hands on work along the way.

UX Research? You have a specific skill set that might be very useful at a large company but a lot of companies will want you to do more or handle more than you did previously.

Thats two examples but there are countless others. Plus a lot of folks go to Stripe as their first FANG+_job. They might not be able to step into another FANG+ role and could have to take a massive pay cut in their next roll.

Oh, the woes of dropping from 98th income percentile to 95th...

Wild animals don't have this problem. If you're a deer you literally run around all day eating plants and fucking. Sure, the animal kingdom has a whole host of other concerns, but my point is that we've replaced all those with a system and we don't have any choice but to live within the boundaries of that system.

It's not legal to live a deer's lifestyle as a human.

In our system's status quo, companies are allowed and encouraged to speculatively over-hire. There is no consequence for doing so. They figure that having a few too many employees is an easily correctable problem, so it's safer to just hire aggressively and hope it pans out. If not, oh well, the business isn't the one paying the price.

I think it would be a good idea for businesses to be required to pay average pay out severances to laid off employees, and that requirement should extend beyond this "generous" 4 months. I also think about hourly employees where severance is a foreign concept.

Maybe then they'd run their businesses more conservatively instead of making moonshot gambles with human lives. Maybe it's not the best policy for "the economy" or "innovation" or "competitive business" but we have more than enough resources to provide for the humans of this world, we just choose not to allocate them fairly.

> Wild animals don't have this problem. If you're a deer you literally run around all day eating plants and fucking. Sure, the animal kingdom has a whole host of other concerns, but my point is that we've replaced all those with a system and we don't have any choice but to live within the boundaries of that system. It's not legal to live a deer's lifestyle as a human.

I have a heard of 15 or so deer on my property. I spend a lot of time watching them, they seem to spend most of their time chewing their cud and watching for things that want to eat them but they seem pretty well adapted to it. They have a pretty good life overall. However, the deer don't have a choice either, but if they were given the choice to live as a typical human I doubt they'd take it. :) But then again, most people wouldn't choose to live as deer either.

Stripe CEOs are just trying to do right by their company and most of their employees. But yes, times are tough for everybody, and I probably shouldn't have minimized that.