Aside from the money, I'm quite glad my job was cut, in hindsight, but only because Amazon handled it so well: They gave us time to sort out a new position. I'm already much more excited about my new gig, and for the right reason (not $).

I'm not sure a union would have helped there, but I'm not opposed. Amazon tried to make hay while the sun was shining, and it didn't work out for all depts. It happens.

Looking at unions from a personal lense can make them seem unnecessary and maybe even negative to some people. However their purpose in my opinion is to benefit the collective of members as a whole.

I have nothing to back up this claim, but it seems like selfishness is what caused reduction of unions in the US. And for the same selfishness it's tough to organize people and kickstart a new union.

You have to show they actually benefit the members as a whole. Union laws in the US are extremely strong, and anti union sentiment is largely a hangover from the 70s, where features of unions limited our manufacturing sectors ability to compete internationally with catastrophic consequences for the Rust Belt.

did you know in advance your job was cut??? because most people did not. some of those people left everything 1 month ago to build a new life in a new country. and for having done that a few times in my past it includes using some of your own money to move / sell things cheaper and obviously for people having to come back to lower wage country where it is harder to find a good job (because tech is not a huge sector like in the US) then it become horrible if you have debts or loans. especially if you left a good job for growing at FAANG

No doubt, I was lucky. Here's the luck factors:

1. I was saving for a house downpayment, so I put most my earnings right into the bank and had already minimized spending

2. They announced layoffs immediately, but then gave us time to finish work and transfer internally. If we couldn't transfer, they would lay us off after 6 weeks. This happened to me as I was a manager of a particular specialty and it was tough to transfer to a job I wanted. Furthermore, everyone around me was cut, so we could all work together and support eachother for 6 weeks.

3. My wife has a full time job so our income was reduced, not eliminated.

4. We had family nearby for any childcare problems, so I could focus on a new job hunt

5. I had friends and network nearby, so I could look for local jobs quickly and efficiently

6. I had a referral from an old co-worker, and that referral turned into my new job, which so far I love.

7. I had insisted on working remote from my hometown area, which has much lower cost of living (which helped with 4, 5), and made our situation much less dire

8. I got a lot of traction from a linkedin post during the 6 weeks job-hunt stage. This is just a function of my coworker network and I'm lucky to have those folks

I feel for those who didn't have these factors. I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to have to navigate visa issues on top of a lack of a local network and reduced / eliminated income. I definitely had home-court advantage in all this.

There is also every other company in the economy who couldn’t compete with Google for engineers

Sad.

Should I care? After all it is about my salary

sounds like you've never been layed off ... yet

I were talking about companies who couldnt compete, you?

Why should I care about those companies? I wish them good, but unless theyre an outlier then I would rather accept better salary

Maybe for some. The illusion they had of a nice job, especially with lots of money promised, made them take too big a credit for their house or whatever. And now they're doomed. You can always say this is their fault for not having foreseen that, but it probably wouldn't have happened to them if they had another, more regular job.

I’m think you’re saying the economy is zero sun, so if tech hadn’t hired these 100k people there would be an equivalent 100k “regular” jobs that would have been created to hire these poor people who can land a high paying tech job but are too dumb to manage their own lives and finances.

I’m not sure it works that way. With 100k fewer tech jobs, would there not have been fewer regular jobs as well?

Nobody "made" them do anything. I never graduated college, I barely made it out of high school. Where did I acquire this knowledge to save money and live reasonably, while these other software developers are "made" to obtain these lifestyles requiring $300k a year?

My guess is that these people, who are "doomed", don't actually exist. I have a strong suspicion that, over the last few years, most folks got in while it was good, and are happy they were around while it lasted.

Saying they would have been better off with a "regular job" is pretty presumptuous. What if these folks are actually smart people who just saved up while FAANGs were offering huge salaries? What if this isn't actually a big deal? What if it was a good thing that ICs were getting paid a lot of money for a bit, instead of having wages suppressed by investors to prevent situations like "probably wouldn't have happened to them if they had another, more regular job."

Give me the money. Let me choose how I spend it. Don't pretend you know what is best for me.

I think more folks that are "average" (myself at the top of this list--mediocre education and "average" skillset) should carefully review finances if they find themselves in a FAANG role.

The average tenure at these companies is what--18 months? Amazon especially.

I think it's delusional to act like a FANNG-gravy train role is something that'll be around in a decade. Especially now.

'doomed' really?

The point is we all know how much these same companies will whine about skills shortages in a couple of years. Even if they cannot manage to make a cent off their work work and completely fail to train them or at least give them experience; they can very easily just write down the salaries till they do need them.

>The point is we all know how much these same companies will whine about skills shortages in a couple of years.

Is that the point? That implies the market is hot again (and I agree with you, it will be eventually) and people are working where they want to. If that's your prediction, what's the problem here? The solution is not to jump ship to Google, then, isn't it?

But by hiring all these people a few years ago, didn't Amazon (and other large tech companies) give these people some valuable experience, beside a quite decent salary?

I personally would prefer to be hired by a big tech company and then laid off, having received the salary, severance pay, and experience, than to never set my foot there.

The in-between time sucks, of course.

Debatable, maybe some people like new grads would prefer it that way but a lot of these people already had experience and jobs before showing up at Amazon. Some may have moved, others turned down other offers, 6-12 months of 20% extra pay doesn’t justify the lurch. In general forcing employees to take on the lion’s share of risk is a jerk move without offering a similar share of profits.

It is frustrating, to be sure... but I think 18k jobs for 2 years is a net-positive for society.

We wouldn't be here discussing this if the economy had not done so poorly.

What if on average, you hire 10 people a year. Each year, there's a 10% chance of having to lay off 10 people. Details of profit/loss aside, what is the optimal move? Never hire so you never have to lay anyone off? Hire only 5 people a year so the impact is not so large?

From Amazon's point of view, this doesn't seem too far removed from their annual firing quotas which I think is already an onerous practice.

From the hyper-scale startup point of view, it's blatantly unsustainable and frankly irresponsible to play fast-and-loose with people's careers by hiring them and then making the position redundant, sometimes within less than a year; even six months in some cases that I've known. The best one can hope for is a generous severance so as to buy time to find a new job in an increasingly crowded market.

Irresponsible for who? Corporations are in the business of their own interests. Employees are a resource to furthering a businesses goals. They aren’t a charity that owes individuals anything. If you think that you’re being naive about what we call at-will employment.

At-will employment being something specific to the US and not the world that exists outside of it...we don't all share the same view on employment (and employment rights for that matter) that the US does.

You have decided they don't have a responsibility to their employees, but that doesn't make it true.

No, I personally did not decide this. Corporations decide this for themselves. Whether I agree or not has nothing to do with the reality of the current situation.

Again, declaring things to be reality does not make them so.

> Irresponsible for who? Corporations are in the business of their own interests. Employees are a resource to furthering a businesses goals.

Personally, I find layoffs irresponsible at a corporate level. When they happen they disrupt team relationships, gut out tribal knowledge, break trust, and create friction that trades short term savings for long term cost. The human cost for unemployment is also hard to ignore. For every 1% increase in unemployment there is a 1-1.6% increase in suicides.

I say that as someone who is working at a company that made headlines for layoffs.

But corporations can't exist without their employees. If they don't see the value in retaining and building good employees, what kind of business do they expect to build? It should be a more symbiotic relationship.