Laid off by Amazon

This Wednesday, my role at Amazon—along with 16,000 others—was eliminated, marking the end of roughly 14 years at the company, spanning March 2012 to the end of January 2026. I found out shortly after waking, after unlocking my phone to, among other things, view the meetings scheduled for the day. A notification had appeared in my text messages, saying that I should check my personal email before coming in for the day:

From Amazon: Before coming to the office, check personal/work email or [URL removed] including spam, for a message on your role.

"Oh", I sensed, "this is probably the layoff"—and I was right.

I opened my email to find a link which then led me to an official expulsion from the company and role that I had poured years of my life into. For which I had made deep and lasting contributions to both its external and internal documentation, its internal documentation tooling, writing process, ownership and feedback model, and its developer onboarding and training.

My first reaction to the news of my sudden non-employment was bemused incredulity, followed by realization of the import of what I was reading. Then came shock, then alternating waves of sadness about the fates of some of my fellow teammates who were also laid off (both this time and previously), and anger that I was one of those chosen to be cut. Yet, mixed with these feelings was an increasing sense of relief, calm, hope, and anticipation.

I had been laid off before at two separate companies: The startup Chromium, where I was one of the last employees standing—which subsequently dissolved without so much as a whimper—and Surreal Software, which underwent a large down-sizing after losing a number of game development contracts. In each of these cases, I felt worried, I felt stressed, and scrambled to find another software job to fill the financial and professional void left by these events.

This felt different. Gone was the underlying dread and anxiety that had followed me from my first corporate software job up to the day of my layoff from Amazon. It felt like a heavy yoke, which I had been carrying for ages and had mostly forgotten existed, had been broken. I felt a sense of lightness, of ease, begin to suffuse my experience of the world. I realized that this career upset... well, it wasn't that upsetting, after all.

Like an exotic animal now freed from the zoo, after many years of living within a walled enclosure, possibilities that were previously unthinkable were now, suddenly, open to me.

I'll be taking some time to re-evaluate my path...