Woke up this morning, made coffee, opened Twitter like an idiot (still calling it Twitter, don't @ me) and the first two things in my feed were Andy Jassy's blog post and a Salesforce memo. Amazon's cutting more than 18,000 jobs. Salesforce is cutting about 10 percent of its workforce, something like 8,000 people. Same day. Both dropped this morning, January 4th, like they coordinated it over drinks, which they obviously didn't, but it sure felt that way scrolling through it at 7am with my coffee going cold.
I don't work at either company. Never have. But I've got a friend, Priya, who's been at AWS for about four years now, and she texted me last night saying people on her team already knew something was coming this week, the rumor mill had been churning since November when the first round of Amazon cuts got reported. So this wasn't exactly a shock to the people inside the building. It's the confirmation that's brutal, not the rumor. There's a specific kind of dread in knowing layoffs are coming but not knowing if it's you, and I don't think I can fully understand that from the outside no matter how many memos I read.
And that's the part that gets me about these posts companies put out. Jassy's is written in that careful, HR-scrubbed corporate voice, all "we don't take these decisions lightly" and "this was a difficult conclusion to reach." I get why, legally and optically that's how it has to be written. But reading it as a normal person, it just feels weirdly cold for something that's about to upend thousands of actual lives right after the holidays. Benioff's memo had similar energy, the whole "we hired too many people during the pandemic surge and now we have to correct" framing, which, sure, is true, but it's also a company admitting it overbuilt on purpose and is now making other people absorb the cost of that bet.
I've been writing this blog since November 2011, so I've sat through a few of these cycles now. Not at this scale, and not this concentrated into a two-week window right at the start of a new year, but I remember 2015 and 2016 having their own rounds of tech belt-tightening, and none of it ever quite lands the same as watching it happen in real time on a feed. What's different this time, at least to me, is the sheer density of it. Meta cut 11,000 in November. Twitter gutted itself down to a skeleton crew back in the fall. Now Amazon and Salesforce on the exact same morning. It's starting to feel less like isolated company decisions and more like the whole industry quietly agreed the free money era is over and somebody has to say it out loud first.
Small tangent, but I also think it's worth saying: I hate that "right-sizing" and "restructuring" have become the preferred words for this. Just say layoffs. Everybody knows what's happening. The euphemism doesn't make it land softer for the person getting the calendar invite for a meeting with no agenda, it just makes the company sound like it's talking around something. If you're going to do the thing, at least call it what it is.
CES starts in Vegas in a day or two and I already know my feed's about to flip from layoff threads to people posting pictures of concept TVs and robot vacuums with knees or whatever nonsense gets unveiled this year, and there's something almost funny about that whiplash. Same industry, same week, one hand cutting 26,000 jobs combined and the other hand showing off a transparent television nobody's going to buy. I'll probably write about CES once the actual announcements start rolling in, assuming anything there is more interesting than last year's, which, low bar.
Anyway. If you're one of the people who got a bad email this morning, I'm sorry, genuinely. I hope the severance is decent and the job market cooperates faster than it looks like it's going to right now. Priya's fine, for what it's worth, at least for today. She said she'll let me know either way by end of week.