Missing the biggest tell, probably because Amazon avoids providing them in the first place:<p>Cutting back on irrelevant benefits like food and office supplies. Executives usually don't <i>like</i> layoffs and try to avoid them with easy cuts to things people won't miss. Since these easy cuts are never meaningful (else someone would have already done them), they almost always proceed to the next steps like layoffs.
My rule of thumb of a company cutting costs was when the healthcare & 401K literature goes from glossy color pamphlets to cheap black & white photocopies that they snail mail to you.
I'm not at Amazon so I don't know if RTO is working. But I would like to be on an in-person team again. I live alone, and not having in-person work relationships has been really hard for me.
Our company, after slowly cutting off the dead branches while demanding RTO since September, finally got a new CEO and started a deep cut of dead branches that would continue to the end of January.<p>I'm not sure if it's good news for me as I'm likely to be cut. But I'm curious to see how this unwinds as an insider.
To be clear this is really a post about Amazon and RTO policies, and written by an ex-Amazon employee. Because:<p>> When the company stops growing, when the founder moves on<p>are certainly signs of changes — the former that either the economics around the company have slowed or they company's matured, the latter too variable to be meaningful — but they aren't necessarily signs that you should quit. And they're are presented here mostly as jabs at Jassy ("I was happy to be leaving as Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos and Adam Selipsky took over AWS"), HR-led corporate culture ("HR processes take up far too much of everyone’s time" at Amazon), and RTO ("we now have the situation that Amazon management care more about real estate than product").