A former Amazon employee claims the company has tried to re-hire him four times since he was arbitrarily laid off, but he refuses to join the organisation again. The former Amazon business analyst, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote about his job loss and its aftermath in an essay for Insider. He said he was laid off by the e-commerce giant in January this year.
In January, the person received an email saying his role had been made redundant and he would receive two months’ severance pay. He was laid off despite his manager’s constant assurances that his job was safe as no one else could do the work he did.
“My manager said, ‘There's not anybody else on the team who does what you do. So you don't need to be concerned,’” the former Amazon employee wrote. “It turns out that wasn't the case. The direct managers had nothing to do with the layoff decisions.”
He explained that two months before the layoffs, the organisation had asked everyone to fill out a document describing “things that we had worked on, things that we owned, and projects that we were looking to complete in the upcoming year.” As the document was shared, people kept editing other people’s entries, adding their names to projects they had not worked on, taking credit for things they had little to do with and more.
All in all, it was a mess, said the former Amazon employee, claiming that his colleagues added their names to his technical pieces. “And so it kind of looked like I was just tagging on to these projects when, in fact, I was owning those projects,” he said, admitting that, in hindsight, he should have pushed harder for his name to appear prominently on the projects he worked.
At that time, however, the management claimed the document was “not a cause for concern”.
After being laid off in January, the former Amazon employee applied to nearly 200 places. Jobs were hard to come by in a landscape populated by layoffs at several IT companies.
‘I felt so unappreciated’
The former Amazon business analyst explained that the layoffs – and the arbitrary manner in which they were carried out – left him feeling unappreciated. So much so that when Amazon said laid off employees could apply for opportunities within Amazon, “I was like absolutely not,” he said.
“My manager and then their manager were always telling me that I was someone they wanted to protect and that I was someone they valued a lot. And at the end, it really didn't feel that way at all. It felt really depersonalized and almost just like a slap across the face because you give so much to them,” the person explained.
This was the reason he continued to turn down Amazon’s efforts to re-hire him. “I got my first outreach on LinkedIn on behalf of Amazon a little over a month after they told us we were getting laid off,” he said. “I told them I’m not interested.”
About 10 days later, his former manager also reached out to him and told him about an opening in his team. Again, the writer of the essay said he was not interested in joining Amazon again.
Even though he did not have a job, he could not face the prospect of returning to the company that had laid him off so unceremoniously.
“The thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that they clearly had roles for these people. You're hiring for the same job that I had. But yet you're telling me my role is redundant,” he wrote for Insider.
All in all, Amazon reached out to him four times. Each time he refused. In the essay, he explained he lost trust in the company. Even though he worked hard at his job, he was laid off. “I did feel like it could easily happen again because I was in a position where I felt like I was doing a really good job and I was working hard... I felt that none of that really mattered to them at all,” he said.
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