Amazon staff are doing what Huge Tech staff typically do once they’re anxious about layoffs: making memes.
The corporate is anticipated to cut thousands more corporate roles as quickly as subsequent week, Enterprise Insider reported on Thursday, citing folks acquainted with the matter. This coming spherical would mark one other wave of mass layoffs at Amazon in only a few months, following the roughly 14,000 jobs eliminated in October.
Within the absence of official companywide communication, staff have been making an attempt to ease pressure in an inner Slack channel with greater than 26,000 staff who joined by posting memes and jokes, which Enterprise Insider considered.
The main focus of their snark? Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos’ famous “two-pizza rule,” initially designed to maintain conferences lean and productive. The rule was easy: by no means have a gathering so giant that two pizzas could not feed your entire group.
As the corporate continues to skinny its ranks, staff are utilizing the identical logic to level out simply how a lot leaner their groups are about to develop into.
Amazon didn’t reply to a request for remark from Enterprise Insider.
One meme confirmed a single, skinny sliver of pizza with the caption “how we feed two pizza groups.”
One other picture featured two Amazon Internet Providers-branded pizza bins, with the caption “did somebody say 2 pizza workforce?” The meme is a nod to the corporate’s cloud division, the place lots of the cuts are anticipated to land.
“I do not assume I’ve ever been on a workforce that may very well be utterly fed with simply two fairly sized pizzas till you have been nonetheless hungry very frugal,” one worker wrote within the Slack channel. “Rising ‘span-of-control’ for managers appears to be the brand new rage.”
Others questioned if two Costco pizzas can be thought of “fairly sized.”
“I used to be considering extra like Domino’s Massive pizzas,” one other worker wrote.
The pizza jokes weren’t the one coping mechanism. Staff additionally shared non-pizza memes.
One riffed on the rumored timing, splashing “JANUARY 27TH” over the scene from “The Shining” displaying Jack Nicholson’s character smashing by way of a door with an ax and “AWS” over his face.
One other meme used the “panik/kalm” template to mock company buzzwords. It reveals an error message about electronic mail not working, presumably as a result of the worker was laid off, with the phrases “Mail not working (have I develop into Nimble?!)”, referring to CEO Andy Jassy’s 2025 remarks about chopping jobs to remain nimble.
Different posts leaned into the dread of the unknown: one meme laid out a guidelines for workers for January 27: “in a position to login,” “mail and Slack works,” and “no random HR assembly in calendar.”
One other merely captured the vibe in all caps: “I do not know what is going to occur on 27 Jan and at this level I am too afraid to ask.”
Amazon is not the primary tech big to see a nervous workforce poke enjoyable at its inner tradition. In 2023, Google employees flooded the corporate’s inner message boards with memes mocking its lavish developer convention, which got here months after it laid off 12,000 employees.
Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit through electronic mail at pranavdixit@protonmail.com or Sign at 1-408-905-9124. Use a private electronic mail handle and a nonwork machine; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
