E-commerce giant Amazon joined the list of global companies which have been laying off employees. In India, the company is in the process of terminating as many as 1,000 people.
A few of the employees who lost jobs took to social media to narrate their experiences. Some of them have said people were breaking down in the offices.
“Year 2022 has been the most challenging year of my life. First I lost my father, after he struggled 2 to 3 months in ICU, due to which I was off from work for almost 4 months,” wrote senior development engineer Omprakash Sharma, who lost his job, on LinkedIn. He was with Amazon for five years and calls his experience there “wonderful”.
“Now on Jan 11, I am impacted by the recent layoffs done by Amazon. This 5 year stint at Amazon had been the most wonderful time of my job life. I have enjoyed every bit of it working with some of the smartest folks in the industry, and learnt great lessons of corporate life. I got the opportunity to work on large scale, customer facing, complex and innovative design problems. I am thankful of everyone who supported me during this time,” he wrote.
He asked those who are in the same boat to "stay positive, stay motivated."
"I need a little help from you, please spread the word around so that I get the right opportunity," Sharma wrote.
According to media reports, employees in Gurugram and Bengaluru offices of the company are worse affected by the mass layoff.
Harsh, another employee who lost his job, had joined Amazon six months ago. He graduated from IIT Mandi as BTech CSE major.
In a LinkedIn post, he wrote: "Never wanted to start my 2023 on this. But as a part of amazon layoffs, my job role got terminated recently."
He wrote that although his days at Amazon have been short, he is grateful for the opportunity.
"In these 6 months, I worked on Java-based tech stack in fully AWS architecture while also getting hands on experience with ReactJS, AWS Lambda, EC2, VPC, API Gateway, workflow orchestrators and performance alarms."
In a post that is doing the rounds on the social media, an Amazon employee said although he still with the company, 75 per cent of his team is gone. Although the post was reportedly deleted later, but screenshots of the same are still available online.
"Although I’m in the remaining 25 per cent, I don’t feel motivated to work anymore. They are firing people in cabins. People are crying in the office. Yesterday I went to the office it was very bad, I went straight to the liquor shop bought 3-4 bottles of beer. I was awake the whole night and I will take sick leave today. It was pip-azaon before now it is something worse (sic!)," the post read.
Atmosphere at Amazon India as layoffs take place:
— Corporate Chat India (@anonCorpChatInd) January 13, 2023
“You can hear people breaking down and crying in the office”
"75% of my team is gone, I'm still employeed but don't feel like working anymore”
Link to post on Grapevine: https://t.co/Af6tAtOgLw pic.twitter.com/qqGpKYV2sd
Amazon had recently announced the termination of over 18,000 roles across the globe due to uncertain economic conditions. This would include 1,000 layoffs in India.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, in a blog post, had said, "Between the reductions, we made in November and the ones we're sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles. Several teams are impacted; however, the majority of role eliminations are in our Amazon Stores and PXT organisations."
