It's not the biggest layoff that the company has ever had, but the most shocking one that I've been a part of. I don't know what happened. I I basically snapped. For those of you who are trying to break into the industry, some of you are going to get laid off. Now, I'm sure you guys are probably wondering what the severance package is like. Hopefully, this will give you guys a good reference point for the future. I just got laid off from Amazon.

I've been at the company for over 6 years now. This was my first job out of college. And to be honest, I do have a lot of emotions going on right now. I thought as a proper Gen Z adult that the best way to go about processing everything is to record a video and publish it online for you all to see. At least if this video flops, I don't really have to worry about people having to watch me experience any real emotions.

Now, this isn't my first layoff that I've experienced at Amazon. In fact, if you've heard anything about the company besides its rather notorious workplace culture, you'll know that layoffs are quite trendy. And [music] it's not just Amazon. The entire industry has been taking hits. Plus, with the addition of AI usage these days, [music] the layoffs have only accelerated. Anyways, it was getting to a point where it felt like the layoffs were coming every [music] few months.

In fact, within the company, we would hear constant leaks and rumors flying, you know, all over the place. Uh, you'd hear about in the hallways. You'd see posts about it on Reddit or on Xiaoongu. I apologize for my pronunciation for any of my [music] Chinese viewers. You would see news online detailing not just who was getting targeted, but also what exact date they were getting targeted. Basically, it felt [music] like the layoffs were being run by Tom Holland.

And every time that we heard the news that our org was within scope for the next layoff, I mean, you could feel [music] the tension in the entire building. You know, some people kind of just accept their fate, accepted the fact that it was beyond their control, [music] and, you know, would just work business as usual, kind of basically not even acknowledge it. And then some people would be really anxious about it. And if they heard that, you know, the impact was happening at 3:00 a.m. the next day, they were staying up until 3:00 a.m. the next day to [music] just refresh their phones and see if they were part of the impacted group.

[music] I've [snorts] been through enough layoffs at Amazon where I've been both of those people, [music] but this time there was no warning. I mean, no one had heard anything. There was no rumor, nothing. And it's not the biggest layoff that the company has ever had, but it was the most shocking one that I'd been a part of. Anyway, so if you've been following along with the channel, you'll know that I work in the or sorry, I used to work in the artificial general intelligence or at Amazon.

In that org, we were working on our own in-house model series called Nova. You know, think of Opus or GPT or any of those models. Amazon was building their own version. Now, there's a good chance you guys haven't heard of this model series. And it's not because it's a company secret. It's mostly because the market has largely been overshadowed by three of the main players and Nova is it's um it's a developing product.

That's what I'll say. Anyway, so when I was interviewing for the team, I was warned very early on that this was [music] a dynamic space that there was a lot of experimentation going on here. Now, this was a big departure from my previous experiences at Amazon working in really stable industries like ads or retail where the business had been essentially long established. The thing is at AGI, no one really knew how to run the business.

And that was not just true at Amazon. I mean, it's true across the entire industry. I mean, it's such a new industry that every company in the AI space is still trying to figure this out. And so essentially there was a lot of [ __ ] around and find out. I chose to join here because I thought it was interesting. It was exciting and at [music] the time AI was already becoming a really trending topic. So I thought it was going to be a really good career move for me.

And this place was doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean we weren't tracking our infrastructure costs. We were just inventing entirely new roles that didn't exist anywhere else to solve very specific problems that no other industries had to deal with. Even the way we coded was different. Traditionally, at a lot of these more stable places, you would see big testing infrastructures and [music] heavy review mechanisms to make sure that buggy code wasn't shipped.

The culture at AGI was very much ask for forgiveness, not permission. And so, tons of people were just writing code and just shipping it. No reviews, no nothing. Um, giving it straight to the customer. And keep in mind, we were doing a lot of this before the AI usage became super common. And so, you know, obviously the use of AI tools [music] accelerated that, but but we were doing that long before that happened. And so, the mindset [music] was completely different over here.

And I'll make a whole other video to talk about that because a lot of this is really just tip of the [music] iceberg stuff. But the point I'm trying to make here is that I mean, this was proper wild west development. the whole thing felt like just one big experiment. If there's one thing I've learned about trying to solve very hard problems, it's that failure is a huge part of that process. And slowly over time, those things began to manifest.

That initial honeymoon phase where everything just felt like potential, that all started to go away and suddenly the culture became hyperaggressive on creating [music] big impact wins in unreasonably short amounts of time. Now, I have a slightly nuanced story for how this impacted me, which I'll get into in another video, but everyone in the entire or could feel it. Suddenly, the intensity dialed up and working late nights and weekends just became the status quo.

I mean, eventually things got so intense at AGI that I mean, when I heard that the next round of layoffs was coming, brother, I was praying [snorts] for it. We'd all heard the news that at 3:00 a.m. one night, the layoff emails would be triggered. And so that night, I stayed up till 3:00 a.m. And for a solid hour, I was just refreshing my inbox trying to manifest that email. I mean, just so that I wouldn't have to continue my work the next day.

Eventually, when it became clear that I was not part of the layoff group, I was kind of devastated. And then later that morning, I went into the office and I saw who got impacted. And I I don't know what happened. I I basically snapped. Really passionate people. I mean seriously, like if you work in the industry, you'll know that, you know, despite what you see on the surface, not a lot of people really care that much about their jobs, work is just work.

And and that's totally great. I think it's a super healthy mindset. But the thing is is some of the most impactful work that happens comes from the people who are genuinely invested in the org's goal, who make the work about their life. So when I came into the office later that morning and I saw who was impacted, I mean it was some of the few people who truly made the org's mission their life and were really passionate about that work.

That's the people that they let go. Here's the thing. As someone who has been an SD and a PM, that's a little teaser for uh another video that I'll make. I know that you never truly understand what someone's going through unless you've been in their position in their role. So, it's easy for me to blame the upper leadership and I don't know what difficult decisions they had to make with the information that was placed in front of them.

But at least personally, it felt like such a betrayal and it felt like the leaders were so disconnected from what was going on at the ground. So I decided to just take a leave [music] and sort things out myself. Now when I came back from the leave, the entire landscape had changed. I mean AI usage was crazy. Suddenly people weren't really writing code anymore. all these different teams who weren't even engineering teams were starting to build all these standalone apps and they would write wiki pages about them kind of marketing them or like selling them saying like you know how they're native AI apps which is kind of [music] just a silly way to say that AI is a core part of the app's functionality and on top of that suddenly all these reorgs just started happening I mean 2 weeks after I started my leave [music] my team got disbanded and everyone got sent to different teams and in the 2 months that I had come back to work.

Like there were three additional reorgs. So while this layoff came off as kind of a surprise, I mean it it's probably more akin to buying a movie ticket for a horror movie, going into the theater, and then experiencing a jump scare. Like I kind of knew what I was getting into this whole time, but you know, still surprised me when it happened. And funny enough, those two months where I returned to work, despite all of the madness, I was actually having kind of a good time.

I I felt empowered to set proper boundaries with work. I wasn't feeling stressed every time something would go wrong. All of my previous anxieties were gone. Weirdly enough, it made me perform better because I wasn't so anxious and taking every unexpected event as a personal guilt. I was actually able to, you know, take a step back, see the larger vision and and solve problems accordingly. Honestly, work was starting to become enjoyable.

I genuinely thought, you know, maybe I could do this long term. Maybe I could do this forever. Maybe I could retire here. And that's when Amazon decided I was way too happy. Anyway, so at 3:00 a.m., I got a text message from Amazon to check my email before coming into [music] the office. I also got a text message from my brother asking if I'd been laid off because apparently an article had already been published about the AGI layoffs.

[music] And honestly, I felt nothing. I mean, I think part of it is probably because, you [music] know, I just woken up, but part of it was also just the fact that I think when it happened, I just kind of jumped straight into [music] action mode and um I was just focused on reading the text, switching to reading the email and just absorbing the information kind of, you know, pushing emotions aside and probably a conditioned behavior from years of on call at Amazon.

And it was a little weird because I think, you know, after six years, you know, basically the entirety of my adult life, um, this chapter was coming to a close. And I guess I thought I'd have more profound feelings about it. But I guess just because this year has been such a roller coaster ride, um, by the time it actually happened, it [music] just felt fine. And I don't know, maybe this is just me suppressing my emotions when things get tough cuz I don't know, I'm too afraid to face the fact that I don't have a job anymore and I haven't interviewed since college.

The market is crashing. Maybe I'll never be able to find a job again. And maybe I'll just be alone and broke. Anyways, whatever. Anyways, so after I found out I got laid off, I immediately started texting my co-workers. Um, thankfully I had their LinkedIn and Instagram because I lost access to all of the company's resources, including Slack. It [music] turned out that they wiped most of our team. This was a really big slash to AGI.

You know, we were just messaging each other for hours just trying to see, you know, who was safe, who, you know, who got impacted and and so funny enough, when I joined AGI, I got hired from one specific manager, but then he hired someone else to become my manager. So, you know, then I was under that person and then eventually I transitioned to a third manager and then I went on leave and when I came back cuz that team was disbanded, I got put under a fourth manager.

Every single one of my managers at AGI was cut. So, and you know, I still really want a job, but to whoever my next manager is. Anyways, later that week, a lot of us ended up going out to dinner and just, you know, talking about it. Uh, so you know, here's a little clip of us doing a spicy wings challenge for some reason. At least you had like your legs. My [ __ ] legs were numb. Now, I'm sure you guys are probably wondering what the severance package is like.

Um, and I am going to share that with you. But I do want to preface this with, you know, every layoff is different. Every company is different. You know, things change over time. But hopefully this will give you guys a good reference point for the [music] future. So, something like 8 hours after I got my initial text message that I'd been laid off, I got my official layoff documents, which had all the severance details.

Basically, I got 3 months of continued employment. So, I'm still technically employed at Amazon, but I [music] am not expected to do any work for the next 3 months. And on top of that, I also get one week of severance pay for every 6 months I've been at the company. Uh, and so since I've been at the company for just over 6 years, [music] that comes to about an additional 3 months. So, overall, my total compensation time period is about 6 months of pay.

For the first 3 months where I'm still employed, I technically do still have access to the [music] internal transfer tools. So, um, I can always interview for other teams at Amazon. And one of the advantages of that is basically just you don't have to go through the external loop, or I guess it it depends, [music] but most teams don't make you go through the external loop if you do an internal transfer. And generally, they do want to hire other Amazon employees versus external hires.

And there are other resources to try to coach people and help them through that process whether they want to continue their career at Amazon at another company or if they have their own entrepreneurial you know passions [music] I guess. So I would say for a pretty notoriously frugal company I mean it's it's not bad. So now the only thing really left to do is to figure out what's next. A lot of my friends at Amazon have been laid off before.

Some of them found jobs at other companies. Some of them ended up working at Amazon. Some of them, you know, shifted their careers entirely. But there is another option, which is kind of just to do [music] nothing. I keep saying I'm not going to talk about this in every video, but I always find a way to bring this up, but you know, I I really like rock climbing. And during my leave, that was one of the things that I spent a lot of time, you know, reconnecting with that lifestyle.

And honestly, if I was good enough to be a proclimr, that's what I'd be doing. Uh but you know, unfortunately, I'm not that good at it. But uh that's also up to the following sponsors whether or not I can. Um but besides that, there was one other really important thing that I learned from my leave. That was that I do really genuinely enjoy software development. I mean, I was drawn towards building things in my time off.

And I want to clarify that that's not necessarily coding. I've never really been that into writing really clean, low-level design code. I It can be fun, but my superpower has always been in my architecture designs, [music] which is essentially just, you know, an exercise in critical thinking. So, I don't really know what I'm going to do next, but I know it's going to be in tech. And I want to share that journey with you guys [music] because surprisingly, a lot of people have come across this channel already.

And for those of you who are trying to break into the industry, [music] some of you are going to get laid off, and that's okay. That's a normal thing. So hopefully this can at least serve as some kind of reference for [music] you so you're at least mentally prepared when that time comes. Anyways, if you made it this far, thank you so much. It really does mean a lot. And just as always, I will see you guys in the next one.

All right.