When their phone pinged with a meeting reminder in January, one former Amazon employee was confused. The company had let them go four days earlier — yet they were still getting invitations to new meetings.
It didn't seem like word had spread about who had been part of a wave of layoffs that included 18,000 workers companywide and 2,300 in the Puget Sound region of Washington — and whose jobs had been saved. The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous to protect future job prospects, wasn't going to be the one to tell their old colleagues.
"One thing Amazon does is, when a process is broken, they write a paper on it. This is one that should be in that process," they said in a recent interview. "A lot of the leadership principles that are preached and lived every single day were not followed."
