Where’s the Respect?

Perhaps the worst part of the layoffs, at least at Amazon, is that so many now-former employees say they learned of them via email rather than through one-on-one meetings or even phone calls. (Salesforce is guilty of this, too.) As Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights wrote on LinkedIn earlier this month:

“One of the most frustrating things to me about the recent tech layoffs across Salesforce, Amazon, Twitter, etc… is that they are happening at some of the ‘most innovative’ companies in the world, yet the layoffs themselves are right out of the ‘best practices’ of the 1990s. After all the tech, diversity, equality, inclusion, efficiency and problem-solving capabilities we’ve figured out over the past 30 years, none of that has gone into making layoffs better and less painful. Every part of the process, down to the cookie cutter 10% cuts, feels like status quo thinking pushed down from last-gen B-schools ignoring both the humanity of the process & long-term goals of the company.”