By Marcus Thorne — AWS Senior Solutions Architect, eleven years
(Note: This is a pseudonymised account. The author’s name and some identifying details have been changed at their request.)
I want to tell you about the longest Tuesday of my life. Not because it was dramatic — though parts of it were — but because I think it captures something about how these things actually happen, which is nothing like the way companies describe them afterward.
It started with a calendar notification at 10:14 in the morning.
I was already three hours into my day. Seattle light through the blinds, second coffee going cold, three browser tabs open to infrastructure documentation I’d been untangling since the previous week. A sync-up invite appeared. Routine enough. I clicked the attached document without really reading the title.
It was a spreadsheet. Rows of names and employee IDs. A column labelled Status. I scrolled, the way you do when you’re not sure what you’re looking at. I reached the T’s.
Thorne, Marcus. Tenure: 11.2 years. Role: Redundant.
I closed the tab. I opened it again. I closed it again.
About four minutes later, the calendar invite was recalled. It vanished from my calendar as cleanly as if it had never existed. A harried VP somewhere had copy-pasted the wrong document into the wrong invite. I was not supposed to have seen that. The official announcement wasn’t scheduled for hours.
I sat in my home office in suburban Seattle and spent the next six hours pretending I hadn’t.
What Eleven Years Looks Like
I should explain what those eleven years meant before I explain what happened to them.
I joined AWS when it was still the part of Amazon that people described at dinner parties by saying “it’s like renting computers.” I spent a decade as a solutions architect — the person clients call when they need someone to design the scaffolding that holds their digital operations together. I had worked on migrations that affected millions of users. I had been on-call during outages that would have made headlines if they’d lasted longer. I knew the system well enough that I sometimes dreamed in its architecture.
I believed in Day 1. That’s Amazon’s foundational principle — the idea that every day should feel like the first day of a startup, that urgency and ownership define you, that complacency is a kind of death. I understood it intellectually. I had internalised it emotionally. I had used it to justify the 80-hour weeks and the missed dinners and the Sunday afternoon Chime notifications that I answered because the alternative felt like betraying something.
What I didn’t fully understand, for a long time, was that Day 1 is a principle about the company’s relationship with its customers. It has nothing to say about the company’s relationship with you.
The Six Hours
Here’s what the six hours between the accidental spreadsheet and the official announcement actually felt like, because I think people who haven’t been through something like this imagine it as one sustained emotional state. It wasn’t.
For the first hour I was genuinely uncertain whether I had read it correctly. The spreadsheet was dense. Maybe I had misread my own name. Maybe Redundant was a technical status that meant something other than what it sounded like. I ran through these possibilities the way you run through whether you’ve actually locked the front door.
By midday I had stopped pretending. I attended a 1 PM sprint meeting and listened to colleagues discuss Q3 targets while knowing, with reasonable certainty, that some of them were about to have the same Tuesday I was having. I did not say anything. I did not know what I would have said.
At 2:30 I went outside and watched my daughter on the swing set we’d bought with my 2024 bonus. She didn’t know anything was different. She asked me to push her higher. I did.
At 4:15 I logged back in and spent forty minutes cleaning legacy code in a project I was now fairly certain I would never finish. I have thought about this a lot since then. It wasn’t denial. It was something closer to muscle memory — the habits of eleven years continuing to run in the absence of the motivation that had produced them. Habit, it turns out, is a very effective sedative.
At 6 PM the news broke publicly. Sixteen thousand corporate roles. The second major round in three months. AWS, retail, HR — the cuts spanned teams across the company, part of a target of roughly 30,000 corporate roles in total. TechAfrica News My phone lit up with messages from former colleagues and friends outside the company who had seen it on the BBC before I had received anything official.
The official email arrived later that evening. Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, wrote that the company had been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” Wikipedia It was a well-constructed paragraph. It said nothing I didn’t already know from a spreadsheet I wasn’t supposed to have opened twelve hours earlier.
Project Dawn
The accidental email — the one that preceded the official announcement by a day and inadvertently told some AWS employees what was coming before they were meant to know — turned out not to be unique to my experience.
A draft internal email signed by Colleen Aubrey, Senior Vice President of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, was sent prematurely to employees, referencing an internal restructuring effort called “Project Dawn” and stating that affected employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica had already been informed — when they hadn’t been yet. Statista The email was recalled. The subject line — Project Dawn — lingered.
There’s something almost too on-the-nose about that name. A new beginning. The start of something. The language of optimism attached to the administrative mechanism of mass displacement.
I don’t think it was cynical. I think it was just a name someone chose in a meeting, the way internal project names always get chosen, without thinking too hard about what it would sound like to the people being coded into its spreadsheets. That’s almost worse than cynicism. Cynicism would require them to have considered our perspective at some point.
What Andy Jassy Actually Said
I want to be fair here, because I think the narrative around tech layoffs tends toward simple villains, and the reality is more uncomfortable than that.
When Jassy was asked in October 2025 whether the job cuts were financially or AI-driven, he said they weren’t. “It’s culture,” he said. “If you grow as fast as we did for several years, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers. Sometimes without realising it, you can weaken the ownership of the people doing the actual work.” Wikipedia
He wasn’t wrong that Amazon’s headcount had ballooned. The workforce had roughly doubled during the pandemic years as e-commerce demand surged, and corporate hiring had outpaced what the underlying business structure could absorb. Wikipedia
And yet. Jassy had also written explicitly to employees that as Amazon rolled out more generative AI and agents, “we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.” World Bank The layoffs aren’t AI-driven right now, he said, while simultaneously confirming they would be AI-driven later. This is technically accurate and practically cold comfort if you are in the category of roles being evaluated for eventual replacement.
I spent eleven years building systems at AWS. Some of what I built is now being used to train the models that will, over the next few years, absorb portions of the work I used to do. I don’t say this with bitterness — I say it because I think it’s important to name it clearly, which the official communications were careful never to do.
The Boy in Chicago
My father used to say that efficiency is empathy. He meant it in the context of good engineering — that a well-designed system saves people time, and time is the most finite thing any of us have. I grew up believing that code was a form of care. I still believe that.
What I had not fully accounted for is that this logic is not symmetrical. The efficiency of a large organisation is not automatically expressed as care for the people inside it. Sometimes it expresses as a spreadsheet, and a column marked Redundant, and a recalled calendar invite, and a Tuesday that lasts until midnight.
Over 120,000 tech workers were laid off globally across major firms in 2025. World Population Review Most of them did not find out the way I did. Most of them got an email, or a Zoom call with someone from HR they’d never met, or a text. Some of them found out when their badge stopped working. The method varies. The structure is the same: one morning you are a Senior Solutions Architect with eleven years of institutional knowledge, and by afternoon you are a severance package and a 90-day internal job search window.
A Business Insider piece from February 2026 ran the headline: “I got laid off from Amazon after 11 years. My high school daughter taught me the biggest lesson on how to move forward.” Statista I read it the morning it published. I didn’t find it sentimental. I found it accurate. The people who are least confused about what actually matters, in my experience, are the ones who haven’t yet spent a decade measuring themselves against a Day 1 standard.
By the time I logged out that Tuesday night — 11:53 PM, the house silent, the screen going dark — I had already started to understand something that would take the following weeks to fully arrive at: the pressure I had carried for eleven years was not Amazon’s to relieve. It had been mine to put down the whole time.
I just needed a Tuesday long enough to do it.
Marcus Thorne is a pseudonym. The author worked as a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS for eleven years and was laid off in January 2026 as part of the company’s 16,000-role reduction.
