After a successful year laying off 30,000 employees at AWS, Amazon's cloud computing side business, the company is running out of employees to include in ever-increasing layoffs. To continue reducing headcount at break-neck speed, and keep the company actively developing new features the marketing teams can show off, they need to change how they select which engineers to lay off. This is why AWS has innovated yet again and will be hiring 11,000 people for the newest type of developer role, the 'Laid-Off Engineer'.
The role of a Laid-Off Engineer is to be a software developer who will be laid off before anyone else. This is an important role, and the company plans to become very dependent on it in the coming months and years. A Laid-Off Engineer is the first line of defense for a development team by adding a level of psychological safety to let the rest of the team know they probably won't be laid off in the next round. Though an AWS representative was quick to point out, it's not a guarantee and any engineer can be laid off at any time for any reason.
AWS CEO Matt Garman says teams have become so productive with A.I. tooling that they can be much smaller. Teams that used to have 6 engineers can now be just as productive with 2. So after adding a Laid-Off Engineer, AWS will only be paying teams of 3. A 50% reduction in cost! When the next round of layoffs needs to occur, in about 2 weeks probably, AWS will be able to reduce headcount by getting rid of everyone with the Laid-Off Engineer title. It's like a rainy day fund.
Obviously this is still a development role and the Laid-Off Engineer is expected to contribute PRs like everyone else. Week 1 will be filled with the usual set of HR trainings, and "getting to know the company" seminars. Since these engineers will be at the company for an average 1-3 weeks, they won't have time to learn team dynamics and be effective. But they're still expected to contribute, otherwise they will end up on a PiP. And to save additional costs, this is the only role at AWS allowing remote work.
AWS says they plan to hire new Laid-Off Engineers as soon as one is laid off to keep the team's psychological safety high, and to keep their pool of Laid-Off Engineers readily available. Previous Laid-Off Engineers will be given priority.