Amazon’s “Day 1” culture primes employees for constant change. And there’s been plenty of it lately: a five-day return-to-office mandate, an AI push, and mass layoffs. Business Insider interviewed 12 current and recent employees about how it’s going.
Here’s what they told us. The responses have been edited for length and clarity.
AI is now central to my work
Andrew Z. Chen is in his early 20s and lives in New York City. He began working for Amazon last year as a software development engineer.
As a software engineer, AI has become a big part of my day-to-day job. I spend most of my time talking to AI agents, and I can’t really imagine going through a day at Amazon without using AI at this point.
I’m expected to work from the office five days a week, but I don’t mind my commute — 20- to- 30 minutes one way via subway, from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
I started a book club at Amazon, and during the last round of layoffs, someone who had RSVP’d was laid off. It was a bit awkward since our meeting was on the day of the layoffs, and the “book” discussion turned into a discussion about the layoffs. But overall, I feel pretty safe in my role because no one on my team was affected by the cuts.
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Despite layoffs and RTO, it’d be hard to land a new role
This Amazon employee is in his 20s and works out of a Seattle office.
Like many of my colleagues, I’ve become more conscious of business priorities and evolving performance expectations, but for now, I feel reasonably stable in my current position.
I generally work from the office five days a week, with exceptions for things like illness, appointments, or occasional travel. My commute is about a 15- to 20-minute walk each way.
One of the biggest benefits of working from the office is that it creates a clear boundary between work and home. The downside is that most of my stakeholders are spread across the country, so nearly all of my meetings are still virtual.
I sometimes think about looking for a job with more flexibility, but I think it could be difficult to land a new role, in part because remote and hybrid roles are very competitive.
I’m more efficient from the office, but I don’t eat as healthily as I’d like
This Amazon employee is a software engineer who works out of a San Francisco office.
Overall, I feel positive about working from the office five days a week. My commute is about 10 minutes by cab or 15 minutes by scooter. Few companies offer the career benefits of a place like Amazon while also providing a hybrid schedule.
One of the biggest benefits is that it helps with work-life balance — I can leave work at the office and not worry about it when I get home. The downside is the limited flexibility during the day. I have less time to cook in the mornings, which makes it more likely that I’ll eat unhealthy food at the office.
After the layoffs over the past year, there was some speculation internally that remote employees — or those not following return-to-office expectations closely — were more likely to be affected. But a few friends of mine who consistently came into the office still lost their jobs.
When it comes to AI, I use it frequently in my software engineering role. It improves speed and execution, but I don’t want to become too dependent on it.
There seemed to be a push to reduce management layers
This Amazon employee is in his 30s and lives in Los Angeles. He worked for Amazon as a product manager before being laid off last October.
When I heard layoffs were likely coming the next day, I set my alarm for 3 a.m. When I woke up, I saw an email informing me I’d been laid off.
While I wasn’t a manager, my understanding was that the cuts were part of a broader effort to reduce management layers. Some managers were converted to individual contributor roles, while others were laid off.
Business Insider is speaking with workers who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads — whether due to a layoff, resignation, job search, or shifting workplace expectations. Share your story by filling out this form.
Before I was laid off, I was required to work from the office five days a week, with no exceptions. Attendance was strictly monitored, and when I requested remote work — for example, when I had a cold — I was told to either come in with a mask or take a sick day. No remote days were allowed. That said, I know other teams were more flexible. In many cases, it seemed to depend on the manager.
When it came to AI, Amazon was all in, and usage was tracked. From what I saw, morale around AI adoption was low. I and many others used AI, but it felt like fear of irrelevance drove most adoption, rather than excitement about the technology.
My short commute makes five-day RTO worth it
Sarthak Gupta is a data scientist who lives in Seattle. He began working for Amazon in 2024.
I’m expected to work from the office five days a week, but my commute is easy — only a five-minute walk.
The short commute has allowed me to focus on building my career instead of feeling drained by getting to and from work. Another major advantage is the networking and visibility — I naturally get to talk to leaders during lunch, coffee breaks, or quick walks.
The only real downside is on days when I’m feeling slightly unwell or would prefer to work from home. There’s been a stronger push for managers and teams to be consistently in the office, and attendance is being tracked more closely. Since everyone is present, there’s also an unspoken expectation of being on time, which reduces some flexibility.
While there have been layoffs, I think many employees have adopted a more pragmatic mindset, focusing on delivering impact and doing their best work, while accepting that some factors are outside individual control.
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The way they track our office hours feels infantilizing
This Amazon employee is in his 20s and works out of the company’s Seattle headquarters.
RTO isn’t the worst thing in the world — I’ve gotten used to it. But finding out they’re tracking office hours was a gut punch. It feels infantilizing, like they don’t trust us.
I used to aim to be in the office around 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to beat the traffic, but I’m now frequently having to stay later to keep up with lots of “urgency” — where we’re told everything is high priority — thus making my afternoon commute longer. I sometimes even have to take 8 p.m. meetings at home.
I’ve always known I will not be at Amazon long-term; it’s a stopping point for career growth. I recently got promoted, so I’ve been looking pretty hard at the new jobs and applying a lot. I’m eager to find a much more flexible company.
A hybrid role of two or three days a week in the office would be fine, but I’m more inclined to look for a job that’s fully remote because there’s always the risk a hybrid company will change to five-day RTO, like how Amazon did, and then I’ll have to start the whole process all over again.
I think of it as one of those “pick two” triangles; you get two of these three things: work-life balance, remote work, or good pay. If you want to find a remote-first company with good work-life balance, you’re not going to get paid as well. If you want remote and paid well, you’re going to get worked to the bone.
Right now, my priorities are remote work and work-life balance. The ultimate goal is to be out of the city, somewhere a little more rural, which comes with a lower cost of living.
I thought my role was secure — then I was put on a PIP
Nicholas Jenkins worked as a program manager at Amazon until leaving the company in December 2024 after being placed on a performance improvement plan.
Beginning in 2022, layoffs and reorganizations seemed to pick up at Amazon, but I thought my role was fairly secure.
That August, there were some early conversations about my performance that I felt weren’t justified. By October, I was formally placed on Amazon’s “focus” performance improvement program. At that point, I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here. This is too stressful.” I was eventually offered a termination package, which I accepted.
When I left Amazon, I assumed I would quickly land a new job. But I underestimated how tough the job market would be.
About seven months later, I found a new role. The key was what I called a “final mile strategy” — focusing not just on landing interviews, but securing an offer. Moving from Seattle back to my hometown of Houston helped, since I had a strong network there that ultimately led to my current job.
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I was granted a work-from-home accommodation, but then denied when I applied again
Dominique Nkamicaniye is a 47-year-old former senior product manager at Amazon in Seattle. She worked at Amazon for over eight years, most recently as a senior product manager in the international expansion organization. She was laid off in January.
I’ve seen the Amazon culture change gradually. We have to pay to park at the office, and management once said we’d no longer get free coffee, before reversing course. It’s not like the Amazon that I remember when I started back in 2017.
I’m a single mother by choice of a 5-year-old boy, and he received a serious diagnosis in 2023. The following year, I became burned out and physically sick from working around the clock and taking care of him. I had to take FMLA twice to take care of my mental and physical health.
Because of my caregiving responsibilities, I asked for and was granted an accommodation to work from home two days a week for six months, but when I reapplied for an extension, I was denied. The process felt unjust and unclear.
I was really nervous about layoffs, having survived four prior rounds during my time there. It still came as a shock when I found out my role had been eliminated. I also felt a sense of relief because I no longer had to deal with the way I was being treated at work.
My son turned 5 the next day. It was a hard birthday because I was really emotional and scared about our future. I’m still looking for a new job. I pray that I never feel squeezed by an organization to the point of no longer being able to take care of my family again.
After being laid off, I wanted a role at a smaller company
Iren Azra Zou is in her late 20s and lives in New Jersey. She worked for Amazon as a software engineer until being laid off last October.
The day before Amazon announced layoffs in October, there were rumors that something big was coming.
I had a strange feeling in my gut that I might be affected, even though I felt I was performing well and had met my goals earlier than expected. It was hard to sleep that night, and the next morning, I learned I’d been laid off.
Upon reflection, I decided that the best fit for me might be at a smaller company with less bureaucracy — and where I could better see the impact of my work.
The pro of working at a big company was that you could do one thing and it could affect millions of people in less than 30 minutes, which was exciting. However, the downside was that it sometimes felt like you were a very tiny piece in a giant machine.
The day after my layoff, the chief technology officer of a startup reached out to me on LinkedIn about a software engineering role with more flexibility. The role seemed like a good fit, so I applied and quickly landed an interview. I was given an offer shortly after, which I accepted.
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AI helps me work faster, even if it’s not perfect
This Amazon employee worked out of a Seattle office before resigning earlier this year.
AI has had a growing impact on my job at Amazon, particularly with coding-related tasks. While AI wasn’t churning out production-ready code yet, a few prompts over the course of a few hours made creating prototypes much easier.
Amazon tracked AI usage at the individual and team level. Overall, I mostly saw using AI as a net positive experience. I didn’t experience AI fatigue— it just made my job easier.
The biggest downside to working five days from the office was the time spent commuting, but as long as office check-in and check-out times were flexible, I could make it work.
Commuting was frustrating when my team worked in a different office
Joanelle Cobos is in her 30s and lives in Las Vegas. She worked for Amazon as a design manager until being laid off last October.
When Amazon implemented a five-day-a-week office policy early last year, it was annoying because I was the only one on my team in my office. There was no in-person collaboration for me to benefit from. And my commute was a 45- to 50-minute drive each way.
Around the time this happened, I was preparing to be laid off. My tenure had been plagued by whispers of voluntary resignation programs and job cuts, basically once a year. My job never felt particularly secure.
Last October, I was laid off and started looking for work. I wasn’t in a rush to jump into another corporate job, even though that’s where the best income is. My goal was to take a lower-stress, lower-paying job with good health benefits and bridge the financial gap with income from my own business. But the job market has been challenging.
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RTO has created a more uniform ideal employee that moves away from the diversity that pushed Amazon forward
This Amazon employee is in his 20s and is based out of a European office.
I always loved going to the office, but the five-day RTO has been extremely stressful. It’s forced my days to get much longer and my expenses to go up. Public transportation would take an hour and 10 minutes one-way, so I switched to taking my car. Parking is another 300 Euros a month.
RTO has totally changed how I view my future at the company. To me, it feels like it’s changed the demographics of employees, based on who’s able to actually come to the office. What pushed Amazon forward over the past years, and what was appreciated, was its diverse workforce — the mothers, the part-timers — who all had different perspectives. Now, it seems we’re moving away from that. That’s a big shift in culture.
In Europe, your job isn’t your identity. I feel there’s a clash between European work norms and the company culture being predetermined by the US headquarters.
In New York or in the States, if I drop that I work for Amazon, people are like, “Oh wow, crazy! Congrats!” Here, I try not to mention that I work for Amazon. I usually say I work for a large logistics company. It’s seen here as being equally problematic as working for Big Tobacco.
After the release of the movie about Melania [which was funded by Amazon], I’ve had people message me, “Why are you still working there?” Lots of people are openly having that conversation, which is very interesting.
I think in the current climate, it’s quite hard to find a job in general. Regardless, I’m confident I’d be able to find a job within half a year or so, because people who work at Amazon generally have a very good reputation for work ethic. I also have some side gigs I could expand if I didn’t work for Amazon.
Got a career story to share? Reach reporter Jacob Zinkula via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com, or via Signal at jzinkula.29. Reach reporter Jane Zhang janezhang@businessinsider.com.
