AI took my job: Amazon employee fired after 11 years speaks out
Behind Amazon’s latest layoffs are the personal stories of long-serving employees who say efficiency, experience and changing priorities quietly took away their jobs.
For many people working in Big Tech, layoffs are numbers on a spreadsheet. To the people who lived through them, they arrive quietly, often after years of loyalty, late nights and work that once seemed inevitable. That reality came crashing down for one Amazon employee, who recently shared the story of her job loss online in a way that resonated with thousands of people — her own efficiency helped her make her role disappear.
Amazon employee Diana L. took to LinkedIn after being fired from the company for the second time. His post was short, almost informal in tone, but it contained a deep sense of exhaustion that is familiar to many tech workers right now. She wrote that she was doing her job well, creating clean and efficient processes, but later those same processes were overtaken by AI.
“I was fired from my job at Amazon for the second time,” he wrote. He also said that the work he had streamlined eventually became automated. The post ended not with anger, but with a calm question about whether he was open to in-person and remote roles, and invited his networks to get in touch.
He is one of 16,000 employees affected by the latest round of Amazon layoffs. According to her LinkedIn profile, Diana has worked at this company for about 11 years. And despite being loyal to the company and receiving promotions over the years, he was fired from Amazon.
It was not AI. And it wasn’t performance: Nick Plumb says after being fired from Amazon job
Another Amazon employee, Nick Plumb, shared a much longer and more detailed account on X, offering a different but equally sobering perspective on the layoffs.
Plumb, who has worked at Amazon for eight years, said his day started with news he never expected. He was fired from his job along with thousands of others. But what he wanted to make clear, he said, was not what this decision was about.
“It wasn’t performance and it wasn’t AI,” Plumb wrote. He explained that he was an L7 leader who worked on global AI enablement, building systems by trusting executives and moving in wherever the company needed them. Despite this, his role was abolished.
According to Plumb, the deeper issue goes beyond technology. In his view, experience has quietly turned into a liability in the American job market. Senior staff costs are high, and while companies can replace experience with cheaper alternatives, sometimes across borders, decisions are framed as efficiency rather than outcomes.
In his post, Plumb argued that AI often serves as a convenient explanation, concealing broader changes in the way labor is treated. He described a system where the global labor market, weak protections and cost-cutting incentives intersect, leaving even high-performing, senior employees vulnerable.
Plumb also revealed that this experience is one of the reasons why he decided to run for Congress, saying that the problem lies in policy and rules written by people who do not realize the impact of such decisions.
What Amazon said
Amazon said in its official communication to affected employees that the layoffs are part of broader organizational changes. In an internal mail sent to employees like Plumb, the company said the roles were eliminated after reviewing priorities and future focus areas while acknowledging the difficulty of the decision.
In a broader statement, Amazon said the cuts are aimed at reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy. The company said most US-based employees will be given 90 days to find internal roles, followed by severance, health benefits and outplacement assistance if they are unable to transition within Amazon.
The company also said it doesn’t plan to announce widespread layoffs every few months, even as teams continue to reevaluate their structure in a rapidly changing world.
A familiar pattern in tech
Diana and Nick’s stories come together to portray two sides of the same reality. One point is how AI-driven efficiency could quietly erase roles. The second suggests how experience and cost are increasingly clashing in modern corporate structures. For employees, the impact is deeply personal. For companies, language remains strategic and visionary. Somewhere in the middle there is a growing unease in the tech industry that doing your job well, even exceptionally well, will no longer be enough to feel secure.
