Amazon's internal chat exploded with memes in anticipation of new layoffs, referencing Bezos's "two-pizza rule" - report

Amazon is expected to conduct another round of corporate layoffs, and employees are exchanging layoff memes on an internal Slack channel against this backdrop - the jokes are based on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's "two-pizza rule," Business Insider reports, UNN writes.

Details

"Amazon employees are doing what employees at large tech companies often do when they're worried about layoffs: creating memes," the publication states.

As Business Insider reported on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the situation, the company is expected to cut thousands more corporate positions as early as next week. This upcoming round will be another wave of mass layoffs at Amazon just months after approximately 14,000 jobs were cut in October.

In the absence of official company-wide announcements, employees are trying to lighten the mood in an internal Slack channel, which over 26,000 people have joined, by posting memes and jokes that Business Insider has reviewed.

At the center of their irony is the famous "two-pizza rule" of Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, originally designed to keep meetings short and productive. The rule was simple: never hold a meeting so large that two pizzas wouldn't be enough for all participants.

As the company continues to shrink its ranks, employees are using the same logic to show how much smaller their teams will become, the publication writes.

One meme featured a thin slice of pizza with the caption "how we feed two pizza teams."

Another image showed two pizza boxes with the Amazon Web Services logo and the caption "did someone say 2 pizza team?" This meme is a nod to the company's cloud division, where many cuts are expected, the publication writes.

"I don't think I've ever worked on a team that could be fully fed with just two reasonably sized pizzas without still being hungry, while remaining very economical," one employee wrote in the Slack channel. "Increasing the 'span of control' for managers seems to be the new trend."

Pizza jokes weren't the only way to cope with the situation. Employees also shared non-pizza-related memes.

Addition

Amazon is not the first tech giant where nervous employees mock the company's internal culture. In 2023, the publication writes, Google employees flooded the company's internal forums with memes ridiculing its lavish developer conference, which took place months after 12,000 employees were laid off.