In April, six months after Amazon began a wave of layoffs that ultimately wiped out 30,000 jobs, a former employee went on the social media site Blind to rant about the end of meritocracy: “What’s the point of getting a good performance review if you can still be laid off anyway?”
Blind is a platform for professionals — a kind of LinkedIn meets Reddit — that allows users to post anonymously after verifying their employer through their work email. In response to the post, Blind users identified as employees of Microsoft, Google and HubSpot were quick to weigh in on the dubious value of performance reviews. Finally, someone from Capital One cut to the chase: “This is exactly why you should *never* sacrifice too much for these companies. You are always disposable to them.”
Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000.
The shift in Big Tech has reshaped its culture, according to interviews with more than a dozen workers at several companies: Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.
Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone.
When it launched in North America in 2015, Blind quickly became a go-to destination for loose-lipped techies. It has since evolved from a site where people compare notes on how to ascend the corporate ranks while still knocking off early to hike or practice Pilates to one where they confess their darkest professional fears and solicit tips on how to survive.
Recent discussion threads on the site include Are Layoffs Making Everyone Lick the Boot?, It’s been 2 years since I was laid off, no offer still and Where do the people that “don’t make it” in the Bay Area move to?
“The whole mood has changed,” said Sunguk Moon, a founder and the chief executive of Blind. “It went from personal career planning to mass anxiety. To users talking about how hard it is to stay motivated when they might lose their job very soon, maybe tomorrow.”
Gloomy Sentiments
Blind grew out of the kinds of workplace struggles that its users often chronicle. The company’s founders worked at a South Korean search engine company called Naver, where employees aired their frustrations on an anonymous message board until higher-ups, weary of the backbiting, shut it down around 2010. Within a few years, Mr. Moon and the other founders set up Blind as an independent alternative.
Blind caught on quickly in South Korea, famously unearthing details of an incident involving the daughter of the chairman of Korean Air, who berated a flight attendant for serving macadamia nuts in a bag rather than a dish. The incident, known as “nut rage,” entered the public consciousness by way of anonymous chatter among airline employees on Blind and later made international headlines.
In 2014, Blind executives arrived in the United States to start a North American version. Desperate to get the attention of employees at Amazon and Microsoft, they threw parties in Seattle and invited tech employees so that Blind employees could schmooze them in person, and posted fliers on Microsoft’s campus.
Today, Blind has tens of thousands of registered users who work or have worked at Amazon and Microsoft — as well as at Alphabet, Meta, Oracle and others. In North America, the company has more than 3.5 million registered users and makes money by selling companies data and analysis, like which keywords are trending in posts by their employees. Mr. Moon said the site had nearly 100 corporate clients. DoorDash and Roblox had been customers in the past.
By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind.
Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success.
(Meta and Oracle declined to comment. Amazon and Microsoft said they tracked the mood of employees through other means, and Amazon said its internal ratings had remained consistent over the past eight years. Google did not respond to a request for comment.)
The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren’t constantly available.
The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties.
Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.
Several Google employees said that in 2023, some colleagues discovered they were being laid off when they swiped their badges to get into the office and found they didn’t work. That memory has made mornings a minor trauma for many who remain.
“The way the first round of layoffs were executed, it meant people experience anxiety about badging into the office,” said Hannah Pho, a Google engineer in New York. “People still make jokes about this.”
Longtime Oracle employees said that, during previous downsizings, the company had typically informed workers in person or by phone that it was eliminating their jobs, and that managers had often helped them find new jobs within the company.
But when she was laid off in March, Cynthia Sloan, a technical writer and manager who had spent almost 20 years at Oracle and a company it acquired, got the news through a generic email that arrived at 3 in the morning.
A Prediction Machine?
Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a “tech layoff tracker” that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed.
“I was on Blind five days a week,” said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company.
Ms. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, which is seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.)
Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. “I was trying to get prepared mentally,” she said.
Blind said the number of users working at Microsoft and Oracle had nearly doubled since the end of 2021, shortly before mass layoffs began in the industry, and had more than doubled at Amazon and Google. The number of users at Meta during that time has nearly tripled.
One current and one former Amazon employee said their co-workers alluded to Blind so often on internal messaging channels like Slack that managers sometimes addressed rumors that bubbled up from the website.
Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers’ reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
The hitch, Mr. Moon said, is deciding when, exactly, the notifications should be sent: When an employer announces layoffs? When it files a layoff notice with the government? Or simply when the layoff chatter on Blind and other social media sites intensifies?
The latter may seem like a low bar, and no one would claim the site is immune from misinformation. But, as the past several months attest, rumors on Blind have a habit of panning out.
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, unemployment and economic mobility.
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