Amazon employees are using humor to cope with the looming layoffs, roasting Jeff Bezos' infamous '2-pizza rule' in an internal Slack channel. As the tech giant prepares to cut thousands more corporate roles, workers are sharing memes and jokes to ease the tension. The focus of their snark? The 'two-pizza rule', a famous guideline from Amazon's founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, which was designed to keep meetings lean and productive. The rule, simple in concept, states that no meeting should be so large that two pizzas couldn't feed the entire group. As the company continues to downsize, employees are using the same logic to highlight the upcoming leaner teams. One meme showed a single, thin slice of pizza with the caption 'how we feed two pizza teams'. Another image featured two Amazon Web Services-branded pizza boxes, with the caption 'did someone say 2 pizza team?' The pizza jokes weren't the only coping mechanism. Employees also shared non-pizza memes, riffing on the rumored timing and corporate buzzwords. One meme splashed 'JANUARY 27TH' over the scene from 'The Shining' showing Jack Nicholson's character smashing through a door with an ax and 'AWS' over his face. Another meme used the 'panik/kalm' template to mock corporate buzzwords, showing an error message about email not working, presumably because the employee was laid off. Amazon isn't the first tech giant to see a nervous workforce poke fun at its internal culture. In 2023, Google employees flooded the company's internal message boards with memes mocking its lavish developer conference, which came months after it laid off 12,000 employees. So, as Amazon employees continue to share memes, it's a reminder that even in times of uncertainty, humor can be a powerful tool for coping and community building.
