Jack Nguyen spent seven years at Amazon across two stints. The five-day RTO mandate and a January layoff pushed him into a tougher job market. He found his next role at Deloitte through a LinkedIn post and a referral.
Jack Nguyen got laid off from Amazon in January. He'd spent seven years at the company across two stints. The first time he left, in 2021, he hit a ceiling on compensation at a cybersecurity company. He came back in 2022 for an engineering role on a new team. Then the RTO mandate changed the calculus.
Amazon announced a five-day return-to-office policy in late 2024. Nguyen called it a "soft layoff" – a way to push people to quit. The company had already cut 27,000 roles in 2023. Nguyen's team survived that round. The January layoffs didn't spare him.
His commute from a Virginia home to Amazon's Arlington office ran an hour and a half each way on public transit. He had two kids and a family to get home to. The company added a shuttle that cut the commute to about an hour, but the five-day mandate made the tradeoff untenable. "I knew I wanted my next role to offer more flexibility," he said.
The job market proved harder than he expected. In previous searches, Nguyen could update his LinkedIn profile and his résumé and submit cold applications. This time, most interviews came through referrals or people in his network. He posted about the layoff on LinkedIn. A former colleague saw the post and referred him for a project delivery specialist role at Deloitte. He landed the job in March after several rounds of interviews.
Deloitte's office schedule depends on the client he supports. Nguyen said the company is much more flexible about office attendance than Amazon was under the five-day mandate. "It's allowed me to spend more time with my family," he said.
The RTO policy raises a question for investors: does it accelerate attrition at a time when cloud and AI competition for talent is intense? Microsoft and Google offer more flexible schedules. Amazon's stock has outperformed both in the past 12 months, but the RTO mandate could eventually weigh on hiring and retention among experienced engineers like Nguyen.
Nguyen's advice for other job seekers: rely on your network. "It's hard enough to find a role by blindly applying online," he said.
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