Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer

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Friday morning, August 14, 2026, I received this text from a number I didn’t recognize:

“ALERT! Dear Amazonians, GREF has temporarily closed the building for today. You are welcome to work from BOS17 until further notice."

I thought the text was odd but I confirmed it was legitimate and continued my day working remotely. My team had our daily standup and everything seemed quite normal, until 3:00 PM when I received this canned email from HR:

“This morning we closed BOS21 following the tragic loss of one of our Amazon colleagues….” [1]

What that email didn’t mention was that this colleague died by suicide. Learning that was surreal… I’ve been working professionally for over a decade and this is the first time I’ve encountered a workplace tragedy like this. I didn’t know what to expect. Later that afternoon there were many positive messages in BOS21’s Slack channel, colleagues offering an open ear and providing links to emergency resources. That was reassuring.

What I didn’t expect was what immediately followed: silence. Specifically, silence from leadership. I’m not talking about line managers or middle managers, I’m talking about directors, VPs, SVPs - many of which work in that same building. I would hope that a tragedy like this is so exceedingly rare[2] that when it does occur, it warrants a personal message or statement from the human leaders that work in that building. An acknowledgement. I would think a human acknowledgement is the bare minimum for “Earth’s best employer.”

I need to correct myself above because what we got was far more dystopian than silence. That same Friday our VP sent an org-wide email boasting about efficiency gains using AI to migrate to Rust. Let me repeat that: 5 hours after a colleague took their own life our VP is celebrating Rust migrations.

At this point, if given the choice of that, I would gladly accept AI generated condolences.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ognyisn3a48a5yevnjjvo/update.jpg?rlkey=hdd62sow7vjo2k7uu1zsxdltq&st=5kaew5r8&e=3

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nrwrrf6bp61vblvygt9ob/img2.jpg?rlkey=f5topyqov589ube7xs1p6xo6d&st=swiffscs