May 1^st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

What happened · Last year, Amazonians on the tech side banded together as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), first coming to the world’s notice with an open letter promoting a shareholders’ resolution calling for dramatic action and leadership from Amazon on the global climate emergency. I was one of its 8,702 signatories. ¶

While the resolution got a lot of votes, it didn’t pass. Four months later, 3,000 Amazon tech workers from around the world joined in the Global Climate Strike walkout. The day before the walkout, Amazon announced a large-scale plan aimed at making the company part of the climate-crisis solution. It’s not as though the activists were acknowledged by their employer for being forward-thinking; in fact, leaders were threatened with dismissal.

Fast-forward to the Covid-19 era. Stories surfaced of unrest in Amazon warehouses, workers raising alarms about being uninformed, unprotected, and frightened. Official statements claimed every possible safety precaution was being taken. Then a worker organizing for better safety conditions was fired, and brutally insensitive remarks appeared in leaked executive meeting notes where the focus was on defending Amazon “talking points”.

Warehouse workers reached out to AECJ for support. They responded by internally promoting a petition and organizing a video call for Thursday April 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist Naomi Klein. An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

Snap! · At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people. ¶

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Let’s give one of those names a voice. Bashir Mohamed said “They fired me to make others scared.” Do you disagree?

Adjectives · Here are some descriptive phrases you might use to describe the activist-firing. ¶

1. “Chickenshit.”

2. “Kill the messenger.”

3. “Never heard of the Streisand effect.”

4. “Designed to create a climate of fear.”

5. “Like painting a sign on your forehead saying ‘Either guilty, or has something to hide.’”

Which do you like?

What about the warehouses? · It’s a matter of fact that workers are saying they’re at risk in the warehouses. I don’t think the media’s done a terribly good job of telling their stories. I went to the video chat that got Maren and Emily fired, and found listening to them moving. You can listen too if you’d like. Up on YouTube is another full-day videochat; it’s nine hours long, but there’s a table of contents, you can decide whether you want to hear people from Poland, Germany, France, or multiple places in the USA. Here’s more reportage from the NY Times. ¶

It’s not just workers who are upset. Here are Attorneys-general from 14 states speaking out. Here’s the New York State Attorney-general with more detailed complaints. Here’s Amazon losing in French courts, twice.

On the other hand, Amazon’s messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety. I actually believe this: I have heard detailed descriptions from people I trust of the intense work and huge investments. Good for them; and let’s grant that you don’t turn a supertanker on a dime.

But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it.

Poison · Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison. ¶

What about AWS? · Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership. ¶

Of course, its workers have power. The average pay is very high, and anyone who’s unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.

Spot a pattern? · At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength. ¶

What’s next? · For me? I don’t know, genuinely haven’t taken time to think about it. I’m sad, but I’m breathing more freely. ¶

If there were some way to turn this into a charitable fundraiser for healthcare workers, protective supplies, or laid-off Americans, that might be something we could get behind. But there is no mention of any of these things in Pentagon's announcement, just "national unity" and "tribute to our great warriors" bullshit that is clearly designed to paper over Trump's dismal 23 percent approval of his response to the pandemic.

Prince talked for an hour straight. At the end of this spiel, Lee's side of the line was quiet. “I was like, ‘Are you still on the phone?’ ” Prince recalls. “Then he said, ‘Yeah, that'll work, let's do that.’ ” And that was it.

They whipped together a demo and in late 2009 raised a little over $2 million from two venture capital firms. It was enough to rent a converted two-bedroom apartment above a nail salon in Palo Alto, where they could start building their idea in earnest. Lee would show up every day wearing the same Calvin Klein jeans, leather jacket, and beanie on his head, and lugging a giant ThinkPad laptop nicknamed the Beast. “We had this shared vision,” Zatlyn says. “And Lee was the architect behind it. He just obsessed over it.”

The following year, Prince talked his way into TechCrunch Disrupt, an onstage competition for startups that can lead to big funding rounds. As Disrupt approached, Prince and Zatlyn grew nervous. Lee had missed a lot of days of work due to migraines. He didn't seem anywhere close to finishing a demo. When the day of the event arrived, Prince and Zatlyn walked onstage praying that the software they were presenting would actually work.

Prince started his pitch. “I'm Matthew Prince, this is Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway is in the back of the room. We're the three cofounders of Cloudflare,” he boomed, stabbing the air with his finger as he spoke. In fact, Lee was backstage furiously fixing a long list of bugs. Prince held his breath when he ran the software, and, perhaps miraculously, it worked. It really worked. In the hour after he walked onstage, Cloudflare got 1,000 new customers, doubling in size.

They earned second place at Disrupt. “In the next couple of weeks, all these somewhat mythical VCs that we'd heard of and read about all called us,” Prince says. Under the onslaught of attention, Prince, Holloway, and one early hire, Sri Rao, rolled out constant fixes to hold the system together. “We launched in September, and in a month we had 10,000 websites on us,” Lee said in the Founderly interview. “If I'd known, we would have had eight data centers instead of five.”

With customers now multiplying, Ian Pye, another early engineer, hollowed out a toaster, tucked an Arduino board inside, and hooked it up to the network. Whenever a website signed up for Cloudflare services, the toaster sang a computerized tune Pye had composed. “It was horribly insecure,” Pye says. “But what were they going to do, hack our toaster?” The toaster lasted two weeks before the singing became too frequent and annoying and they unplugged it.

Cloudflare was growing fast, and Lee worked long days, often from home in Santa Cruz. He and Alexandra now had an infant son. During the first few months of the baby's life, Lee and Alexandra still made time to play videogames together. Alexandra remembers cracking up when Lee co-opted a nursing pillow to support his neck while he sat at his computer. Several of his old friends came over once a week to play the board game version of Game of Thrones or the multiplayer videogame Team Fortress 2. Alexandra focused on childcare, but she made sure the players had food. “I was doing it for him,” she says.

But around 2011 she started noticing that Lee was growing distant and forming some odd new habits. He spent a lot more time asleep, for one. After long workdays, she recalls, he'd walk in the door, take off his shoes, and immediately pass out on the floor. Their cat sometimes curled up and napped on his chest. His son, not yet 2, would clamber over him, trying and failing to rouse him to play.