Ethan Evans spent more than 15 years as a vice president at Amazon, where he helped build Prime Video, Twitch, and other major business lines. He watched reorganizations come and go like weather systems — some predictable, some sudden, all capable of ending careers. Now retired and running a leadership coaching practice, Evans has become one of the most candid voices in tech on a subject most executives discuss only in whispers: how to survive when your company decides to rearrange itself around you.
His advice arrives at a moment of acute anxiety across the technology industry. Amazon alone has cut more than 27,000 corporate jobs since late 2022, according to tracking by Business Insider. And layoffs haven’t stopped. In early 2025, Amazon trimmed positions in its communications and sustainability divisions. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and dozens of smaller firms have followed similar patterns, shedding thousands of roles while simultaneously hiring in areas like artificial intelligence. The restructuring cycle that began during the post-pandemic correction has become, for many workers, a permanent condition.
Evans doesn’t sugarcoat it. “Reorgs are one of the most dangerous things that can happen to your career,” he told Business Insider. Not because they always result in layoffs — many don’t — but because they reshuffle the power dynamics that determine who gets promoted, who gets resources, and who gets quietly sidelined.
The former VP’s framework is built on a core observation that most career advice ignores: in a large organization, your standing depends less on what you accomplish and more on who knows about it and whether they still have the authority to reward it. A reorganization can sever those connections overnight. Your champion gets moved to another division. Your project gets absorbed into someone else’s portfolio. The narrative you’ve carefully built about your value — gone.
So what does Evans recommend?
First, he argues that employees should treat every reorganization as a political event, not merely an operational one. The org chart is being redrawn. New leaders are being installed. Budget authority is shifting. The employees who come through intact are the ones who move fast to understand the new power structure and position themselves within it. Waiting to see how things settle is, in Evans’s telling, one of the worst strategies available. By the time the dust clears, the new leaders have already formed impressions and made commitments.
This runs counter to the instinct most people have during periods of corporate upheaval, which is to keep their heads down and focus on their work. Evans considers this approach dangerously passive. “The people who get cut are often the ones nobody was thinking about,” he said, according to Business Insider. Visibility matters. Not the performative kind — not sending company-wide emails or volunteering for every task force — but the strategic kind. Making sure the right people understand what you do, why it matters, and how it connects to whatever the company has decided its new priorities are.
That last point is where Evans’s advice gets specific. He urges employees to study the stated rationale for the reorg and then explicitly align their work with it. If leadership says the restructuring is about efficiency, frame your contributions in terms of cost savings and speed. If it’s about growth, talk about revenue and customers. The substance of your work may not change, but the language you use to describe it should. This isn’t cynicism. It’s communication.
Evans also draws a sharp distinction between two types of reorganizations. The first is the “strategic reorg,” where a company reshapes itself around new goals — entering a new market, pivoting to AI, consolidating redundant teams. These are often announced with fanfare and internal memos from the CEO. The second is what he calls the “political reorg,” where the real driver is a power struggle among senior leaders. A new SVP arrives and wants to install loyalists. A struggling division gets broken up and parceled out to rivals. These reorganizations are harder to read and more dangerous, because the official explanation rarely matches the actual motivation.
The distinction matters because the survival strategies differ. In a strategic reorg, aligning with the new direction is usually sufficient. In a political one, the critical question is which leader is ascending and which is descending — and whether you can build a relationship with whoever ends up on top.
None of this is unique to Amazon, though the company’s culture makes it a particularly intense laboratory for these dynamics. Amazon’s leadership principles — customer obsession, bias for action, ownership, and the rest — function as a shared vocabulary that employees use to justify decisions and evaluate peers. During a reorg, that vocabulary becomes a weapon. Teams competing for survival frame their work in terms of whichever leadership principle seems most relevant to the new direction. Individuals do the same. The person who can most convincingly argue that their project embodies the company’s stated values is the person most likely to keep their job.
Evans’s observations align with broader research on organizational behavior. A 2023 study published in the Academy of Management Journal found that employees who actively “sensemaking” during restructurings — constructing and communicating narratives about their role in the new order — were significantly more likely to retain their positions and receive favorable assignments afterward. The researchers called it “political skill,” a term that makes many engineers and product managers uncomfortable but that describes a real and measurable competency.
The tech industry’s relationship with reorganizations has changed fundamentally over the past three years. Before 2022, most large tech companies operated under an implicit growth covenant: headcount expanded year after year, and layoffs were rare enough to be genuinely shocking. The pandemic-era hiring spree supercharged this dynamic. Amazon added roughly 800,000 employees between 2019 and 2021, many of them in corporate roles. When growth slowed and interest rates rose, the correction was severe.
But what’s happened since isn’t simply a correction. It’s a structural shift in how tech companies manage their workforces. Continuous restructuring — rolling layoffs, frequent team reshuffles, periodic “flattening” exercises that eliminate management layers — has become a management tool rather than an emergency measure. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, has spoken repeatedly about reducing bureaucracy and increasing the ratio of individual contributors to managers. In September 2024, he mandated a return to five-day in-office work and announced plans to cut the number of managers by 15%, moves that sent a clear signal about the company’s direction.
For employees, this means the skills Evans describes aren’t optional extras. They’re survival requirements. The ability to read organizational politics, build relationships across team boundaries, and communicate your value in language that resonates with current priorities — these are now as important as technical competence. Maybe more so.
Evans is blunt about the asymmetry of information in these situations. Senior leaders typically know about reorganizations weeks or months before they’re announced. They’ve already had conversations about which teams will be affected, which roles will be eliminated, and which managers will gain or lose headcount. By the time the all-hands meeting happens, the decisions are largely made. This means the preparation window for most employees is short, and the information they’re working with is incomplete.
His counter to this is preparation before the reorg hits. Build relationships with leaders outside your immediate team. Maintain a running document of your accomplishments and their business impact. Keep your skills current enough that you could plausibly interview elsewhere on short notice. And pay attention to the signals that a reorg is coming: unusual meetings on executive calendars, projects being quietly shelved, senior leaders asking for org-wide headcount data. These are the early tremors.
The advice extends beyond individual survival. Evans argues that managers have an obligation to protect their teams during restructurings, and that the best managers do this by aggressively advocating for their people in the rooms where decisions get made. A manager who stays silent while their team gets dismantled isn’t being professional. They’re being negligent. This is a view that puts Evans at odds with the more stoic school of management thought, which holds that reorganizations are business decisions and shouldn’t be taken personally. His response: they’re always personal for the people who lose their jobs.
Recent reporting suggests the restructuring cycle at Amazon and its peers is far from over. In April 2025, Amazon announced further organizational changes in its AWS division, consolidating several product teams and shifting resources toward AI infrastructure. Microsoft has made similar moves, folding mixed-reality and other experimental teams into its core cloud and AI groups. Google’s parent company Alphabet restructured its DeepMind and Google Brain teams in 2023 and has continued to adjust the combined organization since. The pattern is consistent: companies are concentrating resources in areas they consider strategically critical and pulling them away from everything else.
For the tens of thousands of tech workers affected by these shifts, Evans’s framework offers something more useful than the standard advice to “stay positive” and “focus on what you can control.” It offers a model for understanding what’s actually happening inside the organization and acting on that understanding. It treats corporate restructuring as what it is — a contest for resources and position — and provides a vocabulary for participating in that contest rather than being a passive object of it.
Not everyone will find this comfortable. The idea that career survival requires political awareness and self-promotion sits uneasily with the meritocratic ideals that many tech workers hold. But Evans, who watched countless talented people lose their positions at Amazon not because they weren’t good enough but because they weren’t visible enough, considers those ideals incomplete. Merit matters. But merit alone, in a large and constantly shifting organization, is not enough.
That’s the uncomfortable truth at the center of his message. And given the current state of the industry, it’s one that more people need to hear.
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