Tech Company Layoffs Scramble Life in Remote-Work ‘Zoom Towns’

Before he was laid off by Amazon, Jesse Lindsey was making more money than he ever had in his life working from home in Bozeman, Montana.

After losing his job, the 39-year-old father and Navy veteran found himself stacking boxes at the local Lowe’s. It wasn’t the life he pictured when he moved with his family last summer, giving up a peripatetic Navy life to take a fully remote job as a technical recruiter in the mountain town.

Amazon’s decision to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, part of the wave of hundreds of thousands of cuts at firms across the US this year, is forcing ...