Three months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers.
Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes. Plus it lets them wipe away future RSU comp that was granted to employees when stock prices were way lower.
Looking at the people around me, people don’t do very good work when they are constantly on their toes. A lot of time is wasted on the rumor mill about the next round of layoffs, people are hesitant to invest in big (needed) changes and opt to just keep the lights on, and technical decisions are often colored by what will still work after person X if laid off (if they ever get laid off) vs picking the best option in front of them. The churn also continually re-opens process gaps, repeats the same projects over and over on a new stack, and other hamster wheel type activity that do nothing to move the business forward. It simply keeps people busy and frustrated while the leadership churn is used to pad their resumes with fancy sounding projects that never actually get completed, but it’s enough for them to leverage it into a new job with a big title.
Meanwhile, 30k Amazon-minded individuals are unleashed on to other tech companies to evangelize Amazon products and services. The design of it all is really apparent.
Ex-Amazonians aren't the best boosters of Amazon. What really happens is that everyone at other big-corps start complaining about new people managers and product/project managers coming in with a culture that is a bit more toxic than normal.
Is this how it plays out, or does it backfire with the former employees being bitter about the layoff and not wanting to be free evangelists for the company didn’t show them any loyalty.
> They might be bitter but evangelize Amazon products are their most marketable skills.
I think you are talking out of ignorance and spite. Most of the services used by Amazon employees are internal services that may or may not be on par with the state of the art. Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.
Anyone who shows up and their only contribution is to push AWS services because that's what they know, the first question I asked them is if they are capable of doing it themselves on-prem. Their answer is no or they don't know how to or some babbling on about it's more expensive and ROI and things like that I dismiss them immediately. Because those may all be true things but without the ability to do it yourself it is impossible to make an accurate assessment if AWS or another cloud service is actually a good fit for what you're doing.
> Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes.
Amazon has been doing that since it was founded, certainly 2001-2006. Every year there would be stack ranking, and they'd get rid of employees and even entire departments in reorgs and layoffs.
All corporate or just expensive US based corporate employees? I didn’t see any specifics listed besides “pandemic era over hiring”. I think their talking points were pulled from an old 1pager this should have been “due to efficiency gains in AI”.
Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.
No one is going to say it but the (effective) end of the H-1B visa program means that tech companies are going to start staffing up more teams where the talent is.
Doesn’t Amazon have 10k+ H-1B workers? “How many workers on visas will they lay off” is an interesting question to understand their internal HR strategy.
There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.
Yeah but they wouldn't risk disruption. They live or die in large part on Holiday Sales, it's a massive part of their revenue stream. If the risk that this could cause disruption wouldn't be worth it if they expected the holiday shopping season to be busy.
> Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.
It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?
Because they aren't and this is just borderline financial fraud? They fire tens of thousands right before an earnings call and then use that to generate future reports. Investors invest and stockholders sip champagne, then they go rehire a significant portion back, completely invalidating all that unlimited growth they promised.
Then, when the next earnings call comes they make some moronic excuse and do it all again. And the past 20 years in the domestic market should have made it abundantly clear to everyone that Wall Street are too stupid to catch on / so bought in they need it to work.
The layoff numbers keep growing too, if you notice. (Fraudulent) numbers keep going up! Yay!
----
Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world? These days, everything just looks to be in the business of growth via scamming consumers of their hard-earned money. They just gave up any pretense of good products or quality service - "fuck you, give me your money" at every. single. turn.
Then all that money goes to 10 guys while everyone else breaks their back for nothing, forced to piss in bottles before going to their +10% YoY apartment to wait to die from health problems they can't afford to fix.
> Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world?
Too slow and expensive. Why innovate when you can extract instead. It's the financialization of our economy. No one cares about or even has incentive to make better widgets, all the incentive is in financial optimization and squeezing out every last cent because the business is now a financial asset, not a product company.
"Pandemic overhiring"? Christ, that was half a decade ago. The pandemic has been over long enough for a kid to go through high school or get a Bachelor's!
But the board will be enriched by this, and that's all that matters.
That’s PR speak for “our leadership has messed up big time and this was the most convenient excuse we could come up with that doesn’t just throw our C-suite in front of the bus.”
Earnings call is this week. Expect some good tap dancing.
And they perviously laid off 27K in 2022 because of "pandemic overhiring". I wouldn't be surprised if in a decade from now they will still be laying off because of the "pandemic overhiring"
Remember these things tend to be lumpy. While that’s a bit over 10% of corporate employees depending on how you count some teams won’t get touched and thus other areas will either get blown up entirely or have layoff rates of much higher than 10%.
There's a lot of reflecting & gesticulating we can do about these companies, as they downsize & try to de-leverage the world's labor.
But the reciprocal side is also worth soulsearching some into too. It feels like such the crisis of our time that we don't have good things for people to do, respectable enough efforts, that so much is ensnared and tangled up in such huge enterprise running along at its own pace. I crave a government that tries to encourage new players, new enterprises, that outright lopsidedly favors those trying to get things started.
Other systematic drivers here also filter out so many would be entrepreneurs and business owners. Cost of essential food, shelter, transportation, health care needs has become incredibly daunting to many, and greatly challenges the ability for new things to get started.
Also the unchecked acquisitions spree of the world brings up all the opportunity in such uncomeptitive and fragile large companies. If we allowed small medium size companies to acquire each other, but kept more controls on bigger companies, we wouldn't be facing such wild shocks from what a couple big players do on the world.
> This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."
What is this take based on?
How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation?
And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?
It’s sorting out org bloat, span of control issues, and teams without a clear ROI. Normal “leadership mismanaged the company and now there’s a mess to cleanup” stuff.
> The cuts beginning this week may impact a variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology, devices and services and operations, among others, the people said.
They should be completely separate. If they were two independent companies, a low margin distribution and logistics company on one side and a high margin software services company on the other then nobody would suggest merging the two together.
> Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”
Actually, they are. Perhaps what is causing your confusion is that other parts of Amazon, such as Ring or Rivian, are also separate companies, whereas parts such as Alexa and Amazon Music aren't.
By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo. For the purposes of the discussion at hand they’re all the same. Amazon PXT and finance is the same team as AWS PXT and finance.
> By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo.
No. My definition is Amazon's actual organization chart as a holding. AWS is an independent first-level branch of direct reports of Andy Jassy, who was AWS's CEO before replacing Bezos. A similar branch is Worldwide Consumer, which groups what you think Amazon actually is, which means the online store, prime, books, devices, etc.
The org suffers from several systemic issues: entrenched tenured employees coasting on accumulated RSUs who resist change, middle management engaged in territorial conflicts/fiefdom turf wars that prioritize their own self-preservation over company goals, numerous underperforming hires made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs, and leaders whose primary competencies lie in mastering the silly cliched "Amazon speak" (Amazon LP this and LP that, quoting Bezos as opening lines, day ones, etc) and the usual de rigueur rituals such as churning out obligatory, meaningless six-pagers, instead of driving genuine innovation or results.
AWS is fast becoming a parody of itself and needs a reset. The recent outage is a harbinger of things to come, if things continue as is.
On the contrary, I feel the opposite. Layoffs are a cheap way to goose your stock price, not much unlike buybacks. I exit positions in companies in either case, as it shows they have no immediate plans for growth.
I don't disagree with the rest. But you can effect a lot of change without mass layoffs...
you must have a pretty short list of companies you can continue to hold. something like 90% of S&P500 does stock buybacks. if you also include layoffs that's going to reach close to every single company.
Jassy is going about this the wrong way. In practice, reducing the number of line managers meant that engineers are having to do the managerial work themselves.
So they're writing even more six-pagers to satisfy the other managers which they're no longer shielded from having to interact with directly.
If this was the case, then every company on the planet would be dealing fent on the side. Given this is not happening, we can conclude that there are secondary objectives of companies.
Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now. After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup.
Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.
And in this case actually correct! Decimate is often used to mean “almost wipe out”, but the word actually comes from “killing every 10th person”.. I.e 10% of a group.
> Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now.
Who exactly do you think is saying this? Because from what I'm understanding, so far Amazon has been decimating teams at the expense of overworking them even more, and by cutting projects at the expense of cancelling maintenance and feature work.
Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money. Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
> Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money.
I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.
Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?
> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.
What do you think "Kindle" is? Is it a specific device? Is it Kindle for Web? Is it the Android or iPhone apps? Is it Kindle for Windows or Kindle for Mac? Among these, can you count how many are paid?
Reminder 'cleaned up' means lives ruined, sick people losing the ability to afford insurance (COBRA is insanely expensive especially considering you just lost your job), homes lost, families forced to move and children losing their friends/forced to new schools, and in some cases suicide.
https://archive.today/rYbTA
Three months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers.
Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes. Plus it lets them wipe away future RSU comp that was granted to employees when stock prices were way lower.
Looking at the people around me, people don’t do very good work when they are constantly on their toes. A lot of time is wasted on the rumor mill about the next round of layoffs, people are hesitant to invest in big (needed) changes and opt to just keep the lights on, and technical decisions are often colored by what will still work after person X if laid off (if they ever get laid off) vs picking the best option in front of them. The churn also continually re-opens process gaps, repeats the same projects over and over on a new stack, and other hamster wheel type activity that do nothing to move the business forward. It simply keeps people busy and frustrated while the leadership churn is used to pad their resumes with fancy sounding projects that never actually get completed, but it’s enough for them to leverage it into a new job with a big title.
Meanwhile, 30k Amazon-minded individuals are unleashed on to other tech companies to evangelize Amazon products and services. The design of it all is really apparent.
Ex-Amazonians aren't the best boosters of Amazon. What really happens is that everyone at other big-corps start complaining about new people managers and product/project managers coming in with a culture that is a bit more toxic than normal.
Is this how it plays out, or does it backfire with the former employees being bitter about the layoff and not wanting to be free evangelists for the company didn’t show them any loyalty.
They might be bitter but evangelize Amazon products are their most marketable skills.
> They might be bitter but evangelize Amazon products are their most marketable skills.
I think you are talking out of ignorance and spite. Most of the services used by Amazon employees are internal services that may or may not be on par with the state of the art. Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.
Anyone who shows up and their only contribution is to push AWS services because that's what they know, the first question I asked them is if they are capable of doing it themselves on-prem. Their answer is no or they don't know how to or some babbling on about it's more expensive and ROI and things like that I dismiss them immediately. Because those may all be true things but without the ability to do it yourself it is impossible to make an accurate assessment if AWS or another cloud service is actually a good fit for what you're doing.
> Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes.
Amazon has been doing that since it was founded, certainly 2001-2006. Every year there would be stack ranking, and they'd get rid of employees and even entire departments in reorgs and layoffs.
lol, have you looked at our stock price lately? Flat YTD. And Jassy is terrible at earnings calls, he always spooks the investors.
Firing people to make new new hire grants is more expensive
At what point does the board and Bezos start thinking Jassy is the problem?
> At what point does the board and Bezos start thinking Jassy is the problem?
A company either dies a hero or lives long enough to install its own Ballmer.
Took MS 14 years to figure that one out. Even with accelerating tech timelines, Jassy has some time.
Hopefully soon. He's big innovations as CEO have been betting everything on AI and RTO
That’s what most institutional investors seem to want
We need them in the office... but also to replace them with AI...
All sounds like a sick fetish. I want to see them getting replaced - I want to see the look on their face and their archive box walk
Even if they did, who would replace him? The risk of choosing someone that could end up making things even worse is pretty high.
> Three months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers.
Wanna bet? The 3-month balance of hired minus fired will be less than 20K. Those ballrooms don't pay for themselves [1].
Let's mark the calendar 01/27/26
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ballroom-donors-white-hou...
All corporate or just expensive US based corporate employees? I didn’t see any specifics listed besides “pandemic era over hiring”. I think their talking points were pulled from an old 1pager this should have been “due to efficiency gains in AI”.
Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.
No one is going to say it but the (effective) end of the H-1B visa program means that tech companies are going to start staffing up more teams where the talent is.
Doesn’t Amazon have 10k+ H-1B workers? “How many workers on visas will they lay off” is an interesting question to understand their internal HR strategy.
Until the government turns to dealing with offshoring. Lot more appetite in both parties to attack that business practice.
And how would they do that? The available methods - tax penalties mainly - are too easy to dodge.
make them harder to dodge
There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.
Very health...very normal
Edit: Doing it right before the holidays can only mean their data on consumption / consumers is grim.
> Doing it right before the holidays
Are many corporate roles seasonal?
Yeah but they wouldn't risk disruption. They live or die in large part on Holiday Sales, it's a massive part of their revenue stream. If the risk that this could cause disruption wouldn't be worth it if they expected the holiday shopping season to be busy.
> Yeah but they wouldn't risk disruption.
Funny, they said the same thing about AWS before layoffs last year.
MBAs will...MBA. Innovation is for Geeks...
Always easier to cut costs, because even a braindead chimp can work out that 4 is less than 5.
Valuing things though, that's a dirty activity for the "technical" ones.
> Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.
It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?
Because investors aren’t actually very intelligent, beyond some vague desire to “make my money bigger”.
Investors only see cutting people as a good thing, the excuse isn't for the investors, its for everyone else.
why do you assume mass firings are a bad thing? shedding 'dead weight' (morality aside) is a good thing, no?
Why set morality aside?
Because they aren't and this is just borderline financial fraud? They fire tens of thousands right before an earnings call and then use that to generate future reports. Investors invest and stockholders sip champagne, then they go rehire a significant portion back, completely invalidating all that unlimited growth they promised.
Then, when the next earnings call comes they make some moronic excuse and do it all again. And the past 20 years in the domestic market should have made it abundantly clear to everyone that Wall Street are too stupid to catch on / so bought in they need it to work.
The layoff numbers keep growing too, if you notice. (Fraudulent) numbers keep going up! Yay!
----
Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world? These days, everything just looks to be in the business of growth via scamming consumers of their hard-earned money. They just gave up any pretense of good products or quality service - "fuck you, give me your money" at every. single. turn.
Then all that money goes to 10 guys while everyone else breaks their back for nothing, forced to piss in bottles before going to their +10% YoY apartment to wait to die from health problems they can't afford to fix.
> Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world?
Too slow and expensive. Why innovate when you can extract instead. It's the financialization of our economy. No one cares about or even has incentive to make better widgets, all the incentive is in financial optimization and squeezing out every last cent because the business is now a financial asset, not a product company.
Exactly. And it's so obvious.
"Pandemic overhiring"? Christ, that was half a decade ago. The pandemic has been over long enough for a kid to go through high school or get a Bachelor's!
But the board will be enriched by this, and that's all that matters.
It is crazy that they are still blaming "pandemic era overhiring".
That’s PR speak for “our leadership has messed up big time and this was the most convenient excuse we could come up with that doesn’t just throw our C-suite in front of the bus.”
Earnings call is this week. Expect some good tap dancing.
If the stats don't lie, they hired ~500k employees in 2020 alone, and nearly doubled their workforce between 2019 and 2021...
The corp speak is free when their is no exec accountability. The beatings will continue till the stock performance improves.
Yes. Next earnings release is October 30, 2025 and this is to allow them to hit the numbers.
Is going to be lovely to see how they spin this as AI optimization ....
Yeah I had to double taking reading that
And they perviously laid off 27K in 2022 because of "pandemic overhiring". I wouldn't be surprised if in a decade from now they will still be laying off because of the "pandemic overhiring"
"Strive to be earth's best employer". That they put a weasel word, "strive", right in their shiny new LP tells you all you need to know.
Remember these things tend to be lumpy. While that’s a bit over 10% of corporate employees depending on how you count some teams won’t get touched and thus other areas will either get blown up entirely or have layoff rates of much higher than 10%.
Jassy's most notable accomplishment in the last five years.
Seconded only by the time he ended WFH in a stealth blog post the day after hosting the all-hands meeting.
There's a lot of reflecting & gesticulating we can do about these companies, as they downsize & try to de-leverage the world's labor.
But the reciprocal side is also worth soulsearching some into too. It feels like such the crisis of our time that we don't have good things for people to do, respectable enough efforts, that so much is ensnared and tangled up in such huge enterprise running along at its own pace. I crave a government that tries to encourage new players, new enterprises, that outright lopsidedly favors those trying to get things started.
Other systematic drivers here also filter out so many would be entrepreneurs and business owners. Cost of essential food, shelter, transportation, health care needs has become incredibly daunting to many, and greatly challenges the ability for new things to get started.
Also the unchecked acquisitions spree of the world brings up all the opportunity in such uncomeptitive and fragile large companies. If we allowed small medium size companies to acquire each other, but kept more controls on bigger companies, we wouldn't be facing such wild shocks from what a couple big players do on the world.
> This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."
What is this take based on?
How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation?
And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?
The layoffs have nothing to do with AI.
It’s sorting out org bloat, span of control issues, and teams without a clear ROI. Normal “leadership mismanaged the company and now there’s a mess to cleanup” stuff.
But AI is both expensive (from a capital standpoint) and a great excuse for investors, hence the spin.
Right after that egregious U.S.-east-1 outage?
Now its just an api call...
replacing hr with claude code powered bash scripts might just be what the industry desperately needs
Amazon and AWS are two separate companies.
From the article:
> The cuts beginning this week may impact a variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology, devices and services and operations, among others, the people said.
Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”
> They’re not “separate companies.”
They should be completely separate. If they were two independent companies, a low margin distribution and logistics company on one side and a high margin software services company on the other then nobody would suggest merging the two together.
How is AWS getting billions of cash and low interest rate loans for capex?
That’s right. The trillion dollar low margin dinosaur pays cash by writing close to zero profit in the books, and signs the bonds.
> How is AWS getting billions of cash and low interest rate loans for capex?
AWS is the cash cow. It owns between a third and half of the world's cloud computing market. Do you think it's hard for AWS to get financing?
Yes. This year only they announced they will exceed 100B in AWS investment. This is almost as high as their 2024 revenue (not profit).
Which cloud company can casually find 100B cash in a year?
Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.
> Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”
Actually, they are. Perhaps what is causing your confusion is that other parts of Amazon, such as Ring or Rivian, are also separate companies, whereas parts such as Alexa and Amazon Music aren't.
By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo. For the purposes of the discussion at hand they’re all the same. Amazon PXT and finance is the same team as AWS PXT and finance.
> By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo.
No. My definition is Amazon's actual organization chart as a holding. AWS is an independent first-level branch of direct reports of Andy Jassy, who was AWS's CEO before replacing Bezos. A similar branch is Worldwide Consumer, which groups what you think Amazon actually is, which means the online store, prime, books, devices, etc.
As an AWS shareholder, I applaud this.
The org suffers from several systemic issues: entrenched tenured employees coasting on accumulated RSUs who resist change, middle management engaged in territorial conflicts/fiefdom turf wars that prioritize their own self-preservation over company goals, numerous underperforming hires made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs, and leaders whose primary competencies lie in mastering the silly cliched "Amazon speak" (Amazon LP this and LP that, quoting Bezos as opening lines, day ones, etc) and the usual de rigueur rituals such as churning out obligatory, meaningless six-pagers, instead of driving genuine innovation or results.
AWS is fast becoming a parody of itself and needs a reset. The recent outage is a harbinger of things to come, if things continue as is.
On the contrary, I feel the opposite. Layoffs are a cheap way to goose your stock price, not much unlike buybacks. I exit positions in companies in either case, as it shows they have no immediate plans for growth.
I don't disagree with the rest. But you can effect a lot of change without mass layoffs...
you must have a pretty short list of companies you can continue to hold. something like 90% of S&P500 does stock buybacks. if you also include layoffs that's going to reach close to every single company.
If Andy Jassy is also part of the 30K to be let go, AMZN will be up 50 points in no time
How does one become an AWS shareholder but not a rest-of-Amazon shareholder?
Amazon as a retailer has far worse problems than AWS.
Jassy is going about this the wrong way. In practice, reducing the number of line managers meant that engineers are having to do the managerial work themselves.
So they're writing even more six-pagers to satisfy the other managers which they're no longer shielded from having to interact with directly.
Even if we suppose all those things are true (not a given), I would not expect these layoffs to meaningfully change them.
Don’t worry, most of those people will end up elsewhere and still think that employee protections are a bad thing because innovation.
roughly 10% of their corporate workforce wow
Wow they have 300k corporate workers?
350k according to the article
Are warehouse workers considered as corporate?
No
Is $59B in _net profit_ last year (~double the year before) enough?
No, it's not! Let's transfer another few $B from workers to our needy shareholders.
Upward and onward!
The goal of a company is to maximize profit, not reach a number and decide that is enough.
If this was the case, then every company on the planet would be dealing fent on the side. Given this is not happening, we can conclude that there are secondary objectives of companies.
I think these days goal of a publicly traded company is to maximise the stock price for next 3 months.
That's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage.
Either way, that's in line with the true definition of "AGI" and getting closer to the timeframe of 2030 to do more with less.
> That's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage.
This is obviously not that. This is a cut before reporting quarterly earnings.
Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now. After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup.
Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.
> After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup.
30k, nearly 10% of their workforce, isn't a little "cleanup to reduce bloat" it's a massacre.
The word decimate is sitting right there.
And in this case actually correct! Decimate is often used to mean “almost wipe out”, but the word actually comes from “killing every 10th person”.. I.e 10% of a group.
eviscerated!
> Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now.
Who exactly do you think is saying this? Because from what I'm understanding, so far Amazon has been decimating teams at the expense of overworking them even more, and by cutting projects at the expense of cancelling maintenance and feature work.
Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money. Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
> Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money.
I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.
Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?
> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.
Kindle is a loss leader?
> Kindle is a loss leader?
What do you think "Kindle" is? Is it a specific device? Is it Kindle for Web? Is it the Android or iPhone apps? Is it Kindle for Windows or Kindle for Mac? Among these, can you count how many are paid?
Reminder 'cleaned up' means lives ruined, sick people losing the ability to afford insurance (COBRA is insanely expensive especially considering you just lost your job), homes lost, families forced to move and children losing their friends/forced to new schools, and in some cases suicide.
The most interesting question is how many management positions got axed as part of this.
The first level or two of management are completely useless and operate more as “slave drivers” than engineers.