15 ms·

Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

315 points by cocochanel 4y ago

lukaesch 4y ago
Looks like a lot of new people will rush to http://www.bestpaidremotejobs.com http://www.bestpaidremotejobs.com again. The latest wave of followers came due to the latest Twitter and Meta layoffs.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Starting to feel like that site is a bit like the guy selling pickaxes to prospectors who have little chance of finding any gold.
noobermin 4y ago
There has been a lot of talk about a correction coming and a bubble bursting specifically in tech for years now. Is this it?
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  If so it’s very mild so far
  - gedy 4y ago
    Agreed, these recent moves are not a great sign, but the dot com crash was so much worse from a people and company perspective. The moment that sticks with me is (former) employees wheeling all the Herman Miller chairs through the parking lot with the facilities guy holding the door open saying "Take it. Take it all..."
    - nkingsy 4y ago
      That’s every startup failing/divesting right? There’s a moment of chaos where priorities aren’t aligned and company assets disappear.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  Probably? But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point, though it probably will overshoot as these things usually do. Meta going from 47K employees in 2019 to 81K employees in about 3 years was just crazy, for example. How do you even assimilate that many new employees in such a short time?
  - gwd 4y ago
    > But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point, That's what the word "correction" implies: That it's going down, not because the business itself is bad or anything in the market has fundamentally changed, but because it was valued "incorrectly" (where "insane" would be an extreme form of "incorrectness"), and that its value is being "corrected".
    - majormajor 4y ago
      I see UncleOxidant as saying it's a 2020-2021 correction, distinct from the larger talk of a correction that's been going around for years now even pre-Covid. I haven't seen signs of that latter, larger one yet. Fingers crossed...
      - UncleOxidant 4y ago
        Exactly. Look at graphs of employee growth at the large tech companies between 2019 and 2022 - we're lopping off some of that growth... probably will end up lopping off a lot of that growth before this is over.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  I just don't see where the tech growth is going to come from to keep the high multiples?
- dvngnt_ 4y ago
  the correction is happening now. the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor. The economy has since rebounded and companies are returning to previous levels. The war isn't helping however
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    >"the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor." This is the really surprising thing to me - many(most?) of these companies are data driven companies. Companies with teams of analytics folks, data scientists, modeling-experts and teams of engineers working on tools to do ML and large scale data analytics. Do none of them actually use their tools and internal expertise to model their own hiring practices and historical market trends? Or maybe they did and always knew they would need to do mass layoffs when inevitably the cheap money pump got shut off?
    - anikom15 4y ago
      No amount of machine learning, analytics, statistics, models, and experts can predict the future.
      - bogomipz 4y ago
        No of course not but I would think it could certainly help to temper exuberance. Especially if you were considering a spectrum of uncertainties.
    - mjr00 4y ago
      I hope that if we've learned anything from the past few years, it's that you can interpret and manipulate data to make it say whatever you want to say. That's true even when analyzing data about the present, doubly so trying to predict the future. Being data-driven is a method for justifying decisions. But it's still a human making a decision in the end.
- paxys 4y ago
  People have been saying "the tech bubble is going to burst" since like 2011. The current round of job cuts and stock drops puts the industry back to ~mid 2020 levels. So it is definitely a correction, but hardly world ending.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Realistically they’ve been saying this since the 1950s
    - NineStarPoint 4y ago
      There was the dot com bubble burst in 2000, so there has actually been one. A few years after the 2008 crash sounds about right to when people started talking about tech bubbles again to me.
      - sqeaky 4y ago
        All the signs were there for everyone to see in the 2000 Dotcom Dotbomb. The root problem was a bunch of investors wildly investing in crappy tech companies, like tinder for cats. There were toxic assets, huge and publicly visible waste, low product output. This time, there is a lot more growth from many companies but we also see the results of that work, products and services exist as a result. There is waste but not like in 2000.
        fnordpiglet 4y ago
        It wasn’t tinder for cats. It was pets.com that was the poster child.
      - fnordpiglet 4y ago
        I lived and worked through it and I’ve not seen tech slow down measurably, even then. There was a correction, and a shake out, but then it picked up basically where it left off and shot up. There have been other busts over the last 70 years but they’re more like a system that overheats, slows, then resumes.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  All the layoffs announced (sans the Musking that just happened) are in line with normal annual attrition plus a bump given the huge hiring spree during the pandemic to meet pandemic demand. I’ll bet $20 if you took HC growth prepandemic and straight lined it through to today inclusive of layoffs you would see normal YoY growth between those two points, which an aberration in 20/21 of high hiring. I think you’ll see a bit of party hangover and if the whole economy sinks it’ll get worse. But overall I’ve not observed any material structural shift in the world or in tech, unlike say the dot com bust or the global financial crisis. There’s some cold spots though like real estate tech that’ll probably go through a tough time. I think a lot of folks here have never been through a down cycle before though and anything that’s not frantic growth and double digit comp growth YoY will feel like a nuclear winter.
- P_I_Staker 4y ago
  Yup, I'm worried about what else could fall, but I think this was a necessary correction, and hope this stays contained.
tamaharbor 4y ago
And they say we are not in a recession.
- rvz 4y ago
  Exactly. Also many said 'engineers are not affected!'. I'm sorry to say they are. The delusion and denial about how this is not a tech crash in 2022 is really quite hilarious and I do not believe that it is over just yet.
- wittycardio 4y ago
  We're in a downtown for the tech industry most other industries are fine
  - boomer918 4y ago
    Tech eats the world. When tech goes down, its competitors go bankrupt.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    Aren't all the big index funds tied to a couple tech giants and a smattering of other companies?
- mc32 4y ago
  It's now safe to admit we have been in one and don't have to play the strict interpretation and can carry on with the colloquial interpretation which had been good enough since ever.
- rob74 4y ago
  Sometimes a recession is also a self-fulfilling prophecy...
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I get we've been cooking the books and printing money during COVID, but shouldn't there be a raw productivity explosion in the US economy with COVID restrictions lifting? Suppressed consumption, increased output, etc? This does seem like some weird massive manipulation of the economy by the elites to grab more wealth and control. Or it's just some collective revenge against the various antiwork / worker empowerment / etc that came out of COVID to put the proles back in their place. Or maybe its just that a lot of investment dollars are drying up from overseas with inflation.
jstx1 4y ago
10 000 out of 1 500 000
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  1,500,000 includes all the hourly workers but my understanding is that the 10,000 is corporate. Still only 3% of corporate workers which is less than they pip every year
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    This is the second time in these comments I've seen this distinction held out as self-evidently meaningful. I sincerely do not understand, can someone please explain why laying off salaried workers matters but hourly ones does not?
    - bern4444 4y ago
      It is the nature of contract work to be temporary. A full time employee is definitionally a stricter contract between employer and employee that is expected to continue for a longer period of time and represents a more binding commitment. There is a meaningful distinction between the expected nature of the role and benefits of a contractor vs full time employee. This isn't to say that laying off contractors doesn't matter, but its not unexpected or as good of a means to understand a company's outlook.
    - tmellon2 4y ago
      Generally speaking the average annual wage of corporate workers (mostly engineers) will be in the six figures. Hourly wage workers take home (on average) median US annual wages. So laying of 10000 engineers (in terms of immediate $ costs) is the equivalent of laying of approximately 30000 to 50000 hourly wage workers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
green-eclipse 4y ago
https://archive.ph/2rwUi https://archive.ph/2rwUi
greatpostman 4y ago
1.6 million counts warehouse employees. Retail and Alexa corporate employees is probably 100k
green-eclipse 4y ago
This is just the latest round of cuts at Amazon: "From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition." Also: "Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months."
- mjr00 4y ago
  There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.
  - green-eclipse 4y ago
    Agreed. I'm just illustrating that it's part of an ongoing pattern at Amazon. Not some new, shocking thing. I'd expect more in the future.
  - hhh 4y ago
    Why?
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    ...what is it? I really can't see a difference.
    - amflare 4y ago
      Hourly workers (unskilled labor) are flexible and cutting hours is almost as easy to reverse as it is to do in the first place. Cutting salaried employees (skilled labor) is a much harder and expensive decision to reverse. So doing so means that there is either a consistent issue that is not getting resolved, thus making them not worth the expense, or things are about to get so bad that the company feels that the savings are worth the loss of skilled labor. And clarify the difference between skilled and unskilled labor (which might make this make more sense), this is not a description of the work itself, but rather the barrier of entry. Anyone can be taken off the street and trained into an "unskilled" position with relative ease. That is not true for "skilled" positions though. Which is why Amazon's decision to start cutting corporate jobs represents a fundamental shift in their path going forward.
green-eclipse 4y ago
> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  $5B is around 1% of their (current) trailing 4 quarter revenue, which I would say is "not outrageous" if voice/home assistants is an area of growth and investment for Amazon. Why would a 2022 article be citing a 2018 loss figure for a almost surely (if my house is any indication) fast-growing segment?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
    Amazon doesn’t release info about the Alexa category in their earnings, so any reporting can only rely on whatever figure has been leaked.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      That seems like reporting on Meta's 2022 losses in virtual reality in late 2026, which would seem absurd, even if that's the best/only information they have at that time. (At some point, you have to admit "we don't have any relevant information" rather than report on "the least irrelevant information we can find".)
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        The story does note how old the figure is, so readers can take it with a grain of salt as appropriate. You could think of reporting on selective leaks like this as kind of a needling for Amazon to release more up-to-date info.
  - green-eclipse 4y ago
tibbydudeza 4y ago
Covid boom is over ???.
bena 4y ago
This is weird because I'm in the middle of the interview process with a division of Amazon. Disclaimer: I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice. And here we go: I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their hiring goals" and I was transferred to another division. Through September and October, I organized the virtual on-site. And my interview was scheduled for last week. The weeks prior, as we know, the shit hit all the fans. I fully expected to get a "too bad, so sad" email saying my interview was cancelled. It wasn't. I went through the interview and I'm waiting to hear back currently. But yeah, I would not be surprised to get a rejection. But from the point of view of my experience, nothing they've done or said has made anything seem off.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Wow, you responded to one of those Amazon recruiters. I can see now that it is responses like this that encourages them to keep pushing. I've removed everything from my linkedin, except my current position, and the only people hitting me up are Amazon recruiters. In fact, once I edited my profile, the rate increased.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  You may well get an offer, but it will probably be deferred to 2023 if so. At Amazon, the interview loop makes a decision regardless of the viability/timing/placement of the actual offer made.
- sakopov 4y ago
  I remember reading somewhere that while Amazon is on a hiring freeze, they still hire to fill positions of those who left the company. So perhaps you're interviewing for one of them.
- ripley12 4y ago
  I've been in a similar situation recently. I passed the interview but the position I applied for (and was really interested in) is no longer open. The nice thing is that interview results at Amazon are valid for 6 months; my understanding is that once you pass the interviews you essentially have a free ticket for 1 job (at an equivalent level) anywhere in Amazon. And so waiting until things open up in 2023 is an option.
andrew_ 4y ago
Can't help but be reminded of this scene from "The Fifth Element" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
- sfpotter 4y ago
  "One million... fine, sir... sorry to have disturbed you." looks like kicked puppy My personal favorite Gary Oldman role.
  - supergeek133 4y ago
    Trivia.. he hated it and only did it as a favor to Luc Besson. Last I knew he's never even watched the movie.
    - andrew_ 4y ago
      which blows my mind because without him it wouldn't be a classic.
__derek__ 4y ago
> The company has sold hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. But Amazon has said the products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources such as voice shopping have not caught on. This is the game, right? For the first time since Alexa launched, Amazon is looking at a painful Q4, so the rest of retail can't cover up the Devices org's big wart.
rabuse 4y ago
This is going to be a terrible holiday season for a lot of people.
- clarge1120 4y ago
  And not just because of corporate layoffs.
  - bonestamp2 4y ago
    I'm not disagreeing, but what are you referring to specifically?
    - Antrikshy 4y ago
      Maybe recession?
      - bonestamp2 4y ago
        Ya, must be, and maybe inflation. But, it would be nice to know in case there's something else that's not on our radar.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  Unemployment is still near historic lows.
  - rabuse 4y ago
    I'm sure the thousands of people layed off and their families affected really care about that "record low unemployment".
    - bolt7469 4y ago
      Those people received generous severance packages, on top of government unemployment benefits.
dmix 4y ago
Did they also massively expand their staff during the pandemic like Twitter/FB did? Edit: looks like they grew headcount by 60% (+500,000 people) in 2020 and 23% (+310,000) in 2021. Today's announcement reduces headcount by 1% which is tiny compared to their growth. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Amazon headcount numbers are different because warehouse workers are counted in that.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  Amazon brought on like 300-400k warehouse workers and customer service numbers would also move when that happens. They have a LOT of those workers compared to corporate and engineering. And they move those numbers a lot as well.
fred_is_fred 4y ago
For those of you in the business who missed 2000-2002 and/or to a lesser extent 2008, you have no idea what is coming. Good luck.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  > to a lesser extent 2008 Why to a lesser extent? 2008 seemed far worse due to the overall recession impacts and the fact that it wasn't just tech companies. I got laid off from my tech job at a non-tech company for example. Both occurrences wrecked a lot of lives (mine included) though, I'll give you that.
  - fred_is_fred 4y ago
    I think 2008 was broader but just from my own personal experience it seemed much worse for tech after the dot.com crash. I worked at the time selling server and storage hardware and after the dot.com crash you could get top of the line servers for pennies on the dollar - this was before AWS et al. It crippled sales for 2 years.
- gilbetron 4y ago
  Nobody has any idea what is coming. And I mean that literally in all ways.
allisdust 4y ago
The recession depending on who you ask seem to be either mild or not happening. All the government indicators (recent inflation, gdp, jobs report) seem to paint a thriving economy. So why are these companies still shedding jobs? I'm starting to wonder if the tech industry is disproportionately impacted similar to dot com bubble from 2000.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  1. Duration. A short and mild recession might be something you hold through. A decade of zero growth -- while technically "no recession for the next decade" -- is quite different, especially for companies (like tech) whose current employment levels are targeted toward growth. 2. Disparate impact. You can have low or no GDP decline while still seeing some sectors take massive short-term and long-term hits.
- Gustomaximus 4y ago
  I assume they see the recession coming and look to shed cost early rather than wait until deep into recession. Profits will be down so need to offset cost. Keep the share price high and get those option bonuses.
zackmorris 4y ago
Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP). Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn? The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has a negative net worth, so can't borrow anything: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-inequality-when-a-fair-shake-isnt/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-... To me, this looks like evidence that profit comes from offloading externalities onto the public. Ordinarily, workers could find work at other companies. But because companies are so large now, they have effective monopolies in markets like shipping. So layoffs could be used as a signal to bring companies up on antitrust charges.
- z3rgl1ng 4y ago
  My pet theory is this boils down to investor confidence. Executives get more comp in stock, cutting workers sends the right signal.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    I second that. These big corps are willing to pay contractor rates for thousands of workers and use phycological manipulation to balance it all out with FTEs. Contractor rate is often double+ FTE pay for the people they work alongside. All of this so they can report lower "employee" headcount.
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    This exactly. Investors need regular signals that the exec team is on their side. These layoffs (especially in troubled economic conditions) are just the kind of rituals that do that.
- whichfawkes 4y ago
  Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities. Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other reasons you might bring antitrust against these companies.
jbaczuk 4y ago
And once these jobs open up again, the U.S. government will take credit for "creating" the new jobs.
clarge1120 4y ago
This could be Amazon anticipating a very slow holiday season.
blobbers 4y ago
Amazon lists employees at 1.6M employees worldwide. (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...) Even if they have 1% churn each month, that's about 16,000 turnover a month. Laying off 10,000 is not news until we find out where the cuts are happening.
- joshuamarksmith 4y ago
  This is specifically tech and corporate employees, which is a much smaller pool than the 1.6M you're quoting. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon (but also haven't stated any opinions)
  - firstSpeaker 4y ago
    What is the ballpark of corporate employees count?
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      Hard to tell but probably around 300K.
  - blobbers 4y ago
    Yes, we know. That's why I specifically said it isn't news until we find out where those 10,000 people are being hit.
lbriner 4y ago
This is so completely normal in these industries that it is a non-headline. Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the shareholders are bothered about ROI. If you want to ride the unicorns and take the risk, that's fine, but there are plenty of people around the world who have far fewer choices with their work and are paid far less so I don't feel too bad that someone's Christmas might be not as expected. If you want job security, get a job somewhere that isn't trying to earn their next billion, where you can make a difference, where you are appreciated and where work/life balance means something. I expect you would feel much better :-)
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Wish I could figure out how to do an Ask HN for non-profit hiring. My previous attempts failed.
  - jpk2f2 4y ago
    Non-profits do layoffs too, unfortunately. In some ways it's almost worse as there's less padding before they're losing money.
    - micro_cam 4y ago
      Grant funded non profit research is at least pretty predictable. You know you are on a 2-5 year grant and you can help apply for the next one.
  - nobodyandproud 4y ago
    Try government. Though I had no luck finding government jobs, because the red tape is ridiculous.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
nightski 4y ago
It's fascinating how there are so many layoffs going on across the economy and yet unemployment is staying so low.
- chasd00 4y ago
  i think layoffs happen much faster than reporting. also, there's just a lot of people out there and tech is only a small piece of the overall labor market.
- mandeepj 4y ago
  > yet unemployment is staying so low. Let the severance period end.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Because 10k here and there is pretty meaningless relative to the total size of the labor market. These layoffs only get press due to the brand names of the companies
yrgulation 4y ago
Coordinated actions aimed at depressing tech wages and forcing return to office.
FabianBeiner 4y ago
Meanwhile, they built the “Amazon Tower” in Berlin (the highest skyscraper in Berlin right now) and are looking to fill it with around 4,000 employees in 2024: https://www-tagesspiegel-de.translate.goog/berlin/hochster-turm-berlins-steht-140-meter-hoch-ist-der-umstrittene-neubau-edge-8742337.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-tagesspiegel-de.translate.goog/berlin/hochster-t...
prometheus76 4y ago
I remember when NYT took pride in its headline writing.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective. > The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things. So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global). Update: Tried to figure out whether the doubling head count was corporate employees or total. I don't have time to dig into it now but a quick search did turn up Amazon's EEO reports in which they break employees down into a number of categories including "Professionals" -- which sounds like it would include engineers. 77K in 2019, 121K in 2021. So it's reasonable to assume those did double from 2019 to the present. See https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-data https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-dat...
- firstSpeaker 4y ago
  Is that "doubled its work force" for the corporate roles or entire amazon?
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    see edit to my post above
- san_dimitri 4y ago
  I am assuming the "doubling" might have come from delivery drivers and workers at warehouses mostly. Looks like the good folks who are let go are now mostly from non-engineering.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  I clearly remember growing up in the 1980's and later and hearing about mass redundancies happening during a bad economy. It was newsworthy because of the potential devastation these events would have had on an area; as in some people may never be employed _ever again_. It's why Ireland gave so many tax breaks to Apple; they employed thousands from one city. Layoffs would have made an already bad situation far worse.
1letterunixname 4y ago
From people who work high-up in AWS, I heard this doesn't generally affect them.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  I'm guessing it's a much more recession-proof line of business.
- oblio 4y ago
  Them as in higher-ups or did they mean it won't affect their low level workers?
googlryas 4y ago
Funny, I've been getting recruiter spam every week from the same set of people, and their last email 3 weeks ago was titled "AWS - This could be the last chance to join the team!!!"
peplee 4y ago
Not sure if other states have a similar system, but Washington posts information about layoffs here: https://esd.wa.gov/about-employees/WARN https://esd.wa.gov/about-employees/WARN. Looks like Amazon Health Services is getting cut as part of this.
- Chamix 4y ago
  The news here is that amazon is going to start the 2 month+ WARN period for a much larger set of orgs this week. Amazon Care/Health Service layoffs are old news.
madduci 4y ago
Will they use the 10-15% cut like everyone else?
imwillofficial 4y ago
Well shit
elforce002 4y ago
Amazon really is something else. Loyalty is really expensive and there'll come a day when they will learn that the hard way. I know these layoffs are because of the uncertainty of the economy but they already have bad rep with things like "hire to fire" candidates, etc...
samanator 4y ago
Why did this never make it to the front page of hackernews? I had to search it up to find it.
rapjr9 4y ago
Maybe Bezos can start giving his fortune away philanthropically starting with these laid off people.

315 points by cocochanel 4y ago

Looks like a lot of new people will rush to http://www.bestpaidremotejobs.com http://www.bestpaidremotejobs.com again. The latest wave of followers came due to the latest Twitter and Meta layoffs.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Starting to feel like that site is a bit like the guy selling pickaxes to prospectors who have little chance of finding any gold.

noobermin 4y ago

There has been a lot of talk about a correction coming and a bubble bursting specifically in tech for years now. Is this it?

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
If so it’s very mild so far
- gedy 4y ago
  Agreed, these recent moves are not a great sign, but the dot com crash was so much worse from a people and company perspective. The moment that sticks with me is (former) employees wheeling all the Herman Miller chairs through the parking lot with the facilities guy holding the door open saying "Take it. Take it all..."
  - nkingsy 4y ago
    That’s every startup failing/divesting right? There’s a moment of chaos where priorities aren’t aligned and company assets disappear.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
Probably? But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point, though it probably will overshoot as these things usually do. Meta going from 47K employees in 2019 to 81K employees in about 3 years was just crazy, for example. How do you even assimilate that many new employees in such a short time?
- gwd 4y ago
  > But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point, That's what the word "correction" implies: That it's going down, not because the business itself is bad or anything in the market has fundamentally changed, but because it was valued "incorrectly" (where "insane" would be an extreme form of "incorrectness"), and that its value is being "corrected".
  - majormajor 4y ago
    I see UncleOxidant as saying it's a 2020-2021 correction, distinct from the larger talk of a correction that's been going around for years now even pre-Covid. I haven't seen signs of that latter, larger one yet. Fingers crossed...
    - UncleOxidant 4y ago
      Exactly. Look at graphs of employee growth at the large tech companies between 2019 and 2022 - we're lopping off some of that growth... probably will end up lopping off a lot of that growth before this is over.
sharemywin 4y ago
I just don't see where the tech growth is going to come from to keep the high multiples?
dvngnt_ 4y ago
the correction is happening now. the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor. The economy has since rebounded and companies are returning to previous levels. The war isn't helping however
- bogomipz 4y ago
  >"the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor." This is the really surprising thing to me - many(most?) of these companies are data driven companies. Companies with teams of analytics folks, data scientists, modeling-experts and teams of engineers working on tools to do ML and large scale data analytics. Do none of them actually use their tools and internal expertise to model their own hiring practices and historical market trends? Or maybe they did and always knew they would need to do mass layoffs when inevitably the cheap money pump got shut off?
  - anikom15 4y ago
    No amount of machine learning, analytics, statistics, models, and experts can predict the future.
    - bogomipz 4y ago
      No of course not but I would think it could certainly help to temper exuberance. Especially if you were considering a spectrum of uncertainties.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    I hope that if we've learned anything from the past few years, it's that you can interpret and manipulate data to make it say whatever you want to say. That's true even when analyzing data about the present, doubly so trying to predict the future. Being data-driven is a method for justifying decisions. But it's still a human making a decision in the end.
paxys 4y ago
People have been saying "the tech bubble is going to burst" since like 2011. The current round of job cuts and stock drops puts the industry back to ~mid 2020 levels. So it is definitely a correction, but hardly world ending.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Realistically they’ve been saying this since the 1950s
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    There was the dot com bubble burst in 2000, so there has actually been one. A few years after the 2008 crash sounds about right to when people started talking about tech bubbles again to me.
    - sqeaky 4y ago
      All the signs were there for everyone to see in the 2000 Dotcom Dotbomb. The root problem was a bunch of investors wildly investing in crappy tech companies, like tinder for cats. There were toxic assets, huge and publicly visible waste, low product output. This time, there is a lot more growth from many companies but we also see the results of that work, products and services exist as a result. There is waste but not like in 2000.
      - fnordpiglet 4y ago
        It wasn’t tinder for cats. It was pets.com that was the poster child.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      I lived and worked through it and I’ve not seen tech slow down measurably, even then. There was a correction, and a shake out, but then it picked up basically where it left off and shot up. There have been other busts over the last 70 years but they’re more like a system that overheats, slows, then resumes.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
All the layoffs announced (sans the Musking that just happened) are in line with normal annual attrition plus a bump given the huge hiring spree during the pandemic to meet pandemic demand. I’ll bet $20 if you took HC growth prepandemic and straight lined it through to today inclusive of layoffs you would see normal YoY growth between those two points, which an aberration in 20/21 of high hiring. I think you’ll see a bit of party hangover and if the whole economy sinks it’ll get worse. But overall I’ve not observed any material structural shift in the world or in tech, unlike say the dot com bust or the global financial crisis. There’s some cold spots though like real estate tech that’ll probably go through a tough time. I think a lot of folks here have never been through a down cycle before though and anything that’s not frantic growth and double digit comp growth YoY will feel like a nuclear winter.
P_I_Staker 4y ago
Yup, I'm worried about what else could fall, but I think this was a necessary correction, and hope this stays contained.

tamaharbor 4y ago

And they say we are not in a recession.

rvz 4y ago
Exactly. Also many said 'engineers are not affected!'. I'm sorry to say they are. The delusion and denial about how this is not a tech crash in 2022 is really quite hilarious and I do not believe that it is over just yet.
wittycardio 4y ago
We're in a downtown for the tech industry most other industries are fine
- boomer918 4y ago
  Tech eats the world. When tech goes down, its competitors go bankrupt.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Aren't all the big index funds tied to a couple tech giants and a smattering of other companies?
mc32 4y ago
It's now safe to admit we have been in one and don't have to play the strict interpretation and can carry on with the colloquial interpretation which had been good enough since ever.
rob74 4y ago
Sometimes a recession is also a self-fulfilling prophecy...
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I get we've been cooking the books and printing money during COVID, but shouldn't there be a raw productivity explosion in the US economy with COVID restrictions lifting? Suppressed consumption, increased output, etc? This does seem like some weird massive manipulation of the economy by the elites to grab more wealth and control. Or it's just some collective revenge against the various antiwork / worker empowerment / etc that came out of COVID to put the proles back in their place. Or maybe its just that a lot of investment dollars are drying up from overseas with inflation.

jstx1 4y ago

10 000 out of 1 500 000

colinmhayes 4y ago
1,500,000 includes all the hourly workers but my understanding is that the 10,000 is corporate. Still only 3% of corporate workers which is less than they pip every year
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  This is the second time in these comments I've seen this distinction held out as self-evidently meaningful. I sincerely do not understand, can someone please explain why laying off salaried workers matters but hourly ones does not?
  - bern4444 4y ago
    It is the nature of contract work to be temporary. A full time employee is definitionally a stricter contract between employer and employee that is expected to continue for a longer period of time and represents a more binding commitment. There is a meaningful distinction between the expected nature of the role and benefits of a contractor vs full time employee. This isn't to say that laying off contractors doesn't matter, but its not unexpected or as good of a means to understand a company's outlook.
  - tmellon2 4y ago
    Generally speaking the average annual wage of corporate workers (mostly engineers) will be in the six figures. Hourly wage workers take home (on average) median US annual wages. So laying of 10000 engineers (in terms of immediate $ costs) is the equivalent of laying of approximately 30000 to 50000 hourly wage workers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stackbutterflow 4y ago

green-eclipse 4y ago

https://archive.ph/2rwUi https://archive.ph/2rwUi

greatpostman 4y ago

1.6 million counts warehouse employees. Retail and Alexa corporate employees is probably 100k

green-eclipse 4y ago

This is just the latest round of cuts at Amazon: "From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition." Also: "Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months."

mjr00 4y ago
There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.
- green-eclipse 4y ago
  Agreed. I'm just illustrating that it's part of an ongoing pattern at Amazon. Not some new, shocking thing. I'd expect more in the future.
- hhh 4y ago
  Why?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  ...what is it? I really can't see a difference.
  - amflare 4y ago
    Hourly workers (unskilled labor) are flexible and cutting hours is almost as easy to reverse as it is to do in the first place. Cutting salaried employees (skilled labor) is a much harder and expensive decision to reverse. So doing so means that there is either a consistent issue that is not getting resolved, thus making them not worth the expense, or things are about to get so bad that the company feels that the savings are worth the loss of skilled labor. And clarify the difference between skilled and unskilled labor (which might make this make more sense), this is not a description of the work itself, but rather the barrier of entry. Anyone can be taken off the street and trained into an "unskilled" position with relative ease. That is not true for "skilled" positions though. Which is why Amazon's decision to start cutting corporate jobs represents a fundamental shift in their path going forward.

green-eclipse 4y ago

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

sokoloff 4y ago
$5B is around 1% of their (current) trailing 4 quarter revenue, which I would say is "not outrageous" if voice/home assistants is an area of growth and investment for Amazon. Why would a 2022 article be citing a 2018 loss figure for a almost surely (if my house is any indication) fast-growing segment?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  Amazon doesn’t release info about the Alexa category in their earnings, so any reporting can only rely on whatever figure has been leaked.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    That seems like reporting on Meta's 2022 losses in virtual reality in late 2026, which would seem absurd, even if that's the best/only information they have at that time. (At some point, you have to admit "we don't have any relevant information" rather than report on "the least irrelevant information we can find".)
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
      The story does note how old the figure is, so readers can take it with a grain of salt as appropriate. You could think of reporting on selective leaks like this as kind of a needling for Amazon to release more up-to-date info.
- green-eclipse 4y ago

tibbydudeza 4y ago

Covid boom is over ???.

bena 4y ago

This is weird because I'm in the middle of the interview process with a division of Amazon. Disclaimer: I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice. And here we go: I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their hiring goals" and I was transferred to another division. Through September and October, I organized the virtual on-site. And my interview was scheduled for last week. The weeks prior, as we know, the shit hit all the fans. I fully expected to get a "too bad, so sad" email saying my interview was cancelled. It wasn't. I went through the interview and I'm waiting to hear back currently. But yeah, I would not be surprised to get a rejection. But from the point of view of my experience, nothing they've done or said has made anything seem off.

latchkey 4y ago
Wow, you responded to one of those Amazon recruiters. I can see now that it is responses like this that encourages them to keep pushing. I've removed everything from my linkedin, except my current position, and the only people hitting me up are Amazon recruiters. In fact, once I edited my profile, the rate increased.
__derek__ 4y ago
You may well get an offer, but it will probably be deferred to 2023 if so. At Amazon, the interview loop makes a decision regardless of the viability/timing/placement of the actual offer made.
sakopov 4y ago
I remember reading somewhere that while Amazon is on a hiring freeze, they still hire to fill positions of those who left the company. So perhaps you're interviewing for one of them.
ripley12 4y ago
I've been in a similar situation recently. I passed the interview but the position I applied for (and was really interested in) is no longer open. The nice thing is that interview results at Amazon are valid for 6 months; my understanding is that once you pass the interviews you essentially have a free ticket for 1 job (at an equivalent level) anywhere in Amazon. And so waiting until things open up in 2023 is an option.

andrew_ 4y ago

Can't help but be reminded of this scene from "The Fifth Element" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg

sfpotter 4y ago
"One million... fine, sir... sorry to have disturbed you." looks like kicked puppy My personal favorite Gary Oldman role.
- supergeek133 4y ago
  Trivia.. he hated it and only did it as a favor to Luc Besson. Last I knew he's never even watched the movie.
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    which blows my mind because without him it wouldn't be a classic.

__derek__ 4y ago

> The company has sold hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. But Amazon has said the products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources such as voice shopping have not caught on. This is the game, right? For the first time since Alexa launched, Amazon is looking at a painful Q4, so the rest of retail can't cover up the Devices org's big wart.

rabuse 4y ago

This is going to be a terrible holiday season for a lot of people.

clarge1120 4y ago
And not just because of corporate layoffs.
- bonestamp2 4y ago
  I'm not disagreeing, but what are you referring to specifically?
  - Antrikshy 4y ago
    Maybe recession?
    - bonestamp2 4y ago
      Ya, must be, and maybe inflation. But, it would be nice to know in case there's something else that's not on our radar.
koheripbal 4y ago
Unemployment is still near historic lows.
- rabuse 4y ago
  I'm sure the thousands of people layed off and their families affected really care about that "record low unemployment".
  - bolt7469 4y ago
    Those people received generous severance packages, on top of government unemployment benefits.

dmix 4y ago

Did they also massively expand their staff during the pandemic like Twitter/FB did? Edit: looks like they grew headcount by 60% (+500,000 people) in 2020 and 23% (+310,000) in 2021. Today's announcement reduces headcount by 1% which is tiny compared to their growth. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

dehrmann 4y ago
Amazon headcount numbers are different because warehouse workers are counted in that.
grogenaut 4y ago
Amazon brought on like 300-400k warehouse workers and customer service numbers would also move when that happens. They have a LOT of those workers compared to corporate and engineering. And they move those numbers a lot as well.

fred_is_fred 4y ago

For those of you in the business who missed 2000-2002 and/or to a lesser extent 2008, you have no idea what is coming. Good luck.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
> to a lesser extent 2008 Why to a lesser extent? 2008 seemed far worse due to the overall recession impacts and the fact that it wasn't just tech companies. I got laid off from my tech job at a non-tech company for example. Both occurrences wrecked a lot of lives (mine included) though, I'll give you that.
- fred_is_fred 4y ago
  I think 2008 was broader but just from my own personal experience it seemed much worse for tech after the dot.com crash. I worked at the time selling server and storage hardware and after the dot.com crash you could get top of the line servers for pennies on the dollar - this was before AWS et al. It crippled sales for 2 years.
gilbetron 4y ago
Nobody has any idea what is coming. And I mean that literally in all ways.

allisdust 4y ago

The recession depending on who you ask seem to be either mild or not happening. All the government indicators (recent inflation, gdp, jobs report) seem to paint a thriving economy. So why are these companies still shedding jobs? I'm starting to wonder if the tech industry is disproportionately impacted similar to dot com bubble from 2000.

thwayunion 4y ago
1. Duration. A short and mild recession might be something you hold through. A decade of zero growth -- while technically "no recession for the next decade" -- is quite different, especially for companies (like tech) whose current employment levels are targeted toward growth. 2. Disparate impact. You can have low or no GDP decline while still seeing some sectors take massive short-term and long-term hits.
Gustomaximus 4y ago
I assume they see the recession coming and look to shed cost early rather than wait until deep into recession. Profits will be down so need to offset cost. Keep the share price high and get those option bonuses.

zackmorris 4y ago

Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP). Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn? The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has a negative net worth, so can't borrow anything: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-inequality-when-a-fair-shake-isnt/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-... To me, this looks like evidence that profit comes from offloading externalities onto the public. Ordinarily, workers could find work at other companies. But because companies are so large now, they have effective monopolies in markets like shipping. So layoffs could be used as a signal to bring companies up on antitrust charges.

z3rgl1ng 4y ago
My pet theory is this boils down to investor confidence. Executives get more comp in stock, cutting workers sends the right signal.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  I second that. These big corps are willing to pay contractor rates for thousands of workers and use phycological manipulation to balance it all out with FTEs. Contractor rate is often double+ FTE pay for the people they work alongside. All of this so they can report lower "employee" headcount.
- flashgordon 4y ago
  This exactly. Investors need regular signals that the exec team is on their side. These layoffs (especially in troubled economic conditions) are just the kind of rituals that do that.
whichfawkes 4y ago
Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities. Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other reasons you might bring antitrust against these companies.

jbaczuk 4y ago

And once these jobs open up again, the U.S. government will take credit for "creating" the new jobs.

clarge1120 4y ago

This could be Amazon anticipating a very slow holiday season.

blobbers 4y ago

Amazon lists employees at 1.6M employees worldwide. (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...) Even if they have 1% churn each month, that's about 16,000 turnover a month. Laying off 10,000 is not news until we find out where the cuts are happening.

joshuamarksmith 4y ago
This is specifically tech and corporate employees, which is a much smaller pool than the 1.6M you're quoting. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon (but also haven't stated any opinions)
- firstSpeaker 4y ago
  What is the ballpark of corporate employees count?
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Hard to tell but probably around 300K.
- blobbers 4y ago
  Yes, we know. That's why I specifically said it isn't news until we find out where those 10,000 people are being hit.

lbriner 4y ago

This is so completely normal in these industries that it is a non-headline. Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the shareholders are bothered about ROI. If you want to ride the unicorns and take the risk, that's fine, but there are plenty of people around the world who have far fewer choices with their work and are paid far less so I don't feel too bad that someone's Christmas might be not as expected. If you want job security, get a job somewhere that isn't trying to earn their next billion, where you can make a difference, where you are appreciated and where work/life balance means something. I expect you would feel much better :-)

datavirtue 4y ago
Wish I could figure out how to do an Ask HN for non-profit hiring. My previous attempts failed.
- jpk2f2 4y ago
  Non-profits do layoffs too, unfortunately. In some ways it's almost worse as there's less padding before they're losing money.
  - micro_cam 4y ago
    Grant funded non profit research is at least pretty predictable. You know you are on a 2-5 year grant and you can help apply for the next one.
- nobodyandproud 4y ago
  Try government. Though I had no luck finding government jobs, because the red tape is ridiculous.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago

nightski 4y ago

It's fascinating how there are so many layoffs going on across the economy and yet unemployment is staying so low.

chasd00 4y ago
i think layoffs happen much faster than reporting. also, there's just a lot of people out there and tech is only a small piece of the overall labor market.
mandeepj 4y ago
> yet unemployment is staying so low. Let the severance period end.
adam_arthur 4y ago
Because 10k here and there is pretty meaningless relative to the total size of the labor market. These layoffs only get press due to the brand names of the companies

yrgulation 4y ago

Coordinated actions aimed at depressing tech wages and forcing return to office.

FabianBeiner 4y ago

Meanwhile, they built the “Amazon Tower” in Berlin (the highest skyscraper in Berlin right now) and are looking to fill it with around 4,000 employees in 2024: https://www-tagesspiegel-de.translate.goog/berlin/hochster-turm-berlins-steht-140-meter-hoch-ist-der-umstrittene-neubau-edge-8742337.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-tagesspiegel-de.translate.goog/berlin/hochster-t...

prometheus76 4y ago

I remember when NYT took pride in its headline writing.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective. > The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things. So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global). Update: Tried to figure out whether the doubling head count was corporate employees or total. I don't have time to dig into it now but a quick search did turn up Amazon's EEO reports in which they break employees down into a number of categories including "Professionals" -- which sounds like it would include engineers. 77K in 2019, 121K in 2021. So it's reasonable to assume those did double from 2019 to the present. See https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-data https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-dat...

firstSpeaker 4y ago
Is that "doubled its work force" for the corporate roles or entire amazon?
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  see edit to my post above
san_dimitri 4y ago
I am assuming the "doubling" might have come from delivery drivers and workers at warehouses mostly. Looks like the good folks who are let go are now mostly from non-engineering.
secondcoming 4y ago
I clearly remember growing up in the 1980's and later and hearing about mass redundancies happening during a bad economy. It was newsworthy because of the potential devastation these events would have had on an area; as in some people may never be employed _ever again_. It's why Ireland gave so many tax breaks to Apple; they employed thousands from one city. Layoffs would have made an already bad situation far worse.

1letterunixname 4y ago

From people who work high-up in AWS, I heard this doesn't generally affect them.

arcturus17 4y ago
I'm guessing it's a much more recession-proof line of business.
oblio 4y ago
Them as in higher-ups or did they mean it won't affect their low level workers?

googlryas 4y ago

Funny, I've been getting recruiter spam every week from the same set of people, and their last email 3 weeks ago was titled "AWS - This could be the last chance to join the team!!!"

peplee 4y ago

Not sure if other states have a similar system, but Washington posts information about layoffs here: https://esd.wa.gov/about-employees/WARN https://esd.wa.gov/about-employees/WARN. Looks like Amazon Health Services is getting cut as part of this.

Chamix 4y ago
The news here is that amazon is going to start the 2 month+ WARN period for a much larger set of orgs this week. Amazon Care/Health Service layoffs are old news.

madduci 4y ago

Will they use the 10-15% cut like everyone else?

imwillofficial 4y ago

Well shit

elforce002 4y ago

Amazon really is something else. Loyalty is really expensive and there'll come a day when they will learn that the hard way. I know these layoffs are because of the uncertainty of the economy but they already have bad rep with things like "hire to fire" candidates, etc...

samanator 4y ago

Why did this never make it to the front page of hackernews? I had to search it up to find it.

rapjr9 4y ago

Maybe Bezos can start giving his fortune away philanthropically starting with these laid off people.