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Here’s a thought that has been percolating in my mind for a bit since these “market adjustments” began a month or two back. Somehow at some point, in what perh

Here’s a thought that has been percolating in my mind for a bit since these “market adjustments” began a month or two back. Somehow at some point, in what perhaps could be blamed on the ever-hated mass produced MBAs - companies got really comfortable with the “it’s not personal, it’s just good business” of letting go of their employees for a slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all - just to make it look to their investors like they got their shit together. We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? And this brings me to my main point - I think years of this has had an unexpected side-effect the companies never signed up for: people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. Now I am not saying it’s all new, but at least in my observation it’s peaking now and my thesis is these things are connected.

smrtinsert 4y ago
Software unions are starting to seem inevitable.
eqmvii 4y ago
Companies are in the business of predicting the market in a quarter, a year, 5 years, etc. They got it wrong and overhired. There's ample evidence of that, and of cooling demand - now and in the future.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  They got sucked into the "new normal" that never was, and was never going to be. We are seeing a massive return to the old normal, which means people are going back to offices (not WFH) people are going back to shopping in person not online, people are going back to eating in restaurants not using Grub Hub or ordering online. etc etc etc
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I think you are wrong. Not completely, but I think you missed the massive change in attitudes that took place the past few years. WFH is likely going to stay in some shape or form since it is clear it can work ( and heavens know emplopyers full remote positions have their pick of qualified candidates ) and likely some RTO will follow ( with another round of - likely muted due to recession - resignations ), but I would hesitate to conclude that good old days are here again. I am not going back.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      WFH and ft remote was always a thing. It was not invented for COVID. So of course some WFH positions will still exist but based on my alerts for different roles the number of full time WFH jobs have dropped off the cliff back down to what I would consider precovid levels
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  Can they beat the Dow Jones also?
- metadat 4y ago
  No company has the slightest clue what the economic environment will look like in 3 years, much less 5.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Hence the layoffs. They still have to try though
    - metadat 4y ago
      Do they really need to "try" by laying peole off? Why is this the standard move despite the business and finances still booming? It's a weird MBA monkey mimicry game. I dislike Amazon yet continue to order stuff at the same rate. How many non-government entities have a base like this? Seems like an enviable position. How many layoff announcements have you seen where the company says "We'd love to keep pursuing this but we flat out can't afford to pay you, we are out of money"? I've seen zero. I understand some of this is prudent financial planning, especially for SMBs, but SFDC and AMZN.. they must be using different calculus. Amazon appears less dependent on the nearly-free-money-gravy-train compared to most businesses, especially VC and startups. Edit: dkrich's comment states it better than I can in every way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254450
      - HDThoreaun 4y ago
        Companies, especially tech companies, invest in their future. Sometimes those bets don’t pay off, sometimes it’s because of external factors. That doesn’t mean those were bad bets necessarily, they just got unlucky. It does mean investors want them to move on to something else though, even if the company as a whole isn’t in a crisis.
      - lmm 4y ago
        If your best guess for what the market is going to be in 3-5 years is now half what you were guessing last week, surely that means you make some changes, and past a certain point you want to make a bigger change than what's going to happen by just freezing hiring and waiting for natural attrition. I'm no fan of companies doing this, but the logic makes sense.
partiallypro 4y ago
Amazon and all of these companies are laying people off based on future forecasts, not based on the current economy. Regardless of if people are first, no company wants teams sitting around not doing anything. I've been laid off, it sucks, but just because Amazon is making money today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow.
- dkrich 4y ago
  What’s unusual about this cycle though is that it’s the fear of a recession due to fed policy that is causing companies to cut back. In past cycles fed policy caused a recession nobody predicted and companies suddenly found their earnings in the toilet and made enormous cuts in head count, R&D spending, etc. Something about this cycle and these cuts feels I dunno, manufacturered or something. Like are 7k high paying jobs at a salesforce indicative of an economy collapsing while the overall labor market is still extremely tight and you’re not hearing about similar layoffs throughout all industries? All of these cuts seem to be follow the leader because we’re worried and I would not be that surprised to see the reality in the overall economy be much better than feared and these same companies hiring again before year end. It probably doesn’t hurt from the c level perspective that Wall Street tends to welcome job cuts at least in the short term. Although it can certainly do lasting damage to morale within a company.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    There’s preliminary data that shows a recession is currently underway. This is reactionary. if the fed cuts rates and stop’s quantity tightening then sure, Amazon will likely u-turn. But that’s due to a situational change.
    - dkrich 4y ago
      I think a great deal of this situation is narrative based. People are generally terrible at predicting earnings six months out as well as recessions and if we get a major recession it would easily be the most widely anticipated recession in history. First it starts with higher than expected CPI followed by hawkish fed policy. People learned their lesson last cycle and became worried that rate hikes as in past cycles would cause a deep recession and began adjusting immediately rather than wait for a recession. This is evidenced by the fact that the S&P peaked about four months before the Fed even hiked one time. That’s a very important point that I think many overlook. When you are completely ignorant of impending danger you are most susceptible to damage. When you’re terrified of getting punched in the face you’re going to take drastic measures to protect yourself and in the process likely not get punched at all. Meanwhile rates have moved very little in 3 months indicating (to me at least) that the bond market believes rate hikes are ending very soon.
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
From yesterday, "Amazon secures $8 billion term loan": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240271. So Amazon does seem to want to have extra cash on hand for some reason.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Probably to add it to their Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
sneak 4y ago
Both parties treating the transaction as simply a business transaction is a good thing for society. Pretending that there is some value to "loyalty" in a vendor/customer relationship is silly, and only hurts you. Job hopping is a good thing for price discovery, and keeps wages for skilled workers going up as inflation eats away at them. Layoffs in downturns are an expected consequence of workers getting more expensive (ie capturing more of their economic value in their paychecks).
- kcb 4y ago
  > Both parties treating the transaction as simply a business transaction is a good thing for society. Maybe. But not when Healthcare is on the line. That part still need to be fixed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results. It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically. They are adjusting as appropriate. Also, these people will be laid off with severance. They were compensated toward the top of market (considering all tech companies) while they were employed. They have Amazon on their resume, which makes future job easier than average. I’m really not concerned about laid off (with severance) FAANG employees relative to the people earning literally 1/10th their comp who are losing jobs without severance. > people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. I really don’t think this is an appropriate comparison. The whole “quiet quitting” thing isn’t going to hurt companies like Amazon because they’ll just PIP the person out and replace them with the tens of thousands of qualified people wanting to get hired at Amazon and do good work. When some “quiet quits” it’s usually their peers who pay the price because the absentee coworker isn’t get their part of the team project done. Makes more work for everyone else, makes groups projects late, and potentially brings down performance reviews of people depending on their work to get their own work done. It’s not fair to write “quiet quitting” off as only affecting the company, because the company is going to be fine. It’s the coworkers who bear the brunt. (Source: Had some “quiet quit” team members over my career, suffered greatly during those times)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- twelve40 4y ago
  > They have Amazon on their resume the parent comment talks about "these companies". what happens when less prominent companies take a cue from fangs and start booting people out, only with crappier severance and crappier resumes? this is far from the last layoff.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You make sure you have savings and don’t depend on the benevolence of any company…
ericmay 4y ago
Or maybe the MBA graduates are just fixing the sinking ship that engineering teams created with over-promising technology and demanding growth for their teams so that they could get bigger budgets: VR, meal delivery, AI, etc. ? I have an MBA man I wish I was one of these master of the universes deciding to hire and fire 17,000 people at a company. Do you need the Stanford MBA, Harvard, Wharton? Does Berkeley suffice these days or do you still need the private Ivy League degree first?
- mancerayder 4y ago
  I thought product teams were responsible for that. Engineers just do.
  - ericmay 4y ago
    In the business world the engineers are like the Wehrmacht.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
This was covered in ArsTechnica [1] and it seems like they are laying off a large portion of the Alexa team because it doesn't make a profit. I bought the Alexa when it first came out and it had and still has a great UI. When the Alexa launched I made a skill on the platform which I don't think anyone really downloaded. What confused me the most was Amazon never allowed for paid skills (which I really think was an extremely bad move) and it appears they just internally justified it as a loss leader but no developer would touch it from a ten foot pole. Cutting something that is a cost center is pretty much standard if you aren't showing as much growth that is expected for you. Therefore, cutting something that costs you ten billion dollars sounds pretty justified to me when they could have profited from it instead. EDIT: Guess I didn't do my research about paid skills... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  https://developer.amazon.com/it-IT/docs/alexa/paid-skills/overview.html https://developer.amazon.com/it-IT/docs/alexa/paid-skills/ov...
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  This is a newer layoff than the one previously covered. Knowing Amazon, they probably needed people to handle the holiday stress, and now they’re laying off more people.
- chihuahua 4y ago
  Alexa is a bit of a mystery. The plan apparently was: 1. Sell millions of devices at cost. Unrelenting sales on Echo devices 2. ??? 3. Profit And Step 2 was never filled in. Maybe it was "if people can re-order paper towels by shouting at Alexa, we'll sell more paper towels". But that plan has its limits.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    What's the mystery? It was to get in on the device platform game: walled garden, app store, ads, subscriptions, control, etc., same as Google, Apple, Meta, and even Microsoft and Sony.
ptero 4y ago
Being able to easily lay off employees means that the companies are much happier hiring, too. Most of those fired will likely land another job soon, precisely because their new employer does not have to treat their hiring as a multi-year commitment. Europe, which makes it very hard to let an employee go, tends to have significantly higher unemployment than the US, which is much more cavalier about layoffs. My 2c.
- gwright 4y ago
  Almost as if TANSTAAFL.
  - metadat 4y ago
    First encounter with this initialism. TANSTAAFL / TINSTAAFL "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp Also, if I may add: I wish there were more substance in your comment. This non-sequitur was disappointing.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gwright 4y ago
      Yeah, there could have been a lot more substance but to be honest a disappointingly large number participants here don't seem to understand that very basic principle when they engage in discussions here. To be clear, the parent to my comment seemed to completely understand TANSTAAFL. My comment was very obliquely directed at other participants in the larger conversation who seem to think that there is no legitimate reason for an employer to ever let a single employee go because any competent business will work like an oracle and make perfect business decisions always. Any unexpected outcome must be because they are greedy corporate monsters that don't care about their employees. (my apologies for the exaggeration but you should have seen what I wrote and deleted previously :-)
      - deleted 4y ago
dcchambers 4y ago
Has the relationship between employer and employee ever felt more transactional?
- scarface74 4y ago
  I’ve worked professionally since 1996. There has never been a day in my professional career that I thought of any job as any more than a means to support my addiction to food and shelter
  - dcchambers 4y ago
    > addiction to food and shelter well put :)
WalterBright 4y ago
I long ago concluded that the way to make pots o' money is to: 1. go out for a walk. Offer the first good looking man a CEO-ship of your new company. 2. pay him $$$$$ 3. hire loads of people 4. fire them all 5. goto 3
- chihuahua 4y ago
  In this scheme, where do the pots 'o money come from?
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    Not that bright a plan.
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    Alexa integration?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Steps 2 and 4 are what the internet tells me are the moneymakers.
i_have_an_idea 4y ago
I have no opinion on the MBA bit, but I think you're spot on about people starting to treat companies the way the companies are treating them. ~10 years ago, when I got my first job, I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource", how important is the company "culture" and all of that corporate kumbaya. And, at that point, the vast majority of people around me cared and wanted to do a good job, going up and beyond. Fast forward to now, and pretty much everyone has the attitude of "f**k these guys", doesn't want to be there and will do the bare minimum to get by. And that's exactly what companies have demonstrated that they deserve. People are tired of job hopping to get market pay, dealing with bulls**t, and being thrown under the bus at the slightest hint of an economic downturn.
- thfuran 4y ago
  >I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource" You tread in strange circles. I'd think a cursory look at history ought to be enough to put the lie to such claims.
  - peruvian 4y ago
    It's crazy to think but people do drink the kool-aid, despite history.
    - shigawire 4y ago
      Some companies operate differently too. Obviously they still watch the bottom line, but some aren't as reactionary and are willing to take more pain to keep employees because they understand the value of that goodwill. More commonly private companies with a strong-willed founder/leader.
      - 542458 4y ago
        Agreed. I work for a privately held company and am a bit less jaded about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the company is my friend or anything… but I know how much the owner hates layoffs on an emotional level and have seen the company do things like shifting everybody to 4.5 day weeks temporarily to avoid the need for layoffs. So I respect that.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Or...the strongest survive. Amazon being one of the strongest, obviously. That is, and MBAs thinking longer term would know, it's not a downturn. It's opportunity. Opportunity to come out the otherside even strong. Jeff is saying "save your money." Amazon is saying "we're cutting." It's self-fulfilling. And once it's over Amazon rein will be even further solidified.
aswanson 4y ago
Bro Ive been on some "business is business, it's strictly financial..." energy with employers since day zero. I pity the fool that never took a financial relationship for anything more than what it is.
nkozyra 4y ago
This is a wonderful observation. When I was a kid my dad said "companies won't think twice about dumping you, don't worry about dumping them." But he worked in the same place for forty years. Sometimes he was treated well, sometimes he wasn't. It occurs to me what a relic that world is but also how it sounded bizarre when my dad said that to me in the early 00s. At that time there were still "lifers" all over that place. Or people who spent 10-20 years working up in the same company. That's all gone now. Everything is more ephemeral, more disposable. I'm not sure if it's a good thing but I'm pretty sure signing up to be a "company man" wasn't, either.
- alexchantavy 4y ago
  The other day I heard on here the phrase "cattle, not pets" used as how to treat servers. This seems useful in this context too.
  - scruple 4y ago
    Replaceable cogs, yes, that's been the push regarding programmers since the 80s? Earlier? Plenty of articles and rants online to read about the phenomenon as it specifically relates to programming going back to the 90s, also probably earlier, too.
  - fijiaarone 4y ago
    The reason you have to pay for a cloud of virtual chickens, is because you can’t get decent bandwidth on a few free range beef & dairy cattle. A single well tended rack in a closet on-site, with a few single cpu servers hosting multiple applications, a SAN, and a fat data pipe could replace hundreds of Kubernetes clusters — if there wasn’t a cartel on network speed.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
“Quiet quitting” = rational behavior
Guthur 4y ago
For me I've decided to avoid US companies as much as I can. It does not help our societies to facilitate the siphoning of our local wealth to enrich foreign companies. Especially ones that have such disregard for their own, imagine their view of the rest of us.
anonreeeeplor 4y ago
I believe that there is a power swing about to happen where talented individuals may get a lot more powerful and influential in relation to institutions and corporations. I liken it to how MANPADS allow individual soldiers to overpower tanks for far cheaper, flipping the script on 100 years of war. It hasn’t fully come to pass yet but corporations hire way too many “credential dead weight.” In my career I have often been completely outraged at how bad credentialed people are in the pure talent department. Some of the most credentialed people who automatically get top roles really are not that smart versus some of the other people I know. Corporations and institutions favor credentials. Individuals who have talent are very different and hopefully will go much further in current market.
- ojbyrne 4y ago
  The “ADS” part of MANPADS stands for “air defense system,” so kind of a malformed analogy.
  - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
    Air defense is to MANPADS as cloud is to Individual developer?
- midoridensha 4y ago
  MANPADS is for shooting down aircraft ("ADS" = air defense system). You're thinking of the Javelin and NLAW anti-tank weapons. Anti-tank rockets have been around for many decades; they're nothing new, but the latest ones are just more effective and have better range. IIRC, the Javelin itself was designed and first deployed back in the 1990s, so it's not exactly new either. What's new in the Ukraine conflict is that Russians apparently don't know how to (or just can't) properly operate tank battalions. Back to MANPADS: man-portable anti-aircraft weapons aren't new either. The US was giving Stingers to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s to shoot down Soviet aircraft.
  - anonreeeeplor 4y ago
    I am in the Ukrainian army. Sometimes, for fun, we shoot MANPADS at the tanks because we already took down all the jets. It’s super fun you should try enlisting.
dexterdog 4y ago
> What happened to “people are our most important resource”? That is a line that is exclusively used by dishonest businesses. If people are more important than money the business will cease to exist eventually.
hintymad 4y ago
> but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? I'm not sure if this is the way a company thinks, even if they wouldn't have pressure from investors or worries for future survival (they would, BTW). Instead, some companies, likely Amazon too, view such cut as necessity for two reasons: bloated organizations slow everyone down, while diluting the company's culture; it's a great chance to trim the low performers. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to explain the underlying logic. > people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results Reid Hoffman wrote a book, The Alliance, which advocates that employees and companies are not family, but for an alliance. When they both have the right goal, they work towards the goal. When they don't, they part ways. Similarly, Netflix's Reed Hastings advocated that companies are like professional sports teams. A professional sports team is brutal when it comes to trading its players, but it does not mean the players will not pull their weights. I personally think the two views are more realistic and help employees advance their careers.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Most workers at large companies are seen as fungible cogs. Even the engineers. What you describe feels, unfortunately, like an antiquated idea from the 1900s. I think we need more unions, more automation, and more social security. We are racing towards a future where there simply won’t be enough “jobs” for everyone and the companies sure as heck aren’t going to look out. Companies have no soul and the humans that run them have worked hard to insulate themselves from that being responsible for the actions of that lack of soul they instilled.
- nxm 4y ago
  I disagree. What you describe is Western Europe with depressed wages and less innovation and dynamic economy. You can’t regulate/unionize into prosperity.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028087
  - lmm 4y ago
    What's "prosperity"? I feel much better off with a decent work-life balance and the assurance that I won't arbitrarily lose my job than I would with a larger number in my bank account but none of that protection.
    - ryan93 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - lmm 4y ago
        > you can literally start a company with the coworkers you would have unionized with and created security for yourself and them. I can, but we'd still be taking on a bunch of risk - we'd have to put the capital into the company, as owners we would no longer be eligible for unemployment insurance if the company did fold, we have the possibility of one of us kicking another out so internal politics suddenly matters - when the whole point of the exercise was to get stability even at the cost of some upside.
PheonixPharts 4y ago
> Are they in danger of running out of money? Have we been in a bubble so long that people have forgotten that the raison d'etre for publicly traded companies existing is not to simply exist, but rather make profit and ideally continually expanding profit for share holders? For a startup runway and growth of whatever nature are all that matter. You need to exist long enough for the exit event, and grow in a way that makes this more possible. If you have a two year runway, you have two more years to win your investors back their money and more. But this is not true for publicly traded companies. Simply surviving or, even worse, slowly burning reserves is not enough. I know so many post-IPO startup employees that dismiss layoffs because "the company has tons of cash!" Do you invest in a company because you think it won't go out of business for a decade? No you invest because their profit margins are healthy and you think they'll continue to grow in a sustainable, net revenue positive way. I still remember the dotcom bubble, which was much shorter than what we've been in, and the public debate among investors was about the "new economy" and claims that "things are different now". However those old fuddy-duddies that kept arguing that companies need to make more than they spend were proven right in just a few years. Today I see CEOs and executive leadership at companies genuinely surprised that they're being asked to prove that they can be profitable. I see generations of tech workers sincerely confused about the very idea of what it means to run a successful business. Amazon is doing massive layoffs because they need to show investors that the know how to create value, and become more profitable. At least Amazon has shown periodically that they can make profit. There are plenty of post-IPO startups that have never proven that they are even capable of not running at a loss.
- mint2 4y ago
  > “the raison d'etre for publicly traded companies existing is not to simply exist, but rather make profit and ideally continually expanding profit for share holders” Should be noted the ideology that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize the profits for shareholder above all else is a modern obsession, and always takes a short term view. Starving a company just for a few good years of share prices is is dumb but often what that ideology leads to. Making profit is part or what a corporation should do, maximizing it above all else is not. Similarly HOAs are supposed to maximize house value but funny how some of the highest property values are places like Palo Alto that aren’t known for HOAs.
etempleton 4y ago
No problem hiring and firing. Hiring for no reason. Setting a random employee growth target and then hiring to that level to only then fire the same amount of people a couple of years later. It is irresponsible growth targets followed by irresponsible cut backs.
Patrol8394 4y ago
> “people are our most important resource” Did you ever believe it? It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource. I have been around for long enough and I have learned that a job is just a contract between parties and it exists for as long as both parties can benefit from it. Don't get caught up in the whole companies family kind of bs or get too emotionally and culturally attached to your employer. Always be on the look up for opportunities and take them. Never stop learning and investing in yourself. Knowledge and experience are your most important asset, keep nurturing them. Also, I wanted to believe that a good chunk of these layoffs should have seen this coming. One must be aware at all time of how valuable (if at all) are for their employer.
- vgel 4y ago
  > It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource. Relevant joke: An engineer is messaging with her boss on Slack after hours. The boss is talking about how his brother is in the hospital. The engineer asks "What are you gonna do?" and the boss responds "Well, he is family..." The engineer says "You're gonna make him come in on weekends?!"
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    "The engineer says 'What? Should I just let him go?'" There might be a joke in there somewhere. But your version have bugs.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> it’s not personal, it’s just good business What message does that send to the employees who stick it out who are expected to "give a part of their lives" for the company? Sacrifice, go the extra mile, "what can you do for the company versus what can the company do for you"?
dasil003 4y ago
I hate to break this to you, but the decline of company-employee loyalty started 40 years ago, and even before that it only existed as a result of unprecedented post-war prosperity and lack of global competition. This doesn't mean that it's all downside for employees though. Amazon grew a huge business and paid their corporate employees top of market with huge upside over the last 20 years due to their phenomenal growth. It was a very good deal for those who worked in Amazon corporate over the last 20 years—a lot of people got richer than their parents ever could have gotten in the previous generation of more stable corporate jobs. But make no mistake, Amazon is not a magic pot of gold, they still have a P&L like any other company. 17,000 employees are not cheap. Amazon grew from 800k employess to 1.3m and then 1.6m at the end of 2019, 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic. It is to be expected that their forecasts were not completely accurate in light of the generational event and tech sea change that the pandemic brought. The fact that people are scandalized by this is indicative of how insane the 12-year bull run for tech really was.
- htag 4y ago
  > they still have a P&L like any other company Amazon's quarterly reports have all been good so far (Q3 2022 is the latest). Sales are up 15% YoY, and they are profitable.
  - imglorp 4y ago
    The coldest view would be the holiday buying surge is over and they can shed some excess to pad that margin until next fall.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Wall St demands growth. Their revenue in 2019 was up 20%. Some of their investments are boat anchors pulling the companies profits down.
    - htag 4y ago
      15% in Q3 2022 is a larger dollar amount than 20% in Q3 2019...
twblalock 4y ago
> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? That's not the logic we should expect from companies in a competitive market economy. Companies that think like that will eventually pile up so many bad decisions that they will fail -- and then everyone gets laid off!
FpUser 4y ago
>"What happened to “people are our most important resource”?" Nothing. But one particular group believes that is is more "equal" than the others.
mancerayder 4y ago
>Somehow at some point, in what perhaps could be blamed on the ever-hated mass produced MBAs - companies got really comfortable with the “it’s not personal, it’s just good business” of letting go of their employees for a slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all - just to make it look to their investors like they got their shit together. Financial services (banks, investment firms, etc.) have been doing this for decades. It might feel revolutionary to a comfortable recent tech company existence, but I'm afraid to say this is the norm. Companies can hire quickly when they think they'll grow, and fire en masse when the tide turns.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I have an MBA and I actually agree. I currently only have some anecdata to back it up ( most of my younger coworkers have a more combative if not ronin-like approach to employers ). Personally, I get it. I had company decide to close doors in our state and I was forced to looks elsewhere, but the management there did make a difference ( acceptable severance based on seniority, help with finding new jobs and so on ) and certainly did see some uncool behavior in my career. That said, I had some minor hopes for the current post-Covid world, because it, however briefly, looked like employees understood what standing together meant and that WFH is something that can easily be done in some positions ( and is artificially dosed as a reward to special ones ). For better or worse, the coming recession will confirm whether I had hoped for too much. FWIW, I am staying mostly remote ( as is most of my team now ). I already told no HR once. I am getting more and more comfortable daily with more otherwise uncomfortable situations despite clearly changing winds and better corporate propaganda ( they did learn from initial fiascos ).
throwawaylinux 4y ago
> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? People are an important resource, certainly for a company like Amazon, and probably the most expensive too. But I don't understand the argument -- you don't just throw money around like that on any other resource. Certainly up until this year it was a seller's market in tech and I saw a lot of movement to chase bigger salaries (which is fine and people should try to get what they want while the getting's good). > And this brings me to my main point - I think years of this has had an unexpected side-effect the companies never signed up for: people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. Now I am not saying it’s all new, but at least in my observation it’s peaking now and my thesis is these things are connected. I'm not sure it is, and I'm not sure if you can assign the "blame" (if there is any) to one side. I think as I said the workers have had a red hot run for quite a few years and it was those peaking conditions that drove the peak in their dissatisfaction. Conditions are going the other way now and people will try to hold their jobs a bit more I expect. And what started the trend from people being lifetime company men to almost no loyalty? I doubt the ruling class one day got together and decided they'd stop treating workers well. It's surely a lot of factors on all sides. People have far more generational wealth including the investment in education, than in the early 1900s, and there are at least some social safety nets, so job loss might be considered less risky. It has become increasingly easier to advertise, search, apply, recruit for jobs outside the local region with telephone, fax, then internet, email. I'm not sure what you'd prefer. Certainly people shouldn't be tied down to companies. Should corporations be made to keep people on long after they're costing more than they're producing? When you look at government and places with undue union power (police comes to mind), you get a lot of incompetence, corruption, and just poor organizations where crap floats to the top and they could never compete without enforced monopolies. Unfortunately it never turns places into egalitarian utopias.
mc32 4y ago
Both parties should see the relationship as bi-directional and symbiotic. Sometimes you have to find a different symbiotic relationship after the one you have has run its course. It does not need to be interpreted as adversarial where you want to get as much out of them as you can for as little effort as possible and neither should they see it as an opportunity to suck the employee dry. It only works while your goals align with the company's goals. There should be a mutual understanding --a meeting of the minds. I give you this for that. But, yes, ultimately, the company is not your friend. HR is definitely not your fiend. You should have friends outside the company. At work you have colleagues and co-workers. It's not to say you cannot cultivate friendships at work that last beyond your time there, but don't presume it to be your source of friends.
JakeAl 4y ago
> it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? Amazon just had to take out an $8B unsecured loan to be paid back in a year to cover operating and capital expenses. Despite what the government is telling you, things are really bad and about to get a lot worse. The lowest hanging fruit/the least valuable employees get cut first. That's how they stay in business. That's the smart business move unless they can pivot. Companies can't just borrow and spend anymore they actually have to be sustainable. Amazon gets loans to buy inventory and equipment and pay employees so they can stock their warehouse and then they pay back those loans later after it's sold. If they don't sell that inventory because consumers have no money they still have to make loan payments so it becomes more costly to them over time and if they want to break even they have to raise prices. This is inflation. The Fed raising interest rates makes borrowing money to do this more expensive so they don't do it or do it less. Money in the economy evaporated in November 2021 with the announcement of Quantitative Tightening and the end of Quantitative Easing. That means getting loans and free money became expensive and private investment in the markets/companies evaporated. This forces inflation to come down because they can't keep borrowing and inflating. They have to stock just what they can easily sell or they find themselves imploding as they can't pay back their loans. Pretty much every industry is going through this, hence all the industries collapsing. You will see a lot of companies that have been struggling go out of business. Why is this happening? Free money basically. Our government pandered to political interests (voters and cronies) and overspent for decades, kicking the can down the road and we're now at the end of the road. The US debt to GDP ratio has been over 120% since 2020 which by IMF definition is an economic death spiral. That means the US is underwater, we don't produce enough money as a nation to pay our bills. By 2028 that death spiral will become irreversible, meaning the payments we make on our loans for all that free money --the bailout money, stimulus checks, the entitlements, that omnibus, the inflation reduction act-- will only go to the interest and no longer the principal. That sets us on track to be insolvent by 2042. Yeah I know, crazy right? But why? Because when this happens all those companies and private investors that poured money into stocks and venture capital can't rely on them for profits so they instead buy government bonds. They don't give as high of a return but it's guaranteed money in a down economy so they do it. The result is the governmnet receives the money they need to pay their bills and all the those living off free money get a reality check and have to live and operate within their means. And balance is restored to the universe. Unless people try to cash out their bonds and find the government is bankrupt. This is why government spending is bad folks. They manipulate the economy to prop it up and print money until the Ponzi scheme fails. Rinse and repeat or pass a balanced budget amendment and demand our government stop spending money on pointless wars and entitlements that buy them votes or kickbacks. As long as there is government debt, as long as the government exists, the cycle will repeat. We'll just have to wait and see if we survive this time. Where we are at the end of the road is unprecedented. This has been building since we got off the gold standard which is what allowed them to overspend money we don't have. Historically this is when there's a world war or a collapse of civilization/Dark Age because most nations are in the same boat. Decadence gets the better of us and lack of restraint (dare I say, conservative behavior) leads to this moment in history once more. Obviously there's more nuance to it than just that, but that's a concise rough summary of what's going on.
kubectl_h 4y ago
There is an interesting exchange in Bourdains "Parts Unknown" [1] that he did in Montana where he's talking to a former labor leader and politician from Butte where he says "the company is a son of a bitch, but they were our son of a bitch" (very much worth watching the entire show, but in particular the Butte segment). I grew up in a union family and that held true of the union as well. Something changed in my lifetime (I'm 40 years old) and I really do think it was NAFTA and free trade in general, but also it was the US reaching a terminal state of resource extraction, or at least the level of resource extraction we were willing to tolerate. The two of these weakened unions and worker solidarity and slowed the profit momentum that we had become accustom to and gave carte blanche to corporations to seek local profits in remote places. I think this fundamentally changed the dynamic of being a worker across all industries and, as you allude to, the focus on organizational optimization (coupled with quarterly earnings focused business culture) only heightened the alienation of workers and now the chicken is coming home to roost for the entire American project. Aside from deindustrialization and optimization, I think much of this can be laid at the foot of the stock market and our collective fixation on it as a barometer for societal success. [1] https://youtu.be/KU7mda-4KwQ?t=1232 https://youtu.be/KU7mda-4KwQ?t=1232
- patentatt 4y ago
  In the 90's the Democratic party abandoned the labor movement because they thought they could get more votes from moderate republicans if they spew the same free market and free trade ideology. And Clinton did that and won, so since then there's been a cohort of political leaders on the left that firmly believe that this is the right and correct path. Literally the same people, they've been in power for 30-40 years. What they miscalculated was that Clinton won the presidency because of his insane charisma and also the Ross Perot spoiler on the right, not the free market stuff. But it was enough cover to dismantle the long-term alliance of the labor movement and the Democratic party.
weatherlite 4y ago
> but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? Stock price crashed. This effects the bonuses/equity of a bunch of employees, some of whom are on the executive levels. Cutting on employment is a very effective method to raise profits and help the stock price. It sucks but that's what the market (investors) like. This is just capitalism ...we've all signed up for this (I guess?).
wdr1 4y ago
> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Um, yes? Honestly, I'm not sure how one could sincerely make this statement. Amazon's net income for Q3 '22 is roughly a third of its net income Q4 '21. If losing 2/3rds of your revenue isn't considered hitting the pocketbook, I don't want is. Now you could yada yada yada they're still profitable, but that's a different argument. Amazon was seeing 20-30% growth of its revenue. Their expenses were also growing at a similar base. Now that top line revenue isn't there, they need to address how to address bottom line growth.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Net income is not revenue, so you got your signals crossed somewhere. From: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273963/quarterly-revenue-of-amazoncom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273963/quarterly-revenue... Revenue Q3 2022: $127 billion Revenue Q4 2021: $137 billion Note the stair-step graph. Q4 is Christmas so it's a lot higher. That's why we normally compare numbers with a year earlier. Revenue Q3 2021: $111 billion
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
college_physics 4y ago
When times are good (new technology being invented / adopted / marketed) nobody asks tough questions: the corporate structure somehow orchestrates production, new goods or services are being created, value is added, everybody participating in a meaningful way in the bonanza is "happy". These periods don't last too long: Technologies are tried but discarded, or are too easy to reproduce and lead to saturation, or competition reaches fierce levels etc. In "stable" or lean times the corporate structure becomes a ruthless spreadsheet optimisation exercise that focuses on exploiting every possible arbitrage (e.g., tax regimes, employee loyalty, overseas labor cost differences etc) to maintain the monetary profitability projections. This leads to endless corporate restructurings, financial engineering and other zero or negative sum games. The lifecycle of a human being, the social and emotional needs to belong, contribute, feel appreciated and helpful, to create value when young and able, in order to receive value when old and frail. These things are not part of the corporate structure contracts. Neither is in any sense a sustainable planet (but thats part of another rant).
additall 4y ago
Because it's leasing an asset, not owning one.
emodendroket 4y ago
Honestly I think it has a lot to do with a hot market, at least to this point. You get a lot more pliant if you don’t think you can find another job easily (one reason why some tech executives don’t actually mind this downturn too much even though it costs them money).

smrtinsert 4y ago

Software unions are starting to seem inevitable.

eqmvii 4y ago

Companies are in the business of predicting the market in a quarter, a year, 5 years, etc. They got it wrong and overhired. There's ample evidence of that, and of cooling demand - now and in the future.

phpisthebest 4y ago
They got sucked into the "new normal" that never was, and was never going to be. We are seeing a massive return to the old normal, which means people are going back to offices (not WFH) people are going back to shopping in person not online, people are going back to eating in restaurants not using Grub Hub or ordering online. etc etc etc
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I think you are wrong. Not completely, but I think you missed the massive change in attitudes that took place the past few years. WFH is likely going to stay in some shape or form since it is clear it can work ( and heavens know emplopyers full remote positions have their pick of qualified candidates ) and likely some RTO will follow ( with another round of - likely muted due to recession - resignations ), but I would hesitate to conclude that good old days are here again. I am not going back.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    WFH and ft remote was always a thing. It was not invented for COVID. So of course some WFH positions will still exist but based on my alerts for different roles the number of full time WFH jobs have dropped off the cliff back down to what I would consider precovid levels
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Can they beat the Dow Jones also?
metadat 4y ago
No company has the slightest clue what the economic environment will look like in 3 years, much less 5.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Hence the layoffs. They still have to try though
  - metadat 4y ago
    Do they really need to "try" by laying peole off? Why is this the standard move despite the business and finances still booming? It's a weird MBA monkey mimicry game. I dislike Amazon yet continue to order stuff at the same rate. How many non-government entities have a base like this? Seems like an enviable position. How many layoff announcements have you seen where the company says "We'd love to keep pursuing this but we flat out can't afford to pay you, we are out of money"? I've seen zero. I understand some of this is prudent financial planning, especially for SMBs, but SFDC and AMZN.. they must be using different calculus. Amazon appears less dependent on the nearly-free-money-gravy-train compared to most businesses, especially VC and startups. Edit: dkrich's comment states it better than I can in every way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254450
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      Companies, especially tech companies, invest in their future. Sometimes those bets don’t pay off, sometimes it’s because of external factors. That doesn’t mean those were bad bets necessarily, they just got unlucky. It does mean investors want them to move on to something else though, even if the company as a whole isn’t in a crisis.
    - lmm 4y ago
      If your best guess for what the market is going to be in 3-5 years is now half what you were guessing last week, surely that means you make some changes, and past a certain point you want to make a bigger change than what's going to happen by just freezing hiring and waiting for natural attrition. I'm no fan of companies doing this, but the logic makes sense.

partiallypro 4y ago

Amazon and all of these companies are laying people off based on future forecasts, not based on the current economy. Regardless of if people are first, no company wants teams sitting around not doing anything. I've been laid off, it sucks, but just because Amazon is making money today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow.

dkrich 4y ago
What’s unusual about this cycle though is that it’s the fear of a recession due to fed policy that is causing companies to cut back. In past cycles fed policy caused a recession nobody predicted and companies suddenly found their earnings in the toilet and made enormous cuts in head count, R&D spending, etc. Something about this cycle and these cuts feels I dunno, manufacturered or something. Like are 7k high paying jobs at a salesforce indicative of an economy collapsing while the overall labor market is still extremely tight and you’re not hearing about similar layoffs throughout all industries? All of these cuts seem to be follow the leader because we’re worried and I would not be that surprised to see the reality in the overall economy be much better than feared and these same companies hiring again before year end. It probably doesn’t hurt from the c level perspective that Wall Street tends to welcome job cuts at least in the short term. Although it can certainly do lasting damage to morale within a company.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  There’s preliminary data that shows a recession is currently underway. This is reactionary. if the fed cuts rates and stop’s quantity tightening then sure, Amazon will likely u-turn. But that’s due to a situational change.
  - dkrich 4y ago
    I think a great deal of this situation is narrative based. People are generally terrible at predicting earnings six months out as well as recessions and if we get a major recession it would easily be the most widely anticipated recession in history. First it starts with higher than expected CPI followed by hawkish fed policy. People learned their lesson last cycle and became worried that rate hikes as in past cycles would cause a deep recession and began adjusting immediately rather than wait for a recession. This is evidenced by the fact that the S&P peaked about four months before the Fed even hiked one time. That’s a very important point that I think many overlook. When you are completely ignorant of impending danger you are most susceptible to damage. When you’re terrified of getting punched in the face you’re going to take drastic measures to protect yourself and in the process likely not get punched at all. Meanwhile rates have moved very little in 3 months indicating (to me at least) that the bond market believes rate hikes are ending very soon.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago

From yesterday, "Amazon secures $8 billion term loan": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240271. So Amazon does seem to want to have extra cash on hand for some reason.

WalterBright 4y ago
Probably to add it to their Scrooge McDuck cash vault.

sneak 4y ago

Both parties treating the transaction as simply a business transaction is a good thing for society. Pretending that there is some value to "loyalty" in a vendor/customer relationship is silly, and only hurts you. Job hopping is a good thing for price discovery, and keeps wages for skilled workers going up as inflation eats away at them. Layoffs in downturns are an expected consequence of workers getting more expensive (ie capturing more of their economic value in their paychecks).

kcb 4y ago
> Both parties treating the transaction as simply a business transaction is a good thing for society. Maybe. But not when Healthcare is on the line. That part still need to be fixed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results. It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically. They are adjusting as appropriate. Also, these people will be laid off with severance. They were compensated toward the top of market (considering all tech companies) while they were employed. They have Amazon on their resume, which makes future job easier than average. I’m really not concerned about laid off (with severance) FAANG employees relative to the people earning literally 1/10th their comp who are losing jobs without severance. > people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. I really don’t think this is an appropriate comparison. The whole “quiet quitting” thing isn’t going to hurt companies like Amazon because they’ll just PIP the person out and replace them with the tens of thousands of qualified people wanting to get hired at Amazon and do good work. When some “quiet quits” it’s usually their peers who pay the price because the absentee coworker isn’t get their part of the team project done. Makes more work for everyone else, makes groups projects late, and potentially brings down performance reviews of people depending on their work to get their own work done. It’s not fair to write “quiet quitting” off as only affecting the company, because the company is going to be fine. It’s the coworkers who bear the brunt. (Source: Had some “quiet quit” team members over my career, suffered greatly during those times)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twelve40 4y ago
> They have Amazon on their resume the parent comment talks about "these companies". what happens when less prominent companies take a cue from fangs and start booting people out, only with crappier severance and crappier resumes? this is far from the last layoff.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You make sure you have savings and don’t depend on the benevolence of any company…

ericmay 4y ago

Or maybe the MBA graduates are just fixing the sinking ship that engineering teams created with over-promising technology and demanding growth for their teams so that they could get bigger budgets: VR, meal delivery, AI, etc. ? I have an MBA man I wish I was one of these master of the universes deciding to hire and fire 17,000 people at a company. Do you need the Stanford MBA, Harvard, Wharton? Does Berkeley suffice these days or do you still need the private Ivy League degree first?

mancerayder 4y ago
I thought product teams were responsible for that. Engineers just do.
- ericmay 4y ago
  In the business world the engineers are like the Wehrmacht.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

This was covered in ArsTechnica [1] and it seems like they are laying off a large portion of the Alexa team because it doesn't make a profit. I bought the Alexa when it first came out and it had and still has a great UI. When the Alexa launched I made a skill on the platform which I don't think anyone really downloaded. What confused me the most was Amazon never allowed for paid skills (which I really think was an extremely bad move) and it appears they just internally justified it as a loss leader but no developer would touch it from a ten foot pole. Cutting something that is a cost center is pretty much standard if you aren't showing as much growth that is expected for you. Therefore, cutting something that costs you ten billion dollars sounds pretty justified to me when they could have profited from it instead. EDIT: Guess I didn't do my research about paid skills... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

fnordpiglet 4y ago
https://developer.amazon.com/it-IT/docs/alexa/paid-skills/overview.html https://developer.amazon.com/it-IT/docs/alexa/paid-skills/ov...
vineyardmike 4y ago
This is a newer layoff than the one previously covered. Knowing Amazon, they probably needed people to handle the holiday stress, and now they’re laying off more people.
chihuahua 4y ago
Alexa is a bit of a mystery. The plan apparently was: 1. Sell millions of devices at cost. Unrelenting sales on Echo devices 2. ??? 3. Profit And Step 2 was never filled in. Maybe it was "if people can re-order paper towels by shouting at Alexa, we'll sell more paper towels". But that plan has its limits.
- pishpash 4y ago
  What's the mystery? It was to get in on the device platform game: walled garden, app store, ads, subscriptions, control, etc., same as Google, Apple, Meta, and even Microsoft and Sony.

ptero 4y ago

Being able to easily lay off employees means that the companies are much happier hiring, too. Most of those fired will likely land another job soon, precisely because their new employer does not have to treat their hiring as a multi-year commitment. Europe, which makes it very hard to let an employee go, tends to have significantly higher unemployment than the US, which is much more cavalier about layoffs. My 2c.

gwright 4y ago
Almost as if TANSTAAFL.
- metadat 4y ago
  First encounter with this initialism. TANSTAAFL / TINSTAAFL "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp Also, if I may add: I wish there were more substance in your comment. This non-sequitur was disappointing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gwright 4y ago
    Yeah, there could have been a lot more substance but to be honest a disappointingly large number participants here don't seem to understand that very basic principle when they engage in discussions here. To be clear, the parent to my comment seemed to completely understand TANSTAAFL. My comment was very obliquely directed at other participants in the larger conversation who seem to think that there is no legitimate reason for an employer to ever let a single employee go because any competent business will work like an oracle and make perfect business decisions always. Any unexpected outcome must be because they are greedy corporate monsters that don't care about their employees. (my apologies for the exaggeration but you should have seen what I wrote and deleted previously :-)
    - deleted 4y ago

dcchambers 4y ago

Has the relationship between employer and employee ever felt more transactional?

scarface74 4y ago
I’ve worked professionally since 1996. There has never been a day in my professional career that I thought of any job as any more than a means to support my addiction to food and shelter
- dcchambers 4y ago
  > addiction to food and shelter well put :)

WalterBright 4y ago

I long ago concluded that the way to make pots o' money is to: 1. go out for a walk. Offer the first good looking man a CEO-ship of your new company. 2. pay him $$$$$ 3. hire loads of people 4. fire them all 5. goto 3

chihuahua 4y ago
In this scheme, where do the pots 'o money come from?
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Not that bright a plan.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  Alexa integration?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Steps 2 and 4 are what the internet tells me are the moneymakers.

i_have_an_idea 4y ago

I have no opinion on the MBA bit, but I think you're spot on about people starting to treat companies the way the companies are treating them. ~10 years ago, when I got my first job, I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource", how important is the company "culture" and all of that corporate kumbaya. And, at that point, the vast majority of people around me cared and wanted to do a good job, going up and beyond. Fast forward to now, and pretty much everyone has the attitude of "f**k these guys", doesn't want to be there and will do the bare minimum to get by. And that's exactly what companies have demonstrated that they deserve. People are tired of job hopping to get market pay, dealing with bulls**t, and being thrown under the bus at the slightest hint of an economic downturn.

thfuran 4y ago
>I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource" You tread in strange circles. I'd think a cursory look at history ought to be enough to put the lie to such claims.
- peruvian 4y ago
  It's crazy to think but people do drink the kool-aid, despite history.
  - shigawire 4y ago
    Some companies operate differently too. Obviously they still watch the bottom line, but some aren't as reactionary and are willing to take more pain to keep employees because they understand the value of that goodwill. More commonly private companies with a strong-willed founder/leader.
    - 542458 4y ago
      Agreed. I work for a privately held company and am a bit less jaded about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the company is my friend or anything… but I know how much the owner hates layoffs on an emotional level and have seen the company do things like shifting everybody to 4.5 day weeks temporarily to avoid the need for layoffs. So I respect that.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Or...the strongest survive. Amazon being one of the strongest, obviously. That is, and MBAs thinking longer term would know, it's not a downturn. It's opportunity. Opportunity to come out the otherside even strong. Jeff is saying "save your money." Amazon is saying "we're cutting." It's self-fulfilling. And once it's over Amazon rein will be even further solidified.

aswanson 4y ago

Bro Ive been on some "business is business, it's strictly financial..." energy with employers since day zero. I pity the fool that never took a financial relationship for anything more than what it is.

nkozyra 4y ago

This is a wonderful observation. When I was a kid my dad said "companies won't think twice about dumping you, don't worry about dumping them." But he worked in the same place for forty years. Sometimes he was treated well, sometimes he wasn't. It occurs to me what a relic that world is but also how it sounded bizarre when my dad said that to me in the early 00s. At that time there were still "lifers" all over that place. Or people who spent 10-20 years working up in the same company. That's all gone now. Everything is more ephemeral, more disposable. I'm not sure if it's a good thing but I'm pretty sure signing up to be a "company man" wasn't, either.

alexchantavy 4y ago
The other day I heard on here the phrase "cattle, not pets" used as how to treat servers. This seems useful in this context too.
- scruple 4y ago
  Replaceable cogs, yes, that's been the push regarding programmers since the 80s? Earlier? Plenty of articles and rants online to read about the phenomenon as it specifically relates to programming going back to the 90s, also probably earlier, too.
- fijiaarone 4y ago
  The reason you have to pay for a cloud of virtual chickens, is because you can’t get decent bandwidth on a few free range beef & dairy cattle. A single well tended rack in a closet on-site, with a few single cpu servers hosting multiple applications, a SAN, and a fat data pipe could replace hundreds of Kubernetes clusters — if there wasn’t a cartel on network speed.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

“Quiet quitting” = rational behavior

Guthur 4y ago

For me I've decided to avoid US companies as much as I can. It does not help our societies to facilitate the siphoning of our local wealth to enrich foreign companies. Especially ones that have such disregard for their own, imagine their view of the rest of us.

anonreeeeplor 4y ago

I believe that there is a power swing about to happen where talented individuals may get a lot more powerful and influential in relation to institutions and corporations. I liken it to how MANPADS allow individual soldiers to overpower tanks for far cheaper, flipping the script on 100 years of war. It hasn’t fully come to pass yet but corporations hire way too many “credential dead weight.” In my career I have often been completely outraged at how bad credentialed people are in the pure talent department. Some of the most credentialed people who automatically get top roles really are not that smart versus some of the other people I know. Corporations and institutions favor credentials. Individuals who have talent are very different and hopefully will go much further in current market.

ojbyrne 4y ago
The “ADS” part of MANPADS stands for “air defense system,” so kind of a malformed analogy.
- AgentOrange1234 4y ago
  Air defense is to MANPADS as cloud is to Individual developer?
midoridensha 4y ago
MANPADS is for shooting down aircraft ("ADS" = air defense system). You're thinking of the Javelin and NLAW anti-tank weapons. Anti-tank rockets have been around for many decades; they're nothing new, but the latest ones are just more effective and have better range. IIRC, the Javelin itself was designed and first deployed back in the 1990s, so it's not exactly new either. What's new in the Ukraine conflict is that Russians apparently don't know how to (or just can't) properly operate tank battalions. Back to MANPADS: man-portable anti-aircraft weapons aren't new either. The US was giving Stingers to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s to shoot down Soviet aircraft.
- anonreeeeplor 4y ago
  I am in the Ukrainian army. Sometimes, for fun, we shoot MANPADS at the tanks because we already took down all the jets. It’s super fun you should try enlisting.

dexterdog 4y ago

> What happened to “people are our most important resource”? That is a line that is exclusively used by dishonest businesses. If people are more important than money the business will cease to exist eventually.

hintymad 4y ago

> but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? I'm not sure if this is the way a company thinks, even if they wouldn't have pressure from investors or worries for future survival (they would, BTW). Instead, some companies, likely Amazon too, view such cut as necessity for two reasons: bloated organizations slow everyone down, while diluting the company's culture; it's a great chance to trim the low performers. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to explain the underlying logic. > people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results Reid Hoffman wrote a book, The Alliance, which advocates that employees and companies are not family, but for an alliance. When they both have the right goal, they work towards the goal. When they don't, they part ways. Similarly, Netflix's Reed Hastings advocated that companies are like professional sports teams. A professional sports team is brutal when it comes to trading its players, but it does not mean the players will not pull their weights. I personally think the two views are more realistic and help employees advance their careers.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Most workers at large companies are seen as fungible cogs. Even the engineers. What you describe feels, unfortunately, like an antiquated idea from the 1900s. I think we need more unions, more automation, and more social security. We are racing towards a future where there simply won’t be enough “jobs” for everyone and the companies sure as heck aren’t going to look out. Companies have no soul and the humans that run them have worked hard to insulate themselves from that being responsible for the actions of that lack of soul they instilled.

nxm 4y ago
I disagree. What you describe is Western Europe with depressed wages and less innovation and dynamic economy. You can’t regulate/unionize into prosperity.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  And yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028087
- lmm 4y ago
  What's "prosperity"? I feel much better off with a decent work-life balance and the assurance that I won't arbitrarily lose my job than I would with a larger number in my bank account but none of that protection.
  - ryan93 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - lmm 4y ago
      > you can literally start a company with the coworkers you would have unionized with and created security for yourself and them. I can, but we'd still be taking on a bunch of risk - we'd have to put the capital into the company, as owners we would no longer be eligible for unemployment insurance if the company did fold, we have the possibility of one of us kicking another out so internal politics suddenly matters - when the whole point of the exercise was to get stability even at the cost of some upside.

PheonixPharts 4y ago

> Are they in danger of running out of money? Have we been in a bubble so long that people have forgotten that the raison d'etre for publicly traded companies existing is not to simply exist, but rather make profit and ideally continually expanding profit for share holders? For a startup runway and growth of whatever nature are all that matter. You need to exist long enough for the exit event, and grow in a way that makes this more possible. If you have a two year runway, you have two more years to win your investors back their money and more. But this is not true for publicly traded companies. Simply surviving or, even worse, slowly burning reserves is not enough. I know so many post-IPO startup employees that dismiss layoffs because "the company has tons of cash!" Do you invest in a company because you think it won't go out of business for a decade? No you invest because their profit margins are healthy and you think they'll continue to grow in a sustainable, net revenue positive way. I still remember the dotcom bubble, which was much shorter than what we've been in, and the public debate among investors was about the "new economy" and claims that "things are different now". However those old fuddy-duddies that kept arguing that companies need to make more than they spend were proven right in just a few years. Today I see CEOs and executive leadership at companies genuinely surprised that they're being asked to prove that they can be profitable. I see generations of tech workers sincerely confused about the very idea of what it means to run a successful business. Amazon is doing massive layoffs because they need to show investors that the know how to create value, and become more profitable. At least Amazon has shown periodically that they can make profit. There are plenty of post-IPO startups that have never proven that they are even capable of not running at a loss.

mint2 4y ago
> “the raison d'etre for publicly traded companies existing is not to simply exist, but rather make profit and ideally continually expanding profit for share holders” Should be noted the ideology that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize the profits for shareholder above all else is a modern obsession, and always takes a short term view. Starving a company just for a few good years of share prices is is dumb but often what that ideology leads to. Making profit is part or what a corporation should do, maximizing it above all else is not. Similarly HOAs are supposed to maximize house value but funny how some of the highest property values are places like Palo Alto that aren’t known for HOAs.

etempleton 4y ago

No problem hiring and firing. Hiring for no reason. Setting a random employee growth target and then hiring to that level to only then fire the same amount of people a couple of years later. It is irresponsible growth targets followed by irresponsible cut backs.

Patrol8394 4y ago

> “people are our most important resource” Did you ever believe it? It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource. I have been around for long enough and I have learned that a job is just a contract between parties and it exists for as long as both parties can benefit from it. Don't get caught up in the whole companies family kind of bs or get too emotionally and culturally attached to your employer. Always be on the look up for opportunities and take them. Never stop learning and investing in yourself. Knowledge and experience are your most important asset, keep nurturing them. Also, I wanted to believe that a good chunk of these layoffs should have seen this coming. One must be aware at all time of how valuable (if at all) are for their employer.

vgel 4y ago
> It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource. Relevant joke: An engineer is messaging with her boss on Slack after hours. The boss is talking about how his brother is in the hospital. The engineer asks "What are you gonna do?" and the boss responds "Well, he is family..." The engineer says "You're gonna make him come in on weekends?!"
- rightbyte 4y ago
  "The engineer says 'What? Should I just let him go?'" There might be a joke in there somewhere. But your version have bugs.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> it’s not personal, it’s just good business What message does that send to the employees who stick it out who are expected to "give a part of their lives" for the company? Sacrifice, go the extra mile, "what can you do for the company versus what can the company do for you"?

dasil003 4y ago

I hate to break this to you, but the decline of company-employee loyalty started 40 years ago, and even before that it only existed as a result of unprecedented post-war prosperity and lack of global competition. This doesn't mean that it's all downside for employees though. Amazon grew a huge business and paid their corporate employees top of market with huge upside over the last 20 years due to their phenomenal growth. It was a very good deal for those who worked in Amazon corporate over the last 20 years—a lot of people got richer than their parents ever could have gotten in the previous generation of more stable corporate jobs. But make no mistake, Amazon is not a magic pot of gold, they still have a P&L like any other company. 17,000 employees are not cheap. Amazon grew from 800k employess to 1.3m and then 1.6m at the end of 2019, 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic. It is to be expected that their forecasts were not completely accurate in light of the generational event and tech sea change that the pandemic brought. The fact that people are scandalized by this is indicative of how insane the 12-year bull run for tech really was.

htag 4y ago
> they still have a P&L like any other company Amazon's quarterly reports have all been good so far (Q3 2022 is the latest). Sales are up 15% YoY, and they are profitable.
- imglorp 4y ago
  The coldest view would be the holiday buying surge is over and they can shed some excess to pad that margin until next fall.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Wall St demands growth. Their revenue in 2019 was up 20%. Some of their investments are boat anchors pulling the companies profits down.
  - htag 4y ago
    15% in Q3 2022 is a larger dollar amount than 20% in Q3 2019...

twblalock 4y ago

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? That's not the logic we should expect from companies in a competitive market economy. Companies that think like that will eventually pile up so many bad decisions that they will fail -- and then everyone gets laid off!

FpUser 4y ago

>"What happened to “people are our most important resource”?" Nothing. But one particular group believes that is is more "equal" than the others.

mancerayder 4y ago

>Somehow at some point, in what perhaps could be blamed on the ever-hated mass produced MBAs - companies got really comfortable with the “it’s not personal, it’s just good business” of letting go of their employees for a slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all - just to make it look to their investors like they got their shit together. Financial services (banks, investment firms, etc.) have been doing this for decades. It might feel revolutionary to a comfortable recent tech company existence, but I'm afraid to say this is the norm. Companies can hire quickly when they think they'll grow, and fire en masse when the tide turns.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I have an MBA and I actually agree. I currently only have some anecdata to back it up ( most of my younger coworkers have a more combative if not ronin-like approach to employers ). Personally, I get it. I had company decide to close doors in our state and I was forced to looks elsewhere, but the management there did make a difference ( acceptable severance based on seniority, help with finding new jobs and so on ) and certainly did see some uncool behavior in my career. That said, I had some minor hopes for the current post-Covid world, because it, however briefly, looked like employees understood what standing together meant and that WFH is something that can easily be done in some positions ( and is artificially dosed as a reward to special ones ). For better or worse, the coming recession will confirm whether I had hoped for too much. FWIW, I am staying mostly remote ( as is most of my team now ). I already told no HR once. I am getting more and more comfortable daily with more otherwise uncomfortable situations despite clearly changing winds and better corporate propaganda ( they did learn from initial fiascos ).

throwawaylinux 4y ago

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? People are an important resource, certainly for a company like Amazon, and probably the most expensive too. But I don't understand the argument -- you don't just throw money around like that on any other resource. Certainly up until this year it was a seller's market in tech and I saw a lot of movement to chase bigger salaries (which is fine and people should try to get what they want while the getting's good). > And this brings me to my main point - I think years of this has had an unexpected side-effect the companies never signed up for: people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. Now I am not saying it’s all new, but at least in my observation it’s peaking now and my thesis is these things are connected. I'm not sure it is, and I'm not sure if you can assign the "blame" (if there is any) to one side. I think as I said the workers have had a red hot run for quite a few years and it was those peaking conditions that drove the peak in their dissatisfaction. Conditions are going the other way now and people will try to hold their jobs a bit more I expect. And what started the trend from people being lifetime company men to almost no loyalty? I doubt the ruling class one day got together and decided they'd stop treating workers well. It's surely a lot of factors on all sides. People have far more generational wealth including the investment in education, than in the early 1900s, and there are at least some social safety nets, so job loss might be considered less risky. It has become increasingly easier to advertise, search, apply, recruit for jobs outside the local region with telephone, fax, then internet, email. I'm not sure what you'd prefer. Certainly people shouldn't be tied down to companies. Should corporations be made to keep people on long after they're costing more than they're producing? When you look at government and places with undue union power (police comes to mind), you get a lot of incompetence, corruption, and just poor organizations where crap floats to the top and they could never compete without enforced monopolies. Unfortunately it never turns places into egalitarian utopias.

mc32 4y ago

Both parties should see the relationship as bi-directional and symbiotic. Sometimes you have to find a different symbiotic relationship after the one you have has run its course. It does not need to be interpreted as adversarial where you want to get as much out of them as you can for as little effort as possible and neither should they see it as an opportunity to suck the employee dry. It only works while your goals align with the company's goals. There should be a mutual understanding --a meeting of the minds. I give you this for that. But, yes, ultimately, the company is not your friend. HR is definitely not your fiend. You should have friends outside the company. At work you have colleagues and co-workers. It's not to say you cannot cultivate friendships at work that last beyond your time there, but don't presume it to be your source of friends.

JakeAl 4y ago

> it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”? Amazon just had to take out an $8B unsecured loan to be paid back in a year to cover operating and capital expenses. Despite what the government is telling you, things are really bad and about to get a lot worse. The lowest hanging fruit/the least valuable employees get cut first. That's how they stay in business. That's the smart business move unless they can pivot. Companies can't just borrow and spend anymore they actually have to be sustainable. Amazon gets loans to buy inventory and equipment and pay employees so they can stock their warehouse and then they pay back those loans later after it's sold. If they don't sell that inventory because consumers have no money they still have to make loan payments so it becomes more costly to them over time and if they want to break even they have to raise prices. This is inflation. The Fed raising interest rates makes borrowing money to do this more expensive so they don't do it or do it less. Money in the economy evaporated in November 2021 with the announcement of Quantitative Tightening and the end of Quantitative Easing. That means getting loans and free money became expensive and private investment in the markets/companies evaporated. This forces inflation to come down because they can't keep borrowing and inflating. They have to stock just what they can easily sell or they find themselves imploding as they can't pay back their loans. Pretty much every industry is going through this, hence all the industries collapsing. You will see a lot of companies that have been struggling go out of business. Why is this happening? Free money basically. Our government pandered to political interests (voters and cronies) and overspent for decades, kicking the can down the road and we're now at the end of the road. The US debt to GDP ratio has been over 120% since 2020 which by IMF definition is an economic death spiral. That means the US is underwater, we don't produce enough money as a nation to pay our bills. By 2028 that death spiral will become irreversible, meaning the payments we make on our loans for all that free money --the bailout money, stimulus checks, the entitlements, that omnibus, the inflation reduction act-- will only go to the interest and no longer the principal. That sets us on track to be insolvent by 2042. Yeah I know, crazy right? But why? Because when this happens all those companies and private investors that poured money into stocks and venture capital can't rely on them for profits so they instead buy government bonds. They don't give as high of a return but it's guaranteed money in a down economy so they do it. The result is the governmnet receives the money they need to pay their bills and all the those living off free money get a reality check and have to live and operate within their means. And balance is restored to the universe. Unless people try to cash out their bonds and find the government is bankrupt. This is why government spending is bad folks. They manipulate the economy to prop it up and print money until the Ponzi scheme fails. Rinse and repeat or pass a balanced budget amendment and demand our government stop spending money on pointless wars and entitlements that buy them votes or kickbacks. As long as there is government debt, as long as the government exists, the cycle will repeat. We'll just have to wait and see if we survive this time. Where we are at the end of the road is unprecedented. This has been building since we got off the gold standard which is what allowed them to overspend money we don't have. Historically this is when there's a world war or a collapse of civilization/Dark Age because most nations are in the same boat. Decadence gets the better of us and lack of restraint (dare I say, conservative behavior) leads to this moment in history once more. Obviously there's more nuance to it than just that, but that's a concise rough summary of what's going on.

kubectl_h 4y ago

There is an interesting exchange in Bourdains "Parts Unknown" [1] that he did in Montana where he's talking to a former labor leader and politician from Butte where he says "the company is a son of a bitch, but they were our son of a bitch" (very much worth watching the entire show, but in particular the Butte segment). I grew up in a union family and that held true of the union as well. Something changed in my lifetime (I'm 40 years old) and I really do think it was NAFTA and free trade in general, but also it was the US reaching a terminal state of resource extraction, or at least the level of resource extraction we were willing to tolerate. The two of these weakened unions and worker solidarity and slowed the profit momentum that we had become accustom to and gave carte blanche to corporations to seek local profits in remote places. I think this fundamentally changed the dynamic of being a worker across all industries and, as you allude to, the focus on organizational optimization (coupled with quarterly earnings focused business culture) only heightened the alienation of workers and now the chicken is coming home to roost for the entire American project. Aside from deindustrialization and optimization, I think much of this can be laid at the foot of the stock market and our collective fixation on it as a barometer for societal success. [1] https://youtu.be/KU7mda-4KwQ?t=1232 https://youtu.be/KU7mda-4KwQ?t=1232

patentatt 4y ago
In the 90's the Democratic party abandoned the labor movement because they thought they could get more votes from moderate republicans if they spew the same free market and free trade ideology. And Clinton did that and won, so since then there's been a cohort of political leaders on the left that firmly believe that this is the right and correct path. Literally the same people, they've been in power for 30-40 years. What they miscalculated was that Clinton won the presidency because of his insane charisma and also the Ross Perot spoiler on the right, not the free market stuff. But it was enough cover to dismantle the long-term alliance of the labor movement and the Democratic party.

weatherlite 4y ago

> but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? Stock price crashed. This effects the bonuses/equity of a bunch of employees, some of whom are on the executive levels. Cutting on employment is a very effective method to raise profits and help the stock price. It sucks but that's what the market (investors) like. This is just capitalism ...we've all signed up for this (I guess?).

wdr1 4y ago

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Um, yes? Honestly, I'm not sure how one could sincerely make this statement. Amazon's net income for Q3 '22 is roughly a third of its net income Q4 '21. If losing 2/3rds of your revenue isn't considered hitting the pocketbook, I don't want is. Now you could yada yada yada they're still profitable, but that's a different argument. Amazon was seeing 20-30% growth of its revenue. Their expenses were also growing at a similar base. Now that top line revenue isn't there, they need to address how to address bottom line growth.

skybrian 4y ago
Net income is not revenue, so you got your signals crossed somewhere. From: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273963/quarterly-revenue-of-amazoncom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273963/quarterly-revenue... Revenue Q3 2022: $127 billion Revenue Q4 2021: $137 billion Note the stair-step graph. Q4 is Christmas so it's a lot higher. That's why we normally compare numbers with a year earlier. Revenue Q3 2021: $111 billion
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college_physics 4y ago

When times are good (new technology being invented / adopted / marketed) nobody asks tough questions: the corporate structure somehow orchestrates production, new goods or services are being created, value is added, everybody participating in a meaningful way in the bonanza is "happy". These periods don't last too long: Technologies are tried but discarded, or are too easy to reproduce and lead to saturation, or competition reaches fierce levels etc. In "stable" or lean times the corporate structure becomes a ruthless spreadsheet optimisation exercise that focuses on exploiting every possible arbitrage (e.g., tax regimes, employee loyalty, overseas labor cost differences etc) to maintain the monetary profitability projections. This leads to endless corporate restructurings, financial engineering and other zero or negative sum games. The lifecycle of a human being, the social and emotional needs to belong, contribute, feel appreciated and helpful, to create value when young and able, in order to receive value when old and frail. These things are not part of the corporate structure contracts. Neither is in any sense a sustainable planet (but thats part of another rant).

additall 4y ago

Because it's leasing an asset, not owning one.

emodendroket 4y ago

Honestly I think it has a lot to do with a hot market, at least to this point. You get a lot more pliant if you don’t think you can find another job easily (one reason why some tech executives don’t actually mind this downturn too much even though it costs them money).