16 ms·

Amazon has raised the number of jobs it plans to cut 18,000

68 points by wallaBBB 4y ago

wallaBBB 4y ago
https://archive.is/lRbxR https://archive.is/lRbxR
Lendal 4y ago
So, approximately 1% of its workforce.
- swarnie 4y ago
  I'm not sure the size of the reduction is the key point here, its the reversal from limitless hiring which is more telling.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  So in line with the amount of turnover each year anyways due to "rank and yank" policies, be it official or just the implicit result of management's actions. The news industry is incredibly desperate for stories about layoffs it seems.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > The news industry is incredibly desperate for stories about layoffs it seems. I don't think this is an informed take. Amazon not only cancelled all hires but also increased the number of employees they want to fire. From the first time in the company's history, they explicitly announced they were going to fire people in a purely cost-cutting approach and in a way that was not tied to employee performance. If anything, this signals that Amazon changed radically it's corporate strategy from a growth-oriented strategy to a consolidation one. This has strong implications on the company's revenue expectations.
    - bushbaba 4y ago
      Or that it’s downsizing the Alexa and other retail r&d ventures.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      And they can start that hiring engine back up the morning after they make that press release. If you simply went through all of a company like IBM's announced layoffs of some percentage, you would find their headcount rapidly converges to a value of 0% sometime early in the company's history. Last time I checked, IBM is a not yet an AI-run business to the best of our understanding.
      - simplotek 4y ago
        > And they can start that hiring engine back up the morning after they make that press release. This is just ignorant speculation from your end. Amazon stopped all hiring rounds over a month ago and even rescinded open offers, and that hasn't changed since Andy Jassy announced the company was going to start the unprecedented firing rounds.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    The media hates tech because tech ate their lunch first. Any bad news gets immediate coverage, and when they’re out of that they start to make up problems.
    - jrsj 4y ago
      It’s more than that, it’s also that all of the wannabe journalists out there have contempt for people that are more successful than them that are lower social status. That being said I don’t think that has anything to do with Amazon in this case, just negative coverage of tech more broadly.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Humans are bad at big numbers. I wouldn't have guessed that was 1% of their workforce, nor the turnover rate. I would've guessed 150-200K, and 25%/year turnover. Even though this means more people. 18k still sounded huge until I wrote this comment.
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > Even though this means more people. 18k still sounded huge until I wrote this comment. 18k is huge because Amazon has been killing off entire teams, managers and all, instead of doing the typical Jack Welch decimation tactics.
  - zug_zug 4y ago
    I hard disagree. I think layoffs incredibly emotionally jarring and a huge act of disrespect to the employees. You could be years-in pending promotion and given the boot with not even a word of justification (happens more often than you might think). And even though it's just 1% the not-knowing factor means it psychologically affects everyone. It's important to name-and-shame companies that can't be bothered to let go of people through legitimate channels of performance reviews, PIPs, allowing transfers, etc. Legitimizing overhire overfire is a dangerous road.
- zwischenzug 4y ago
  If it's one percent, that makes me think it's an announcement designed to help the share price, or send a message to its workforce, since 1% is close to natural attrition of a few months, ie some sort of hiring freeze could achieve a similar thing.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    With natural attrition you don't get to pick which teams/people leave.
- bluedino 4y ago
  These aren't evenly distributed. I doubt any warehouse or fulfillment people are affected by this. These are people in corporate and technology roles, so it's a bigger number than 1%
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    Warehouse and fulfillment already has pretty aggressive turnover rates already too; rather sure it would be suboptimal to make the position look less secure when you’re already churning through bodies so quickly.
- tehlike 4y ago
  It's higher fraction of corporate workforce, though.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  I don’t think they lay-off the warehouse workers since the work is so shit that it naturally has very high turnover.
lapcat 4y ago
Dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478 (402 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257365 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=amazon&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
chasd00 4y ago
Why did so much tech go on a pandemic hiring spree? Did they think it was going to last forever? I don't understand all everyone ( in tech ) made the same mistake. "oh let's increase our headcount by 25% in response to a pandemic that is mutating and gradually lessoning in severity while vaccines and other medicines are dramatically increasing in efficacy... but it's going to last forever." what am i missing? How did the whole industry get it wrong? Did they think the whole planet was goign to be ok with these authoritarian hobby regimes keeping everyone locked inside glued to a monitor?
- capableweb 4y ago
  What makes you think it was a mistake? Could very well have been planned. "Lets hire like crazy in order to meet demand, and when the demand disappears again, do layoffs". Probably someone calculated something somewhere saying "If we hire 25% more people to take advantage of the increased demand, we'll earn more profits even with layoffs with heavy severances for everyone after X months".
  - chasd00 4y ago
    well... I guess.tiff, i mean that could very well have been it. idk it just seems like a terribly bad business decision by the whole industry. If it was a capacity thing then adding headcount would decrease capacity for at least a year or so as you have to integrate all those people into culture and work to get things productive. On the other hand, I can see a "turn the knob up, then turn the knob down" strategy making sense to some people.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      > On the other hand, I can see a "turn the knob up, then turn the knob down" strategy making sense to some people. Especially when the company culture basically boils down to "The individual employee is worth nothing" and "People should be able to be fired as easily as they are hired", which Amazon seems to be, at least judging by the people I've been close to who worked at Amazon.
  - 4y ago
honestduane 4y ago
This is just corporate gaslighting at this point; There is no legitimate reason so many very profitable tech companies need to fire so many when we are not even in a recession according to the United States Government and the treasury and the banks, and its not like they are not making record profits. They cant say "we are making record profits" and in the same breath say "we need to fire people to survive" that's not how that works. Pick one.
- shmatt 4y ago
  Making profits does not have to mean funding teams that aren't generating anything significant in terms or product and/or income. Many of these companies have a small portion making most of the profits, and all the others eating them up (see: VR, Voice). You can do it the Amazon way, cutting products that are bleeding money, or the Salesforce way asking all units to cut 10% across the board, but just keeping failed products and units because "we have money" isn't really a good reason
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    But keeping people employed because "we have money" is a really good reason.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      Why Amazon and not investors? Investors can pay those people to do something more useful than Amazon's best ideas at the moment.
      - whiplash451 4y ago
        That's a pretty inhuman way of thinking IMO. The moment a company hires people, the onus is on it to keep these people busy. You don't "return" people like you return money.
  - noodle 4y ago
    If they were making record profits, they would be looking to expand their profitable divisions, would they not? They would likely not lay people off, but reorganize internally to move resources away from failing areas and into the clearly thriving, very profitable areas; or start something completely new. Hiring one good employee is expensive and difficult.
osigurdson 4y ago
Perhaps one of the upsides of the layoffs is we will see more new/interesting startups in the upcoming years.
- sovietmudkipz 4y ago
  That's what I think too! It's like a star dying releasing its heavy materials that are then the basis for new stars. Think of all the raw talent that will be now be released to coalesce into new lean startups, released from the gravity of technical debt. We're all able to do more with less people. IMO It's only a matter of time before we have a one person unicorn company (>1billion revenue). So let's goooo with the innovation!
firstSpeaker 4y ago
Do they layoff at all levels or just it is more less experienced engineers?

68 points by wallaBBB 4y ago

wallaBBB 4y ago

https://archive.is/lRbxR https://archive.is/lRbxR

Lendal 4y ago

So, approximately 1% of its workforce.

swarnie 4y ago
I'm not sure the size of the reduction is the key point here, its the reversal from limitless hiring which is more telling.
sidewndr46 4y ago
So in line with the amount of turnover each year anyways due to "rank and yank" policies, be it official or just the implicit result of management's actions. The news industry is incredibly desperate for stories about layoffs it seems.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > The news industry is incredibly desperate for stories about layoffs it seems. I don't think this is an informed take. Amazon not only cancelled all hires but also increased the number of employees they want to fire. From the first time in the company's history, they explicitly announced they were going to fire people in a purely cost-cutting approach and in a way that was not tied to employee performance. If anything, this signals that Amazon changed radically it's corporate strategy from a growth-oriented strategy to a consolidation one. This has strong implications on the company's revenue expectations.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Or that it’s downsizing the Alexa and other retail r&d ventures.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    And they can start that hiring engine back up the morning after they make that press release. If you simply went through all of a company like IBM's announced layoffs of some percentage, you would find their headcount rapidly converges to a value of 0% sometime early in the company's history. Last time I checked, IBM is a not yet an AI-run business to the best of our understanding.
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > And they can start that hiring engine back up the morning after they make that press release. This is just ignorant speculation from your end. Amazon stopped all hiring rounds over a month ago and even rescinded open offers, and that hasn't changed since Andy Jassy announced the company was going to start the unprecedented firing rounds.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  The media hates tech because tech ate their lunch first. Any bad news gets immediate coverage, and when they’re out of that they start to make up problems.
  - jrsj 4y ago
    It’s more than that, it’s also that all of the wannabe journalists out there have contempt for people that are more successful than them that are lower social status. That being said I don’t think that has anything to do with Amazon in this case, just negative coverage of tech more broadly.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Humans are bad at big numbers. I wouldn't have guessed that was 1% of their workforce, nor the turnover rate. I would've guessed 150-200K, and 25%/year turnover. Even though this means more people. 18k still sounded huge until I wrote this comment.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > Even though this means more people. 18k still sounded huge until I wrote this comment. 18k is huge because Amazon has been killing off entire teams, managers and all, instead of doing the typical Jack Welch decimation tactics.
- zug_zug 4y ago
  I hard disagree. I think layoffs incredibly emotionally jarring and a huge act of disrespect to the employees. You could be years-in pending promotion and given the boot with not even a word of justification (happens more often than you might think). And even though it's just 1% the not-knowing factor means it psychologically affects everyone. It's important to name-and-shame companies that can't be bothered to let go of people through legitimate channels of performance reviews, PIPs, allowing transfers, etc. Legitimizing overhire overfire is a dangerous road.
zwischenzug 4y ago
If it's one percent, that makes me think it's an announcement designed to help the share price, or send a message to its workforce, since 1% is close to natural attrition of a few months, ie some sort of hiring freeze could achieve a similar thing.
- jstx1 4y ago
  With natural attrition you don't get to pick which teams/people leave.
bluedino 4y ago
These aren't evenly distributed. I doubt any warehouse or fulfillment people are affected by this. These are people in corporate and technology roles, so it's a bigger number than 1%
- atdrummond 4y ago
  Warehouse and fulfillment already has pretty aggressive turnover rates already too; rather sure it would be suboptimal to make the position look less secure when you’re already churning through bodies so quickly.
tehlike 4y ago
It's higher fraction of corporate workforce, though.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
I don’t think they lay-off the warehouse workers since the work is so shit that it naturally has very high turnover.

lapcat 4y ago

Dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478 (402 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34256850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257365 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=amazon&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

chasd00 4y ago

Why did so much tech go on a pandemic hiring spree? Did they think it was going to last forever? I don't understand all everyone ( in tech ) made the same mistake. "oh let's increase our headcount by 25% in response to a pandemic that is mutating and gradually lessoning in severity while vaccines and other medicines are dramatically increasing in efficacy... but it's going to last forever." what am i missing? How did the whole industry get it wrong? Did they think the whole planet was goign to be ok with these authoritarian hobby regimes keeping everyone locked inside glued to a monitor?

capableweb 4y ago
What makes you think it was a mistake? Could very well have been planned. "Lets hire like crazy in order to meet demand, and when the demand disappears again, do layoffs". Probably someone calculated something somewhere saying "If we hire 25% more people to take advantage of the increased demand, we'll earn more profits even with layoffs with heavy severances for everyone after X months".
- chasd00 4y ago
  well... I guess.tiff, i mean that could very well have been it. idk it just seems like a terribly bad business decision by the whole industry. If it was a capacity thing then adding headcount would decrease capacity for at least a year or so as you have to integrate all those people into culture and work to get things productive. On the other hand, I can see a "turn the knob up, then turn the knob down" strategy making sense to some people.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > On the other hand, I can see a "turn the knob up, then turn the knob down" strategy making sense to some people. Especially when the company culture basically boils down to "The individual employee is worth nothing" and "People should be able to be fired as easily as they are hired", which Amazon seems to be, at least judging by the people I've been close to who worked at Amazon.
- 4y ago

honestduane 4y ago

This is just corporate gaslighting at this point; There is no legitimate reason so many very profitable tech companies need to fire so many when we are not even in a recession according to the United States Government and the treasury and the banks, and its not like they are not making record profits. They cant say "we are making record profits" and in the same breath say "we need to fire people to survive" that's not how that works. Pick one.

shmatt 4y ago
Making profits does not have to mean funding teams that aren't generating anything significant in terms or product and/or income. Many of these companies have a small portion making most of the profits, and all the others eating them up (see: VR, Voice). You can do it the Amazon way, cutting products that are bleeding money, or the Salesforce way asking all units to cut 10% across the board, but just keeping failed products and units because "we have money" isn't really a good reason
- p0pcult 4y ago
  But keeping people employed because "we have money" is a really good reason.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Why Amazon and not investors? Investors can pay those people to do something more useful than Amazon's best ideas at the moment.
    - whiplash451 4y ago
      That's a pretty inhuman way of thinking IMO. The moment a company hires people, the onus is on it to keep these people busy. You don't "return" people like you return money.
- noodle 4y ago
  If they were making record profits, they would be looking to expand their profitable divisions, would they not? They would likely not lay people off, but reorganize internally to move resources away from failing areas and into the clearly thriving, very profitable areas; or start something completely new. Hiring one good employee is expensive and difficult.

osigurdson 4y ago

Perhaps one of the upsides of the layoffs is we will see more new/interesting startups in the upcoming years.

sovietmudkipz 4y ago
That's what I think too! It's like a star dying releasing its heavy materials that are then the basis for new stars. Think of all the raw talent that will be now be released to coalesce into new lean startups, released from the gravity of technical debt. We're all able to do more with less people. IMO It's only a matter of time before we have a one person unicorn company (>1billion revenue). So let's goooo with the innovation!

firstSpeaker 4y ago

Do they layoff at all levels or just it is more less experienced engineers?