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Amazon set to begin new round of layoffs affecting over 18,000 people
- tdiff 4y agoDo they also fire people in countries like Germany that offer more protection for workers, or is it all about US?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- berkle4455 4y agoThe timelines and numbers around Amazon blurry. I believe they are: * Nov 14, 2022: 10k layoffs coming soon * Jan 5, 2023: Correction. 18k layoffs coming soon * Jan 18, 2023: 18k layoffs commence The article headline seems to imply it’s a fresh round of 18k as opposed to the same we’ve known about.
- tnel77 4y agoDoom and gloom gets the most clicks. News is just an afterthought at this point.
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoIt's still 8k extra job loses in our industry... we should be kinda scared and worried
- pc86 4y agoWhy? It's 1.2% of Amazon's workforce, which is basically nothing.
- glofish 4y ago10k here, 20k there, next thing we're talking real numbers.
- pc86 4y agoAs others pointed out it's very likely that more people quit in any given month.
- glofish 4y agoyou seem to be implying these would be the same people and that those quitting normally would not be replaced
- hello_moto 4y ago> it's very likely that more people quit in any given month 18k quit in a given month? Nope.
- hello_moto 4y agoThere are thousands job cuts and hiring freeze in this industry. While 1.2% is nothing, that 1.2% won't have easy time to get re-hire when there's a massive layoffs in the specific industry they're on + hiring freeze + recession coming up.
- tnel77 4y agoI meant the headline kind of implying 18,000 fresh job cuts like the comment I was replying to was saying. Obviously, layoffs in the tech industry should concern all of us.
- winReInstall 4y agoAlways good to have layoffs in the future, when its performance review and sallery re-negotiation time. Sets the mood. Guess some lone wulfs currently rediscovering unions aka packs for themselves.
- xkqd 4y agoAlso gives folks the opportunity to hold off on the new house or luxury car.
- geodel 4y agoSince it is long term and difficult to get started on unions, lone wolves are moving to Europe for now.
- hello_moto 4y agoThey'll get cut eventually. Just like META London part of 11k just got the cut yesterday, not last year.
- ffmpegy 4y agogrim reading. hopefully this won't become a wider trend in the sector.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twiddling 4y agoThere was a LOT of hiring the last two years. SFDC added 17K just last year, for example.
- jwestbury 4y agoHas this surpassed a normal round of PIPs yet, though? Amazon effectively has a 7% layoff every single year.
- VirusNewbie 4y agoWonder if they are just going to roll that in to help the stock price?
- iLoveOncall 4y agoPIPs are not all fired in one day, it happens semi-randomly throughout the year. Also, this quota is on top of the 6% of mandatory attrition, not replacing it.
- _b 4y agoHaving a 7% unregretted attribution target is pretty different than a 7% layoff. Many (most?) of the folks who make up that 7% leave on their own, because both the employee and the company are on the same page that it isn't working out. A 7% layoff affects some people who are good employees, did nothing wrong, and are safe from a PIP -- but their position just no longer makes sense for the company to keep.
- twawaaay 4y agoNumbers need to be understood in context, otherwise our primate brains distort the truth behind with a bunch of biases we have wired into them. The company has around 1.5M employees. It fires 18k people. This is 1.2% of the headcount. Many more people resign on their own on any given month, most likely.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoSo are they layoffs or just natural reduction of staff count? Layoffs implies force and paying compensation (depending on state / country).
- Insanity 4y agoThis is not accurate. It is 18k corp employees, that does not include the 1M+ warehouse workers.
- coredog64 4y agoYes and no. These layoffs are limited to corporate employees. IIRC, that’s a third of all employees. Also, this is Amazon and not AWS, as the latter has allegedly decided to up URA targets for 2023.
- danaris 4y agoFor those without the same proficiency in alphabet soup, can you clarify what "URA targets" are?
- haasted 4y agoGood question. I googled, and it may be "unregretted attrition rate," or URA, which represents the percentage of employees that managers aren't sad to see leave the company — whether they part ways voluntarily or otherwise. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-secret-terms-only-workers-know-dictionary-2021-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-secret-terms-only-wor...
- _-david-_ 4y ago
- tannhauser23 4y agoGood luck to everyone at Amazon.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago[dead]
- marban 4y agoThe only question: When is Jeff coming back?
- ilamont 4y agoThis. Jassy's skills in building AWS does not extend to managing other divisions. I've watched interviews with him and video of the events he's forced to attend, and he projects discomfort and worry. Bezos surely is concerned, not just for the org and lost growth but his own personal fortune.
- mabbo 4y agoMy friend just got notified he's out. He has like 12 years with the company. He was half way through a meeting that he was driving/leading when he got the notification.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI'm ever reminded of Clint Eastwood as William Munny in "Unforgiven", when he says, "we all have it coming, kid".
- powvans 4y ago“Deserves got nothing to do with it.”
- yellow_lead 4y agoThat's dehumanizing and souless.
- kvetching 4y agoAbsolutely. This happened multiple times throughout my career in Tech. Everything I devoted my life to for years, taken from me, multiple times. There is no such thing as job security.
- 1248 4y agoAt least we have it relatively easy (I think you're talking about programming positions?). Imagine working in a mine or something and then what do you do.
- eatsyourtacos 4y agoI think these comparisons are kind of disingenuous. Of course we understand what you mean. But on the other hand, it's kind of not relevant at all. OPs life is not that one of a coal miner. In theory this person has worked hard all his life, studied, dedicated time to companies. This is what he is doing. Then it's kind of taken away without his control. Saying "well at least you don't work in a mine" is minimizing his real problem so much. Should it be put in perspective? Sure. But it also doesn't really make it any better. Infact I would argue that kind of response is kind of like "hey why should we give everyone free healthcare? At least you have access to healthcare for money, 100 years ago we barely even had medicine so you should feel lucky!". True.. but also completely misses the entire point.
- aspirant1408 4y agoHope this isn’t the first of many..
- rc_mob 4y agoThis is a strange and confusing comment
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agowouldnt it techinically be the 2nd or 3rd of n?
- fullshark 4y agoOr perhaps you hope it's the last of many? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-tech-company-layoffs-in-2022/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-tech-company-la... https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- nrki 4y agoThanks for the links, but I have problems with that visualcapitalist graphic: - carzoo, walmart, getir, carvana, doordash, hellofresh, tesla, rivian, peloton: not really tech companies. Mostly teched-up logistics companies. - the twitter layoffs aren't (only) due to "the market", they're due to the unpredictability of its owner. The source for the data is https://www.trueup.io/layoffs https://www.trueup.io/layoffs, which is better and also has a source for the black bars in visualcapitalists' graphic.
- dougSF70 4y agoAre these the 18000nalready announced or is this a new round?
- nickm12 4y agoThese are the 18k already announced. There were two rounds of news about this. First "at least 10k" and then "18k". There was also some news earlier that indicated some some of that number was already informed a couple of months ago, but it's unclear how much.
- geraldwhen 4y agoWhy would anyone work somewhere that cuts 7% annually as a rule BEFORE layoffs?
- edgyquant 4y agoBecause they have bills to pay and not everyone has the ability to pick and choose the job they like the best
- geraldwhen 4y agoReplace “anyone” with “developers” then. And most do have the ability to pick their job.
- edgyquant 4y agoThey really don’t though. I thought this way for awhile until I became friends with some junior/mid level devs who spent months depressed because they wanted any job.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoMost people don't think they're the bottom 7% of workers in their field. Also to have a FAANG company on their resume or maybe just because they were in need of income at the point in time the job was offered to them.
- xyzelement 4y agoDifferent people have different confidence and risk tolerance. I once advised someone like this - take the Amazon offer. First of all, YOU (this guy was excellent and driven) aren't likely to be in the bottom X percent. And even if you are, the X years you spend at Amazon will teach you skills (not to mention resume) you won't get anywhere else. So even if you got laid off, you'd be better off long run. That doesn't work for everyone of course.
- rnk 4y ago
- jader201 4y ago> Amazon is trimming its head count after it went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019. This makes the news a bit less shocking, I think. Many tech companies are suffering — and laying off — due to the economy, and didn’t “swell” quite to the level Amazon did during the pandemic. While I’m sure the economy is still certainly a factor here, it would make sense for a company that needed to expand to meet the sudden demands brought on by the pandemic to need to course-correct once that died down. Especially since it was felt: > primarily in its human resources and stores divisions Both of these probably had to ramp up disproportionately to meet the sudden demands of the pandemic. To be clear, this is still sad/unfortunate news for the affected folks. But I believe it's not quite the shock other news of layoffs has been.
- throwaway5959 4y ago“Many tech companies are suffering — and laying off — due to the economy” That’s one way to characterize companies making billions of dollars in profits.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoAmazon actually "only" earned $2.5 billion profit in Q3 2022, which is pretty low considering their size. Compare to their layoff buddies (and apparently "doomed company") Meta, whose profit was $5.6 billion.
- throwaway5959 4y agoAmazon intentionally doesn’t make a profit. It’s an excellent tax avoidance strategy and since their shareholders are OK with it a fantastic way to put their competition out of business.
- StreamBright 4y ago
- wnolens 4y agoI really hate how I read about this on the news, not first but only there. The last layoff came and went without a peep from any management above me, even week+ later. Looks like the same again. I was around for a big Microsoft layoff many years ago and it was well communicated internally and empathically. We were given audience (10:1) with directors upon request to ask questions and plead for our fallen. The individuals let go were eulogized with authentic tears by the humans who were given headcount by corporate and then had it taken away. It wasn't the bottom or some biased subset that was culled, but a seemingly random selection across bands to hit a target. (I'm inclined to believe this, given what I saw). We lobbied for our people, and actually got one hired back in a different division that wasn't subject to the layoff.
- dehrmann 4y agoIt's a lot easier to lay people off remotely.
- verst 4y agoWe learned about the Microsoft layoffs in the news yesterday and right now nobody knows who will be impacted. I'm sure they will handle it as well as they can, but learning about it from the news first instead of the CEO is also odd. We did get an email from Satya this morning but it appears that notifying impacted folks will be done in a distributed manner by their management chain. Most of the company isn't hiring now so there won't be many internal jobs that those being terminated could try to apply for.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago> but learning about it from the news first instead of the CEO is also odd. Isn't that always the case? It is hard to keep something like a huge layoff secret, it will invariably leak as soon as the cogs are set into motion and before the CEO can message the ranks.
- verst 4y agoIt is to be expected. I didn't mean that a leak is unusual, but rather that learning about it this way _feels_ strange.
- jedberg 4y agoFYI every article on this is getting the math wrong. It's 18,000 with today plus the layoffs in November (which the press quoted at 10,000), not 18,000 today. Assuming the press was correct in November, it's 8,000 today.
- __derek__ 4y agoThe press was correct, but premature, in November. It apparently ended up being a few thousand in November, so over 10k today.
- resuresu 4y agoI thought there was a labor shortage and no one wanted to work…
- typon 4y agoIt's interesting reading all these comments reaching for concepts not quite in peoples vocabularies because they have been stripped out systematically. Its cruel, inhumane, how can they just make a unilateral decision about something I devoted myself to, companies are making billions in profits etc. Marx wrote about all this 150 years ago in great detail.