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Numbers 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
by twawaaay 4y ago
Numbers 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 agoNot sure on the accuracy but in a random article it says The company also has a metric called “unregretted attrition rate” (URA), which represents the percentage of employees it would like to see leave the company – voluntarily or otherwise – in a given year. https://www.hcamag.com/us/news/general/leaked-amazon-memo-shows-how-it-forces-out-employees-to-hit-targets/253161 https://www.hcamag.com/us/news/general/leaked-amazon-memo-sh...
- 2QUS2WMe 4y agoUnregretted attrition
- gtaylor 4y agoThey may mean "unregrettable attrition".
- mabbo 4y agoUnregretted Rate of Attrition. Within every org of ~100+ people, they stack rank and cut the bottom K%. It used to be 4%. Now it's 7%. They get put onto a PIP, and very few improve enough to stay.
- interestica 4y agoYou can't answer a call to help with alphabet soup and then also add more! PIP - performance improvement plan
- heyoni 4y agoLol for real. lol = laugh out loud
- crhulls 4y agoBased on overall headcount, yes, but looking at only corporate headcount the denominator is much bigger. This article was a bit vague and said “stores and human resources divisions.”
- joshribakoff 4y ago18,000 is 18,000. Restating it as a single digit percentage of the headcount is itself a distortion.
- Invictus0 4y agoNot a distortion, just a change in perspective. Microsoft, in comparison, just cut 5% of employees.
- 56friends 4y agoWhen talking about human suffering using percentages of the population is dehumanizing.
- twawaaay 4y agoSo you say statistics needs to be banned because it omits individual tragedies? An intelligent and empathic enough person can use statistics to inform themselves while also remembering there are individual tragedies. Statistics is necessary to be able to understand things that are happening around us. Otherwise the information we are getting would be largely meaningless.
- 56friends 4y agoYes, that's exactly what I said: statistics should be banned and statisticians should be put in jail. Next time you encounter human suffering in your life - put things in perspective. Parent died? Well, did you know it’s just 1/8B people on the planet?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hotpotamus 4y agoThere are two or three classes of employees at Amazon, and one of those seems to get the attention of people here.
- mediaman 4y agoTo be fair, it's unlikely to see many warehouse workers be laid off, because the attrition rate is so high they can just attrit out within months. The exception would be total warehouse closures, but I don't think we've seen a lot of those because each one is such an enormous capital investment. Though maybe they closed one in response to a union activation effort?
- hotpotamus 4y agoYes, that's the other class of employee.
- ipaddr 4y agoDoes it surprise you that tech related layoffs would get the attention on a news site related to tech. Why haven't people talked about the effects of these layoffs on dog-walkers servicing these former employees? They are talking about it on my dogwalking reddit forum.
- krolden 4y agoIts still 18k people who are now out of a job.
- mabbo 4y agoI'm torn here. On the one hand, part of me thinks "Yeah but this is corporate employees! This is people like me!". And then another part of me steps in and asks "So what, the more than a million logistics employees aren't people? They don't count?". I guess the point is that there are two classes of employees at Amazon. Most of us here on HN aren't used to seeing our class being impacted by job losses.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI agree with your analysis and your ability to introspect seems rare. That said, when Jeff Bezos looks down upon the Earth from his penis rocket, do you think he sees 2 classes of employee, or do you think that to him, they are a mass of undifferentiated human resources?
- Pigalowda 4y agoBezos thinking of employees as "human" resources seems pretty generous right now. I'm betting he has switched to calling employees "overhead" and is simply reducing it. Or maybe he likes a different food preparation metaphor and thinks of the trimmed employees as "fat".
- 33955985 4y agoNot used to seeing it but surely even the youngest in our cohort are aware that we’ve been here twice before. Tech is a big risk, big reward business. Charge ye Teslas while ye may.
- bmitc 4y ago> Many more people resign on their own on any given month, most likely. That’s probably not true, but either way, it’s irrelevant. Voluntarily resigning, most likely with another job already lined up, is not the same as being laid off.
- bmitc 4y agoEspecially if one is on a worker visa such as an H-1B.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoTheres 300k corporate employees. These layoffs dont include the warehouse workers
- chrisweekly 4y ago18k/300k == 0.06, so a 6% cut in corp.
- lr4444lr 4y agoWasn't the COVID death rate something line 0.1% for the initial alpha strain? Losing a job is not as traumatic as you or your family getting a deadly disease, but the point is that very unpleasant, life disrupting events don't require odds much above infinitesimal to cause real social problems.
- twawaaay 4y agoThe question is whether 18k people fired from a company that employs 1.5M people is newsworthy. Assuming no discrimination here, I believe it is not and the constant talk of it is just a clickbait and trying to find news where there aren't any. It would be different if this was large portion of the said company, but it is not.
- tempsy 4y agoThis is a silly way to look at it. A large number of the million+ headcount is warehouse. This layoff impacts corporate workers only, so it's a much higher percentage of total corporate workers.
- count 4y agoHR staff at the warehouse are the same 'corporate' employees as the box lifters at the warehouse...
- tempsy 4y agoI’ll assume you know what I mean and just want to argue lol. Majority of Amazon workers are essentially blue collar jobs. This primarily affects salaried corporate workers in towers in Seattle etc. So the impact to those types of jobs is clearly more than 1%.
- twawaaay 4y agoI dislike your hypocrisy. You call my view silly, and at the same time you make distinction between corporate and warehouse workers as if these were two separate classes of people presuming firing warehouse workers was not a big deal but corporate is. Amazon employs 1.5M people total and I don't care if somebody works in a warehouse or an office. They all have their lives to continue and families to feed.
- twelve40 4y agothere is no hypocrisy, here is the deal: I hate it when manufacturing jobs get cut. I hate it when warehousing jobs get cut. But these numbers do not directly relate to what happens in my field, so in order to understand what happens in my field, these numbers must be considered separately.
- midoridensha 4y agoDoes HN have articles about companies like FedEx or Walmart doing layoffs? No, because those are out of the field for readers here.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]