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Amazon targets as many as 30k corporate job cuts, sources say
- zerosizedweasle 1y agoVery health...very normal Edit: Doing it right before the holidays can only mean their data on consumption / consumers is grim.
- belter 1y agoMBAs will...MBA. Innovation is for Geeks...
- jalapenos 1y agoAlways easier to cut costs, because even a braindead chimp can work out that 4 is less than 5. Valuing things though, that's a dirty activity for the "technical" ones.
- xnx 1y ago> Doing it right before the holidays Are many corporate roles seasonal?
- zerosizedweasle 1y agoYeah but they wouldn't risk disruption. They live or die in large part on Holiday Sales, it's a massive part of their revenue stream. If the risk that this could cause disruption wouldn't be worth it if they expected the holiday shopping season to be busy.
- christhecaribou 1y ago> Yeah but they wouldn't risk disruption. Funny, they said the same thing about AWS before layoffs last year.
- rvz 1y agoThat's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage. Either way, that's in line with the true definition of "AGI" and getting closer to the timeframe of 2030 to do more with less.
- Supermancho 1y ago> That's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage. This is obviously not that. This is a cut before reporting quarterly earnings.
- christhecaribou 1y agoRight after that egregious U.S.-east-1 outage?
- motorest 1y agoAmazon and AWS are two separate companies. From the article: > The cuts beginning this week may impact a variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology, devices and services and operations, among others, the people said.
- JCM9 1y agoAmazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”
- motorest 1y ago> Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.” Actually, they are. Perhaps what is causing your confusion is that other parts of Amazon, such as Ring or Rivian, are also separate companies, whereas parts such as Alexa and Amazon Music aren't.
- JCM9 1y agoBy your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo. For the purposes of the discussion at hand they’re all the same. Amazon PXT and finance is the same team as AWS PXT and finance.
- motorest 1y ago> By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo. No. My definition is Amazon's actual organization chart as a holding. AWS is an independent first-level branch of direct reports of Andy Jassy, who was AWS's CEO before replacing Bezos. A similar branch is Worldwide Consumer, which groups what you think Amazon actually is, which means the online store, prime, books, devices, etc.
- heywintermute 1y agoroughly 10% of their corporate workforce wow
- triceratops 1y agoWow they have 300k corporate workers?
- nylon4831 1y ago350k according to the article
- lateforwork 1y agoIt is crazy that they are still blaming "pandemic era overhiring".
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThe corp speak is free when their is no exec accountability. The beatings will continue till the stock performance improves.
- belter 1y agoYes. Next earnings release is October 30, 2025 and this is to allow them to hit the numbers. Is going to be lovely to see how they spin this as AI optimization ....
- JCM9 1y agoThat’s PR speak for “our leadership has messed up big time and this was the most convenient excuse we could come up with that doesn’t just throw our C-suite in front of the bus.” Earnings call is this week. Expect some good tap dancing.
- myth_drannon 1y agoAnd they perviously laid off 27K in 2022 because of "pandemic overhiring". I wouldn't be surprised if in a decade from now they will still be laying off because of the "pandemic overhiring"
- saos 1y agoYeah I had to double taking reading that
- valcker 1y agoIf the stats don't lie, they hired ~500k employees in 2020 alone, and nearly doubled their workforce between 2019 and 2021...
- JCM9 1y agoNot surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now. After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup. Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.
- bugbuddy 1y agoThe most interesting question is how many management positions got axed as part of this.
- christhecaribou 1y agoThe first level or two of management are completely useless and operate more as “slave drivers” than engineers.
- motorest 1y ago> Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now. Who exactly do you think is saying this? Because from what I'm understanding, so far Amazon has been decimating teams at the expense of overworking them even more, and by cutting projects at the expense of cancelling maintenance and feature work.
- JCM9 1y agoLike a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money. Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoReminder 'cleaned up' means lives ruined, sick people losing the ability to afford insurance (COBRA is insanely expensive especially considering you just lost your job), homes lost, families forced to move and children losing their friends/forced to new schools, and in some cases suicide.
- raincom 1y agoAre warehouse workers considered as corporate?
- bugbuddy 1y agoNo
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://archive.today/rYbTA https://archive.today/rYbTA
- JCM9 1y agoRemember these things tend to be lumpy. While that’s a bit over 10% of corporate employees depending on how you count some teams won’t get touched and thus other areas will either get blown up entirely or have layoff rates of much higher than 10%.
- paxys 1y agoThree months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers. Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes. Plus it lets them wipe away future RSU comp that was granted to employees when stock prices were way lower.
- al_borland 1y agoLooking at the people around me, people don’t do very good work when they are constantly on their toes. A lot of time is wasted on the rumor mill about the next round of layoffs, people are hesitant to invest in big (needed) changes and opt to just keep the lights on, and technical decisions are often colored by what will still work after person X if laid off (if they ever get laid off) vs picking the best option in front of them. The churn also continually re-opens process gaps, repeats the same projects over and over on a new stack, and other hamster wheel type activity that do nothing to move the business forward. It simply keeps people busy and frustrated while the leadership churn is used to pad their resumes with fancy sounding projects that never actually get completed, but it’s enough for them to leverage it into a new job with a big title.
- butler533 1y agoMeanwhile, 30k Amazon-minded individuals are unleashed on to other tech companies to evangelize Amazon products and services. The design of it all is really apparent.
- al_borland 1y agoIs this how it plays out, or does it backfire with the former employees being bitter about the layoff and not wanting to be free evangelists for the company didn’t show them any loyalty.
- brazukadev 1y agoThey might be bitter but evangelize Amazon products are their most marketable skills.
- trenning 1y agoAll corporate or just expensive US based corporate employees? I didn’t see any specifics listed besides “pandemic era over hiring”. I think their talking points were pulled from an old 1pager this should have been “due to efficiency gains in AI”. Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.
- paxys 1y agoNo one is going to say it but the (effective) end of the H-1B visa program means that tech companies are going to start staffing up more teams where the talent is.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoDoesn’t Amazon have 10k+ H-1B workers? “How many workers on visas will they lay off” is an interesting question to understand their internal HR strategy.
- master_crab 1y agoUntil the government turns to dealing with offshoring. Lot more appetite in both parties to attack that business practice.
- projectazorian 1y agoAnd how would they do that? The available methods - tax penalties mainly - are too easy to dodge.
- DeepYogurt 1y agomake them harder to dodge
- master_crab 1y agoYup. This is not difficult and it’s a fairly bounded problem. Only a few hundred companies are capable of the level of outsourcing that is considered significant. And those companies are highly sensitive to regulatory demands
- ndiddy 1y ago> Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter. It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?
- christhecaribou 1y agoBecause investors aren’t actually very intelligent, beyond some vague desire to “make my money bigger”.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoInvestors only see cutting people as a good thing, the excuse isn't for the investors, its for everyone else.
- webdevver 1y agowhy do you assume mass firings are a bad thing? shedding 'dead weight' (morality aside) is a good thing, no?
- DangitBobby 1y agoWhy set morality aside?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Tadpole9181 1y agoBecause they aren't and this is just borderline financial fraud? They fire tens of thousands right before an earnings call and then use that to generate future reports. Investors invest and stockholders sip champagne, then they go rehire a significant portion back, completely invalidating all that unlimited growth they promised. Then, when the next earnings call comes they make some moronic excuse and do it all again. And the past 20 years in the domestic market should have made it abundantly clear to everyone that Wall Street are too stupid to catch on / so bought in they need it to work. The layoff numbers keep growing too, if you notice. (Fraudulent) numbers keep going up! Yay! ---- Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world? These days, everything just looks to be in the business of growth via scamming consumers of their hard-earned money. They just gave up any pretense of good products or quality service - "fuck you, give me your money" at every. single. turn. Then all that money goes to 10 guys while everyone else breaks their back for nothing, forced to piss in bottles before going to their +10% YoY apartment to wait to die from health problems they can't afford to fix.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThere's a lot of reflecting & gesticulating we can do about these companies, as they downsize & try to de-leverage the world's labor. But the reciprocal side is also worth soulsearching some into too. It feels like such the crisis of our time that we don't have good things for people to do, respectable enough efforts, that so much is ensnared and tangled up in such huge enterprise running along at its own pace. I crave a government that tries to encourage new players, new enterprises, that outright lopsidedly favors those trying to get things started. Other systematic drivers here also filter out so many would be entrepreneurs and business owners. Cost of essential food, shelter, transportation, health care needs has become incredibly daunting to many, and greatly challenges the ability for new things to get started. Also the unchecked acquisitions spree of the world brings up all the opportunity in such uncomeptitive and fragile large companies. If we allowed small medium size companies to acquire each other, but kept more controls on bigger companies, we wouldn't be facing such wild shocks from what a couple big players do on the world.
- tacticalturtle 1y ago> This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure." What is this take based on? How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation? And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?
- JCM9 1y agoThe layoffs have nothing to do with AI. It’s sorting out org bloat, span of control issues, and teams without a clear ROI. Normal “leadership mismanaged the company and now there’s a mess to cleanup” stuff.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoBut AI is both expensive (from a capital standpoint) and a great excuse for investors, hence the spin.
- jnaina 1y agoAs an AWS shareholder, I applaud this. The org suffers from several systemic issues: entrenched tenured employees coasting on accumulated RSUs who resist change, middle management engaged in territorial conflicts/fiefdom turf wars that prioritize their own self-preservation over company goals, numerous underperforming hires made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs, and leaders whose primary competencies lie in mastering the silly cliched "Amazon speak" (Amazon LP this and LP that, quoting Bezos as opening lines, day ones, etc) and the usual de rigueur rituals such as churning out obligatory, meaningless six-pagers, instead of driving genuine innovation or results. AWS is fast becoming a parody of itself and needs a reset. The recent outage is a harbinger of things to come, if things continue as is.
- oenton 1y agoAs another AWS shareholder, I can agree with most of your points however this one requires citation (emphasis mine) > numerous underperforming hires _made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs_
- sharts 1y agoHow does one become an AWS shareholder but not a rest-of-Amazon shareholder? Amazon as a retailer has far worse problems than AWS.
- silisili 1y agoOn the contrary, I feel the opposite. Layoffs are a cheap way to goose your stock price, not much unlike buybacks. I exit positions in companies in either case, as it shows they have no immediate plans for growth. I don't disagree with the rest. But you can effect a lot of change without mass layoffs...
- jnaina 1y agoIf Andy Jassy is also part of the 30K to be let go, AMZN will be up 50 points in no time
- rsanek 1y agoyou must have a pretty short list of companies you can continue to hold. something like 90% of S&P500 does stock buybacks. if you also include layoffs that's going to reach close to every single company.
- sharts 1y agoDon’t worry, most of those people will end up elsewhere and still think that employee protections are a bad thing because innovation.
- pasola 1y agoJassy's most notable accomplishment in the last five years. Seconded only by the time he ended WFH in a stealth blog post the day after hosting the all-hands meeting.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoIs $59B in _net profit_ last year (~double the year before) enough? No, it's not! Let's transfer another few $B from workers to our needy shareholders. Upward and onward!
- HDThoreaun 1y agoThe goal of a company is to maximize profit, not reach a number and decide that is enough.
- Ekaros 1y agoI think these days goal of a publicly traded company is to maximise the stock price for next 3 months.
- yifanl 1y agoIf this was the case, then every company on the planet would be dealing fent on the side. Given this is not happening, we can conclude that there are secondary objectives of companies.
- ThrowawayR2 1y agoWhy would anyone gripe about "needy shareholders" on a site paid for and run by a tech VC firm for tech startups, founders, and fellow venture capitalists? If you disapprove of too much money going to shareholders, you're in the wrong place to find a receptive audience.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago> If you disapprove of too much money going to shareholders, you're in the wrong place to find a receptive audience. On this point the audience and I are on opposite sides, and that's fine by me :)
- QuiEgo 1y ago"Strive to be earth's best employer". That they put a weasel word, "strive", right in their shiny new LP tells you all you need to know.
- AznHisoka 1y agoI did some analysis of every job posting from Amazon since 2020. Turns out the % of jobs going to offshored countries almost tripled since 2020: https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-story-the-data-tells-the-rest/ https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st...