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These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decision
by phoe-krk 1y ago
These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
- maxehmookau 1y ago100%. Amazon hired 14,000 people, and now it's firing 14,000 people it no longer wants on its payroll. Plain and simple.
- actionfromafar 1y agoNah, it gained 14,000 people, they kinda sneak in to the buildings and start doing work if you aren't serious about your perimeter security.
- heresie-dabord 1y agoFrom the CNN report [1]: --- Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative. "Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said. --- [1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs
- nothrowaways 1y agoReplace Jassy with AI
- iLoveOncall 1y agoGPT-1 or GPT-2, which would match his reasoning abilities, are unfortunately deprecated, so we can't.
- wiseowise 1y agoThey will. But by the time it happens, Jassy already made millions in cash + much more in stocks and will retire comfortably while others will slave away for new AI overlords.
- random9749832 1y agoPrepare for the bogeyman.
- gedy 1y ago"Agents" is now a word on my corporate bullshit bingo card
- schnable 1y agoContinually AI is used to justify layoffs that seem like simple corrections to overhiring.
- HacklesRaised 1y agoI always wonder if the people responsible for the over-hiring are on the block? My personal experience suggests not.
- schnable 1y agoI think it depends on the company. I don't know how bad of a problem it is for big businesses like Amazon. Sure there's some lost profits and a write-down with the layoff, but it's not like Amazon hasn't been successful and profitable in the meantime. The overhiring may be justifiable as a defensive strategy. I was at a smaller public company that overhired during COVID then struggled with profits (among other things). CEO and leadership lost a ton of money due to the share price drops from COVID peaks and CEO was ultimately pushed out.
- mikeocool 1y agoMost boards(particularly of large publicly traded tech companies) don't hire CEOs to ensure their companies remain stable in the longterm at the expense of profits, they hire them to grow short term profits. Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
- cromd 1y agoTheir addition of AI into Quicksight (their BI tool) really cemented for me how much they're willing to bluff to look relevant. They launched the AI addition at least a year ago, but recently rebranded the whole thing as "Quick Suite", promoting new AI capabilities. It really just seems like a new skin, with more purple. So far, out of 4 people at my org who tried it, all were disappointed after upgrading. I get much better results from sending a CSV to ChatGPT and asking for a graph. It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period. Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop. Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?
- motorest 1y ago> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go. This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
- seydor 1y agoIs there a difference?
- sbarre 1y agoPassive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language. If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".
- grugagag 1y agoThat would make Bezos look bad .
- jalapenos 1y ago"Regrettable attrition". Going to go wash my hands after typing that.
- itsoktocry 1y ago>Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language. "Job losses" isn't passive voice. "Jobs were lost" would be passive voice. Why are people so hung up on "job losses", as if we don't hear this every day? Who cares?
- sbarre 1y agoYou're being pedantic for no good reason. You know what I meant. If you don't care about this conversation, why are you participating?
- orlp 1y agoPassive voice deflects responsibility and agency. Loss happens, firings are a decision.
- slumberlust 1y ago
- latexr 1y agoI was just thinking the same, this is quite the weasel wording. Not only the “losses” but the passive voice. As if Amazon is a person who walked to work one day and realise it has a hole in its pocket from which thousands of jobs fell off. “Oh well, these things happen, not my fault and nothing I can do about it”, Amazon says as it shrugs its shoulders and whistles down the factory floor with a skip in its step.
- jwmerrill 1y ago“Passive voice” is a grammatical term. “Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice. “14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the passive voice. There is not a 1:1 relationship between being vague about agency and using the passive voice.
- happimess 1y agoI've heard it described as the "exculpative voice".
- qsi 1y agoCorrect. There's nothing vague about "the burglar was shot by me." It's passive but crystal clear.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoGrammatically correct, but missing the narrative subtext. "Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs. People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret. This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events. "Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets. Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces. The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.
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- martin-t 1y agoIt's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you. All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it. And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
- hippo22 1y agoMost corporate employees at Amazon do get some stock, and you’re also free to exchange the money you earn for ownership of any public company.
- adrianN 1y agoPeople can use money to buy shares in companies to participate in their profits. Owners of companies carry the risk that the company goes bankrupt.
- throwaway173738 1y agoWhat’s the actual hazard there? I get that a company going bankrupt causes money to evaporate into wages and capital. But are the owners actually facing any real risk? You have to be an accredited investor to buy in in any real way and one of the tests is that your investment is below a certain percentage of your means.
- adriand 1y agoYou forgot to mention the part where they also invest millions in lobbying and buying off politicians to control policy, and hundreds of millions or billions acquiring media companies to control the public narrative, all so that ordinary workers - who vastly outnumber the billionaires - do not get out the pitchforks and demand a more equitable distribution of wealth.
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- supriyo-biswas 1y agoThe conspiracist view would be that the media-industrial complex would want to prevent the stock price of a given company from dipping, as well as help them skirt around legal issues that may arise for the company in question if everyone reports the "layoff" as such, which is not always done according to practices (there are sometimes reports in the media about such, not specifically about Amazon though).
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoMass layoffs tend to make stock prices go higher, not lower... so nothing to worry about there. If the news stories were even more brutal, accusing Amazon of axing tens of thousands and then laughing when those people begged and pleaded that they wouldn't be able to afford baby formula, I think I suspect that this would be even better at closing time than some less offensive journalism.
- mv4 1y ago... which will also result in bonuses to execs for hitting/exceeding their efficiency goals.
- hopelite 1y agoNarcissistic processes/systems/people always externalize the consequences of their own actions by pushing those consequences off on others while keeping the benefits they pillaged for themselves. Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse? You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago> let people go Or, as you said, firings.
- Toby1VC 1y agoThese numbers are inflated to be unparsable. I suspect it's either 14 people or a small monetary loss. Do you feel different today?
- chadash 1y ago"job losses" is BBC editorializing. They do not use that term in their letter: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workforce-reduction https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...
- xnorswap 1y agoIndeed, Amazon use the euphemism, "making organizational changes".
- sgt 1y agoAnd by applying these organizational changes, each person can become more load bearing and have so much more scope and impact. This is not a loss, it's a great win for everyone! /s
- jalapenos 1y agoMakes it sound like they shuffled desks and gave everyone new team names. How fun! (Not like, you know, some people getting divorced soon, some people biting a revolver soon)
- mc32 1y agoIt’s equivalent to “restructuring” which doesn’t directly mean reduction in force but it does mean that I directly.
- darrenf 1y agoI sincerely suspect the BBC would only ever use "fired"/"firings" if the employees were being dismissed for conduct reasons, since that's the common usage in British English. I've been let go -- indeed, I've lost my job (it's the employees who suffer job losses, not the employer) -- but I've never been fired.
- acatnamedjoe 1y ago"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears. I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.
- lexszero_ 1y ago"Letting go" belongs in the same HR phrasebook. They didn't ask permission to quit and the company were so generous to let them, the initiative was from the other side.
- YcYc10 1y agoYeah a classic euphemism.
- BadCookie 1y agoIt’s better than “RIFed,” at least.
- qsi 1y agoThat reads differently to me. The company is doing the letting go. Like letting loose. Or letting fly. It's agency on the part of the company. Letting them see. All of these will have euphemistic overtones as no company will want to say that they axed 10,000 people.
- hibikir 1y agoI thought the modern lingo was "impacted". So and so was impacted. Ten thousand employees were impacted. It avoids let go, but detaches as much as possible from the personal crisis.
- jalapenos 1y agoThey just have to look harder and they'll find those jobs they lost.
- anonymous_sorry 1y agoThere's an interesting asymmetry in language in this area. Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry. But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost". If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoDoublespeak? Try to speak in such a legalese way that although things are technically true, yet still those words are crafted in such a way to influence others... So in this case of our capitalist system, doublespeak exists in such a way because they can create money or not lose money by doing such doublespeak as saying to investors this as a destroyed would make them have a negative connotation with amazon itself which would reduce their stock price. Everything is done for the stock price. Everything. The world is a little addicted on those shareholders returns that we can change our language because of it.
- andsoitis 1y ago> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication. Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired. So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish. The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
- edanm 1y ago> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc. Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".
- rco8786 1y ago"job loss" is purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs. It's the same as language like "officer involved shooting" to avoid saying "an officer shot a person" or calling a "murder" a "loss of life".
- andsoitis 1y ago> purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs. Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)." And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."
- hk1337 1y agoIt's a loss for the one being fired.
- reassess_blind 1y agoCompanies have no incentive to employ as many people as possible. Really it’s the opposite, make as much money as possible, while paying as few employees as possible.
- dmschulman 1y agoThe incentive many times is to create a scarcity of talent for other tech companies by hiring as many experts as you can. Facebook, Amazon, and many others have been employing this strategy for over a decade, but now that the era of cheap money is over we're seeing a pivot away.
- bluGill 1y agoThat is the incentive to employee more people - they can do more with those people. There is a balance between the two though. More people means less focus.
- otikik 1y agoJeffrey Bezos: All those jobs will be lost. Like tears in the rain.
- disqard 1y ago(you inspired me) I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A blue-green planet from suborbital space. Four commas in my net worth. I watched tens of thousands of employees get misplaced in my couch cushions. All their jobs will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
- InsideOutSanta 1y ago> These aren't "job losses" You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here. /s
- coliveira 1y agoThere is so much stupidity to unpack here. They say they need to use the opportunity provided by AI. However, what kind of opportunity is that requiring them to fire people in order to use it? Is AI making them more efficient or less efficient? If it's making more efficient, why they need to lay off all these people who are getting more efficient? So that other companies will pick up the workers they spend so much time to train on their systems, and replicate the same technologies elsewhere? I think these companies have lost all their brains and there is a stupid AI system making bad decisions for them. I also fully expect these companies to lose their shirt to smarter companies in the next few years and decades.
- gniv 1y agoThey are neither. They eliminated 14k roles. Employees have 90 days to find new roles. It remains to be seen how many end up being fired.
- drcongo 1y agoTo lose one job, Mr. Bezos, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 14000 looks like carelessness.