Amazon Cutting Another 9,000 Jobs 49
Amazon is cutting another 9,000 jobs, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote to employees in a memo on Monday. The move, which impacts roles in AWS, PXT, Advertising and Twitch, comes weeks after the e-commerce group said it would eliminate 18,000 jobs. Jassy: As part of our annual planning process, leaders across the company work with their teams to decide what investments they want to make for the future, prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses. For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole.
Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile Huawei announced that it is increasing R&D spending: https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
This is so stupid. In a few years Amazon will be trying to hire these people back, having lost ground to companies that looked beyond the next quarter.
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Amazon has famously been known for not caring about the stock price, and looking far into the future. Perhaps that's changing now?
Re: Meanwhile... (Score:3)
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It's because Jassy took over.
By all account Jassy is a complete and utter plank.
You know what they say, cut once, and cut deep - you make job cuts because you've forecast your expected revenue for the year and your expected costs, and if your costs are higher than your revenue you make enough cuts to get back in the black.
If you then make cuts again 3 months later in the same fucking year, the obvious point is you have absolutely no idea how your business is doing, it means your forecasts from 3 months ago
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The Amazon version of Steve Ballmer.
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In the 80s they called it "dumbsizing".
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It's very difficult to find good company leadership these days. Most of them are mental midgets that are too spineless to stand up to their quarterly earnings. All these layoffs really do is signal to workers where to not waste their time. These roles certainly could be all dead weight, but amazon already recently contracted headcount, so one would expect the dead weight would have already gone out the door. This really does just smell like pandering to the stock price, which is pretty pathetic.
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Indeed. And workers _will_ remember how they were treated. Amazon will find it expensive to replace any of them later on.
Re: Meanwhile... (Score:2)
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Indeed. Either these people should never have been hired in the first place or they should not be let go because they will be hard and expensive to replace. In both cases, this is a good indicator for gross stupidity. As to Huawei, what does not kill them makes them stronger. A lot stronger. And they seem to understand that.
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Huawei seems to understand that they must invest in R&D to succeed. This is a golden opportunity for them, because idiots are cutting their R&D and giving Huawei and anyone else willing to delay their 3rd yacht by a few years the chance to push even further ahead.
I wonder if Bezos is going to do the same at Blue Origin, putting them even further behind SpaceX.
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Yep. Arrogance is a primary reason for losing a leadership position. I expect that in a few years, Huawei will be able to make any non-generic components they use themselves. That is a _very_ strong position that is exceptionally hard to attack.
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If you check the article I linked to, Huawei says that they have basically replaced the US supply chains entirely.
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Makes sense. Now they will have a go at replacing all remaining ones.
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To advocate for Satan, maybe management realized it had made a mistake and moved to correct it. Everyone makes mistakes, even good managers.
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While possible, that would stipulate a capacity for self-reflection and personal improvement in management that I find quite implausible. My take is that in order to raise to the top as a "manager", you must manage to convince all others and yourself how great you are without actually investing any effort in acquiring or improving any skills that would make you good at the leadership part. Developing real insight and leadership qualities takes far too long to be a useful strategy. All you could hope for wit
Is it stupid? purge quiet quitters? (Score:3)
Meanwhile Huawei announced that it is increasing R&D spending: https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
This is so stupid. In a few years Amazon will be trying to hire these people back, having lost ground to companies that looked beyond the next quarter.
So 27,000 total job cuts out of 1.62 million? The interesting metric to me is not total lost, but how far back in time this rolls back their headcount. My guess is late 2022. Some companies are in trouble. Meta and anyone dealing with crypto are in serious serious trouble. Amazon is not. They're just restructuring at this point.
All companies accumulate dead weight. To quote a semi-famous technical speaker, "a lot of people you work with have retired...they just haven't told anyone yet" (quiet qu
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1.62 million includes all the warehouse staff, drivers and so forth. These cuts are affecting their tech divisions, including AWS cloud.
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A few remarks...
> Meanwhile Huawei announced that it is increasing R&D spending
This might be a false comparison. Huawei and Amazon are very different companies. It would be difficult to directly compare them, and to suggest that the strategy that works for one would work for the other is at best naive. For example, it's worth noting Huawei is effectively a state owned enterprise of the PRC, and their business is subsidised by the state. It's also worth noting that the PRC tightly controls the public
I don't know about Amazon (Score:3)
The Republican Party is in charge of the House of Representatives or those kind of investigations would start and they have made it clear they will not be proceeding with any investigations regarding antitrust.
Right around the same time Facebook announced Mass layoffs.
What it looks like is that Facebook was hi
Yes, but the UNCERTAINTYYYY!!!!! (Score:2)
Such BS. The future is always uncertain, but it's a great go-to excuse when you don't want to tell the true reason.
ChatGPT (Score:3)
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ChatGPT is offline at the moment, twiddling its thumbs. So I think it is already doing their job.
Glad I don't work there (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon has sent me dozens of recruitment emails over the years, and probably 6-8 of them in 2022. They described how much easier the hiring process was these days, that they had raised their compensation levels, and that there were multiple teams/locations looking for help.
The company has a bad reputation as an employer and I never took the bait, but I bet a lot of new hires are being jettisoned in these multiple rounds of layoffs.
Re:Glad I don't work there (Score:5, Insightful)
I literally opened up my personal email today to yet another message from LinkedIn with two more "connection requests" from Amazon recruiters. Hell. No.
That place has worked extremely hard for a very long time to earn a reputation for rewarding employee loyalty and excellence with a pink slip, not to mention grinding skilled employees into husks, regardless of whether they wear a blueor white collar. There is something fundamentally rotten at the core of Amazon's culture. Until they fix that, I can't imagine any level of compensation sufficient to garner my interest.
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May just be recruiters that get only paid for success. Google has these and they only stopped bothering me after I told them that sure, I would come in for an interview at my usual hourly rate, to be paid in advance.
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Another thing that really throws me off about them is quality of the AWS products. Ease of use it is not, and it looks like a bunch of people who weren't talking to each other put together a bewildering kitchen sink of separate components. I don't want to add things to their ball of paper mache.
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Smart move! I accepted a job with them when COVID struck, only to quickly learn they were just taking advantage of all the tech talent that got dumped onto the employment market when companies they worked for shut down or did massive cut-backs. It was Amazon's way to grab them up while they could get them relatively inexpensively. Then they proceeded to grind through them, seeing who would put up with excessive demands and hours of unpaid work needed to please departmental managers. The rest slowly got wr
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Employment with the FAANG companies appears to give people a boost in technical cred for some reason. People will cycle through and get a senior position elsewhere in a couple of years. I interviewed at one place and they reverently told me the lead engineer had worked at Facebook. After about 15 minutes of conversation with the young man I decided he was an asshole. Sure was proud of himself though.
I don't know if the FAANG 'endorsement' on the resume applies to people who get laid off from Amazon, but may
Vegita, what’s his layoff level? (Score:2, Funny)
This is how billionaires share memes. Just a little joke between him and Elon.
where is the twitter layoff article? (Score:3)
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Not the advertisers they've lost [cnn.com].
Not the multiple outages [cnn.com] the company keeps having.
Nor how Twitter has stopped paying its rent and other bills [axios.com] which have now led to lawsuits [cbsnews.com].
Nope, not one single article on the disasater Twitter has turned into since that pedo guy took over. Wonder why
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You read it on the internet so it must be true.
Jerome Powell wants 2 million (Score:2)
He was asked by Senator Warren about his plan to stop the spiral of layoffs once it started, he didn't have one.
Meanwhile he's an outspoken supporter of the banking deregulation that crashed SVB.
This man wants a depression, and we're all going down in it. And when it hits even if you're retired expect to see your social security & Medicare benefits cut. Meanwhile it won't do anything t
Mod Bait (Score:2)
Parent knows I'm right, but is either being paid to suppress certain narratives or likes doing it for the lulz (aka "useful idiot").
another bean counter (Score:2)
This is what happens when a successful company is taken over by a bean counter from a visionary founder. Expect a long decline for Amazon, as happened for many other top companies like IBM, RCA, Xerox, ...
the sky is falling, again. (Score:3)
Is it impossible to deliver context with stories any longer?
Or are we really only trying to deliver the most inflammatory clickbait intended to trigger people economically, racially, politically, religiously, whatever we can to do make people upset is the goal?
I would say:
- we just came out of 2 years of covid where consumer demand for home delivery purchasing blew through the roof.
- Amazon swelled its employee numbers to try to keep up with demand. According to https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net] in 2019 Amazon was 800k staff; by 2021 that was 1.6 million (!!).
- consumer demand across all metrics is now plummeting as inflation and recession looms.
OF COURSE they're going to lay people off.
9k, on top of 18k is still only 1.6% of their payroll. This isn't even a correction, this is still within the error bars of what normal companies do every year.
Yet here, it's delivered as if this is a reason to panic.
And we wonder why our society is prone to anxiety and division?
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This.
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