Amazon Starts Layoffs in HR and Cloud Units (cnbc.com) 21
Amazon on Wednesday began laying off some employees in its cloud computing and human resources divisions. From a report: Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky and human resources head Beth Galetti sent notes to staffers in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica informing them of the job cuts. "It is a tough day across our organization," Selipsky wrote in the memo. The layoffs are part of the previously announced job cuts that are expected to affect 9,000 employees. Last week, Amazon laid off some employees in its advertising unit, and it has let go of staffers in its video games and Twitch livestreaming units in recent weeks. Amazon wrapped up a separate round of cuts earlier this year that affected approximately 18,000 employees. Combined with the cuts this month, it marks the largest layoffs in Amazon's 29-year history. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been aggressively slashing costs across the company as the e-retailer reckons with an economic downturn and slowing growth in its core retail business. Amazon froze hiring in its corporate workforce, axed some experimental projects and slowed warehouse expansion.
OH NO! NOT HR! (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've seen, HR departments tend to grow exponentially faster than most other business units, especially over the last couple decades when most of their time is spent putting together easter egg hunts, coloring contests, and other activities for the younger hires and school-minded executives. If any company announces cuts in human resources, it sends a shudder of terror through the spines of CEOs everywhere. It's a message that the company is on the verge of either complete collapse, or the realization that maybe busywork and bullshit isn't a profit center.
With how shit Amazon is, and how shit the average HR employee is, what circle of hell does a fired HR employee from Amazon spring forth from?
Re:OH NO! NOT HR! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Anywhere I've been HR tends to protect and grow its own. Granted, I'm not in techy circles, I just work a tech job for backwoods industries. They just figured out that HR was more than payroll about twenty-five years ago or so and are still riding high on the wave of stupidity that places like Wells Fargo epitomized in the nineties and aughts - i.e. the color contents (FOR CANDYBAR PRIZES! YAY!) and easter egg hunts (legit, this happened at my place of employment the last two years, WTF?).
HR is a canary (Score:3)
Many large companies keep a bare-bones crew of permanent HR folks, supplemented by a bunch of contractors. The contractors are the first to be hired and fired in the HR group. HR needs to ramp up first to hire and onboard other new employees, and HR can be shrunk when the company is contracting and isn't hiring. So, HR tends to be a canary indicating how hiring in a company will go in the future.
Re: OH NO! NOT HR! (Score:2)
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My ex-wife worked for corporate HR for a large Orangey home improvement company. Their main issue was the department was about 2/3 lifers who had been in the same position for sometimes decades, and whose productivity was a fraction of the newer folks. There were various reasons for that from struggling with the various electronic systems, keeping track of the regulations per-state/per-area, etc etc but it dragged down the performance of the whole department and was a big part of the reason she left for gre
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I'll answer your anecdote with a couple of my own, though I've only worked at 3 companies in the last 42 years, and two of them were too small to have an HR department. The other one (with 45 to 95 employees, it grew rapidly until 2008) had a single partner plus his assistant as the HR dept. It never grew, and sort of shrunk after he retired. They been since bought out, so I don't know what the HR de
HR bloat can definitely go.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Like another user commented.... Amazon HR is an utter joke. Seems like they must be a bunch of (mostly women) who were handed the jobs with no regard for if they actually perform functions such as properly following up with people to advise them that they were selected for a second interview.
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I don't know about the "mostly women" part, but my personal interactions with them for higher level jobs have been rather uninspiring. The same goes for Google, actually.
Maybe Amazon will turn out to be like Twitter where Musk said:
"If you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, turns out."
Re: HR bloat can definitely go.... (Score:3)
Amazon is a much different beast than Twitterâ¦their platform was stable, and they werenâ(TM)t in the business of creating services to sell -they just need staff to maintain the platform.
AWS, is a whole different beast. To stay relevant, they have to compete with software development firms, Google and Microsoft, who donâ(TM)t have any major retail operations to worry about. Amazon has to invest in engineers, deleopers, AI scientists, quantum scientists, hardware, chips, datacentersâ
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I only mentioned the "mostly women" part because historically, that's just a fact. Human Resources was essentially created as a department as a way to help women enter the "white collar" office workplace. Nothing wrong with that, except I think it led to many companies over-hiring HR staff when they realized they were in industries with mostly male workers and wanted to try to balance it out.
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Late 70's & early 80's I worked for a large mechanical engineering division of a "now" purely Bowling Alley machinery manufacturer, We used to take on 40 to 50 engineering apprentices and 5 or 6 foundry apprentices a year (3 to 4 year course) it was all run by the "Personnel Manager" with his secretary (men didn't type back then). Long and short, Malcolm retired and 2 years later the "HR" department was up to 17 or 18 people, add another 15 or 20 3 years later, apprentices were down to 4 or 5 intake per
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That's called deindustrialization.
HR should concentrate on their core business (Score:2)
Get my money to me on time and keep their nose out of a hiring process they have no fucking clue about.
How many people do you need for that, anyway?
Bad news for Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
The HR layoffs are not that surprising. Amazon has drastically slowed down on hiring so Recruiters and HR types are going to be let go. Not to dance on the grave or anything but isn't there a delicious irony in HR people getting fired? After all, that's mostly what they do to others.
Never the less...
What I think is of greater concern is layoffs in their Cloud division. As I understand it, AWS is the ONLY profitable division in the whole company. They lose money on books and merchandise and Prime Video. If cloud adoption is slowing down that could really spell trouble for Amazon.
Re: Bad news for Amazon (Score:3)
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HR does not fire others. Managers do.
HR are NOT managers.
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As I understand it, AWS is the ONLY profitable division in the whole company. .
AWS is the savior of Amazon. Before it, they lost money every single year. Their other businesses were never profitable. Always in the red. I was amazed that they continually lost money and yet convinced investors that profitability was right down the road. And this was years before AWS was even a concept in Bezos' brain. And to this day, the massive profits from AWS essentially subsidizes all the other Amazon divisions. If AWS profits are slowing down, they're in trouble.
Bigger Question Here Is AWS⦠(Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft and Google have been experiencing strong revenue growth in their cloud computing services. In fact, I would go as far as to say it is their strongest growth component at the moment.
Big question here is whether that corresponds to a general growth in cloud computing tech, or AWS share getting eaten. Hell, could even be both, which would be the worst case scenario for Amazon.
Guess we will see come next week or soâ¦
Re:Bigger Question Here Is AWS⦠(Score:5, Informative)
Big question here is whether that corresponds to a general growth in cloud computing tech, or AWS share getting eaten
From here [aag-it.com], it appears that Azure is the fastest growing cloud, with 2% year over year percentage growth, Google grew by 1% and Amazon showed no percentage change. Of course, the overall cloud market is growing, so all companies got increased revenue. Percentage-wise, the market share for Amazon is at 33% (unchanged over the last couple of years), Microsoft's share reached 23% (at the beginning of 2023) and Google is at 11%. It looks like Azure and GCP are capturing market share from smaller providers.
From the article, small and medium enterprises prefer Azure (with more SME users of Azure than AWS or GCP) while heavy hitters mostly go with AWS.
HR is not your friend. (Score:1)