Amazon Cuts Another 16,000 Jobs (aboutamazon.com) 40
Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating approximately 16,000 roles across the company as part of organizational changes that began in October 2025 and are only now being finalized by certain teams. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the news in a memo to employees, framing the reductions as an effort to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. The memo follows another memo that the company accidentally sent to employees.
Same story? (Score:2)
Is this the same as this [slashdot.org]? Or is this something different? Or are we still in dupe mode?
Re:Same story? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Amazon was responsible for its own dupe, in other words... they just found a novel way to accomplish it.
Econmic collapse of 2008? (Score:5, Informative)
All the quarterly earnings reports start coming out 28th-6th. We'll get to see how many of these mass layoffs are really due to "AI" productivity versus revenue being down across the board.
Re:Econmic collapse of 2008? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course is will be, and rightly so. Those dumb-ass tariffs are hollowing out small businesses, that's why you do not see the impact on Wall Street. Small business do not list on Wall Street. Many of those businesses relied upon stuff from China which now costs more. Added to that, the steel and lumber tariffs that go into many goods the U.S. produces (and it still produces a lot) are raising the prices of finished goods. The export driven farm economy is going down because his dumbass tariffs have caused countries to buy elsewhere; the U.S. can no longer be trusted. la Presidenta could see something odd in his corn flakes some morning and decide a new round of tariffs are in order.
The fun doesn't stop there though. The domestic farm economy relies upon migrant labor, the migrant labor la Presidenta is scaring the hell out of and shipping off to anywhere he can stick them. You might have noticed the mass migration of Americans to take those jobs, should be happening any day now, really, just wait, it's coming.....and the pink unicorns are froliccing in the fields.....the white ones are attending Christian Nationalist rallies, at least the humans seem to see them.
And the dollar has been losing value because la Presidenta cannot stop trying to euthanize the Fed. Reserve, so demand for dollars is shrinking. It turns out foreign investors do not trust la Presidenta to not screw the pooch. Speaking of which, la Presidenta says he likes a weak dollar because "you make more money". Whatever, it means that the regular proles will pay more for foreign goods of which the U.S. imports a lot. Ah, but then they'll be forced to buy American goods. Righto, at inflated prices because the reason they chose the foreign stuff was because it costs less. B....b.....but, then Americans will start new companies to replace the foreign goods. Maybe....in the fullness of time, but I doubt it. And if they do, they will still cost more than the foreign goods because those damn foreigners have been at a long time and know how to make them efficiently. And even if new American companies learn to make them efficiently, they only have to undercut the foreign competition on price by a little bit. The proles will still take it in the neck.
If you look at the jobs stats, then it is clear the economy is not generating jobs and is losing them. The coming LLM bots will cause more jobs to be lost. And if that doesn't pan out, then all that investment is lost. More pain either way.
Re:Econmic collapse of 2008? (Score:5, Insightful)
And even if new American companies learn to make them efficiently, they only have to undercut the foreign competition on price by a little bit. The proles will still take it in the neck.
If you look at the jobs stats
That's really the rub. Even if the manufacturing came back, which I agree it wouldn't, the jobs still wouldn't because automation has increased a hell of a lot over the last few decades. We could bring 100% of the manufacturing back and it wouldn't solve unemployment.
Re:Econmic collapse of 2008? (Score:4, Insightful)
The post you're replying to said Christian Nationalist, not Christian. They're not the same thing. See the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] which begins, "Christian nationalism asserts that the United States is a country founded by and for Christians."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What is today's kool aid flavor?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
https://www.cia.gov/readingroo... [cia.gov]
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Jo... [wikispooks.com]
Re:Econmic collapse of 2008? (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of it isn't, but part of it absolutely will be.
Usually I have been fairly dismissive that happenstance of economic swings one way or the other are blamed or credited to the current president. Good or bad, democrat or republican. There are policies with longer term implications that can set a broad tone, but the dramatic events tend to be associated with private sector happenings.
This time the administration chose to stomp on international trade, and that has real consequences. The dollar has taken a tumble, trading partners that once went along with US over China have warmed to China, prices of everything are up, our exports are impacted.
The tech bubble bursting admittedly will have relatively less to do with the administration, but the tech bubble from a financial perspective has largely provided cover for those fundamentals faltering.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah this admin is paradigm breaking, we usually could not pin major economic movements on the Executive because they are not supposed to and historically have not involved themselves into such broad matters.
This admin though has decided they want to run anything and everything they can via the White House directly and Congressional Republicans, fully completing their transition into supplicant little worms, have decided Article I isn't really a thing, they have a king to make decisions for them now.
After t
Re: (Score:2)
However, the current environment is volatile, and it's closer to the Dotcom than the MBS era. A lot of the valuation is based on growth (AI specifically), so even if revenue is up for now, lower forecasts could trigger a market drop.
As for layoffs... it's almost certainly to show earnings gro
News media is 90% billionaire owed (Score:3, Insightful)
We aren't going to hear about the recession until January 6th 2028. And that assumes Trump doesn't get a third term
Re: (Score:2)
The economy started collapsing once the government introduced such concepts that allowed it to get to the point of the collapse. 2007 was a result of a number of wrong and bad decisions, it was not the cause. The cause is the government expansion, printing of paper money, federal reserve controlling and manipulating interest rates to be below what market would set, various rules, laws, regulations and taxes that prevent formation of capital and of businesses and promote outsourcing manufacturing.
What we a
Re: (Score:2)
The economy started collapsing in 2007, but no one really noticed until 2008
Bear Sterns was all over the news throughout the second half of 2007
Robots and less throughput. (Score:3)
People are buying less, especially in the US, where tariffs and recurring budget-overruns/lockdowns and non-sensical tax policies put significant pressure on regular people. Add to that more and more optimization, bots and AI doing an increasing portion of physical and mental labor and you've got the perfect storm of overall job-loss. Especially in Orgs such as Amazon that already bank on optimizing huge portions of the consumer-trade economy and have their sole purpose in doing exactly that.
Re: (Score:3)
People are buying less, especially in the US, where tariffs and recurring budget-overruns/lockdowns and non-sensical tax policies put significant pressure on regular people. Add to that more and more optimization, bots and AI doing an increasing portion of physical and mental labor and you've got the perfect storm of overall job-loss. Especially in Orgs such as Amazon that already bank on optimizing huge portions of the consumer-trade economy and have their sole purpose in doing exactly that.
The entire world is going into savings mode on the expectation that the other shoe is about to drop, but I suspect the footwear has already started falling in the US.
With the amount of personal debt the average American carries, specifically unsecured debt (read: not your house or car) it's going to be a blood bath when easy credit stops being given out... again. It's not even been 20 years since the last time.
The ROTW will be somewhat better insulated although places like the UK or Australia are not
Re: Robots and less throughput. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
People are buying less, especially in the US...
No, consumers are not buying less [apnews.com]. This is one of the paradoxes of recent US economic performance. The consumer sentiment surveys [apnews.com] suggest that consumers are very down on the economy, but that doesn't seem to have affected their spending.
Can Amazon hire ONE person (Score:2)
It's 2026 and the first result of a search for "hard drive 20tb" is a 16TB hard drive, FFS.
Re: Can Amazon hire ONE person (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not looking at this the right way.
It's likely the one you're being shown first will get them a bigger margin.
You wouldn't want to prioritize your needs before stockholder value.
Re: (Score:2)
You're not looking at this the right way.
It's likely the one you're being shown first will get them a bigger margin.
You wouldn't want to prioritize your needs before stockholder value.
I would prioritize the customer buying a product from them over a customer buying a product from someone else.
When I specify that I need a 100-foot Ethernet cable, I'm not going to say, "Oh, but Amazon is suggesting a 10-foot cable. That seems like a good enough alternative." To within the margin of error, nobody is going to do that. And yet this is the quality level of Amazon's dogs**t search results.
Amazon search results are such total garbage that roughly one in four searches causes me to leave Amazon
Re: (Score:2)
Their search is intentionally shitty so you spend more time digging through random garbage. Google isn't any better because half the links are just your words regurgitated back into Amazon.
Re: (Score:3)
It does succeed at that sub-goal, because I never go to Amazon any more and spend my time digging through, cheaper, random garbage at Alibaba.
Re: (Score:2)
Their search is intentionally shitty so you spend more time digging through random garbage. Google isn't any better because half the links are just your words regurgitated back into Amazon.
Google is, in fact, way better. It is still not great, because Google search picks up all of Amazon's garbage content like "People who bought this product ultimately bought" and "People who bought this product also bought" and thinks that the product page contains your search terms, but at least Google lets you hard exclude search terms, which gives you some chance of finding what you want. Amazon doesn't even do that, which makes its search borderline useless unless your needs are very, very, very simpli
Re: (Score:2)
Oh their search works fine... for them, it's not really intended to work for the customer...
Re: (Score:2)
Which jobs? (Score:2)
Big Tech is going from nerd daycare to a business (Score:3, Insightful)
That was just the visible effects. The other effect is staff bloat and that layoffs were a bummer...so what happens to your nerds when they get old and can't keep up and decide they don't want to write code anymore? Well, they go to management. I worked at a place where you were expected to code for 3-5 years and then move to management...I had like 10 layers between me and the CEO. I only knew what about 3 of them did. The org chart was insanely complex and no one could tell me what those guys in the middle were doing. When you're competing for geniuses...if Google is laying off people regularly, they'll just go to Facebook, Netflix, or some upstart. That's been one of many reasons why top talent preferred younger companies to older ones like Microsoft.
So from 2003 to 2023, we had about 20 years where layoffs were taboo. Cruft accumulated. Companies went from nimble and innovative to bureaucratic. Take Google...they had so many awesome projects 20-15 years ago. They still have GREAT projects, which they never bother to update...for example Google Fiber or their WiFi routers...which I love, but they seem to get no love....same for their web services. I don't know for sure if that's from organizational cruft, but it would be logical to assume it is.
All those great engineers from 20 years ago who did amazing things....but now, they have kids, aren't motivated to work more than they have to and have learned the organization well enough not to get fired with cause...now they're middle managers...barely adding value, attending meetings, putting on a show, etc. This wasn't a huge issue. Interest rates were low, so you could just create a job for them and barely care if they were really providing enough value to justify their hefty salary.
But now..borrowing is expensive. Layoffs are not taboo. It's time to run your company like a real business, not a daycare for tech enthusiasts.
Let's pretend Big Tech isn't evil and isn't incompetent....I know, it's a stretch...but let's pretend Sundar Pichai hires you to run Google right...
What would you do? Organizational streamlining. You want to retain your engineers. You want to only keep managers that actually provide value. My company removed 2 intermediate managers...EXTREMELY well paid directors that only managed like 2 directors...who seemed to run everything. No one I know had any clue what those 2 did.
Now going back to AI. Having used AI since it was commercially available, it's not going to replace your engineering staff...if you know what you're doing. Yeah...my UI skills are 20 years old. I am clueless on modern frameworks. I can vibe code you a new angular app...but...how badly do you want to put something in production I don't fully understand? Are you willing to risk an outage?...a data leak? When I used AI to generate Java, a language I know well, well...it compiles about 50% of the time. Giving it the simplest problems, it solves them slightly over half the time. The solutions?...almost always dated and poorly written. Yeah, it works...but it's convoluted and basic. I am not confident it's actually saving me time. It might be. However, I spend so much time fixing their shit and confirming it actually works that I could have usually written it faster if I just did it without their help. Everyone working with LLMs knows this.
However, if your job is to summarize meetings?...to answer questions for executives?...well I can see those AI tools doing a pretty decent job. AI can be an excellent tool to act as a buffer...allowing executives to ask questions in depth before speaking to a human being.
Re: Big Tech is going from nerd daycare to a busin (Score:2)
If anything, the very low rates were a significant cause of inflation that allowed the GOP to win the last election cycle. Artificially forcing them lower will incase inflation.
Not relevant (Score:2)
I do believe they colluded given who all the major players announced the layoff in a very short timespan, making me think it was in the works and they were sitting on it until the right moment. However, many have acknowledged this publicly and most analysts point that to a major factor.
With low interest rates, sloppy investments are a great tool. Wi
Re: (Score:2)
I think there's reality in what you're saying - but do we know who all these people are who they're laying off from "big tech"? At least from the buzz I see on sites like LinkedIn, it's pretty often their rank and file software developers!
The problem with "middle management" is they tend to be extremely difficult to get rid of. They're the ones usually tasked with reporting to leadership how well various groups are performing, and conversely, tasked with handling job cuts in a sane/sensible manner. So THEY
People that do not understand business (Score:2)
What else is new? This is economics graduates that never managed to actually understand their subject acting like herd animals. The short-term outlook is bad? Fire people! That will surely fix things! We can always rehire them and loss of institutional knowledge is not a thing, right?
Overdo this just a bit and your enterprise is on the road into a grave. Sure, may take a while, but there is no way to recover.
amazon layoff (Score:2)
"Reduce layers" is the new black (Score:1)
Seems like every layoff announcement these days claims it's about "reducing layers" but as far as I can tell the only "layer" getting reduced is the layer of people they have to pay.
One of my former employers did a "layer reduction" last year and according to friends who still work there they still have just as many layers...just not as many coworkers.