Three 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.
Looking 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.
Meanwhile, 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.
Ex-Amazonians aren't the best boosters of Amazon. What really happens is that everyone at other big-corps start complaining about new people managers and product/project managers coming in with a culture that is a bit more toxic than normal.
Is 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.
> They might be bitter but evangelize Amazon products are their most marketable skills.
I think you are talking out of ignorance and spite. Most of the services used by Amazon employees are internal services that may or may not be on par with the state of the art. Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.
> Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.
Is there more information on this somewhere. I had leadership telling me and a few others that we needed to replicate something on-par with AWS for internal use (with about 10 devs and less than a year timeline). I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
> I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
Amazon has multiple incantations of this. As legend would have it, AWS was an offshoot of Amazon's internal cloud infrastructure designed to monetize it to amortize their investment on bare metal infrastructure. They partitioned their networks for security reasons and for a few years their infrastructure evolved independently. Then AWS was a huge success and took a life of its own. Only relatively recently did Amazon started to push to drop their internal infrastructure to put all their eggs on AWS in general but serverless solutions in particular.
Well, There's not going to be much because it would violate NDA, but, nothing is 'elastic'.
Somewhere, someone, has to buy a set amount of servers, based on a running capacity projection and build those into usable machines. The basis of a datacenter, is an inventory system, a dhcp server, a tftp server, and a DNS server that get used to manage the lifecycle of hardware servers. That's what everyone did at one point, and the best of them build themselves tooling.
What amazon has is built on what was available at the time both for tooling and existing systems that they'd have to integrate with. You almost certainly don't have to build anything that complex. Additionally, you can get an off the shelf DCIM that integrates with your DHCP and DNS servers and trigger ansible runners in your boot sequences that handle the lifecycle steps. It's considerably easier to do now than it was 15 years ago.
While they don't use AWS specifically for a lot of stuff, the internal tooling can still build thousands of boxes an hour though they don't really pay for UI work for that stuff.
You can put a host(s) in a fleet, tell it the various software sets you want installed and click go and you'll have a fleet when you come back, so don't think that what you're being asked to build is impossible or not being used under every single major cloud provider or VPS provider.
The slightly harder part is deciding what you're going to give to devs for a front end. Are you providing raw hosts, VMs, container fleets, all of it? how are you handling multi-zone or multi-region . . ., how are you billing or throttling resources between teams.
The beauty of this is you get a lot of stuff for free these days. You can build out a fleet, provide a few build scripts that can be pulled into some CI/CD pipeline in your code forge of choice and you don't really need to build a UI.
Provisioning tooling is hard, but it's a lot easier now that it was 15/20 years ago and all the parts are there. I've built it several times on very small teams. I would have loved to have 10 devs to build something like that, but the reality is that you can get 80% with a little glue code and a few open source servers.
Anyone who shows up and their only contribution is to push AWS services because that's what they know, the first question I asked them is if they are capable of doing it themselves on-prem. Their answer is no or they don't know how to or some babbling on about it's more expensive and ROI and things like that I dismiss them immediately. Because those may all be true things but without the ability to do it yourself it is impossible to make an accurate assessment if AWS or another cloud service is actually a good fit for what you're doing.
What I would give for my org to just buy an oxide rack and run everything license free on there. Shame the only people with access to our CIO are salesmen…
> Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes.
Amazon has been doing that since it was founded, certainly 2001-2006. Every year there would be stack ranking, and they'd get rid of employees and even entire departments in reorgs and layoffs.
Amazon stock is up 170% since the start of 2023. It is absolutely cheaper to fire employees who are owed hundreds of thousands or even millions in stock grants over the next 2-3 years and replace them with new hires. Doubly so at Amazon where vesting is all back-loaded (5/15/40/40).
Doesn't that also make current employees nervous that the same will happen to them, and that their backloaded grants are at risk until they cross the finish line? It would seem pretty de-motivating, even for those who aren't let go in this RIF.
All 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.
No 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.
Doesn’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.
What's the "dodge" here? All these companies already have a large presence in other countries. They can adjust employee counts in each of these locations as they see fit.
Yup. 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
There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.
> 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?
Because 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!
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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.
> Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world?
Too slow and expensive. Why innovate when you can extract instead. It's the financialization of our economy. No one cares about or even has incentive to make better widgets, all the incentive is in financial optimization and squeezing out every last cent because the business is now a financial asset, not a product company.
"Pandemic overhiring"? Christ, that was half a decade ago. The pandemic has been over long enough for a kid to go through high school or get a Bachelor's!
But the board will be enriched by this, and that's all that matters.
That’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.
And 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"
Remember 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%.
Yeah 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.
There'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.
> 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.
They should be completely separate. If they were two independent companies, a low margin distribution and logistics company on one side and a high margin software services company on the other then nobody would suggest merging the two together.
> Which cloud company can casually find 100B cash in a year?
AWS. Because AWS reports close to $11B/quarter, which is over half Amazon's entire revenue, and AWS owns the cloud computing market, on which the whole world runs.
> 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.
By 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
Why 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.
If 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.
Not 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.
And in this case actually correct! Decimate is often used to mean “almost wipe out”, but the word actually comes from “killing every 10th person”.. I.e 10% of a group.
> 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.
Like 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.
> Like 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.
I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.
Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?
> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.
What do you think "Kindle" is? Is it a specific device? Is it Kindle for Web? Is it the Android or iPhone apps? Is it Kindle for Windows or Kindle for Mac? Among these, can you count how many are paid?
Reminder '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.
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.
Jassy is going about this the wrong way. In practice, reducing the number of line managers meant that engineers are having to do the managerial work themselves.
So they're writing even more six-pagers to satisfy the other managers which they're no longer shielded from having to interact with directly.
On 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...
you 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.
No, as it's not permanent. Going from no buybacks to buybacks for example can be a bad sign to me. Companies who have been doing them for years perhaps less so. Same with layoffs. It's not like a boycott list, it's more of a near term indicator for me.
And the way we will break through this problem is to fire a shitload of people such that everybody is frightened for their continued employment such that they focus on looking the part and fight for the most valuable turf so that they aren't likely to be on the chopping block next time.
