Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective.
> The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things.
So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global).
Update: Tried to figure out whether the doubling head count was corporate employees or total. I don't have time to dig into it now but a quick search did turn up Amazon's EEO reports in which they break employees down into a number of categories including "Professionals" -- which sounds like it would include engineers. 77K in 2019, 121K in 2021. So it's reasonable to assume those did double from 2019 to the present. See https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-dat...
I am assuming the "doubling" might have come from delivery drivers and workers at warehouses mostly. Looks like the good folks who are let go are now mostly from non-engineering.
This is just the latest round of cuts at Amazon: "From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition."
Also: "Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months."
> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot.
$5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.
In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons.
Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Apple CarPlay - a big touchscreen - not voice commands.
I worked for Alexa before. If I remember correctly there are only 4 use cases of it like weather, smart devices, music and timers/alarms. There used to be 10k employees at that time of which 3k were working in music alone. There was definitely a bloat at that time.
The third party ecosystem never caught up and there is no killer app for Alexa other than those 4 use cases. The API (slots/intents) is limited and hard to create any useful interaction with it. My gut feeling is many divisions will be affected in Alexa.
How is that much loss possible? Not a hardware engineer, but from the exterior it feels like there is nothing exotic about the design which would warrant extravagant development costs.
Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?
$5B is around 1% of their (current) trailing 4 quarter revenue, which I would say is "not outrageous" if voice/home assistants is an area of growth and investment for Amazon.
Why would a 2022 article be citing a 2018 loss figure for a almost surely (if my house is any indication) fast-growing segment?
Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP).
Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn?
The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has a negative net worth, so can't borrow anything:
To me, this looks like evidence that profit comes from offloading externalities onto the public.
Ordinarily, workers could find work at other companies. But because companies are so large now, they have effective monopolies in markets like shipping. So layoffs could be used as a signal to bring companies up on antitrust charges.
Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities.
Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other reasons you might bring antitrust against these companies.
Lol it cannot borrow 10 trillion $$. Where are these make believe numbers coming from? And it can carry the employees at somewhere between moderate to severe risk of bankruptcy (in the case of amazon, it is lower than moderate).
If you have a crystal ball and know when the economy will reverse, no one will fire anyone. Otherwise you have to cut costs and human labor are the biggest costs in most companies. Sure, we could get into a culture where we ask people to take pay cuts for a brief period in return for stability but that seems to not work for some reason so people get laid off.
They absolutely certainly can not borrow 10 trillion USD. They do have massive revolving lines of credit (think billions, not even 10s of billions, much less trillions) but those come with conditions; it's not like a credit card at that level where you can just use it your whims. I don't even think the Federal government could borrow that amount overnight.
Corporations don't always see attrition as a bad thing, especially amazon. When execs buy to much it's nice to be able to make some returns, especially if it's the stuff you don't really like.
Why go into debt if it's not going to benefit the company in the long term? We don't actually know how long economic downturns can be, or what kind of turmoil will be encountered. Why keep a liability.
Then you have the attitude of management itself. There has been talk for some time that companies have been going crazy with hiring, and that's certainly the case. However, many mangers and execs have gotten in the mindset that their being horribly abused, and their employees have gotten lazy and entitled.
Have you talked to a manager, or CTO in the last few years (off the record, and not as an employee/coworker). They absolutely despise the average working stiff and are relishing the opportunity to exercise their powers again.
If my business is valued at a million dollars and I take out a loan for a million, my business is now valued at 0. That’s basic accounting. Amazon had a net income of 14B last year - no one will let them borrow anything close to their market cap, much less 10X it.
Edit: This assumes I spend my loan on payroll which is what the OP originally suggested.
Iirc, the Soviet Union used to guarantee a job. Not sure how well that worked out for them, though. Don't they have a massive alcoholism problem still?
This is so completely normal in these industries that it is a non-headline.
Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the shareholders are bothered about ROI.
If you want to ride the unicorns and take the risk, that's fine, but there are plenty of people around the world who have far fewer choices with their work and are paid far less so I don't feel too bad that someone's Christmas might be not as expected.
If you want job security, get a job somewhere that isn't trying to earn their next billion, where you can make a difference, where you are appreciated and where work/life balance means something. I expect you would feel much better :-)
> that someone's Christmas might be not as expected.
You should have sympathy for PEOPLE. Every one of the PEOPLE effected by any lay off or industry change is a person. It could be your relative, it could be you, ti could be me. Let's get out of the "I don't feel too bad for that person that's not me" and try to have compassion for fellow humans.
> If you want job security, get a job somewhere that isn't trying to earn their next billion, where you can make a difference, where you are appreciated and where work/life balance means something. I expect you would feel much better :-)
... What?!?!? Where is this magical place you're talking about. Small companies can be better, but they can also be much worse, and you may have less recourse. You can really hide under a rock at a big corporation for like... decades.
Many of the "meaningful" jobs are low paying, and can be even more soul crushing. Teachers aren't always treated great. It's far more of a "hated by all" profession than you realize. Social work seems to be a tough racket on many fronts. You could have to do some difficult things and are almost guaranteed to see levels of despair and injustice that are difficult to bear.
All that for pathetic pay, but at least you have good job security, maybe sometimes with an asterisk; so best case you're one of the lucky ones guaranteed to be poor forever. I've heard that non-profits can be incredibly toxic as well.
In fact it almost seems that the "meaningful" professions are even worse, usually. There's a lot of corporate environments that are quite pleasant, have good pay and decent security.
"Heart" work almost always seems like a bad bet for financial security, and work environment. Doesn't seem worth it unless you're a very specific kind of person with talent that HAS to be a part of something, so is willing to put up with almost anything; boss puts cigarettes out on your forehead to pass the time? Sounds great, I'm just excited to be making music!
You will ALWAYS have 10 people tirelessly fighting for the job.
So you think a job at a startup is more secure? You think a job at a smaller company is more secure?
BigTech layoffs might make news because they're Big but plenty of smaller companies will be laying off as the economy contracts, too. Also 99% of Amazon employees will be fine and the ones that are fired, at least on the corporate side, will find new jobs quickly because the rest of the industry is clamoring to hire ex-FAANG. Hard to see how working there is some huge risk.
Amazon brought on like 300-400k warehouse workers and customer service numbers would also move when that happens. They have a LOT of those workers compared to corporate and engineering. And they move those numbers a lot as well.
This is weird because I'm in the middle of the interview process with a division of Amazon.
Disclaimer:
I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice.
And here we go:
I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their hiring goals" and I was transferred to another division.
Through September and October, I organized the virtual on-site. And my interview was scheduled for last week. The weeks prior, as we know, the shit hit all the fans. I fully expected to get a "too bad, so sad" email saying my interview was cancelled. It wasn't. I went through the interview and I'm waiting to hear back currently.
But yeah, I would not be surprised to get a rejection. But from the point of view of my experience, nothing they've done or said has made anything seem off.
> The company has sold hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. But Amazon has said the products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources such as voice shopping have not caught on.
This is the game, right? For the first time since Alexa launched, Amazon is looking at a painful Q4, so the rest of retail can't cover up the Devices org's big wart.
The recession depending on who you ask seem to be either mild or not happening. All the government indicators (recent inflation, gdp, jobs report) seem to paint a thriving economy.
So why are these companies still shedding jobs? I'm starting to wonder if the tech industry is disproportionately impacted similar to dot com bubble from 2000.
i think layoffs happen much faster than reporting. also, there's just a lot of people out there and tech is only a small piece of the overall labor market.
Funny, I've been getting recruiter spam every week from the same set of people, and their last email 3 weeks ago was titled "AWS - This could be the last chance to join the team!!!"
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
> The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things.
So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global).
Update: Tried to figure out whether the doubling head count was corporate employees or total. I don't have time to dig into it now but a quick search did turn up Amazon's EEO reports in which they break employees down into a number of categories including "Professionals" -- which sounds like it would include engineers. 77K in 2019, 121K in 2021. So it's reasonable to assume those did double from 2019 to the present. See https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-dat...
[+] [-] san_dimitri|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] secondcoming|3 years ago|reply
It was newsworthy because of the potential devastation these events would have had on an area; as in some people may never be employed _ever again_.
It's why Ireland gave so many tax breaks to Apple; they employed thousands from one city. Layoffs would have made an already bad situation far worse.
[+] [-] firstSpeaker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outworlder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] green-eclipse|3 years ago|reply
Also: "Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months."
[+] [-] mjr00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] green-eclipse|3 years ago|reply
$5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|3 years ago|reply
In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons.
Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Apple CarPlay - a big touchscreen - not voice commands.
[+] [-] nblgbg|3 years ago|reply
The third party ecosystem never caught up and there is no killer app for Alexa other than those 4 use cases. The API (slots/intents) is limited and hard to create any useful interaction with it. My gut feeling is many divisions will be affected in Alexa.
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
Do they sell the devices at a profit?
Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?
[+] [-] 0cf8612b2e1e|3 years ago|reply
Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
Why would a 2022 article be citing a 2018 loss figure for a almost surely (if my house is any indication) fast-growing segment?
[+] [-] zackmorris|3 years ago|reply
Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn?
The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has a negative net worth, so can't borrow anything:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-...
To me, this looks like evidence that profit comes from offloading externalities onto the public.
Ordinarily, workers could find work at other companies. But because companies are so large now, they have effective monopolies in markets like shipping. So layoffs could be used as a signal to bring companies up on antitrust charges.
[+] [-] whichfawkes|3 years ago|reply
Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other reasons you might bring antitrust against these companies.
[+] [-] hnews_account_1|3 years ago|reply
If you have a crystal ball and know when the economy will reverse, no one will fire anyone. Otherwise you have to cut costs and human labor are the biggest costs in most companies. Sure, we could get into a culture where we ask people to take pay cuts for a brief period in return for stability but that seems to not work for some reason so people get laid off.
[+] [-] cellis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|3 years ago|reply
Why go into debt if it's not going to benefit the company in the long term? We don't actually know how long economic downturns can be, or what kind of turmoil will be encountered. Why keep a liability.
Then you have the attitude of management itself. There has been talk for some time that companies have been going crazy with hiring, and that's certainly the case. However, many mangers and execs have gotten in the mindset that their being horribly abused, and their employees have gotten lazy and entitled.
Have you talked to a manager, or CTO in the last few years (off the record, and not as an employee/coworker). They absolutely despise the average working stiff and are relishing the opportunity to exercise their powers again.
[+] [-] koheripbal|3 years ago|reply
That is what they are designed to do. That's why people pay to be part-owners.
[+] [-] serjester|3 years ago|reply
Edit: This assumes I spend my loan on payroll which is what the OP originally suggested.
[+] [-] fullshark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readthenotes1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3rgl1ng|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbriner|3 years ago|reply
Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the shareholders are bothered about ROI.
If you want to ride the unicorns and take the risk, that's fine, but there are plenty of people around the world who have far fewer choices with their work and are paid far less so I don't feel too bad that someone's Christmas might be not as expected.
If you want job security, get a job somewhere that isn't trying to earn their next billion, where you can make a difference, where you are appreciated and where work/life balance means something. I expect you would feel much better :-)
[+] [-] notyourwork|3 years ago|reply
You should have sympathy for PEOPLE. Every one of the PEOPLE effected by any lay off or industry change is a person. It could be your relative, it could be you, ti could be me. Let's get out of the "I don't feel too bad for that person that's not me" and try to have compassion for fellow humans.
edit: spelling typo
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|3 years ago|reply
... What?!?!? Where is this magical place you're talking about. Small companies can be better, but they can also be much worse, and you may have less recourse. You can really hide under a rock at a big corporation for like... decades.
Many of the "meaningful" jobs are low paying, and can be even more soul crushing. Teachers aren't always treated great. It's far more of a "hated by all" profession than you realize. Social work seems to be a tough racket on many fronts. You could have to do some difficult things and are almost guaranteed to see levels of despair and injustice that are difficult to bear.
All that for pathetic pay, but at least you have good job security, maybe sometimes with an asterisk; so best case you're one of the lucky ones guaranteed to be poor forever. I've heard that non-profits can be incredibly toxic as well.
In fact it almost seems that the "meaningful" professions are even worse, usually. There's a lot of corporate environments that are quite pleasant, have good pay and decent security.
"Heart" work almost always seems like a bad bet for financial security, and work environment. Doesn't seem worth it unless you're a very specific kind of person with talent that HAS to be a part of something, so is willing to put up with almost anything; boss puts cigarettes out on your forehead to pass the time? Sounds great, I'm just excited to be making music!
You will ALWAYS have 10 people tirelessly fighting for the job.
[+] [-] koboll|3 years ago|reply
So you think a job at a startup is more secure? You think a job at a smaller company is more secure?
BigTech layoffs might make news because they're Big but plenty of smaller companies will be laying off as the economy contracts, too. Also 99% of Amazon employees will be fine and the ones that are fired, at least on the corporate side, will find new jobs quickly because the rest of the industry is clamoring to hire ex-FAANG. Hard to see how working there is some huge risk.
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] datavirtue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|3 years ago|reply
Edit: looks like they grew headcount by 60% (+500,000 people) in 2020 and 23% (+310,000) in 2021.
Today's announcement reduces headcount by 1% which is tiny compared to their growth.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...
[+] [-] grogenaut|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bena|3 years ago|reply
Disclaimer:
I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice.
And here we go:
I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their hiring goals" and I was transferred to another division.
Through September and October, I organized the virtual on-site. And my interview was scheduled for last week. The weeks prior, as we know, the shit hit all the fans. I fully expected to get a "too bad, so sad" email saying my interview was cancelled. It wasn't. I went through the interview and I'm waiting to hear back currently.
But yeah, I would not be surprised to get a rejection. But from the point of view of my experience, nothing they've done or said has made anything seem off.
[+] [-] green-eclipse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rabuse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabianBeiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samanator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __derek__|3 years ago|reply
This is the game, right? For the first time since Alexa launched, Amazon is looking at a painful Q4, so the rest of retail can't cover up the Devices org's big wart.
[+] [-] allisdust|3 years ago|reply
So why are these companies still shedding jobs? I'm starting to wonder if the tech industry is disproportionately impacted similar to dot com bubble from 2000.
[+] [-] greatpostman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yrgulation|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adam_arthur|3 years ago|reply
These layoffs only get press due to the brand names of the companies
[+] [-] mandeepj|3 years ago|reply
Let the severance period end.
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply