Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would change the world and be the source of our future growth and success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we given up on that?
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
Most SDEs have grown up in a severe labor deficit. It's so interesting seeing the idealism smack in to reality.
1. Those "employee-appreciations" were a cost-saving measure to retain talent. 20% time towards projects that benefit the employer vs getting paid 20% more, or free food at an incremental cost of $100/mo/employee instead of paying $2000/mo/employee for equivalent comp-based retention.
2. We are no longer in a severe labor demand deficit. Quality of life will converge on the American norm - treating employees like disposable cogs, under layers of brutal middle-management politics.
3. "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The only examples that come to my mind are niche companies that market based on such an ethos, like Patagonia. Of course there are stable European companies, and US union shops, but those aren't disruptive. WeWork had that ethos for a little while I guess.
Plenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including meta. Band rooms too. It’s mostly Amazon that’s an absolutely awful, terrible, horrendous company.
I don't know what is surprising, it's just capitalism being capitalism. There were game rooms because they thought it would be useful for making money, they don't have game room anymore because they think its' useful for making money now
Being "managed out" (as this is sometimes called) of a long term role can be very traumatic. Especially if you-the-employee approach the situation with a natural and genuine desire to fix or heal the situation, in the face of the (unbeknownst to you) deliberate and ongoing undermining coming from management. Which then draws the process out as long as possible - max pain.
Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction.
I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.
Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices. The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming, putting everything on "performance" etc.
My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into. The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so the smart move would be to move the people involved into the company's AI efforts.
I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.
Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses (let’s exclude warehouse/logistics in Amazons case). So why is there an order of magnitude more staff than what’s needed to run those?
There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth.
Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do.
This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it.
When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.
These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around.
Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.
Amazon is two businesses in one. AWS is a high margin technology services business. The rest is a low margin box shifting distributor.
To be competitive in distribution you need to be ruthless about costs. I've consulted for a few of these sort of companies and it's insane what they will do to save a few pennies. They are utterly miserable places to work as their frugal attitude spills over into all their interactions. It starts with using doors as desks and progresses to making staff piss in a bottle.
I suspect this culture is what makes Amazon as a whole such a difficult employer.
If they were two independent businesses then it would never make sense for them to merge, just as you wouldn't expect Microsoft to buy Walmart. It would probably be better for both sides if they divorced.
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements
Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year.
When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it.
The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error.
And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train.
Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.
>Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs
This is not really true anymore and is exactly why Google and Amazon are doing big layoffs. Money isn't free anymore. The "just grow at all costs" couldn't last forever and it's finally coming to an end
Investors are specifically expecting profitability now and not just growth of customers. The end of what you're talking about is precisely what is happening now
Keep The Lights On effort was typically around 10% of total capacity. The rest of the effort was because the goal is not to maintain, it’s to drive improvements to the business.
> Very few people are needed to run the technology elements of these businesses
Have you used AWS before? The complexity of the site alone should tell you this side of the business would need more than a "very few" people to run it. And that's just their web services side, never mind retail.
It sounds like a bad situation at Amazon, but if my company wanted to pay me indefinitely to do nothing, I have plenty of ideas for how I could use the time…
Interesting that they feel that they are “trailing in AI”. The second that they cannot just repackage open source and integrate it in their infra, they throw hands in the air.
I couldn’t help but smile. To be clear, its not just Amazon who does this but they are guilty of not investing seriously in developing new tech, only monetizing it. Out of all the BigTech, they are the only one that doesn’t even pretend to invest in some sort of industrial lab focused on basic research (Even IBM has a Research division, even today).
AI is still pretty much a bubble. We don't really even have anything that remotely resembles AI right now, just way better search engines, that Amazon was never in the business of. All they need to do to stay relevant in AI is to offer cost effective EC2 instances with accelerator hardware.
A friend had a similar experience. They got "benched" with no impactful work and promises of impactful project work once headcount is available. In reality, no headcount was available on their team for over 18 months, and there were no prospects in the foreseeable future. Bad performance review feedback with raise not keeping pace with inflation with some random excuse. They got the message and changed jobs, taking their decade of Amazon-internal knowledge with them.
They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Addendum:
Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
I see the same trend with Google, Facebook, okta etc.
There are multiple factors. Ofcourse from orgs perspective it is cost saving measure. But from another phenomenon that has happened is that graduates from lower tier colleges have gotten good in cracking leetcode, faang style interviews.
There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these interviews in India.
I have encountered this during my time recruiting as well, where the same position I applied for was also listed for 1 day (then taken down) in Hyderabad. Likely stealthily collect applications. Ultimately, they said I passed the rounds, but the role was cut.
Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India robustly for dev positions.
When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt that it is solely infeasible for you to wfh at your billing rate.
> They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on their universities. It's not new.
> expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it.
> Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly
3 days from office like all the other office.
> Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.
Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are. However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India unless they are forced to even though comparatively make less money here.
Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+ complain about barely being able to afford their life.
I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill high tech salaries.
Maybe it is just circumstance but I had been working with devs in Hyderabad since at least 2016 when I was at Amazon. I’m sure they are expanding the workforce there, though
Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?
At any of these companies with monopolist market position, as the writer of this article notes, the only way to keep increasing profits is to get rid of the talent they overpaid to keep it away from competitors. And you could probably cut 25% of the engineering staff in places like Google and Amazon and actually increase efficiency. A lot of guys like this are going to find themselves having to find other employment elsewhere and having to scrape by on $250K/yr...
OP: I was told the final date of my employment would be Dec 31st (turns out that date was made up). I asked to be let go in Oct with severance but it wasn’t approved. I’ve been checking messages and reviewing requests but not taking on any new work.
He explains in the post. "Our number one priority is to find another job." I believe it's implied "within the company."
This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other open roles."
Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If they don't need that position anymore they should cough up severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
This is actually funny in that it reminds me of a Big Dumb Bank that I worked for post-GFC that was so screwed they were in endless cut mode. One year they basically ran out of money to severance people out by Q3. How the accounting magic of this works is beyond me, but they continued to employ these people instead of laying them off.
There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3.
Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done.
It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.
> I’ve heard similar tactics being used at other companies–mostly large companies–and it’ll only continue in 2024 as they make decisions that drive short term profits over all else.
When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.
> There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.
“The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience. The word comes from Latin decem, meaning "ten." Decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.”
> Pipelines, SDKs, and security are centralized. All components of a service team are self-contained as part of that team. It turns out that devops is a very expensive org chart.
I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.
Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?
[+] [-] wolverine876|2 years ago|reply
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
[+] [-] losteric|2 years ago|reply
1. Those "employee-appreciations" were a cost-saving measure to retain talent. 20% time towards projects that benefit the employer vs getting paid 20% more, or free food at an incremental cost of $100/mo/employee instead of paying $2000/mo/employee for equivalent comp-based retention.
2. We are no longer in a severe labor demand deficit. Quality of life will converge on the American norm - treating employees like disposable cogs, under layers of brutal middle-management politics.
3. "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The only examples that come to my mind are niche companies that market based on such an ethos, like Patagonia. Of course there are stable European companies, and US union shops, but those aren't disruptive. WeWork had that ethos for a little while I guess.
[+] [-] asylteltine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|2 years ago|reply
It’s not subtle. It’s overt & being externally communicated.
Wall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies.
The pendulum has swung back from the years where growth was all that mattered.
It’s now back to focus on profitability.
The pendulum will swing back again at some point as well.
It’s cyclical.
[+] [-] ejb999|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulpy123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crtified|2 years ago|reply
Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction.
I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.
[+] [-] BeefDinnerPurge|2 years ago|reply
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
[+] [-] nine_zeros|2 years ago|reply
My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
[+] [-] hornban|2 years ago|reply
I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.
[+] [-] dougweltman|2 years ago|reply
There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth.
Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do.
This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it.
When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.
These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around.
Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|2 years ago|reply
To be competitive in distribution you need to be ruthless about costs. I've consulted for a few of these sort of companies and it's insane what they will do to save a few pennies. They are utterly miserable places to work as their frugal attitude spills over into all their interactions. It starts with using doors as desks and progresses to making staff piss in a bottle.
I suspect this culture is what makes Amazon as a whole such a difficult employer.
If they were two independent businesses then it would never make sense for them to merge, just as you wouldn't expect Microsoft to buy Walmart. It would probably be better for both sides if they divorced.
[+] [-] w10-1|2 years ago|reply
Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year.
When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it.
The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error.
And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train.
Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.
[+] [-] mixdup|2 years ago|reply
This is not really true anymore and is exactly why Google and Amazon are doing big layoffs. Money isn't free anymore. The "just grow at all costs" couldn't last forever and it's finally coming to an end
Investors are specifically expecting profitability now and not just growth of customers. The end of what you're talking about is precisely what is happening now
[+] [-] minkiebun|2 years ago|reply
Keep The Lights On effort was typically around 10% of total capacity. The rest of the effort was because the goal is not to maintain, it’s to drive improvements to the business.
[+] [-] iot_devs|2 years ago|reply
This is currently false, or at least very up to debate.
[+] [-] htss2013|2 years ago|reply
If WFH destroys long term value creation, then why didn't the stock market punish every tech company when they all announced permanent WFH?
[+] [-] Ancalagon|2 years ago|reply
Have you used AWS before? The complexity of the site alone should tell you this side of the business would need more than a "very few" people to run it. And that's just their web services side, never mind retail.
[+] [-] burlesona|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] padthai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ActorNightly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nameoda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|2 years ago|reply
Addendum:
Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
[+] [-] debarshri|2 years ago|reply
There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these interviews in India.
[+] [-] hackernewds|2 years ago|reply
Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India robustly for dev positions.
When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt that it is solely infeasible for you to wfh at your billing rate.
[+] [-] kburman|2 years ago|reply
Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on their universities. It's not new.
> expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it.
> Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly
3 days from office like all the other office.
> Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
Covid time is long gone.
[+] [-] drubio|2 years ago|reply
They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.
Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
[+] [-] pylua|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citizenpaul|2 years ago|reply
I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are. However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India unless they are forced to even though comparatively make less money here.
Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+ complain about barely being able to afford their life.
I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill high tech salaries.
[+] [-] timeagain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pylua|2 years ago|reply
If it truly were free trade then we could choose to live there and accept a lesser salary.
Eventually offshoring to South America will probably hurt India as that is poised to expand and has overlapping timezones.
[+] [-] Hypocritelefty|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimbob45|2 years ago|reply
The first candidate to promise an outlawing of outsourcing gets my vote.
[+] [-] abeppu|2 years ago|reply
Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?
[+] [-] yborg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stickfigure|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeagain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustinGarrison|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzb|2 years ago|reply
This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other open roles."
Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If they don't need that position anymore they should cough up severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
[+] [-] burlesona|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveBK123|2 years ago|reply
There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3.
Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done.
It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.
[+] [-] chank|2 years ago|reply
When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|2 years ago|reply
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...
Compare to Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple/Meta’s 20%+ profit margins.
[+] [-] Podgajski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixass|2 years ago|reply
Last sentence is pure bullshit
[+] [-] thrw542|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|2 years ago|reply
I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.
[+] [-] rdl|2 years ago|reply