These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.
Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.
So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.
The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
Whenever there are layoffs of a major company, like half the comments here always bemoan the particular wording the article or company uses to describe the layoffs. It's a pointless exercise IMO (though I agree with you, ironically "firing" is less accurate than "let go").
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations.
AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc.
Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".
That’s what I was thinking but I looked it up in the dictionary and appears that firing is already pretty neutral yet picked up the negative connotation, presumably because most people consider firings to be with cause. Even ‘layoffs’ has picked up a negative connotation. I’m not sure if it’s possible for language to to continuously outrun the associations, I guess we either police the language more fervently or continue inventing new words.
Part of me hates the capriciousness of randomly selected layoffs but it’s done for a few main reasons, firstly that it’s not exploitable by internal politicking (at least less explicable). Secondly, reduces exposure to lawsuits about performance. Thirdly, reduces reputational damage to those laid off. Of course there is an incredible incentive to lie about the randomness.
I was just thinking the same, this is quite the weasel wording. Not only the “losses” but the passive voice. As if Amazon is a person who walked to work one day and realise it has a hole in its pocket from which thousands of jobs fell off. “Oh well, these things happen, not my fault and nothing I can do about it”, Amazon says as it shrugs its shoulders and whistles down the factory floor with a skip in its step.
This also stuck out to me, but in defense of Amazon (yuck), I don't see that language directly from anyone at Amazon. They use the regular "reduction in corporate workforce" BS that every big company on earth uses. It just seems like an editorial choice unless I'm missing something.
Doublespeak? Try to speak in such a legalese way that although things are technically true, yet still those words are crafted in such a way to influence others...
So in this case of our capitalist system, doublespeak exists in such a way because they can create money or not lose money by doing such doublespeak as saying to investors this as a destroyed would make them have a negative connotation with amazon itself which would reduce their stock price.
Everything is done for the stock price. Everything. The world is a little addicted on those shareholders returns that we can change our language because of it.
I sincerely suspect the BBC would only ever use "fired"/"firings" if the employees were being dismissed for conduct reasons, since that's the common usage in British English. I've been let go -- indeed, I've lost my job (it's the employees who suffer job losses, not the employer) -- but I've never been fired.
I think we may be hitting an issue in translation between English and American; in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy". "Job losses" is a perfectly reasonable neutral phrase here. Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.
People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.
> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
"Letting go" belongs in the same HR phrasebook. They didn't ask permission to quit and the company were so generous to let them, the initiative was from the other side.
I thought the modern lingo was "impacted". So and so was impacted. Ten thousand employees were impacted. It avoids let go, but detaches as much as possible from the personal crisis.
That reads differently to me. The company is doing the letting go. Like letting loose. Or letting fly. It's agency on the part of the company. Letting them see. All of these will have euphemistic overtones as no company will want to say that they axed 10,000 people.
There is so much stupidity to unpack here. They say they need to use the opportunity provided by AI. However, what kind of opportunity is that requiring them to fire people in order to use it? Is AI making them more efficient or less efficient? If it's making more efficient, why they need to lay off all these people who are getting more efficient? So that other companies will pick up the workers they spend so much time to train on their systems, and replicate the same technologies elsewhere?
I think these companies have lost all their brains and there is a stupid AI system making bad decisions for them. I also fully expect these companies to lose their shirt to smarter companies in the next few years and decades.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A blue-green planet from suborbital space. Four commas in my net worth. I watched tens of thousands of employees get misplaced in my couch cushions. All their jobs will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Companies have no incentive to employ as many people as possible. Really it’s the opposite, make as much money as possible, while paying as few employees as possible.
That is the incentive to employee more people - they can do more with those people. There is a balance between the two though. More people means less focus.
The incentive many times is to create a scarcity of talent for other tech companies by hiring as many experts as you can. Facebook, Amazon, and many others have been employing this strategy for over a decade, but now that the era of cheap money is over we're seeing a pivot away.
Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.
Their addition of AI into Quicksight (their BI tool) really cemented for me how much they're willing to bluff to look relevant. They launched the AI addition at least a year ago, but recently rebranded the whole thing as "Quick Suite", promoting new AI capabilities. It really just seems like a new skin, with more purple. So far, out of 4 people at my org who tried it, all were disappointed after upgrading. I get much better results from sending a CSV to ChatGPT and asking for a graph.
It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.
Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.
Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?
in the uk job losses and firings are different things, with different meanings, so the criticism here is a bit off.
job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone
firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job
(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")
It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”
They aren’t accidents, it’s an inherent part of how we designed cars and roads and we decided as society that we are ok with thousands of people killed by cars.
Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language.
If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".
The conspiracist view would be that the media-industrial complex would want to prevent the stock price of a given company from dipping, as well as help them skirt around legal issues that may arise for the company in question if everyone reports the "layoff" as such, which is not always done according to practices (there are sometimes reports in the media about such, not specifically about Amazon though).
Mass layoffs tend to make stock prices go higher, not lower... so nothing to worry about there. If the news stories were even more brutal, accusing Amazon of axing tens of thousands and then laughing when those people begged and pleaded that they wouldn't be able to afford baby formula, I think I suspect that this would be even better at closing time than some less offensive journalism.
You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here.
Narcissistic processes/systems/people always externalize the consequences of their own actions by pushing those consequences off on others while keeping the benefits they pillaged for themselves.
Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse?
You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.
It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you.
All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.
And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return. With Amazon obviously the risk of that is low. But for many new companies the risk is very high. Therefore the payoffs are also high, to attract people to take the risk. Where I sympathize with your view is that sometimes an investment risk is taken, and the payout far exceeds the risk by any reasonable and sane margin. So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures, on the hope that the one successful one is so successful that it pays the losses of the failed ones. But yea, this system is not really working for the vast majority of people and that is a tragedy.
Well you do get that weird "ownership" concept, pushed on everyone by that bozo Bezos, where you are supposed to "act as owner" of the business, but get no benefits out of it, only the risks :)
"getting paid" is the operative word. Employees get paid, that is their compensation. If you want to be an owner, you need to either invest, or have that clearly included in your employment agreement.
Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.
Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.
This is called "consensual exchange" and it is by far the most ethical way to run society. You don't have to agree to these terms. You can go start your own company. It's a free country. The alternative always seems to boil down to various bureaucrats dictating terms to people. What gives them the right to do so?
You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.
The same can be said in the relationship of the company towards the employee. Any employee can leave any moment they want and all the investments the company has done on them will be lost.
You forgot to mention the part where they also invest millions in lobbying and buying off politicians to control policy, and hundreds of millions or billions acquiring media companies to control the public narrative, all so that ordinary workers - who vastly outnumber the billionaires - do not get out the pitchforks and demand a more equitable distribution of wealth.
andsoitis|4 months ago
While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.
Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.
So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.
The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
rco8786|4 months ago
It's the same as language like "officer involved shooting" to avoid saying "an officer shot a person" or calling a "murder" a "loss of life".
hn_throwaway_99|4 months ago
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
pseudalopex|4 months ago
This meaning is present in many people's minds. It is not present in many people's minds or any dictionary I saw ever.
to remove someone from their job, either because they have done something wrong or badly, or as a way of saving the cost of employing them[1]
The act or an instance of dismissing someone from a job.[2]
the action of forcing somebody to leave their job[3]
And so on.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fire
[2] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/firing
[3] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
edanm|4 months ago
AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc.
Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".
cjbgkagh|4 months ago
Part of me hates the capriciousness of randomly selected layoffs but it’s done for a few main reasons, firstly that it’s not exploitable by internal politicking (at least less explicable). Secondly, reduces exposure to lawsuits about performance. Thirdly, reduces reputational damage to those laid off. Of course there is an incredible incentive to lie about the randomness.
Forgeties79|4 months ago
To me everything else is weasel words.
FranzFerdiNaN|4 months ago
People are fired for a cause, namely Amazon needs more profit for its shareholders.
dgs_sgd|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
latexr|4 months ago
jwmerrill|4 months ago
“Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice.
“14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the passive voice.
There is not a 1:1 relationship between being vague about agency and using the passive voice.
mkipper|4 months ago
anonymous_sorry|4 months ago
Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry.
But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost".
If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.
Imustaskforhelp|4 months ago
So in this case of our capitalist system, doublespeak exists in such a way because they can create money or not lose money by doing such doublespeak as saying to investors this as a destroyed would make them have a negative connotation with amazon itself which would reduce their stock price.
Everything is done for the stock price. Everything. The world is a little addicted on those shareholders returns that we can change our language because of it.
chadash|4 months ago
darrenf|4 months ago
pjc50|4 months ago
People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.
xnorswap|4 months ago
antifacistpleb|4 months ago
[deleted]
motorest|4 months ago
This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
lexszero_|4 months ago
hibikir|4 months ago
qsi|4 months ago
YcYc10|4 months ago
coliveira|4 months ago
I think these companies have lost all their brains and there is a stupid AI system making bad decisions for them. I also fully expect these companies to lose their shirt to smarter companies in the next few years and decades.
otikik|4 months ago
disqard|4 months ago
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A blue-green planet from suborbital space. Four commas in my net worth. I watched tens of thousands of employees get misplaced in my couch cushions. All their jobs will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
reassess_blind|4 months ago
bluGill|4 months ago
dmschulman|4 months ago
maxehmookau|4 months ago
actionfromafar|4 months ago
heresie-dabord|4 months ago
---
Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.
---
[1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs
cromd|4 months ago
It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.
Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.
Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?
schnable|4 months ago
nothrowaways|4 months ago
random9749832|4 months ago
gedy|4 months ago
gniv|4 months ago
jalapenos|4 months ago
seydor|4 months ago
orlp|4 months ago
Loss happens, firings are a decision.
dust-jacket|4 months ago
job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job
(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")
01HNNWZ0MV43FF|4 months ago
portaouflop|4 months ago
They aren’t accidents, it’s an inherent part of how we designed cars and roads and we decided as society that we are ok with thousands of people killed by cars.
jonkho|4 months ago
mrtksn|4 months ago
rs186|4 months ago
sbarre|4 months ago
If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".
JKCalhoun|4 months ago
Or, as you said, firings.
hk1337|4 months ago
Toby1VC|4 months ago
supriyo-biswas|4 months ago
NoMoreNicksLeft|4 months ago
mv4|4 months ago
InsideOutSanta|4 months ago
You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here.
/s
hopelite|4 months ago
Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse?
You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.
drcongo|4 months ago
martin-t|4 months ago
All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.
And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
kristov|4 months ago
hippo22|4 months ago
hansmayer|4 months ago
SoftTalker|4 months ago
Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.
Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.
adrianN|4 months ago
thegrimmest|4 months ago
You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.
tirant|4 months ago
4ndrewl|4 months ago
reassess_blind|4 months ago
adriand|4 months ago