There's been a lot of debate around Amazon's hiring practices, particularly given the conflicting data and statements from the company. A core issue seems to be that Amazon has alienated a significant portion of its domestic engineering talent pool. Many experienced engineers have left, and others seem unwilling to return, even when offered higher-level roles. I personally was an L7 engineer and turned down a boomerang offer.
In response, Amazon appears to be increasingly turning to H-1B workers - especially from countries where the company’s reputation hasn't soured as much.
While these engineers may be less experienced, they're often more willing to accept lower compensation, due in part to discrepancies in wage data reported by the Department of Labor. For example, the BLS wage data, which sets a $115k cap for certain wage codes, has led to a misalignment in what’s considered a "fair wage" enabling companies like Amazon to pay these workers below actual market rates.
This reliance on overseas talent seems to be more than just a cost-saving measure; it also reflects Amazon's ongoing struggle with high turnover among its U.S. engineering staff. The company’s well-documented high attrition rates, as highlighted in reports like this one from Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r... - shed light on the challenges Amazon faces in retaining domestic engineers.
The LinkedIn data also supports this trend.
Candidly, it seems that Amazon has burned too many bridges with U.S.-based engineers, forcing the company to increasingly rely on a less experienced labor pool from abroad in order to maintain its operations, despite being an American based, publicly traded company.
From my understanding, the last budget bill passed (called the big beautiful bill by some) had changes to section 174. Specifically that software R&D could once again be immediately fully expensed in the year incurred rather than amortized over several years SO LONG AS its a US based expense. Non US based R&D expenses still need to be amortized, and over an ugly 15 year period.
What significant changes to section 174 were made in the big beautiful bill?
Key Changes
The bill created a new Section 174A that restores immediate deductibility for domestic research and experimental (R&E) expenditures, largely reversing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act requirement that had forced companies to capitalize and amortize all R&E expenses starting in 2022.
Domestic vs. Foreign Treatment:
Starting with tax years beginning after December 31, 2024, businesses may immediately deduct domestic R&E expenditures in the year they are paid or incurred
Foreign R&E expenditures must continue to be capitalized and amortized over 15 years under the original Section 174
Retroactive Relief Options:
The new rules permit taxpayers to deduct previously capitalized and unamortized domestic R&E expenditures over a one- or two-year period, and small businesses may opt to apply new Section 174A going back to 2022 and file amended returns. Eligible small business taxpayers (generally those with average annual gross receipts during the preceding three years not exceeding $31 million) can retroactively expense R&E expenditures for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2021, by filing amended returns.
Alternative Treatment: Taxpayers may still elect to capitalize and amortize domestic R&E expenditures over a period of not less than 60 months, or elect to amortize them over a 10-year period.
This represents a major win for businesses conducting research and development, as the 2022-2024 capitalization requirement had created significant tax burdens and compliance complexity.
It's not even H1Bs and not just Amazon. Amazon and most Big Tech companies have been shifting jobs overseas (via hiring freezes in the US and open headcount in India) for almost 4 years now.
But I can tell you with fair certainty that Amazon's high turnover rate is NOT happening in their engineering departments, though. It's happening in their retail or business departments.
I'm kind of horrified by the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric in engineering circles online and how normalized it's becoming. (Especially troubling how much Indians in particular are drawing ire). Is it really that much different if Amazon brings in a foreign worker to Seattle vs someone from Mississippi? Immigration restrictions are arbitrary and unfair, and in my mind any carveouts for them are a good thing.
>It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.) [...] So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.
Amazon is a meatgrinder on its workforce, but I will give credit where it's due - I think thinning out management is a noble goal and endeavor. If it's true that these layoffs don't impact as many IC roles, it's probably worth calling that out.
(It's just awful convenient that the timing of this is also when everyone is staring down a rough economy)
If the problem is that lower-downs are carrying out extensive planning for meetings where higher-ups are present, the culture issue might not be with the people who are adapting...
> Amazon is a meatgrinder on its workforce, but I will give credit where it's due - I think thinning out management is a noble goal and endeavor. If it's true that these layoffs don't impact as many IC roles, it's probably worth calling that out.
Their filings show that it is still mostly ICs. If you’re doing a cut of 15% of the company (or whatever the number is), that has to include a large number of ICs.
Indeed. It seems like splitting hairs. It says that their upper level management made a lot of bad calls about headcount growth. And, as always, it's the people below the decision makers who pay the price.
> Jassy explained that as Amazon added headcount, locations and lines of business in recent years, “you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers … sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work.”
"And here's something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Eight bosses."
"Eight?"
"Eight, Bob."
That's a funny way to describe deliberately wasting thousands of work hours screening, interviewing and hiring people they didn't need. It seems like those making these staffing decisions should be the first to go, yet that never seems to be the case.
> Amazon says it didn’t cut 14,000 people because of money. It cut them because of ‘culture’
So they're saying Amazon has culture of being assholes to others? I guess at least they're honest about it, and their admission comports with other accounts about how they do business.
> Culture of importing cheaper labor that they can manipulate.
> The H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.
Offshoring is a much bigger problem. These abusive companies can "save" way more money by exporting the job than importing a worker to fill it, and pandemic-era changes have accelerated that.
> “We are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup, and … that means removing layers.”
I learned a long time ago that behaving like a startup is not a good thing, and I've specifically oriented my career towards working at companies that don't even want to pretend to imitate startup culture. I'm very happy in enterprise-land.
You set the expectation that you can deliver at the pace of a lean startup, but every step of the way you are slowed down by a process or internal dependency that is operating like a fortune 100 company.
Large companies should just fund startups and acquire them when the product has shipped than try to create a culture where teams are expected to operate a speedboat that is towed by an oceanliner.
Kinda. The sweet spot is working at a "mid-cap" company. The company is growing and you have resources and freedom to do things, but not so big that you are in a bureaucratic nightmare.
I tell people that the best size of company to work at is one that's just barely big enough to have an HR department.
It is especially not a good thing when you need to provide reliable services, coordinate across multiple business units, retain talent not chasing an equity payday, and protect your moat.
Finding out that one of the world's largest economic forces aspires to burn out their workforce and spend more time shooting from the hip is depressing.
This seems like more smoke and mirrors. I’ve heard some speculation that this is about cutting capex in salaries so they can afford a big purchase from Nvidia. I guess we’ll see in the coming months.
Hello, highly experienced engineer prospective hire. Tell me about a time when some memorized interview behavioral question, in STAR format. Now do this coding screening despite all your experience. Now tell me you want to be an engineer in a startup, and not in huge company of metrics-gaming and routine stack ranking cullings.
Sure. They have a culture of making more money at any cost. See the many reports of treating their workforce poorly. Their people are expendable. The statement is accurate, just not in the way they want us to interpret it.
I don't know how it couldn't be more obvious the only option they had in order to satiate Wall Street is to buy more GPUs for their wildly overbooked AWS demand induced by AI, and the only way to do that was by cutting fixed costs, aka salaries.
Best decision I ever made was repeatedly ignoring emails from Amazon recruiters while they were allowing remote work around the pandemic. Fuck that place.
One of the better decisions I ever made was not ignoring emails from folks recruiting for Amazon in 2003. It was a different place back then, and truly like "the world's largest startup." The other thing that was different back then was that the people I worked with were all so blindingly smart. I'm pretty smart, but in 2003 I often felt like the dumbest person in the room[1]. In 2025 that feeling was rare, and not simply because I had 20 years more wisdom.
I left Amazon for the third and last time a couple months ago and have no regrets.
If you're still there and reading this, Amazon still has a lot going for it as a place to work. But it's not the electric place I recall from 20 years ago. I'm not sure if there is any company that can match both the startup-like freedom of action with massive scale of early 2000s Amazon.
[1] In case it isn't obvious: this is a desirable condition because it means you get to learn something.
Even most here on HN who are in the business of replacing humans with AI would agree that Amazon knows they are lying.
Must be close to a rats den working at Amazon's offices with over 200K+ employees in corporate to then look at them and then lay them off and say it's for "culture".
There's no reason for them to tell the truth, given its immensively profitable to keep lying with no costs at all.
If you decide to join Amazon after this, make sure you get a brain scan first.
Hey, I’m not a lawyer and also probably pissing in the wind here, but isn’t firing like 14k people for not financial reasons a giant ass wrongful termination suit?
How does a company define or at least describe company culture and displays it up front? I am genuinely curious, and not trying to start any sort of flame wars.
Even in Reagan's yuppie cocaine fueled 1980s America, layouts around the holidays were considered a very bad, and only done when a company was desperate. It was a guaranteed social scarlet letter for executives. In post 2010 'tech bro' America, management does it just for the LOLs. This isn't normal, even for capitalist America.
The average tech CEO today is a much greater villian daily than the nationally reviled 'corporate raiders' of that time were a couple of times a year. I don't know WTF happened to this country.
Amazon went from an innovative tech company with an efficient culture where builders could build and ship great products, and where promotions where based on merit, to a completely toxic bureaucratuc hellhole, where all decision making has been hijacked by sociopathic parasites who have learned to game the system for their own benefit.
- most leadership, including technical, is now filled with compete imposters who have very little understanding of tech or market.
- product and strategy decisions are not based on data anymore. Any 'data' is now extremely cherry-picked
- it's standard practice to just completely hide/exclude any negative indicators/metrics.
- promotions are no longer merit-based. They are based exclusively on your ability to social engineer your managers/leadership, and your ability to manufacture metrics that sound good (to imposters who can't rationally inspect/critique them)
- there is zero real innovation happening at Amazon now
- good engineers are leaving in droves and being replaced by 3rd party external consultants
Hierarchical structures are so odd, you would think the higher levels optimize for intelligence and empathy but in practice it optimizes for sociopathy and maybe public speaking skills
honestduane|4 months ago
In response, Amazon appears to be increasingly turning to H-1B workers - especially from countries where the company’s reputation hasn't soured as much.
Example: https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/amazon-dot-com-services-l...
While these engineers may be less experienced, they're often more willing to accept lower compensation, due in part to discrepancies in wage data reported by the Department of Labor. For example, the BLS wage data, which sets a $115k cap for certain wage codes, has led to a misalignment in what’s considered a "fair wage" enabling companies like Amazon to pay these workers below actual market rates.
This reliance on overseas talent seems to be more than just a cost-saving measure; it also reflects Amazon's ongoing struggle with high turnover among its U.S. engineering staff. The company’s well-documented high attrition rates, as highlighted in reports like this one from Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r... - shed light on the challenges Amazon faces in retaining domestic engineers.
The LinkedIn data also supports this trend.
Candidly, it seems that Amazon has burned too many bridges with U.S.-based engineers, forcing the company to increasingly rely on a less experienced labor pool from abroad in order to maintain its operations, despite being an American based, publicly traded company.
jrs235|4 months ago
What significant changes to section 174 were made in the big beautiful bill?
Key Changes The bill created a new Section 174A that restores immediate deductibility for domestic research and experimental (R&E) expenditures, largely reversing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act requirement that had forced companies to capitalize and amortize all R&E expenses starting in 2022.
Domestic vs. Foreign Treatment:
Starting with tax years beginning after December 31, 2024, businesses may immediately deduct domestic R&E expenditures in the year they are paid or incurred
Foreign R&E expenditures must continue to be capitalized and amortized over 15 years under the original Section 174
Retroactive Relief Options:
The new rules permit taxpayers to deduct previously capitalized and unamortized domestic R&E expenditures over a one- or two-year period, and small businesses may opt to apply new Section 174A going back to 2022 and file amended returns. Eligible small business taxpayers (generally those with average annual gross receipts during the preceding three years not exceeding $31 million) can retroactively expense R&E expenditures for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2021, by filing amended returns.
Alternative Treatment: Taxpayers may still elect to capitalize and amortize domestic R&E expenditures over a period of not less than 60 months, or elect to amortize them over a 10-year period.
This represents a major win for businesses conducting research and development, as the 2022-2024 capitalization requirement had created significant tax burdens and compliance complexity.
keeda|4 months ago
gigiogigione|3 months ago
dalyons|4 months ago
legitster|4 months ago
But I can tell you with fair certainty that Amazon's high turnover rate is NOT happening in their engineering departments, though. It's happening in their retail or business departments.
I'm kind of horrified by the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric in engineering circles online and how normalized it's becoming. (Especially troubling how much Indians in particular are drawing ire). Is it really that much different if Amazon brings in a foreign worker to Seattle vs someone from Mississippi? Immigration restrictions are arbitrary and unfair, and in my mind any carveouts for them are a good thing.
legitster|4 months ago
>It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.) [...] So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.
Amazon is a meatgrinder on its workforce, but I will give credit where it's due - I think thinning out management is a noble goal and endeavor. If it's true that these layoffs don't impact as many IC roles, it's probably worth calling that out.
(It's just awful convenient that the timing of this is also when everyone is staring down a rough economy)
whatshisface|4 months ago
busymom0|4 months ago
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
SilverElfin|4 months ago
Their filings show that it is still mostly ICs. If you’re doing a cut of 15% of the company (or whatever the number is), that has to include a large number of ICs.
Fomite|4 months ago
sleight42|4 months ago
jihadjihad|4 months ago
standardUser|4 months ago
That's a funny way to describe deliberately wasting thousands of work hours screening, interviewing and hiring people they didn't need. It seems like those making these staffing decisions should be the first to go, yet that never seems to be the case.
Pwntastic|4 months ago
ceejayoz|4 months ago
podgietaru|4 months ago
The culture was abysmal. Not because of layers, Andy, but because you decided to do all your announcements in secret on A to Z.
Cowardice.
palmotea|4 months ago
So they're saying Amazon has culture of being assholes to others? I guess at least they're honest about it, and their admission comports with other accounts about how they do business.
650REDHAIR|4 months ago
The H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.
palmotea|4 months ago
> The H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.
Offshoring is a much bigger problem. These abusive companies can "save" way more money by exporting the job than importing a worker to fill it, and pandemic-era changes have accelerated that.
amyjess|4 months ago
I learned a long time ago that behaving like a startup is not a good thing, and I've specifically oriented my career towards working at companies that don't even want to pretend to imitate startup culture. I'm very happy in enterprise-land.
mingus88|4 months ago
You set the expectation that you can deliver at the pace of a lean startup, but every step of the way you are slowed down by a process or internal dependency that is operating like a fortune 100 company.
Large companies should just fund startups and acquire them when the product has shipped than try to create a culture where teams are expected to operate a speedboat that is towed by an oceanliner.
legitster|4 months ago
I tell people that the best size of company to work at is one that's just barely big enough to have an HR department.
supportengineer|4 months ago
cosmicgadget|4 months ago
Full disclosure: I do not have an MBA.
ryandvm|4 months ago
Finding out that one of the world's largest economic forces aspires to burn out their workforce and spend more time shooting from the hip is depressing.
whazor|4 months ago
josefritzishere|4 months ago
somanyphotons|4 months ago
agentultra|4 months ago
renewiltord|4 months ago
Insanity|4 months ago
hbosch|4 months ago
neilv|4 months ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|4 months ago
alsetmusic|4 months ago
kawfey|4 months ago
GiorgioG|4 months ago
jrauser|4 months ago
I left Amazon for the third and last time a couple months ago and have no regrets.
If you're still there and reading this, Amazon still has a lot going for it as a place to work. But it's not the electric place I recall from 20 years ago. I'm not sure if there is any company that can match both the startup-like freedom of action with massive scale of early 2000s Amazon.
[1] In case it isn't obvious: this is a desirable condition because it means you get to learn something.
Izikiel43|4 months ago
Too many horror stories.
rybosworld|4 months ago
Reminds me of Marc Benioff in a lot of ways.
rvz|4 months ago
Even most here on HN who are in the business of replacing humans with AI would agree that Amazon knows they are lying.
Must be close to a rats den working at Amazon's offices with over 200K+ employees in corporate to then look at them and then lay them off and say it's for "culture".
There's no reason for them to tell the truth, given its immensively profitable to keep lying with no costs at all.
If you decide to join Amazon after this, make sure you get a brain scan first.
ncr100|4 months ago
Amazon spent a ton of money on AI.
It hasn't paid off, yet
And Amazon needs to stay profitable over some time-bound interval.
So, layoff expensive human resources ... continue investing in AI, fingers crossed that it pays off, and the market is happy.
Profit.
davidw|4 months ago
jonway|4 months ago
owl_vision|4 months ago
gdiamos|4 months ago
supportengineer|4 months ago
uv pip install culture
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
_DeadFred_|4 months ago
The average tech CEO today is a much greater villian daily than the nationally reviled 'corporate raiders' of that time were a couple of times a year. I don't know WTF happened to this country.
jmclnx|4 months ago
googlywoogly|4 months ago
- most leadership, including technical, is now filled with compete imposters who have very little understanding of tech or market.
- product and strategy decisions are not based on data anymore. Any 'data' is now extremely cherry-picked
- it's standard practice to just completely hide/exclude any negative indicators/metrics.
- promotions are no longer merit-based. They are based exclusively on your ability to social engineer your managers/leadership, and your ability to manufacture metrics that sound good (to imposters who can't rationally inspect/critique them)
- there is zero real innovation happening at Amazon now
- good engineers are leaving in droves and being replaced by 3rd party external consultants
_DeadFred_|4 months ago
neuroelectron|4 months ago
Podrod|4 months ago
an0malous|4 months ago
treetalker|4 months ago
qujine|4 months ago
Nah, it's to instill fear.
Otherwise, why would you layoff people that are high performers due to 'culture'? That's just idiotic.
gorbachev|4 months ago
jjk166|4 months ago
somelamer567|4 months ago
toephu2|4 months ago
lightbendover|4 months ago
[deleted]
kazinator|4 months ago
[deleted]