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.
The more important thing it does though is remove culpability from the employee who doesn't have a job anymore. That person will be looking for a job (we assume, perhaps a few will just retire or something else). The companies they apply at will want to know why they no longer work at Amazon - there is a big difference between "I was sexually harassing my coworkers" (pick a crime, sexual harassment seems to be the big one these days), and "Amazon decided they didn't need my job done any more".
The owner of the employer company just experienced a vacation in space, renting an entire European country for a wedding, etc.
Some employees are going to experience losing their housing. Losing their health benefits while sick. Children will be moved from their friends/schools. Some will lose their careers as they won't find new related work quick enough and will have to take whatever they can get for their next job.
Most all will answer whether or not it was "with cause" if someone calls them up, though? Specifically because they have to if the caller is about unemployment, no?
Most employers won't confirm the reason for termination with random callers who are verifying employment history.
Unemployment insurance is a bit different. When a former employee files for unemployment benefits then the state will notify the last employer, and that employer can dispute the claim if the termination was for cause. In practice many employers don't dispute unemployment claims even for employees whom they terminated for performance reasons because it's not worth the hassle.
The rate that employers pay for unemployment insurance is tied to the number of claims. While they wouldn't dispute in bulk for layoffs, it is worth the hassle when it's for cause.
I confess this surprises me. I didn't think they had to give specific details, but I thought they had to at least confirm whose decision it was for the termination.
In most cases when a company wants to fire someone they will first pull them into an office and tell them they are allowed to submit their resignation right now. If this happens it is normally best for you to accept that offer as then they will say you left in good standing. At least this way you can find a new job.
There is the possible exception that you already have enough evidence that you were going to sue them anyway, then you can take that you were fired to your lawyer (you should already have a lawyer and gotten their advice on the situation). However I don't think this has ever been the case for anyone.
The other exception is when the police are there and will arrest you as part of firing you. I'm not aware of this happening, but it seems like it probably has at some point (like once per decade across all jobs in the world)
No, don’t resign instead of getting terminated. The reason they offer that is gets them off the hook for unemployment and makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
It’s in old company best interest for you to get a new job because jobless people start talking to lawyers when they get desperate.
>No, don’t resign instead of getting terminated. The reason they offer that is gets them off the hook for unemployment and makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
Depends on whether they're offering something, otherwise yeah it's worse for you unless you suspect they have evidence of you embezzling company funds or something.
> makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
That is why they do it. However you still should accept the offer unless you are going to sue them which most are not. Just find a new job and move on. Try to do better.
> No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
The good standing is not something you want to risk. They have the ability to say not in good standing and might even have the obligation to say that to some people (depending on local laws, but if it wasn't in good standing it is at least unethical to say it was). By resigning first everyone agrees that it was in good standing and you all move on (even though you are clearly cutting the line).
Again, this assumes that like most people you won't be suing. Likely you know you screwed up (though perhaps you don't agree it is bad enough to be fired). For most it just isn't worth trying to fight it out. If you are an exception than by all means refuse - but be prepared for the consequences.
Companies rarely answer "Eligible for rehire" or "Departed in Good Standing" because that's lawsuit bait, at least in the United States. Companies don't answer questions about your employment because companies have gotten sued and lost unless they have clear evidence.
Worrying about company asking "Good standing" is like when Elementary Teacher talking about your permanent record. It does not exist.
I'm fine with the idea that they won't share specifically that they fired someone for a specific reason. The surprising part, to me, is that they can't share if it was company's decision to end the relationship. My understanding was that if you just up and quit, then you don't qualify for unemployment benefits.
And I hasten to add that I'm fine being wrong on this point. Surprise can last a bit, though. :D
What they tell unemployment can be different from random "companies". Large companies have a policy of only given dates worked and "left in good standing" (or rarely not - but not is something they can be sued for and so rarely given because best case it will cost them half a million in lawyers fees if they win in court)
Companies don't have to answer any questions about your employment, they are just nice about it.
Whose decision could reveal something about employee and if employee thinks it's bullshit, that's defamation lawsuit possibility. I even know companies who bosses talk good about people they have fired because having ex-employee stew is not good. Get them a new job and move on.
When employers do a reference check, the reference has a choice of:
1) Sticking to the legally safe answer of only confirming dates
OR
2) Confirm dates and share a few anecdotes about how the person was good to work with
If a previous employer chooses only to confirm dates, and refuses to answer any other questions, it's often a way of signaling something bad went down but you can't talk about it.
"culpability" is also purposefully loaded. It's not wrong for a company to decide that certain jobs are no longer needed. How they handle that could be more or less considerate of the human impact, but there's really no way to do it that won't cause some some upset to the terminated employee.
>It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"
If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? If a textile mill is making record profits because of new textile machinery, would you consider it reasonable for the business to keep the old workers around, even though they're not needed anymore? Yes, it always sucks to lose a job, but I don't see how Amazon did them dirty or even broke some sort of informal contract.
They absolutely didn't. It's within Amazon's legal rights to cut as many employees as they like for any reason (besides a protected one).
With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
In my opinion, chasing ever increasing profitability as a tech company is cannibalizing future earnings. By cutting over and over in pursuit of more profit, you are trading compound earnings (ie: create new products) for money today by injecting fear into your 'innovation centers'.
>With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
So going back to the textile mill example above, what should the owner do? Keep the workers around even though they're not needed until the next recession, and only then fire them? If it's a particularly profitable industry, it might even still be profitable even with a recession, so is amazon on the hook for decades, until there's some sort of industry-wide crisis (think the one that hit the American auto industry in 2008), and by then it's too late because upstarts without the burden of older employees have already overtaken them?
I dunno, I got used to the weekly beatings. You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.
If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays.
I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands.
If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
If you truly believe the best people are not layed off from corporations, you must be extremely young and just starting out. Corporations are a lot less rational than you imply
> purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.
Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."
And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."
There is enough people who don’t read articles just headlines whose world view can be changed with this.
In Hungary, where I’m originally from, one of my friends sent me an article, which was about immigration in 2015, because she thought that the local district government wanted to move “migrants” (dog whistle for non white people over there) into her district. The headline said that, the body said the exact opposite… and it worked.
Also there are a ton of comments here, on Reddit, and really everywhere, that makes it quite obvious that a lot of people don’t read just headlines.
If a person fails to understand they are essentially working for a feudal lord when they sign up to work for Amazon, the educational system has failed.
In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.
Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?
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".
4. (transitive, employment) To terminate the employment contract of (an employee), especially for cause (such as misconduct, incompetence, or poor performance).
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.
In Britain we have quite strong employment laws and a bit less of a ruthless corporate culture, so in many sectors it's fairly uncommon for people to be terminated for poor performance, so I suspect "misconduct" is a higher percentage of overall firings here.
Yeah for sure. Unfortunately in the US it’s not uncommon for companies to find “a pattern of behavior” or “less than stellar work” that is enough to justify not giving you your severance, but also not too severe that they can’t be blamed for never bringing it up and putting you on a PIP (performance improvement plan, not sure if that’s a term in other countries).
In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.
There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.
> In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.
You meant i.e. or e.g.?
Under performance may be considered termination for cause in your state. It is not generally.
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.
Still puts them in a weak position to critique others on their use of words. We might like to hold the BBC to a higher standard but none of the big news sites are good at details like this.
True, I did make a mistake, but in my defense I’m but one person making a passing comment in an internet forum. Even then, if I had noticed my error before the edit window (which I do not control) expired, I would have issued a correction.
The BBC, on the other hand, is a major organisation employing professional writers and editors. It’s their job to inform clearly, not throw mud in people’s faces with the kind of indirect wording used to conceal intentions.
The situations are not in the same category. I made a mistake in word usage; the article’s title is manipulating meaning, using public relations-style words carefully chosen for the goal of minimising backlash.
Furthermore, I don’t think you need to be perfect to point out imperfection. It is perfectly valid to go to a restaurant and say “this pizza tastes bad” even if you don’t know how to cook.
Grammatically correct, but missing the narrative subtext.
"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.
People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.
This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.
"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.
Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.
The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.
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.
Which, at least in American English, comes across like corporate jargon/weasel words. Lost their job is literally true and would probably take a bunch more words to describe the precise reasons.
Both things can be literally true. I've lost my job by being made redundant, twice. In Britain redundancy is a very specific thing, where your role no longer exists and you must be let go in a fair way according to employment law. It's quite the opposite of jargon or weasel words here: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights
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.
> 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.
This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years
I think American English is the same colloquially. “I got fired” means I didn’t perform or did something wrong. “I got laid off” is our “I was made redundant”.
“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.
> in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy"
OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)
And by applying these organizational changes, each person can become more load bearing and have so much more scope and impact. This is not a loss, it's a great win for everyone! /s
> 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?
Most boards(particularly of large publicly traded tech companies) don't hire CEOs to ensure their companies remain stable in the longterm at the expense of profits, they hire them to grow short term profits.
Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
They will. But by the time it happens, Jassy already made millions in cash + much more in stocks and will retire comfortably while others will slave away for new AI overlords.
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")
We didn't fail to secure things because we spent our security budget on security theatre - we were just kindly offering those poor hackers money to support their families.
My favourite is during terrorist attacks in Europe, it's always like "car attacks crowd". Like the car's wife had left it and it had decided to go out with a bang.
The problem is, there isn't much initial facts to base on, other than that a vehicle has plowed into a crowd. In the early 30-60 minutes, you often don't even know how many people died and how many are injured because emergency services are still working on rescue (alive people) and recovery (dead people).
Maybe it's political or religious terrorism, maybe it's suicide-by-cop, maybe it's a generic mental health issue (think schizophrenics whose head voice tells them to commit violence), maybe it's a health issue (heart attack, driver floors the gas pedal), maybe it's a streetrace gone wrong, maybe it's a DUI, maybe it's a mechanical issue (loss of brake/steering), maybe it's a geriatric driver who just doesn't have any idea where he even is, maybe it's a driver blindly following Maps and ignoring the policeman winking at him, thus not noticing he's heading right for a rally.
You see, the list of issues why a car plows into a crowd is very very long, and often it takes the police hours to determine what's going on. They gotta interview bystanders and victims, they gotta obtain and review camera footage, possibly search the driver's home and digital devices - because unlike Twitter pseudo-journalists and click/ragebait "news" media, police can normally be held accountable if they claim something in public that doesn't turn out to be true.
I think usually the vehicle has not, say, been flung unoccupied into a crowd by an oversized slingshot experiment gone wrong.
So it'd be nice if they'd say like "a man has ploughed into a crowd" - we'll safely assume he didn't use an actual plough since I hear those are fairly slow.
It does make a difference regarding people viewing news outlets as informers rather than an arm of some kind of agenda.
Maybe it's an effort to be more polite than "by some prick who can't drive".
I suppose there's at least one example of someone being hit by a car that slipped off a car transporter too. "Had car thrown at him by negligent shipping company" would be a more click worthy headline though
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.
> It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”
See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:
> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.
[…]
> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
Michigan.gov website references Merriam-Webster dictionary definition "an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance".
Then it says no one is at fault, but the definition specifically included carelessness and ignorance which does imply fault.
> Calling a crash an “accident” suggests no one is at fault. In reality, crashes result from preventable actions like distraction, inattention, or risky driving.
But all of these go under carelessness / ignorance.
And there is always a party that's at fault traffic accidents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.
Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.
Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!
> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures
The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.
I have been an employee for 30 years across 10 jobs - one of which was Amazon from 2020-2023. I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job. I always stayed ready to look for a job at a moments notice and it has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking.
In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.
As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.
Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
For now, expect that to be clawed back severely over the next few years.
It’s already happening. The pay I am seeing offered now in second tier tech cities like Atlanta where I use to live are the same as they were in 2016 and haven’t kept up with inflation.
I’m having to continuously move up and closer to the “stakeholders”.
Yes and when my employers - including Amazon - decided they wanted to stop putting money into my account, I didn’t stress.
I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.
I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.
> 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.
I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:
- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.
- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA
- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools
- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.
In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
I suppose. But in a world where upset people then act irrationally up to and including doing some murder I wonder if we start mapping burnt out individuals to a higher "cost" than their lost spending. What for example is the objective cost of Samuel Cassidy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting#Perpetr...
Oh I agree with you. I don't live in the US, but in a country that has a very high progressive tax rate. I am taxed about 50% of my income currently. But I gladly pay it because I like to live in a safe country with strong government programs and a great healthcare system. It is also very difficult to fire an employee here. Companies generally have to pay people to leave, and this can be a year salary upwards. But I do sympathize with people in the US, even if the "average" lifestyle experience is higher, because a lot of people seem to be struggling there.
Spare us your sympathy. When it's harder to terminate employees then employers are more reluctant to hire in the first place, leading to higher unemployment rates and overall slower economic growth. As a US based employee who has been laid off before (multiple times) I prefer our approach.
Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
Yes, Martin. All men (and women) are created equal. The purpose of that document and in that phrase is that all are created equal under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal". Those are completely different things and as you mentioned, it's a very popular (and stupid) meme which is why I responded specifically to what you wrote there.
> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?
Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.
>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company
Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?
Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
This drives me nuts. You move to another city, risk your livelihood on a new job that you don’t know if is gonna work out for you. Your kids go to a new school, your partner has to either move to find a new job, or make it work long distance for a while… Your whole life changes on what is essentially a bet, you have no security whatsoever. And people say the risk is not yours.
Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.
Then don’t do that? In 2020, when I had the “opportunity” to work at Amazon in a role that would eventually require relocating after COVID, there was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life to work for Amazon and that was after my youngest had graduated. I instead interviewed for a “permanently remote role” [sic]. If that hadn’t been available, I would have kept working local jobs for less money.
Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.
If your a billionaire and you invest in index funds, the risk of becoming homeless is really low, sure. The system works in such a way that the more money you have the easier it is to make more money. So if your stuck at the bottom, your really stuck.
And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.
If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.
Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!
So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.
Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.
Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.
The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?
Isn't it the same as the house in roulette - sure each spin the house is taking risk - but if the game is structured so the odds are in your favour - you are taking less risk than the customer.
It comes down to who is setting the rules of the game.
This is unfortunately true.
Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.
Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.
Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time.
Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.
>Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.
No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.
Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.
And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.
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The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.
1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.
2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.
In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.
They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
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 :)
Cash comp at Amazon is extremely limited, with at least half of your comp coming from RSUs (or cash equivalent during the first year). So if Amazon is wildly successful, you do get a huge benefit out of it (my grants resulted in a salary that was ~ $100K more than the band I was assigned at review).
Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.
"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.
What’s the actual hazard there? I get that a company going bankrupt causes money to evaporate into wages and capital. But are the owners actually facing any real risk? You have to be an accredited investor to buy in in any real way and one of the tests is that your investment is below a certain percentage of your means.
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.
The business the person I was responding to was referring to?
I’m aware of the difficulties of running a business. I’d still always prefer to own the business rather than work within it despite that risk, which is why I do.
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.
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.
To be clear, it’s worse. Read the press release carefully:
1. 14k was the net change in “corporate headcount” which is PR puffery speak saying they’re firing a lot more but when you net out folks let go slotting into open roles elsewhere the net change today would be a 14k reduction
2. It also says that “looking ahead” “we expect to… find additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.” That’s PR puffery speak for “there will be more layoffs coming soon.”
Amazon has really struggled under Andy Jassy’s tenure as CEO. Innovation has slowed, and there were huge misses on areas like AI.
What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership. Andy Jassy preaches about company culture and efficiency but the culture went to crap and the company became bloated on his watch so…
Amazon likely needs new leadership to get it past the Andy Jassy chapter and move to a new phase of innovation and growth. It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.
The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs.
Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.
I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?
Bedrock is just hosting a bunch of different LLMs. It is just as capable as the third party LLMs it hosts. It hosts everything except for OpenAI and Gemini models as far as the popular ones. Even Nova, Amazon’s models, are good enough for the most part, cheaper and usually faster.
Bedrock imposes limitations on context window sizes and output sizes over and above those of the underlying model. There's also a bunch of undifferentiated heavy lifting that Amazon requires their customers to perform when they could have added value there.
Have you noticed how bad their devices dept was gutted? I can easily imagine a proper AI system backing alexa, rolled out to all existing customers, which would potentially boost the viability of that whole product line.
right now I have no idea what Alexa is for anymore. It pings me when a package arrives but so does my phone. I can't order from it, because it makes me open the app. I can manage a shopping list I guess? I ask it the temp outside from time to time b/c I don't want to go look at the thermometer outside my window?
A proper device would discuss with me product options and Q&A, or something. Even piping Grok/GPT5 through to answer questions would be light years ahead of the current crap answers I get when I ask questions. And why doesn't it do a good job of identifying songs that are playing? That's trivial software, and it could recommend some songs like this (which is something I use GPT for).
I don't know I'm just a trad software engineer, but it sure seems like it's low risk / high improvement to at least have a modern LLM feature in that product.
I never use Siri except when driving. But when driving, it's really wonderful to have, since my car does not have car play.
As a daily user, it's clear they have been actively messing with Siri still, particularly in the last year. But the changes seem to mostly make it worse. It now misses "hey siri" half the time for no apparent reason. I feel like they just don't know what they want to do with it.
I have privacy concerns, but an AI that worked as a servant would be a great help. I can't afford servants (or slaves), but I want something that listens in and takes action when I want something. Interrupt me when I'm planning vacation to remind me that there is some other event at home when I'd be gone. When I run low on baking powder ensure I get more.
Again, the privacy concerns need to be addressed. However there is a lot of potential for an AI in my house if it works.
It works by listening for the keyword (it's name), and only then opening a connection to servers. You can verify this by removing internet connectivity and it'll still "turn on" when you say it's name, but will be unable to respond.
The Alexa product as it is, is already lighting money on fire. Adding LLM integration to it would just be pouring gasoline on it; iirc inference is still not profitable even in easier sectors so Alexa would be a particularly bad place for it. (Even though it would be amazing UX, but I doubt enough people would pay the price it costs to break even).
Surely b2b "model API provider" would've been a great fit for Amazon, but others are absolutely dominating this space right now.
The silver lining for Amazon is that nobody is making a profit by actually providing that service. It's just massive valuations and VC money flowing freely instead of a sustainable business model, and Amazon plays a much longer game - they can recover even if being so far behind is a "bad look" for their current management.
It's not hard to switch between OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure/Google/whatever and Amazon can surely eventually compete well in this space.
AWS is probably in last place among computing clouds on AI and the AI managed services from AWS are pretty second-rate.
Amazon had Alexa (Echos) everywhere and that was teed up to knock it out of the park putting a real AI assistant in every home. Then the devices team totally blew it and did almost nothing to take advantage of that huge lead. Folks are now basically just throwing these things in the trash and the devices unit is a huge pit of cash on fire.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. This is spot on. Likely Amazon and AWS folks in denial of where they really are relative to the market’s bar at the moment.
They had the infrastructure and muscle to put a dent into Google Search and Microsoft Enterprise software... but instead they've ceeded to OpenAI and Anthropic.
They had a bridgehead device of the type that OpenAI are struggling to create with Jonny Ive in Alexa... but nothing seems to be happening with Alexa now.
If Microsoft couldn’t compete with Google in search, how could Amazon? Even if the search were better, how do you get people to switch to it if Google is the default everywhere? Besides Alexa was losing billions when it was backed by the relatively cheap to run Amazon Lex pattern matching service. It would have lost more being backed by an LLM and it actually got worse from all indications.
How much of the search market will Agents or Chatbots take?
Google clearly believe : a chunk.
People switched to GPT and Claude...
Amazon risk becoming logistics and datacenters, what's wrong with that you ask? Well, it's not where the money is. The money is in the website and the application layer.
And how much of this switch do you think will happen as long as Google is the default search engine for every major browser and every major smartphone outside of China?
Even if “agents” aren’t overhyped, why would someone switch to Amazon instead of just using Google’s offerings?
Google has reported record revenues even after the advent of LLMs and have integrated AI overviews and a separate chat tab.
Why am I calling Anthropic/Google/OpenAI APIs for my AI inference and not AWS ones? Even Azure has some decent AI inference endpoints I encounter with clients.
Short term - higher stock evaluation.
Long term - depends on what value AI bubble will be able to deliver. But it's not like Amazon is sitting out of this game, they do invest into their AI (Nova models), with little return to show for it.
Second, Amazon had a problem before Andy took over. Way too many managers and incompetent people in very senior levels. The fact that he's doing something about it is a good thing for Amazon. You don't become a CEO of a behemoth such as Amazon and expect to show impact within 6 months. It takes years.
In terms of AI, they did invest in Anthropic early on and are a significant stakeholder. That's critical since Anthropic is a trillion dollar company in the making and they trump everyone in enterprise AI. They are much more likely to succeed with smart partnerships than doing their own thing.
1. Lots of cracks showing in AWS before he took the big job, lack of focus, bloat of too many services with too few users
2. He then hired Adam to take over AWS which didn’t work out well
3. Good to see he’s cleaning things up, but we’re past the “clean things up” phase for a CEO. He’s been in role for a while now. That should have been the first few years of his tenure.
4. Anthropic was a good investment, but Amazon is just one of many investors. It’s nothing like the partnership that MSFT and OpenAI have, which was further strengthened with today’s announcements there. Amazon has nothing comparable to counter that.
From the beginning Adam was intended to be an interim AWS CEO: They didn't have someone who was ready immediately, so Adam was the bridge. Unfortunately, Adam was the bridge to Matt Garman :(
That's fair. I actually didn't realize it's been already 4+ years since he took over as CEO. I do think that we haven't heard the last word of Amazon Anthropic's partnership. Microsoft is already deep in OpenAI, and Google, while also a major stakeholder in Anthropic, directly competes with Gemini (API, code, etc). Amazon has foundation models but not really in the game, so this partnership is likely to continue. Both sides need it (Amazon for staying in the AI game and Anthropic for the resources and cash)
Once a company moves on to recurring, large-scale layoffs justified by vague corporate Mumbo-Jumbo, I think it is safe to assume it is a "day 2" company.
The original shareholder letter said the company wouldn’t pander to Wall Street or focus on short term improvements. It’s now slashing jobs a few days before earnings to try and placate Wall Street since it can’t grow via innovation. That’s all the proof you need to see that Amazon is now in full “Day 2” mode.
Is this one of those things that are meant to sound deep and profound by inventing terminology, but isn't? That's such a like day 2 person thing to do.
(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)
I hope the shark thing isn’t said in earnest ever by anyone. It is the height of parody of a hustle culture bro. On second thought would you want $1 million now or $5000 a day and the guy says neither because that’s not how you build wealth or something. It’s probably number one.
My theory is that when an organization descends into a cycle of repetitive downsizings, it inevitably leads to people focusing more on protecting their jobs than on business value.
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.
My company’s been through layoffs/reorgs every 3–6 months for three years. One thing is true: performance management happens faster. Many chronic low performers were laid off, and a few “too many cooks” problems were resolved. Those benefits are real and genuine.
But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:
1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.
2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.
3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.
Your comment made wonder if there is an social / economic phenomenon tied to your characterization. I'd be really curious if there is any academic work done on further elucidating it.
Edit: Did some research with ChatGPT and found the following papers if anyone else is interested in the above concepts.
Unless you are in the position of Zuckerberg or the Google founders, everyone’s main motivation is to keep their jobs.
If you are just an employee - it’s beyond naive to prioritize anything but your own job. Of course I am not advocating back stabbing and throwing others under the bus. Getting ahead in BigTech is always about playing politics and getting on the right projects to show “impact”.
It's a matter of it being an active vs passive effort to "keep your job." Once you have to actively worry about the status of your job something is wrong (be it with you or your employer).
First employees work for the customer, then they work for the company, then they work for themselves. Sounds like Amazon is between the 2nd and 3rd stage.
I wonder if the company that makes part of its money from consumer goods shipped from China knows something about the impact of tariffs on consumer spending. They've probably already assessed the impact on their models of Black Friday and Christmas purchases and decided it looks bad.
(most of their money is from AWS, though. I wonder if AI is making that less stock-relevant.)
This is a little exaggerated, considering ZIRP was 2009 to 2022, 13 years, and came well after Amazon had established its trajectory.
And they did kind of successfully roll out a global logistics network, at a time when no one thought anyone could compete with Walmart. And they became leaders in the cloud computing space.
These aren't trivial accomplishments solely enabled by ZIRP.
> we want to operate like the world’s largest startup
This is a phrase I hear repeated by leadership a lot, and it's usually code for "why doesn't everyone else just make the business grow faster?" It is almost always, as in this case, followed by statements that suggest they don't understand what is actually different about the way a start up functions and why they stopped operating that way at some point in the first place.
I worked at AOL back when they did quarterly "staff reductions". They would go and hire lots of them right back; it was an accounting trick. Never mind the fact that families were affected and employees were constantly stressed near the end of every quarter. Those things don't matter, quarterly numbers do when growth has stalled.
My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.
This is a great tactic, where competent, good workers find a more stable job, and the ones unable to get a better job are then rehired. On one hand, you can bully them more, and they'll stay, on the other hand, they're so bad at their job, no one else wants them either.
I believe they call this "contracting". Which is not what they purported to do. Having to go through all the bullshit about the hiring process, benefits, taxes, and all that over and over is an absurd inefficiency. It also doesn't help when people are just trying to feed and care for their families.
Because of that experience (and lots of other anecdotal evidence), I see no reason for anybody to ever work at amazon unless they are ok with being a contractor.
Bearing in mind that I'm nothing resembling an accountant, I believe it has to do with getting them off the books by the end of the quarter before the statement goes out. That shows as less liability for the quarterly statement. The cost of severance and hiring is for the next quarter, so it doesn't affect the current quarter's numbers.
So:
- Company has 10 employees at an annual cost of 100k each. That's 250k (1mm / 4) of employee expenses for the quarter.
- Company lays off 5 employees right before the end of the quarter. That's only 5 employees on the payroll in the current quarter, because you account for the number of employees when the statement is issued. Re-hiring and severance payouts are going to be done sometime in the future.
Congratulations, your employee expense was only 125k for the quarter!
Never mind the fact that families were affected and employees were constantly stressed near the end of every quarter.
It's this sort of thing that has me re-thinking the fairness of employees giving employers the customary (in the United States) two week notice before leaving.
Employees don't get two weeks notice before being fired without cause.
It's supposed to be because replacing an employee is so difficult for the company. Well, it's a hell of a lot more difficult for an employee to lose a job than it is for a company to lose a worker.
If I'm employer "at will" then my employer should also be retained "at will." If they want to negotiate another arrangement, that's fine.
I've taken pay cuts twice in my career, but both times it was at unfunded startups and it was more of a "we'll get you back for this later" (one did, one did not).
I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.
Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
This. Companies will always min/max a system so they retain as much money as possible for as few hands as they can manage, always funneled upwards to executives and shareholders.
Rather than trying to “negotiate” with these entities, regulations should be wielded to stop min-maxing beyond a certain point or in bad faith, and firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.
“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.”
That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.
My experience with these sorts of layoffs is that they are not tightly bound to performance. If you have underperformers you can fire them the ordinary way.
At this point I would not be surprised if there isn't an "AI" tool that looks across employees by salary range, department earnings, seniority and age and just generates a list at a moments notice.
I was around for a desperate layoff at a small company in the early 2ks and got to watch as management basically ran around the office doing this logic in real time. Some people are get pulled in because they aren't high performing or they're unliked, but most was a simple expense/income calculation.
Exactly. How is it that an org suddenly discovered thousands of employees are under performers? And how is it that the number of under performers coincides with the number McKinsey and Co (or similar company) said it would be?
>Exactly. How is it that an org suddenly discovered thousands of employees are under performers?
The more correct statement is they suddenly cared about under performers. It's not any different than say, you noticing your grocery bills going up and as a result you cancel all the subscriptions you don't need. It's not like all those SaaS services' value propositions suddenly plummeted because the price of eggs went up, but now you suddenly have an eye for cutting costs.
Literally this. Corporations are good at making up plausible excuses, but anyone who takes more than two seconds to evaluate their claims beyond face value will find they’re almost always complete bullshit.
Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.
This, plus companies do different stuff. If eg. amazons streaming service fails, but normal sales of physical items surge and in total, compensate to make a profit, you can't really move streaming developers, marketers etc. to warehouse jobs.
Countries used to be overwhelmingly autocratic - often ruled by hereditary dictators called kings. People realized unchecked power will always lead to abuse and overthrew them.
Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].
If only we had a system of rules we could vote on which would make this arrangement forbidden...
---
[0]: You can't legally overthrow a government either but if you do it successfully anyway, then you are the government and you decide what is legal.
Ironically, no democratic countries I know of have clauses in their ruleset ("laws") which declare that people are allowed to overthrow the government if it's no longer democratic, even if those democratic governments were created by overthrowing a previous dictatorship.
The US kind of does in that at least in spirit if the government violates the constitution we have this 2nd Amendment and plenty of moral precedent from the founders. It’s in the Declaration of Independence too which, in my view, is just the first page of the Constitution. The 0th Amendment if you will.
Related to your second point about autocracy - I mean the good thing is you can, today, go start a company with the exact governance structure you propose and go compete in the market.
I always find this so funny. “Citizens have guns so they can overthrow a government that has tanks, helicopters, nuclear weapons, bunker busting bombs, etc”
Ok so the US military is going to drop a nuclear weapon on Dallas or Buffalo to stop insurgents? Why even bother writing something like that when you know it’s stupid?
Obviously governments have superior firepower and can and have quashed rebellions. But rebellions have been successful as well. Taking away arms from the people makes rebellion in the case of tyranny that much harder.
I don’t think it’s unfair to question whether such rights are worthwhile or not, but I do think it’s unfair to suggest that since the government has helicopters you can’t have a rebellion. They sure didn’t need any tanks or helicopters when the MAGA goons tried to hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
Not to mention the army is composed of people who, despite systematic indoctrination, can decide to switch sides.
However, this is a huge danger of ML ("AI"). It allows individuals to concentrate power. All real-world power comes from violence. Sufficiently advanced ML models allow individuals to profile subordinates and remove them before they rebel and (partially now but increasingly in the future) to control swarms of drones and robots.
Really good call out on the AI/ML. Now that is dangerous.
Also, as an army veteran who served on active duty including a tour in Iraq (not direct combat role, thankfully) I can tell you that in my experience you're spot on - the systematic indoctrination isn't to a political party but it's to the military and to defending the country and the Constitution. That's up to interpretation. The military has never been faced with resolving a constitutional crises so we really don't know how things would play out - but not every soldier is a rabid Trump supporter or something. Far from it. Very far from it.
Rebellions have been successful in underfunded countries with few resources. Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
And those people were all pardoned by the same President who cheered them and on and he was voted back into office. If Trump - who was still president then had wanted to call in the full force of government he could have.
Do you think they would have let thousands of minorities invade the capital?
Strange you linked to some random journal article describing the incident as "In 1985 police bombed the Philadelphia headquarters occupied by members of the black counterculture group MOVE.". The wikipedia article adds far needed context:
>The 1985 MOVE bombing, locally known by its date, May 13, 1985,[2] was the aerial bombing of a house, and the destruction of 61 more houses by the subsequent fire, in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by the Philadelphia Police Department during an armed battle with MOVE, a black liberation organization. MOVE members shot at Philadelphia police who had come to evict them from the house they were using as their headquarters. Philadelphia police aviators then dropped two explosive devices from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter onto the roof of the house, which was occupied at the time. For 90 minutes, the Philadelphia Police Department allowed the resulting fire to burn out of control, destroying 61 previously evacuated neighboring houses over two city blocks and leaving 250 people homeless.[3] Six adults and five children were killed in the attack;[4] two occupants of the house, one adult and one child, survived. A lawsuit in federal court found that the city used excessive force and violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.[5]
Furthermore it's a stretch to claim that some incident that killed 11 people is somehow expandable to nuking a whole city.
No, it’s the idea that no one cared. If San Francisco was bombed tomorrow, MAGA would celebrate and say “he owned the libs”. If the MOVE bombing had happened today, conservative media would dig up everything everyone who got killed did ave say they “deserved it”.
There are no red or blue cities or states. This is a made up fiction and we should stop using those terms because they are divisive and only serve to make the country weak.
> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
No because that's a strawman. Though those yokels on January 6th sure gave it a try.
> If today, the National Guard dropped a non nuclear bomb on a blue city, 40% of the US population would shrug if not outright cheer.
This would never happen unless there's a zombie apocalypse or that city was invaded by another country. No American would cheer a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York or Houston or something - why are you even entertaining such outlandish nonsense?
There are very much two views of what America should be like and pretending there isn’t is why Democrats keep losing.
40% of Americans cheer how the current administration treats immigrants, non straight people, etc and continue defend the words of a racist podcaster. They wouldn’t want a “nuclear” bomb because it affects them. But there was no real fallout politically for the police MOVE bombing.
If you don’t think this country is divided, you haven’t been looking at where this country is and it’s view on reality.
Those yokels on January 6th tried. But do you think they could have overcome even the local SWAT let alone the military? There have been yokels running around for decades trying. Heck an entire Confedrrsre army couldn’t defeat the US government backed by the states
> Those yokels on January 6th tried. But do you think they could have overcome even the local SWAT let alone the military?
Well they did - they weren't far away from grabbing Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. What's the US military going to do? It's not really equipped for this kind of stuff, oh and those yokels didn't really bring a ton of firearms, but they could have. Thankfully I don't think those yokels expected to have the success that they did and they didn't really intend to try and overthrow the government, though I personally believe they all should have been tried as many of them were.
> There are very much two views of what America should be like and pretending there isn’t is why Democrats keep losing.
The Democrats are losing because their ideas are by and large bad, and most Americans don't agree with them. Communism? Open Borders? Those are the topics that dominate the Democratic Party right now and as an independent I also find those ideas completely unpalatable, even though perhaps stupidly I still keep voting for Democrats locally because the MAGA goons make me so mad.
I'm not suggesting the country isn't divided - it always has been and it's perhaps more divided now because people are spending all day on the Internet, but further dividing the country be calling things "red" or "blue" is actively harmful. Besides even in those so called "red" or "blue" areas there are plenty of people who are on the other side of the dominating spectrum. Plenty of rural Californias who vote Republican, plenty of liberals in Kansas City.
No one is advocating for “communism” any more than Obama was a “secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law into the US”. If you want to talk “socialism” that’s what you call tariffs that US citizens are paying and redistributing the taxes to farmers hurt by the tariffs.
Again do you think if the terrorist on Jan 6th had bern minorities there wouldn’t have been overwhelming force? Even if they did manage to get to Pelosi and Pence, they weren’t going to overthrow the entire government.
What could the military do? They had guns. They could shoot people. I’m well stew that red and blue is not statewide and there are more Republican voters in California than South Dakota.
No, there are many progressives who are quite literally calling for communism or to implement economic policies we know are destructive. This is like you trying to tell me MAGA goons don't want a 3rd Trump term. Call a spade a spade.
> Again do you think if the terrorist on Jan 6th had bern minorities there wouldn’t have been overwhelming force? Even if they did manage to get to Pelosi and Pence, they weren’t going to overthrow the entire government.
Some of them were minorities by the way. In fact you can go look at polling and you'll see Trump outperformed his last win across minority groups.
But no, I don't think there would have been overwhelming force. There were/are too many J6 losers and they're not going to just gun them all down on TV. The military certainly wouldn't.
So let’s say the mostly Black Million Man March had turned violent and decided to invade the Capitol - what do you think the reaction would have been?
What Democratic candidate on the national stage is saying that the government should take over all private industry and pay everyone the same and control industry? This is real “communism”
> So let’s say the mostly Black Million Man March had turned violent and decided to invade the Capitol - what do you think the reaction would have been?
I don't really know, are they a Black Million Man March for a sitting president named Donald J. Trump? You're just throwing straw man arguments out there.
> What Democratic candidate on the national stage is saying that the government should take over all private industry and pay everyone the same and control industry? This is real “communism”
There's always talk about things like nationalizing industries and such. Government run grocery stores, you name it. Some ideas are worth trying, some aren't, but as we do try new ideas we should be vigilant against authoritarian ideologies whether those are coming from MAGA or commies. Keep in mind I'm separating out Progressives from Democrats because like the Republicans they're not all united.
As I know you are well aware with MAGA goons, you don't have to come out with a piece of paper and say "Hello, we are Communists and we want to implement these specific things to achieve our stated goal of Communism. Thank you". It's emergent from policy and platforms, terms of usage "equity" etc.
You’re still being hand wavy. Saying “we should have government run grocery stores where there are food deserts and wouldn’t be profitable for private corporations” is not “communism”. Do you know what Communism actually is? Give a specific example.
What Democratic candidate is saying we should be a “communist country”?
But your original arguments was that J6 was evidence that a few people with guns could have taken over the entire federal government and that the full force of even local SWAT couldn’t have intervened.
> But your original arguments was that J6 was evidence that a few people with guns could have taken over the entire federal government and that the full force of even local SWAT couldn’t have intervened.
I don't think that's really what my argument was, and things are getting convoluted here. Happy to clarify to the best of my ability.
What was written that I responded to was:
> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
My point was look at what a few yokels did on January 6th, and they weren't even armed with weapons and frankly I don't think 80% of them even thought they'd get in the building and do the damage that they did do. For many of those folks they found themselves almost in an accidental insurrection.
Can local SWAT open up fire with machine guns and gun all those people down (especially without weapons)? Sure they can. But that's crossing one hell of a Rubicon and not the standard operating procedure for this kind of stuff. Instead of gunning people down they wait until things cool off and then arrest people 1 by 1.
> What Democratic candidate is saying we should be a “communist country”?
As I already explained you don't have to say "we should be a communist country" - instead you can just espouse communism views or other harmful views with various twists of language. You know that's true because MAGA does it.
You don't have to be a candidate for office either, you just need to have influence. That's an arbitrary requirement you made up.
Again, separating out Democrats from Progressives, you can find various instances of folks advocating for things like nationalization of industries, "equity", and so forth. I don't need to provide a specific example because there's no point - what does that accomplish? If I provide an example of a Progressive arguing for communism or communist ideology (whether explicit or implicit) what does that change?
If I find a single example of a Progressive politician arguing for communism or specific features of communist ideology what does that change? Are you going to reply "I was wrong"? It's just arguing for arguing sake.
Bigger picture, I'm not sure why you're so hung up on this. Communism and its ill effects are just one of many things that you can find Progressives arguing in favor of, similar to things like Open Borders. Those policies are unpopular for a good reason, hence Trump and Republicans won the election and Trump got more votes than he did last time. The reason Democrats are losing is because Progressive ideology and frankly I don't care what we really call it (socialism, communism, whatever it's just one big basket of deplorable ideas) is unpopular with Americans and the votes continue to prove that out. I'm pointing this out as someone who is independent and quite frankly votes Democrat most of the time. You don't have to agree with my assessment, but you can look at the election results and see for yourself that I'm right. If the Democrats don't drop this nonsense they'll continue to lose elections because for most people (not me necessarily) MAGA is a preferable alternative to Progressive and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Trump is out of the picture.
The entire argument was that it is dumb to think that a few yokels playing militia or even an “armed civilian nation” with guns can take on the modern US military.
You haven’t seen videos of local police taking on protestors during the civil rights movement with impunity? Do you think the current administration would have any problem doing the same in all of the cities he’s invaded with the National Guard and that his supporters - 40% of the country - wouldn’t just shrug like they did when he pardoned 1500+ domestic terrorist who look and think like them?
I’m limiting it to national politicians who won the nomination to represent their party in Congress because no one cares what someone’s crazy uncle who calls themselves a Democrat thinks.
You brought up “Communism”? What ideas are you now calling “socialist”?
And everyone loves “socialism” as long as it benefits them - see almost every red state that gets more in federal tax dollars than they pay, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA (as long as they don’t call it “ObamaCare”), give a few “socialist” ideas that national Democrats want to implement that you are afraid of?
And “open borders” is another boogeyman talking point. Check how many illegal immigrants were deported by Obama vs Trump for instance or even Biden.
Nope, see various rebellions throughout history plus insurgencies and such.
It won’t work not because it wouldn’t work - you’re also assuming 100% military compliance and, as a veteran who served in active duty I can tell you not everyone agrees or disagrees with the current administration and people really do care about the Constitution, but it wouldn’t work because when you sit down and really think about it, the status quo for 90% of people is pretty good and they’re not going to take up arms over the vast majority of things a government does.
> Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].
Nearly every publicly trade company has a very well defined method by which executives can be replaced.
Companies are a dictatorship appointed by an oligarchy that is appointed by the democratic votes of shareholders.
You can't fire people and rehire them at lower pay; they'd be so upset at you you wouldn't be able to trust them to do anything properly. What you can do is fire people you think you're paying too much and hire someone else to do the same job at lower pay.
>Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
And the reverse? We literally just went through a phase where tech companies over hired like crazy, at ridiculous salaries. We had people remote working 3 or more jobs at a time. And yet, people still act like companies have all the power?
This stuff ebbs and flows. The reality is the value of your labour fluctuates, despite the inconvenience of that to you.
as if they don't already; the job market is a market with a mechanism for price discovery (duh. wouldn't be a market otherwise.)
the unfortunate fact is that the people forced to be sellers of their time on the market have livelihoods and families to support, so the market is in most places very heavily regulated, some would say overregulated. OTOH capitalism really did pull out many countries out of extreme poverty, so it isn't globally bad, but outcomes for individual participants aren't always... that great.
The Colorado rules about publishing salary ranges really help make it a true market. Better insight on compensation, in more places, would be even better. And evolving laws as the workarounds evolve; this is why we have legislators.
> I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary.
They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/copays/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.
No, you are not applying for one target job, but one target promotion, the company is less important compared to the promo path and often times you can do things like get a promo and come back to your original company with 200% the salary.
I think that's much harder in an economy with routine layoffs, so my point is that a lot of the working population is already taking pay cuts every year they can't leave their job, yeah?
The instant that offer was made, any sensible person will start looking for another job. The only people who will stay are the ones who can’t get hired elsewhere. You’ll lose your best people and keep the worst.
Layoffs are very tricky because just the act of laying people off can trigger good employees who remain to start looking elsewhere. It can trigger a sort of evaporative cooling of your whole workforce. A strategy of offering reduced pay instead of being laid off would exacerbate it.
I wish the average and median salary of every position at the company was legally required to be made available to every employee and candidate so the negotiation can be an actual negotiation instead of a guessing game.
I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.
But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.
From the article, Amazon has 1.5 million employees across offices and warehouses. With about 350,000 corporate employees in executive, managerial and sales.
So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?
I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI
Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment
It’s actually not warehouses. It’s groceries. Amazon jumped from a few hundred thousand to 1mm+ with the acquisition of Whole Foods. The corporate jobs is inclusive of engineering and aws.
They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.
These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.
Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.
Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.
I’m not sure I get what part of what I said this relates to, but the visa system in the US is extraordinary draconian compared to other countries for high skill work visas. It’s extremely limited in quantity and if you lose your job you need to find a new one within weeks or need to leave the country. Converting to a permanent visa is difficult and has long time commitments and even then you are not secure in your status. As of recently even minor vehicular infractions can lead to violent deportation and family separation, losing all your belongings and if you own a home forced to sell and remove your kids from school. I know a lot of folks on H1-B and other visas and they live in constant fear especially in competitive cultures like Amazon where people are let go almost capriciously - jeopardizing their life with their families and constantly leaving them insecure in everything in life.
To your point the system is friendly to the employer, but it’s very much not to the employee.
This is a lot. If you are in a company large enough, you surely know at least 20 people and one of them is gone. The earlier floated figure was even larger: 30K
I suppose it’s what you are used to. A company that I worked with had under 100 staff, very profitable but had a staff turnover of about 10% per year.
People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.
Let them prove that this is not a big deal, but also take note that this is going to continue.
It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.
> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?
Numbers do not support that. Jobs might be shrinking within Amazon, but globally the situation is the opposite.
Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).
That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.
Most jobs are not interchangeable, especially globally.
What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.
Rather, a correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates and excessive money printed which promoted & rewarded hiring just to be compretitive
> correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's planned, merciless strategy. It costs nearly nothing to fire a ton of people, so why not hire a bunch with free money and dump them as soon as the free money disappears
While bad, that’s something entirely different. The reported 30,000 seems to be because of economic conditions, whereas that 600,000 number is allegedly from robotic improvements in their warehouses. Not great for the American workforce either way, but they aren’t exactly the same.
It also forecast a certain business growth that we see not happening. Also, no sane PM would document to fire 600,000 people, it’s always “avoid hiring, wink wink”.
Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?
Apparently they let go some (or all?) of the AGS (amazon game studios) and putting New World (mmorpg game) on maintenance mode. This game currently has around 30-40k concurrent players on steam and probably as much or more on consoles. I feel bad for people got fired and gamers (myself included). I really like that game
If not for the top 10 of the S&P 500 - the companies that can get a meeting at the white house - we'd probably be in a recession and S&P would be down.
The EU did it too, probably second with the US being last. It’s just that the EU focused on worker’s rights, protections for origins of products (can’t call bubbly wine Champaign if it’s not from there), etc.
It's "losing" compared to the US? Haha. I guess from a true VC startup bro perspective. It's not "the EU is way behind the US and China", it's "the EU and US are way behind China". Because the latter is the only one who has been taking long-term decision on decision over the last decades, whereas for the other two, 95% is for the short-term, the next quarter, the next election a year from now. The US is even worse in this regard, hence why it's deteriorating even more rapidly.
An actual socialist would say the state in capitalist society provides a legal and infrastructural framework that supports business enterprises and the accumulation of capital, so it is business as usual. But feel free to throw words around as they mean nothing.
(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)
The biggest "pretend" is where spokesmen, spin doctors, and sycophants for the plutocrat class have somehow convinced the 99% that stocks going up makes more jobs for the little people.
The most pernicious part of the con is that by systematically dismantling pensions and forcing everyone into 401(k)s, they've ensured that we all have to root for the plutocrats. We're forced to watch our retirement funds, which means we're incentivized to hope Amazon's stock does go up after firing 14k (or 30k according to other sources) people.
It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.
Factor out the AI companies doing circular dealing to juke their stock price and GDP growth was like 0.1% combine that with purchasing power loss and US economy is net negative.
It's pretty clear what happens next.
Over 42 million people are about to lose their SNAP payments in 4 days[1] and millions more medical care.
The only publicly traded companies that are involved in what could be considered circular dealings in enough volume to affect their stock price are Nvidia and Oracle.
Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.
It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.
"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."
The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.
(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)
The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.
I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.
> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]
Reports suggest there was an interaction that occurred between HR and some 13,000 staff, ultimately resulting in job losses. The staff were noted to be “behaving suspiciously “. Investigations are underway.
Google tried this and gave up, as it didn’t work out[1].
For now, there’s a lot of focus on automating software dev jobs, but I think companies are just starting to realize automation will thin the management layers as well.
I think it might actually be easier to automate middle management than it would be technical folks. It's not exactly difficult to shove an AI agent into a meeting, have it record everything, and ask everyone for updates. Likewise, it isn't hard to have an AI agent just read through tickets and prompt people for updates. Dystopian? Yeah. Hard? No. Also, the AI would be better than most middle managers I've encountered. The sad thing is, I've also had a few excellent middle managers who helped me grow as a professional.
Which is what we're seeing right now - middle management, and vestigial organizations not related to the core dev team (Trust & Safety and co.) getting trimmed.
As for LLMs, I am perfectly capable of opening a notepad, taking notes, and converting them into Jira tickets (as I have done in the past) without bleeding edge machine learning models
And in a really dystopian world, the AI could review everyone’s PRs and documentation and rank engineers based on their contributions. It could even make compensation decisions based on that. Much of the performance management can be automated (with human in the loop).
Then you could have fewer managers managing more people (and get rid of a bunch of layers of management overhead). They could focus on the higher value parts of management like coordinating between teams, making tough execution decisions, resolving technical blockers / ambiguity, etc
I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to. Then you look for low hanging “fruits” like this (cutting costs) instead of innovating and creating newer things (selling more).
Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to make their HR leaner.
> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.
> I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to.
See, that's the problem with tying all these amazing advances in automation and labor-saving to a system beholden to capital: it only considers what can make it more profit, not what can make the world better.
I guarantee you there are many, many more things we can do with "more", at any scale, if you take the profit motive out of the equation (or even just put it second or third on the list).
I'm sure for some roles this works out. Software development has been doing it for decades: developers get better tools that make them more productive, this lowers costs, and at the lower price point there is a lot more demand for more and better software. Classic induced demand. But how much elastic demand is there for accounting or logistics?
I don't understand this thread. Is Amazon supposed to keep expanding ever and ever again? If those people are needed, then Amazon will fall (good riddance), if they are not needed then that's just good business.
I don't see any issues as long as everyone plays a fair game.
It’s worth noting that they are offering folks the opportunity to find a new role internally. It’s layoffs with a touch of reallocation of people to more important projects.
I'm sure this was in the works long before last week's outage, but it's certainly a bad look. The industry broadly knows how Amazon works; I'm sure a few AWS customers are looking and wondering if it's finally biting them, right as they double down on the strategy.
> At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn).
The unemployment rate in the US is climbing. If you look at a 5-year curve, it looks like nothing. But if you look at a 3-year window it's devastating. Seeing the highs of 2003 and 2009 it seems likely that it will continue to climb.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Numbers are all in the black and up year over year and compared to previous quarter.
Double digit revenue growth in both retail and AWS.
Often I wonder whether corporate leaders took any kind of logic class in college or if they just have a fetish for harming people for no reason. Either that or whatever business school they went to believes that poor customer service and bad products increase revenue.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures, external that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
I’m fairly ignorant to these things, but why does Amazon need 350k corporate employees?
People losing jobs always sucks, but I can’t help but think that a company of this size inevitably has bloat that they do not need.
At this point it really does feel like a corporate welfare program.
Have you counted how many links there are on Amazon.com and how many services there are on AWS? Don't forget MGM etc. Just some back-of-the-envelope maths will tell you how many employees are needed.
I would agree that Amazon in general and AWS should never be this big. But that does not equal "bloated".
As soon as the AI bubble pops and the true definition of AGI has been achieved i.e (30% increase in global unemployment by 2035) then it will mean the gradual decrease in many BS tech salaries.
We will certainly get a huge financial crash along the way.
I’ve heard multiple numbers for this layoff from unofficial sources. Does anyone think Amazon was trying to identify a leak by letting internal parties know about the layoffs with slightly different details?
My totally uneducated guess is that they leak exaggerated numbers on purpose to make the real numbers look less bad in comparison. The idea being that a few days before the official news everyone is talking about a potential 30 or 40K people layoff. Then, when the official news come out and state that they are laying off 14K people, it sounds less dramatic (in relative terms). This makes people (who are not affected by this) to feel like the news were overblown and are not as significant.
Or it could have been internal politics. Amazon top management set the goal to cut 30k and after internal discussions with lower management they come up with 14k positions that can actually be cut.
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.
> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings".
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.
"job loss" is purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.
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".
The more important thing it does though is remove culpability from the employee who doesn't have a job anymore. That person will be looking for a job (we assume, perhaps a few will just retire or something else). The companies they apply at will want to know why they no longer work at Amazon - there is a big difference between "I was sexually harassing my coworkers" (pick a crime, sexual harassment seems to be the big one these days), and "Amazon decided they didn't need my job done any more".
That's why "layoff" is the right word to use. It makes it clear that it was Amazon's decision and not through any direct fault of the employee.
Yes. Job loss is what the employee experiences, not the employer.
The owner of the employer company just experienced a vacation in space, renting an entire European country for a wedding, etc.
Some employees are going to experience losing their housing. Losing their health benefits while sick. Children will be moved from their friends/schools. Some will lose their careers as they won't find new related work quick enough and will have to take whatever they can get for their next job.
While the owner vacations in space for fun.
No employer is going to discuss reasons for a termination. Too much potential liability.
Most all will answer whether or not it was "with cause" if someone calls them up, though? Specifically because they have to if the caller is about unemployment, no?
I'm not in HR but as I understand it most companies will not say anything other than confirming dates of employment.
They won't confirm if the termination was the choice of the employee or the company? Doesn't that have implications for unemployment benefits?
Most employers won't confirm the reason for termination with random callers who are verifying employment history.
Unemployment insurance is a bit different. When a former employee files for unemployment benefits then the state will notify the last employer, and that employer can dispute the claim if the termination was for cause. In practice many employers don't dispute unemployment claims even for employees whom they terminated for performance reasons because it's not worth the hassle.
The rate that employers pay for unemployment insurance is tied to the number of claims. While they wouldn't dispute in bulk for layoffs, it is worth the hassle when it's for cause.
Makes sense.
If your talking about employment verification, no they don't say why. Just confirm dates of employment.
If you get fired you can lie about it. No one can find out.
I confess this surprises me. I didn't think they had to give specific details, but I thought they had to at least confirm whose decision it was for the termination.
In most cases when a company wants to fire someone they will first pull them into an office and tell them they are allowed to submit their resignation right now. If this happens it is normally best for you to accept that offer as then they will say you left in good standing. At least this way you can find a new job.
There is the possible exception that you already have enough evidence that you were going to sue them anyway, then you can take that you were fired to your lawyer (you should already have a lawyer and gotten their advice on the situation). However I don't think this has ever been the case for anyone.
The other exception is when the police are there and will arrest you as part of firing you. I'm not aware of this happening, but it seems like it probably has at some point (like once per decade across all jobs in the world)
No, don’t resign instead of getting terminated. The reason they offer that is gets them off the hook for unemployment and makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
It’s in old company best interest for you to get a new job because jobless people start talking to lawyers when they get desperate.
>No, don’t resign instead of getting terminated. The reason they offer that is gets them off the hook for unemployment and makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
Depends on whether they're offering something, otherwise yeah it's worse for you unless you suspect they have evidence of you embezzling company funds or something.
> makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
That is why they do it. However you still should accept the offer unless you are going to sue them which most are not. Just find a new job and move on. Try to do better.
> No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
The good standing is not something you want to risk. They have the ability to say not in good standing and might even have the obligation to say that to some people (depending on local laws, but if it wasn't in good standing it is at least unethical to say it was). By resigning first everyone agrees that it was in good standing and you all move on (even though you are clearly cutting the line).
Again, this assumes that like most people you won't be suing. Likely you know you screwed up (though perhaps you don't agree it is bad enough to be fired). For most it just isn't worth trying to fight it out. If you are an exception than by all means refuse - but be prepared for the consequences.
Companies rarely answer "Eligible for rehire" or "Departed in Good Standing" because that's lawsuit bait, at least in the United States. Companies don't answer questions about your employment because companies have gotten sued and lost unless they have clear evidence.
Worrying about company asking "Good standing" is like when Elementary Teacher talking about your permanent record. It does not exist.
I should find it more amusing than I do that I largely still fall for stuff like the permanent record idea. I definitely fell for it, though.
I'm fine with the idea that they won't share specifically that they fired someone for a specific reason. The surprising part, to me, is that they can't share if it was company's decision to end the relationship. My understanding was that if you just up and quit, then you don't qualify for unemployment benefits.
And I hasten to add that I'm fine being wrong on this point. Surprise can last a bit, though. :D
What they tell unemployment can be different from random "companies". Large companies have a policy of only given dates worked and "left in good standing" (or rarely not - but not is something they can be sued for and so rarely given because best case it will cost them half a million in lawyers fees if they win in court)
Makes perfect sense.
Companies don't have to answer any questions about your employment, they are just nice about it.
Whose decision could reveal something about employee and if employee thinks it's bullshit, that's defamation lawsuit possibility. I even know companies who bosses talk good about people they have fired because having ex-employee stew is not good. Get them a new job and move on.
When employers do a reference check, the reference has a choice of:
1) Sticking to the legally safe answer of only confirming dates
OR
2) Confirm dates and share a few anecdotes about how the person was good to work with
If a previous employer chooses only to confirm dates, and refuses to answer any other questions, it's often a way of signaling something bad went down but you can't talk about it.
"culpability" is also purposefully loaded. It's not wrong for a company to decide that certain jobs are no longer needed. How they handle that could be more or less considerate of the human impact, but there's really no way to do it that won't cause some some upset to the terminated employee.
It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"
I can only imagine what this will do to morale. If even positive quarters means job cuts, why even try to have a positive quarter.
>It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"
If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? If a textile mill is making record profits because of new textile machinery, would you consider it reasonable for the business to keep the old workers around, even though they're not needed anymore? Yes, it always sucks to lose a job, but I don't see how Amazon did them dirty or even broke some sort of informal contract.
They absolutely didn't. It's within Amazon's legal rights to cut as many employees as they like for any reason (besides a protected one).
With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
In my opinion, chasing ever increasing profitability as a tech company is cannibalizing future earnings. By cutting over and over in pursuit of more profit, you are trading compound earnings (ie: create new products) for money today by injecting fear into your 'innovation centers'.
>With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
So going back to the textile mill example above, what should the owner do? Keep the workers around even though they're not needed until the next recession, and only then fire them? If it's a particularly profitable industry, it might even still be profitable even with a recession, so is amazon on the hook for decades, until there's some sort of industry-wide crisis (think the one that hit the American auto industry in 2008), and by then it's too late because upstarts without the burden of older employees have already overtaken them?
I dunno, I got used to the weekly beatings. You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.
If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays. I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands. If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
What a cute naive thinking of life.
If you truly believe the best people are not layed off from corporations, you must be extremely young and just starting out. Corporations are a lot less rational than you imply
> purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.
Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."
And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."
There is enough people who don’t read articles just headlines whose world view can be changed with this.
In Hungary, where I’m originally from, one of my friends sent me an article, which was about immigration in 2015, because she thought that the local district government wanted to move “migrants” (dog whistle for non white people over there) into her district. The headline said that, the body said the exact opposite… and it worked.
Also there are a ton of comments here, on Reddit, and really everywhere, that makes it quite obvious that a lot of people don’t read just headlines.
Right and that is different that passive wording of "job loss" used above?
Yes we’re discussing the headline
> Yes we’re discussing the headline
Ah I see, your beef is with the BBC, not Amazon.
If a person fails to understand they are essentially working for a feudal lord when they sign up to work for Amazon, the educational system has failed.
In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.
Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?
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".
> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations.
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...
counterpoint:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fire#Verb
4. (transitive, employment) To terminate the employment contract of (an employee), especially for cause (such as misconduct, incompetence, or poor performance).
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.
Why is downsizing and an employee’s role no longer being cost effective for the business not considered “cause” for firing?
IANAL, but I believe "cause" means "the employee gave the company cause to fire them". Poor performance, bad conduct, etc.
It's not so much that "cause" means anything as that "for cause" has a specific meaning.
Cause in this context specifically refers to the employee having done something wrong or illegal and means the employee is guilty of misconduct.
It is very rare for someone that is fired to be "guilty of misconduct," unless you consider poor performance misconduct.
In Britain we have quite strong employment laws and a bit less of a ruthless corporate culture, so in many sectors it's fairly uncommon for people to be terminated for poor performance, so I suspect "misconduct" is a higher percentage of overall firings here.
Yeah for sure. Unfortunately in the US it’s not uncommon for companies to find “a pattern of behavior” or “less than stellar work” that is enough to justify not giving you your severance, but also not too severe that they can’t be blamed for never bringing it up and putting you on a PIP (performance improvement plan, not sure if that’s a term in other countries).
With cause think crimes or near crimes. Sexually harassment of a coworker, taking things from the warehouse...
In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.
There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.
> In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.
You meant i.e. or e.g.?
Under performance may be considered termination for cause in your state. It is not generally.
The only phrases they should be using are “Amazon lays off 14,000…” or (in the case of with cause) “Amazon fires 14,000…”
To me everything else is weasel words.
> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause,
People are fired for a cause, namely Amazon needs more profit for its shareholders.
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.
“Passive voice” is a grammatical term.
“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.
GP obviously meant passive tone, not passive noun-verb relationship.
Still puts them in a weak position to critique others on their use of words. We might like to hold the BBC to a higher standard but none of the big news sites are good at details like this.
True, I did make a mistake, but in my defense I’m but one person making a passing comment in an internet forum. Even then, if I had noticed my error before the edit window (which I do not control) expired, I would have issued a correction.
The BBC, on the other hand, is a major organisation employing professional writers and editors. It’s their job to inform clearly, not throw mud in people’s faces with the kind of indirect wording used to conceal intentions.
The situations are not in the same category. I made a mistake in word usage; the article’s title is manipulating meaning, using public relations-style words carefully chosen for the goal of minimising backlash.
Furthermore, I don’t think you need to be perfect to point out imperfection. It is perfectly valid to go to a restaurant and say “this pizza tastes bad” even if you don’t know how to cook.
I've heard it described as the "exculpative voice".
Correct. There's nothing vague about "the burglar was shot by me."
It's passive but crystal clear.
Grammatically correct, but missing the narrative subtext.
"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.
People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.
This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.
"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.
Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.
The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.
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.
There's an interesting asymmetry in language in this area.
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.
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.
"job losses" is BBC editorializing. They do not use that term in their letter: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...
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.
"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears.
I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.
"Made redundant" is another term for the latter.
Which, at least in American English, comes across like corporate jargon/weasel words. Lost their job is literally true and would probably take a bunch more words to describe the precise reasons.
Both things can be literally true. I've lost my job by being made redundant, twice. In Britain redundancy is a very specific thing, where your role no longer exists and you must be let go in a fair way according to employment law. It's quite the opposite of jargon or weasel words here: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights
Synergized is the term I typically hear.
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.
> 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.
This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years
I think American English is the same colloquially. “I got fired” means I didn’t perform or did something wrong. “I got laid off” is our “I was made redundant”.
“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.
Fired means terminated for any reason to many Americans. And academics, economists, and lawyers avoid it in my experience.
> in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy"
OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)
How would you describe that, in British English?
"Breach of contract"? "Sacked" would probably work colloquially.
Indeed, Amazon use the euphemism, "making organizational changes".
It’s equivalent to “restructuring” which doesn’t directly mean reduction in force but it does mean that I directly.
Makes it sound like they shuffled desks and gave everyone new team names. How fun!
(Not like, you know, some people getting divorced soon, some people biting a revolver soon)
And by applying these organizational changes, each person can become more load bearing and have so much more scope and impact. This is not a loss, it's a great win for everyone! /s
[dead]
> 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.
Yeah a classic euphemism.
It’s better than “RIFed,” at least.
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.
Jeffrey Bezos: All those jobs will be lost. Like tears in the rain.
(you inspired me)
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.
From the CNN report [1]:
---
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
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?
Continually AI is used to justify layoffs that seem like simple corrections to overhiring.
I always wonder if the people responsible for the over-hiring are on the block? My personal experience suggests not.
Most boards(particularly of large publicly traded tech companies) don't hire CEOs to ensure their companies remain stable in the longterm at the expense of profits, they hire them to grow short term profits.
Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
Replace Jassy with AI
They will. But by the time it happens, Jassy already made millions in cash + much more in stocks and will retire comfortably while others will slave away for new AI overlords.
GPT-1 or GPT-2, which would match his reasoning abilities, are unfortunately deprecated, so we can't.
Prepare for the bogeyman.
"Agents" is now a word on my corporate bullshit bingo card
They are neither. They eliminated 14k roles. Employees have 90 days to find new roles. It remains to be seen how many end up being fired.
They just have to look harder and they'll find those jobs they lost.
Is there a difference?
Passive voice deflects responsibility and agency.
Loss happens, firings are a decision.
Ironically, Amazon's document writing culture stresses NOT using passive voice, but it seems acceptable to do so when you need to spin a PR.
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 not what you say, but how you say it” syndrome.
Same as "hackers stole your data" versus "we left your data on an open S3 bucket"
We didn't fail to secure things because we spent our security budget on security theatre - we were just kindly offering those poor hackers money to support their families.
It’s like a rocket flew into the refugee camp vs the occupation forces struck the refugee camp with a rocket.
My favourite is during terrorist attacks in Europe, it's always like "car attacks crowd". Like the car's wife had left it and it had decided to go out with a bang.
Damn cars why do they do that! Ironically soon cars may start actually doing it.
The problem is, there isn't much initial facts to base on, other than that a vehicle has plowed into a crowd. In the early 30-60 minutes, you often don't even know how many people died and how many are injured because emergency services are still working on rescue (alive people) and recovery (dead people).
Maybe it's political or religious terrorism, maybe it's suicide-by-cop, maybe it's a generic mental health issue (think schizophrenics whose head voice tells them to commit violence), maybe it's a health issue (heart attack, driver floors the gas pedal), maybe it's a streetrace gone wrong, maybe it's a DUI, maybe it's a mechanical issue (loss of brake/steering), maybe it's a geriatric driver who just doesn't have any idea where he even is, maybe it's a driver blindly following Maps and ignoring the policeman winking at him, thus not noticing he's heading right for a rally.
You see, the list of issues why a car plows into a crowd is very very long, and often it takes the police hours to determine what's going on. They gotta interview bystanders and victims, they gotta obtain and review camera footage, possibly search the driver's home and digital devices - because unlike Twitter pseudo-journalists and click/ragebait "news" media, police can normally be held accountable if they claim something in public that doesn't turn out to be true.
I think usually the vehicle has not, say, been flung unoccupied into a crowd by an oversized slingshot experiment gone wrong.
So it'd be nice if they'd say like "a man has ploughed into a crowd" - we'll safely assume he didn't use an actual plough since I hear those are fairly slow.
It does make a difference regarding people viewing news outlets as informers rather than an arm of some kind of agenda.
Normally it’s the terrorists that are so bright that they fire rockets into their own territory. So, “rocket flew” is actually being nice to them.
The same difference as in "He died of heart attack" and "She was killed in a car crash".
Or one of my favorites, "was hit by a car". While true in the strict physical sense, that’s like reporting that someone was "shot by a gun".
"killed by an officer's duty weapon" or "died in an officer-involved shooting" are the ways police departments tend to put it.
Maybe it's an effort to be more polite than "by some prick who can't drive".
I suppose there's at least one example of someone being hit by a car that slipped off a car transporter too. "Had car thrown at him by negligent shipping company" would be a more click worthy headline though
Fox news spin: "his heart murdered him, as we all know all hearts secretly want to do to all of us".
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.
> It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”
See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:
> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.
[…]
> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...
For automobiles specifically:
* https://crashnotaccident.com
* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...
* https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...
Michigan.gov website references Merriam-Webster dictionary definition "an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance".
Then it says no one is at fault, but the definition specifically included carelessness and ignorance which does imply fault.
> Calling a crash an “accident” suggests no one is at fault. In reality, crashes result from preventable actions like distraction, inattention, or risky driving.
But all of these go under carelessness / ignorance.
And there is always a party that's at fault traffic accidents.
Normal dialogue:
Bob: I got into a traffic accident.
Alice: Who was at fault?
Bob: ...
killed by drivers, cars are inanimate objects
Killed semantics includes intentionality (and lack of), while dying by accident clearly removes any intentionality whatsoever.
So it's much more faithful to truth to talk about accidents than by killing, even if both terms are semantically correct.
It’s intentional though see above comment by throw0101c.
I agree that it’s a hard pill to swallow especially if you are US American.
> I agree that it’s a hard pill to swallow especially if you are US American.
Can you point me to countries that don't deflect agency in accident reporting?
Here's a headline from just today in the UK:
> Man airlifted to hospital after pedestrian hit
First line in of the story:
> A man has been airlifted to hospital after a vehicle hit a pedestrian.
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".
That would make Bezos look bad .
"Regrettable attrition".
Going to go wash my hands after typing that.
>Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language.
"Job losses" isn't passive voice. "Jobs were lost" would be passive voice.
Why are people so hung up on "job losses", as if we don't hear this every day? Who cares?
You're being pedantic for no good reason. You know what I meant.
If you don't care about this conversation, why are you participating?
> let people go
Or, as you said, firings.
It's a loss for the one being fired.
These numbers are inflated to be unparsable. I suspect it's either 14 people or a small monetary loss. Do you feel different today?
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.
100%. Amazon hired 14,000 people, and now it's firing 14,000 people it no longer wants on its payroll. Plain and simple.
Nah, it gained 14,000 people, they kinda sneak in to the buildings and start doing work if you aren't serious about your perimeter security.
... which will also result in bonuses to execs for hitting/exceeding their efficiency goals.
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.
> These aren't "job losses"
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
To lose one job, Mr. Bezos, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 14000 looks like carelessness.
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.
> 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.
I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.
Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.
Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!
> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures
The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.
I have been an employee for 30 years across 10 jobs - one of which was Amazon from 2020-2023. I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job. I always stayed ready to look for a job at a moments notice and it has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking.
In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.
As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.
Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
For now, expect that to be clawed back severely over the next few years.
It’s already happening. The pay I am seeing offered now in second tier tech cities like Atlanta where I use to live are the same as they were in 2016 and haven’t kept up with inflation.
I’m having to continuously move up and closer to the “stakeholders”.
>I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job.
Your "ability to get a job" is not what put money into your bank account twice a month. Your employer did.
Yes and when my employers - including Amazon - decided they wanted to stop putting money into my account, I didn’t stress.
I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.
I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.
> 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.
I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:
- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.
- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA
- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools
- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.
In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
Everything you said is true, but the relevant risk in the equation is objective risk, not relative risk.
I suppose. But in a world where upset people then act irrationally up to and including doing some murder I wonder if we start mapping burnt out individuals to a higher "cost" than their lost spending. What for example is the objective cost of Samuel Cassidy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting#Perpetr...
Oh I agree with you. I don't live in the US, but in a country that has a very high progressive tax rate. I am taxed about 50% of my income currently. But I gladly pay it because I like to live in a safe country with strong government programs and a great healthcare system. It is also very difficult to fire an employee here. Companies generally have to pay people to leave, and this can be a year salary upwards. But I do sympathize with people in the US, even if the "average" lifestyle experience is higher, because a lot of people seem to be struggling there.
yea I did not want to assume but my take here is very biased upon my locale.
Spare us your sympathy. When it's harder to terminate employees then employers are more reluctant to hire in the first place, leading to higher unemployment rates and overall slower economic growth. As a US based employee who has been laid off before (multiple times) I prefer our approach.
Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.
What does the R stand for?
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Still wouldn't be close to the level of inequality we have today: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guarante...
> What does the R stand for?
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
> You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day
Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
> No, you are making this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
Yes, Martin. All men (and women) are created equal. The purpose of that document and in that phrase is that all are created equal under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal". Those are completely different things and as you mentioned, it's a very popular (and stupid) meme which is why I responded specifically to what you wrote there.
> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?
Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.
>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company
Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?
Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
This drives me nuts. You move to another city, risk your livelihood on a new job that you don’t know if is gonna work out for you. Your kids go to a new school, your partner has to either move to find a new job, or make it work long distance for a while… Your whole life changes on what is essentially a bet, you have no security whatsoever. And people say the risk is not yours.
Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.
But yeah, no risk. No risk at all.
Then don’t do that? In 2020, when I had the “opportunity” to work at Amazon in a role that would eventually require relocating after COVID, there was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life to work for Amazon and that was after my youngest had graduated. I instead interviewed for a “permanently remote role” [sic]. If that hadn’t been available, I would have kept working local jobs for less money.
Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.
If your a billionaire and you invest in index funds, the risk of becoming homeless is really low, sure. The system works in such a way that the more money you have the easier it is to make more money. So if your stuck at the bottom, your really stuck.
And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.
I don't think the billionare is at risk of becoming homeless even if they invest all $10m in a single company and it goes belly up.
If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.
Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!
So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.
Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.
Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.
The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?
Same argument applies to investors.
Isn't it the same as the house in roulette - sure each spin the house is taking risk - but if the game is structured so the odds are in your favour - you are taking less risk than the customer.
It comes down to who is setting the rules of the game.
This is unfortunately true. Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.
Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.
Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes. Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.
>Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.
> you get a regular paycheck
No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.
Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.
And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.
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The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.
1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.
2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.
In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.
They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
> But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.
Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?
Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.
Most corporate employees at Amazon do get some stock, and you’re also free to exchange the money you earn for ownership of any public company.
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 :)
Cash comp at Amazon is extremely limited, with at least half of your comp coming from RSUs (or cash equivalent during the first year). So if Amazon is wildly successful, you do get a huge benefit out of it (my grants resulted in a salary that was ~ $100K more than the band I was assigned at review).
Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.
"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.
People can use money to buy shares in companies to participate in their profits. Owners of companies carry the risk that the company goes bankrupt.
What’s the actual hazard there? I get that a company going bankrupt causes money to evaporate into wages and capital. But are the owners actually facing any real risk? You have to be an accredited investor to buy in in any real way and one of the tests is that your investment is below a certain percentage of your means.
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.
I think you just invented co-operatives.
Correct, owning the business will almost always be a better financial deal than working for the business.
Which business? The majority of businesses fail and never turn a profit. A success like Amazon is the exception, not the rule.
The business the person I was responding to was referring to?
I’m aware of the difficulties of running a business. I’d still always prefer to own the business rather than work within it despite that risk, which is why I do.
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.
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.
To be clear, it’s worse. Read the press release carefully:
1. 14k was the net change in “corporate headcount” which is PR puffery speak saying they’re firing a lot more but when you net out folks let go slotting into open roles elsewhere the net change today would be a 14k reduction
2. It also says that “looking ahead” “we expect to… find additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.” That’s PR puffery speak for “there will be more layoffs coming soon.”
Amazon has really struggled under Andy Jassy’s tenure as CEO. Innovation has slowed, and there were huge misses on areas like AI.
What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership. Andy Jassy preaches about company culture and efficiency but the culture went to crap and the company became bloated on his watch so…
Amazon likely needs new leadership to get it past the Andy Jassy chapter and move to a new phase of innovation and growth. It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.
> there were huge misses on areas like AI
Honest question. What could they have possibly gained from AI? What did they miss out on by not getting into AI?
The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs.
Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.
I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?
I'm curious what are the shortcomings you find with SageMaker?
Bedrock is just hosting a bunch of different LLMs. It is just as capable as the third party LLMs it hosts. It hosts everything except for OpenAI and Gemini models as far as the popular ones. Even Nova, Amazon’s models, are good enough for the most part, cheaper and usually faster.
Bedrock imposes limitations on context window sizes and output sizes over and above those of the underlying model. There's also a bunch of undifferentiated heavy lifting that Amazon requires their customers to perform when they could have added value there.
Have you noticed how bad their devices dept was gutted? I can easily imagine a proper AI system backing alexa, rolled out to all existing customers, which would potentially boost the viability of that whole product line.
right now I have no idea what Alexa is for anymore. It pings me when a package arrives but so does my phone. I can't order from it, because it makes me open the app. I can manage a shopping list I guess? I ask it the temp outside from time to time b/c I don't want to go look at the thermometer outside my window?
A proper device would discuss with me product options and Q&A, or something. Even piping Grok/GPT5 through to answer questions would be light years ahead of the current crap answers I get when I ask questions. And why doesn't it do a good job of identifying songs that are playing? That's trivial software, and it could recommend some songs like this (which is something I use GPT for).
I don't know I'm just a trad software engineer, but it sure seems like it's low risk / high improvement to at least have a modern LLM feature in that product.
Hard agree. Same for Siri.
I don't get why they just don't do it. There are jailbreaks, making it talk trash and so on, but is that the majority of users? I doubt it.
I never use Siri except when driving. But when driving, it's really wonderful to have, since my car does not have car play.
As a daily user, it's clear they have been actively messing with Siri still, particularly in the last year. But the changes seem to mostly make it worse. It now misses "hey siri" half the time for no apparent reason. I feel like they just don't know what they want to do with it.
There is absolutely nothing in the world I would like less than an AI device listening to all of my conversations at home.
I have privacy concerns, but an AI that worked as a servant would be a great help. I can't afford servants (or slaves), but I want something that listens in and takes action when I want something. Interrupt me when I'm planning vacation to remind me that there is some other event at home when I'd be gone. When I run low on baking powder ensure I get more.
Again, the privacy concerns need to be addressed. However there is a lot of potential for an AI in my house if it works.
It works by listening for the keyword (it's name), and only then opening a connection to servers. You can verify this by removing internet connectivity and it'll still "turn on" when you say it's name, but will be unable to respond.
It can buffer your words as text until you call it. How many kB do one speak per day? 50?
I use almost daily my google nest to set timers hand free while cooking, and managing radio playbacks: I’m an avid web radio listener.
The Alexa product as it is, is already lighting money on fire. Adding LLM integration to it would just be pouring gasoline on it; iirc inference is still not profitable even in easier sectors so Alexa would be a particularly bad place for it. (Even though it would be amazing UX, but I doubt enough people would pay the price it costs to break even).
Am I missing something? Alexa+ with LLMs was already released this year?
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
Too little too late
Surely b2b "model API provider" would've been a great fit for Amazon, but others are absolutely dominating this space right now.
The silver lining for Amazon is that nobody is making a profit by actually providing that service. It's just massive valuations and VC money flowing freely instead of a sustainable business model, and Amazon plays a much longer game - they can recover even if being so far behind is a "bad look" for their current management.
It's not hard to switch between OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure/Google/whatever and Amazon can surely eventually compete well in this space.
AWS is probably in last place among computing clouds on AI and the AI managed services from AWS are pretty second-rate.
Amazon had Alexa (Echos) everywhere and that was teed up to knock it out of the park putting a real AI assistant in every home. Then the devices team totally blew it and did almost nothing to take advantage of that huge lead. Folks are now basically just throwing these things in the trash and the devices unit is a huge pit of cash on fire.
The list goes on…
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. This is spot on. Likely Amazon and AWS folks in denial of where they really are relative to the market’s bar at the moment.
They had the infrastructure and muscle to put a dent into Google Search and Microsoft Enterprise software... but instead they've ceeded to OpenAI and Anthropic.
They had a bridgehead device of the type that OpenAI are struggling to create with Jonny Ive in Alexa... but nothing seems to be happening with Alexa now.
If Microsoft couldn’t compete with Google in search, how could Amazon? Even if the search were better, how do you get people to switch to it if Google is the default everywhere? Besides Alexa was losing billions when it was backed by the relatively cheap to run Amazon Lex pattern matching service. It would have lost more being backed by an LLM and it actually got worse from all indications.
How much of the search market will Agents or Chatbots take?
Google clearly believe : a chunk.
People switched to GPT and Claude...
Amazon risk becoming logistics and datacenters, what's wrong with that you ask? Well, it's not where the money is. The money is in the website and the application layer.
And how much of this switch do you think will happen as long as Google is the default search engine for every major browser and every major smartphone outside of China?
Even if “agents” aren’t overhyped, why would someone switch to Amazon instead of just using Google’s offerings?
Google has reported record revenues even after the advent of LLMs and have integrated AI overviews and a separate chat tab.
Why am I calling Anthropic/Google/OpenAI APIs for my AI inference and not AWS ones? Even Azure has some decent AI inference endpoints I encounter with clients.
Never seen a single person use AWS for this.
Short term - higher stock evaluation. Long term - depends on what value AI bubble will be able to deliver. But it's not like Amazon is sitting out of this game, they do invest into their AI (Nova models), with little return to show for it.
What if I told you that Amazon has spent more money on AI this year than any other company? On track to spend nearly 150B by the end of the year?
I’d say leadership should be fired for having so little to show for it
>It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.
You had me all the wya until this line.
Yeah that was my read too, I'm anticipating more rounds over the next few months
First, Andy led AWS to what it is today.
Second, Amazon had a problem before Andy took over. Way too many managers and incompetent people in very senior levels. The fact that he's doing something about it is a good thing for Amazon. You don't become a CEO of a behemoth such as Amazon and expect to show impact within 6 months. It takes years.
In terms of AI, they did invest in Anthropic early on and are a significant stakeholder. That's critical since Anthropic is a trillion dollar company in the making and they trump everyone in enterprise AI. They are much more likely to succeed with smart partnerships than doing their own thing.
1. Lots of cracks showing in AWS before he took the big job, lack of focus, bloat of too many services with too few users
2. He then hired Adam to take over AWS which didn’t work out well
3. Good to see he’s cleaning things up, but we’re past the “clean things up” phase for a CEO. He’s been in role for a while now. That should have been the first few years of his tenure.
4. Anthropic was a good investment, but Amazon is just one of many investors. It’s nothing like the partnership that MSFT and OpenAI have, which was further strengthened with today’s announcements there. Amazon has nothing comparable to counter that.
From the beginning Adam was intended to be an interim AWS CEO: They didn't have someone who was ready immediately, so Adam was the bridge. Unfortunately, Adam was the bridge to Matt Garman :(
That's fair. I actually didn't realize it's been already 4+ years since he took over as CEO. I do think that we haven't heard the last word of Amazon Anthropic's partnership. Microsoft is already deep in OpenAI, and Google, while also a major stakeholder in Anthropic, directly competes with Gemini (API, code, etc). Amazon has foundation models but not really in the game, so this partnership is likely to continue. Both sides need it (Amazon for staying in the AI game and Anthropic for the resources and cash)
Once a company moves on to recurring, large-scale layoffs justified by vague corporate Mumbo-Jumbo, I think it is safe to assume it is a "day 2" company.
The original shareholder letter said the company wouldn’t pander to Wall Street or focus on short term improvements. It’s now slashing jobs a few days before earnings to try and placate Wall Street since it can’t grow via innovation. That’s all the proof you need to see that Amazon is now in full “Day 2” mode.
I was not aware of this term before.
For others: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeff-bezos-day-1-versus-2-com...
Non-LinkedIn version: https://ourdinnertable.wordpress.com/2025/05/06/jeff-bezos-d...
> “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by death. And that’s why it’s always Day 1.”
Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep
Is this one of those things that are meant to sound deep and profound by inventing terminology, but isn't? That's such a like day 2 person thing to do.
(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)
Day 2 is like Switzerland---small and neutral. Day 1 is like Germany---ambitious and misunderstood.
Had completely forgotten that futurama bit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FvrcvPNpdd8
Which is the one people like to hug?
I hope the shark thing isn’t said in earnest ever by anyone. It is the height of parody of a hustle culture bro. On second thought would you want $1 million now or $5000 a day and the guy says neither because that’s not how you build wealth or something. It’s probably number one.
The shark line is a quote from Futurama in an episode where an 80s corporate raider takes over Planet Express.
Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep
Sharks eat sheep?
I'm not really sure how this fits with Amazon's corporate culture. I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis.
If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?
My theory is that when an organization descends into a cycle of repetitive downsizings, it inevitably leads to people focusing more on protecting their jobs than on business value.
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.
My company’s been through layoffs/reorgs every 3–6 months for three years. One thing is true: performance management happens faster. Many chronic low performers were laid off, and a few “too many cooks” problems were resolved. Those benefits are real and genuine.
But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:
1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.
2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.
3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.
Your comment made wonder if there is an social / economic phenomenon tied to your characterization. I'd be really curious if there is any academic work done on further elucidating it.
Edit: Did some research with ChatGPT and found the following papers if anyone else is interested in the above concepts.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9537742/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235279297_The_survi...
https://backend.production.deepblue-documents.lib.umich.edu/...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10025906/
https://strategy.sjsu.edu/www.stable/pdf/Staw%2C%20B%2C%20L%...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0312896220970609
+5 Insightful
Unless you are in the position of Zuckerberg or the Google founders, everyone’s main motivation is to keep their jobs.
If you are just an employee - it’s beyond naive to prioritize anything but your own job. Of course I am not advocating back stabbing and throwing others under the bus. Getting ahead in BigTech is always about playing politics and getting on the right projects to show “impact”.
It's a matter of it being an active vs passive effort to "keep your job." Once you have to actively worry about the status of your job something is wrong (be it with you or your employer).
First employees work for the customer, then they work for the company, then they work for themselves. Sounds like Amazon is between the 2nd and 3rd stage.
there are alot of tenured people that are good at politics, but dont provide much actual value
I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis.
Local TV says it's because too many people caved in to the return-to-work demand.
Or they know something that the current Administration does not (or is withholding)? Maybe it's time to buckle up for a coming economic storm.
I wonder if the company that makes part of its money from consumer goods shipped from China knows something about the impact of tariffs on consumer spending. They've probably already assessed the impact on their models of Black Friday and Christmas purchases and decided it looks bad.
(most of their money is from AWS, though. I wonder if AI is making that less stock-relevant.)
Oh no, they might only make $15 billion instead of $18 billion next quarter?
>Oh no, they might only make $15 billion instead of $18 billion next quarter?
Exactly. It's a for-profit company, not a charity or a jobs program.
> coming economic storm
We are already in it.
Don't worry, when ZIRP returns, they'll be a day 1 company again.
People mistook ZIRP for genius for 25 years.
This is a little exaggerated, considering ZIRP was 2009 to 2022, 13 years, and came well after Amazon had established its trajectory.
And they did kind of successfully roll out a global logistics network, at a time when no one thought anyone could compete with Walmart. And they became leaders in the cloud computing space.
These aren't trivial accomplishments solely enabled by ZIRP.
The Yen Carry trade financed US VC since 1999, thanks to ZIRP from the BOJ.
Not Ironic at all that Dot Com immediately followed.
I think stuff like this will eventually pull Bezos back in.
From: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...
> we want to operate like the world’s largest startup
This is a phrase I hear repeated by leadership a lot, and it's usually code for "why doesn't everyone else just make the business grow faster?" It is almost always, as in this case, followed by statements that suggest they don't understand what is actually different about the way a start up functions and why they stopped operating that way at some point in the first place.
Much like the classic "our department in [big company] works a lot like a startup"
I worked at AOL back when they did quarterly "staff reductions". They would go and hire lots of them right back; it was an accounting trick. Never mind the fact that families were affected and employees were constantly stressed near the end of every quarter. Those things don't matter, quarterly numbers do when growth has stalled.
My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.
Classic Bluth Company "Black Friday" move: https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Friday
This is a great tactic, where competent, good workers find a more stable job, and the ones unable to get a better job are then rehired. On one hand, you can bully them more, and they'll stay, on the other hand, they're so bad at their job, no one else wants them either.
I believe they call this "contracting". Which is not what they purported to do. Having to go through all the bullshit about the hiring process, benefits, taxes, and all that over and over is an absurd inefficiency. It also doesn't help when people are just trying to feed and care for their families.
Because of that experience (and lots of other anecdotal evidence), I see no reason for anybody to ever work at amazon unless they are ok with being a contractor.
Doesn't sound very labour-law friendly
'murica
I mean, no-one messages each other on AOL now so yeah. Those quarterly earnings though, they were something
> They would go and hire lots of them right back; it was an accounting trick.
How did it benefit the company's accounting? Doesn't it create an additional expense in both severance and hiring costs?
Bearing in mind that I'm nothing resembling an accountant, I believe it has to do with getting them off the books by the end of the quarter before the statement goes out. That shows as less liability for the quarterly statement. The cost of severance and hiring is for the next quarter, so it doesn't affect the current quarter's numbers.
So:
- Company has 10 employees at an annual cost of 100k each. That's 250k (1mm / 4) of employee expenses for the quarter.
- Company lays off 5 employees right before the end of the quarter. That's only 5 employees on the payroll in the current quarter, because you account for the number of employees when the statement is issued. Re-hiring and severance payouts are going to be done sometime in the future.
Congratulations, your employee expense was only 125k for the quarter!
Never mind the fact that families were affected and employees were constantly stressed near the end of every quarter.
It's this sort of thing that has me re-thinking the fairness of employees giving employers the customary (in the United States) two week notice before leaving.
Employees don't get two weeks notice before being fired without cause.
It's supposed to be because replacing an employee is so difficult for the company. Well, it's a hell of a lot more difficult for an employee to lose a job than it is for a company to lose a worker.
If I'm employer "at will" then my employer should also be retained "at will." If they want to negotiate another arrangement, that's fine.
For layoffs like this, employers typically give out two months of severance, so I'm not sure what you're whining about.
Of course if you're willing to burn bridges with your employer, there's nothing stopping you from quitting immediately. Have at it.
Companies pay out severance mostly for compliance with the WARN act. If they could get away with not doing this, they absolutely would.
This is a reflection of 1) compensation has come down since the ZIRP era at least in some roles and 2) it's a hirer's market.
This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down.
I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere
I've taken pay cuts twice in my career, but both times it was at unfunded startups and it was more of a "we'll get you back for this later" (one did, one did not).
I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.
Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
This. Companies will always min/max a system so they retain as much money as possible for as few hands as they can manage, always funneled upwards to executives and shareholders.
Rather than trying to “negotiate” with these entities, regulations should be wielded to stop min-maxing beyond a certain point or in bad faith, and firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.
“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.”
That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.
My experience with these sorts of layoffs is that they are not tightly bound to performance. If you have underperformers you can fire them the ordinary way.
At this point I would not be surprised if there isn't an "AI" tool that looks across employees by salary range, department earnings, seniority and age and just generates a list at a moments notice. I was around for a desperate layoff at a small company in the early 2ks and got to watch as management basically ran around the office doing this logic in real time. Some people are get pulled in because they aren't high performing or they're unliked, but most was a simple expense/income calculation.
Exactly. How is it that an org suddenly discovered thousands of employees are under performers? And how is it that the number of under performers coincides with the number McKinsey and Co (or similar company) said it would be?
>Exactly. How is it that an org suddenly discovered thousands of employees are under performers?
The more correct statement is they suddenly cared about under performers. It's not any different than say, you noticing your grocery bills going up and as a result you cancel all the subscriptions you don't need. It's not like all those SaaS services' value propositions suddenly plummeted because the price of eggs went up, but now you suddenly have an eye for cutting costs.
Literally this. Corporations are good at making up plausible excuses, but anyone who takes more than two seconds to evaluate their claims beyond face value will find they’re almost always complete bullshit.
Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.
This, plus companies do different stuff. If eg. amazons streaming service fails, but normal sales of physical items surge and in total, compensate to make a profit, you can't really move streaming developers, marketers etc. to warehouse jobs.
Behavior is shaped by incentives.
Countries used to be overwhelmingly autocratic - often ruled by hereditary dictators called kings. People realized unchecked power will always lead to abuse and overthrew them.
Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].
If only we had a system of rules we could vote on which would make this arrangement forbidden...
---
[0]: You can't legally overthrow a government either but if you do it successfully anyway, then you are the government and you decide what is legal.
Ironically, no democratic countries I know of have clauses in their ruleset ("laws") which declare that people are allowed to overthrow the government if it's no longer democratic, even if those democratic governments were created by overthrowing a previous dictatorship.
The US kind of does in that at least in spirit if the government violates the constitution we have this 2nd Amendment and plenty of moral precedent from the founders. It’s in the Declaration of Independence too which, in my view, is just the first page of the Constitution. The 0th Amendment if you will.
Related to your second point about autocracy - I mean the good thing is you can, today, go start a company with the exact governance structure you propose and go compete in the market.
I always find this so funny. “Citizens have guns so they can overthrow a government that has tanks, helicopters, nuclear weapons, bunker busting bombs, etc”
Ok so the US military is going to drop a nuclear weapon on Dallas or Buffalo to stop insurgents? Why even bother writing something like that when you know it’s stupid?
Obviously governments have superior firepower and can and have quashed rebellions. But rebellions have been successful as well. Taking away arms from the people makes rebellion in the case of tyranny that much harder.
I don’t think it’s unfair to question whether such rights are worthwhile or not, but I do think it’s unfair to suggest that since the government has helicopters you can’t have a rebellion. They sure didn’t need any tanks or helicopters when the MAGA goons tried to hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
Not to mention the army is composed of people who, despite systematic indoctrination, can decide to switch sides.
However, this is a huge danger of ML ("AI"). It allows individuals to concentrate power. All real-world power comes from violence. Sufficiently advanced ML models allow individuals to profile subordinates and remove them before they rebel and (partially now but increasingly in the future) to control swarms of drones and robots.
Really good call out on the AI/ML. Now that is dangerous.
Also, as an army veteran who served on active duty including a tour in Iraq (not direct combat role, thankfully) I can tell you that in my experience you're spot on - the systematic indoctrination isn't to a political party but it's to the military and to defending the country and the Constitution. That's up to interpretation. The military has never been faced with resolving a constitutional crises so we really don't know how things would play out - but not every soldier is a rabid Trump supporter or something. Far from it. Very far from it.
If today, the National Guard dropped a non nuclear bomb on a blue city, 40% of the US population would shrug if not outright cheer.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/socprac/vol10/iss1/15/
Rebellions have been successful in underfunded countries with few resources. Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
And those people were all pardoned by the same President who cheered them and on and he was voted back into office. If Trump - who was still president then had wanted to call in the full force of government he could have.
Do you think they would have let thousands of minorities invade the capital?
>https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/socprac/vol10/iss1/15/
Strange you linked to some random journal article describing the incident as "In 1985 police bombed the Philadelphia headquarters occupied by members of the black counterculture group MOVE.". The wikipedia article adds far needed context:
>The 1985 MOVE bombing, locally known by its date, May 13, 1985,[2] was the aerial bombing of a house, and the destruction of 61 more houses by the subsequent fire, in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by the Philadelphia Police Department during an armed battle with MOVE, a black liberation organization. MOVE members shot at Philadelphia police who had come to evict them from the house they were using as their headquarters. Philadelphia police aviators then dropped two explosive devices from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter onto the roof of the house, which was occupied at the time. For 90 minutes, the Philadelphia Police Department allowed the resulting fire to burn out of control, destroying 61 previously evacuated neighboring houses over two city blocks and leaving 250 people homeless.[3] Six adults and five children were killed in the attack;[4] two occupants of the house, one adult and one child, survived. A lawsuit in federal court found that the city used excessive force and violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.[5]
Furthermore it's a stretch to claim that some incident that killed 11 people is somehow expandable to nuking a whole city.
No, it’s the idea that no one cared. If San Francisco was bombed tomorrow, MAGA would celebrate and say “he owned the libs”. If the MOVE bombing had happened today, conservative media would dig up everything everyone who got killed did ave say they “deserved it”.
There are no red or blue cities or states. This is a made up fiction and we should stop using those terms because they are divisive and only serve to make the country weak.
> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
No because that's a strawman. Though those yokels on January 6th sure gave it a try.
> If today, the National Guard dropped a non nuclear bomb on a blue city, 40% of the US population would shrug if not outright cheer.
This would never happen unless there's a zombie apocalypse or that city was invaded by another country. No American would cheer a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York or Houston or something - why are you even entertaining such outlandish nonsense?
There are very much two views of what America should be like and pretending there isn’t is why Democrats keep losing.
40% of Americans cheer how the current administration treats immigrants, non straight people, etc and continue defend the words of a racist podcaster. They wouldn’t want a “nuclear” bomb because it affects them. But there was no real fallout politically for the police MOVE bombing.
If you don’t think this country is divided, you haven’t been looking at where this country is and it’s view on reality.
Those yokels on January 6th tried. But do you think they could have overcome even the local SWAT let alone the military? There have been yokels running around for decades trying. Heck an entire Confedrrsre army couldn’t defeat the US government backed by the states
> Those yokels on January 6th tried. But do you think they could have overcome even the local SWAT let alone the military?
Well they did - they weren't far away from grabbing Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. What's the US military going to do? It's not really equipped for this kind of stuff, oh and those yokels didn't really bring a ton of firearms, but they could have. Thankfully I don't think those yokels expected to have the success that they did and they didn't really intend to try and overthrow the government, though I personally believe they all should have been tried as many of them were.
> There are very much two views of what America should be like and pretending there isn’t is why Democrats keep losing.
The Democrats are losing because their ideas are by and large bad, and most Americans don't agree with them. Communism? Open Borders? Those are the topics that dominate the Democratic Party right now and as an independent I also find those ideas completely unpalatable, even though perhaps stupidly I still keep voting for Democrats locally because the MAGA goons make me so mad.
I'm not suggesting the country isn't divided - it always has been and it's perhaps more divided now because people are spending all day on the Internet, but further dividing the country be calling things "red" or "blue" is actively harmful. Besides even in those so called "red" or "blue" areas there are plenty of people who are on the other side of the dominating spectrum. Plenty of rural Californias who vote Republican, plenty of liberals in Kansas City.
No one is advocating for “communism” any more than Obama was a “secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law into the US”. If you want to talk “socialism” that’s what you call tariffs that US citizens are paying and redistributing the taxes to farmers hurt by the tariffs.
Again do you think if the terrorist on Jan 6th had bern minorities there wouldn’t have been overwhelming force? Even if they did manage to get to Pelosi and Pence, they weren’t going to overthrow the entire government.
What could the military do? They had guns. They could shoot people. I’m well stew that red and blue is not statewide and there are more Republican voters in California than South Dakota.
> No one is advocating for “communism”
No, there are many progressives who are quite literally calling for communism or to implement economic policies we know are destructive. This is like you trying to tell me MAGA goons don't want a 3rd Trump term. Call a spade a spade.
> Again do you think if the terrorist on Jan 6th had bern minorities there wouldn’t have been overwhelming force? Even if they did manage to get to Pelosi and Pence, they weren’t going to overthrow the entire government.
Some of them were minorities by the way. In fact you can go look at polling and you'll see Trump outperformed his last win across minority groups.
But no, I don't think there would have been overwhelming force. There were/are too many J6 losers and they're not going to just gun them all down on TV. The military certainly wouldn't.
So let’s say the mostly Black Million Man March had turned violent and decided to invade the Capitol - what do you think the reaction would have been?
What Democratic candidate on the national stage is saying that the government should take over all private industry and pay everyone the same and control industry? This is real “communism”
> So let’s say the mostly Black Million Man March had turned violent and decided to invade the Capitol - what do you think the reaction would have been?
I don't really know, are they a Black Million Man March for a sitting president named Donald J. Trump? You're just throwing straw man arguments out there.
> What Democratic candidate on the national stage is saying that the government should take over all private industry and pay everyone the same and control industry? This is real “communism”
There's always talk about things like nationalizing industries and such. Government run grocery stores, you name it. Some ideas are worth trying, some aren't, but as we do try new ideas we should be vigilant against authoritarian ideologies whether those are coming from MAGA or commies. Keep in mind I'm separating out Progressives from Democrats because like the Republicans they're not all united.
As I know you are well aware with MAGA goons, you don't have to come out with a piece of paper and say "Hello, we are Communists and we want to implement these specific things to achieve our stated goal of Communism. Thank you". It's emergent from policy and platforms, terms of usage "equity" etc.
You’re still being hand wavy. Saying “we should have government run grocery stores where there are food deserts and wouldn’t be profitable for private corporations” is not “communism”. Do you know what Communism actually is? Give a specific example.
What Democratic candidate is saying we should be a “communist country”?
But your original arguments was that J6 was evidence that a few people with guns could have taken over the entire federal government and that the full force of even local SWAT couldn’t have intervened.
> But your original arguments was that J6 was evidence that a few people with guns could have taken over the entire federal government and that the full force of even local SWAT couldn’t have intervened.
I don't think that's really what my argument was, and things are getting convoluted here. Happy to clarify to the best of my ability.
What was written that I responded to was:
> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
My point was look at what a few yokels did on January 6th, and they weren't even armed with weapons and frankly I don't think 80% of them even thought they'd get in the building and do the damage that they did do. For many of those folks they found themselves almost in an accidental insurrection.
Can local SWAT open up fire with machine guns and gun all those people down (especially without weapons)? Sure they can. But that's crossing one hell of a Rubicon and not the standard operating procedure for this kind of stuff. Instead of gunning people down they wait until things cool off and then arrest people 1 by 1.
> What Democratic candidate is saying we should be a “communist country”?
As I already explained you don't have to say "we should be a communist country" - instead you can just espouse communism views or other harmful views with various twists of language. You know that's true because MAGA does it.
You don't have to be a candidate for office either, you just need to have influence. That's an arbitrary requirement you made up.
Again, separating out Democrats from Progressives, you can find various instances of folks advocating for things like nationalization of industries, "equity", and so forth. I don't need to provide a specific example because there's no point - what does that accomplish? If I provide an example of a Progressive arguing for communism or communist ideology (whether explicit or implicit) what does that change?
If I find a single example of a Progressive politician arguing for communism or specific features of communist ideology what does that change? Are you going to reply "I was wrong"? It's just arguing for arguing sake.
Bigger picture, I'm not sure why you're so hung up on this. Communism and its ill effects are just one of many things that you can find Progressives arguing in favor of, similar to things like Open Borders. Those policies are unpopular for a good reason, hence Trump and Republicans won the election and Trump got more votes than he did last time. The reason Democrats are losing is because Progressive ideology and frankly I don't care what we really call it (socialism, communism, whatever it's just one big basket of deplorable ideas) is unpopular with Americans and the votes continue to prove that out. I'm pointing this out as someone who is independent and quite frankly votes Democrat most of the time. You don't have to agree with my assessment, but you can look at the election results and see for yourself that I'm right. If the Democrats don't drop this nonsense they'll continue to lose elections because for most people (not me necessarily) MAGA is a preferable alternative to Progressive and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Trump is out of the picture.
The entire argument was that it is dumb to think that a few yokels playing militia or even an “armed civilian nation” with guns can take on the modern US military.
You haven’t seen videos of local police taking on protestors during the civil rights movement with impunity? Do you think the current administration would have any problem doing the same in all of the cities he’s invaded with the National Guard and that his supporters - 40% of the country - wouldn’t just shrug like they did when he pardoned 1500+ domestic terrorist who look and think like them?
I’m limiting it to national politicians who won the nomination to represent their party in Congress because no one cares what someone’s crazy uncle who calls themselves a Democrat thinks.
You brought up “Communism”? What ideas are you now calling “socialist”?
And everyone loves “socialism” as long as it benefits them - see almost every red state that gets more in federal tax dollars than they pay, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA (as long as they don’t call it “ObamaCare”), give a few “socialist” ideas that national Democrats want to implement that you are afraid of?
And “open borders” is another boogeyman talking point. Check how many illegal immigrants were deported by Obama vs Trump for instance or even Biden.
https://tracreports.org/reports/759/
Also the U.S. Constitution allows for a full rewrite by a constitutional convention process. This hasn't been attempted, of course.
Yea good point. I always forget about that.
> if the government violates the constitution we have this 2nd Amendment and plenty of moral precedent from the founders.
Yeah? How's that working out right now, when the government is unquestionably violating the Constitution left and right?
Well you still need the people to actually believe the Constitution is being violated or that it’s not something that can be corrected.
Won't work if the government is willing to use the army against you, like the current one.
Nope, see various rebellions throughout history plus insurgencies and such.
It won’t work not because it wouldn’t work - you’re also assuming 100% military compliance and, as a veteran who served in active duty I can tell you not everyone agrees or disagrees with the current administration and people really do care about the Constitution, but it wouldn’t work because when you sit down and really think about it, the status quo for 90% of people is pretty good and they’re not going to take up arms over the vast majority of things a government does.
> Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].
Nearly every publicly trade company has a very well defined method by which executives can be replaced.
Companies are a dictatorship appointed by an oligarchy that is appointed by the democratic votes of shareholders.
You can't fire people and rehire them at lower pay; they'd be so upset at you you wouldn't be able to trust them to do anything properly. What you can do is fire people you think you're paying too much and hire someone else to do the same job at lower pay.
>Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
And the reverse? We literally just went through a phase where tech companies over hired like crazy, at ridiculous salaries. We had people remote working 3 or more jobs at a time. And yet, people still act like companies have all the power?
This stuff ebbs and flows. The reality is the value of your labour fluctuates, despite the inconvenience of that to you.
as if they don't already; the job market is a market with a mechanism for price discovery (duh. wouldn't be a market otherwise.)
the unfortunate fact is that the people forced to be sellers of their time on the market have livelihoods and families to support, so the market is in most places very heavily regulated, some would say overregulated. OTOH capitalism really did pull out many countries out of extreme poverty, so it isn't globally bad, but outcomes for individual participants aren't always... that great.
The Colorado rules about publishing salary ranges really help make it a true market. Better insight on compensation, in more places, would be even better. And evolving laws as the workarounds evolve; this is why we have legislators.
Spreadsheet doesn’t like that option because number go down more with this option
> I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary.
They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/copays/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.
Are you getting cost of living raises that beat inflation recently? How do I negotiate for those
get a new job every two years, spend the first year working hard and the second year getting a new job
"get a new job every two years, spend the first year working hard and the second year getting a new job"
but you just assuming the vacancies position stayed the same which is never happen
No, you are not applying for one target job, but one target promotion, the company is less important compared to the promo path and often times you can do things like get a promo and come back to your original company with 200% the salary.
Find another buyer willing to pay you what you want.
I think that's much harder in an economy with routine layoffs, so my point is that a lot of the working population is already taking pay cuts every year they can't leave their job, yeah?
Easy, be a low-wage worker. Their gains outpaced inflation since COVID.
Or, even easier, just be a capital owner, instead of a wagie. (/s)
The instant that offer was made, any sensible person will start looking for another job. The only people who will stay are the ones who can’t get hired elsewhere. You’ll lose your best people and keep the worst.
Layoffs are very tricky because just the act of laying people off can trigger good employees who remain to start looking elsewhere. It can trigger a sort of evaporative cooling of your whole workforce. A strategy of offering reduced pay instead of being laid off would exacerbate it.
I wish the average and median salary of every position at the company was legally required to be made available to every employee and candidate so the negotiation can be an actual negotiation instead of a guessing game.
I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.
But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.
From the article, Amazon has 1.5 million employees across offices and warehouses. With about 350,000 corporate employees in executive, managerial and sales.
So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?
I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI
Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment
It’s actually not warehouses. It’s groceries. Amazon jumped from a few hundred thousand to 1mm+ with the acquisition of Whole Foods. The corporate jobs is inclusive of engineering and aws.
They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.
These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.
Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.
Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.
well, one reason people might stay is they are on a visa and the government has a nice corporate friendly visa system in this country.
I’m not sure I get what part of what I said this relates to, but the visa system in the US is extraordinary draconian compared to other countries for high skill work visas. It’s extremely limited in quantity and if you lose your job you need to find a new one within weeks or need to leave the country. Converting to a permanent visa is difficult and has long time commitments and even then you are not secure in your status. As of recently even minor vehicular infractions can lead to violent deportation and family separation, losing all your belongings and if you own a home forced to sell and remove your kids from school. I know a lot of folks on H1-B and other visas and they live in constant fear especially in competitive cultures like Amazon where people are let go almost capriciously - jeopardizing their life with their families and constantly leaving them insecure in everything in life.
To your point the system is friendly to the employer, but it’s very much not to the employee.
This is a lot. If you are in a company large enough, you surely know at least 20 people and one of them is gone. The earlier floated figure was even larger: 30K
I suppose it’s what you are used to. A company that I worked with had under 100 staff, very profitable but had a staff turnover of about 10% per year.
People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.
Let them prove that this is not a big deal, but also take note that this is going to continue.
It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.
> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?
Numbers do not support that. Jobs might be shrinking within Amazon, but globally the situation is the opposite.
Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).
That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.
[1] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-expects-global-unemplo... [2] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-annual-jobs-report-say... [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Most jobs are not interchangeable, especially globally.
What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.
It makes no sense to look at global averages for the employment market.
> Population is still growing
I think the relevant number here is working age population.
Rather, a correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates and excessive money printed which promoted & rewarded hiring just to be compretitive
> correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's planned, merciless strategy. It costs nearly nothing to fire a ton of people, so why not hire a bunch with free money and dump them as soon as the free money disappears
Plus, possibly some forward-looking positioning for a future where automation drives leaner companies with fewer employees per dollar of revenue.
Still. Less jobs on the market
I mean, may as well just point back to the 2000 tech bubble if we're going to keep nodding our heads at that line
We all know that this is just the beginning to get us desensitized.
The leaked plan is to fire up to 600,000 people. So roughly up to 40% of their workforce.
While bad, that’s something entirely different. The reported 30,000 seems to be because of economic conditions, whereas that 600,000 number is allegedly from robotic improvements in their warehouses. Not great for the American workforce either way, but they aren’t exactly the same.
Hmmm, if you’re referring to this article[1], please make sure you’re accurately representing it.
Amazon is not firing up to 600,000 people, they plan to automate jobs to avoid hiring 600,000 people projected out to 2033.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons...
It also forecast a certain business growth that we see not happening. Also, no sane PM would document to fire 600,000 people, it’s always “avoid hiring, wink wink”.
Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?
[dead]
Apparently they let go some (or all?) of the AGS (amazon game studios) and putting New World (mmorpg game) on maintenance mode. This game currently has around 30-40k concurrent players on steam and probably as much or more on consoles. I feel bad for people got fired and gamers (myself included). I really like that game
Offshoring definitely playing a part too according to the data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737134
It really feels like we are in the middle of a recession.
Worse, we’ve been in one but have been pretending we aren’t. Stock goes up.
If not for the top 10 of the S&P 500 - the companies that can get a meeting at the white house - we'd probably be in a recession and S&P would be down.
It's almost like a merger of Capital and State.
It has been and it is. Both US and China have successfully created a Leviathan albeit if different form. EU is way behind and that’s why it’s losing.
The EU did it too, probably second with the US being last. It’s just that the EU focused on worker’s rights, protections for origins of products (can’t call bubbly wine Champaign if it’s not from there), etc.
To compete with other Leviathan unfortunately you have to become one too. It’s just for survival.
It's "losing" compared to the US? Haha. I guess from a true VC startup bro perspective. It's not "the EU is way behind the US and China", it's "the EU and US are way behind China". Because the latter is the only one who has been taking long-term decision on decision over the last decades, whereas for the other two, 95% is for the short-term, the next quarter, the next election a year from now. The US is even worse in this regard, hence why it's deteriorating even more rapidly.
You might say its rather socialist...
Just missing the social programs that redistribute the wealth to the working class
The system/ideology you're looking for starts with an "F" and ends with "ascism"
There's a better word for it.
It’s #9 on the list actually
An actual socialist would say the state in capitalist society provides a legal and infrastructural framework that supports business enterprises and the accumulation of capital, so it is business as usual. But feel free to throw words around as they mean nothing.
Why don't you exclude the worst performing industries instead?
Previously discussed:
“ Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512317
Given that the dollar has lost ~10% of its value since the start of the year, that's good... Right?
Waiting for the music to stop…
(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)
That's because music doesn't stop often and historically not sitting down was almost always a better strategy.
The biggest "pretend" is where spokesmen, spin doctors, and sycophants for the plutocrat class have somehow convinced the 99% that stocks going up makes more jobs for the little people.
The most pernicious part of the con is that by systematically dismantling pensions and forcing everyone into 401(k)s, they've ensured that we all have to root for the plutocrats. We're forced to watch our retirement funds, which means we're incentivized to hope Amazon's stock does go up after firing 14k (or 30k according to other sources) people.
It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.
are stocks even going up outside of tech stocks that can benefit from AI investment? everything else seems stagnant
No. And even in tech, its highly concentrated in AI.
The S&P 500 is almost 10% Nvidia. Just Nvidia. Y'all that's scary.
The Nifty Fifty concept from the 70s sound almost sensible compared to the bullshit of Magnificent Seven of now.
The same cycle just goes around and around...
SP500 is flat this year when you account for loss of purchasing power of the US dollar:
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
Factor out the AI companies doing circular dealing to juke their stock price and GDP growth was like 0.1% combine that with purchasing power loss and US economy is net negative.
It's pretty clear what happens next.
Over 42 million people are about to lose their SNAP payments in 4 days[1] and millions more medical care.
It's gonna get bad.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7d9j7p5qo
The only publicly traded companies that are involved in what could be considered circular dealings in enough volume to affect their stock price are Nvidia and Oracle.
"Exclude data I don't like, combing it with other data that's unrelated in unknown ways, and voila: DOOM!"
No it's not:
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCAD
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXJPY
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCNY
Hmm, might have you cherry-picked some data?
Line goes up or it gets the stonks again
Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.
It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.
"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."
The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.
(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)
The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.
I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.
Is that an increase in sales, or just everything getting more expensive?
A year on year increase in sales is real. It's not silly metrics like "net worth". Actual value is being exchanged.
The middle? Oh we are just starting....
Our industry has probably been in a recession for the past 3-4 years. Where have you been?
We are…
We already were in one. You just waited until someone else told you it was too late.
Recession is a term with a very defined meaning and that meaning does not include employment at all.
It does include employment. It's discussed in terms of "employment" or "jobs" thresholds and trends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession
> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]
Recession is officially whatever NBER says it is and it doesn’t have a well defined meaning.
Also it’s by design a trailing designation. You will be in (and possibly out) of a recession before NBER declares one, by definition.
This is actually a good read: https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating
Employment is an important indicator according NBER.
Yes, more accurately we're in the middle of an extremely shitty economy for everyone but stockholders
We've been in a global economic depression for more than a decade already.
Does feel like that
Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by this unfortunate corporate-involved job loss incident at this time.
Reports suggest there was an interaction that occurred between HR and some 13,000 staff, ultimately resulting in job losses. The staff were noted to be “behaving suspiciously “. Investigations are underway.
You would think that a company that's making some 50 billion in profits every year would be able to find something useful to do for those 14k people.
They definitely seem to have gone from “invest in growing the business at all costs” to “ruthless efficiency and cost cuts”
So we'll probably start seeing other companies do their firing cycles again.
I guess this has just become kind of a feature of our times.
My personal question is aren't managers in AWS technical people? Can't you offer them IC positions?
Google tried this and gave up, as it didn’t work out[1].
For now, there’s a lot of focus on automating software dev jobs, but I think companies are just starting to realize automation will thin the management layers as well.
[1] https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/3/50375/fil...
Yuck, what even is that website? Someone pays for this?
Ha - sorry about that. Edited my comment to reference the original HBR paper rather than the Inc magazine silliness.
I think it might actually be easier to automate middle management than it would be technical folks. It's not exactly difficult to shove an AI agent into a meeting, have it record everything, and ask everyone for updates. Likewise, it isn't hard to have an AI agent just read through tickets and prompt people for updates. Dystopian? Yeah. Hard? No. Also, the AI would be better than most middle managers I've encountered. The sad thing is, I've also had a few excellent middle managers who helped me grow as a professional.
Which is what we're seeing right now - middle management, and vestigial organizations not related to the core dev team (Trust & Safety and co.) getting trimmed.
As for LLMs, I am perfectly capable of opening a notepad, taking notes, and converting them into Jira tickets (as I have done in the past) without bleeding edge machine learning models
I wouldn’t be surprised to see this at all.
And in a really dystopian world, the AI could review everyone’s PRs and documentation and rank engineers based on their contributions. It could even make compensation decisions based on that. Much of the performance management can be automated (with human in the loop).
Then you could have fewer managers managing more people (and get rid of a bunch of layers of management overhead). They could focus on the higher value parts of management like coordinating between teams, making tough execution decisions, resolving technical blockers / ambiguity, etc
Wasn't technology supposed to enable workers to do more, instead of doing the same with less?
I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to. Then you look for low hanging “fruits” like this (cutting costs) instead of innovating and creating newer things (selling more).
Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to make their HR leaner.
> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.
> I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to.
See, that's the problem with tying all these amazing advances in automation and labor-saving to a system beholden to capital: it only considers what can make it more profit, not what can make the world better.
I guarantee you there are many, many more things we can do with "more", at any scale, if you take the profit motive out of the equation (or even just put it second or third on the list).
I'm sure for some roles this works out. Software development has been doing it for decades: developers get better tools that make them more productive, this lowers costs, and at the lower price point there is a lot more demand for more and better software. Classic induced demand. But how much elastic demand is there for accounting or logistics?
Yeah, finally 1-2 billion profit more on top of the 68 billion they already generate.
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I don't understand this thread. Is Amazon supposed to keep expanding ever and ever again? If those people are needed, then Amazon will fall (good riddance), if they are not needed then that's just good business.
I don't see any issues as long as everyone plays a fair game.
Once a company reaches a certain size, it can limp along, hidden to everyone, for years - decades - before they go away.
“Amazon will fail”, maybe, in 50 years, from decisions made now.
It’s worth noting that they are offering folks the opportunity to find a new role internally. It’s layoffs with a touch of reallocation of people to more important projects.
Is this targeting mostly individual contributors? Or are Directors/VPs also getting cut just as equally?
That's a good one.
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AWS outages will become the norm?
I'm sure this was in the works long before last week's outage, but it's certainly a bad look. The industry broadly knows how Amazon works; I'm sure a few AWS customers are looking and wondering if it's finally biting them, right as they double down on the strategy.
> At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn).
Greed is good?
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...
By the way, could Amazon not even bother to proofread a mass layoff announcement? "We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly"
At least we know this was written by a human, because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake. Maybe they fired the proofreaders already.
> because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake
To be fair, an Amazon model might, so if they're using those.. /s
True, but I expect such nonsense from the company. There is absolutely no excuse for BBC to use this wording! Why would they?
Any word on what percentage hit AWS?
there is little mourning for people who didn't get hired at all in the first place.
Aws goes down. And then layoffs follow. Feels like Headlines management.
Can confirm — itsa me
The unemployment rate in the US is climbing. If you look at a 5-year curve, it looks like nothing. But if you look at a 3-year window it's devastating. Seeing the highs of 2003 and 2009 it seems likely that it will continue to climb. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
If you'd like to be really upset, check the labor participation rate.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
There's a whole lot that number doesn't capture, but broadly, U-3 is roughly flat and in the traditionally healthy range.
AGI has been achieved internally.
Q3 results [PDF]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/...
Numbers are all in the black and up year over year and compared to previous quarter.
Double digit revenue growth in both retail and AWS.
Often I wonder whether corporate leaders took any kind of logic class in college or if they just have a fetish for harming people for no reason. Either that or whatever business school they went to believes that poor customer service and bad products increase revenue.
That's Q2. Q3 will be announced day after tomorrow. This announcement might mean they are not doing that well (compared to expectations).
Typo, sorry.
I’d bet $5 that Q3 is profitable with similar growth.
Just imagine the productivity they could achieve if they kept those 14,000 and had them use AI, too! Productivity overload. Levels we have never seen.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures, external that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
I’m fairly ignorant to these things, but why does Amazon need 350k corporate employees?
People losing jobs always sucks, but I can’t help but think that a company of this size inevitably has bloat that they do not need.
At this point it really does feel like a corporate welfare program.
Have you counted how many links there are on Amazon.com and how many services there are on AWS? Don't forget MGM etc. Just some back-of-the-envelope maths will tell you how many employees are needed.
I would agree that Amazon in general and AWS should never be this big. But that does not equal "bloated".
As competition catches up, Amazon is feeling like a corporate welfare program too.
Is this their annual stack and cut?
Is there any meaningful way to get breakdowns by department, location, or race?
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45730798
What’s the severance package at Amazon like?
Standard 3 mo w/ insurance during that period? Do they accelerate vesting schedule?
Any AMZN drones care to chime in?
1 month for each year and partial year worked. They don’t accelerate vesting schedule.
Former AWS drone. Fortunately I never had to work in an office.
Think bare minimum.
does we live in era that side hustles is an necessity????
Almost no side hustles make any money, most are simply a complete waste of time and energy. Hence no, everyone still needs jobs.
seems like you talking from your experiences
Oh, and by the way,
you're fired.
Fired?
W-W-What do you mean,
fired?
Um, how else
can I say it?
You're being let go,
your department's
being downsized,
you're part of
an outplacement,
we're going in a
different direction,
we're not picking
up your option...
Take your pick.
I got more.
"The Emperor's new groove"
Economy in bad shape + AI bubble + tons of fake jobs = prepare for this to be much more common in the next coming years.
Natural correction for excessive money printed and ultra-low interest rates in the previous years
Correct.
As soon as the AI bubble pops and the true definition of AGI has been achieved i.e (30% increase in global unemployment by 2035) then it will mean the gradual decrease in many BS tech salaries.
We will certainly get a huge financial crash along the way.
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everybody read 'bullshit jobs' and basically agreed
at first that just meant many of us adopted a middle-aged-coasting career strategy after covid and/or having kids
but now management is agreeing
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731199
Maybe, but this one has all the comments.
I’ve heard multiple numbers for this layoff from unofficial sources. Does anyone think Amazon was trying to identify a leak by letting internal parties know about the layoffs with slightly different details?
My totally uneducated guess is that they leak exaggerated numbers on purpose to make the real numbers look less bad in comparison. The idea being that a few days before the official news everyone is talking about a potential 30 or 40K people layoff. Then, when the official news come out and state that they are laying off 14K people, it sounds less dramatic (in relative terms). This makes people (who are not affected by this) to feel like the news were overblown and are not as significant.
Or it could have been internal politics. Amazon top management set the goal to cut 30k and after internal discussions with lower management they come up with 14k positions that can actually be cut.
Leaks are intentional. There's a reason they always happen and always in the same way.
are you talking about the difference is size (15,000 vs 30,000) and affected orgs?