Amazon layoffs now expected to mount to 20k, including top managers

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3682071/amazon-layoffs-now-expected-to-mount-to-20000-including-top-managers.html

by uladzislau • 4 years ago

167 66 4 years ago

A lot of people inside that company carrying on an illusion of providing value. Managers stacked on managers, cracking their whips on reports to build tech that never adds anything at all to the company

justahuman74• 4 years ago

What are some examples of things being built that are not adding anything to the company?

ryanisnan• 4 years ago

Amazon health lake, maybe?

greatpostman6• 4 years ago

I worked there a few years. The thing is, some systems are so complex it might take 6-9 months to even understand the value add within the org. At which point it comes to light that there is very little value add. And all the meetings you were kept from attending were political gatekeeping.

An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.

diceduckmonk• 4 years ago

Can’t speak for Amazon, but when I was Google a bunch of high level leads were building a less generic / powerful / expressive Angular, implemented using Angular, so it’s an order of magnitude more sluggish. They were from eng prod (building tools for developers) but had no front end experience.

I’ve been around the block enough to see how management can tie BS projects back into the scope of some director level “vision”. When it’s a bull market, everyone in the org wins.

halestock• 4 years ago

Alexa?

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

Alexa has apparently torched 10 billion dollars (just in 2022!) with nothing to show for positive cash flow. It's a cool gadget but they bet the damn farm on it. Thousands of people working on it over the years, all to just lose billions of dollars.

dv_dt2• 4 years ago

Perhaps the Amazon employee evaluation system has selected for employees that can play the selection game instead of delivering value. Classic case of the measurement getting gamed and distorting the thing it was supposed to measure.

simfree3• 4 years ago

The evaluation system at Amazon drives a culture where most white collar staff won't be there 2 to 3 years from now and they realize they are in a stressful meatgrinder just around the time they start to gain a working knowledge of the project they have been assigned to.

It's not often the employees fault that they leave for greener pastures or are Pivot'ed out of Amazon, they usually work 3+ years at software firms before/after Amazon. Amazon would rather light money on fire by paying to recruit talent, give them half a year to start being positively impactful, then turn up the heat in the year or so thereafter until the employee is gone, rather than treat their workforce decently.

Acting like a garbage employer is sapping Amazon of talent, slowing down projects and burning tons of money on talent. Focus more on team building exercises, invest in actual mentoring if your employees, stop pressuring managers to rank and Pivot employees needlessly and Amazon can stop letting talented people slip out of the organization.

baandam• 4 years ago

It is a huge reason why 10+ years of zero interest rates and capital being worthless is a terrible idea. It creates such massive dislocation and waste.

Capital is no longer worthless. The entire complex system is rewiring but it will be a long process. So many self interested sticky wires to break.

1270018080• 4 years ago

6% of their company gets pipped every year, and from the article, 20k is 6% of the corporate office. Interesting. I guess they're taking the bottom ~12% this year instead.

simfree3• 4 years ago

Regrettable attrition is going to be through the roof at Amazon this year. Last year was bad enough, the layoffs of these 20,000 employees are going to save significantly less than what attrition will cost Amazon this year: https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-2...

9008342103• 4 years ago

That number is for low performers, not for PIPs. Only a certain percentage of low performers make it to the PIP stage and even making it the PIP stage doesn't mean you are fired. Also that 6% fluctuates and isn't a hard and fast rule ever year.

And knowing how Hacker News works, I'll likely have someone show up and tell me that I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about. But let's just skip that part - I have direct experience and counter examples that back up everything I'm saying that go on for years.

mgrthrow3• 4 years ago

I was a manager at Amazon for teams of 5-15 engineers.

The smallest percentage for "needs improvement" ratings I was expected to hit was 5%, the largest was 15%.

Anyone who was needs improvement would be added to the "dev list", and many would enter into a pip. Eventually, Amazon added a system called Pivot that was designed to soften the need improvement process. It did seem to result in fewer pips.

70% of people who entered a pip failed and were terminated. Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement. The expectation was clear - fire them or fix them within 6 months.

awill• 4 years ago

>Amazon employees are ranked from level 1 to level 7, and staff at all levels will likely be affected....

Well this is completely wrong. It's hard to trust the rest of the article when they can't get the basics right.

xerxesaa• 4 years ago

Might still be correct. Levels 1 to 7 are before reaching director. Once you get to director, I believe the performance expectations change. For example, I don't think directors need to be managed out as part of the quotas. I am guessing a lot of these layoffs are going to be done as part of the forced attrition quotas.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

They're probably reporting that old-school D&D (sans A) saving throws are needed to maintain employment at those levels . . .

So what is reasonably right-ish?

reaperducer• 4 years ago

Well this is completely wrong. It's hard to trust the rest of the article when they can't get the basics right.

Well, there was no comma in his first sentence. It's hard to trust the rest of the comment if he can't get the basics right.

officialjunk• 4 years ago

c'mon... incorrect facts are a different level than a missing punctuation mark.

schoubey• 4 years ago

This is correct, people above L7 aren't considered part of regular performance management.

ngcc_hk• 4 years ago

It is up and down that keep organisation honest and health. For the safety net, it should have but not via the private org. Sadly the health insurance is private based. Not sure how to solve that.

datalopers• 4 years ago

Bezos saw ChatGPT and called up Jassy: “Fire all the middle managers, we’ve got a bonafide replacement!”

greatpostman6• 4 years ago

Might be a welcome improvement

euroderf• 4 years ago

"Management finds your lack of raw computing power disturbing."

pram• 4 years ago

There are also a ton of posts about rescinded offers on Blind. Including someone who was in the process of relocating to Seattle:

https://www.teamblind.com/post/amazon-rescinding-contract-on...

I'd be pretty nervous giving a 2 week notice atm.

phreeza• 4 years ago

I'm not on blind but I thought you need a corporate email to even sign up there?

harryVic2• 4 years ago

They have a special feature for people who have been laid off to request access.

capableweb• 4 years ago

Not really, I think any non-typical-email-provider domain is being accepted. You can buy a .xyz domain for cheap and use that.

wheelinsupial• 4 years ago

No Work Email? Sign up with a personal email address and get read-only access to limited content.

https://us.teamblind.com/logic

kcplate• 4 years ago

I'd be pretty nervous giving a 2 week notice atm.

I’d second this advice and add…don’t let dollar signs guide you away from stability in this economy.

tmaly• 4 years ago

I am interviewing a candidate this week who had their L4 offer rescinded.

homeland221• 4 years ago

If you look at the Amazon revenue and stock prices which is closer to something like 2018-2019 before pandemic, they only had 800K staff back then. Now they have 1.6M. You do the math. 20K only? If they can shed it under 50K that would have been miracle...I won't be surprise by end of 2023, they total more than 1M let go.

donavanm2• 4 years ago

You're drastically conflating two very different sides of the house. Hourly workers are generally employed in logistics, FCs, customer service etc. This segment dramatically increased in 2020, to 1.2-1 4M employees IIRC, and for the past year CFO Olsavsky has talked about shedding ~20% of this workforce as demand scales back down. A lot of that is simply accomplished by slowing hiring and letting the high turn over rate happen.

Separately there are teh corporate employees in finance, tech roles, management, etc. These are teh employees in question when CEO Jassy and friends have talked about shrinking some divisions like health care or alexa. This is also where the recent 10-20k numbers are concerned.

Amazon layoffs now expected to mount to 20k, including top managers

Related Stories