Amazon targets as many as 30k corporate job cuts, sources say

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/

by zerosizedweasle • 9 months ago

180 122 9 months ago

reuters.com

zerosizedweasle2• 9 months ago

Very health...very normal

Edit: Doing it right before the holidays can only mean their data on consumption / consumers is grim.

belter3• 9 months ago

MBAs will...MBA. Innovation is for Geeks...

jalapenos2• 9 months ago

Always easier to cut costs, because even a braindead chimp can work out that 4 is less than 5.

Valuing things though, that's a dirty activity for the "technical" ones.

xnx• 9 months ago

Doing it right before the holidays

Are many corporate roles seasonal?

zerosizedweasle2• 9 months ago

Yeah but they wouldn't risk disruption. They live or die in large part on Holiday Sales, it's a massive part of their revenue stream. If the risk that this could cause disruption wouldn't be worth it if they expected the holiday shopping season to be busy.

rvz• 9 months ago

That's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage.

Either way, that's in line with the true definition of "AGI" and getting closer to the timeframe of 2030 to do more with less.

Supermancho• 9 months ago

That's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage.

This is obviously not that. This is a cut before reporting quarterly earnings.

christhecaribou4• 9 months ago

Right after that egregious U.S.-east-1 outage?

motorest10• 9 months ago

Amazon and AWS are two separate companies.

From the article:

The cuts beginning this week may impact a variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology, devices and services and operations, among others, the people said.

JCM97• 9 months ago

Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”

belter3• 9 months ago

Now its just an api call...

  aws hr reduce workforce --region us-east-1

webdevver3• 9 months ago

replacing hr with claude code powered bash scripts might just be what the industry desperately needs

heywintermute• 9 months ago

roughly 10% of their corporate workforce wow

triceratops• 9 months ago

Wow they have 300k corporate workers?

nylon4831• 9 months ago

350k according to the article

lateforwork• 9 months ago

It is crazy that they are still blaming "pandemic era overhiring".

toomuchtodo4• 9 months ago

The corp speak is free when their is no exec accountability. The beatings will continue till the stock performance improves.

belter3• 9 months ago

Yes. Next earnings release is October 30, 2025 and this is to allow them to hit the numbers.

Is going to be lovely to see how they spin this as AI optimization ....

JCM97• 9 months ago

That’s PR speak for “our leadership has messed up big time and this was the most convenient excuse we could come up with that doesn’t just throw our C-suite in front of the bus.”

Earnings call is this week. Expect some good tap dancing.

myth_drannon• 9 months ago

And they perviously laid off 27K in 2022 because of "pandemic overhiring". I wouldn't be surprised if in a decade from now they will still be laying off because of the "pandemic overhiring"

saos• 9 months ago

Yeah I had to double taking reading that

valcker• 9 months ago

If the stats don't lie, they hired ~500k employees in 2020 alone, and nearly doubled their workforce between 2019 and 2021...

JCM97• 9 months ago

Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now. After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup.

Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.

bugbuddy2• 9 months ago

The most interesting question is how many management positions got axed as part of this.

christhecaribou4• 9 months ago

The first level or two of management are completely useless and operate more as “slave drivers” than engineers.

motorest10• 9 months ago

Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now.

Who exactly do you think is saying this? Because from what I'm understanding, so far Amazon has been decimating teams at the expense of overworking them even more, and by cutting projects at the expense of cancelling maintenance and feature work.

JCM97• 9 months ago

Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money. Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.

thewebguyd2• 9 months ago

After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup.

30k, nearly 10% of their workforce, isn't a little "cleanup to reduce bloat" it's a massacre.

sunir• 9 months ago

The word decimate is sitting right there.

raincom• 9 months ago

Are warehouse workers considered as corporate?

bugbuddy2• 9 months ago

toomuchtodo4• 9 months ago

https://archive.today/rYbTA

JCM97• 9 months ago

Remember these things tend to be lumpy. While that’s a bit over 10% of corporate employees depending on how you count some teams won’t get touched and thus other areas will either get blown up entirely or have layoff rates of much higher than 10%.

paxys4• 9 months ago

Three months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers.

Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes. Plus it lets them wipe away future RSU comp that was granted to employees when stock prices were way lower.

al_borland3• 9 months ago

Looking at the people around me, people don’t do very good work when they are constantly on their toes. A lot of time is wasted on the rumor mill about the next round of layoffs, people are hesitant to invest in big (needed) changes and opt to just keep the lights on, and technical decisions are often colored by what will still work after person X if laid off (if they ever get laid off) vs picking the best option in front of them. The churn also continually re-opens process gaps, repeats the same projects over and over on a new stack, and other hamster wheel type activity that do nothing to move the business forward. It simply keeps people busy and frustrated while the leadership churn is used to pad their resumes with fancy sounding projects that never actually get completed, but it’s enough for them to leverage it into a new job with a big title.

butler533• 9 months ago

Meanwhile, 30k Amazon-minded individuals are unleashed on to other tech companies to evangelize Amazon products and services. The design of it all is really apparent.

al_borland3• 9 months ago

Is this how it plays out, or does it backfire with the former employees being bitter about the layoff and not wanting to be free evangelists for the company didn’t show them any loyalty.

seanmcdirmid2• 9 months ago

Ex-Amazonians aren't the best boosters of Amazon. What really happens is that everyone at other big-corps start complaining about new people managers and product/project managers coming in with a culture that is a bit more toxic than normal.

elmerfud• 9 months ago

Anyone who shows up and their only contribution is to push AWS services because that's what they know, the first question I asked them is if they are capable of doing it themselves on-prem. Their answer is no or they don't know how to or some babbling on about it's more expensive and ROI and things like that I dismiss them immediately. Because those may all be true things but without the ability to do it yourself it is impossible to make an accurate assessment if AWS or another cloud service is actually a good fit for what you're doing.

malfist2• 9 months ago

lol, have you looked at our stock price lately? Flat YTD. And Jassy is terrible at earnings calls, he always spooks the investors.

Firing people to make new new hire grants is more expensive

master_crab3• 9 months ago

At what point does the board and Bezos start thinking Jassy is the problem?

paxys4• 9 months ago

Amazon stock is up 170% since the start of 2023. It is absolutely cheaper to fire employees who are owed hundreds of thousands or even millions in stock grants over the next 2-3 years and replace them with new hires. Doubly so at Amazon where vesting is all back-loaded (5/15/40/40).

bigbadfeline• 9 months ago

Three months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers.

Wanna bet? The 3-month balance of hired minus fired will be less than 20K. Those ballrooms don't pay for themselves [1].

Let's mark the calendar 01/27/26

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ballroom-donors-white-hou...

lamontcg• 9 months ago

Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes.

Amazon has been doing that since it was founded, certainly 2001-2006. Every year there would be stack ranking, and they'd get rid of employees and even entire departments in reorgs and layoffs.

trenning• 9 months ago

All corporate or just expensive US based corporate employees? I didn’t see any specifics listed besides “pandemic era over hiring”. I think their talking points were pulled from an old 1pager this should have been “due to efficiency gains in AI”.

Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.

paxys4• 9 months ago

No one is going to say it but the (effective) end of the H-1B visa program means that tech companies are going to start staffing up more teams where the talent is.

toomuchtodo4• 9 months ago

Doesn’t Amazon have 10k+ H-1B workers? “How many workers on visas will they lay off” is an interesting question to understand their internal HR strategy.

master_crab3• 9 months ago

Until the government turns to dealing with offshoring. Lot more appetite in both parties to attack that business practice.

Kephael• 9 months ago

There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.

ndiddy• 9 months ago

Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?

christhecaribou4• 9 months ago

Because investors aren’t actually very intelligent, beyond some vague desire to “make my money bigger”.

seanmcdirmid2• 9 months ago

Investors only see cutting people as a good thing, the excuse isn't for the investors, its for everyone else.

webdevver3• 9 months ago

why do you assume mass firings are a bad thing? shedding 'dead weight' (morality aside) is a good thing, no?

DangitBobby• 9 months ago

Why set morality aside?

Tadpole91812• 9 months ago

Because they aren't and this is just borderline financial fraud? They fire tens of thousands right before an earnings call and then use that to generate future reports. Investors invest and stockholders sip champagne, then they go rehire a significant portion back, completely invalidating all that unlimited growth they promised.

Then, when the next earnings call comes they make some moronic excuse and do it all again. And the past 20 years in the domestic market should have made it abundantly clear to everyone that Wall Street are too stupid to catch on / so bought in they need it to work.

The layoff numbers keep growing too, if you notice. (Fraudulent) numbers keep going up! Yay!

----

Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world? These days, everything just looks to be in the business of growth via scamming consumers of their hard-earned money. They just gave up any pretense of good products or quality service - "fuck you, give me your money" at every. single. turn.

Then all that money goes to 10 guys while everyone else breaks their back for nothing, forced to piss in bottles before going to their +10% YoY apartment to wait to die from health problems they can't afford to fix.

jauntywundrkind• 9 months ago

There's a lot of reflecting & gesticulating we can do about these companies, as they downsize & try to de-leverage the world's labor.

But the reciprocal side is also worth soulsearching some into too. It feels like such the crisis of our time that we don't have good things for people to do, respectable enough efforts, that so much is ensnared and tangled up in such huge enterprise running along at its own pace. I crave a government that tries to encourage new players, new enterprises, that outright lopsidedly favors those trying to get things started.

Other systematic drivers here also filter out so many would be entrepreneurs and business owners. Cost of essential food, shelter, transportation, health care needs has become incredibly daunting to many, and greatly challenges the ability for new things to get started.

Also the unchecked acquisitions spree of the world brings up all the opportunity in such uncomeptitive and fragile large companies. If we allowed small medium size companies to acquire each other, but kept more controls on bigger companies, we wouldn't be facing such wild shocks from what a couple big players do on the world.

tacticalturtle• 9 months ago

This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."

What is this take based on?

How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation?

And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?

JCM97• 9 months ago

The layoffs have nothing to do with AI.

It’s sorting out org bloat, span of control issues, and teams without a clear ROI. Normal “leadership mismanaged the company and now there’s a mess to cleanup” stuff.

disgruntledphd2• 9 months ago

But AI is both expensive (from a capital standpoint) and a great excuse for investors, hence the spin.

jnaina2• 9 months ago

As an AWS shareholder, I applaud this.

The org suffers from several systemic issues: entrenched tenured employees coasting on accumulated RSUs who resist change, middle management engaged in territorial conflicts/fiefdom turf wars that prioritize their own self-preservation over company goals, numerous underperforming hires made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs, and leaders whose primary competencies lie in mastering the silly cliched "Amazon speak" (Amazon LP this and LP that, quoting Bezos as opening lines, day ones, etc) and the usual de rigueur rituals such as churning out obligatory, meaningless six-pagers, instead of driving genuine innovation or results.

AWS is fast becoming a parody of itself and needs a reset. The recent outage is a harbinger of things to come, if things continue as is.

sharts2• 9 months ago

How does one become an AWS shareholder but not a rest-of-Amazon shareholder?

Amazon as a retailer has far worse problems than AWS.

silisili2• 9 months ago

On the contrary, I feel the opposite. Layoffs are a cheap way to goose your stock price, not much unlike buybacks. I exit positions in companies in either case, as it shows they have no immediate plans for growth.

I don't disagree with the rest. But you can effect a lot of change without mass layoffs...

jnaina2• 9 months ago

If Andy Jassy is also part of the 30K to be let go, AMZN will be up 50 points in no time

rsanek• 9 months ago

you must have a pretty short list of companies you can continue to hold. something like 90% of S&P500 does stock buybacks. if you also include layoffs that's going to reach close to every single company.

pasola2• 9 months ago

Jassy is going about this the wrong way. In practice, reducing the number of line managers meant that engineers are having to do the managerial work themselves.

So they're writing even more six-pagers to satisfy the other managers which they're no longer shielded from having to interact with directly.

mji• 9 months ago

Even if we suppose all those things are true (not a given), I would not expect these layoffs to meaningfully change them.

UncleMeat• 9 months ago

And the way we will break through this problem is to fire a shitload of people such that everybody is frightened for their continued employment such that they focus on looking the part and fight for the most valuable turf so that they aren't likely to be on the chopping block next time.

oenton• 9 months ago

As another AWS shareholder, I can agree with most of your points however this one requires citation (emphasis mine)

numerous underperforming hires _made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs_

sharts2• 9 months ago

Don’t worry, most of those people will end up elsewhere and still think that employee protections are a bad thing because innovation.

pasola2• 9 months ago

Jassy's most notable accomplishment in the last five years.

Seconded only by the time he ended WFH in a stealth blog post the day after hosting the all-hands meeting.

insane_dreamer2• 9 months ago

Is $59B in _net profit_ last year (~double the year before) enough?

No, it's not! Let's transfer another few $B from workers to our needy shareholders.

Upward and onward!

HDThoreaun• 9 months ago

The goal of a company is to maximize profit, not reach a number and decide that is enough.

Ekaros• 9 months ago

I think these days goal of a publicly traded company is to maximise the stock price for next 3 months.

yifanl• 9 months ago

If this was the case, then every company on the planet would be dealing fent on the side. Given this is not happening, we can conclude that there are secondary objectives of companies.

ThrowawayR2• 9 months ago

Why would anyone gripe about "needy shareholders" on a site paid for and run by a tech VC firm for tech startups, founders, and fellow venture capitalists? If you disapprove of too much money going to shareholders, you're in the wrong place to find a receptive audience.

insane_dreamer2• 9 months ago

If you disapprove of too much money going to shareholders, you're in the wrong place to find a receptive audience.

On this point the audience and I are on opposite sides, and that's fine by me :)

QuiEgo• 9 months ago

"Strive to be earth's best employer". That they put a weasel word, "strive", right in their shiny new LP tells you all you need to know.

AznHisoka• 9 months ago

I did some analysis of every job posting from Amazon since 2020. Turns out the % of jobs going to offshored countries almost tripled since 2020: https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st...

Amazon targets as many as 30k corporate job cuts, sources say

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