Amazon Targets as Many as 30k Corporate Job Cuts, Sources Say
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Corporate Restructuring
Amazon is planning to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs, sparking discussion on the company's motivations, the impact on employees, and the broader implications for the tech industry.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Edit: Doing it right before the holidays can only mean their data on consumption / consumers is grim.
Valuing things though, that's a dirty activity for the "technical" ones.
Are many corporate roles seasonal?
Funny, they said the same thing about AWS before layoffs last year.
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.
This is obviously not that. This is a cut before reporting quarterly earnings.
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.
Actually, they are. Perhaps what is causing your confusion is that other parts of Amazon, such as Ring or Rivian, are also separate companies, whereas parts such as Alexa and Amazon Music aren't.
No. My definition is Amazon's actual organization chart as a holding. AWS is an independent first-level branch of direct reports of Andy Jassy, who was AWS's CEO before replacing Bezos. A similar branch is Worldwide Consumer, which groups what you think Amazon actually is, which means the online store, prime, books, devices, etc.
They should be completely separate. If they were two independent companies, a low margin distribution and logistics company on one side and a high margin software services company on the other then nobody would suggest merging the two together.
That’s right. The trillion dollar low margin dinosaur pays cash by writing close to zero profit in the books, and signs the bonds.
AWS is the cash cow. It owns between a third and half of the world's cloud computing market. Do you think it's hard for AWS to get financing?
Which cloud company can casually find 100B cash in a year?
AWS. Because AWS reports close to $11B/quarter, which is over half Amazon's entire revenue, and AWS owns the cloud computing market, on which the whole world runs.
Probably you mean operating income.
The key number for operating a company is the free cash flow.
AWS does not have the cash flow to maintain its CAPEX. It currently uses part of Retail FCF and additional debt that the entire AMZN company takes.
NVIDIA does not offer you 10 year payment plan (like depreciation schedules assume). They ask for their cash upfront.
If it was that easy to find cash OpenAI would not have given up so much equity to dinosaurs with strong balance sheet.
Is going to be lovely to see how they spin this as AI optimization ....
Earnings call is this week. Expect some good tap dancing.
Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.
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.
I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.
Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?
> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.
What do you think "Kindle" is? Is it a specific device? Is it Kindle for Web? Is it the Android or iPhone apps? Is it Kindle for Windows or Kindle for Mac? Among these, can you count how many are paid?
30k, nearly 10% of their workforce, isn't a little "cleanup to reduce bloat" it's a massacre.
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.
I think you are talking out of ignorance and spite. Most of the services used by Amazon employees are internal services that may or may not be on par with the state of the art. Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.
Is there more information on this somewhere. I had leadership telling me and a few others that we needed to replicate something on-par with AWS for internal use (with about 10 devs and less than a year timeline). I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
Yes, everywhere. You just need to look for it. See the following link, which has references to Apollo and MAWS.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/amazon-notable-systems/
> I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
Amazon has multiple incantations of this. As legend would have it, AWS was an offshoot of Amazon's internal cloud infrastructure designed to monetize it to amortize their investment on bare metal infrastructure. They partitioned their networks for security reasons and for a few years their infrastructure evolved independently. Then AWS was a huge success and took a life of its own. Only relatively recently did Amazon started to push to drop their internal infrastructure to put all their eggs on AWS in general but serverless solutions in particular.
Somewhere, someone, has to buy a set amount of servers, based on a running capacity projection and build those into usable machines. The basis of a datacenter, is an inventory system, a dhcp server, a tftp server, and a DNS server that get used to manage the lifecycle of hardware servers. That's what everyone did at one point, and the best of them build themselves tooling.
What amazon has is built on what was available at the time both for tooling and existing systems that they'd have to integrate with. You almost certainly don't have to build anything that complex. Additionally, you can get an off the shelf DCIM that integrates with your DHCP and DNS servers and trigger ansible runners in your boot sequences that handle the lifecycle steps. It's considerably easier to do now than it was 15 years ago.
While they don't use AWS specifically for a lot of stuff, the internal tooling can still build thousands of boxes an hour though they don't really pay for UI work for that stuff.
You can put a host(s) in a fleet, tell it the various software sets you want installed and click go and you'll have a fleet when you come back, so don't think that what you're being asked to build is impossible or not being used under every single major cloud provider or VPS provider.
The slightly harder part is deciding what you're going to give to devs for a front end. Are you providing raw hosts, VMs, container fleets, all of it? how are you handling multi-zone or multi-region . . ., how are you billing or throttling resources between teams.
The beauty of this is you get a lot of stuff for free these days. You can build out a fleet, provide a few build scripts that can be pulled into some CI/CD pipeline in your code forge of choice and you don't really need to build a UI.
Provisioning tooling is hard, but it's a lot easier now that it was 15/20 years ago and all the parts are there. I've built it several times on very small teams. I would have loved to have 10 devs to build something like that, but the reality is that you can get 80% with a little glue code and a few open source servers.
And frankly I hold them to a higher standard so they disappoint me more often.
Firing people to make new new hire grants is more expensive
All sounds like a sick fetish. I want to see them getting replaced - I want to see the look on their face and their archive box walk
A company either dies a hero or lives long enough to install its own Ballmer.
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.
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...
Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.
Epic handwave. And you're wrong btw. If anything small business outsources even more than large companies. Tons of small business owners have zero US employees but have a personal assistant/CX agent in the Philippines, IT contractor in Latam, design contractors in Eastern Europe, etc.
You would need China-level capital controls to make this work and that is not compatible with the dollar remaining as a reserve currency. Nor will Congress or the Supreme Court go for it.
Perhaps it was less expensive to hire offshore, but if importing foreign talent isn't an option anymore, the tradeoff will change and US companies will have to expand their foreign offices (which I personally hope).
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?
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.
Too slow and expensive. Why innovate when you can extract instead. It's the financialization of our economy. No one cares about or even has incentive to make better widgets, all the incentive is in financial optimization and squeezing out every last cent because the business is now a financial asset, not a product company.
"Pandemic overhiring"? Christ, that was half a decade ago. The pandemic has been over long enough for a kid to go through high school or get a Bachelor's!
But the board will be enriched by this, and that's all that matters.
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?
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.
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.
I don't disagree with the rest. But you can effect a lot of change without mass layoffs...
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.
/s
> numerous underperforming hires _made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs_
Amazon as a retailer has far worse problems than AWS.
No, it's not! Let's transfer another few $B from workers to our needy shareholders.
Upward and onward!
On this point the audience and I are on opposite sides, and that's fine by me :)
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.
Seconded only by the time he ended WFH in a stealth blog post the day after hosting the all-hands meeting.