Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
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Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#2This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up.
Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director.
This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has passed or not, etc.
The past 3 days have probably been the least productive for all of Amazon's existence, everyone is thinking only about those layoffs (and I'm in an org that is supposed to be safe...).
So far there are reports of about 30 teams being shut down, but new ones are coming every hour or so.
Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook, Twitter, etc. but no, we're going to be living in fear for the next weeks or months.
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#3Note: Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a 29.28% increase from 2020.
So the proposed cuts represent less than 1% of their profit (not net) from last year.
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#4This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up. Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director. This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has pass…
Unfortunately this is how it works at a lot of companies. Just a mess.
I was working at Best Buy when the stock price was $8/share... we had "Tornado Thursdays" where every Thursday for months you'd hear of a small amount of people getting notice they were laid off. I suspect they did this to avoid labor rules of notification/SEC?
Prior to that, we went through a LARGE layoff where they gathered everyone in a room, said "go back to your desks you'll see a 15 minute meeting on your calendar if you're impacted" and at the end of the day they gathered the remainder in a room and said "if you're here you're safe".
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#5I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting:
"Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block."
This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#6This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up. Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director. This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has pass…
Nothing more demoralizing than living in fear and rumorville. I was at a big bank post 2008 and it was months of messages about did you hear so and so got the tap on the shoulder. You never knew when or why, you just didn't know everyday if it was going to be your last. Not exactly how you want to live your life.
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#7I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
I imagine you can get an "anonymous tech industry insider" to say absolutely anything including the exact opposite statement. Another issue with the statement is the fact it is an opinion using an undefined metric.
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#8The "worlds best employer" is horribly mismanaging this layoff. It's all hush hush, and nobody is admitting anything until suddenly you have a meeting at the end of the day with a bigwig and HR.
The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance. If you're unable to find another job, you get a week of severance per 6 months of employment (min 4 weeks, max 20).
Oh, and we're being told to use those 60 days to find a job internally at amazon....during a hiring freeze.
World's best employer my ass.
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#9I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
Both of these things can be true. There is a lag time behind hiring someone, PIPing them, and terminating them. Amazon was on a hiring spree. They are almost certainly still be bloated even after these layoffs.
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon as an SDE II on the logistics side of retail.
Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees
#10I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?
I imagine you can get an "anonymous tech industry insider" to say absolutely anything including the exact opposite statement. Another issue with the statement is the fact it is an opinion using an undefined metric.
It's also pretty standard for an engineer to say "Yeah, I could build that in a weekend" when talking about some super scaled website like twitter or facebook or whatnot.
"Bloated" isn't for engineers to decide really, we're terrible at judging efforts involved.