AWS outages will become the norm?
Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
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Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#92It really feels like we are in the middle of a recession.
"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 mi…
Is that an increase in sales, or just everything getting more expensive?
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#93These 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.
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 perpet…
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.
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#95Once 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.
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
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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...
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[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.
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#97I’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…
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.
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#98These 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.
"job losses" is BBC editorializing. They do not use that term in their letter: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you getting cost of living raises that beat inflation recently? How do I negotiate for those
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?
Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
#100It 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.
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.)