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Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

bbc.com

161–170 of 537 posts

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#161
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is unfortunately true. Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.

Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.

Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes. Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#162
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a difference?

Same as "hackers stole your data" versus "we left your data on an open S3 bucket"

We didn't fail to secure things because we spent our security budget on security theatre - we were just kindly offering those poor hackers money to support their families.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#163
post #98
post #4

These 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...

[dead]

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#164
post #12

Once 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'm not really sure how this fits with Amazon's corporate culture. I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis. If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?

My theory is that when an organization descends into a cycle of repetitive downsizings, it inevitably leads to people focusing more on protecting their jobs than on business value.

By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#165
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language. If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".

That would make Bezos look bad .

"Regrettable attrition".

Going to go wash my hands after typing that.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#166
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?

Numbers do not support that. Jobs might be shrinking within Amazon, but globally the situation is the opposite. Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005). That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005. [1] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-e…

Most jobs are not interchangeable, especially globally.

What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#168
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?

Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.” That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.

This, plus companies do different stuff. If eg. amazons streaming service fails, but normal sales of physical items surge and in total, compensate to make a profit, you can't really move streaming developers, marketers etc. to warehouse jobs.

Re: Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.” That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.

My experience with these sorts of layoffs is that they are not tightly bound to performance. If you have underperformers you can fire them the ordinary way.

Exactly. How is it that an org suddenly discovered thousands of employees are under performers? And how is it that the number of under performers coincides with the number McKinsey and Co (or similar company) said it would be?
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