Yes, the current executive culture of mass layoffs.
The culture is "I want another yacht".
AKA the culture of “Why is AWS down again?”
Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
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Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#22Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#23Using "culture fit" to justify mass layoffs is, in fairness, probably a sign of a company's culture. Just not in the way they intended.
Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#24Amazon went from an innovative tech company with an efficient culture where builders could build and ship great products, and where promotions where based on merit, to a completely toxic bureaucratuc hellhole, where all decision making has been hijacked by sociopathic parasites who have learned to game the system for their own benefit.
- most leadership, including technical, is now filled with compete imposters who have very little understanding of tech or market.
- product and strategy decisions are not based on data anymore. Any 'data' is now extremely cherry-picked
- it's standard practice to just completely hide/exclude any negative indicators/metrics.
- promotions are no longer merit-based. They are based exclusively on your ability to social engineer your managers/leadership, and your ability to manufacture metrics that sound good (to imposters who can't rationally inspect/critique them)
- there is zero real innovation happening at Amazon now
- good engineers are leaving in droves and being replaced by 3rd party external consultants
Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#25> Amazon says it didn’t cut 14,000 people because of money. It cut them because of ‘culture’
So they're saying Amazon has culture of being assholes to others? I guess at least they're honest about it, and their admission comports with other accounts about how they do business.
Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#26Hierarchical structures are so odd, you would think the higher levels optimize for intelligence and empathy but in practice it optimizes for sociopathy and maybe public speaking skills
Gervais Principle
The problem with reading that is that it is, I find, almost impossible to stop classifying people into sociopath, clueless or losers....
Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#27Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#28Best decision I ever made was repeatedly ignoring emails from Amazon recruiters while they were allowing remote work around the pandemic. Fuck that place.
One of the better decisions I ever made was not ignoring emails from folks recruiting for Amazon in 2003. It was a different place back then, and truly like "the world's largest startup." The other thing that was different back then was that the people I worked with were all so blindingly smart. I'm pretty smart, but in 2003 I often felt like the dumbest person in the room[1]. In 2025 that feeling was rare, and not simply because I had 20 years more wisdom.
I left Amazon for the third and last time a couple months ago and have no regrets.
If you're still there and reading this, Amazon still has a lot going for it as a place to work. But it's not the electric place I recall from 20 years ago. I'm not sure if there is any company that can match both the startup-like freedom of action with massive scale of early 2000s Amazon.
[1] In case it isn't obvious: this is a desirable condition because it means you get to learn something.
Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#29Culture of importing cheaper labor that they can manipulate. The H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.
> Culture of importing cheaper labor that they can manipulate.
> The H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.
Offshoring is a much bigger problem. These abusive companies can "save" way more money by exporting the job than importing a worker to fill it, and pandemic-era changes have accelerated that.
Re: Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
#30So, union busting then :)