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Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
21–30 of 169 posts
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#22Right now, amazon is packed full of L6 and L7 software managers, making 450-900k a year, that: 1. dont understand ai 2. have had the same skill set for 10 years 3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks 4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money…
Let me ask this question. Why can Netflix make a decent tv app and Amazon cannot?
Lots of companies can make decent apps. And IMO the Prime Video TV/Mobile and Amazon mobile apps are "decent" from a "they do what they're trying to do" standpoint and don't fail all the time.
But they don't really think about things from a "consumer who wants to watch something tonight" vs "shopper who we want to get money from" perspective. So the Prime Video app has been painful to navigate and use. Things like concepts of how people want to interact with TV shows - one top level entry with seasons in it, vs top-level entries per season, which took them forever to change - reflect quick and dirty shoveling of concepts over from how they'd sell box sets or such vs thinking about it from a user-first POV. Or how search will return a match for just about anything because they will happily sell it to you vs having as a default "show any free results first because I'm not looking to spend more right now."
That's a product/vision failure (or just mismatch with what you and I want) not an engineering/engineering culture thing.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#23Right now, amazon is packed full of L6 and L7 software managers, making 450-900k a year, that: 1. dont understand ai 2. have had the same skill set for 10 years 3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks 4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money…
Isn’t that the job? I’m not even sure what “understand AI” even means, from where I sit, it maybe means “add AI to everything” and that doesn’t seem that complicated. I’m not here to defend the people in Amazon corporate, I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim. It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.
Amazon got where it was by ruthlessness. What may not be OK is in US you need a job to get healthcare. But other than that people earning that much can't expect job for life type situation like a firefighter or teacher. In US almost everyone is a defacto contractor by virtue of at will employment.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#24Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#2510% over a year, split into two waves isn't that extreme. It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporations exist to support the lives of humans, not the other way around.
They exist to provide value to other entities. There is no requirement for supporting humans or even having employees.
They exist to do things that individuals could not do.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#27Jassy's only lever for shareholder value. Sad.
They're fine expanding in India. Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1]. For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same a…
A great indication that more layoffs in high cost of living environments such as the US are going to happen.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#28Right now, amazon is packed full of L6 and L7 software managers, making 450-900k a year, that: 1. dont understand ai 2. have had the same skill set for 10 years 3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks 4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money…
Corporations exist to support the lives of humans, not the other way around.
From the corporations' point of view, humans are computing substrate.
Relevant speech by SF author Charlie Stross, from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#29There's some stuff that, culturally, I don't think Amazon will ever do well. Amazon Games should be shuttered entirely. Their latest game was a really embarrassing flop; "King of Meat", which they expected to have 100,000 daily concurrent players, reached a max of 320 concurrents during a free weekend[0]. Have you heard of a single Amazon Prime Original Movie[1]? Likely only one -- 2025's War of the Worlds, which became a meme because it is legitimately one of the worst movies of all time.
Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well. Which is awesome when you're dealing with databases and the logistics of delivering packages. But it's effectively the opposite of games, movies and other creative media where you have to trust a single person or small group of people with a vision. Otherwise you get what Amazon gives, which is unappetizing slop.
If I were Jassy I'd cut off these product lines entirely. It's just not a good fit for how Amazon operates.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/king-of-meat-studio-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_ori...
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#30Jassy's only lever for shareholder value. Sad.
They're fine expanding in India. Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1]. For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same a…
This is real. I work at one of the big tech and have access to their internal head count breakdowns. The overall headcount is mostly stagnant but the US headcount is decreasing with a corresponding increase in Europe and mostly India based HC.