Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

This is weird because I'm in the middle of the interview process with a division of Amazon.

Disclaimer:

I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice.

And here we go:

I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their hiring goals" and I was transferred to another division.

Through September and October, I organized the virtual on-site. And my interview was scheduled for last week. The weeks prior, as we know, the shit hit all the fans. I fully expected to get a "too bad, so sad" email saying my interview was cancelled. It wasn't. I went through the interview and I'm waiting to hear back currently.

But yeah, I would not be surprised to get a rejection. But from the point of view of my experience, nothing they've done or said has made anything seem off.

I think these moves are possible if we're not in a recession. If Amazon underperformed over the year, and its earnings are lower than estimated, they could be simply cutting costs in Q4 to offset the lowered earnings. The cause of that underperformance is really what would tell you if we're headed for a recession and Amazon has their fingers in so many pies it'd be hard to attribute laying off 1/150th of their workforce to the overall economy I think.

That this is happening at a number of big tech companies isn't a surprise I don't think. The biggest layoffs this year so far have been at companies that made large scale changes (Meta, Twitter) or over-hired over the course of the pandemic when that level of business turned out not to be permanent (Stripe, Shopify).

It's possible that this is industry-specific. Tech companies exploded during the pandemic if they had anything to do with stuff you do indoors, and this is the real "post-pandemic" year (talking economically).

Other industries which took it on the chin during the pandemic are recovering well this year, notably anything travel-related seems to be doing incredibly well and some companies are on track for banner years.

That said, I suspect we're going to see a few quarters of stagnant growth (0% to 0.3%) or mild contraction (0% to -0.3%), maybe not enough in a row to declare recession.

US GDP was up 2.6% annualized in 2022Q3 (https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product) and unemployment was 3.7% in Oct2022.

> But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point,

That's what the word "correction" implies: That it's going down, not because the business itself is bad or anything in the market has fundamentally changed, but because it was valued "incorrectly" (where "insane" would be an extreme form of "incorrectness"), and that its value is being "corrected".