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Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

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Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#41
post #24

I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics. I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because tha…

(Context: I’m an IC and told my Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)

If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#42
post #24

I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics. I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because tha…

Deming agreed with you: Quality control is a management problem. But there's management and there's management. If we're talking about 14000 people, they're not the top managers of the business, and getting rid of them won't change the culture. They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#43
post #9

Most managers are human ticket classifiers.

> human ticket classifiers

Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#44

This is weird blogspam based on a Business Insider article from October of last year, which was based on a quote from Amazon's CEO in September of last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-could-cut-managers-sa... TL;DR: > CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. It appears the rest is sp…

Padme meme: by hiring more ICs, right?

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#45
post #11
post #2

So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless, but literally a drag to the company and progress?

The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.

Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to scale middle managers so they can effectively manage multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who knows, this is just wild speculation.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#46
post #9

Most managers are human ticket classifiers.

There's a lot of truth in this. We haven't figured out how to automate complex systems. Instead, systems operate under partial automation, and exceptions are handled by humans. This is also true of any bureaucracy. Because automation is invisible and humans are visible, it will always appear that bureaucrats are spending most of their time taking care of the failures of unnecessarily complex systems.

The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.

Consider the many HN threads to the effect of " just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#47
post #33

Just a few weeks ago I was contacted by Amazon recruiter and refused for exactly this reason. I expect more layoffs as they figure out they don't need this many engineers after all. They will turn into money pumping google search analog.

From a surface level it seems like they've operated like this since... forever. AWS is still a very nice product, at least for the use cases I have for it. I have a hard time reconciling those two things.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#48
post #24

I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics. I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because tha…

The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the "most political" managers are the one who stay. Which is natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more visibility to. That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game. So the company might be worse after this.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#49
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.

Who created the policies and procedures?

Bezos.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#50

I am curious how do you just hire 14,000 managers at the cost of $3.5B yearly more than you needed? Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.

Also some finance guy gets rewarded for making that much cost savings, and they have meat to give to the shareholders, it’s an endless cycle. The finance folks only get the gain, the revenue/quality loss of their actions will not be measured accurately and will not be traced back to their actions. Only upsides.
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