Amazon spent a lot of time and money and built a top-tier workforce. But now they are out of ideas for what these people can do? They don't have any untapped opportunities left? No projects that never quite made it to the top of the stack? No deferred maintenance that could be taken care of now?
Amazon cuts 16k jobs
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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#522Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#523>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell you what, why don't we get rid of management altogether and just have a flat org ?
> A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They r…
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#525>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too. Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India inc…
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#526This summer I went camping and at the campground next to me was a middle manager at Amazon. I’ve been out of the workforce for about a year, so I asked him how much of an impact AI was having in his role. He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and re…
> He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him. Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway. I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work do…
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean maybe that's the good news. There is huge potential for an upswing!
I don't think that's how it works. It's not like coiling a spring it's more like starting to roll a ball down a hill, once you ruin it it keeps getting worse in a feedback loop as various systems feed on each other (populism, erosion of norms, etc).
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#528Insightful Comment from X - https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=2... I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them. And I was still cut. Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an…
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#529Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution. How do you stop multinational companies like Amazon from using the global talent pool as they see fit and pay whatever wages the local market will bear? Without that it comes off as the standard "elect me because foreigners are bad".
They need to understand that their profits depend on people with disposable income. The US has some of the most profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon’s sales?