The Amazon culture that exists today is nowhere comparable to the culture that existed 5-7 years ago.
A lot of the Amazonians who had a "mission first" mindset at the mid- and upper-level rungs of engineering and product management all ended up become leadership or executive management at other companies, or founding their own companies.
That said, it is important to highlight the mindset that did help Amazon during it's golden era.
5-7 years isn't that long ago and it was just as terrible back then.
Yeah, the same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry.
It is from a career perspective - at least at AWS, a large portion of high calibre Engineering and Product Leadership left during that time period and the backfills for those roles just plain sucked.
> same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry
In what way? Demanding that people who are being paid $200k-400k TC need to execute and show that they can execute is something which needed to be done in the tech industry.
> In what way? Demanding that people who are being paid $200k-400k TC need to execute and show that they can execute is something which needed to be done in the tech industry.
Where does this come from? Maybe if you're drinking whatever (toxic) koolaid Amazon gave you, but Amazon has a lower profit-per-employee than Docusign: https://www.trueup.io/revenue-per-employee
Not exactly the steward of execution you think it is.
Hey, cut them some slack. They're barely getting by: they only made $18 billion in profit last quarter. They gotta cut some dead weight to stay solvent.
I'm not sure I understand this viewpoint. Just because a company made a big profit doesn't mean it has to keep positions it decides is unneeded. This isn't the first time I've seen this type of attitude and I'm genuinely curious about the alternative. Once you make above $X in profit, you're obligated to keep employees who aren't necessarily doing the work you want done?
They take huge personal, family and financial risks to move for a job. When you are getting rid en-masse people, you are ruining local communities. There is a real societal cost.
It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive. Not to mention that once the company has established a reputation of a revolving door, then nobody gives a shit about it. They will exploit it for the short term and let it die.
Layoffs should the absolute last resort for a company due to the disruption they cause. If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
I absolutely agree with your assessment that it should be the last resort option due to the societal cost of a large number of people losing their job. On top of the risks you mention, there's also the mental hit that often accompanies layoffs not just for the folks who were fired, but the increased feeling of paranoia from the people who are left.
But can it not be the case the this /was/ the company's last resort? There's another option of moving people around and retraining them to do another function. What if that was considered and then rejected because there weren't enough departments growing to warrant that? Rhetorically, if they don't have the ability/opportunity to re-assign people, then what?
I understand your argument but it just seems like you’re purposely being contrarian.
Here’s why what you wrote seems needlessly contrarian: Amazon just posted an $18B quarter, so there is no pressing financial pressure. Okay, so you suggest this may be a last resort in lieu of retraining, but we’re talking about 14k jobs across many teams (I know of at least 40 affected), levels, and job families. The idea of needing to cross train is obviously not the culprit at that scale; An SDE laid off from one team can easily perform the same tasks on many others internally. This also completely ignores how Amazon works internally, with managers required to rank employees for pip, and, for events just like this one, URA, regardless of whether or not they deem them to be competent or not.
Of course, Amazon has also been documented to use automated processes for pip/layoffs, and the idea that layoffs involved any ounce of consideration as a last resort is so unbelievable it feels almost inflammatory.
The notion that criticizing one of history’s most profitable companies laying off thousands (at the height of their profits) is the same thing as stating, “every company beyond profit X should never do layoffs” is a blatant misrepresentation and ignores any context.
I'll explain you how it works: upper management needs urgent spend cuts in the next 3-6-12 months to get bonus -> upper management lays off N thousands people in order to reach goal and get bonus.
Because 25+ years of experience in American Capitalism as its evolved and practiced today has taught me that C-Suite and upper management makes FOMO driven decisions on fear, politics and corporate quarterly returns, ie humans forced into a hunger games like culture of lowest common decency and hype driven cycles of management speak - 5 years ago it was Crypto and offshoring and now its AI more offshoring -paying only lip service to employee obligations with no attention to anything beyond that (forget pensions or decent healthcare of the 20 Century)
Ultimately even the most talented people are numbers on spreadsheet strewn aside at the end of the day as MBA capitalist hackers try to optimize every aspect of a short term numbers game to get ahead in stack ranking..
I’ve watched as incredibly talented and driven people are thrown by the wayside and ageism and lack of human decency or respect is has become the norm
Watching hardworking people and the middle class suffer because Billionaires, insane growth expectations, MBAs and Private Equity had burned this country to the ground…
And yes, don’t forget that those type As who worked on NASA missions - “Mission focused” as the article naively trumpets to get attention - once they get cancer, get a little past 50, have kids with needs ie suffer some through life - like all of us eventually do..they get on the chopping block - and are quickly forgotten trust me, I worked in Mission Control too once
Now, Amazon has never been an ethical company—and I’m sure its employees know that to one extent or another but they have indeed been a relentless one and that relentlessness and metric driven culture has driven the humanity out of the tech world (whatever little it had as Autistic or Nerdy edgelord billionaires fund ever more corrupt politics and misery for the masses) as our society is rewarded with even more shorter term thinking and an attention economy with the attention span of a Goldfish.. all these tech companies deserve worse than the skewering they got in HBOs Silicon Valley
Ok end of Rant.. hope some younger folks take heed and try to change up this shitty system
> If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
Look no further than the economies of France and Germany… both of those countries have very stringent regulations around layoffs. And none of whom have the dominance of American companies or breadth of unicorn startups.
Making firing difficult makes hiring difficult, which disincentives risk and innovation.
The leave/fire at-will contracts of most tech jobs in the US is a feature, not a bug.
> It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive.
Sometimes, but sometimes not. Layoffs are important to get rid of low performers who could be replaced with better talent, and they’re important to help companies adjust their labor to market conditions.
Neither France nor Germany have access to the high-risk capital that American startups enjoy.
Layoff protections and entrepreneurship in this case have a correlation but not a causation relationship.
If your thesis was correct startups would thrive in States with absolutely zero protections, yet the most successful tech startups are in the most “stringent” (for American standards) State. California.
Is the friction of hiring and firing responsible for all of Europe’s economic stagnation? Only some of it? If only some, how are you quantifying the proportion?
I pulled myself from a recent Amazon interview process because of how bad they are. At first I had the opinion that this could be interesting and exciting, but the more I thought about how they treated people, the more I realized that the internal culture must be terrible. And honestly I just don't need to be involved with any of that.
14k is massive layoff, even for a company as large as amazon. it isn’t about the “employees who aren’t necessarily doing the work you want done” for sure (all the while they are off-shoring by the more thousands while “america first”-run government is bailing out argentine :)
That's 4% of corporate employees going by Reuter's 350k corp employee count[0]. Sounds well within the trimming-the-fat numbers. The rest of your comment alludes to an obligation towards improving the domestic economy. That can be done through regulation, but then there's a balancing act between under/over regulation. Too much and you end up in an EU situation that hinders small tech business growth.
So we come back to my previous statement/question. Above what profit amount should a company be obligated to keep (in their eyes) unproductive workers?
to answer your question - company should have a right to fire 99% of the people if they want at any point in time and there should be no regulation of any kind against that ever.
what america should do is add $250k per year per employee tax for any employee hired outside of the US.
People won't unionize because they don't actually have very much power nowadays compared to corps. People who unionized in the 40s, 50s and 60s could afford a home on an hourly wage. In the labor market its pretty much serfdom, unless you come from money. Look at rents vs incomes for goodness sake
They’re people, not disposable objects. The alternative would be to distribute the cost of the layoffs evenly across the employer and the employees. Right now employees pay a disproportionate portion of the cost.
The cost you're referring to is fairly abstract - I'm not sure how it can be implemented for the employer. The cost to the laid-off employee is a loss of income, mental trauma, potential loss of residence. What would your ideal solution for the employer be here?
Loss of money? Layoffs normally have severance packages that are paid out to the employee - this can be seen as the company taking a monetary hit - though not proportional like you said. But what's the alternative here? 5x/10x'ing the severance package? I feel like that would make the job market even rougher as companies would be even more conservative with who and how much they hire.
Mental trauma? I mentioned it in another comment, but the employees after a layoff normally do have an increased fear of future layoffs which impact morale which would result in lower productivity.
Loss of residence / food? I'm coming up blank here.
Yeah I’m not sure there’s an obvious/ideal answer.
I do think there’s value in disincentivizing churn though. What we’ve been seeing lately is rapid hiring followed by rapid firing. I bet there’s some inflection point where the job market would actually benefit from less churn even if it comes at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term.
A lot of the Amazonians who had a "mission first" mindset at the mid- and upper-level rungs of engineering and product management all ended up become leadership or executive management at other companies, or founding their own companies.
That said, it is important to highlight the mindset that did help Amazon during it's golden era.