Probably for the same reason that you don't give to me your cash left over after expenses and taxes.
"A manager in one unit making cuts said his team was briefed that Bezos and the Amazon brass wanted to put more pressure on managers to weed out lower performers and enforce spending discipline after the rapid growth of recent years."
Layoffs seem kinda shitty, but it's usually better than firing with cause. The worker will still qualify for unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn't have to go through the time and expense of a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).
The worker would qualify for unemployment benefits even if fired for good-faith poor performance. For terminations, only gross misconduct (criminal acts, deliberately failing to work, etc.) is disqualifying.
For low end jobs, retail and the like? it's pretty common to be fired 'with cause.' even for small things that I do twice a week, like being late or something.
I suspect that it's because employers only pay unemployment insurance on the first $7K or so of wages they pay an employee in a year, so while an increase in their unemployment insurance rate matters if they are paying retail rates, it really doesn't if they are paying programmer rates.
The funny thing is that I don't think any of my programmer friends would fight it either way; it's not worth the effort. But friends working retail? yeah, sometimes it makes sense to fight it... and their employer actually gets up in court, and argues why this person they paid almost nothing and then fired shouldn't get what amounts to a pittance.
The whole thing seems kind of unfair and messed up.
Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their size.
I can't speak to Amazon, but Apple has quite a few prolific OSS contributions. Off the top of my head there's llvm/clang, cups, swift, GCD, and webkit.
The amzn [0], aws[1], and awslabs[2] github pages combined have 500+ repositories. AWS contributed back to the Linux kernel[3] and Xen[4] for Spectre and Meltdown related things. There are other projects large enough that they are under their own page, like Blox[5]. There's been plenty of others I've stumbled across randomly - this list isn't meant to be exhaustive or even close to it, but just what I personally can think of off the top of my head.
(Disclaimer: I work at AWS, and contribute to an open source project as a portion of my job. This isn't an official post or anything of that nature, and opinions expressed are my own - I'm just a random dude that wants to share that a lot of cool open source stuff happens at Amazon/AWS!)
[0] https://github.com/amzn [1] https://github.com/aws [2] https://github.com/awslabs [3] https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.15.... [4] https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2018-01... [5] https://github.com/blox/blox
As you probably know, Amazon profits have been marginal or non-existent. They use the net profit from some businesses to pay for expansion in others. To do that, they have to actually produce net profits in some of their businesses, i.e. keep costs under control. Bezos is using the older retail business to finance his newer, shinier adventures in digital devices. And the layoffs are exactly in the retail business, the cash cow business, to free up more money for shinier things.
Q4 results [1] say North America produced $1.7bln in operating income, and AWS produced 1.35bln. When Amazon says "North America", I think they mean "North American retail". So while international retail lost almost a billion dollars, I wouldn't say "AWS subsidizes everything".
[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4142526-amazon-com-q4-2017-...
(Edit: Q4 produces more retail profits than other quarters while AWS is probably steadier, so on an annual basis AWS probably produces a larger part of the operating income. But even so, retail has been operating income positive, so AWS isn't "subsidizing everything".
How would you justify the raises and keeping the redundant positions -- especially if they were already paid market rates or if they were underperformers?