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Comment by green-eclipse | Hacker News Reader

This is just the latest round of cuts at Amazon: "From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition."

Also: "Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months."

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There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.

Agreed. I'm just illustrating that it's part of an ongoing pattern at Amazon. Not some new, shocking thing. I'd expect more in the future.

Why?

...what is it? I really can't see a difference.

Hourly workers (unskilled labor) are flexible and cutting hours is almost as easy to reverse as it is to do in the first place. Cutting salaried employees (skilled labor) is a much harder and expensive decision to reverse. So doing so means that there is either a consistent issue that is not getting resolved, thus making them not worth the expense, or things are about to get so bad that the company feels that the savings are worth the loss of skilled labor.

And clarify the difference between skilled and unskilled labor (which might make this make more sense), this is not a description of the work itself, but rather the barrier of entry. Anyone can be taken off the street and trained into an "unskilled" position with relative ease. That is not true for "skilled" positions though. Which is why Amazon's decision to start cutting corporate jobs represents a fundamental shift in their path going forward.

Hourly employees are easier to replace because the training path is much shorter.

Amazon has something like 100k corporate employees, and their URA targets force managers to PIP approximately 6% of the corporate employees every year, so going from 6% to 10% isn’t exactly a massive change.

This isn't going from 6 to 10% though, this is a one-time reduction of 10% on top of the normal 6%.

Employees who are PIP'd are replaced, though. The positions themselves still exist. This is cutting 10k positions if I'm interpreting correctly, so it's really going from 0% to 4%. It may also impact entire teams or business lines.

This is a reduction of 10% on top of the expected regular attrition (6%).

Somewhat OT, but I never understood why so many corporations have this hard and fast rule that they have to fire (or give no bonus to) a set percentage every year: "We must fire X% of people."

I have worked at a few firms that have done this, and I have heard from a few people their managers arbitrarily picked them to get knocked into a lower tier.

Conversely, if they hired a big cohort of bozos one year, you know they would never say, "We would like to get rid of 15%, but our plan is only to get rid of 10%." They would have no problem going beyond 10%.

> so going from 6% to 10% isn’t exactly a massive change.

It is if made overnight!

True. The hourly workers are more likely to be living paycheque-to-paycheque, and their lives will be more impacted than a tech worker with 12 months of runway and job prospects everywhere.

Attrition rates at Amazon are really something else

They do have 1.5 million employees (per Google)

Which can be confusing because there are two amazons - the Walmart competitor and the cloud company.

Same with Apple, to be fair. Apple retail may employ more than Apple corporate.

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