Amazon 'prepares mass job cuts' as sales slow

It's the same reason Home Depot and Lowes carry essentially the same products at the same prices, even though there is an entire world of building materials and hardware they don't have. Despite the idea of competition, large companies generally move in lock step. If they do something different they might end up falling behind the pack, and maintaining their position is the most important thing to do.

In this case, massive amounts of new money were pushed into the economy by lowering interest rates to zero and other stimulus, so the economic climate was one of more "growth" regardless of what fundamental analysis would say. This was the disconnect between Wall St and Main St widely that was recognized at the time. There was no way to know what the "new normal" would happen or what it would look like, so executives stayed with the pack.

And what really was the downside for hiring employees, even if they were just going to be let go later? Basically just the overhead of onboarding and getting them up to speed. And given that they were likely employed for a year or two, this wasn't even that wasteful.

Of course it sucks for the people whose lives are disrupted. But that's life in a paperclip maximizer driven by fickle centralized policy.

Well it’s tricky right? Amazon had huge demand. If they didn’t hire during the pandemic then they can’t meet the demands of their customers. Performance degrades. Packages don’t deliver on time. They run out of stock. Is it preferable to provide shitty service to your customers or hire to meet those demands and then adjust to market realities later?

In Jassy’s (the current CEO of Amazon) defense. He wasn’t the CEO of Amazon when the over hiring occurred. He was the CEO of AWS. From the reports, all of the layoffs are happening in Retail.

Disclaimer: Jassy is my skip*10 manager.

I'm not sure what you're asking here - those companies made bank, the execs got bonuses and they're still profitable. From the perspective of capitalism (which cares nothing about humans being fired), over hiring doesn't seem to be a bad choice at all.

Perhaps this is among the biggest differences between US and EU: in the first it is much easier to fire people and this may lead to massive hires when the conditions made it necessary, knowing that they can easily reduce the workforce when such conditions change; on the contrary, in EU it is more difficult to fire the employees, so companies tend to be more cautious to hire large amounts of new employees.

"How did so many companies assume the pandemic/lockdown bump was going to be permanent" it mostly was. Amazon, for example, is seeing slowing growth but still record high revenue last quarter.

Just to add: silicon valley started the tres of overhiring to drain the talent pool as a competitive advantage and others have followed along.

My observation too with 80/20. In fact - the system seems to be designed to work as such. You'd be going against the grain trying to make things anything other than 80/20. The only concern for individuals is: is being in either group in line with your personal goals?

This is literally on the website. They’ll pay you to leave - its not some secret scheme.

I would say certain industries are facing a recession, but the economy is more than tech. "IRL" fields like hospitality and the trades are having boomtimes and unable to hire or retain employees fast enough e.g. restaurants are short about 3 million workers.

Partisans playing at mental gymnastics. Both sides are guilty and the people endure reality no matter the narrative.

The standard disinformation tactics to dispute definitions of things like 'recession' to focus people onto pointless discussions and debates on how to even spuriously define what recession and inflation are when in reality the prices of food, gasoline, hardware, materials, and you name it have skyrocketed. It doesn't matter which team was in office, the simple truth is compared to 2020 this is where we are and until people accept they might need to figure out how to stay invested into politics longer than election seasons and deeper than news broadcasts, this will endure.

I think no one?

Article mentions 3% of office staff.

Are you in the US/Europe? Your job market in tech is utterly unbelievable for people outside those regions, even now. It simply rains (tech) jobs over there in biblical proportions.

It depends. Senior-level people are likely fine, judging by the number of LinkedIn hits I get every week.

That’s a stretch, Amazon has been known for bad quality for years. I have actively been trying to buy less from them since over a year now, I imagine others have as well and for longer. This trend was going to catch up with them eventually.

Not saying this is what happened but my theory has just as much evidence as yours.

Most of Amazon employees live very near from the office, a substantial amount simply walk or bike to the office. Seattle downtown is practically an Amazon jungle.