Amazon did a lot of stuff. Most of the engineers weren't really fungible, they were more specialized. The robotics project set was really hard hit, and frankly that's good for the industry as now there's more talent floating around. Robotics has been super dry for a long time.

Most of the tech companies are letting a mix of recent hires, corporate middle management and in amazon’s case some logistics warehouse workers and specialty project engineers were let go. It’s a pretty eclectic, diverse group of people so its not as hard as it sounds to reabsorb into other companies. If they were all engineers or all HR there might be issues but in an already over-employed economy already 17k jobs won’t even make a dent in just about any sector right now.

You didn't see this coming?

The contraction in unavoidable. Mania is never good. At some point heads have to come back down to Earth. The further we go into space the harder they crash back to Earth.

Even the current state is still ridiculous. There is still high demand but back to normality is preferred. The quality of highly-paid/low-experience-knowledge-quality engineers was toxicating the market and I’d say hurting the good ones instead.

If they are not really into tech (and just making money, which is fine by its own right), then they’ll land somewhere else.

If we had regulations to ensure jobs and roles. Obligated a company to give a four month parachute if laid off or fired it would making companies hire better talent as to avoid too much loss.

Prevent artificial unavailability of jobs. When you release 17k people into the work force you can be sure Amazon will be slow to fill the gap it created. So it holds up hiring. Then those 17k people are going to flock to whatever available role can be acquired. This will extend the interviewing processes and make it harder.

Tech companies and unfair hiring practices are what are leading to our financial collapse.