Back in the day they managed to avoid 'layoffs' by transferring thousands of people from Fire Phone -> Alexa. They somehow avoided layoffs from shutting down Prime Air (drones, not 767s), even though that had a lot of employees.
They're pretty good at getting people to leave without doing 'layoffs'.
Heck, if you believe that they've always had 5-10% 'unregretted attrition' targets, which I do, and apply it to the whole company, that's 50-100k employees per year!
This came up last time the Amazon layoffs were on HN, but: the URA target (which was 2-6% when I was there) is for people, not positions. That is, the intent is that departments are continually removing their worst performers, but replacing those people as soon as possible. This is an elimination of 17,000 positions who will not be backfilled.
Whether you agree with the URA target approach or not (I suspect most do not), 6% URA is fundamentally different from 6% layoffs.
Can't post too many details, but we are actively delivering to customers in test markets today. A publically released video from a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDyeUiWL3M&ab_channel=amazo...
Source: I'm an SDE at Prime Air.
I saw this recently?
=> I work at Amazon but far away from prime air
Sounds like you've got a perfect background for Prime Air though! Hopefully we'll be hiring again sometime this year - feel free to reach out (email in profile) if you want to chat more about it.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/amazon-begins-drone-...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220506053517/https://www.busin...
Since when does having zero openings mean that a team is shut down? Sometimes teams are staffed enough to not need more people at the moment, so they will post a job opening whenever there is a need for it.
A specific personal example: my org had a period of a couple of months with no openings in late second half of last year, simply because we didn't need more people at the time, and then we posted more openings later. We were nowhere close to being shut down.
This is not a claim that anyone made. The claim was that an ad for zero openings doesn't prove a team hasn't shut down.
If that's what the argument actually was trying to say, then I fully agree with it, makes perfect sense.