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Comment by honestduane | Hacker News Reader

This is just corporate gaslighting at this point; There is no legitimate reason so many very profitable tech companies need to fire so many when we are not even in a recession according to the United States Government and the treasury and the banks, and its not like they are not making record profits.

They cant say "we are making record profits" and in the same breath say "we need to fire people to survive" that's not how that works. Pick one.

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Making profits does not have to mean funding teams that aren't generating anything significant in terms or product and/or income. Many of these companies have a small portion making most of the profits, and all the others eating them up (see: VR, Voice).

You can do it the Amazon way, cutting products that are bleeding money, or the Salesforce way asking all units to cut 10% across the board, but just keeping failed products and units because "we have money" isn't really a good reason

If they were making record profits, they would be looking to expand their profitable divisions, would they not? They would likely not lay people off, but reorganize internally to move resources away from failing areas and into the clearly thriving, very profitable areas; or start something completely new.

Hiring one good employee is expensive and difficult.

I feel like im stating the obvious but you can't just double the headcount on AWS and expect AWS profits to double

The profitable divisions are probably still hiring, and there might be an option for some of the 18,000 to interview internally before getting terminated, some companies gave that option (30 day internal interview deadline). But you can't just move 3,000 Alexa employees to AWS and expect things to go smoothly

Have they doubled the number of employees at AWS? During what time period?

Why then, did they make the decision to do so?

Yeah, unless you see this as a cheap opportunity to slurp up talent and ditch anyone that's seen as a "problem".

I'm sure the warehouse workers can easily be retrained to work on AWS. There's even data warehousing which would be a natural transition.

The article is about corporate staff, not warehouse workers.

> Many of these companies have a small portion making most of the profits, and all the others eating them up (see: VR, Voice).

Depends on your time horizon. You can fire allof engineering tomorrow. Costs will drop dramatically, revenue stays where it is. But over time things will stop working and your competiton will take over with new features and being able to keep the lights on when something breaks. Same applies to many departments. Short time dispensible, long term absolutely not.

Ask the Twitter staff. First days the toilets were still clean..

But keeping people employed because "we have money" is a really good reason.

Why Amazon and not investors? Investors can pay those people to do something more useful than Amazon's best ideas at the moment.

That's a pretty inhuman way of thinking IMO. The moment a company hires people, the onus is on it to keep these people busy.

You don't "return" people like you return money.

This is a very naive take.

When I invest in Amazon or any other company, I expect Amazon to invest in projects that give me a rate of return that exceeds the 4% that I can easily get from Treasury.

If it can't, Amazon better return my money.

Also, Amazon can't hoard employees that aren't being productive. It is better those employees work for startups and other endeavors.

individually, it sucks short-time, but as a nation we are better off with this system. Tech companies not only have generous severance packages

Well, it has long been argued that stock buy back is an indicator a company that doesn’t know how to invest into its own r&d. Not to say that Amazon is the type of company that doesn’t know where to move it’s people, perhaps they don’t know at the moment and would rather save on the labor.

Unless your company is in financial hardship, ditching headcount is similar to a stock buy back. You don’t know how to invest the money, and you don’t know how to invest the people - yet.

More likely, poor management due to growth incentives caused a lot of unnecessary hires and now's an opportune time to do layoffs.

stock buy backs are a more tax efficient version of a dividend (at least in theory)

Amazon's economy has only improved in the last 10 years.

These firings are coordinated across large tech companies to reduce salaries and benefits, make employees work longer hours, and in general shift the power away from employees and back to the executives.

> Amazon's economy has only improved in the last 10 years.

This is a very ignorant take. In 2022 Amazon became the first company ever to lose $1trilion market value.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-09/amazon-hi...

In concrete terms, Amazon's stock prices tanked over 50% in less than a year.

This is not the hallmark of a healthy company.

> These firings are coordinated across large tech companies to reduce salaries and benefits, make employees work longer hours, and in general shift the power away from employees and back to the executives.

Your conspiracy theory ignores the fact that until very recently all companies were on a hiring binge without having any business case beyond "growth", not to mention that they are moving jobs overseas for years replacing highly paid engineers in the US with modestly paid engineers in India and Europe.

Amazon's stock price rises and falls with the rest of the market. It does not indicate "corporate health". There's no conspiracy theory here - tech companies have a history of colluding to suppress wages. Even if there's no collusion here it is easy for executives to recognize an opportunity to cut wages and employee power and they'll all jump on it.

> Also, Amazon can't hoard employees that aren't being productive.

They absolutely can, and this is a major FAANG recruiting strategy.

It is the nolan bushnel way of locking up things. He would buy up capacity at different foundries to lock out competitors from building their own game system. When WB bought atari out they stopped doing that and we had a few dozen competitors within 2 years.

Basically suck all the energy out of the room and lock out any possible competitors. MS employed a similar strategy in the late 90s. FAANG does the exact same thing now.

Amazon can't horde the employees, but I would expect them to be more responsible than save up for massive layoffs.

Amazon of all companies, a Covid sweetheart, is just devilish.

I have no words for this one honestly. Watch what a mega profitable company does during a recession and you’ll know everything you need to know. They are not good to workers, from top to the warehouse bottom. I believe every last story about the warehouse workers, all the way to the PIP nonsense.

Responsibility and sustainability, I think, only happens on the small scale. It is too hard for a company like Amazon to be responsible, so rather than them being evil, it's just... easier to do other things. Path of least resistance.

I think there are large corps that do this well... Publix is employee-owned, and they have never had a layoff in nearing 100 years... (they were founded in 1930, so weathered every major modern economic disaster)

> There is no legitimate reason so many very profitable tech companies need to fire so many

Both hiring and terminating more than they need, depending on which direction they feel the wind is blowing, is the norm; on the termination side, notification requirements (e.g., WARN Act) exacerbate that (I am not saying they are a net negative, just that they encourage pushing the numbers up.)

> They cant say "we are making record profits" and in the same breath say "we need to fire people to survive" that's not how that works

Corporations don’t optimize for odds of survivial; if they are making record profits but could, in their assessment, be making bigger record profits, that’s what they’ll go for.

> This is just corporate gaslighting at this point ..[sip].. They cant say "we are making record profits" and in the same breath say "we need to fire people to survive" that's not how that works. Pick one.

This might be a bit harsh in relation to Amazon.

I saw a comment on another site mentioning total workforce. A quick look at Amazon's Wikipedia page reveals that they employ 1,544,000 as of September 2022. Is 18,000 really that much?

It's like getting rid of 1 person in an office of 100.

There's also the issue of market forces. On March/2022 their stock price was around $164. It was $143 on August/2022 and it's been plummeting since then. Currently at $83.

I also followed a source link on Wikipedia that led me to this Sept/2020 article: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon-to-hire-100-000-in-u... : Amazon to Hire 100,000 in U.S. and Canada. This was during Covid's initial height. I think some people criticized them for this too.

I'm of the position that, in this case, Amazon really has very little choice. These 18,000 might really be excessive. They don't come across as a company that tries to get by with a skeleton crew. They constantly overload to ensure smooth operations.

They are also one of the few "Tech" firms where you can talk to real people at a moment's notice - which is part of this overloading for smooth operations philosophy.

According to Joe Biden, we've been in a recession for two years. But even if he was imprecise as he is wont to be, the Fed is saying there is a slowdown. Companies are not going to wait till they are near bankruptcy to lay people off.

Yes, they overhired but also those people hired got experience and a job. They may have instead landed a different job paying less (otherwise they would not have taken this job) or they may have not landed any job at all if all companies decided not to add that 25% growth in headcount.

> Yes, they overhired but also those people hired got experience and a job.

Do you have any idea how much stress and strain this can put on a person, especially if they are the provider for their family?

Please don't make excuses for one of the richest companies in the world abusing their position and treating human beings like expendible machines.

I know it's hard. I don't wish it --but at the same time many people _got_ jobs _because_ companies overhired. Had they not, then many people would have had no job at all or would have had to take lesser jobs. Just imagine 25% tech across the board if they had kept their belts tight. How many people would have not gotten that tech job over the last two to three years? That would suck even more.

Why do you assume they over hired, vs using this as a cludgal to force the remaining employees to work longer hours to pick up the slack, and drive down salaries at the same time?

All of them would have found work elsewhere. Or what's even more likely -- already had work, but Amazon lured them with slightly higher comp.

And it's even worse: people working in white collar level Amazon type jobs will survive, but not all people are at that level.....and, combine this sort of thing with various other sorts of sub-optimal things that exist within the system in large quantities and you might end up with a lot of angry and confused people assembling at prominent political buildings on special days.

Perceptions of this can easily be wallpapered over with "Haha, those people are [just] stupid, they should [just] be laughed at [for their stupidity - yours is fine]", but that does not eliminate the problem, it only eliminates awareness of it.

Was that a gaff you're making a joke about?

How do we define recession?

Why would any company fire anybody if they are generating money for them?

To drive down wages. All tech companies firing thousands of people at the same time is a simple way to do this. Hire back in a year at much reduced salaries and benefits.

I cynically suspect this to be the case. As soon as one does it; the others have to follow to have any hope of controlling the tech salary bubble. They Don have to collude, just watch and match percentages.

> Why would any company fire anybody if they are generating money for them?

Amazon has been cutting teams that either could not justify their existence or worked in money-losing investments. Alexa was a very public project getting the axe.

I still don't understand why they axed Alexa. It doesn't make any sense to me in the context of the rest of their business.

> I still don't understand why they axed Alexa.

Alexa was described as "a colossal failure" which lost 10 billion dollars last year alone.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

I don't really understand how that division could rack up $10 billion in losses in a single year either.

Because it’s an embarrassing product and Jassy doesn’t love it like Bezos.

They think these 18,000 aren’t helping making enough money to justify the costs.

There is an open window for tech companies to free-ride layoffs at the moment, that's what's happening. And they are taking this opportunity to its fullest.

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