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Comment by deltree7 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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)

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