The company has around 1.5M employees. It fires 18k people. This is 1.2% of the headcount.
Many more people resign on their own on any given month, most likely.
On the one hand, part of me thinks "Yeah but this is corporate employees! This is people like me!".
And then another part of me steps in and asks "So what, the more than a million logistics employees aren't people? They don't count?".
I guess the point is that there are two classes of employees at Amazon. Most of us here on HN aren't used to seeing our class being impacted by job losses.
Tech is a big risk, big reward business. Charge ye Teslas while ye may.
Re re-training yourself as a software engineer... I wonder how often people really need to do this either... to keep getting top possible salary maybe, but just ("just"!) to keep getting a better salary than most of the USA? Maybe sometimes. But, I mean, there are still people making very very good money writing Fortran and COBOL... probably better money than you can make writing PHP -- and you can still make better money than most of the USA writing PHP! OK if you specialized in, like, Flash or ColdFusion, you probably had to learn something different.
An intelligent and empathic enough person can use statistics to inform themselves while also remembering there are individual tragedies.
Statistics is necessary to be able to understand things that are happening around us. Otherwise the information we are getting would be largely meaningless.
Next time you encounter human suffering in your life - put things in perspective. Parent died? Well, did you know it’s just 1/8B people on the planet?
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-secret-terms-only-wor...
The company also has a metric called “unregretted attrition rate” (URA), which represents the percentage of employees it would like to see leave the company – voluntarily or otherwise – in a given year.
https://www.hcamag.com/us/news/general/leaked-amazon-memo-sh...
Within every org of ~100+ people, they stack rank and cut the bottom K%. It used to be 4%. Now it's 7%.
They get put onto a PIP, and very few improve enough to stay.
PIP - performance improvement plan
lol = laugh out loud
That’s probably not true, but either way, it’s irrelevant. Voluntarily resigning, most likely with another job already lined up, is not the same as being laid off.
A large number of the million+ headcount is warehouse.
This layoff impacts corporate workers only, so it's a much higher percentage of total corporate workers.
Majority of Amazon workers are essentially blue collar jobs. This primarily affects salaried corporate workers in towers in Seattle etc. So the impact to those types of jobs is clearly more than 1%.
You call my view silly, and at the same time you make distinction between corporate and warehouse workers as if these were two separate classes of people presuming firing warehouse workers was not a big deal but corporate is.
Amazon employs 1.5M people total and I don't care if somebody works in a warehouse or an office. They all have their lives to continue and families to feed.
I hate it when manufacturing jobs get cut. I hate it when warehousing jobs get cut. But these numbers do not directly relate to what happens in my field, so in order to understand what happens in my field, these numbers must be considered separately.
Assuming no discrimination here, I believe it is not and the constant talk of it is just a clickbait and trying to find news where there aren't any.
It would be different if this was large portion of the said company, but it is not.
The exception would be total warehouse closures, but I don't think we've seen a lot of those because each one is such an enormous capital investment. Though maybe they closed one in response to a union activation effort?
Why haven't people talked about the effects of these layoffs on dog-walkers servicing these former employees? They are talking about it on my dogwalking reddit forum.