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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't lump Amazon in with the others, unless the additional hiring/cuts were to AWS. That's because Amazon __had__ to increase its distribution/warehouse staff during the pandemic just to handle to the __huge__ increase in online purchases, regardless of how long that pattern lasted. So it's going to have a more cyclical hiring/firing pattern than pure tech companies who don't need to double their engineering staff just because there's a temporary surge in their software/services.

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But they did that, too. You read about 18000 people being dropped by Amazon, but you didn't read about the 80000 which have been "silently" let go on top of that. Thing is, somewhere in the news you may have stumbled over the downsize from ~1.6 million to ~1.5 million, and 18000 isn't enough for that. These 80000 are part of that cycle you mentioned.

was at amazon at peak covid.

distribution/warehouse problem and over hiring problem are two separate problems.

i will explain overhiring problem.

from 2018 to 2021 many amazon executives and director leave company. this continued in 2022.

these “tech” leadership very hands on..strong technical acumen. they have vision..manage people..understand business..understand the tech and how to scale.

these people not perfect. under them it very hard burnout factory of place to work. good chance if you work here you need therapy.

these people all start leaving.

they replace by “professional” managers. professional manager has one goal: grow headcount and build empire so they get promoted.

entire teams exist with no valuable output. team of 8 people supporting a service built 10 years ago maybe doing patching like replace outdated java log4j library and redeploy. no feature work. entire team can be fired and service ownership could be given easily to some team doing feature work in another space.

this problem happening all over amazon. innovation at amazon is on how to increase revenue. what they do is hire mba grad, put pressure on them to deliver. Mba grad does obvious shitty thing… let show more ads. if you see amazon.com and search it is now flea market but before you buy any cheap trash first you see walls and walls of “sponsored” recommendation or what is actually fucking ad.

it a massive grift.

amazon need Bezos to return like bob iger do at Disney. jassy only focus on aws

Amazon laid off thousands of corporate employees, many of whom were in tech. I know some personally.

Solid point. It's easy to forget what Amazon actually does and only focus on the tech side.

> Amazon __had__ to increase its distribution/warehouse staff during the pandemic just to handle to the __huge__ increase in online purchases, regardless of how long that pattern lasted. This is certainly what I remember from the pandemic, but it seems like it would be hard to quantify. Anecdotally, for my fairly typical family, we were probably ordering < 10% of our items online; does anyone have data on orders vs. average household?

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