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Comment by sleepybrett | Hacker News Reader

If the number is a large enough percentage they couldn't do a lockout. While it may be an industry-wide supply side problem for employees you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff and hire new people and expect things to just keep on truckin', losing that much institutional knowledge would be suicide.

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That's certainly the theory behind collective action. But the problem is you can't go from nothing/online venting to organizing multi-thousand-employee walkouts, any more than you can get up after years of bedrest and run a marathon. The capacity to effectively organize white collar tech workers at Amazon (or anywhere else) was never built up, and now it's too late.

> you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff

Define huge? Tech companies increased their headcount between 2020 and 2022 by at least double-digit percentage, Amazon included. I'm not sure how many of them are essential in top management's eyes.

A large percentage of employees can definitely walk out if they do not need to worry about paying their bills, should things turn south. There will be less demand and more supply of workers in the foreseeable future.

My opinion is generic across all companies. I am not an Amazon employee, nor own any stocks.

Tell that to Twitter.

Basecamp might be a more salient example.

It's way too soon to draw conclusions.

Given people were originally predicting collapse within days, how long do you need to draw conclusions?

How do you know the business will not collapse? Revenue internally is down 40% and importantly the activity is a cesspool, wouldn't reckon that's the company just chugging along

"How do you know the business will not collapse"? That's a ridiculous question. Eventually all things die. The question is not will Twitter die but when, and so far the people predicting imminent demise were all completely wrong. Musk's detractors clearly had no idea at all of how much bloat ideological hiring had created inside firms like Twitter. Even if Twitter gets sold or whatever next year, it won't be vindication for those people because they were already proven wrong.

I made an account just to tell you that after a decade of placeholder Twitter account, I started using it after Elon. When Tucker Carlson posted his videos about being fired, my dad made an account because he thinks it'll be the new YouTube. He doesn't even watch Foxnews.

I was referring to engineering, not the rest of the business.

amazon is not twitter.

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