Amazon made record breaking profit but still laid off more than 18000 employees (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon made record breaking profit but still laid off more than 18000 employees (2023)

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38 pointsZuckMusk21 comments

Isn't it kind of a matter of business integrity when the advantages of being a stakeholder are adjusted in response to differing overall prosperity conditions?

I'm having a hard time figuring out what the connection is supposed to be between having a big profit and laying off employees.

My first thought is that the writer is suggesting that companies should only lay off employees when the employees 1) are financial drains and 2) are such bad financial drains that the company would otherwise go broke. A lot of people do think that way, but it doesn't actually make any sense.

In good times the worker bees' are told 'we need to be cautious for going forward, sorry, we're tightening the belt'. In bad times they are told 'we need to tighten the belt'. This didn't use to be the case. Large bonuses on good years were the norm in the USA. Businesses are exploiting employees' believing in the previous system that no longer exists in order to squeeze out a little more productivity today. But business doesn't realize they are harming their future dynamic with employees. People are catching on that the system has changed to 'heads the company wins, tails the employees lose'. Labor relations are going to go back to early 1900s adversarial style from the 1950s/60s 'the tide is raising everyone's boat' and EVERYONE will end up the poorer from it.

Stock buybacks are an illegal manipulation of the stock market and should be made illegal again. They encourage this horrible destructive to the country/economy/workers/and ultimately companies policy.

To clarify, instead of building a strong company with a strong workforce as was the historical norm in the USA during it's prosperous times, companies 'invest' in stock buybacks, which do NOTHING to strengthen the company, their sole purpose is to manipulate the company's stock in the short term.

Forget workers rights, we all need to 'unionize' (work in union) to eliminate stock buybacks and get them reclassified as stock manipulation like there were prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency. If companies want to 'give money away' with respect to stocks, they can issue dividends, which changes to dynamics of the stock market (Prosperous pre-1980s America's 'I buy a company because it will be strong long term and pay me dividends' versus enshitified 2024 American stock market's 'I buy stocks for short term one time capital gains at the expense of all else').

https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/stock-buy...

Imagine yourself as an employee at amazon who sees people being laid off due to "unfavorable macroeconomic conditions" just to then see the company report massive profits while you saw no pay increase (so a reduction with inflation), benefits made slightly worse, and expectations to increase productivity to makeup for those people that were laid off.

Are you going to stand in front of that employee and say, "You are being nonsensical for connecting these things."?

And if you want to say the situation I've come up is contrived and isn't perfectly representative for all workers, you are correct. But for the percentage it is accurate for, that it does represent, do you really expect them not to connect things?

While keeping around employees with a consistent negative value is not a smart business move, over the long term those employees might have an overall positive value. Companies like Amazon love to whine and complain, along with demanding political solutions, to their labor acquisition issues that often are due to a desire to put short term finances ahead of long-term planning. It's also a sign of refusing to invest in people, demanding that the labor market magically conjure up any desired type of labor at the moment the company wants it.

I agree, 'but' is the wrong conjunction here and 'still' the wrong adverb.

It should've said:

Amazon made record breaking profit because (among other things) they laid off more than 18000 employees (2023)

I came into the comments to say this as well.

Why are these two completely different metrics being put into the same title as if they correlate in some rational way?

The answer is they don’t, but it incites irrational reactions. Which, in my mind, is what Reddit is for; not HN.

They also payed zero tax on their profits. This should annoy basically everyone who does pay taxes

This is like the non-crime version of the Butterfield Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Butterfield#Criticism

(2023)

Some deep insight from DanPriceSeattle here?

Some more discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478

This is a Tweet from Jan 2023

Probably has more employees than any other tech company.

It certainly does if you count the wage-slave class that are often overlooked here.

I dunno. I get plenty of upvotes for articles about people organizing unions.

Oddly the anti-politics stance in HN focuses around “culture war” issues, I don’t get articles flagged on topics like “Was Trotsky Right About the Theory Of Permanent Revolution?”. The axis of economics from Marx to Van Mises is pretty safe but say anything about gender and you are [dead].

The HN bias isn't against Amazon's hourly workers; it's about recognizing that they exist in the first place. When I say "Amazon Employee", what does that typically mean here? Because I bet that it's 10 people stacking boxes or driving a truck to every 1 person who sits behind a desk at home.

It's a frequent sentiment on HN that "Amazon is a bad place to work" and I think they are talking about blue collars. I've me many white collar Amazonians (say AWS envangelist Jeff Barr, and a robotics engineer I know, and a relative who works as an accountant) who would probably say AMZN is the best place they've ever worked.

I think the HN audience is more diverse than people think. The average HNer is not in Silicon Valley for instance.

I've never even been to California, but have worked an entire professional career in tech. I certainly know people who have done white-collar stints at Amazon and it was universally a bad experience (among the people I knew I mean). It's an enormous company even if you do ignore the other 90%, so it's certainly possible that there are cushy places within it.

Come to Seattle, meet the white collar employees they burn through at an alarming rate. The way Amazon operates is a meat grinder, even for most of their white collar workforce the churn is significantly higher than other tech companies in the region.

Microsoft, Google, Nintendo, Facebook, F5 and other local firms don't quite have the Hired to Fired pipeline that occurs within 12 to 24 months for the average Amazonian. At each stage it seems Amazon is lighting money on fire...

A while back I remember AMZN recruiters seemed to call anybody who was rumoured to be able to code more than once a month. I'd see Ask HN's were somebody asked "How come I can't get any interviews from FAANG?" and I'd ask "You mean you haven't talked to an AZMN recruiter" and sure enough they'd talked to AMZN recruiters.

The people I've mentioned above who seem happy at AMZN have the common denominator that the AMZN job was a definite step up from what they were doing before.

Not like I know a ton of Amazonian white collars, but it still seems like a worse place than average. My wife's team had a guy leave a few years ago and almost immediately come back because it wasn't worth it. They seem to have a hiring problem that probably leads to all the stack ranking and mandatory attrition because they can't assure the people they hire are qualified. I interviewed with AWS once, but didn't accept, and the experience was frankly just bizarre. I was thrown back and forth between people with roles in all manner of completely unrelated disciplines. One woman accidentally hot mic'd herself when she didn't realize I hadn't signed off yet and complained that she had no idea what I was talking about because she hadn't had a technical role in 20 years. They gave me the option to talk one on one with a developer who would have no input into hiring and she told me, as the chosen spokesperson for AWS, that she didn't like working there and probably wasn't going to stick around, but it was her first real job after college so there she was.

Ironically, on the other hand, when I was first leaving the Army 15 years ago, the enlisted guys leaving at the same time were overwhelmingly all looking to work either as roughnecks or in Amazon distribution centers because they paid so much better than anything else you could expect to get hired for with no qualifications other than willingness to get beat up and tired.

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