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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

This is just a way for Amazon to do layoffs without formal layoffs. Let’s face it, the economy is (and has been) slowing down.

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I know this theory is being put forward but it never made sense to me as 1/ severance is at most a few months of salary, and forcing people out this way will also take months, during which time employees will be much less productive, and /2 this approach will skew the population that leaves to those with better options (ie your high performers.)

This approach will skew the population that leaves to the "troublemakers" who insist on working from home, so if those leave (from the WFO advocates' perspective), all the better...

I did recently this “back to the office” thing. At the same time layoffs were happening. It was super obvious that not complying with new rules will bring first warning, second warning and layoff without any package.

The packages were tailored for greenhorns, as low as possible to be enough for junior engineers to leave quickly. It was obvious again, that the return to the office for older and experienced folks will cause natural attrition and some 5% of expensive people will leave without severance package by quitting like I did. 200 got packages, 300 quit voluntarily. It was one third of workforce in that particular location. I heard it was celebrated as a success in the highest floor.

For big organizations these high performers are not important. Good presenters are what matters. Things are achieved by a mass. Sometimes having few departments to do basically the same development. Because somebody on the top of command chain didn’t align properly. Or higher ups just don’t care.

It's pretty much exactly this. superstars matter when management can properly direct them, which is almost never big companies (it's very often small companies/startups though). The past decade of superstar hiring in tech was so obviously a raising rivals cost/ monopolizing talent so said talent won't go start a startup that unseats the large company from its excess oligopoly profits strategy. When interest rates got high enough to make yield matter and all of a sudden these big guys needed to actually perform quarter to quarter they started cutting all these excess, expensive people loose and this is just one of the ways to force that attrition. (consequently, I expect the company(ies) that will unseat the big tech guys has already/will be shortly created by some of these downsized staff and the next 10 years will be very interesting.

I think people are too quick to think it's only one reason. It can be a mix of all the reasons. Amazon has expensive offices, deals with cities, poor communication, and also wouldn't mind some percentage of people choosing to move on.

I'm not saying they're doing this to reduce headcount but if they are, it does make sense. They're a company with 300,000 corporate employees making over $600B/yr in revenue. They survived the dotcom bubble, the Great Recession, and a global pandemic. My point is they should be viewed as a well oiled money making machine, not a small business where the owner directly hires and manages people. Their executives and importantly, their investors, don't care about individuals or short term blips in headcount or financial impacts. They'll recover and move on.

Performing a layoff affects Amazon's access to H-1B and other similar programs -- you must pretend to look for workers in the US before accessing these programs. A layoff puts the lie to the token attempt.

OTOH, constructive dismissal programs such as RTO preserves their access to H-1B workers.

This seems... implausible, because Amazon _has been hiring people_; their total number of employees has been going _up_ a year or so now.

The employer would you waste the opportunity who to lay off, and depend on a semi random selection of people with the most potential to excel if their personal circumstances improve.

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