Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly
techstartups.com
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They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.
IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very honest conversations with my managers about these things regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I doubt I'd have the same success.
Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the manager track generally has higher pay at each level. Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden. Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good.
This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
Would be interested in comparing the interview processes for ICs vs. managers at Amazon. Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?
> things have gotten better
If you read up on humanity, you'll likely find that it would be a bad idea to put money on any wager that this will end.
For FAANG, most front-line manager roles have a leetcode style coding round, though it may be easier and/or weighted less heavily than for an IC.
At the least a bad manager can make the place you spend a majority of your waking hours a worse place to be, and at their worse they can permanently harm the trajectory of your career or even your mental (and by proxy physical) health.
Some analogies are limited by the weight their original context conveys. I wouldn't let a surgeon get away with "the ethics board will only talk about this heinous thing I did, when most of the time they don't see me at all".
Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.
But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.
Like I have only seen a terrible management culture in 2 of my employees, but for 1 of them, it lead to:
30 or 40 careers damaged, internal stalinist purges. Months wasted on drama. 21 million yearly recurring in wasted IT expense. Probably close on 500 million in non recurring waste over 4 years. 4 million yearly recurring in executive waste. Significant brand damage, significant resume damage for people who worked through it. Actual end user harm.
Ironically every place I've worked, a lot of these bad programmers got placed into the management pipeline, because they had not the skills to hack it as an IC, so it was a worst case scenario of "fake it till you make it".
You could be the most incompetent programmer in the world, but a suave bullshitter is a shoe-in for management, where they now get to tell the competent programmers how to do their jobs.
https://ezo.io/blog/crowdstrike-outage-and-the-blue-screen-o...
Bad managers can also lead to a lot of bad programmers because all the good ones left. I reckon a bad manager is a multiplier of bad programmers. Bad is just bad no matter what level you are in.
You remember what you learned from good managers, and you remember how bad managers made you feel. Benign ones could be replaced by an LLM.
It might not be a grand conspiracy or might not come from meticulous planning, but what happens is they just work for self preservation. Its no secret that people who work on a thing are bound to know things about them better than some body who just approves leaves, or makes abstract decisions. You will get replaced if you don't assert authority often and proactively kill the biggest threat to your position. This also means maintaining pets, and rewarding them more than people who are performing better.
All of this resembles a pattern of behaviour over the years with managers sabotaging everything good around to save themselves.
Over years I have seen managers are the biggest reason why companies go down. There are few other reasons.
A good manager can motivate people, but in absence of interesting projects or budget to pay people, they can still lose talent.
A bad manager can make even interesting work and good compensation intolerable and lead to a revolving door of B players as no one with better options wants to stick around.
The through line for me of genuinely bad managers is guys (always guys) who are emotionally unstable and/or have anger management issues. Whether it was being put on as an effect to get a result, or they genuinely had no control, it doesn't matter.
Shouting at people, berating people in public, praising in private while criticizing in team meetings, going on tirades over petty stuff (formatting of internal non-user facing documentation), etc.
For some harder numbers though: it seems to also follow the pareto principle : https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/13/most-amer...
20% of "fair/poor" management ruining the 80% of good.
(though this is from 2023. A lot has changed in sentiments since then).
If you are working for an emotionally unstable shouter, the negativity seeps into your work and quality of life. I've seen bad managers make adult men cry (rarely for any good reason) and still last 2-3 years.
If you work for a good manager, you learn a little more stuff, maybe.
For a manager there is a longer leash as the things they can impact are harder to measure with long and variable lags. So it can take 3 years easily for an obviously bad manager to be dealt with.
https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
The reality is that the Microsoft style of organization is very prominent in the industry.
Easy enough to solve, just remove a few layers.
Those 10 layers of management work for them, not you. That's why they exist.
Removal of bosses is literally more efficient because it reduces the amount of work per unit person.
From you.
But you do realize that previously, you had to produce outputs for your boss and skip - but now, you only need to produce for skip?
For 2 bosses, the hypothetical low/mid manager has to consider 2 bosses perspectives, 2 bosses politics, 2 bosses promos, 2 bosses peer teams, 2 bosses meetings, 2 bosses technical skill, 2 bosses status reports, 2 bosses committees, 2 bosses ad-hoc demands.
With 1 boss, that work reduces to 1 bosses perspectives, 1 bosses politics, 1 bosses promos, 1 bosses peer teams, 1 bosses meetings, 1 bosses technical skill, 1 bosses status reports, 1 bosses ad-hoc demands.
Removal of 1 boss led to 50% decline in work for 1 low/mid manager. Scale that to 10 low/mid managers, you now have a large amount of time freed up - SIMPLY because 1 single org chart bottleneck has been removed.
Either he wasn't, or you are just not aware of all the work he was doing.
A good manager is a shit umbrella. Most of my managers have been good.
A big IF - and now the company has to hire more HR and more bosses to check on this boss. Create more bureaucracy around checking "if they are any good".
> did most of the reporting and communication to keep the skip level happy
And someone had to do reporting and communication to this boss in the first place. Thus, a boss requires someone/some people below them to spend time reporting to them, and themselves needs to spend time reporting above them to the skip.
From the big bosses perspective, this miniature boss's existence added more work to the company than required - thus, leading to the original post.
Just yanking layers to minimal required bosses is enough to reduce total work.
As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.
Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
edit: I've enjoyed two managers since I started working ~2008. The rest were either harmful or generally ineffective, unfortunately. We can get along well... but I know the job's not for me. It's like HR, for the business.
Contrary to GP, career development has yet to meaningfully happen within the same business. I have to move to advance, so I do.
That is not the real world.
Turns out working for your brother-in-law they let you manage yourself too.
wrong and painfully ignorant
One of the many challenges I have is that some of them will literally tinker their way to nowhere i.e. they have strong cases of Shiny New Toy Syndrome. If it weren't for me, there would be piles of unfun/unsexy work that never gets done and we'd suffer for it, and it would impact the rest of our engineering org.
It's a thankless job though, I often feel like no one likes me when I'm actually doing my job well. It's OK, I actually agreed to go back into management becauseI was terrified about the prospect of reporting to some new manager my company pulled in off the street (my old manager left).
I'll say this too, while I'm not very hands on these days, I understand what my team is doing and why and can speak with them about the details. I feel like that goes a long way helping me do my job well and understanding what they need to do, to do their jobs well. Non-technical software managers don't really make sense in my worldview.
Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice
Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
Here's a decent summary of how we got here:
One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Oh, I can hate both. :) The (possibly) good news is now the free money train is gone, companies will actually have to pay attention to how their teams are working. The bad news is they might just chop off heads regardless of ability.
Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.
Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.
That’s the point, surely
I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.
I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Edited to add:
I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
Middle management is also the memory of the company.
The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.
It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.
They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.
Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
The people who play politics also have their work judged by results. Getting yourself promoted to head a project that prints money for the company with little cost doesn't necessarily cause the project to stop printing money.
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much managing then the flies will start buzzing.
Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.
I don't buy it.
We don't stop all crime, but that doesn't mean we stop funding all police and jails.
This is a fundamental human organization problem that many countless organizations of people have failed to perform optimally since people have started organizing into groups.
If you truly believe that, then this is cognitive dissonance in it's highest form.
Amazon, with its billions and hoards of smart people, still ended up in a situation where they find themselves in excess of 14,000 employees.
It means that there's no simple formula and perhaps once in a while, orgs just need to clear the slate and see where the pain points are and build up once again.
Their field of view spans from little guys at the bottom of the chain, through the essence of working product up to at least two levels of management.
And they do have good judgement, if they didn't they wouldn't be able to consistently deliver value in the past.
And anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
How do you tell the difference?
How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?
You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.
How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders
Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.
Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.
>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.
Excellent observations.
People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.
But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"
Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.
It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.
Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.
The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
They did exactly what I said they did, moving some managers to IC in the very worst case but mostly shuffling teams around.
2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.
3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.
4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.
In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
A 14,000 employee cut is less than one percent.
Of course I know there are a lot of warehouse and delivery employees but they have managers, too.
While the power dynamic of employment is uneven, if you wish for a company to never be able to let you go then you're also wishing for the hiring process to be far more difficult. If you wish for companies to have unreasonable processes involved in terminating employees, you're also wishing for extreme scrutiny in the hiring process rather than being able to get a job where employers take a chance on you.
There are literally fewer layoffs in tech now than 2 years ago. Go to the charts tab and scroll down to "Tech layoffs since COVID-19": https://layoffs.fyi/
There were over 4x the amount of tech layoffs 2 years ago according to this chart.
I understand the emotion behind your comments, as many people are frustrated with the economy in the US today. But your argument would be a lot stronger if you used factual, quantitative analysis.
>There are literally fewer layoffs than 2 years ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/economy/us-jobs-report-februa...
The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.
I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
Quelle surprise.
If I got a “tell me 5 things you did last week” email I would throw my computer through the window.
I’m sorry, that’s beyond toxic. That’s radioactive culture. I understand the need for layoffs. But I also understand mutual respect.
Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.
Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for the next earnings report.
I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.
You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.
Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.
But nevermind; this is not the same.
Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses: Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.
Odd standard; it had both composite and RGB lines, but also control lines, so, like HDMI-CEC, you could set it up so that your VCR couldn’t quite control your TV. It also supported daisy-chaining, a bit like SCSI, so you could connect your TV to your VCR and your VCR to your DVD player.
Even before SCART, European TV equipment tended to use DIN (you may remember this as the IBM AT keyboard connector) rather than RCA.
Oddly, there was a brief period where it was somewhat common for early HD TVs to have component RCA connectors; while SCART did support HD component, people apparently did not trust it.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By the time they were widespread in Europe, the technology had advanced, so someone from the 2000s might think Europe did credit cards better. (The M and the V in EMV actually stand for the American companies MasterCard and VISA.)
I wonder if there's a term for this phenomenon.
As for the cards, again you can thank France; Cartes Bancaires introduced a predecessor to EMV in the 80s, and France moved quite quickly to make chip cards standard and then mandatory. Other countries followed in the 90s and early noughties. However, by the time EMV predecessors launched, there’d been credit cards in Europe since the 1960s (usually national standards).
Incidentally, this is also indirectly why the US was so late to the party with tap to pay. With chip and pin via EMV, it became essential that card terminals be available to the customer; an employee taking the card in the back wasn’t an option. So by the time tap to pay was introduced in the late noughties, more or less all shops and restaurants already had either counter-mounted or portable terminals, so it was an easy transition. In the US, it was more common to have swipe machines not necessarily directly accessible to the customer, which made tap to pay less attractive, and it didn’t really become near-universal until Apple and Google Pay forced the issue (actually, even then it didn’t become universal; I was in SF last year and was in a surprisingly large number of places which only had swipe machines).
The amount of time people spend holding (rather than pocketing) their phones is also probably higher than it was in the 2010s, so the cost of digging it out of your purse/pocket is less relevant.
[meta] Having a conversation about credit card and video standards in a thread about managerial layoffs feels apropos to how my brain works about other curious topics. We're basically cosplaying a Wikipedia hole.
Another factor may be that American card terminals were traditionally quite slow, or at least vendors rarely prioritised speed (I have no idea _why_ this was the case, but it definitely seems to have been the case). Tap to pay really works best if the auth can happen within a second or so.
I will say in terms of physical connectors, by the later years it was quite common to have poor connectivity with SCART - stiff cables leaving the connector at an angle that would gradually lever it out of the socket, the flat pins that would break off after repeated insertions...
I'm in Ireland as well, but I remember that as a high-end TV thing, mostly, though it did get more common towards the end of the analog connector era, especially for flatscreen TVs. Your generic 21" CRT TV usually just had a single SCART connector and a tuner connector, tho.
I suspect that the reason RCA (especially _component_ RCA) became more common in the flat-screen/early HD era was largely that, while SCART supported component output, the UX tended to be really bad, and there was no way for the TV to signal support to the attached device. So, virtually all set top boxes and DVD players could output RGB component via SCART, but this was never turned on by default, and the user wasn't necessarily aware of it.
I think some VHS players also had some form of pass through/switching capability of their own? It's been a while.
You’d normally want your sky/cablelink box connected through your vcr, so that you could record off the box, not connected separately to the tv.
Amazon did it on a shorter timeline and shipped the usage before the infrastructure, but it's not as wildly different as you state. The same seed grew branches in different directions, whose tips ended up very far apart from one another.
For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.
It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.
I guess I agree; Amazon should split up.
jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.
So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable.
This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.
According to TFA they have about 106000 managers before this layoff. You don't give 106k people any meaningful control over the company's policies and procedures, that has to come from the layers above the managers, probably several layers up.
Definitely not the people being laid off.
If you are not responsible for whatever decisions you make, and you don't even make any decisions that amount to anything at all, plus you don't do anything(code, SRE etc) why should you have a job?
They are literally mandating people come in to sit in a room on video calls with people sitting in a room in other offices all around the country/world. That’s the most egregious one, but add up all the controls, pair it with layoffs and threats of more, and you’re not going to end up with an employee base that’s testing the limits of what’s possible. You’ll end up with a well behaved herd of docile workers.
They’re not going to change that behavior by getting rid of middle managers when those demands are coming from the C levels or the board
Complaining about the structure is like your sales complaining that your customers choose your competition's product - nobody cares.
I think Gervais captures these dynamics the best https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
https://www.army.mil/article/106872/understanding_mission_co...
Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood.
I'm honestly interested in alternatives.
edit: I'll say, I've only ever left a job because of a manager. Shortly before leaving my current job, due to a crap manager, the previous manager was fired. The entire org benefited.
I wouldn't bet they will suddenly become good at hiring managers.
The question is, how many managers did they hire since the last round of layoffs, and what percent are being layed off now? Or, in other words, what's the bad hire rate? How does that unavoidable number compare to the industry?
14k people is 0.9% of their employees. Let's say they have a 16% manager ratio. That's maybe 5% of their management. What's the management/non-management ratio? Is it meant to balance for the reductions in headcount?
I think it’s worthwhile challenging this assumption. In a layoff, with that many people, I don’t think you can say much beyond that the company doesn’t want to pay them anymore.
If these layoffs are any like I've been involved with, nobody is surprised by who stays. It's almost obvious. There are sometimes surprises by who lets go, usually having to do with the required headcount, where some better ones need to get let go too.
> In a layoff, with that many people
Absolute numbers are often used to appeal to emotion. It's less than 1%! Assuming 16% manager/non ratio, it's only 5% of management, so I suspect they aren't cutting too deep, or at all, into the high performing people.
They may care about each member of their 'congregation' and provide 'support' where they can, but ultimately they know their own head depends on staying true to doctrine and interpreting edicts.
Total # Employee: 1,556,000
Planned # Layoff: 14,000 (or 0.9%)
I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more like a 4-5% layoff, a level at which people will really notice it.
Where does it say anything about this being only “office” jobs, as you put it.
(second sentence in btw)
The tricky part is what to do when you scale, as you can't simply leave teams to their own devices as they will run their separate ways, so you do more and faster but in the wrong direction.
But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop everything from happening.
It is a complex balance.
TL;DR:
> CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a source.
Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?
The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.
Consider the many HN threads to the effect of "<Service> just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.
> Amazon is set to cut around 14,000 managerial positions by early 2025, aiming to save between $2.1 billion and $3.6 billion annually.
If the number is $2.1 to $3.6, I wonder why the headline went with $3.5. Weird.
I need my team to be independent, make decisions and challenge my (brilliant) ideas. They simply need to be good with what they know, at their level.
I will actively evangelize my strategy (they can challenge it, ultimately I am the accountable), I will always have their back (because I am like this, there is no profound philosophy behind this) and when they did something successful, they did it and present in front of the board. When they fucked up, I fucked up.
This is not some kind of messianic approach - just generic mortality. I spend a lot of time with them and O like to have them as "work friends".
I would hate to be hit by suvh layoff, and I am rather happy with the fact that they would be pissed off as well.
The rest got jobs from mergers, takeovers, friendships, time or lack of strategy/interest from others.
And what happened to the good ones you may ask? They all left the places where I was to grow somewhere else.
Management mostly creates politics (ghost & real ones) - I would love for management to truly help teams employees and projects - but they rarely do.
To be a good manager you need to manage up and down - but most only manage up...
You need a good culture with proper incentives to be rewarded as a good manager. But that's not really the world most live in these days. Instead, the good get exploited by the bad and either leave to protect themselves or cause discourse as they try to do their job and inevitably be overthrown by those above.
These are not the workers who travel from warehouse to warehouse living in their RV's.
It makes me wonder if Amazon's AI implementations are starting to move up the food chain as was generally predicted for the U.S. economy 5 years ago.
Seems.. low?
Then again, this is HN, where they say the "average" tech worker in the world makes $400K and drives a Ferrari.
We’re at the point that an AI can now perform the requisite performance metric failing, sternly worded cautionary performance review, translate the verbal conversation for HR records as documentation for a subsequent firing if needed, and simply not care that your kid died and it has been a rough month.
Left to their own devices, the corporate dystopia is pretty bleak.
If you dislike managers generally, why would you think Amazon is firing them for all the reasons you personally dislike them as a class?
What is Amazon’s actual motive here?
The reasons are as usual. Anticipating economic headwinds and how to make number go up despite that,s174 (sp?) changing how you amortize R&D, early attempts to incorporate AI into workflows, etc. Companies at the moment are not at all concerned with lean development nor streamlining workflows.
If anyone can be replaced by AI it's the PHBs