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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

This is old news and refers to the 15% figure that was announced last year (more than 6 months ago!) and for which the "layoffs" are already completed.

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...

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1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of managers.

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.

How do the cost savings work then?

That's a made up figure from the journalist. They estimated that managers each earn between 200-350K and came to that number.

These numbers always seem huge but also don't forget that Amazon employs 1.5 million people.

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.

It still is big. Let's not start to treat 10's of thousands of skill labor losing their jobs through no fault of their own as an everyday occurance. We may as well leave the US at that point.

It literally is an everyday occurrence. It is statistical fact. There are 340 million people in the USA. Tens of thousands of people lose and gain jobs every day. That is normal and not particularly unusual or cruel.

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.

Mass layoffs are not an everyday occurrence. It wasn't an occurance 2 years ago. Let alone decades ago. "person got fired" and "entire parta of an industry are laid off" are entirely different scales. It's like treating a wildfire incident with a person's single home burning down.

Literally an everyday occurrence. There are 33.2 million companies in the USA. Mass layoffs happen every day. But you know what else happens every day? Mass hiring.

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.

Well, you're clearly not interested in a goof faith discussion of we can't even align on what "mass firings are" l. I'm not here to just yell words at each other over nitpicks. You know what I meant when I said "over decades"

>There are literally fewer layoffs than 2 years ago.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/economy/us-jobs-report-februa...

They probably just "promoted" people under them and then immediately fired these people for "poor performance". It is an old scheme they have.

No, they did not. Managerial positions are not a promotion in Amazon, they're just a lateral move, and the process takes around 6 months...

They did exactly what I said they did, moving some managers to IC in the very worst case but mostly shuffling teams around.

You probably don't understand what these people are capable of. You're right that the normal process can take several months, but I wouldn't discard them rushing a number of people to management just to lay them off as soon as possible.

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