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Comment by wubrr | Hacker News Reader

The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.

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Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to scale middle managers so they can effectively manage multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who knows, this is just wild speculation.

Who created the policies and procedures?

If the answer you were looking for was "managers", then you have no concept of just how big Amazon is.

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.

So, the people that manage the managers?

Try the people that manage the people that manage the people that manage the managers. Maybe.

Definitely not the people being laid off.

So the layoffs make sense?

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?

Execs.

Bezos.

(Bezos all the way down)

But it is neat that the internal tooling is 15 years behind the times. It’s like being teleported to 2005. The nostalgia value surely makes up for any “inefficiency” /s

that's the definition of an incompetent / mediocre manager. Most organizations expect their employees and managers in poarticular to be "breaking doors", which is the opposite attitude to blindly following any internal process.

You have a very warped view of the world if you think most companies, or even Amazon in particular, are expecting their employees to be “breaking doors”.

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

To be fair, OP was talking about the companies' expectations, not the behavior they are incentivizing. Many companies expect their employees to innovate, while implementing processes that prevent innovation. Many companies expect their employees to "take courageous risks" while punishing risk-taking that goes wrong. Many companies expect their employees to "act like they are owners" while giving them no equity or profit sharing.

Exactly. It is about expectations, and it is about inbalance. Every employee expects ideal benefits with minimal work, every emplyer expects ideal work with mininal benefits. The reality is balance here is one of very many possibilities with leverage being most of the times one one side, rather than in the middle.

Complaining about the structure is like your sales complaining that your customers choose your competition's product - nobody cares.

Ah yes, I do see that distinction. I was only talking about what they were _doing_, not what they _expected_

You only need managers to the extent their actions can have an effect down the line. Otherwise they don't "manage" anything, hence they become communication brokers, potentially unnecessary. The reality is that in most cases that's the reality, but that doesn't make the reality the goal and, in fact, motivates these decisions.

I think Gervais captures these dynamics the best https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

this is same as saying soldiers in the military have the right to decide which orders they can disobey and which not

Almost - it's called "mission command" and the core idea is to prioritize initiative, flexibility, and independent judgment over strict adherence to orders’ exact wording.

https://www.army.mil/article/106872/understanding_mission_co...

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