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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

> It is a fact that there have been 27,000+ Amazonians impacted by layoffs between 2022 and 2024, continuing into 2025. It's hard to know how many of these were AWS versus other parts of its Amazon parent, because the company is notoriously tight-lipped about staffing issues. Internal documents reportedly say that Amazon suffers from 69 percent to 81 percent regretted attrition across all employment levels. In other words, "people quitting who we wish didn't." The internet is full of anecdata of senior Amazonians lamenting the hamfisted approach of their Return to Office initiative; experts have weighed in citing similar concerns.

So the title is all speculation. The author put 2 and 2 together and concluded that 10 is greater than 9.

Worthless article.

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Maybe its speculation, but I mean drawing conclusions becomes easy when 40% of devops staff being laid off by AWS was in the news three days ago.

https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops...

AWS doesn’t even have a “devops team” nor even any devops job roles. AWS also does not use Terraform (which is what the article says everyone was replaced with) at any significant scale, so this article is similar junk.

Uh, they still have roles open for DevOps:

https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3080348/devops-engineer-linux-re...

https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3082914/devops-systems-engineer-...

This one mentions terraform by name (though that doesn't necessarily imply its in use, though having worked in large companies I would argue that sweeping statements about a popular technology not being used is likely to be wrong)

https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3042892/delivery-consultant-devo...

AWS does not have dedicated devops roles. All AWS SWEs are expected to take oncall shifts and respond to incidents, manage build pipelines, etc rather than having specific devops people to do it for them. The article you linked claiming 40% of them were fired is total junk. You can believe that or not, I don’t care.

The last one is a ProServe role, which is a consulting role that spends their time working in customer environments, which is where they may encounter terraform. It does not mean anything about internal use of terraform.

Again, I’d be wary making sweeping generalisations like that.

I already showed you that AWS has (or hires) DevOps people with publicly available information, maybe the article is incorrect but you’re clearly not better informed, so maybe cut it with the rude commentary.

Misunderstanding the things you are linking does not mean you proved anyone wrong.

I’m going to link this again, what role is this please:

https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3080348/devops-engineer-linux-re...

Within AWS this role falls under the Systems Engineer job family. It is not a devops role, and its involvement in events like today would be the same involvement as every other SWE at Amazon.

Just do a quick google search for that “40% of devops laid off” and you’ll see that it’s actually an old article from months ago that multiple people, including AWS employees, are saying is bullshit and unsourced.

edit: found another source that says this 40% number came from an AWS consultant that worked with customers to help them be better at DevOps, and it was 40% of their specific team that was laid off. Even if it were true, it has nothing to do with the internal operations of AWS services. This is why it’s important to understand the information you’re sharing before making judgements off of it.

All I am finding are corroborating articles, maybe you can help me here.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/aws_sheds_jobs/

Seems wild that you would promote job titles you don’t hire for, makes me think that it’s reasonable for news outlets to refer to those roles in the same way honestly.

There is nothing in that article that mentions either devops or 40% of any team or role being cut. It doesn’t corroborate anything.

It makes a direct claim of hundreds of cloud staff being laid off.

You know what though? I’m not wasting my time with you, the fact was that this was all over social media. Then a huge outage- my original comment was factually accurate even if we contend that the article itself was bunk. And AWS clearly hires DevOps staff.

You’ve not even disproved anything you’re just making me play internet fetch. I’m not replying anymore.

> It makes a direct claim of hundreds of cloud staff being laid off.

I don't have any dog in this fight, but I don't see where this article makes your case. From your article:

> We understand around 100 jobs are at stake.

> Sources familiar with AWS operations who requested anonymity told The Register most of the layoffs affected people in marketing and outreach roles, although chatter on sites like Blind suggests folks in frontline support and in other positions may have been affected, too.

You seem to be kind of annoyed that somebody on the internet hasn’t taken your assertion that you just sort of generally Know Better as strongly as you’d like. You could probably put this entire discussion to bed by clarifying your current position at AWS and how your job there gives you direct knowledge of their devops practices.

Source: Former AWS Professional Services employee.

Notice the job description:

As part of the AWS Managed Operations team, you will play a pivotal role in building and leading operations and development teams dedicated to delivering high-availability AWS services, including EC2, S3, Dynamo, Lambda, and Bedrock, exclusively for EU customers.

They aren’t looking for DevOpe engineers to work alongside the “service teams” - the teams that build and support internal AWS services. They are working with AWS customers who may already be using Terraform. AWS has a large internal consulting division staffed with full time employees. When they work with customers they will use Terraform if needed.

You could both be right if they are trying to expand terraform use from a beachhead to the entire company. You need to hire people with prior experience for such things.

I work for Amazon (AWS for 4 years then “the website” side of the house for the last 3)

The previous commenter is correct, there is no NOC or devops team and I’ve not encountered a Devops job family and I’ve never seen terraform internally. Within AWS, the service teams that work these outages are the same ones that design the service, fix bugs, deploy the pipelines, be oncall, etc. the roles that fill these teams are pretty much one of three types: nde, sde, sysde. They typically use cdk if they’re doing AWS things, else they’ll use internal tooling.

The job you posted is a customer facing consultant like role - customers use terraform so having a customer facing consultant type that knows how customer-y things work is a good decision.

I worked at AWS and still have friends who work there. I don’t know any L5s who wouldn’t jump at a chance to leave if they even got a slightly worse offer than what they are making now. I know a few L6s and L7s that would stick around out of momentum.

But I know very few people in the industry who know about Amazon’s reputation that have a life long dream of working there given a choice.

I was 46 when I was hired there for a “permanently remote [sic] field by design role” in ProServe and it was my 8th job out of college. I went in with my eyes wide open. I had a plan, stay for four years, sell my RSUs as soon as they vested, pay off debt, save some money, put it on my resume to open doors and make connections and leave.

I was never expecting to make more when I left. I used the time to downsize and reduce my expenses - including moving to state tax free Florida.

When I saw the writing on the wall, I played the game while I was on focus to get my next vest and wait for the “get 40k+ severance and leave immediately or try to work through the PIP”.

I took the latter and had three offers within 3 weeks. This was late 2023.

How long did you stick it out? Were you close toward completing your plan?

Close enough. I missed 2 vesting periods. But the severance and rapidly having a job made up for one and I got refreshers my third year that I hadn’t counted on.

I left debt free, sold my old home for exactly twice what I had built for 8 years earlier, downsized to a condo half the price I sold it for (and 1/3 the size) and I was debt free with savings.

I’m now a staff consultant working full time at a 3rd party AWS consulting firm with a lot less stress and still remote. They were the last to fall. But AWS made their ProServe department return to office at the beginning of this year.

Ah that's really nice for you. Congratulations for gritting the teeth and making through all those years.

Just because its speculation doesnt mean its worthless. But yeah it should be taken as speculation rather than a validated and tested hypithesis

Anything that wastes my time and only reveals its half-assed reasoning half way through the article is indeed worthless.

You could make smart inferences based on past and very frequent occurrences.

Or you could just say "there is no way the thing that constantly happens over and over again has happened once again, just no way".

Staff cuts constantly happen in the name of maximising profits. They always yield poor results for a company's performance. Every time. Especially for the consumer's side of it (not the company's finances of course).

Every time.

But maybe this time it's different. That one time.

First time reading El Reg?

i mean, you can assume if its on theregister its not going to have some kind of academic rigor or whatever it might be you're looking for. its the register, same basic rigor quality as the ny post.

that said, my suspicion is they're likely on to something here regarding layoffs and quality degradation.

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