Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division | Hacker News Reader

Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

bbc.com

379 pointsmosura521 comments

These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.

> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings".

While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.

Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.

So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.

The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.

"job loss" is purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.

It's the same as language like "officer involved shooting" to avoid saying "an officer shot a person" or calling a "murder" a "loss of life".

The more important thing it does though is remove culpability from the employee who doesn't have a job anymore. That person will be looking for a job (we assume, perhaps a few will just retire or something else). The companies they apply at will want to know why they no longer work at Amazon - there is a big difference between "I was sexually harassing my coworkers" (pick a crime, sexual harassment seems to be the big one these days), and "Amazon decided they didn't need my job done any more".

"culpability" is also purposefully loaded. It's not wrong for a company to decide that certain jobs are no longer needed. How they handle that could be more or less considerate of the human impact, but there's really no way to do it that won't cause some some upset to the terminated employee.

It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"

I can only imagine what this will do to morale. If even positive quarters means job cuts, why even try to have a positive quarter.

> purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.

Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."

And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."

If a person fails to understand they are essentially working for a feudal lord when they sign up to work for Amazon, the educational system has failed.

In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.

Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?

Whenever there are layoffs of a major company, like half the comments here always bemoan the particular wording the article or company uses to describe the layoffs. It's a pointless exercise IMO (though I agree with you, ironically "firing" is less accurate than "let go").

Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.

Well their actions suck and their reasoning is probably a lie. So... what now? I already cancelled my Prime subscription this year.

> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations.

This meaning is present in many people's minds. It is not present in many people's minds or any dictionary I saw ever.

to remove someone from their job, either because they have done something wrong or badly, or as a way of saving the cost of employing them[1]

The act or an instance of dismissing someone from a job.[2]

the action of forcing somebody to leave their job[3]

And so on.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fire

[2] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/firing

[3] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

counterpoint:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fire#Verb

4. (transitive, employment) To terminate the employment contract of (an employee), especially for cause (such as misconduct, incompetence, or poor performance).

> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations.

AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc.

Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".

That’s what I was thinking but I looked it up in the dictionary and appears that firing is already pretty neutral yet picked up the negative connotation, presumably because most people consider firings to be with cause. Even ‘layoffs’ has picked up a negative connotation. I’m not sure if it’s possible for language to to continuously outrun the associations, I guess we either police the language more fervently or continue inventing new words.

Part of me hates the capriciousness of randomly selected layoffs but it’s done for a few main reasons, firstly that it’s not exploitable by internal politicking (at least less explicable). Secondly, reduces exposure to lawsuits about performance. Thirdly, reduces reputational damage to those laid off. Of course there is an incredible incentive to lie about the randomness.

The only phrases they should be using are “Amazon lays off 14,000…” or (in the case of with cause) “Amazon fires 14,000…”

To me everything else is weasel words.

> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause,

People are fired for a cause, namely Amazon needs more profit for its shareholders.

Why is downsizing and an employee’s role no longer being cost effective for the business not considered “cause” for firing?

IANAL, but I believe "cause" means "the employee gave the company cause to fire them". Poor performance, bad conduct, etc.

Cause in this context specifically refers to the employee having done something wrong or illegal and means the employee is guilty of misconduct.

In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.

There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.

With cause think crimes or near crimes. Sexually harassment of a coworker, taking things from the warehouse...

I was just thinking the same, this is quite the weasel wording. Not only the “losses” but the passive voice. As if Amazon is a person who walked to work one day and realise it has a hole in its pocket from which thousands of jobs fell off. “Oh well, these things happen, not my fault and nothing I can do about it”, Amazon says as it shrugs its shoulders and whistles down the factory floor with a skip in its step.

“Passive voice” is a grammatical term.

“Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice.

“14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the passive voice.

There is not a 1:1 relationship between being vague about agency and using the passive voice.

GP obviously meant passive tone, not passive noun-verb relationship.

Still puts them in a weak position to critique others on their use of words. We might like to hold the BBC to a higher standard but none of the big news sites are good at details like this.

I've heard it described as the "exculpative voice".

Correct. There's nothing vague about "the burglar was shot by me."

It's passive but crystal clear.

Grammatically correct, but missing the narrative subtext.

"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.

People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.

This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.

"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.

Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.

The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.

This also stuck out to me, but in defense of Amazon (yuck), I don't see that language directly from anyone at Amazon. They use the regular "reduction in corporate workforce" BS that every big company on earth uses. It just seems like an editorial choice unless I'm missing something.

There's an interesting asymmetry in language in this area.

Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry.

But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost".

If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.

Doublespeak? Try to speak in such a legalese way that although things are technically true, yet still those words are crafted in such a way to influence others...

So in this case of our capitalist system, doublespeak exists in such a way because they can create money or not lose money by doing such doublespeak as saying to investors this as a destroyed would make them have a negative connotation with amazon itself which would reduce their stock price.

Everything is done for the stock price. Everything. The world is a little addicted on those shareholders returns that we can change our language because of it.

"job losses" is BBC editorializing. They do not use that term in their letter: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...

I sincerely suspect the BBC would only ever use "fired"/"firings" if the employees were being dismissed for conduct reasons, since that's the common usage in British English. I've been let go -- indeed, I've lost my job (it's the employees who suffer job losses, not the employer) -- but I've never been fired.

"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears.

I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.

"Made redundant" is another term for the latter.

I think we may be hitting an issue in translation between English and American; in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy". "Job losses" is a perfectly reasonable neutral phrase here. Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.

People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.

> Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.

This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years

I think American English is the same colloquially. “I got fired” means I didn’t perform or did something wrong. “I got laid off” is our “I was made redundant”.

“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.

Fired means terminated for any reason to many Americans. And academics, economists, and lawyers avoid it in my experience.

> in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy"

OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)

How would you describe that, in British English?

"Breach of contract"? "Sacked" would probably work colloquially.

Indeed, Amazon use the euphemism, "making organizational changes".

It’s equivalent to “restructuring” which doesn’t directly mean reduction in force but it does mean that I directly.

Makes it sound like they shuffled desks and gave everyone new team names. How fun!

(Not like, you know, some people getting divorced soon, some people biting a revolver soon)

And by applying these organizational changes, each person can become more load bearing and have so much more scope and impact. This is not a loss, it's a great win for everyone! /s

> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.

This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.

"Letting go" belongs in the same HR phrasebook. They didn't ask permission to quit and the company were so generous to let them, the initiative was from the other side.

I thought the modern lingo was "impacted". So and so was impacted. Ten thousand employees were impacted. It avoids let go, but detaches as much as possible from the personal crisis.

That reads differently to me. The company is doing the letting go. Like letting loose. Or letting fly. It's agency on the part of the company. Letting them see. All of these will have euphemistic overtones as no company will want to say that they axed 10,000 people.

Yeah a classic euphemism.

It’s better than “RIFed,” at least.

There is so much stupidity to unpack here. They say they need to use the opportunity provided by AI. However, what kind of opportunity is that requiring them to fire people in order to use it? Is AI making them more efficient or less efficient? If it's making more efficient, why they need to lay off all these people who are getting more efficient? So that other companies will pick up the workers they spend so much time to train on their systems, and replicate the same technologies elsewhere?

I think these companies have lost all their brains and there is a stupid AI system making bad decisions for them. I also fully expect these companies to lose their shirt to smarter companies in the next few years and decades.

Jeffrey Bezos: All those jobs will be lost. Like tears in the rain.

(you inspired me)

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A blue-green planet from suborbital space. Four commas in my net worth. I watched tens of thousands of employees get misplaced in my couch cushions. All their jobs will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Companies have no incentive to employ as many people as possible. Really it’s the opposite, make as much money as possible, while paying as few employees as possible.

That is the incentive to employee more people - they can do more with those people. There is a balance between the two though. More people means less focus.

The incentive many times is to create a scarcity of talent for other tech companies by hiring as many experts as you can. Facebook, Amazon, and many others have been employing this strategy for over a decade, but now that the era of cheap money is over we're seeing a pivot away.

100%. Amazon hired 14,000 people, and now it's firing 14,000 people it no longer wants on its payroll. Plain and simple.

Nah, it gained 14,000 people, they kinda sneak in to the buildings and start doing work if you aren't serious about your perimeter security.

From the CNN report [1]:

---

Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.

"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.

---

[1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs

Their addition of AI into Quicksight (their BI tool) really cemented for me how much they're willing to bluff to look relevant. They launched the AI addition at least a year ago, but recently rebranded the whole thing as "Quick Suite", promoting new AI capabilities. It really just seems like a new skin, with more purple. So far, out of 4 people at my org who tried it, all were disappointed after upgrading. I get much better results from sending a CSV to ChatGPT and asking for a graph.

It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.

Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.

Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?

Continually AI is used to justify layoffs that seem like simple corrections to overhiring.

I always wonder if the people responsible for the over-hiring are on the block? My personal experience suggests not.

Most boards(particularly of large publicly traded tech companies) don't hire CEOs to ensure their companies remain stable in the longterm at the expense of profits, they hire them to grow short term profits.

Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.

I think it depends on the company. I don't know how bad of a problem it is for big businesses like Amazon. Sure there's some lost profits and a write-down with the layoff, but it's not like Amazon hasn't been successful and profitable in the meantime. The overhiring may be justifiable as a defensive strategy.

I was at a smaller public company that overhired during COVID then struggled with profits (among other things). CEO and leadership lost a ton of money due to the share price drops from COVID peaks and CEO was ultimately pushed out.

Replace Jassy with AI

GPT-1 or GPT-2, which would match his reasoning abilities, are unfortunately deprecated, so we can't.

They will. But by the time it happens, Jassy already made millions in cash + much more in stocks and will retire comfortably while others will slave away for new AI overlords.

Prepare for the bogeyman.

"Agents" is now a word on my corporate bullshit bingo card

They are neither. They eliminated 14k roles. Employees have 90 days to find new roles. It remains to be seen how many end up being fired.

They just have to look harder and they'll find those jobs they lost.

Is there a difference?

Passive voice deflects responsibility and agency.

Loss happens, firings are a decision.

Ironically, Amazon's document writing culture stresses NOT using passive voice, but it seems acceptable to do so when you need to spin a PR.

in the uk job losses and firings are different things, with different meanings, so the criticism here is a bit off.

job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job

(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")

Same as "hackers stole your data" versus "we left your data on an open S3 bucket"

We didn't fail to secure things because we spent our security budget on security theatre - we were just kindly offering those poor hackers money to support their families.

It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”

They aren’t accidents, it’s an inherent part of how we designed cars and roads and we decided as society that we are ok with thousands of people killed by cars.

> It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”

See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:

> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.

[…]

> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.

* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...

For automobiles specifically:

* https://crashnotaccident.com

* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...

* https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...

Michigan.gov website references Merriam-Webster dictionary definition "an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance".

Then it says no one is at fault, but the definition specifically included carelessness and ignorance which does imply fault.

> Calling a crash an “accident” suggests no one is at fault. In reality, crashes result from preventable actions like distraction, inattention, or risky driving.

But all of these go under carelessness / ignorance.

And there is always a party that's at fault traffic accidents.

Normal dialogue:

Bob: I got into a traffic accident.

Alice: Who was at fault?

Bob: ...

killed by drivers, cars are inanimate objects

Killed semantics includes intentionality (and lack of), while dying by accident clearly removes any intentionality whatsoever.

So it's much more faithful to truth to talk about accidents than by killing, even if both terms are semantically correct.

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it” syndrome.

It’s like a rocket flew into the refugee camp vs the occupation forces struck the refugee camp with a rocket.

My favourite is during terrorist attacks in Europe, it's always like "car attacks crowd". Like the car's wife had left it and it had decided to go out with a bang.

The problem is, there isn't much initial facts to base on, other than that a vehicle has plowed into a crowd. In the early 30-60 minutes, you often don't even know how many people died and how many are injured because emergency services are still working on rescue (alive people) and recovery (dead people).

Maybe it's political or religious terrorism, maybe it's suicide-by-cop, maybe it's a generic mental health issue (think schizophrenics whose head voice tells them to commit violence), maybe it's a health issue (heart attack, driver floors the gas pedal), maybe it's a streetrace gone wrong, maybe it's a DUI, maybe it's a mechanical issue (loss of brake/steering), maybe it's a geriatric driver who just doesn't have any idea where he even is, maybe it's a driver blindly following Maps and ignoring the policeman winking at him, thus not noticing he's heading right for a rally.

You see, the list of issues why a car plows into a crowd is very very long, and often it takes the police hours to determine what's going on. They gotta interview bystanders and victims, they gotta obtain and review camera footage, possibly search the driver's home and digital devices - because unlike Twitter pseudo-journalists and click/ragebait "news" media, police can normally be held accountable if they claim something in public that doesn't turn out to be true.

Damn cars why do they do that! Ironically soon cars may start actually doing it.

Normally it’s the terrorists that are so bright that they fire rockets into their own territory. So, “rocket flew” is actually being nice to them.

The same difference as in "He died of heart attack" and "She was killed in a car crash".

Or one of my favorites, "was hit by a car". While true in the strict physical sense, that’s like reporting that someone was "shot by a gun".

"killed by an officer's duty weapon" or "died in an officer-involved shooting" are the ways police departments tend to put it.

Maybe it's an effort to be more polite than "by some prick who can't drive".

I suppose there's at least one example of someone being hit by a car that slipped off a car transporter too. "Had car thrown at him by negligent shipping company" would be a more click worthy headline though

Fox news spin: "his heart murdered him, as we all know all hearts secretly want to do to all of us".

Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language.

If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".

That would make Bezos look bad .

"Regrettable attrition".

Going to go wash my hands after typing that.

>Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language.

"Job losses" isn't passive voice. "Jobs were lost" would be passive voice.

Why are people so hung up on "job losses", as if we don't hear this every day? Who cares?

You're being pedantic for no good reason. You know what I meant.

If you don't care about this conversation, why are you participating?

> let people go

Or, as you said, firings.

It's a loss for the one being fired.

These numbers are inflated to be unparsable. I suspect it's either 14 people or a small monetary loss. Do you feel different today?

The conspiracist view would be that the media-industrial complex would want to prevent the stock price of a given company from dipping, as well as help them skirt around legal issues that may arise for the company in question if everyone reports the "layoff" as such, which is not always done according to practices (there are sometimes reports in the media about such, not specifically about Amazon though).

Mass layoffs tend to make stock prices go higher, not lower... so nothing to worry about there. If the news stories were even more brutal, accusing Amazon of axing tens of thousands and then laughing when those people begged and pleaded that they wouldn't be able to afford baby formula, I think I suspect that this would be even better at closing time than some less offensive journalism.

... which will also result in bonuses to execs for hitting/exceeding their efficiency goals.

> These aren't "job losses"

You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here.

Narcissistic processes/systems/people always externalize the consequences of their own actions by pushing those consequences off on others while keeping the benefits they pillaged for themselves.

Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse?

You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.

To lose one job, Mr. Bezos, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 14000 looks like carelessness.

It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you.

All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.

And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.

I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return. With Amazon obviously the risk of that is low. But for many new companies the risk is very high. Therefore the payoffs are also high, to attract people to take the risk. Where I sympathize with your view is that sometimes an investment risk is taken, and the payout far exceeds the risk by any reasonable and sane margin. So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures, on the hope that the one successful one is so successful that it pays the losses of the failed ones. But yea, this system is not really working for the vast majority of people and that is a tragedy.

> you get a regular paycheck

No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.

Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.

And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.

---

The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.

1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.

2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.

In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.

They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.

> As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.

Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.

Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!

> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures

The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.

> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:

- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.

- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA

- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools

- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.

In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.

Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.

>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company

Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?

Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?

If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.

Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!

So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.

Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.

Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.

The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?

> But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?

Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.

This is unfortunately true. Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.

Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.

Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes. Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.

Most corporate employees at Amazon do get some stock, and you’re also free to exchange the money you earn for ownership of any public company.

Well you do get that weird "ownership" concept, pushed on everyone by that bozo Bezos, where you are supposed to "act as owner" of the business, but get no benefits out of it, only the risks :)

Cash comp at Amazon is extremely limited, with at least half of your comp coming from RSUs (or cash equivalent during the first year). So if Amazon is wildly successful, you do get a huge benefit out of it (my grants resulted in a salary that was ~ $100K more than the band I was assigned at review).

Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.

"getting paid" is the operative word. Employees get paid, that is their compensation. If you want to be an owner, you need to either invest, or have that clearly included in your employment agreement.

Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.

Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.

People can use money to buy shares in companies to participate in their profits. Owners of companies carry the risk that the company goes bankrupt.

What’s the actual hazard there? I get that a company going bankrupt causes money to evaporate into wages and capital. But are the owners actually facing any real risk? You have to be an accredited investor to buy in in any real way and one of the tests is that your investment is below a certain percentage of your means.

This is called "consensual exchange" and it is by far the most ethical way to run society. You don't have to agree to these terms. You can go start your own company. It's a free country. The alternative always seems to boil down to various bureaucrats dictating terms to people. What gives them the right to do so?

You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.

The same can be said in the relationship of the company towards the employee. Any employee can leave any moment they want and all the investments the company has done on them will be lost.

I think you just invented co-operatives.

Correct, owning the business will almost always be a better financial deal than working for the business.

Which business? The majority of businesses fail and never turn a profit. A success like Amazon is the exception, not the rule.

You forgot to mention the part where they also invest millions in lobbying and buying off politicians to control policy, and hundreds of millions or billions acquiring media companies to control the public narrative, all so that ordinary workers - who vastly outnumber the billionaires - do not get out the pitchforks and demand a more equitable distribution of wealth.

To be clear, it’s worse. Read the press release carefully:

1. 14k was the net change in “corporate headcount” which is PR puffery speak saying they’re firing a lot more but when you net out folks let go slotting into open roles elsewhere the net change today would be a 14k reduction

2. It also says that “looking ahead” “we expect to… find additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.” That’s PR puffery speak for “there will be more layoffs coming soon.”

Amazon has really struggled under Andy Jassy’s tenure as CEO. Innovation has slowed, and there were huge misses on areas like AI.

What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership. Andy Jassy preaches about company culture and efficiency but the culture went to crap and the company became bloated on his watch so…

Amazon likely needs new leadership to get it past the Andy Jassy chapter and move to a new phase of innovation and growth. It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.

> there were huge misses on areas like AI

Honest question. What could they have possibly gained from AI? What did they miss out on by not getting into AI?

The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs.

Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.

I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?

Have you noticed how bad their devices dept was gutted? I can easily imagine a proper AI system backing alexa, rolled out to all existing customers, which would potentially boost the viability of that whole product line.

right now I have no idea what Alexa is for anymore. It pings me when a package arrives but so does my phone. I can't order from it, because it makes me open the app. I can manage a shopping list I guess? I ask it the temp outside from time to time b/c I don't want to go look at the thermometer outside my window?

A proper device would discuss with me product options and Q&A, or something. Even piping Grok/GPT5 through to answer questions would be light years ahead of the current crap answers I get when I ask questions. And why doesn't it do a good job of identifying songs that are playing? That's trivial software, and it could recommend some songs like this (which is something I use GPT for).

I don't know I'm just a trad software engineer, but it sure seems like it's low risk / high improvement to at least have a modern LLM feature in that product.

AWS is probably in last place among computing clouds on AI and the AI managed services from AWS are pretty second-rate.

Amazon had Alexa (Echos) everywhere and that was teed up to knock it out of the park putting a real AI assistant in every home. Then the devices team totally blew it and did almost nothing to take advantage of that huge lead. Folks are now basically just throwing these things in the trash and the devices unit is a huge pit of cash on fire.

The list goes on…

Surely b2b "model API provider" would've been a great fit for Amazon, but others are absolutely dominating this space right now.

The silver lining for Amazon is that nobody is making a profit by actually providing that service. It's just massive valuations and VC money flowing freely instead of a sustainable business model, and Amazon plays a much longer game - they can recover even if being so far behind is a "bad look" for their current management.

It's not hard to switch between OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure/Google/whatever and Amazon can surely eventually compete well in this space.

They had the infrastructure and muscle to put a dent into Google Search and Microsoft Enterprise software... but instead they've ceeded to OpenAI and Anthropic.

They had a bridgehead device of the type that OpenAI are struggling to create with Jonny Ive in Alexa... but nothing seems to be happening with Alexa now.

Why am I calling Anthropic/Google/OpenAI APIs for my AI inference and not AWS ones? Even Azure has some decent AI inference endpoints I encounter with clients.

Never seen a single person use AWS for this.

What if I told you that Amazon has spent more money on AI this year than any other company? On track to spend nearly 150B by the end of the year?

Short term - higher stock evaluation. Long term - depends on what value AI bubble will be able to deliver. But it's not like Amazon is sitting out of this game, they do invest into their AI (Nova models), with little return to show for it.

>It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.

You had me all the wya until this line.

First, Andy led AWS to what it is today.

Second, Amazon had a problem before Andy took over. Way too many managers and incompetent people in very senior levels. The fact that he's doing something about it is a good thing for Amazon. You don't become a CEO of a behemoth such as Amazon and expect to show impact within 6 months. It takes years.

In terms of AI, they did invest in Anthropic early on and are a significant stakeholder. That's critical since Anthropic is a trillion dollar company in the making and they trump everyone in enterprise AI. They are much more likely to succeed with smart partnerships than doing their own thing.

1. Lots of cracks showing in AWS before he took the big job, lack of focus, bloat of too many services with too few users

2. He then hired Adam to take over AWS which didn’t work out well

3. Good to see he’s cleaning things up, but we’re past the “clean things up” phase for a CEO. He’s been in role for a while now. That should have been the first few years of his tenure.

4. Anthropic was a good investment, but Amazon is just one of many investors. It’s nothing like the partnership that MSFT and OpenAI have, which was further strengthened with today’s announcements there. Amazon has nothing comparable to counter that.

>What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership.

It's the result of economic headwinds and companies switching to maintenance mode. Except whever they can sell "AI" in their initiative. And of course, add in a healthy dose of outsourcing under the hood.

Yeah that was my read too, I'm anticipating more rounds over the next few months

Once a company moves on to recurring, large-scale layoffs justified by vague corporate Mumbo-Jumbo, I think it is safe to assume it is a "day 2" company.

The original shareholder letter said the company wouldn’t pander to Wall Street or focus on short term improvements. It’s now slashing jobs a few days before earnings to try and placate Wall Street since it can’t grow via innovation. That’s all the proof you need to see that Amazon is now in full “Day 2” mode.

I was not aware of this term before.

For others: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeff-bezos-day-1-versus-2-com...

Non-LinkedIn version: https://ourdinnertable.wordpress.com/2025/05/06/jeff-bezos-d...

> “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by death. And that’s why it’s always Day 1.”

Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep

Is this one of those things that are meant to sound deep and profound by inventing terminology, but isn't? That's such a like day 2 person thing to do.

(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)

Had completely forgotten that futurama bit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FvrcvPNpdd8

Which is the one people like to hug?

Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep

Sharks eat sheep?

I hope the shark thing isn’t said in earnest ever by anyone. It is the height of parody of a hustle culture bro. On second thought would you want $1 million now or $5000 a day and the guy says neither because that’s not how you build wealth or something. It’s probably number one.

I'm not really sure how this fits with Amazon's corporate culture. I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis.

If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?

My theory is that when an organization descends into a cycle of repetitive downsizings, it inevitably leads to people focusing more on protecting their jobs than on business value.

By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.

I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis.

Local TV says it's because too many people caved in to the return-to-work demand.

First employees work for the customer, then they work for the company, then they work for themselves. Sounds like Amazon is between the 2nd and 3rd stage.

there are alot of tenured people that are good at politics, but dont provide much actual value

Or they know something that the current Administration does not (or is withholding)? Maybe it's time to buckle up for a coming economic storm.

I wonder if the company that makes part of its money from consumer goods shipped from China knows something about the impact of tariffs on consumer spending. They've probably already assessed the impact on their models of Black Friday and Christmas purchases and decided it looks bad.

(most of their money is from AWS, though. I wonder if AI is making that less stock-relevant.)

Oh no, they might only make $15 billion instead of $18 billion next quarter?

> coming economic storm

We are already in it.

Don't worry, when ZIRP returns, they'll be a day 1 company again.

People mistook ZIRP for genius for 25 years.

This is a little exaggerated, considering ZIRP was 2009 to 2022, 13 years, and came well after Amazon had established its trajectory.

And they did kind of successfully roll out a global logistics network, at a time when no one thought anyone could compete with Walmart. And they became leaders in the cloud computing space.

These aren't trivial accomplishments solely enabled by ZIRP.

I think stuff like this will eventually pull Bezos back in.

Is there any non-day 2 company in this day and age? Seems like everyone's laying off en masse. Even the job reports can't hide it.

If you're not working in nursing the flux of retired Baby boomers you're either already rich or on unsteady ground.

From: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...

> we want to operate like the world’s largest startup

This is a phrase I hear repeated by leadership a lot, and it's usually code for "why doesn't everyone else just make the business grow faster?" It is almost always, as in this case, followed by statements that suggest they don't understand what is actually different about the way a start up functions and why they stopped operating that way at some point in the first place.

Much like the classic "our department in [big company] works a lot like a startup"

Sounds like some marketer got tasked into trying to convince a group of people that the company is looking at aggressive growth and unrealized markets for as long as they are willing to entertain that delusion.

I worked at AOL back when they did quarterly "staff reductions". They would go and hire lots of them right back; it was an accounting trick. Never mind the fact that families were affected and employees were constantly stressed near the end of every quarter. Those things don't matter, quarterly numbers do when growth has stalled.

My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.

This is a great tactic, where competent, good workers find a more stable job, and the ones unable to get a better job are then rehired. On one hand, you can bully them more, and they'll stay, on the other hand, they're so bad at their job, no one else wants them either.

I believe they call this "contracting". Which is not what they purported to do. Having to go through all the bullshit about the hiring process, benefits, taxes, and all that over and over is an absurd inefficiency. It also doesn't help when people are just trying to feed and care for their families.

Because of that experience (and lots of other anecdotal evidence), I see no reason for anybody to ever work at amazon unless they are ok with being a contractor.

Doesn't sound very labour-law friendly

I mean, no-one messages each other on AOL now so yeah. Those quarterly earnings though, they were something

Classic Bluth Company "Black Friday" move: https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Friday

> They would go and hire lots of them right back; it was an accounting trick.

How did it benefit the company's accounting? Doesn't it create an additional expense in both severance and hiring costs?

Bearing in mind that I'm nothing resembling an accountant, I believe it has to do with getting them off the books by the end of the quarter before the statement goes out. That shows as less liability for the quarterly statement. The cost of severance and hiring is for the next quarter, so it doesn't affect the current quarter's numbers.

So:

- Company has 10 employees at an annual cost of 100k each. That's 250k (1mm / 4) of employee expenses for the quarter.

- Company lays off 5 employees right before the end of the quarter. That's only 5 employees on the payroll in the current quarter, because you account for the number of employees when the statement is issued. Re-hiring and severance payouts are going to be done sometime in the future.

Congratulations, your employee expense was only 125k for the quarter!

Never mind the fact that families were affected and employees were constantly stressed near the end of every quarter.

It's this sort of thing that has me re-thinking the fairness of employees giving employers the customary (in the United States) two week notice before leaving.

Employees don't get two weeks notice before being fired without cause.

It's supposed to be because replacing an employee is so difficult for the company. Well, it's a hell of a lot more difficult for an employee to lose a job than it is for a company to lose a worker.

If I'm employer "at will" then my employer should also be retained "at will." If they want to negotiate another arrangement, that's fine.

For layoffs like this, employers typically give out two months of severance, so I'm not sure what you're whining about.

Of course if you're willing to burn bridges with your employer, there's nothing stopping you from quitting immediately. Have at it.

This is a reflection of 1) compensation has come down since the ZIRP era at least in some roles and 2) it's a hirer's market.

This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down.

I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere

I've taken pay cuts twice in my career, but both times it was at unfunded startups and it was more of a "we'll get you back for this later" (one did, one did not).

I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.

Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.

This. Companies will always min/max a system so they retain as much money as possible for as few hands as they can manage, always funneled upwards to executives and shareholders.

Rather than trying to “negotiate” with these entities, regulations should be wielded to stop min-maxing beyond a certain point or in bad faith, and firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.

“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.”

That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.

Behavior is shaped by incentives.

Countries used to be overwhelmingly autocratic - often ruled by hereditary dictators called kings. People realized unchecked power will always lead to abuse and overthrew them.

Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].

If only we had a system of rules we could vote on which would make this arrangement forbidden...

---

[0]: You can't legally overthrow a government either but if you do it successfully anyway, then you are the government and you decide what is legal.

Ironically, no democratic countries I know of have clauses in their ruleset ("laws") which declare that people are allowed to overthrow the government if it's no longer democratic, even if those democratic governments were created by overthrowing a previous dictatorship.

You can't fire people and rehire them at lower pay; they'd be so upset at you you wouldn't be able to trust them to do anything properly. What you can do is fire people you think you're paying too much and hire someone else to do the same job at lower pay.

>Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.

And the reverse? We literally just went through a phase where tech companies over hired like crazy, at ridiculous salaries. We had people remote working 3 or more jobs at a time. And yet, people still act like companies have all the power?

This stuff ebbs and flows. The reality is the value of your labour fluctuates, despite the inconvenience of that to you.

as if they don't already; the job market is a market with a mechanism for price discovery (duh. wouldn't be a market otherwise.)

the unfortunate fact is that the people forced to be sellers of their time on the market have livelihoods and families to support, so the market is in most places very heavily regulated, some would say overregulated. OTOH capitalism really did pull out many countries out of extreme poverty, so it isn't globally bad, but outcomes for individual participants aren't always... that great.

The Colorado rules about publishing salary ranges really help make it a true market. Better insight on compensation, in more places, would be even better. And evolving laws as the workarounds evolve; this is why we have legislators.

> I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary.

They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/copays/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.

Are you getting cost of living raises that beat inflation recently? How do I negotiate for those

get a new job every two years, spend the first year working hard and the second year getting a new job

Find another buyer willing to pay you what you want.

Easy, be a low-wage worker. Their gains outpaced inflation since COVID.

Or, even easier, just be a capital owner, instead of a wagie. (/s)

The instant that offer was made, any sensible person will start looking for another job. The only people who will stay are the ones who can’t get hired elsewhere. You’ll lose your best people and keep the worst.

Layoffs are very tricky because just the act of laying people off can trigger good employees who remain to start looking elsewhere. It can trigger a sort of evaporative cooling of your whole workforce. A strategy of offering reduced pay instead of being laid off would exacerbate it.

Sharing the risk (and rewards) with the company is why we take 50% or more of our comp as RSUs instead of being paid in straight cash. This should already be factored in. If the company does bad, we should already be taking an (effective) pay cut.

Amazon's backloaded vesting is terrible (for both Amazon and Amazonians) for this exact reason.

Spreadsheet doesn’t like that option because number go down more with this option

I wish the average and median salary of every position at the company was legally required to be made available to every employee and candidate so the negotiation can be an actual negotiation instead of a guessing game.

I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.

But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.

It technically is in California. If your position is posted in a job ad in California is needs to disclose wage.

If we're on wish mode: I sure wish worker would come together and proper unionize rather than do anything else to grovel to the company. These are not new problems, and blood was spilt to get where we are today, follow by decades of disestablishment to claw it back.

From the article, Amazon has 1.5 million employees across offices and warehouses. With about 350,000 corporate employees in executive, managerial and sales.

So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?

I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI

Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment

It’s actually not warehouses. It’s groceries. Amazon jumped from a few hundred thousand to 1mm+ with the acquisition of Whole Foods. The corporate jobs is inclusive of engineering and aws.

They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.

These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.

Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.

Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.

This is a lot. If you are in a company large enough, you surely know at least 20 people and one of them is gone. The earlier floated figure was even larger: 30K

Let them prove that this is not a big deal, but also take note that this is going to continue.

It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.

> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.

> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.

So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.

Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?

We all know that this is just the beginning to get us desensitized.

The leaked plan is to fire up to 600,000 people. So roughly up to 40% of their workforce.

It really feels like we are in the middle of a recession.

Worse, we’ve been in one but have been pretending we aren’t. Stock goes up.

If not for the top 10 of the S&P 500 - the companies that can get a meeting at the white house - we'd probably be in a recession and S&P would be down.

Previously discussed:

“ Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512317

Waiting for the music to stop…

(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)

The biggest "pretend" is where spokesmen, spin doctors, and sycophants for the plutocrat class have somehow convinced the 99% that stocks going up makes more jobs for the little people.

Line goes up or it gets the stonks again

Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.

It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.

Is there anyway to "fix" this? WHy are people only thinking short term these days? That mindset seems a bit... morbid.

"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."

The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.

(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)

The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.

I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.

Is that an increase in sales, or just everything getting more expensive?

A year on year increase in sales is real. It's not silly metrics like "net worth". Actual value is being exchanged.

The middle? Oh we are just starting....

Our industry has probably been in a recession for the past 3-4 years. Where have you been?

We are…

We already were in one. You just waited until someone else told you it was too late.

Recession is a term with a very defined meaning and that meaning does not include employment at all.

It does include employment. It's discussed in terms of "employment" or "jobs" thresholds and trends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession

> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]

Yes, more accurately we're in the middle of an extremely shitty economy for everyone but stockholders

Recession is officially whatever NBER says it is and it doesn’t have a well defined meaning.

This is actually a good read: https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating

Employment is an important indicator according NBER.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...

By the way, could Amazon not even bother to proofread a mass layoff announcement? "We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly"

At least we know this was written by a human, because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake. Maybe they fired the proofreaders already.

> because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake

To be fair, an Amazon model might, so if they're using those.. /s

You would think that a company that's making some 50 billion in profits every year would be able to find something useful to do for those 14k people.

They definitely seem to have gone from “invest in growing the business at all costs” to “ruthless efficiency and cost cuts”

Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by this unfortunate corporate-involved job loss incident at this time.

Reports suggest there was an interaction that occurred between HR and some 13,000 staff, ultimately resulting in job losses. The staff were noted to be “behaving suspiciously “. Investigations are underway.

Rumours say a resignation letter was recovered from a bush nearby. We have Starbuck's ex-VP of HR with us in the studio tonight to help us make sense of the situation, and talk to us about their new book "Layoffs for Dummies".

Q3 results [PDF]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/...

Numbers are all in the black and up year over year and compared to previous quarter.

Double digit revenue growth in both retail and AWS.

Often I wonder whether corporate leaders took any kind of logic class in college or if they just have a fetish for harming people for no reason. Either that or whatever business school they went to believes that poor customer service and bad products increase revenue.

That's Q2. Q3 will be announced day after tomorrow. This announcement might mean they are not doing that well (compared to expectations).

So we'll probably start seeing other companies do their firing cycles again.

I guess this has just become kind of a feature of our times.

Offshoring definitely playing a part too according to the data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737134

The unemployment rate in the US is climbing. If you look at a 5-year curve, it looks like nothing. But if you look at a 3-year window it's devastating. Seeing the highs of 2003 and 2009 it seems likely that it will continue to climb. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

If you'd like to be really upset, check the labor participation rate.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

There's a whole lot that number doesn't capture, but broadly, U-3 is roughly flat and in the traditionally healthy range.

Apparently they let go some (or all?) of the AGS (amazon game studios) and putting New World (mmorpg game) on maintenance mode. This game currently has around 30-40k concurrent players on steam and probably as much or more on consoles. I feel bad for people got fired and gamers (myself included). I really like that game

My personal question is aren't managers in AWS technical people? Can't you offer them IC positions?

Google tried this and gave up, as it didn’t work out[1].

For now, there’s a lot of focus on automating software dev jobs, but I think companies are just starting to realize automation will thin the management layers as well.

[1] https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/3/50375/fil...

Wasn't technology supposed to enable workers to do more, instead of doing the same with less?

I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to. Then you look for low hanging “fruits” like this (cutting costs) instead of innovating and creating newer things (selling more).

Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to make their HR leaner.

> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.

I'm sure for some roles this works out. Software development has been doing it for decades: developers get better tools that make them more productive, this lowers costs, and at the lower price point there is a lot more demand for more and better software. Classic induced demand. But how much elastic demand is there for accounting or logistics?

Yeah, finally 1-2 billion profit more on top of the 68 billion they already generate.

Just imagine the productivity they could achieve if they kept those 14,000 and had them use AI, too! Productivity overload. Levels we have never seen.

Is this targeting mostly individual contributors? Or are Directors/VPs also getting cut just as equally?

That's a good one.

I don't understand this thread. Is Amazon supposed to keep expanding ever and ever again? If those people are needed, then Amazon will fall (good riddance), if they are not needed then that's just good business.

I don't see any issues as long as everyone plays a fair game.

Once a company reaches a certain size, it can limp along, hidden to everyone, for years - decades - before they go away.

“Amazon will fail”, maybe, in 50 years, from decisions made now.

>as long as everyone plays a fair game.

Well that's the issue. If you've been paying attention to what's really going on you know that this isn't a game at all but merely a hostile coup from the plutocracy. If you really think AI is automating all these jobs then you've fallen for the spin.

Is this their annual stack and cut?

AWS outages will become the norm?

I'm sure this was in the works long before last week's outage, but it's certainly a bad look. The industry broadly knows how Amazon works; I'm sure a few AWS customers are looking and wondering if it's finally biting them, right as they double down on the strategy.

> At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn).

Greed is good?

It's good. Until it isn't. And then everything collapses all at once.

It’s worth noting that they are offering folks the opportunity to find a new role internally. It’s layoffs with a touch of reallocation of people to more important projects.

And if it's anything like the external labor market, 98% of them won't actually get any answer back because there's no hiring at Amazon right now. At least, not in the US.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45730798

What’s the severance package at Amazon like?

Standard 3 mo w/ insurance during that period? Do they accelerate vesting schedule?

Any AMZN drones care to chime in?

1 month for each year and partial year worked. They don’t accelerate vesting schedule.

Former AWS drone. Fortunately I never had to work in an office.

Think bare minimum.

True, but I expect such nonsense from the company. There is absolutely no excuse for BBC to use this wording! Why would they?

Any word on what percentage hit AWS?

AGI has been achieved internally.

there is little mourning for people who didn't get hired at all in the first place.

Aws goes down. And then layoffs follow. Feels like Headlines management.

does we live in era that side hustles is an necessity????

Almost no side hustles make any money, most are simply a complete waste of time and energy. Hence no, everyone still needs jobs.

Can confirm — itsa me

Is there any meaningful way to get breakdowns by department, location, or race?

Economy in bad shape + AI bubble + tons of fake jobs = prepare for this to be much more common in the next coming years.

Natural correction for excessive money printed and ultra-low interest rates in the previous years

Oh, and by the way,

you're fired.

Fired?

W-W-What do you mean,

fired?

Um, how else

can I say it?

You're being let go,

your department's

being downsized,

you're part of

an outplacement,

we're going in a

different direction,

we're not picking

up your option...

Take your pick.

I got more.

"The Emperor's new groove"

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNZSgzjqQc4

everybody read 'bullshit jobs' and basically agreed

at first that just meant many of us adopted a middle-aged-coasting career strategy after covid and/or having kids

but now management is agreeing

Meanwhile new grads can't even start their careers to begin with and are left scambling to even take a step into adulthood. They missed the boar. kids aren't even on the horizon. What does that say?

> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures, external that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.

I’m fairly ignorant to these things, but why does Amazon need 350k corporate employees?

People losing jobs always sucks, but I can’t help but think that a company of this size inevitably has bloat that they do not need.

At this point it really does feel like a corporate welfare program.

Have you counted how many links there are on Amazon.com and how many services there are on AWS? Don't forget MGM etc. Just some back-of-the-envelope maths will tell you how many employees are needed.

I would agree that Amazon in general and AWS should never be this big. But that does not equal "bloated".

As competition catches up, Amazon is feeling like a corporate welfare program too.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45731199

Maybe, but this one has all the comments.

I’ve heard multiple numbers for this layoff from unofficial sources. Does anyone think Amazon was trying to identify a leak by letting internal parties know about the layoffs with slightly different details?

My totally uneducated guess is that they leak exaggerated numbers on purpose to make the real numbers look less bad in comparison. The idea being that a few days before the official news everyone is talking about a potential 30 or 40K people layoff. Then, when the official news come out and state that they are laying off 14K people, it sounds less dramatic (in relative terms). This makes people (who are not affected by this) to feel like the news were overblown and are not as significant.

Leaks are intentional. There's a reason they always happen and always in the same way.

are you talking about the difference is size (15,000 vs 30,000) and affected orgs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com