Amazon layoffs now expected to mount to 20k, including top managers(computerworld.com)
computerworld.com
Amazon layoffs now expected to mount to 20k, including top managers
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3682071/amazon-layoffs-now-expected-to-mount-to-20000-including-top-managers.html
71 comments
I'm not on blind but I thought you need a corporate email to even sign up there?
Not really, I think any non-typical-email-provider domain is being accepted. You can buy a .xyz domain for cheap and use that.
No Work Email?
Sign up with a personal email address and get read-only access to limited content.
https://us.teamblind.com/logic
https://us.teamblind.com/logic
They have a special feature for people who have been laid off to request access.
> I'd be pretty nervous giving a 2 week notice atm.
I’d second this advice and add…don’t let dollar signs guide you away from stability in this economy.
I’d second this advice and add…don’t let dollar signs guide you away from stability in this economy.
I am interviewing a candidate this week who had their L4 offer rescinded.
>>Amazon employees are ranked from level 1 to level 7, and staff at all levels will likely be affected....
Well this is completely wrong. It's hard to trust the rest of the article when they can't get the basics right.
Well this is completely wrong. It's hard to trust the rest of the article when they can't get the basics right.
Might still be correct. Levels 1 to 7 are before reaching director. Once you get to director, I believe the performance expectations change. For example, I don't think directors need to be managed out as part of the quotas. I am guessing a lot of these layoffs are going to be done as part of the forced attrition quotas.
Well this is completely wrong. It's hard to trust the rest of the article when they can't get the basics right.
Well, there was no comma in his first sentence. It's hard to trust the rest of the comment if he can't get the basics right.
Well, there was no comma in his first sentence. It's hard to trust the rest of the comment if he can't get the basics right.
c'mon... incorrect facts are a different level than a missing punctuation mark.
They're probably reporting that old-school D&D (sans A) saving throws are needed to maintain employment at those levels . . .
So what is reasonably right-ish?
So what is reasonably right-ish?
This is correct, people above L7 aren't considered part of regular performance management.
A lot of people inside that company carrying on an illusion of providing value. Managers stacked on managers, cracking their whips on reports to build tech that never adds anything at all to the company
Perhaps the Amazon employee evaluation system has selected for employees that can play the selection game instead of delivering value. Classic case of the measurement getting gamed and distorting the thing it was supposed to measure.
The evaluation system at Amazon drives a culture where most white collar staff won't be there 2 to 3 years from now and they realize they are in a stressful meatgrinder just around the time they start to gain a working knowledge of the project they have been assigned to.
It's not often the employees fault that they leave for greener pastures or are Pivot'ed out of Amazon, they usually work 3+ years at software firms before/after Amazon. Amazon would rather light money on fire by paying to recruit talent, give them half a year to start being positively impactful, then turn up the heat in the year or so thereafter until the employee is gone, rather than treat their workforce decently.
Acting like a garbage employer is sapping Amazon of talent, slowing down projects and burning tons of money on talent. Focus more on team building exercises, invest in actual mentoring if your employees, stop pressuring managers to rank and Pivot employees needlessly and Amazon can stop letting talented people slip out of the organization.
It's not often the employees fault that they leave for greener pastures or are Pivot'ed out of Amazon, they usually work 3+ years at software firms before/after Amazon. Amazon would rather light money on fire by paying to recruit talent, give them half a year to start being positively impactful, then turn up the heat in the year or so thereafter until the employee is gone, rather than treat their workforce decently.
Acting like a garbage employer is sapping Amazon of talent, slowing down projects and burning tons of money on talent. Focus more on team building exercises, invest in actual mentoring if your employees, stop pressuring managers to rank and Pivot employees needlessly and Amazon can stop letting talented people slip out of the organization.
It goes deeper than just the evaluation system. It's that Amazon is the definition of "process over people". To the point where the people are seen as fungible, interchangeable, and easily replaced.
The evaluation system is just the logical outcome of the much deeper culture that drives the company.
The evaluation system is just the logical outcome of the much deeper culture that drives the company.
The evaluation system does not exist on it's own. People run and maintain that system even it it appears as a naturalistic set of immutable rules to most subject to it without being able to influence a change.
What are some examples of things being built that are not adding anything to the company?
I worked there a few years. The thing is, some systems are so complex it might take 6-9 months to even understand the value add within the org. At which point it comes to light that there is very little value add. And all the meetings you were kept from attending were political gatekeeping.
An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.
An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.
I think you are describing all big tech companies. But what's the solution? I think it's just a result of having a large org. 20% of the org delivers 80% of the value. But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%. When times are tough, it doesn't.
Definitely it makes sense to take bets on new tech. But a lot of higher up managers are not running these projects in good faith. At some level they know the projects are futile, and many around them are playing a game acting otherwise
How do you know that? I don't disagree that many projects are futile. But it is usually only apparent in hindsight, and humans are very good at justifying their own jobs and by extension, their team's jobs.
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> But what's the solution? I think it's just a result of having a large org.
Right. Maybe Elon's approach is correct, and all these layoffs are a chance for companies to trim the fat and focus on what matters.
We're only now realizing the bubble the tech industry was in, and that pursuing endless growth is not sustainable.
> But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%.
Does it, though? You're paying for full-time engineers to work on bets that might be completely misaligned even if they succeed, which also might be unlikely. And this makes up the majority of your company? It sounds ludicrous in any market.
Right. Maybe Elon's approach is correct, and all these layoffs are a chance for companies to trim the fat and focus on what matters.
We're only now realizing the bubble the tech industry was in, and that pursuing endless growth is not sustainable.
> But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%.
Does it, though? You're paying for full-time engineers to work on bets that might be completely misaligned even if they succeed, which also might be unlikely. And this makes up the majority of your company? It sounds ludicrous in any market.
Did people working on that engine know that their work is being ignored?
Yes…but the thing is downstream systems are dynamic and real time, so “could” use the recommendations, but never actually do. Hypothetically…
This type of thing goes on all over the company. Another example, a complex “data provider platform”. Which is actually just spinning up spark clusters, joining data, and making it available to downstream consumers. There’s a lot of bells and whistles, notifications built on top. Strip away the details, it’s just doing a join. Ten engineers, two senior engineers making 500k, long hours.
That’s Amazon.
This type of thing goes on all over the company. Another example, a complex “data provider platform”. Which is actually just spinning up spark clusters, joining data, and making it available to downstream consumers. There’s a lot of bells and whistles, notifications built on top. Strip away the details, it’s just doing a join. Ten engineers, two senior engineers making 500k, long hours.
That’s Amazon.
I encountered the same sort of problems at amazon, I felt like it was because leadership didn't incentivize those optimizations to be made across the org. We'd identify some team that was the only one that could help us with something and nobody would lift a finger for us. Teams who were on the hook would ship us incomplete and untested APIs claiming they were done in order to work on other stuff. Managers didn't want to bring it up with other teams because of political ramifications.
That’s insane, how do the people in the org justify their work for promotion? There isn’t any need to map it back to observed top line metric shifts even for a 30 person effort?
“Person xyz built a complex model deployment system, capable of updating the recommendation engine in real time, with automated rollbacks and A/B testing. He leveraged 4 junior engineers and collaborated with multiple data science teams”
Indeed, this is why corporate KPIs exist.
Requiring everything to move KPIs is psychotic, but if your effort should have moved a KPI, and didn't, then you'd better have a damn good story about how it delivered value elsewhere instead.
Requiring everything to move KPIs is psychotic, but if your effort should have moved a KPI, and didn't, then you'd better have a damn good story about how it delivered value elsewhere instead.
Can’t speak for Amazon, but when I was Google a bunch of high level leads were building a less generic / powerful / expressive Angular, implemented using Angular, so it’s an order of magnitude more sluggish. They were from eng prod (building tools for developers) but had no front end experience.
I’ve been around the block enough to see how management can tie BS projects back into the scope of some director level “vision”. When it’s a bull market, everyone in the org wins.
I’ve been around the block enough to see how management can tie BS projects back into the scope of some director level “vision”. When it’s a bull market, everyone in the org wins.
Yeah, that sounds like something that would happen at Google, and done by backend engineers
And then this one project adopts it for some random reason and you're left holding the bag
And then this one project adopts it for some random reason and you're left holding the bag
From what I've heard frontend engineers are considered less skilled than backend engineers at Google?
That's the general thinking across the industry not just at Google.
From my unscientific observations from 3+ years ago: frontend has a lower bar of entry, and more competition by being the default software engineering discipline of choice for those transitioning from Design roles or coding boot camps.
It also empirically paid less, all things being equal.
It also empirically paid less, all things being equal.
I don't think so?
Alexa has apparently torched 10 billion dollars (just in 2022!) with nothing to show for positive cash flow. It's a cool gadget but they bet the damn farm on it. Thousands of people working on it over the years, all to just lose billions of dollars.
I’d really like to understand what all those people are doing. Like I can understand hundreds, but thousands? Does this thing carry on normal conversations with this people at this point? Like does it do much more than act as an alarm clock or Amazon order taker?
Also $10 billion? Do they hemorrhage money on hardware?
Also $10 billion? Do they hemorrhage money on hardware?
Related experience: I spent two years on Google Assistant's media team. We were ~35 people. Projects included integration with YouTube (5 person team), the visual UI for touch screens in cars (8), performance improvements (3-4), making "play" and "pause" commands work through the lock screen (3 people), backend migration to a new struct for representing a user query built by the linguists (5 people)
It sounds like that's the fat right there! I know it's an example, but 8 people for visual UI? That's an example of something that could be down by 1 person or 100 people, depending on your attitude of design by committee. Easy to imagine meetings about meetings studying 500 possible interaction schemes before honing in on a final 15 to run mock-ups to evaluate before deciding to etc etc.
Rube Goldberg vs just empowering someone to design something and move on.
Rube Goldberg vs just empowering someone to design something and move on.
So 1 person to design, prototype, and test the thing? The design has to go thru many iterations, feedback sessions, approvals by managers and their managers, approvals from the design system folks, approval from the engineers who have to implement the thing. Then the prototyping- should a designer also know Java and the Android SDK to build a prototype? And should they commit the code into production and set up an experiment for A/B testing? (Whole set of data collection and bias concerns and approvals needed here) Or if they build a prototype in, let's say, Figma, is that high fidelity enough? (More internal feedback and managers required) Then the testing: building a research plan that avoids bias, asks the right questions, defines how success is measured, yeah the feedback might be subjective but the process needs to be empirical. And then gathering all of this data and compiling a whole set of research findings and suggestions so the manager-of-manager whoever is in charge can feel comfortable with going ahead and actually building the thing.
(I work in UX, and there is a lot of bullshit like this)
(I work in UX, and there is a lot of bullshit like this)
Ah I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around.
If people shift around, you still need people to support the previous work too, so you don't really gain anything. You still need 5 people to support and iterate features that YouTube effort etc.
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> Ah I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around.
You're thinking of Siri.
You're thinking of Siri.
Just throwing stuff at fan hoping something sticks. Vr, AI, anything.
Alexa?
Amazon health lake, maybe?
It is a huge reason why 10+ years of zero interest rates and capital being worthless is a terrible idea. It creates such massive dislocation and waste.
Capital is no longer worthless. The entire complex system is rewiring but it will be a long process. So many self interested sticky wires to break.
Capital is no longer worthless. The entire complex system is rewiring but it will be a long process. So many self interested sticky wires to break.
6% of their company gets pipped every year, and from the article, 20k is 6% of the corporate office. Interesting. I guess they're taking the bottom ~12% this year instead.
Regrettable attrition is going to be through the roof at Amazon this year. Last year was bad enough, the layoffs of these 20,000 employees are going to save significantly less than what attrition will cost Amazon this year: https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-2...
That number is for low performers, not for PIPs. Only a certain percentage of low performers make it to the PIP stage and even making it the PIP stage doesn't mean you are fired. Also that 6% fluctuates and isn't a hard and fast rule ever year.
And knowing how Hacker News works, I'll likely have someone show up and tell me that I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about. But let's just skip that part - I have direct experience and counter examples that back up everything I'm saying that go on for years.
And knowing how Hacker News works, I'll likely have someone show up and tell me that I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about. But let's just skip that part - I have direct experience and counter examples that back up everything I'm saying that go on for years.
I was a manager at Amazon for teams of 5-15 engineers.
The smallest percentage for "needs improvement" ratings I was expected to hit was 5%, the largest was 15%.
Anyone who was needs improvement would be added to the "dev list", and many would enter into a pip. Eventually, Amazon added a system called Pivot that was designed to soften the need improvement process. It did seem to result in fewer pips.
70% of people who entered a pip failed and were terminated. Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement. The expectation was clear - fire them or fix them within 6 months.
The smallest percentage for "needs improvement" ratings I was expected to hit was 5%, the largest was 15%.
Anyone who was needs improvement would be added to the "dev list", and many would enter into a pip. Eventually, Amazon added a system called Pivot that was designed to soften the need improvement process. It did seem to result in fewer pips.
70% of people who entered a pip failed and were terminated. Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement. The expectation was clear - fire them or fix them within 6 months.
“Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement.“
If your employee had year over year “needs improvement”, they would rate the manager as “needs improvement”?
Why would a manager who has control over their employees have any incentive to keep an employee with “needs improvement”.
It seems like the manager would be incentivized to do one of the following:
1. Ensure their “needs improvement” employee is dismissed.
2. Artificially rate their employee higher than “needs improvement” in the second year. The manager has control over the rating process.
3. Encourage their employee to transfer to another team.
4. Transfer to another team themselves.
5. Help improve their employee through coaching and feedback.
Although #5 should be the preferred approach, it’s the one which requires change by the employee. 1-4 are completely under control of the manager.
If your employee had year over year “needs improvement”, they would rate the manager as “needs improvement”?
Why would a manager who has control over their employees have any incentive to keep an employee with “needs improvement”.
It seems like the manager would be incentivized to do one of the following:
1. Ensure their “needs improvement” employee is dismissed.
2. Artificially rate their employee higher than “needs improvement” in the second year. The manager has control over the rating process.
3. Encourage their employee to transfer to another team.
4. Transfer to another team themselves.
5. Help improve their employee through coaching and feedback.
Although #5 should be the preferred approach, it’s the one which requires change by the employee. 1-4 are completely under control of the manager.
I mean, you've called out what happened exactly. Managers got aggressive in firing folks, they dumped them to other teams, or they'd play rating roulette and give others a needs improvement ratings.
The smallest percentage for "needs improvement" ratings I was expected to hit was 5%, the largest was 15%.
How do you do that if you're managing a team of 5?
Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement.
Makes sense to me. A manager's #1 job should be to ensure that the people who report to them are able to work to the full extent of their capabilities; if you're not assisting employees who need improvement, you have no business being a manager.
How do you do that if you're managing a team of 5?
Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement.
Makes sense to me. A manager's #1 job should be to ensure that the people who report to them are able to work to the full extent of their capabilities; if you're not assisting employees who need improvement, you have no business being a manager.
> How do you do that if you're managing a team of 5?
Law of large numbers at higher org levels, not individual teams. No one is hitting a specific 5% or 20% on a single team. Even at a sr manager scope with 25-50 people it's not going to be exact. But at a Director or VP, with 300-3,000, then you can see the performance target values come in to focus. Regardless theyre all targets and exceptions, with lots of explanation, do happen for good and ill.
Law of large numbers at higher org levels, not individual teams. No one is hitting a specific 5% or 20% on a single team. Even at a sr manager scope with 25-50 people it's not going to be exact. But at a Director or VP, with 300-3,000, then you can see the performance target values come in to focus. Regardless theyre all targets and exceptions, with lots of explanation, do happen for good and ill.
But your director has a mandate, and they will pass that down and force everyone to at least consider who on their team could be NI.
If you look at the Amazon revenue and stock prices which is closer to something like 2018-2019 before pandemic, they only had 800K staff back then. Now they have 1.6M. You do the math. 20K only? If they can shed it under 50K that would have been miracle...I won't be surprise by end of 2023, they total more than 1M let go.
You're drastically conflating two very different sides of the house. Hourly workers are generally employed in logistics, FCs, customer service etc. This segment dramatically increased in 2020, to 1.2-1
4M employees IIRC, and for the past year CFO Olsavsky has talked about shedding ~20% of this workforce as demand scales back down. A lot of that is simply accomplished by slowing hiring and letting the high turn over rate happen.
Separately there are teh corporate employees in finance, tech roles, management, etc. These are teh employees in question when CEO Jassy and friends have talked about shrinking some divisions like health care or alexa. This is also where the recent 10-20k numbers are concerned.
Separately there are teh corporate employees in finance, tech roles, management, etc. These are teh employees in question when CEO Jassy and friends have talked about shrinking some divisions like health care or alexa. This is also where the recent 10-20k numbers are concerned.
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It is up and down that keep organisation honest and health. For the safety net, it should have but not via the private org. Sadly the health insurance is private based. Not sure how to solve that.
Bezos saw ChatGPT and called up Jassy: “Fire all the middle managers, we’ve got a bonafide replacement!”
"Management finds your lack of raw computing power disturbing."
Might be a welcome improvement
https://www.teamblind.com/post/amazon-rescinding-contract-on...
I'd be pretty nervous giving a 2 week notice atm.