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Very health...very normal

Edit: Doing it right before the holidays can only mean their data on consumption / consumers is grim.

Three months from now - Amazon hiring 50k new corporate workers.

Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes. Plus it lets them wipe away future RSU comp that was granted to employees when stock prices were way lower.

There's a lot of reflecting & gesticulating we can do about these companies, as they downsize & try to de-leverage the world's labor.

But the reciprocal side is also worth soulsearching some into too. It feels like such the crisis of our time that we don't have good things for people to do, respectable enough efforts, that so much is ensnared and tangled up in such huge enterprise running along at its own pace. I crave a government that tries to encourage new players, new enterprises, that outright lopsidedly favors those trying to get things started.

Other systematic drivers here also filter out so many would be entrepreneurs and business owners. Cost of essential food, shelter, transportation, health care needs has become incredibly daunting to many, and greatly challenges the ability for new things to get started.

Also the unchecked acquisitions spree of the world brings up all the opportunity in such uncomeptitive and fragile large companies. If we allowed small medium size companies to acquire each other, but kept more controls on bigger companies, we wouldn't be facing such wild shocks from what a couple big players do on the world.

All corporate or just expensive US based corporate employees? I didn’t see any specifics listed besides “pandemic era over hiring”. I think their talking points were pulled from an old 1pager this should have been “due to efficiency gains in AI”.

Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.

> Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?

It is crazy that they are still blaming "pandemic era overhiring".

Remember these things tend to be lumpy. While that’s a bit over 10% of corporate employees depending on how you count some teams won’t get touched and thus other areas will either get blown up entirely or have layoff rates of much higher than 10%.

I did some analysis of every job posting from Amazon since 2020. Turns out the % of jobs going to offshored countries almost tripled since 2020: https://bloomberry.com/blog/amazons-layoffs-tell-half-the-st...

Don’t worry, most of those people will end up elsewhere and still think that employee protections are a bad thing because innovation.

> This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."

What is this take based on?

How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation?

And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?

roughly 10% of their corporate workforce wow

Is $59B in _net profit_ last year (~double the year before) enough?

No, it's not! Let's transfer another few $B from workers to our needy shareholders.

Upward and onward!

Right after that egregious U.S.-east-1 outage?

"Strive to be earth's best employer". That they put a weasel word, "strive", right in their shiny new LP tells you all you need to know.

Are warehouse workers considered as corporate?

As an AWS shareholder, I applaud this.

The org suffers from several systemic issues: entrenched tenured employees coasting on accumulated RSUs who resist change, middle management engaged in territorial conflicts/fiefdom turf wars that prioritize their own self-preservation over company goals, numerous underperforming hires made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs, and leaders whose primary competencies lie in mastering the silly cliched "Amazon speak" (Amazon LP this and LP that, quoting Bezos as opening lines, day ones, etc) and the usual de rigueur rituals such as churning out obligatory, meaningless six-pagers, instead of driving genuine innovation or results.

AWS is fast becoming a parody of itself and needs a reset. The recent outage is a harbinger of things to come, if things continue as is.

Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now. After periods of strong growth it’s not unusual for things to need a good cleanup.

Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.

That's a lot of employees getting punished for that AWS outage.

Either way, that's in line with the true definition of "AGI" and getting closer to the timeframe of 2030 to do more with less.

Jassy's most notable accomplishment in the last five years.

Seconded only by the time he ended WFH in a stealth blog post the day after hosting the all-hands meeting.