I think this was orchestrated to not give Amazon employees any internal (or very few) options for transfer. First they freeze corp hiring and thousands of positions dry up, then a long drawn out layoff is initiated that gets leaked in the press way before any senior leadership pipes up to talk about it. You have allegedly have 60 days to find a new position in the company. What positions? There is a hiring freeze. Plus in classic Amazon fashion the severance is on the low end of the industry. Plus the added departures just from the stress of not knowing who gets cut next. I guess this has been orchestrated for maximum attrition, which seems to be their forte over there under the orange smile.
I'm not a fan of Zuckerberg, but his communication about the layoff at Meta was much more timely, clear and empathetic than this note from Jassy.
Meta employees were angry about the sudden layoff announcement and access cut off. Many wanted an advance notice like what Jassy has given. I guess there is no "right" way to do this.
In this particular case, what Jassy seems to be saying to employees is that they should be customer obsessed and work hard for the holiday season but he cannot guarantee they will still have their job in Q1. That sucks. My heart goes out to everyone who is and will be impacted.
> Many wanted an advance notice like what Jassy has given.
There were 48 hours of layoffs and no communication from any CEO, S-Team member or other senior leadership at Amazon. Beth Galetti (HR) took the time write up a post about the hiring freeze a couple weeks back but radio silence from leadership while the rank and file scrambled to find out who was affected. With Amazon being so fastidious about communications to curate their corporate image, it's surprising that they didn't bother to communicate unless it was (possibly) intentional.
I appreciate Andy finally sending something out, but it feels like this was a big miss at the very least.
Meta employees got gold-plated severance packages. The complainers have other issues than the layoff.
> For those who lost their job in the United States, Meta said it would pay severance of 16 weeks of their base pay, along with two additional weeks for every year they worked at the company. Laid-off workers and their families will have health care paid for six months. [0]
Yes, angry. For people on visa, it doesn't matter if severance is gold or silver plated. They will only have 60 days to find another job or leave the country. Giving an advance notice will help them mentally prepare and start looking for a job assuming the worst case so they get some buffer days.
I agree though Meta's severance package was quite good.
If a layoff isn't an attempt [1] to get rid of under-performing talent or dump under-performing business divisions, then I've always felt that across the board pay adjustments are a much more ethical approach.
I'd be much more inclined to stay at a company that lowered my pay 20% than a company that laid off my coworkers. Not letting people go shows empathy, and uniform pay decreases align everyone's interests in getting back to a good state.
I could see why some might jump ship from a poorly performing company during ordinary economic times, but during this down tech cycle, the grass isn't necessarily greener. Going elsewhere might be difficult or put your head back on the chopping block.
For people on the lower end of the pay spectrum, 20% is a lot. I don't know exactly the wage distribution, but it's not like the customer support people being laid off are getting SWE salaries. So "let's just uniformly cut salaries" can be a much harder proposition.
And then you get into the difficulties where the highest paid people tend to be paid with stock, so _they already are having pay cuts from drops_. When you're looking at "cash on hand" problems it's hard to get everything balanced right. Though I do think it's worth it to try and make something work.
Personally I'm a bit of the opinion that larger companies have a responsibility to bank in employee costs more long term than in growth phases. Especially places with higher attrition, if you're able to run the clock for a year hiring freezes + shutting down teams that you want to shut down anyways feels like it would be less demotivating. But I don't know
Yeah basically going to make everyone work hard over peak to try and keep their jobs then start the cuts in January. The cuts will probably be whatever the delta is between the missed revenue from q4 and what wall street estimated.
> The cuts will probably be whatever the delta is between the missed revenue from q4 and what wall street estimated
This is backward looking.
The right thing to do is look at your forecasts of the future and adjust according to those (because the past is in the past and is unchangeable).
Honestly if it needed to be done, it was kind to do it before the holidays with the generous severance. I think a lot of these folks might FIRE or otherwise start down a different path. I don’t know how Amazon is doing this right during their peak sales and logistics season.
I've been through a number of layoffs all the way from getting notice that my last day is 2 weeks from the announcement to 9 months. To be honest, the shorter period was better, at least for me.
When it's a long notice (say >2 months), you enter into this weird gray zone. You're neither unemployed nor employed with a long term job. All motivation disappears and you're just "waiting". Obviously you can use the time to find a new job, but there is only so much time you can devote to that.
It was far better to get notice a month or two in advance of pending layoffs (exactly who not disclosed), then get an announcement that your last day is in 2 weeks, but you'll get 60 days of pay, then your severence payout.
Felt like "ripping the bandaid off" was much preferable. At least you can get on with things at that point.
Not necessarily. They're contractually required to make X number of episodes, but there's no way to guarantee quality or ratings. If they make cuts in the staffing of budget for this show, the show quality will drop. Suppose they cut the VFX budget by 75%, for instance: the show will have horrible FX, but they can still meet their contractual requirements. Or they could cut actor salaries in future seasons (which maybe haven't been negotiated with the actors yet), causing key actors to quit, necessitating either re-casting (which is usually bad) or rewriting the story.
Amazon has a bunch of internal openings and hiring waivers -- for the profit centers. I think most of the layoffs will be belt tightening. Including my entire org.
If your goal is to cut costs and you have no net reduction in HC - then you've failed. What did you want them to do - besides not wanting them to cut costs. It's an even worse look to get rid of 20k people and have 25k openings after.
Maybe you have features that can be built somewhere like aws where you have already sold it to a customer and you just don't have the devs. And you know you're going to cut from a part of the company where there is no expectation that the features from the devs will increase revenue. Tuning up the Alexa weather app isn't likely to get more customers but and aws database offering that some other fortune 500 is asking for might be revenue positive a couple months after release.
There more to it than the total cost of devs it matters what people are working on and if the products will produce revenue.
I understand that, they had like 40k job openings a little while ago, and they are cutting 10k so my guess is that plenty get re-aligned and some don't.
> I'm not a fan of Zuckerberg, but his communication about the layoff at Meta was much more timely, clear and empathetic than this note from Jassy.
Ironically I remember some rabblerousing around Zuck's announcement as well but overall I would have to agree; Meta was a bit more transparent vs the staggered approach we are seeing from Amazon.
It's weird because there's still a 'public gap' with at least Amazon's announcement; as a person who has been at bigcorps, I know a hiring freeze is not a hard freeze or transfer-freeze, necessarily. But the overall messaging here is a bit more grim.
> Plus the added departures just from the stress of not knowing who gets cut next.
My cynical and experienced self knows that I've sat in interviews where beforehand I was given a psychological profile based on how the candidate answered a questionnaire. (The company was sub 2k employees, which is worth mentioning because it obfuscates who I'm referring to but also shows how 'accessible' this service is.)
From this viewpoint, I'd have to say they are hoping that the people who don't jump ship are those confident enough their existing options will vest that they will stay, and can handle the impending work-life-balance disruptions.
Of course, they might not -actually- be able to. And some who think they can, cannot, and that will come out in the woodwork.
Perhaps more sadly though, are those who couldn't make it and suffered external effects.
It's a real concern. I was 'stuck' in a job due to the Great Recession and the consequences of not just quitting and doing some random minwage gig cost me a good 5+ years of my life to get back on my feet (There's still parts I'm trying to fix!)
tl;dr - This sounds like turnover for SDEs may get closer to warehouse worker turnover.
I remember complaints about Zuckerberg's announcement too, but they were more about the tone of the announcement than the fact that people were being laid off. His email suggested that some people weren't pulling their weight and needed to pick it up or resign. Even if that were the case that's a management or business culture problem and shaming people isn't the proper way to solve it.
I'm very curious, how did staying at a job throw you off your feet more than doing a random minwage gig?
Sometimes I have a feeling I could do with a random minwage gig for some time due to fatigue from programming in a corporate environment, but have been putting it off due to it being a questionable financial decision, especially now with a looming recession. Wha
> I'm very curious, how did staying at a job throw you off your feet more than doing a random minwage gig?
At the time, minimum wage was a lot less and other expenses (helping pay for my now-ex-wife's college and car insurance, then a whole long story of undiagnosed ADD) made doing so untenable, especially since about half of that time was before the ACA was in a usable state.
I'll note however that there is a difference between fatigue (1), an unhealthy working environment (2), and abuse (3).
The job in question was in category 3. It is just over 10 years ago, at that job that my boss told me I couldn't have a day off when my mother had a 50/50 shot of surviving the next 48 hours.
Category 2, is something you have to recognize as such, because it has a subtle difference between 1 and 3. (Or, maybe, 3 is a subset of 2.) I've been in that boat, and it tends to be a situation where you can't take a proper break, or every 1-week vacation you ever take makes you regret taking it.
I'm not a fan of Zuckerberg, but his communication about the layoff at Meta was much more timely, clear and empathetic than this note from Jassy.
- Zuckerberg: https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes...
- Jassy: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/a-note-from-ce...