Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees
- Reference: 1668468610
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/11/14/amazon_job_cuts/
- Source link:
Loquacious unnamed sources faimilar with the process told The New York Times that [1]cuts are coming in corporate and technology jobs at Amazon's devices organization, which would include reductions to the Alexa team, as well as in retail and human resources.
The total number of people that could lose their job has yet to be finalized, although the indication is that 3 percent of Amazon's corporate workforce and less than 1 percent of its global headcount will be affected, equating to circa 10,000 individuals.
[2]
Amazon is renowned for having a high staff attrition rate that it maintains partly through performance improvement plans (PIPs). According to various sources, Amazon regularly "PIPs" between 6 and 10 percent of its workforce during review periods, and is known for its extremely [3]grueling and cutthroat environment.
[4]
[5]
But in terms of actual redundancies, the looming cuts could be the largest round of layoffs in Amazon's 28-year history.
PIPs to the left of me, layoffs to the right
"Contraction" is the word of the year for the tech sector - many organizations have either reassessed their headcount in the past six months or are freezing hires as the worldwide economy stalls.
Most recently, Lyft and Stripe fired [6]more than 10 percent of their respective staff. Salesforce also recently began laying off [7]hundreds of employees , and Meta announced last week that it was [8]chopping more than 11,000 people .
[9]GlobalFoundries cuts jobs to slash operating costs
[10]Salesforce trims workforce as growth slows post-lockdowns
[11]Unlucky for some: Meta chops 13% of global workforce
[12]Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally
Then, of course, there's Twitter. The now Musk-infused social media platform waved goodbye to 3,700, equating to [13]50 percent of its headcount .
Musk's [14]week of chaos and layoffs at Twitter continued with more surprises this weekend, when Twitter apparently terminated a reported 4,400 of its 5,500 contract employees, all [15]without letting internal Twitter teams know that it was happening.
One Twitter contractor, who worked as a content moderator, [16]said she was fired over the weekend and expressed concern that content moderation on Twitter would slip as she and her colleagues were pushed out. The loss of content moderators is unlikely to please advertisers, who have continued to distance themselves from Twitter.
[17]
In one costly example, drugmaker Eli Lilly announced this weekend that it would [18]pull advertising from Twitter after being unhappy with the company's response to an account impersonating the insulin maker. The fake account announced Eli Lilly would begin making insulin for free, and was picked up widely enough to briefly depress the company's stock price, so that $8 account may have cost Twitter millions in ad revenues.
Musk said recently Twitter was losing $4 million a day and so needed to make sweeping cost reductions to keep the wolves from the door.
Amazon isn't in that position, though the ecommerce platform and cloud biz sounded some notes of caution in its recently filed [19]calendar Q3 earnings report .
[20]
CFO Brian Olsavsky talked of "ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties" leading some AWS customers to concentreate on "controlling costs". It isn't just customers being forced to closely inspect overheads. ®
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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y3Mc5pUil961c0c8up8jCQAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/amazon_aws_recruitment/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y3Mc5pUil961c0c8up8jCQAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y3Mc5pUil961c0c8up8jCQAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/03/lyft_stripe_twitter_layoffs/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/salesforce_trims_workforce_as_growth/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/meta_redundancies_mark_zuckerberg/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/globalfoundries_layoff_reports/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/salesforce_trims_workforce_as_growth/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/meta_redundancies_mark_zuckerberg/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/07/twitter_recalls_staff/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/07/twitter_layoffs_were_bad_but/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/twitter_musk_week/
[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/13/twitter-suddenly-cuts-large-number-of-contract-workers.html
[16] https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-misinformation-social-media-a469130efaebc8ed029a647a149c5049
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y3Mc5pUil961c0c8up8jCQAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/14/twitter-fake-eli-lilly/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/28/aws_q3_2022/
[20] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y3Mc5pUil961c0c8up8jCQAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Stupid twitter account name
What I want to know is why the hell is Eli Lilly's twitter account "LillyPad"???
WTF. That sounds like the worst fake account name ever.
Missing information
The article tells us that Amazon is known for its gruelling and cut-throat environment. Further, that staff attrition is achieved through what seems like the investment bank annual appraisal bottom 10% have to go approach.
However if salaries are significantly higher than the industry norm (are they?) then this would be useful to know.
In such circumstances Amazon's behaviour would not then seem unusual if not particularly pleasant.
Not particularly relevant but intended to illustrate my point, a thousand years ago when I was in a reasonably well paid job in a not awful if not great environment, the consultancy firm we were working with dangled a carrot but I declined because as a bit of a square peg, I preferred my then risk reward ratio to a potentially short term opportunity to earn a lot of money in a round hole.
Re: Missing information
From very personal former experience, they do pay very good salaries, at least coming within shouting distance of contract rates.
Add to that, stock options (though if I'd stayed I'd be pretty miffed with the performance if I hadn't been able to cash out during the peak). In addition, at least during the peak of the pandemic, a very generous personal purchase policy for home office. That may now be gone, though.
For that... well, the cited ElReg article is very much spot on, it just isn't complete. It's, well, it's a cult. You drink the kool-aid and yes, you are lost to the rest of the world. Everything you say, no matter how trivial, that relates in any way to the company must be filtered. To ridiculous extent.
However, what isn't mentioned at all is that the company (at least AWS) is already fractured into fiefdoms led by empire-builders. How you do, whether you become a celeb who holds forth at events or whether you're PIPed, all comes down to what kingdom you end up in.
I went from 10 months of some of the most amazing work I ever got to do in my career - and a prized Accolade - to absolute hell on Earth in a matter of weeks, doomed by a re-org (former manager left, his manager lost in inner-AWS warfare and up the chain). You can't even simply change to a better or more interesting team because your manager essentially can poison the chalice. Even the people you used to successfully work with and who know better, can no longer touch you with a 10-foot pole.
Meh
You have to be young and naive to not know large companies are badly managed in every possible way and as an employee, you are nothing more than a cipher.
Musk said recently Twitter was losing $4 million a day and so needed to make sweeping cost reductions to keep the wolves from the door.
Rather than cutting costs and people- and therefore the ability to deliver your product.. how about improving their quality, so people are actually satisfied with your product, and willing to pay for it?
absolute crazy talk, I know..
especially for something like social media, where you would have to pay me to use it..
Dump & swap
From what I see, the layoffs for self-driving cars, Twits, and Metaverse are real. Everything else is purging highly paid staff to make room for cheap and desperate hires. Layoffs in Q4, sell on brief stock surge, hire back for cheap next year.
The flaw in this plan is that companies are rushing it and making too many mistakes.
Amazon has 1.4 million employees, but how many are in warehouses or driving trucks, and how many are tech workers? I assume the article is about 10k tech workers fired, because they probably fire 10k warehouse employees every single day.