Best decision I ever made was repeatedly ignoring emails from Amazon recruiters while they were allowing remote work around the pandemic. Fuck that place.
> Jassy explained that as Amazon added headcount, locations and lines of business in recent years, “you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers … sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work.”
"And here's something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Eight bosses."
"Eight?"
"Eight, Bob."
> “We are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup, and … that means removing layers.”
I learned a long time ago that behaving like a startup is not a good thing, and I've specifically oriented my career towards working at companies that don't even want to pretend to imitate startup culture. I'm very happy in enterprise-land.
Even most here on HN who are in the business of replacing humans with AI would agree that Amazon knows they are lying.
Must be close to a rats den working at Amazon's offices with over 200K+ employees in corporate to then look at them and then lay them off and say it's for "culture".
There's no reason for them to tell the truth, given its immensively profitable to keep lying with no costs at all.
If you decide to join Amazon after this, make sure you get a brain scan first.
Hierarchical structures are so odd, you would think the higher levels optimize for intelligence and empathy but in practice it optimizes for sociopathy and maybe public speaking skills
Amazon went from an innovative tech company with an efficient culture where builders could build and ship great products, and where promotions where based on merit, to a completely toxic bureaucratuc hellhole, where all decision making has been hijacked by sociopathic parasites who have learned to game the system for their own benefit.
- most leadership, including technical, is now filled with compete imposters who have very little understanding of tech or market.
- product and strategy decisions are not based on data anymore. Any 'data' is now extremely cherry-picked
- it's standard practice to just completely hide/exclude any negative indicators/metrics.
- promotions are no longer merit-based. They are based exclusively on your ability to social engineer your managers/leadership, and your ability to manufacture metrics that sound good (to imposters who can't rationally inspect/critique them)
- there is zero real innovation happening at Amazon now
- good engineers are leaving in droves and being replaced by 3rd party external consultants
> Amazon says it didn’t cut 14,000 people because of money. It cut them because of ‘culture’
So they're saying Amazon has culture of being assholes to others? I guess at least they're honest about it, and their admission comports with other accounts about how they do business.
Hello, highly experienced engineer prospective hire. Tell me about a time when some memorized interview behavioral question, in STAR format. Now do this coding screening despite all your experience. Now tell me you want to be an engineer in a startup, and not in huge company of metrics-gaming and routine stack ranking cullings.
How does a company define or at least describe company culture and displays it up front? I am genuinely curious, and not trying to start any sort of flame wars.
This seems like more smoke and mirrors. I’ve heard some speculation that this is about cutting capex in salaries so they can afford a big purchase from Nvidia. I guess we’ll see in the coming months.
>It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.) [...] So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.
Amazon is a meatgrinder on its workforce, but I will give credit where it's due - I think thinning out management is a noble goal and endeavor. If it's true that these layoffs don't impact as many IC roles, it's probably worth calling that out.
(It's just awful convenient that the timing of this is also when everyone is staring down a rough economy)
37 comments
[ 758 ms ] story [ 3876 ms ] threadThe H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.
I learned a long time ago that behaving like a startup is not a good thing, and I've specifically oriented my career towards working at companies that don't even want to pretend to imitate startup culture. I'm very happy in enterprise-land.
Even most here on HN who are in the business of replacing humans with AI would agree that Amazon knows they are lying.
Must be close to a rats den working at Amazon's offices with over 200K+ employees in corporate to then look at them and then lay them off and say it's for "culture".
There's no reason for them to tell the truth, given its immensively profitable to keep lying with no costs at all.
If you decide to join Amazon after this, make sure you get a brain scan first.
- most leadership, including technical, is now filled with compete imposters who have very little understanding of tech or market.
- product and strategy decisions are not based on data anymore. Any 'data' is now extremely cherry-picked
- it's standard practice to just completely hide/exclude any negative indicators/metrics.
- promotions are no longer merit-based. They are based exclusively on your ability to social engineer your managers/leadership, and your ability to manufacture metrics that sound good (to imposters who can't rationally inspect/critique them)
- there is zero real innovation happening at Amazon now
- good engineers are leaving in droves and being replaced by 3rd party external consultants
So they're saying Amazon has culture of being assholes to others? I guess at least they're honest about it, and their admission comports with other accounts about how they do business.
The culture was abysmal. Not because of layers, Andy, but because you decided to do all your announcements in secret on A to Z.
Cowardice.
>It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.) [...] So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.
Amazon is a meatgrinder on its workforce, but I will give credit where it's due - I think thinning out management is a noble goal and endeavor. If it's true that these layoffs don't impact as many IC roles, it's probably worth calling that out.
(It's just awful convenient that the timing of this is also when everyone is staring down a rough economy)