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Jassy's only lever for shareholder value. Sad.
Right now, amazon is packed full of L6 and L7 software managers, making 450-900k a year, that:

1. dont understand ai

2. have had the same skill set for 10 years

3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks

4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics

for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money to just maintain status quo

[redacted due to non-useful information]
10% over a year, split into two waves isn't that extreme. It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.
There's some stuff that, culturally, I don't think Amazon will ever do well. Amazon Games should be shuttered entirely. Their latest game was a really embarrassing flop; "King of Meat", which they expected to have 100,000 daily concurrent players, reached a max of 320 concurrents during a free weekend[0]. Have you heard of a single Amazon Prime Original Movie[1]? Likely only one -- 2025's War of the Worlds, which became a meme because it is legitimately one of the worst movies of all time.

Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well. Which is awesome when you're dealing with databases and the logistics of delivering packages. But it's effectively the opposite of games, movies and other creative media where you have to trust a single person or small group of people with a vision. Otherwise you get what Amazon gives, which is unappetizing slop.

If I were Jassy I'd cut off these product lines entirely. It's just not a good fit for how Amazon operates.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/king-of-meat-studio-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_ori...

An AI bubble pop is going to create depression if this sort of thinking continues. Fire bright people to spend money on questuonable quality AI. If others follow we are saying "all in" and shoving the poker chips on more model improvements.
That is why software engineers also need unions.

(but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)

but unions are one of the many reasons why it is cheaper just to hire in India instead of the US
Excellent, get ready for more large outages at AWS and a proliferation of bugs across the rest of Amazon’s empire.

For the last few months I still randomly get errors opening audible. You know, to buy more books.

Outsourcing is the main reason for the layoffs, but I’m sure no one is going to mention it.
The only AWS service I still use is SES, for sending emails from client applications. Surely that can be self hosted? Can anyone reccommend a competitor?