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Amazon job cuts: Read the memos
- jpeter 4y agoJeff needs more money for his rockets and yachts
- eganist 4y agoSuper interesting seeing companies grow like wildfire and overspend as returns for investors skyrocket, and then as the market swings downward, they buoy their stock prices a bit by just as quickly cutting heads. The inverted accountability scheme for leaders doing this is another perverse enabling factor; I've complained about this before, but that tends to lead to flames about why founders etc. can't have ownership of headcount and the fate of their companies etc. I'm not seeing a clear solution for this culture of toying with thousands of peoples' lives for a quick buck... well, aside from the (sadly) politically loaded move to unionize more white collar work and thus provide actual accountability. Why unions are a political matter is beyond me; IATSE uses their strength to ensure excellent benefits for their members in media/entertainment.
- cj 4y agoHow do mass layoffs work in places like the EU? I know it's much more difficult to fire people in the EU, but is there an exception if it's done as part of a layoff? The only real solution I can think of is regulatory in nature (e.g. requiring paying out 6 months pay during a layoff, which might make companies think twice before "hiring ahead of growth") Because let's face it, "hiring ahead of growth" is the real problem. These companies aren't firing people because they are making less money. They're firing people because they hired people before they actually needed them, in anticipation of future growth that didn't materialize.
- yourusername 4y agoEmployment rules are not the same across the EU. You would have to specify the country. In NL if you fire more than 20 people in a 3 month period there is a specific set of rules you have to apply and it determines in what order you must fire people as part of a mass layoff and who you can even fire as part of a mass layoff.
- elil17 4y agohttps://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/employment-contracts/redundancies/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/employ... tl;dr: There is a special process called collective redundancy which requires a 30 day notice given to the workers. There are also country-specific rules.
- KaiserPro 4y agodepends on which part of the EU. Uk (not EU but europe despite what it says) requires consultancy and a minimum compensation for being fired france its a bit more complex, but it sometimes requires the consent of the person being fired, so it can be very expensive.
- jonp888 4y agoSome of the differences in Germany would be: 1. The minimium notice period for termination of employment is between 1 and 3 months. 2. The employer must select which employees to lay off depending on social factors(age, do they have young children or other dependents, are they disabled etc.) and not based on performance ratings. 3. If the company is laying off staff, but also at the same time hiring people with a similar skillset, they have to offer the existing staff the preferred chance to take the positions. I think there is also a culutural difference to think long term even when enjoying short term success, but perhaps that is also present in the US when comparing tech and non-tech companies.
- denimnerd42 4y agoIn the US the WARN notice requires 60 days. But that's why you see 2-3 month severances and no notice as it's considered an alternative.
- outside1234 4y agoCan you explain #2 more? Are you saying that they must select employees that being laid off would have the lowest impact to?
- ghaff 4y agoSo basically regulations that you shouldn't hire someone unless you're really really sure you're going to keep them around for a long time?
- zirgs 4y agoProbation exists. And it's possible to hire contractors too. At-will is worse than contract work, because the contractor knows when he will be let go.
- freedom2099 4y agoI work in France… the company I work for is travel related… and we have thousands of employees. During the pandemic we did not let go a single person! We had 2 years of basically zero revenue and the most we did was offer very juicy severance package for people willing to go or to retire early!
- jjtheblunt 4y agoYour comment made me wonder something i don’t remember being discussed in these terms, but what about our markets and laws makes liquidity in employers and employees work poorly?
- jen20 4y ago> but what about our markets and laws makes liquidity in employers and employees work poorly 1. The utter insanity of family medical insurance being tied to employment. 2. Non-compete agreements without full (or higher) compensation being valid. I’m sure there are others, but those two are a good start.
- jjtheblunt 4y agothose are great examples!
- brookst 4y agoDo you think these people would have been better off if tech had carried net fewer heads the past couple of years? Having an extra 100k employed for two years is worse than those jobs just never existing?
- ZiiS 4y agoThe point is we all know how much these same companies will whine about skills shortages in a couple of years. Even if they cannot manage to make a cent off their work work and completely fail to train them or at least give them experience; they can very easily just write down the salaries till they do need them.
- itsoktocry 4y ago>The point is we all know how much these same companies will whine about skills shortages in a couple of years. Is that the point? That implies the market is hot again (and I agree with you, it will be eventually) and people are working where they want to. If that's your prediction, what's the problem here? The solution is not to jump ship to Google, then, isn't it?
- nine_k 4y agoBut by hiring all these people a few years ago, didn't Amazon (and other large tech companies) give these people some valuable experience, beside a quite decent salary? I personally would prefer to be hired by a big tech company and then laid off, having received the salary, severance pay, and experience, than to never set my foot there. The in-between time sucks, of course.
- blululu 4y agoDebatable, maybe some people like new grads would prefer it that way but a lot of these people already had experience and jobs before showing up at Amazon. Some may have moved, others turned down other offers, 6-12 months of 20% extra pay doesn’t justify the lurch. In general forcing employees to take on the lion’s share of risk is a jerk move without offering a similar share of profits.
- eunos 4y agoWhat I'd like to know is what were the leaderships (Google, Amazon, et al) thinking or expecting when they decided to mass hire.
- jvanderbot 4y ago"Make hay while the sun shines"
- itsoktocry 4y ago>I'm not seeing a clear solution for this culture of toying with thousands of peoples' lives for a quick buck A bit over-dramatic, no? Nothing to say about the employees who left their companies for Google to "make a quick buck"? Business expand and contract. Should Google be considered a retirement home? The people who took these jobs are smart men and women who will go on to work at other companies. This isn't new.
- throwaway6734 4y agoSeriously, these companies were and still are paying insane salaries. I have no sympathy.
- jrwoodruff 4y agoIt'd be neat to have a list of companies that use this strategy. It seems like all the big ones do?
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoThere's no solution because, from society's perspective, there's no problem. The whole idea of capitalism involves competition and consistent growth, right? In any human society, that leads inevitably to war and conquest. It also means exploiting whatever resources are available, including human resources. Back in the day it was using colonial slaves to cheaply mine resources, deforesting for fuel/ships/etc, or hunting animals to extinction (food, oil, pelts, etc). Today it's using cheap labor in 3rd world countries, dumping chemicals in rivers, deforesting rainforest for cattle pasture. And when a competitor (foreign empire or corporation) threatens you, you basically work to either destroy or own the competition and their citizens/customers (although you might also simply make a backroom deal for peace). All for the wealth and glory of a corporation/CEO/board/Emperor/nation. Our companies are just acting as the new empires of global society. Have been for nearly a century, when the old empires began to crumble. Same humans, different maps & hats.
- jaqalopes 4y agoUnionization is the correct response here. The incentives of company leaders simply don't account for workers' desire to not lose their jobs. The only way to change this is for workers to change said incentives--by organizing. Of course, easy for me to say as a freelancer. I'm definitely not trying to say unionizing tech would be easy. But it certainly is simple, at least conceptually.
- jxf 4y ago100%. This is the entire point of unions -- to represent the collective interests of the some segment of (or all) a company's workers.
- subradios 4y agoUnfortunately when unions are weak, they are negative value - and when they are strong they are the UAW. Workers are not a firm, and structuring labor as it's own firm is known as contracting and or a guild.
- screwturner68 4y agoI'd love to see some apprentice programs in IT, it would at least give everyone a standard base of knowledge like what you are supposed to have in a union journeyman. Right now everybody with six months experience considers themselves senior, we have no standards and we all fight each other which isn't how a union works.
- robjan 4y agoI used to work in a unionised engineering department. There were benefits, such as being hard to lay off large amounts of the workforce. There were also disadvantages, such as collective bargaining which meant high performers generally weren't rewarded and salaries were generally below market.
- screwturner68 4y agoYep, it's good with the bad. Another "good" as I get older is that seniority means something, it's harder to discriminate against the older guys and replace them with a 20 year old for half the price.
- jackmott42 4y agoIs this actually bad? Would it be better for those 18k jobs to never have been available at all?
- michaelcampbell 4y ago> Why unions are a political matter is beyond me; My take is because unions facilitate less profit for C-levels, who then buy/rent lobbyists to bribe, errr, "persuade" politicians to enact laws or regulations or whatever to keep unions out.
- theRealMe 4y agoHeadline is confusing. It makes it sound like there will be 18k new layoffs, but this is information that has been public since November and the cuts happened two days ago. (Or at least the bulk of them did)
- sairahul82 4y agoIt’s not clear actually. I know some friends who are affected in Nov and some are affected yesterday.
- midlightdenight 4y agoIt happened in two waves. 10k back in November and 8k this week.
- revlolz 4y agoThis article was late to the game therefore headline is garbage. Amazon laid off 18k ppl in the most clusterfuck way. They had an article leaked about the wave 1 in November that impacted some 8k to 11k and then this weds the total was brought up to 18k. The emails from the article were sent to Amazon employees on weds the 18th after Amazon employees spent all of the holidays and January stressed wondering "am I going to be laid off?" No new layoffs, but the 18k is the collective total and it's being spread out so long because of Amazon leadership incompetence and world wide labor laws differing.
- revskill 4y agoThis is what happened when the stakeholders know what AI can do.
- neogodless 4y agoLots of previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427277 (203 comments, 2 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253478 (462 comments, 15 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626896 (279 comments, 1 month ago)
- manishsharan 4y agoIn this economy, the only companies that are not laying off people are the groceries store. They have nearly doubled their profits since last year
- coffeebeqn 4y agoAmazon owns multiple grocery chains!
- sumeno 4y agoNot really, unemployment rates are at 20 year lows
- 3327 4y ago[dead]
- mittermayr 4y agoThere's rarely any talk about how many of these (if any!) are actually contractors / vendors. All the big companies have outsourced a huge number of staff to agencies (presumably to be more flexible in short-term budgeting and "turning the resource off", when needed, so they don't have to worry about the legal intricacies, as that is by-design conveniently also outsourced to the vendor in most cases). Curious if the 18k here is on top of shutting down external contracts.
- flandish 4y agoInteresting take. Can we consider contract labor a “layoff”? Wouldn’t they try to “look better” (like they are not laying off) by not considering “closed contract” not the same as “layoff”? Wouldn’t the contracted firm be doing the layoff not the tech comp? Interesting take!
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
- sriram_sun 4y agoContract jobs are never part of layoffs. OTOH, not all full time roles have an actual human assigned. They could also be budgeted for, but not filled yet. Post 2008, managers usually kept a couple of unfilled roles for events like this.
- aliljet 4y agoThis should be renamed. Amazon has laid off 18,000 and this links to the memos from senior leadership at that company.
- lp4vn 4y agoNobody can convince me that big corps are not taking part this "trend" of firing people with the purpose of rehiring them later and keep the compensation of the workforce in check. As many comments have already pointed out, all these companies are sitting on a huge cushion of money, and if you have money the best moment to invest is during a crisis. Companies realized a long time ago that they should find ways of lowering salaries, now the big moment finally came it seems.
- ballenf 4y ago> the best moment to invest is during a crisis Are we at the beginning, middle or end of it? Investing broadly at the beginning of a crisis that has the signs of being deep is less advised.
- pastacacioepepe 4y agoThat's an interesting point of view. It would make economical sense for big corps to act as a labor market cartel, and the fact that they are all laying off together is a suspicious coincidence.
- georgemcbay 4y ago> It would make economical sense for big corps to act as a labor market cartel Wouldn't be anything too new: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297... As is too often the case, the cost of getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar are dwarfed by the savings over time so no reason to think they will avoid doing similar things in the future.
- MrOwnPut 4y agoThat's a bingo!
- screwturner68 4y agoIt's always been a big game of follow the leader, one tech company lays off 5000 workers then a next company lays off 5000 workers because if it's good for company A it must be good for company B. It's no different than when Yahoo told all their workers they had to come into the office and all the tech companies tried to drag their workers back into the office, they just didn't want to miss the trend. In a year everyone will be hiring again and companies will be screaming about needing more skilled (and cheaper) workers but for now it's just the semi-annual culling of the herd.
- ProAm 4y agoFor the company that spent decades putting mom and pop shops out of business it is very hard to feel sad for layoffs. It's just their own bed these folks now have to sleep in. As an investor I am also happy. For the workers, it's sad maybe unfair but such is life.
- ketanmaheshwari 4y agoThere is a typo in the title: of -> off.
- travisgriggs 4y agoCame here to say this myself, for F’s sake.
- elforce002 4y agoInteresting. I cannot separate what the Feds said regarding inflation tbh. On one side, the government was gloating over the fact of low unemployment numbers, on the other side, you have the Feds saying with no shame whatsoever they need to low inflation numbers by raising interest rates and orquestrate moves to layoff people with the objective to lower the demand for goods and services. This looks like a coordinated "attack" where companies and government colluded against the common folk. There's a win-win for them. Companies will start reducing salaries since there'll be more supply of workers, and the government will say "we promise to lower inflation" as campaign slogan.
- Centigonal 4y agoInflation hurts the common folk as well though (people who own assets have their assets stay the same in real value, people who don't have the spending power of their bank accounts eroded). What you're theorizing might still be happening (inflation looks like it's been controlled for the last few months, but layoffs continue), but lowering inflation is more than PR.
- js8 4y agoThere is an excellent interview with Clara Mattei on The Majority Report, about her book The Capital Order. She has a similar point, historically supported.
- cableshaft 4y agoTo be fair, inflation numbers are going back down in the US, while countries that aren't raising their interest rates (or at least not as aggressively as the US is) still have much higher inflation, double digits in some cases. So it does seem to be working, as shitty as it is. I don't think all these companies really need to lay people off though, they're just using 'everyone else is doing it' as an excuse to get away with it and juice up their stock price.
- wcunning 4y agoIs there a good tracker of layoffs in tech with a breakdown of how many were software vs marketing vs service/warehouse/ancillary workers? I'm curious what the software engineer availability glut scale might be at the moment...