Posted on 11/16/2022 12:27:45 PM PST by Red Badger
Amazon has begun laying off employees in its corporate and tech workforce.
CEO Andy Jassy has moved aggressively to cut costs across Amazon, and the company previously said it would freeze hiring in its corporate workforce.
Amazon on Tuesday began laying off employees in its corporate and tech workforce as CEO Andy Jassy steps up efforts to rein in costs.
The company notified workers in several divisions, including Alexa and the Luna cloud gaming unit, that they were being let go, according to LinkedIn posts from Amazon employees who said they had been impacted.
Amazon is aiming to eliminate about 10,000 jobs, mostly in retail, devices and human resources, The New York Times reported Monday. The number remains fluid because the cuts are being implemented by individual teams, according to the Times.
By midday Tuesday, Amazon had not sent out any companywide communication about the planned layoffs, which sparked frustration among employees, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.
Representatives from Amazon declined to comment.
In recent weeks, Amazon also began laying off some contracted employees who worked in recruiting roles for its advertising, internal operations, and Fire TV divisions, according to people with knowledge of the cuts.
One employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said Amazon informed her earlier this month that it wouldn’t be renewing her contract. Last month, she was in talks to pursue a full-time role in Amazon’s consumer division, but her interview was abruptly canceled due to ongoing restructuring, she was told.
The Amazon Spheres, part of the Amazon headquarters campus, right, in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021. Concerns about Covid, crime and homelessness and open warfare between the city government and parts of its lucrative tech and business sector have emptied Seattle's commercial districts. Voters are hoping a new mayor will turn things around but even though most are Democrats, they disagree on what change is needed. Photographer: Chona Kasing
Jassy has aggressively curtailed expenses across the company in recent months as it stares down a weakening economy and slowing growth in its retail business. Previously, the company said it would pause hiring among its corporate workforce, and it has halted some experimental projects, as well as opted to close, delay or cancel new warehouse locations.
Until now, it had managed to avoid mass layoffs by offering employees impacted by project closures the opportunity to transfer to other divisions within the company.
The job cuts represent a stark reversal for Amazon, which less than a year ago couldn’t find enough workers to keep its warehouses staffed in a hot labor market and was still in the midst of a pandemic-fueled hiring spree. It nearly doubled its workforce between the end of 2019 and the end of 2021 from 798,000 employees globally to 1.6 million.
Since then, it has moved to slow headcount growth as consumers have returned to physical stores, and its retail business is no longer growing at a rapid clip as it has in recent years. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky last month said the company is seeing signs consumers are feeling the sting of inflation.
“We are preparing for what could be a slower growth period,” Olsavsky said on a call with reporters following the company’s third-quarter earnings results, which included weaker-than-expected guidance for the current period.
The company still plans to bring on 150,000 employees for the holiday shopping period, the same number of workers it said it would add last year.
Job cuts are hitting the tech sector hard after years of unbridled growth. Facebook parent Meta last week laid off 13% of its staff, while Twitter, Shopify, Salesforce and Stripe have also announced cuts.
The expected layoffs would represent the biggest cut in the company’s 28-year history. In 2001, Amazon slashed 1,300 jobs, or 15% of its workforce, after the dot-com bubble burst.
Brandon wishes all of the newly unemployed a very Merry Christmas!
Supposedly, they had thousands of programmers working just on Alexa. No wonder it never worked very well - can you imagine how hard it must be to coordinate the changes among that giant mob of software wizards?
And thanks them for voting for his agenda and policies a couple of weeks ago.
They should learn to code.
I do a little programming and I truly hate to try and figure out other people’s code. I like tight code, and I use lots of documentation comments to explain it in detail. So the next guy/gal doesn’t have to figure out why I did such and such.....
Now if I ask the weather it tells me and then adds a commercial for some other useful service it can do like "Today will be cloudy with a chance of rain. I can also tell you recipes for sweet treats and desserts, would you like to hear some now?"
I'm at the point of saying 'Amazon, you had a good thing going and you done f-ed it up."
>> I like tight code, and I use lots of documentation comments to explain it in detail.
Thanks a lot for spoiling the curve, there, buckaroo. :-)
What timing. Right after the election.
This trend is making me nervous. A few months ago my in box would be full of recruiter emails. Now, not so much and my own company has a hiring freeze now. I have no intention of getting jabbed if a new company requires it. Got kids in college and a mortgage payment. Go to vote the bums out and the bums cheat and stay in place.
Poor, poor Jeff. Horrible if he loses a buck.
He does pay very well, however. My doc’s nephew graduated from Seattle U a few years ago and was hired right away as AMZ advertising manager for a cool $1 million per year. Wonder whether he’ll survive the firings.
I once took a program my boss wrote and reduced it in size by nearly half with even more functions than his...............
Guys like you seem amaze me. I'll be like 'okay, so I need to reposition the star charts to what they would have looked like in 500BC. That's really complex and I'm not good at writing code so let's see if any code exists that I can look at as examples..."
And there will be one that has just one like like
##&%*[quad]^*;
And it does the whole thing. I'm like ... but .... how?
Depression right around the corner folks. Recession already here.
best economy ever.
Ahhh, the beautiful simplicity of logic and switching.
I've got a couple of Echo devices with Alexa, and with some perseverance you can turn all of that stuff off. The Echo Show 8 I have in my bedroom is being used exclusively as an alarm clock, and all it ever shows is the time in big characters for my aged eyes. But the nice thing about it is that you can set an alarm with verbal commands alone, which is less frustrating than fumbling about with buttons. The Echo Show 15 in my dining room continually displays some fine classic artworks and only leaves off when you give it a command, after which it goes back to the display.
I'm not a cheerleader for Amazon, but I have to admit that their Echo devices are very useful in many ways. I feel a bit like Rush Limbaugh with his support of Apple.
Since the vast majority are proud demonrats to begin with, Isn’t this what they voted for?
Just back from Columbus Ohio. I can’t believe the building going on. So many cranes I wonder how they don’t bump into each other. I cannot imagine a severe downturn. The math tells me it must happen (like 2007-2011). But it doesn’t happen. Amazing
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