I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great.
They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.
IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very honest conversations with my managers about these things regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I doubt I'd have the same success.
Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the manager track generally has higher pay at each level. Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden. Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks).
Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
I worked in a University lab during grad school, then worked in the private sector for 16 years, and have been back working on research software for the last four years. All I'll say is that the software world should not look at the research world for best practices on delivering software products, except maybe to do the exact opposite of what they do.
I think it all depends on finding a group of people who share the same goal of making something great together. One person who isn’t interested in that goal can be insidious to a self-managed team. And getting everyone involved means having some reward for doing well, like a validating mission or direct interactions with customers, which can be hard in some roles.
These don’t even remotely compare. In academia, timelines are long, failure is extremely high, total team involvement on a project is small, motivation is different, as is team selection criteria.
Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice
I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day is without taking any time to understand those team dynamics and which processes fit in those dynamics. It's like a coach that calls nothing but pass plays for a run centric team and makes the 180lb guy play lineman and the 300lb guy play defensive back while thinking 20% turnover is good. No higher understanding of software development what so ever. For me and my teams, they've mostly been a burden.
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
In my experience, most contemporary managers also think they know everything now because they can write genAI prompts without realizing the AI will tend to agree with whatever they put into it.
Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
> I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day
One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team.
The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
My career hasn't been as long but it's been 50% good 50% bad roughly - of the bad ones, one was a sycophant to a narcissistic product owner but didn't directly cause me any trouble, while the other two were promoted developers who tried to force their will on developers while also playing political games to try and preserve themselves.
You don't quit companies, you quit managers. I've fortunately had great ones who balanced being into my development with making sure the job was being done. But that's not a universal experience, sadly. I work in games so you can find plenty of horror stories on what happens under bad management without me giving second hand stories of other teams I worked next to being raked in the coals.
I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.
I've also had all good managers who helped me move up levels, etc. across 3 companies for about 5 years. I think you're right about the side effects, and it's sad to see. It reflects, in my mind, an acknowledgment from these companies that they won't grow as much in the future as people right now think they will
One or two rare exceptions over 15 years must account for several bad years, no?
As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.
Yeah, I’ve been working in the industry about 20 years, and I’ve had one bad manager experience (and also a couple of not-great experiences where I didn’t really _have_ a manager).
Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.
> IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with
I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.
Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.
I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics.
I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Edited to add:
I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
(Context: I’m an IC and told my
Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
I don't think OP was necessarily trying to imply "there should be no managers", but simply "I don't want to become a manager" - which is perfectly valid.
Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.
It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.
From what I’ve seen flatter (not flat) company structures have less politics and a healthier culture. When you get into the 7, 8, 9 layer manager hierarchy at a software company is when things have really gone to shit
The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the "most political" managers are the one who stay.
Which is natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more visibility to.
That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game.
So the company might be worse after this.
The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers.
They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.
Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
Those people are also dead weight. I despise the fact that I have to play politics at work. Work should be based on results, period. Spending time politicking is not producing results; at best, it’s eventually producing via cajoling what could have been accomplished in 1/4 the time if you’d been left alone and trusted.
IMHO, workplace politics can happen and be caused at any level of a company. I think it's a natural thing for some people to do.
Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.
Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.
>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.
Excellent observations.
People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.
>. Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"
I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less obvious to some people.
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
> I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.
> I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.
How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders
Incredibly hard. If there were some formula and it was really easy to just keep "the good ones", then every company would only have great managers. It's simply not that easy at scale.
Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.
Deming agreed with you: Quality control is a management problem. But there's management and there's management. If we're talking about 14000 people, they're not the top managers of the business, and getting rid of them won't change the culture.
They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
Middle management _is_ the culture of a company. A regular worker interacts not at all with the CxOs except reading their emails and every day with their managers.
Middle management is also the memory of the company.
You want to solve this problem? Then promote from below. We all understand that representative democracy is the best organizational form and then we turn around and run ALL our corporations as dictatorships.
It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.
Nah, they're both downstream of complexity. Complexity creates both managers and politics. But managers do create more complexity and more politics.
The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
Politics happen due to people. There is this myth that you don't need management or leadership at all. But there are enough examples of bad managed teams and bad self directed teams that its pretty obvious that politics happen in the absence of management.
I think it’s subjective like any role, but mostly you are trying to evaluate what their team is delivering, are they making effective strategic plans, how’s their 360 degree feedback and survey scores of worker satisfaction, are they making successful hires and retaining their people, are they growing the next generation of leaders, and so on?
I'm an engineering manager (EDIT - not at Amazon or at a very large firm), and I do 10,000 bazillion things a day, usually involving fixing lousy project management, setting processes so random people on the team don't get slammed by random external demands, guiding people's careers, talking people off the ledge / therapy, matching people's skills and interests to the projects and work, creating other teams to run ops so engineers can engineer, talk to senior management in a way they need to hear to protect the people below from nonsense, proving to the people above that I need headcount (and then creating a hiring process), helping people below being new managers, helping junior people learn, and interacting with clients and business people so the engineers are protected from it.
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
Don't take it too harshly, most of HN would build facebook in a weekend and exit for billions. And usually they only see their circle of influence without actually trying to be a manager in a first place to understand what does it take.
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
This is old news and refers to the 15% figure that was announced last year (more than 6 months ago!) and for which the "layoffs" are already completed.
Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.
The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:
1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of managers.
2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.
3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.
4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.
In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
It still is big. Let's not start to treat 10's of thousands of skill labor losing their jobs through no fault of their own as an everyday occurance. We may as well leave the US at that point.
Haha a friend was just recommending I apply for a job there. I told her hell no. It's one of the worst in big tech. Probably second worst after twitter.
The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.
I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
I have had a long career working for F50 companies across a few decades. I can tell you, my time as a senior manager at Microsoft in mid 00’s has been the most pleasant experience I have had working in the private sector. A lot has changed in the past 20 years, but I am in touch with many colleagues still working there, and we still recommend Microsoft over the rest.
Working with Microsoft's customer facing tools and people is very different from working inside Microsoft. Not that you'll like one if you hate the other but just that they're different enough that you can't judge one by your experience with the other.
Also some finance guy gets rewarded for making that much cost savings, and they have meat to give to the shareholders, it’s an endless cycle. The finance folks only get the gain, the revenue/quality loss of their actions will not be measured accurately and will not be traced back to their actions. Only upsides.
A long time ago Google used to have a program called "bureaucracy busters," where submissions were reviewed by the CFO to find internal barriers to getting things done.
It was a good system. It no longer really exists and has been replaced by endless reprioritization and detailed bean counting justifying every single small action to prove to layers of management that what you are doing is worthwhile as Google slowly rots into a decayed husk of its old self.
The yellow|white|red jacks on the back of your TV are "RCA jacks." RCA stands for Radio Corporation of America. The same RCA launched NBC, which launched CNBC, which is a dominant source of financial news in the US.
You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.
Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.
It seems weird but realizing one supports the other it kinda makes sense.
For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.
It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.
Readit News
They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.
IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very honest conversations with my managers about these things regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I doubt I'd have the same success.
Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the manager track generally has higher pay at each level. Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden. Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
That is not the real world.
Turns out working for your brother-in-law they let you manage yourself too.
Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
Here's a decent summary of how we got here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6gMf5zR2c4
Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good.
This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
The reality is that the Microsoft style of organization is very prominent in the industry.
I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.
As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.
Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.
Deleted Comment
That’s the point, surely
Deleted Comment
I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.
Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.
I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Edited to add:
I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.
It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.
They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.
Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.
Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.
>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.
Excellent observations.
People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.
But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.
You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.
How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders
And anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.
They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
Middle management is also the memory of the company.
Deleted Comment
It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.
The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
How do you tell the difference?
How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?
Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much managing then the flies will start buzzing.
Deleted Comment
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.
The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.
3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.
4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.
In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
A 14,000 employee cut is less than one percent.
Of course I know there are a lot of warehouse and delivery employees but they have managers, too.
They did exactly what I said they did, moving some managers to IC in the very worst case but mostly shuffling teams around.
The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.
I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
Quelle surprise.
Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.
Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for the next earnings report.
I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.
You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.
Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.
But nevermind; this is not the same.
Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses: Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.
For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.
It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.
I guess I agree; Amazon should split up.