this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
449 points (98.9% liked)

News

23376 readers
1849 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Why do they want to get rid of people?

[–] EnderMB@lemmy.world 46 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Amazon gets rid of around 5-8% of their staff every year through unregretted attrition, where they'll fire "underperforming" people, with maybe 10-15% of people being threatened with underperformance "

Alongside this, to cut a long story short Amazon grew huge during COVID, and despite tens of thousands of layoffs the company has been trying to shrink everywhere possible, cutting fat wherever they can. IMO, leadership made lots of really stupid decisions, and the CEO has set Amazon on a course where irreparable damage has been made.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't think this is going to be just cutting fat though. They're going to have their desperate and least-talented employees working in the office while their most talented employees will end up finding remote employment elsewhere. That's how RTO always goes.

[–] EnderMB@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Oh, 1000%. I could write a book on how monumentally stupid the whole process is (and most Amazonians agree), but the fundamental points are:

  • The people that stay are of a certain mindset, where you don't pick up "hard" tasks, and you are quick to establish blame/ownership elsewhere.
  • Data is king, but you can lie a lot with data.
  • Employees are customers also, and when you piss off employees you piss off customers and their families.
  • You spend a huge sum of money on hiring and training talent, only to send them to your competitors.
  • You spend money to give severance to active employees. That is still, to be, the dumbest thing ever. SO many people don't resign, they just down tools or do a bad job to get the extra pay. PIP is called Paid Interview Prep for a reason.
  • Amazon's Focus/Pivot has such a bad reputation that being fired used to mean that other big companies would happily tell you "if you have any trouble at Amazon, let me know and we'll start an interview loop".

Most fundamentally of all...very few companies do this. It died with Jack Welch/GM and Gates/Microsoft, after they saw the same downfalls. Amazon is yet to learn their lesson, and it shows in how poorly the "Amazon Management School" under Bezos are performing. The other big tech companies also now do this, although less severe, and surprise surprise, they're all going downhill - making awful decisions, delivering nothing of value, and ignoring customers over leadership.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

5-8% of their staff every year

I'm aware of this policy but I didn't realise the number was that large.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 13 points 2 months ago

It's a great strategy to have your employees backstabbing each other instead of working together too. "Oh, Jim is struggling? Good, one more person below me in the ranks".

[–] Huckledebuck@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago

It feels the exact same way in the USPS.

[–] Piemanding@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm assuming new people are less likely to complain about no raises and bad conditions.

[–] EnderMB@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

True, paired with Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.

With that said, a lot of people (like myself) joined Amazon when remote working was encouraged, only to then be told to go in 3 days a week. We lost loads of really great engineers that didn't have opportunities in their local area. We'll likely lose a LOT of people again, myself included, unless opportunities open elsewhere where I can transfer to a new area. Amazon are tricky, though, and they'll preempt this by reducing transfers or laying people off soon to ensure that those that cannot adhere to 5 days a week are considered to have "resigned voluntarily".

That's all to say that a lot of bad faith on Amazon's part will likely scare people away from joining. After the NYT article dropped almost a decade ago, Amazon got around it being hard to hire by having great transfer opportunities and high salaries. Neither of those exist now, and with all the anti-worker rhetoric and lies about internal AI performance "saving x hours on upgrades" I don't see Amazon ever getting top talent again. Amazon will slip into boomer tech soon enough.

[–] rolaulten@startrek.website 8 points 2 months ago

Just to give an outsider perspective to anyone reading this. I live in the Seattle Metro, have worked for Microsoft, and now work at a unicorn. I have a list of skill and experience that any ops department would drool over. Amazon is is one of the companies I won't even apply to unless I'm desperate for a job (and even then I'm not planning to stay).

And I know I'm not the only one.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 months ago

Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.

This really happening? What sort of roles are they moving?

[–] cultsuperstar@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Non-Amazon related answer: every company does this at some point, usually for cost cutting. They want people to quit vs letting people go. They basically introduce less-than-ideal working conditions knowing some people will leave because of it. I haven't looked at the job market personally but friends have said it's not great so basically people have to put up with it or take their chances not finding another job for a while.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

It also depends on where you live. Where I live, if you are working a fully remote job, and your employment contract doesn't specify that you need to work in the office, if they try to force you back into the office then you can quit and go on employment insurance since it would be considered a constructive dismissal.

[–] fakir@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This quarter's top line might not be looking great, so gotta improve the bottom line to impress the Wall Street analysts.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, that's a constant. I was wondering if there's more to it. :D

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Rampant over hiring.