Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees Online megacorp Amazon is the latest tech giant to be linked with sweeping layoffs following reports that up to 10,000 redundancy notices will start to be distributed to employees from this week. Loquacious unnamed sources faimilar with the process told The New York Times that cuts are coming in corporate and technology jobs …
The article tells us that Amazon is known for its gruelling and cut-throat environment. Further, that staff attrition is achieved through what seems like the investment bank annual appraisal bottom 10% have to go approach.
However if salaries are significantly higher than the industry norm (are they?) then this would be useful to know.
In such circumstances Amazon's behaviour would not then seem unusual if not particularly pleasant.
Not particularly relevant but intended to illustrate my point, a thousand years ago when I was in a reasonably well paid job in a not awful if not great environment, the consultancy firm we were working with dangled a carrot but I declined because as a bit of a square peg, I preferred my then risk reward ratio to a potentially short term opportunity to earn a lot of money in a round hole.
From very personal former experience, they do pay very good salaries, at least coming within shouting distance of contract rates.
Add to that, stock options (though if I'd stayed I'd be pretty miffed with the performance if I hadn't been able to cash out during the peak). In addition, at least during the peak of the pandemic, a very generous personal purchase policy for home office. That may now be gone, though.
For that... well, the cited ElReg article is very much spot on, it just isn't complete. It's, well, it's a cult. You drink the kool-aid and yes, you are lost to the rest of the world. Everything you say, no matter how trivial, that relates in any way to the company must be filtered. To ridiculous extent.
However, what isn't mentioned at all is that the company (at least AWS) is already fractured into fiefdoms led by empire-builders. How you do, whether you become a celeb who holds forth at events or whether you're PIPed, all comes down to what kingdom you end up in.
I went from 10 months of some of the most amazing work I ever got to do in my career - and a prized Accolade - to absolute hell on Earth in a matter of weeks, doomed by a re-org (former manager left, his manager lost in inner-AWS warfare and up the chain). You can't even simply change to a better or more interesting team because your manager essentially can poison the chalice. Even the people you used to successfully work with and who know better, can no longer touch you with a 10-foot pole.
Musk said recently Twitter was losing $4 million a day and so needed to make sweeping cost reductions to keep the wolves from the door.
Rather than cutting costs and people- and therefore the ability to deliver your product.. how about improving their quality, so people are actually satisfied with your product, and willing to pay for it?
absolute crazy talk, I know..
especially for something like social media, where you would have to pay me to use it..
From what I see, the layoffs for self-driving cars, Twits, and Metaverse are real. Everything else is purging highly paid staff to make room for cheap and desperate hires. Layoffs in Q4, sell on brief stock surge, hire back for cheap next year.
The flaw in this plan is that companies are rushing it and making too many mistakes.
According to various sources, Amazon regularly "PIPs" between 6 and 10 percent of its workforce during review periods, and is known for its extremely grueling and cutthroat environment.
So that's why I keep getting tapped up by recruiters trying to get me to join the Amazon fold.
The fake account announced Eli Lilly would begin making insulin for free, and was picked up widely enough to briefly depress the company's stock price, so that $8 account may have cost Twitter millions in ad revenues
On that one: insulin costs ten times the European price in the US. Big pharma is gouging people in need.
If people taking advantage of this kind of blackmail from Big Pharma were a little bit hurt financially by this false tweet, it's just a little bit of justice served.
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