The more important thing it does though is remove culpability from the employee who doesn't have a job anymore. That person will be looking for a job (we assume, perhaps a few will just retire or something else). The companies they apply at will want to know why they no longer work at Amazon - there is a big difference between "I was sexually harassing my coworkers" (pick a crime, sexual harassment seems to be the big one these days), and "Amazon decided they didn't need my job done any more".

"culpability" is also purposefully loaded. It's not wrong for a company to decide that certain jobs are no longer needed. How they handle that could be more or less considerate of the human impact, but there's really no way to do it that won't cause some some upset to the terminated employee.

It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"

I can only imagine what this will do to morale. If even positive quarters means job cuts, why even try to have a positive quarter.

> purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.

Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."

And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."

If a person fails to understand they are essentially working for a feudal lord when they sign up to work for Amazon, the educational system has failed.

In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.

Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?

counterpoint:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fire#Verb

4. (transitive, employment) To terminate the employment contract of (an employee), especially for cause (such as misconduct, incompetence, or poor performance).

IANAL, but I believe "cause" means "the employee gave the company cause to fire them". Poor performance, bad conduct, etc.

Cause in this context specifically refers to the employee having done something wrong or illegal and means the employee is guilty of misconduct.

With cause think crimes or near crimes. Sexually harassment of a coworker, taking things from the warehouse...

In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.

There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.

GP obviously meant passive tone, not passive noun-verb relationship.

I've heard it described as the "exculpative voice".

Correct. There's nothing vague about "the burglar was shot by me."

It's passive but crystal clear.

Grammatically correct, but missing the narrative subtext.

"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.

People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.

This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.

"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.

Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.

The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.

"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears.

I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.

> Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.

This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years

I think American English is the same colloquially. “I got fired” means I didn’t perform or did something wrong. “I got laid off” is our “I was made redundant”.

“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.

> in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy"

OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)

How would you describe that, in British English?

It’s equivalent to “restructuring” which doesn’t directly mean reduction in force but it does mean that I directly.

Makes it sound like they shuffled desks and gave everyone new team names. How fun!

(Not like, you know, some people getting divorced soon, some people biting a revolver soon)

And by applying these organizational changes, each person can become more load bearing and have so much more scope and impact. This is not a loss, it's a great win for everyone! /s

It’s better than “RIFed,” at least.

I always wonder if the people responsible for the over-hiring are on the block? My personal experience suggests not.

They will. But by the time it happens, Jassy already made millions in cash + much more in stocks and will retire comfortably while others will slave away for new AI overlords.

GPT-1 or GPT-2, which would match his reasoning abilities, are unfortunately deprecated, so we can't.

Ironically, Amazon's document writing culture stresses NOT using passive voice, but it seems acceptable to do so when you need to spin a PR.

We didn't fail to secure things because we spent our security budget on security theatre - we were just kindly offering those poor hackers money to support their families.

My favourite is during terrorist attacks in Europe, it's always like "car attacks crowd". Like the car's wife had left it and it had decided to go out with a bang.

Normally it’s the terrorists that are so bright that they fire rockets into their own territory. So, “rocket flew” is actually being nice to them.

Or one of my favorites, "was hit by a car". While true in the strict physical sense, that’s like reporting that someone was "shot by a gun".

Fox news spin: "his heart murdered him, as we all know all hearts secretly want to do to all of us".

> It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”

See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:

> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.

[…]

> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.

* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...

For automobiles specifically:

* https://crashnotaccident.com

* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...

* https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...

killed by drivers, cars are inanimate objects

That would make Bezos look bad .

>Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language.

"Job losses" isn't passive voice. "Jobs were lost" would be passive voice.

Why are people so hung up on "job losses", as if we don't hear this every day? Who cares?

> As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.

Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.

Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!

> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures

The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.

> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:

- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.

- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA

- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools

- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.

In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.

Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.

>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company

Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?

Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?

If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.

Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!

So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.

Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.

Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.

The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?

This is unfortunately true. Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.

Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.

Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes. Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.

> you get a regular paycheck

No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.

Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.

And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.

---

The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.

1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.

2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.

In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.

They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.

> But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?

Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.

Cash comp at Amazon is extremely limited, with at least half of your comp coming from RSUs (or cash equivalent during the first year). So if Amazon is wildly successful, you do get a huge benefit out of it (my grants resulted in a salary that was ~ $100K more than the band I was assigned at review).

Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.

What’s the actual hazard there? I get that a company going bankrupt causes money to evaporate into wages and capital. But are the owners actually facing any real risk? You have to be an accredited investor to buy in in any real way and one of the tests is that your investment is below a certain percentage of your means.

Which business? The majority of businesses fail and never turn a profit. A success like Amazon is the exception, not the rule.

I'm curious what are the shortcomings you find with SageMaker?

Bedrock is just hosting a bunch of different LLMs. It is just as capable as the third party LLMs it hosts. It hosts everything except for OpenAI and Gemini models as far as the popular ones. Even Nova, Amazon’s models, are good enough for the most part, cheaper and usually faster.

There is absolutely nothing in the world I would like less than an AI device listening to all of my conversations at home.

Hard agree. Same for Siri.

I don't get why they just don't do it. There are jailbreaks, making it talk trash and so on, but is that the majority of users? I doubt it.

I use almost daily my google nest to set timers hand free while cooking, and managing radio playbacks: I’m an avid web radio listener.

The Alexa product as it is, is already lighting money on fire. Adding LLM integration to it would just be pouring gasoline on it; iirc inference is still not profitable even in easier sectors so Alexa would be a particularly bad place for it. (Even though it would be amazing UX, but I doubt enough people would pay the price it costs to break even).

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. This is spot on. Likely Amazon and AWS folks in denial of where they really are relative to the market’s bar at the moment.

If Microsoft couldn’t compete with Google in search, how could Amazon? Even if the search were better, how do you get people to switch to it if Google is the default everywhere? Besides Alexa was losing billions when it was backed by the relatively cheap to run Amazon Lex pattern matching service. It would have lost more being backed by an LLM and it actually got worse from all indications.

I’d say leadership should be fired for having so little to show for it

From the beginning Adam was intended to be an interim AWS CEO: They didn't have someone who was ready immediately, so Adam was the bridge. Unfortunately, Adam was the bridge to Matt Garman :(

That's fair. I actually didn't realize it's been already 4+ years since he took over as CEO. I do think that we haven't heard the last word of Amazon Anthropic's partnership. Microsoft is already deep in OpenAI, and Google, while also a major stakeholder in Anthropic, directly competes with Gemini (API, code, etc). Amazon has foundation models but not really in the game, so this partnership is likely to continue. Both sides need it (Amazon for staying in the AI game and Anthropic for the resources and cash)

Is this one of those things that are meant to sound deep and profound by inventing terminology, but isn't? That's such a like day 2 person thing to do.

(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)

Had completely forgotten that futurama bit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FvrcvPNpdd8

Which is the one people like to hug?

I hope the shark thing isn’t said in earnest ever by anyone. It is the height of parody of a hustle culture bro. On second thought would you want $1 million now or $5000 a day and the guy says neither because that’s not how you build wealth or something. It’s probably number one.

Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep

Sharks eat sheep?

My company’s been through layoffs/reorgs every 3–6 months for three years. One thing is true: performance management happens faster. Many chronic low performers were laid off, and a few “too many cooks” problems were resolved. Those benefits are real and genuine.

But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:

1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.

2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.

3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.

Unless you are in the position of Zuckerberg or the Google founders, everyone’s main motivation is to keep their jobs.

If you are just an employee - it’s beyond naive to prioritize anything but your own job. Of course I am not advocating back stabbing and throwing others under the bus. Getting ahead in BigTech is always about playing politics and getting on the right projects to show “impact”.

>Oh no, they might only make $15 billion instead of $18 billion next quarter?

Exactly. It's a for-profit company, not a charity or a jobs program.

The Yen Carry trade financed US VC since 1999, thanks to ZIRP from the BOJ.

Not Ironic at all that Dot Com immediately followed.

'murica

Companies pay out severance mostly for compliance with the WARN act. If they could get away with not doing this, they absolutely would.

“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.”

That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.

Behavior is shaped by incentives.

Countries used to be overwhelmingly autocratic - often ruled by hereditary dictators called kings. People realized unchecked power will always lead to abuse and overthrew them.

Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].

If only we had a system of rules we could vote on which would make this arrangement forbidden...

---

[0]: You can't legally overthrow a government either but if you do it successfully anyway, then you are the government and you decide what is legal.

Ironically, no democratic countries I know of have clauses in their ruleset ("laws") which declare that people are allowed to overthrow the government if it's no longer democratic, even if those democratic governments were created by overthrowing a previous dictatorship.

The Colorado rules about publishing salary ranges really help make it a true market. Better insight on compensation, in more places, would be even better. And evolving laws as the workarounds evolve; this is why we have legislators.

get a new job every two years, spend the first year working hard and the second year getting a new job

Find another buyer willing to pay you what you want.

Easy, be a low-wage worker. Their gains outpaced inflation since COVID.

Or, even easier, just be a capital owner, instead of a wagie. (/s)

I’m not sure I get what part of what I said this relates to, but the visa system in the US is extraordinary draconian compared to other countries for high skill work visas. It’s extremely limited in quantity and if you lose your job you need to find a new one within weeks or need to leave the country. Converting to a permanent visa is difficult and has long time commitments and even then you are not secure in your status. As of recently even minor vehicular infractions can lead to violent deportation and family separation, losing all your belongings and if you own a home forced to sell and remove your kids from school. I know a lot of folks on H1-B and other visas and they live in constant fear especially in competitive cultures like Amazon where people are let go almost capriciously - jeopardizing their life with their families and constantly leaving them insecure in everything in life.

To your point the system is friendly to the employer, but it’s very much not to the employee.

Most jobs are not interchangeable, especially globally.

What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.

It makes no sense to look at global averages for the employment market.

> Population is still growing

I think the relevant number here is working age population.

> correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates

It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".

Plus, possibly some forward-looking positioning for a future where automation drives leaner companies with fewer employees per dollar of revenue.

Still. Less jobs on the market

I mean, may as well just point back to the 2000 tech bubble if we're going to keep nodding our heads at that line

It also forecast a certain business growth that we see not happening. Also, no sane PM would document to fire 600,000 people, it’s always “avoid hiring, wink wink”.

Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?

It's almost like a merger of Capital and State.

Why don't you exclude the worst performing industries instead?

Given that the dollar has lost ~10% of its value since the start of the year, that's good... Right?

That's because music doesn't stop often and historically not sitting down was almost always a better strategy.

The most pernicious part of the con is that by systematically dismantling pensions and forcing everyone into 401(k)s, they've ensured that we all have to root for the plutocrats. We're forced to watch our retirement funds, which means we're incentivized to hope Amazon's stock does go up after firing 14k (or 30k according to other sources) people.

It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.

are stocks even going up outside of tech stocks that can benefit from AI investment? everything else seems stagnant

SP500 is flat this year when you account for loss of purchasing power of the US dollar:

https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR

Also it’s by design a trailing designation. You will be in (and possibly out) of a recession before NBER declares one, by definition.

We've been in a global economic depression for more than a decade already.

Ha - sorry about that. Edited my comment to reference the original HBR paper rather than the Inc magazine silliness.

Which is what we're seeing right now - middle management, and vestigial organizations not related to the core dev team (Trust & Safety and co.) getting trimmed.

As for LLMs, I am perfectly capable of opening a notepad, taking notes, and converting them into Jira tickets (as I have done in the past) without bleeding edge machine learning models

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this at all.

And in a really dystopian world, the AI could review everyone’s PRs and documentation and rank engineers based on their contributions. It could even make compensation decisions based on that. Much of the performance management can be automated (with human in the loop).

Then you could have fewer managers managing more people (and get rid of a bunch of layers of management overhead). They could focus on the higher value parts of management like coordinating between teams, making tough execution decisions, resolving technical blockers / ambiguity, etc