At 14000, it's likely there wasn't much consideration on an individual basis.

I understand your argument but it just seems like you’re purposely being contrarian.

Here’s why what you wrote seems needlessly contrarian: Amazon just posted an $18B quarter, so there is no pressing financial pressure. Okay, so you suggest this may be a last resort in lieu of retraining, but we’re talking about 14k jobs across many teams (I know of at least 40 affected), levels, and job families. The idea of needing to cross train is obviously not the culprit at that scale; An SDE laid off from one team can easily perform the same tasks on many others internally. This also completely ignores how Amazon works internally, with managers required to rank employees for pip, and, for events just like this one, URA, regardless of whether or not they deem them to be competent or not.

Of course, Amazon has also been documented to use automated processes for pip/layoffs, and the idea that layoffs involved any ounce of consideration as a last resort is so unbelievable it feels almost inflammatory.

The notion that criticizing one of history’s most profitable companies laying off thousands (at the height of their profits) is the same thing as stating, “every company beyond profit X should never do layoffs” is a blatant misrepresentation and ignores any context.

Because 25+ years of experience in American Capitalism as its evolved and practiced today has taught me that C-Suite and upper management makes FOMO driven decisions on fear, politics and corporate quarterly returns, ie humans forced into a hunger games like culture of lowest common decency and hype driven cycles of management speak - 5 years ago it was Crypto and offshoring and now its AI more offshoring -paying only lip service to employee obligations with no attention to anything beyond that (forget pensions or decent healthcare of the 20 Century)

Ultimately even the most talented people are numbers on spreadsheet strewn aside at the end of the day as MBA capitalist hackers try to optimize every aspect of a short term numbers game to get ahead in stack ranking..

I’ve watched as incredibly talented and driven people are thrown by the wayside and ageism and lack of human decency or respect is has become the norm

Watching hardworking people and the middle class suffer because Billionaires, insane growth expectations, MBAs and Private Equity had burned this country to the ground…

And yes, don’t forget that those type As who worked on NASA missions - “Mission focused” as the article naively trumpets to get attention - once they get cancer, get a little past 50, have kids with needs ie suffer some through life - like all of us eventually do..they get on the chopping block - and are quickly forgotten trust me, I worked in Mission Control too once

Now, Amazon has never been an ethical company—and I’m sure its employees know that to one extent or another but they have indeed been a relentless one and that relentlessness and metric driven culture has driven the humanity out of the tech world (whatever little it had as Autistic or Nerdy edgelord billionaires fund ever more corrupt politics and misery for the masses) as our society is rewarded with even more shorter term thinking and an attention economy with the attention span of a Goldfish.. all these tech companies deserve worse than the skewering they got in HBOs Silicon Valley

Ok end of Rant.. hope some younger folks take heed and try to change up this shitty system

Neither France nor Germany have access to the high-risk capital that American startups enjoy.

Layoff protections and entrepreneurship in this case have a correlation but not a causation relationship.

If your thesis was correct startups would thrive in States with absolutely zero protections, yet the most successful tech startups are in the most “stringent” (for American standards) State. California.

Well, look no further than the American economy if you want to see what unlimited layoffs and outsourcing can do.

Is the friction of hiring and firing responsible for all of Europe’s economic stagnation? Only some of it? If only some, how are you quantifying the proportion?

they are not “unproductive” :)

to answer your question - company should have a right to fire 99% of the people if they want at any point in time and there should be no regulation of any kind against that ever.

what america should do is add $250k per year per employee tax for any employee hired outside of the US.

Except amazon trims the fat every year

Yeah I’m not sure there’s an obvious/ideal answer.

I do think there’s value in disincentivizing churn though. What we’ve been seeing lately is rapid hiring followed by rapid firing. I bet there’s some inflection point where the job market would actually benefit from less churn even if it comes at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term.

> What would your ideal solution for the employer be here?

Have business make responsibility more than ruthless sociopathy to grow, like any other era of business