Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

101 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by niuzeta
(mynorthwest.com)

148 Comments

int_19h

13 hours ago

That is why software engineers also need unions.

(but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)

futuraperdita

13 hours ago

> but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand

This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.

The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.

thedevilslawyer

12 hours ago

There's no unions for H1B workers. If there's any union stepping up for their interest, it would find mass enrollment tomorrow. Unfortunately, there isn't support by non-h1b engineers, let alone unions.

Arch-TK

12 hours ago

Not everywhere is in America you know... And non-H1B workers are probably precisely the kinds of workers that should be the ones rocking the boat.

nine_k

8 hours ago

Rocking the boat so much as to get fired, fail to find another employer before the visa expires, and be sent back home? A terrifying perspective for many.

futuraperdita

6 hours ago

Just to clarify that the parent may have edited, but wrote "non-H1B" workers, so they would be speaking about domestic / citizen employees, not ones on visa.

KittenInABox

11 hours ago

I am a non-h1b engineer and I declare it is in my best interest to advocate for h1-b engineers. Otherwise management would simply calculate why would they hire me and treat me well when they can hire a more desperate h1b holder and treat them like trash.

readthenotes1

10 hours ago

Have you looked at who brought in the most H1B workers recently?

augusto-moura

12 hours ago

Not sure about other countries, but there were a few trys in creating unions for software engineers in Brazil, where I live. They all failed for lack of interest from the engineers themselves.

Aside from that, you need to contribute with money for something that will not get you anything in the short term. Also the lack of transparency incentives corruption

wat10000

12 hours ago

Why does there have to be a lack of transparency?

augusto-moura

12 hours ago

I'm not saying it has to, I'm saying what happened in Brazil

xienze

13 hours ago

Unions are only going to be effective in a domain where the job can’t be done just as well by someone on the other side of the planet. Think plumbers, electricians, etc. The fact that the work has to be done “here and now” is the leverage those workers have.

A software engineer’s union would just kick whatever offshoring is happening into overdrive.

joe_mamba

12 hours ago

Yep this. I think i've lost count of home many US and German companies keep moving their SW positions to my home country because US labor is too expensive and German workers rights and unions too annoying for business.

Where I live now in Austria, there's some union of IT workers, but it's small and toothless because they know their work can be offshored and have no leverage especially that the country is already not attractive to investors as-is due to high costs, high taxes and regulations. IT workers giving themselves even more benefits and protections through unions, like the rail workers have for example, would just mean non critical IT work leaves the country ASAP to neighboring Hungary or Slovakia or something.

In a globalized free market without trade and regulatory barriers, where the products and the "labor" travels freely over a wire with no borders or tariffs, the best value players win all, and everyone else is stuck in a race to the bottom trying to match that even if their operating costs are higher due to regulations, taxes, etc

Unions only worked in jobs where the workers could collectively use the leverage they had all along against their employer but were too afraid to use due to retaliation, but unions can't fix real world economic and trade facts that make your leverage zero to begin with. See the VFX industry for best example.

bojan

12 hours ago

If offshoring were that easy, American and European companies would have been doing it already, as it's a great deal on paper, why wouldn't the companies jump at the opportunity to get engineers for 30% of the cost?

However, the experienced reality repeatedly doesn't live up to the promise.

joe_mamba

12 hours ago

Look, I'm not gonna argue on the pros and cons of offshoring, I'm just telling you the reality of what's happening where I live. Obviously, not everything can be outsourced 1:1 with massive savings and get same quality, but businesses don't care and more and more work is offshored now, whether you want it or not, especially in times of economic downturn when labor cost becomes more pressing and execs can show savings so they're taking their chances whether it pays off in the future or not we'll see.

Nobody would risk disrupting smooth running operations by introducing offshoring to save a few pennies, when free money was raining from the sky, but now that money is getting tighter and covid opened the doors to accepting more work done remotely and less work done in sync face to face, then offshoring is now a lot less risky and off-putting than in the past.

Plus, unlike the Indian offshoring scare of ~20 years ago, besides the remote work thing, offshore labor is a lot more skilled at IT task now. There isn't that massive gap anymore, where only Americans or Germans new how to write SW, and the eastern world only knew to make sneakers and do call support. Thanks to STEM universities, access to good education sources, FOSS and self learning, people outside the west can code just as good but at a lower cost when you keep the same hiring bar and don't just pay some offshore middleman consultancy for the cheapest labor.

And the proof is in the pudding as most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India at this point. You can say all you want, that offshoring isn't gonna work because of quality or culture or whatever, but it sure seems like it is working for them, and I don't think this genie is going back in the bottle.

xienze

12 hours ago

They have been offshoring for decades. We go in cycles of execs asking “why the hell are we paying these entitled Americans so much when Indian will do just as good for peanuts?”, then offshoring, then realizing it doesn’t work that well. The next guy comes in and the cycle repeats.

However, the second an IT union gets established they’re just going to say the hell with it, India ain’t so bad.

joe_mamba

11 hours ago

>then realizing it doesn’t work that well

How isn't it working? Most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India/Asia/LatAm/CEE at this point. So something must be working if they keep growing there.

nirui

7 hours ago

Why so self-defecting? Even some of the job could be out-sourced, some positions just cannot. If those people can unionize, it might starts to grow from there.

It's like planting the seeds, it might not work from time to time and from places to places, but sometime the result might surprise you. But you'll never know if you don't give it a try.

It's like... (maybe an inappropriate example) how NRA brainlessly defending gun rights. They don't first spend 500 billions on gun safety research trying to prove gun is safe, no, they want guns, and then they come up reasons why guns are good.

In the recent years I'm started to think maybe this NRA-style method is actually how to set things in motion (if it's not the only effective way), as any added prerequisite or cations may eventually bog things down to a stop. You all read the CIA sabotage manual right? There's a chapter detailed how you can stop a plan by adding complexity (i.e. bigger committees etc).

gosub100

12 hours ago

Unions might be able to bargain against h1b because they can have an honest conversation with management about the "we just can't FIND anybody" lie.

thedevilslawyer

12 hours ago

When there's no solidarity amongst ALL workers, no wonder unions are a non starter.

In such an environment, H1B workers will actively fight union formation.

xienze

12 hours ago

But remember, the company can always decide to just not employ US-based employees (including H1B) at all. Your job can be done elsewhere for a fraction of the cost, remember?

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

bpt3

13 hours ago

If there was a union in place, the massive over hiring that led to this wouldn't have happened and the competent developers would have made less money. So how exactly does everyone come out ahead there?

close04

12 hours ago

Despite the downvotes, this is at least partially correct. If unions were ubiquitous in the tech sector, companies would have been a lot more stingy with the hiring during ZIRP or boom eras. Or they would have been more creative with the hiring form - contractors, temporary staff, etc. None of these companies would risk locking in so many employees knowing that they'll be very expensive or impossible to fire.

I don't know about how a union would affect the standard salary being offered. I'd say that it could be higher for those essential enough to be "core staff", those that the company hires permanently knowing they'll be hard to get rid of and who drive the company forward because they're motivated with additional means.

So a union might drive the salaries and employment conditions up for the "core" team, while driving them down for the "temps". I've been through this as a unionized tech worker in both categories, and this is how it played out.

beanjuiceII

12 hours ago

software engineers definitely don't need unions

ewuhic

12 hours ago

said the devil himself

4er_transform

13 hours ago

[flagged]

selfawareMammal

12 hours ago

You're entirely relying on a false dichotomy and an unsupported causal chain, assuming (without evidence!) that unions inherently reduce efficiency, slow growth, and lower living standards. The fact is that there's evidence that unions can correct power imbalances, raise wages, reduce inequality, and even support long-term productivity and social stability

roenxi

12 hours ago

> The fact is that there's evidence that unions can correct power imbalances, raise wages, reduce inequality, and even support long-term productivity and social stability

I suppose there was a time when American manufacturing had a big power/equality/productivity and social stability imbalance over Chinese manufacturing and the US unions did play a role in correcting that and promoting Chinese wealth and power. So in principle I agree. I'm just less sure that AWS employees are going to benefit from doing the same thing in software.

andrekandre

10 hours ago

  > Preventing efficiency in markets slows growth, which slows the progression of living standards.
graph me unionization levels, market efficiency and standards of living (for the bottom 80%) and tell me what is correlated with what

Spooky23

12 hours ago

Unionism is capitalism. If you are a W2 employee in the United States, you are in a contractual relationship in which you have very limited leverage to negotiate and limited protections.

Humans organize together in many different ways for many different reasons. Your own assertion belies that — if my negotiating my terms of working for someone is crime against humanity, why should the guy controlling the capital have that right?

The dude for whom I work is worth $10-15B. What should he make for the benefit of humanity and efficiency? He negotiated a deal with the board for his comp.

wat10000

12 hours ago

Unions are just businesses that sell labor. There’s nothing wrong with getting a bunch of people to cooperate on selling labor, any more than there is with getting a bunch of people together to cooperate on selling bananas.

Refreeze5224

12 hours ago

Markets are anti-human. Any economic system not designed for the well-being of human beings is anti-human. "Living standards" is a concept the owning class uses to justify their obscene wealth and promulgation of a system solely focused on profit.

groundzeros2015

13 hours ago

What will the union do?

This is a boom and bust industry by nature. Projects finish or cancel, and work winds down. You can always be laid off. Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine.

loeg

13 hours ago

10% over a year, split into two waves isn't that extreme. It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.

Lammy

13 hours ago

> It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.

That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

joe_mamba

13 hours ago

It's not some global conspiracy, it just aligns with the end of the ZIRP era. Companies could ignore headcount and hire endlessly just to singla growth to investors, while free money was raining from the sky.

dingaling

10 hours ago

Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. That is, they made so much money they couldn't find any way to spend over five BILLION per month even with this 'excess' headcount.

readthenotes1

9 hours ago

Are you saying they should be a charity?

Or is this like the old Soviet Union thing where people said they pretended to pay us and we pretended to work?

loeg

13 hours ago

Why would you explain this with a conspiracy theory of collusion instead of Occam's razor -- that they were responding to similar changes in market conditions, with input from similar shareholders?

keeda

12 hours ago

This is not a conspiracy theory, even though what I'm about to say will sound like it. If you can talk to someone from the exec class in confidence (which unfortunately may require a close personal relationship or high trust), they'll tell you there was a clear -- if somewhat tacit -- understanding that the job market had gotten too hot during Covid and something "had to be done" about it after ZIRP ended.

Elon's layoffs at Twitter were basically the signal for the rest of the industry that it's time to reverse the trend.

loeg

11 hours ago

Responding to identical market conditions in similar ways based on input from overlapping shareholders does not require collusion between execs.

keeda

8 hours ago

Right, but I'm contending there is a form of collusion. Here's a paraphrased conversation I had with someone who's in the exec class when I remarked on all the layoffs happening at the same time:

"Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead."

When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually getting rather bad amongst the employees and from a product quality / safety perspective, the response was, "It doesn't matter. They've all decided the status quo must change and decided that they want to do the same things."

This rhymes with what I heard from other senior people as well. And suspiciously the same anti-employee tactics have been happening across the industry at the same time -- layoffs, forced attrition, shifting jobs offshore, RTO, increased workloads with reducing headcount leading to record levels of burnout...

Even if we charitably assume it's group-think, that's still a form of collusion.

Lammy

13 hours ago

Please stop validating the language of the oppressors

groundzeros2015

13 hours ago

Can you defend your point?

Lammy

12 hours ago

They literally got caught colluding to depress wages. You're a fool if you expect that their goals have changed.

zaphirplane

13 hours ago

occam isn’t a law of nature, it’s an expression or a sharp quip

I don’t see a conspiracy here other than sheep herd mentality of hire hire hire then too many

darth_avocado

12 hours ago

> Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million.

Is it mentioned anywhere that the roles eliminated are all going to be software engineers, because that’s what all the threads so far are interpreting this as. This feels more like preparing for a recession without saying it out loud. People aren’t buying as much anymore and with focus on cost savings across tech, can easily understand AWS not covering for lower retail revenue anymore.

loeg

6 hours ago

It's almost never only SWEs.

malfist

13 hours ago

10% over a year on top of Amazon's 10% rank and yank. Thats a huge cut.

loeg

13 hours ago

What makes you think this is on top of some other layoff process?

klodolph

12 hours ago

I’ll say that the parent comment is correct and explain why I think it’s correct.

Amazon has demonstrated a preference for “unregretted attrition” (URA). URA is the name for what happens when engineers exit the company and Amazon is happy that they do. The exit can either be due to a PIP failure (performance improvement plan) or just unhappiness with the company. If you believe URA works well, then URA is how Amazon gets rid of low-performing employees. If you are like me, then you believe that URA is mostly explained by the following factors:

- Failure of Amazon to successfully develop engineers. A good company will turn engineers into better engineers, and Amazon gets rid of them instead, which is inefficient. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon was not competent enough to develop these engineers into better engineers.

- Consequences of poor culture, causing good engineers to mentally check out and eventually leave. The attrition is only unregretted because the good engineers will care less and therefore look like bad performers, when they’re good performers in a bad environment.

- A way for Amazon to avoid paying out stock grants at the 2-year mark (which is when you get most of your stock grants at Amazon). The attrition is only unregretted because somebody at Amazon cares more about the short-term bottom line.

- A way for managers to exercise control over employees they don’t like. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon’s decisions about employee performance are based on bad data provided by managers.

I won’t share stories here but the targets are around 5% per year, maybe a little higher.

loeg

11 hours ago

Meta also does something like 5% in unregretted attrition a year. I just don't know why you think AMZN wouldn't include those people in layoffs preferentially to higher performers.

nine_k

8 hours ago

During my time at Meta, they were teaching the engineers a lot, spent a lot of effort on proper onboarding, allowed changing teams at least once a year (more often with longer tenure), and otherwise seemed to make it easier for an engineer to find a better place in the Meta's structure instead of leaving.

refulgentis

13 hours ago

Not sure of your familiarity with FAANG pre-2022, but this is absolutely not the norm.

loeg

13 hours ago

Can you elaborate? I've been working in tech for 15 years and FAANG for 5. We've always had layoffs.

WalterBright

12 hours ago

I've been in the tech industry for 45 years. Layoffs happen regularly. Well, not regularly, what it is is a chaotic system. There will be good times and bad times. The best way to deal with it is to immediately save, at a minimum, 6 months of runway. Preferably a year.

When you're in between jobs, work on:

1. improving your job skills

2. network

3. build your resume by contributing to open source

4. start your own business

refulgentis

10 hours ago

I don't intend to be dismissive by sharing a bunch, I ate a bunch of downvotes so I should share something. But, there's no singular, like, Wikipedia article for "tech layoffs spiked significantly in 2022 and have stayed elevated" - so this is a mix of informal and formal and academic and business news that treats that knowledge as implicit while discussing it.

(I am deeply curious what valhalla you are at that skipped this so much that it was a foreign idea! N or A, it must be one of those two)

https://www.nerdwallet.com/finance/learn/tech-layoffs

https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/comments/1ljvpr4/where_all_...

https://progresschamber.org/insights/tech-has-shed-nearly-20...

https://www.washington.edu/news/2025/05/14/tech-industry-lay...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/tech-layoffs-2022.html

loeg

6 hours ago

Sure, it waxes and wanes. 2022-2023 were probably above average layoff years, while 2020-2021 before that were probably below average years. I think layoffs have fallen since 2023 rather than staying elevated, but I haven't attempted to quantify that.

joe_mamba

13 hours ago

ZIRP was also not the norm. Times change though.

mupuff1234

13 hours ago

But these are profitable companies, now their cash on hand can actually earn interest.

joe_mamba

13 hours ago

>But these are profitable companies

Q: You know what investors and shareholders love more than having 1 billion dollars?

A: Having 2 billion dollars. And with all the money being burned on AI, having 2 billion is better than 1.

If mass layoffs causes the stock to go from 1 to 2, then guess what's gonna happen?

In the ZIRP era companies would hire needlessly to get the stock up because that signaled growth to investors. Now it's the opposite, you trim because that gets the stock up, not because they conspire together to lay off people.

loeg

13 hours ago

Why is the highest and best use of a company's free cash paying the least productive employees, instead of returning cash to shareholders or investing it in something more productive?

darth_avocado

12 hours ago

Pre 2022 also did not have this many employees in FAANG.

mjr00

13 hours ago

There's some stuff that, culturally, I don't think Amazon will ever do well. Amazon Games should be shuttered entirely. Their latest game was a really embarrassing flop; "King of Meat", which they expected to have 100,000 daily concurrent players, reached a max of 320 concurrents during a free weekend[0]. Have you heard of a single Amazon Prime Original Movie[1]? Likely only one -- 2025's War of the Worlds, which became a meme because it is legitimately one of the worst movies of all time.

Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well. Which is awesome when you're dealing with databases and the logistics of delivering packages. But it's effectively the opposite of games, movies and other creative media where you have to trust a single person or small group of people with a vision. Otherwise you get what Amazon gives, which is unappetizing slop.

If I were Jassy I'd cut off these product lines entirely. It's just not a good fit for how Amazon operates.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/king-of-meat-studio-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_ori...

cobolcomesback

13 hours ago

That list of movies is just the movies that Amazon Studios has been the distributor for via Prime Video. Amazon didn’t necessarily produce or fund all of the movies in that list. It’s a bunch of cheap movies that are likely meant to be loss leaders for Prime Video subscriptions, which is something that very much does fit the style of Amazon. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV all have a similar list of D-tier garbage just to fill their catalogs.

On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.

Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.

gerdesj

12 hours ago

"Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well."

Quite.

I remember when they started off flogging books in the '90s. I completely agree with you that trying to do "creative" is a bloody daft idea for a bunch of very efficient box shifters.

tayo42

13 hours ago

Fallouts been pretty good. Not sure what they did right there

goostavos

12 hours ago

I found the first season OK enough, but the second season to be unwatchable.

dhdaadhd

10 hours ago

Agreed, the characters now just abandon their established traits from one scene to the next in service of a contrived story

add-sub-mul-div

13 hours ago

Nolan and Joy are in charge of that one, they likely had the power to negotiate keeping control rather than letting Amazon fuck it up with algorithms. That's my best guess about why it's good and everything else on Amazon is crap.

elcritch

12 hours ago

Excellent, get ready for more large outages at AWS and a proliferation of bugs across the rest of Amazon’s empire.

For the last few months I still randomly get errors opening audible. You know, to buy more books.

mikert89

13 hours ago

Right now, amazon is packed full of L6 and L7 software managers, making 450-900k a year, that:

1. dont understand ai

2. have had the same skill set for 10 years

3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks

4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics

for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money to just maintain status quo

cmiles74

13 hours ago

Isn’t that the job? I’m not even sure what “understand AI” even means, from where I sit, it maybe means “add AI to everything” and that doesn’t seem that complicated.

I’m not here to defend the people in Amazon corporate, I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim. It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.

RHSeeger

13 hours ago

And, to be realistic, "add AI to everything" is a sure sign that the person does _not_ understand AI.

hsbauauvhabzb

13 hours ago

They might not understand ai, but they do understand how to keep their job and maybe get a promotion, while causing massive problems for everyone else to deal with.

cmiles74

13 hours ago

Tell that to the people cashing big checks at Microsoft and Google. ;-)

WalterBright

12 hours ago

> I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim

Amazon doesn't owe anybody a job. Likewise, if you buy groceries from Safeway, you can switch to buying from Walmart anytime.

> It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.

I'm sure there are a lot of things people don't buy even though they can afford it.

hahahahhaah

13 hours ago

Amazon got where it was by ruthlessness. What may not be OK is in US you need a job to get healthcare. But other than that people earning that much can't expect job for life type situation like a firefighter or teacher. In US almost everyone is a defacto contractor by virtue of at will employment.

blibble

13 hours ago

> I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim.

isn't this the American dream?

become Bezos, then exploit every last cent out of your suppliers, employees and customers

mikert89

13 hours ago

no you dont understand, the whole career ladder at amazon is clogged with people at the company 10+ years, that have been in their role 5+ years. its a big game of dont get fired, and collect pay checks as long as possible

stanmancan

13 hours ago

Yes that’s how jobs work; you go to work, do your job, try not to get fired, and get paid for the work you do.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

cmiles74

13 hours ago

These are the people Amazon hired, with the qualifications for which Amazon was hiring. If Amazon has some nebulous “career ladder” problem, I believe the fault can be laid at the feet of Amazon’s hiring practices.

Deciding one day to simply fire them all, I guess for doing what they were hired to do, is not okay.

WalterBright

12 hours ago

> Deciding one day to simply fire them all, I guess for doing what they were hired to do, is not okay.

Business conditions change constantly.

awesome_dude

13 hours ago

> its a big game of dont get fired, and collect pay checks as long as possible

That pretty much sums it up for 90% of the world's employment...

Lammy

13 hours ago

Corporations exist to support the lives of humans, not the other way around.

GolfPopper

13 hours ago

From the corporations' point of view, humans are computing substrate.

Relevant speech by SF author Charlie Stross, from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

nebula8804

13 hours ago

Wow 34c3, what a blast from the past! I still don't fully understand what "tuwat" meant ha ha. The best I could come up with was "Do something. Don't ask for permission".

charcircuit

13 hours ago

They exist to provide value to other entities. There is no requirement for supporting humans or even having employees.

SoftTalker

13 hours ago

They exist to do things that individuals could not do.

mikert89

13 hours ago

they should give some younger people a shot to move into these management positions.

hdgvhicv

13 hours ago

Maybe those young people should form their own company

rvz

13 hours ago

This is the correct answer in 2026.

artyom

13 hours ago

1. they don't understand their own job, why they're even there, let alone AI.

2. yes, if you're talking about basic reading skills at best.

3. correct. except "autopilot" doesn't even mean solving the basic problems they're supposed to solve as part of the role.

4. which is exactly what Amazon asked them to do.

> for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge.

Absolutely. Starting at the C-suite, VP, and director levels (L8 and above).

Source: I was there.

evantbyrne

13 hours ago

Culture flows from the top down

jahnu

13 hours ago

Let me ask this question. Why can Netflix make a decent tv app and Amazon cannot?

majormajor

13 hours ago

Lots of companies can make decent apps. And IMO the Prime Video TV/Mobile and Amazon mobile apps are "decent" from a "they do what they're trying to do" standpoint and don't fail all the time.

But they don't really think about things from a "consumer who wants to watch something tonight" vs "shopper who we want to get money from" perspective. So the Prime Video app has been painful to navigate and use. Things like concepts of how people want to interact with TV shows - one top level entry with seasons in it, vs top-level entries per season, which took them forever to change - reflect quick and dirty shoveling of concepts over from how they'd sell box sets or such vs thinking about it from a user-first POV. Or how search will return a match for just about anything because they will happily sell it to you vs having as a default "show any free results first because I'm not looking to spend more right now."

That's a product/vision failure (or just mismatch with what you and I want) not an engineering/engineering culture thing.

mikert89

13 hours ago

amazon has mediocre quality talent that they grind to the bone. which worked when the company just needed raw execution. amazon has an operations culture, which was important for:

1. scaling retail

2. keeping the servers running at AWS

all the low hanging fruit has been picked, they need a fundamentally different employee base

spwa4

13 hours ago

> all the low hanging fruit has been picked, they need a fundamentally different employee base

As anyone in software development can tell you, this does not compute. You cannot do things this way, and any experienced software engineer can tell you it doesn't work.

Besides, it's not how Amazon worked at all. Amazon is famous for having systematically verified ("mathematically proved") how it's core systems operated. Whereas, for example Google only did that in redesigns when the systems had already collapsed once or twice due to scale, not from early on. And even that is superior to how Microsoft or Oracle did it: they bought Google employees and had them design an iteration of what Google is running (yes, is running, not was running. Google redesigned it's core systems ... and then mostly didn't migrate. Borg was never replaced with Omega and the main large system that they migrated to is Spanner. Kubernetes isn't Borg. Kubernetes grew out of Borg's successor. Except Google never migrated away from Borg)

https://cacm.acm.org/practice/systems-correctness-practices-...

I'm sure Amazon had entire departments, much larger than core engineering, just like every other company, where it looked like everything was operationally focused. That doesn't mean core engineering doesn't exist, or does nothing.

vineyardmike

12 hours ago

Publishing a paper (in 2025) about formal verification is miles different than implementing it company wide. Anyone who has talked to an Amazonian SWE knows they’re not building their systems like this.

The Amazon way is to quickly grind something out, and build on as many layers of AWS abstractions as possible. They’re famous for the hustle and grind not the stellar engineering acumen of formal verification.

artyom

12 hours ago

This is really easy to answer, with some perspective from the inside, but mostly from public information:

- Amazon has 3 main business lines ("orgs"): Ecommerce, AWS and devices.

- Ecommerce and AWS are (now) cash cows. Devices bleeds money. TV falls into the devices organization.

- Devices was a Bezos bet. Current Amazon couldn't care less honestly.

- The devices organization is (today, after layoffs and people leaving in droves) essentially full of incompetent people, where all the leftovers of the other two orgs end up.

- It's people that was hired to build structure with the sole purpose of some higher-up promotion. They never served any other purpose, neither they have any particularly sophisticated skill.

- That's the people that makes the TV app.

SoftTalker

13 hours ago

TV is Netflix's core competency. It's a sideline at best for Amazon.

alephnerd

13 hours ago

Amazon Prime Video isn't targeting the US market anymore - they made a hard pivot to India [0][1][2], and as such are primarily investing in MX Player.

[0] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/apo...

[1] - https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/prime-video-india-growth-pa...

[2] - https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/prime-video-india-content-c...

pityJuke

13 hours ago

Wait, when the fuck did the Android app I used to play on-device videos with become a streaming app, that then got acquired by Amazon?!

(I know the literal answer is on Wikipedia, but I’m flabbergasted.)

alephnerd

13 hours ago

Back in 2018-19 because their founder Karan Bedi was smart and recognized he could leverage his past corporate experience in Big Media in India in order to make MX Player a streaming platform targeting India2 and India3, and thus build a scalable business.

rvz

13 hours ago

Exactly. This is why it makes absolutely zero sense to join Amazon right now as they are the worst ones to join [0] (Unless you specialize in robotics or actual AI and not controlling 'Agents')

They are aiming to layoff 30k employees this year. They are one bad earnings away from a surprise mass layoff unfortunately.

The other big tech companies are at lesser risk.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741246

Der_Einzige

13 hours ago

Fully agreed and those downvoting you are Amazon employees mad that they don’t get to bully and harass their subordinates anymore.

otterley

13 hours ago

[redacted due to non-useful information]

kungfulkoder

13 hours ago

You're making a common mistake. WARN is for the _previous_ layoff. The way they execute these, they bump out your effective last day such that there is no WARN notice till after it's already announced.

otterley

13 hours ago

Where do you see that from the text of the letter to the ESD?

nlawalker

13 hours ago

"While WARN requires only 60 days’ advance notice, Amazon is providing at least 90 days’ notice to all affected employees before their separations are scheduled to occur. Affected employees who accept internal transfer opportunities at Amazon prior to their separation date will not be separated as a result of this action."

These people were told they were being laid off in October but remain on payroll. What Amazon is "bracing" for is another one of these announcements, much larger, announcing people who will actually separate from the company 90 days later. They will find out on or around the same day the WARN notice is posted.

otterley

13 hours ago

Oh, darn. You are right. Thanks for the clarification.

patch_cable

13 hours ago

The date of the notice is October 28th. The separation dates given in the letter are 90 days out from the date of the notice (for some technical reasons, some employees had a separation dates a bit further out.)

loeg

13 hours ago

Looks like a lot of recruiting and SW Eng I/II for Amazon (approximately a L3-4 at Google or Meta). Does Amazon do up-or-out?

The Meta layoff is 100% Reality Labs (they published team names, in addition to locations and roles).

Edit: parent comment removed the link, but it was https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe... .

otterley

11 hours ago

> Does Amazon do up-or-out?

They do not. They have no qualms about eliminating more senior roles as necessary, and generally prefer to staff in a bottom-heavy way because, among other things, it's more frugal.

abnercoimbre

13 hours ago

Found this section noteworthy:

> Employee separations resulting from this action are expected to be permanent. The affected employees are not represented by a union or any other collective bargaining representative.

loeg

13 hours ago

It is presumably required by the state unemployment office. You'll find nearly identical language in the other letters on the ESD site.

elseweather

13 hours ago

This is the WARN notice for the _previous_ layoff in October. Presumably they'll file another one for the next wave this week.

forgetbook

10 hours ago

The only AWS service I still use is SES, for sending emails from client applications. Surely that can be self hosted? Can anyone reccommend a competitor?

mickle00

13 hours ago

Jassy's only lever for shareholder value. Sad.

alephnerd

13 hours ago

They're fine expanding in India.

Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1].

For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same as they would in Germany [5].

I warned people on HN for years to not be greedy with remote work (1-2 day hybrid is not the end of the world) and not be pissy to Americans of non-European heritage and derogatorily calling us H1Bs.

Either way those of us who know how to take advantage of brutal raw capitalism win - especially as this administration is helping further enhance this offshoring [6] with technology transfers [7].

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/us-loses-...

[1] - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill...

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_...

[3] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...

[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

[6] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uDtm-k6JvI8

[7] - https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/04/the-india-us-tru...

einszwei

13 hours ago

This is real. I work at one of the big tech and have access to their internal head count breakdowns. The overall headcount is mostly stagnant but the US headcount is decreasing with a corresponding increase in Europe and mostly India based HC.

bigfatkitten

13 hours ago

The company I just left is firing as many people in the US as possible and rehiring primarily in India, with Dublin and Toronto by exception.

FedRAMP requires US persons on US soil, and so as far as Americans are concerned, only senior management and people working on the federal business are safe.

porridgeraisin

an hour ago

> requires US persons on US soil

Is that true for everyone involved in the project? One of my friends works on a FedRamp project from Pune. Most engg and PMs are in Pune. Maybe the top mgmt and VPs need to be US-based?

bigfatkitten

41 minutes ago

No, just the people with privileged access to the system because of the way the data residency, personnel screening and other requirements interact.

You can have PMs or software engineers writing code from anywhere you like, but your engineers in Pune can’t go poking around your FedRAMP High prod environment.

vachina

13 hours ago

Shocking. Expect software quality to take a nosedive.

user

12 hours ago

[deleted]

vjvjvjvjghv

10 hours ago

Same at my company. No new hiring in the US.

refulgentis

13 hours ago

Same at Google (Poland and India are doing great)

rvz

13 hours ago

A great indication that more layoffs in high cost of living environments such as the US are going to happen.

vjvjvjvjghv

13 hours ago

“ Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Gold Card leads to a reserve brain drain”

Seems a lot of the Trump policies go exactly the opposite of what was planned. The supply people at my company are telling me that there is a huge push to move manufacturing away from the US due to tariffs.

Mountain_Skies

13 hours ago

The United States has a labor pool of over 170 million people. If you can't find Amazon workers in a country of that size, it's due to one thing and one thing only: you're a bigot who hates Americans. We can dance around it and dress it up like we have for the past thirty years but it's time to call it for what it is: bigotry and hatred wearing a dress of openness. Just admit what you are instead of continuing this absurd dance that pretends 170 million people are all defective. Now mash that down vote button to feel good about your bigotry that you've written "VIRTUE" all over to hide the destructive force it truly is.

brainwad

13 hours ago

When you buy services, is your bar good enough, or do you look for best value for money? And are those who try to optimise bigots merely for not buying from their local provider?

But anyway, the decrease in hiring in the US will be mostly driven by foreigners that will still be hired, but now not relocate to the US. Why hire someone on a H1-B at an extra cost of 100k when you can hire the same person in some other office and not pay that cost? It's a self-own by the US.

elcritch

12 hours ago

That’s just another way of admitting that H1-B was always about lowering costs rather than lack of talent.

brainwad

4 hours ago

No, it's about being able to hire more people at the same hiring bar and comp for companies hiring at scale, like (pre-2022) big tech. If you limit yourself to only hiring Americans in your US office, then you are at a talent disadvantage unless/until you open another office in a more friendly jurisdiction. And if you open such a satellite office and hire there, then that's worse for the US than if you had hired them in the US, because the US misses out on the income tax.

Many other countries have the exact same sorts of visas, because it is good to attract talented, high-paid workers to your country.

alephnerd

12 hours ago

It's comments like this that make those of us who are of immigrant origins or the children of immigrants indifferent to losses even if we are impacted as well.

Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off.

If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k jobs in GOP-leaning upstate NY, the CEO of that company (who also invented the entire field of flash memory) may as well hedge and shift abroad [1] helping other countries move up the HBM value chain [2]. And even the Trump admin is giving a helping hand [3][4].

If you can't respect our community, why shouldn't we geopolitically hedge as well?

[0] - https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2026/01/trump-cabinet-member...

[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260123VL207/micron-commerc...

[2] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZAICbxB0kT0

[3] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uDtm-k6JvI8

[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/04/the-india-us-tru...

elcritch

8 hours ago

That was not my intent. H1-B visas were sold as helping talent shortage. There are many genuinely talented immigrants and always have been. Fantastic! A previous company hired an H1-B visa and he was truly a talent in robotics.

However that doesn't mean that the real political support for masses of H1-Bs was ever about talent. It was about lowering labor costs by semi-exploiting large numbers of immigrants willing to work insane hours knowing they'd loose their visa's otherwise.

There's also lots of talented American's here by immigration or born here who were affected by all developer salaries being suppressed by the big H1-B visa abusers.

wat10000

12 hours ago

Do you apply this philosophy to your electronics purchases?

seattle_spring

13 hours ago

> I warned people on HN for years to not be greedy with remote work (1-2 day hybrid is not the end of the world)

It's not the end of the world, but it's also not really remote work if you have to live within commuting distance of an office.

cute_boi

11 hours ago

Outsourcing is the main reason for the layoffs, but I’m sure no one is going to mention it.

hahahahhaah

13 hours ago

An AI bubble pop is going to create depression if this sort of thinking continues. Fire bright people to spend money on questuonable quality AI. If others follow we are saying "all in" and shoving the poker chips on more model improvements.