[HN Gopher] Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions ...
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B
yearly
Author : 05bmckay
Score : 136 points
Date : 2025-03-17 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techstartups.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techstartups.com)
| justmarc wrote:
| So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless,
| but literally a drag to the company and progress?
| DesiLurker wrote:
| No now just senior managers are supposed to pickup the slack
| and drag the company behind on there own. and also program
| managers & useless product managers.
|
| jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the
| internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were
| almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr.
| engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full
| of political BSers.
| coliveira wrote:
| Don't forget principals. Most of them do nothing the whole
| day and are compensated to create BS projects that go
| nowhere.
| viccis wrote:
| In my experience, the worst of them are lodged in there tighter
| than trichinella larvae.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah because the good ones already left the shitshow to get a
| job somewhere better. Because they can.
| anacrolix wrote:
| The best are always the first to leave
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Their upper managers don't want "best", they want loyal,
| they want yes men that will make perfect henchmen, that's
| what best is for them so they get exactly what they're
| looking for. People who rock the boat aren't gonna cut
| it.
| viccis wrote:
| This is true. I've also found that there are perverse
| incentives when it comes to (especially upper) management.
| Building up enough political clout in your organization
| that aren't answerable to many people, and managing your
| image among the few you are answerable to, is the best
| skill one can have if the outcome is steady long term
| employment. Providing value to your company and coworkers
| doesn't correlate as much with surviving corporate haircuts
| like these.
| hibikir wrote:
| A manager decides to spend their energy managing their
| relationships up, down or sideways. The very worst will focus
| solely on managing the upwards relationship, but that's
| precisely what makes them hard to dislodge: Every second of
| their day is spent on efforts that helped their job security
| by relationship building.
|
| So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at
| finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving
| their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying
| to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking
| they are indispensable.
|
| This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have
| found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was
| easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The
| ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is
| much stronger than people realize.
| wubrr wrote:
| The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon
| internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't
| change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded
| managers. The current processes, culture, and
| 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic
| af.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Who created the policies and procedures?
| dboreham wrote:
| Bezos.
| lolinder wrote:
| If the answer you were looking for was "managers", then you
| have no concept of just how big Amazon is.
|
| According to TFA they have about 106000 managers before
| this layoff. You don't give 106k people any meaningful
| control over the company's policies and procedures, that
| has to come from the layers above the managers, probably
| _several_ layers up.
| random3 wrote:
| that's the definition of an incompetent / mediocre manager.
| Most organizations expect their employees and managers in
| poarticular to be "breaking doors", which is the opposite
| attitude to blindly following any internal process.
| lovich wrote:
| You have a very warped view of the world if you think most
| companies, or even Amazon in particular, are expecting
| their employees to be "breaking doors".
|
| They are literally mandating people come in to sit in a
| room on video calls with people sitting in a room in other
| offices all around the country/world. That's the most
| egregious one, but add up all the controls, pair it with
| layoffs and threats of more, and you're not going to end up
| with an employee base that's testing the limits of what's
| possible. You'll end up with a well behaved herd of docile
| workers.
|
| They're not going to change that behavior by getting rid of
| middle managers when those demands are coming from the C
| levels or the board
| bdangubic wrote:
| this is same as saying soldiers in the military have the
| right to decide which orders they can disobey and which not
| parasense wrote:
| Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be
| overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many
| direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to
| scale middle managers so they can effectively manage
| multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which
| would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who
| knows, this is just wild speculation.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'm interested to hear what type of structure you prefer over
| one that has managers overseeing developers.
|
| Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I
| might have misunderstood.
|
| I'm honestly interested in alternatives.
| boredatoms wrote:
| They'll just hire more managers again in 18months
| nomel wrote:
| Even if they do, they've culled those that they deemed weren't
| a good fit, possibly changing the hiring criteria. If the
| criteria for both is rational, purging can be very good for an
| org, and the employees. Crap managers make jobs suck for
| everyone involved.
|
| edit: I'll say, I've only ever left a job because of a manager.
| Shortly before leaving my current job, due to a crap manager,
| the previous manager was fired. The entire org benefited.
| jmull wrote:
| These guys either hired 14K bad/useless managers, or fired
| 14K decent, useful managers, or some combination of both.
|
| I wouldn't bet they will suddenly become good at hiring
| managers.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is old news and refers to the 15% figure that was announced
| last year (more than 6 months ago!) and for which the "layoffs"
| are already completed.
|
| Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own
| kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back
| to IC positions.
|
| The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was
| announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the
| real announcement was September 2024:
|
| https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
| Ancalagon wrote:
| How do the cost savings work then?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| That's a made up figure from the journalist. They estimated
| that managers each earn between 200-350K and came to that
| number.
| coliveira wrote:
| They probably just "promoted" people under them and then
| immediately fired these people for "poor performance". It is an
| old scheme they have.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| No, they did not. Managerial positions are not a promotion in
| Amazon, they're just a lateral move, and the process takes
| around 6 months...
|
| They did exactly what I said they did, moving some managers
| to IC in the very worst case but mostly shuffling teams
| around.
| patternMachine wrote:
| 1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting
| this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of
| managers.
|
| 2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the
| mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math
| that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of
| employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.
|
| 3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.
|
| 4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.
|
| In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe
| some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
| dangus wrote:
| These numbers always seem huge but also don't forget that
| Amazon employs 1.5 million people.
|
| A 14,000 employee cut is less than one percent.
|
| Of course I know there are a lot of warehouse and delivery
| employees but they have managers, too.
| jedberg wrote:
| https://archive.ph/RBxg1
| bagels wrote:
| Who lays off the engineers now?
| ginko wrote:
| AI :)
| nextworddev wrote:
| You are being downvoted but we know it's coming
| jrsdav wrote:
| The teary-eyed CEO, of course.
| sampton wrote:
| Most managers are human ticket classifiers.
| johnny99 wrote:
| I would have also thought this an insult, until joining a
| company where nobody was classifying the tickets.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > human ticket classifiers
|
| Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot
| of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave
| me hope there is a better/alternative system?
| arccy wrote:
| our lord and saviour, chatgpt obviously
| analog31 wrote:
| There's a lot of truth in this. We haven't figured out how to
| automate complex systems. Instead, systems operate under
| partial automation, and exceptions are handled by humans. This
| is also true of any bureaucracy. Because automation is
| invisible and humans are visible, it will always appear that
| bureaucrats are spending most of their time taking care of the
| failures of unnecessarily complex systems.
|
| The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a
| lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly
| similar to bureaucracy.
|
| Consider the many HN threads to the effect of "<Service> just
| deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation
| process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security
| ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.
| elif wrote:
| I imagine one thread of the logic is like dang, AI is only
| producing mediocre work this year. What can we replace where
| mediocrity is acceptable... How about a role whose primary
| function is interhuman language.. where we can fallback on the
| humans involved (engineers, c levels) naturally catching and
| correcting mistakes?
| lysace wrote:
| Amazon (the online retailer nowadays mostly hawking Chinese
| alphabet-salad-named brands) and/or AWS the cloud service
| behemoth?
|
| I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.
| bsimpson wrote:
| The yellow|white|red jacks on the back of your TV are "RCA
| jacks." RCA stands for Radio Corporation of America. The same
| RCA launched NBC, which launched CNBC, which is a dominant
| source of financial news in the US.
|
| You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the
| same company that told your parents what stocks to buy and
| sell.
|
| Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and
| Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous
| for its soap.
| lysace wrote:
| We mostly didn't have RCA jacks in Europe when I grew up.
|
| But nevermind; this is not the same.
|
| Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses:
| Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| How many H1b or are they getting rid of just Americans?
| androiddrew wrote:
| #shareholder-value
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is weird blogspam based on a Business Insider article from
| October of last year, which was based on a quote from Amazon's
| CEO in September of last year:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-could-cut-managers-sa...
|
| TL;DR:
|
| > CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the
| ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by
| the end of the first quarter of 2025.
|
| It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from
| analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a
| source.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Padme meme: by hiring more ICs, right?
| bb88 wrote:
| I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is
| caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company,
| the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should
| benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have
| to bob and weave to get through the politics.
|
| I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the
| best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's
| how you got there in the first place.
|
| Edited to add:
|
| I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad
| management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor,
| well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because
| they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
| analog31 wrote:
| Deming agreed with you: Quality control is a management
| problem. But there's management and there's management. If
| we're talking about 14000 people, they're not the top managers
| of the business, and getting rid of them won't change the
| culture.
|
| They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
| Marazan wrote:
| Middle management _is_ the culture of a company. A regular
| worker interacts not at all with the CxOs except reading
| their emails and every day with their managers.
|
| Middle management is also the memory of the company.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Nah, they're both downstream of complexity. Complexity creates
| both managers and politics. But managers do create more
| complexity and more politics.
|
| The problem in companies like this is there are often few
| incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like
| Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
| cscheid wrote:
| (Context: I'm an IC and told my Manager multiple times that I'd
| quit if they ever make me a manager)
|
| If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read
| "The tyranny of structurelessness" to understand what a
| managerless place becomes. _everyone_ and no one becomes a
| manager, and there's no explicit avenue of recourse. There's a
| good reason management arises. We can discuss good management
| vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there's no such
| thing as "no management".
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I read OP as change the management to change the culture, not
| remove it.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I don't think OP was necessarily trying to imply "there
| should be no managers", but simply "I don't want to become a
| manager" - which is perfectly valid.
| dakial1 wrote:
| The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience
| is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the
| "most political" managers are the one who stay. Which is
| natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more
| visibility to. That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth
| nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game. So the company
| might be worse after this.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came
| from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers.
|
| They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme.
| The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics
| with nobody to keep them in check.
|
| Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
| LittleTimothy wrote:
| I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are
| clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways
| for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there
| aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar
| characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less
| obvious to some people.
|
| Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations
| to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those
| same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether
| that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing
| chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that
| don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people
| get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just
| the easiest to spot from below.
| megadata wrote:
| Totally. You'll get the Lord of the Flies scenario.
|
| Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much
| managing then the flies will start buzzing.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I do believe if you want real culture change in a company,
| the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because
| that's how you got there in the first place.
|
| Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
|
| If you want to change the culture of a place - business,
| family, community - start by changing yourself.
| raincom wrote:
| Figuring out "bad management" is really a hard problem. The
| same problem exists in the government bureaucracies too.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Incredibly hard. If there were some formula and it was really
| easy to just keep "the good ones", then every company would
| only have great managers. It's simply not that easy at scale.
| bb88 wrote:
| Listen to yourself. It's management's job to manage people.
| Some of those people are going to be managers. So
| management can't police themselves apparently?
|
| I don't buy it.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Ask tech leads who consistently deliver value who's good
| one and who's not - you'll get pretty accurate picture.
| blueboo wrote:
| Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa. -Taleb
| firecall wrote:
| > I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of
| bad management.
|
| How do you tell the difference?
| beambot wrote:
| > I'm saying get rid of bad management.
|
| How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?
| bdangubic wrote:
| by who is better at corporate politics of course :)
| lovich wrote:
| > I do believe if you want real culture change in a company,
| the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because
| that's how you got there in the first place.
|
| You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to
| your employees. That doesn't seem to align with Amazons
| policy's lately like RTO5.
|
| How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if
| your answer is "don't", I don't think that's an option as the
| drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not
| middle managers misinterpreting orders
| 0rzech wrote:
| IMHO, workplace politics can happen and be caused at any level
| of a company. I think it's a natural thing for some people to
| do.
|
| Especially at big companies which kinda resemble small
| countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird
| alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
|
| What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to
| actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing
| the same thing.
|
| Also companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and
| solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy
| rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in
| turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized,
| including workplace politics.
|
| I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a
| passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
| hintymad wrote:
| > The more "politics" you have at a company,
|
| Note a lot of the times the "politics" do not necessarily come
| from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company
| dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility
| decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy
| to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more
| politics.
| uoaei wrote:
| I've heard that the managers there aren't nearly as big a problem
| as the incentive structures that are imposed on managers. The
| competitiveness within the ranks compromises the office culture.
| This was explained to me as the origin of the plague of PIPs.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Haha a friend was just recommending I apply for a job there. I
| told her hell no. It's one of the worst in big tech. Probably
| second worst after twitter.
|
| The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them
| a lot and I hate it.
|
| I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I
| don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
| piecerough wrote:
| What's a decent european enterprise?
| nomel wrote:
| Expanding on this, even a little, would make your comment much
| more interesting.
| Kurd wrote:
| I have had a long career working for F50 companies across a few
| decades. I can tell you, my time as a senior manager at
| Microsoft in mid 00's has been the most pleasant experience I
| have had working in the private sector. A lot has changed in
| the past 20 years, but I am in touch with many colleagues still
| working there, and we still recommend Microsoft over the rest.
| bdangubic wrote:
| over my 25+ years I've heard the exact same thing - no
| personal experience, just hearing other people's
| croes wrote:
| The people still working at MS recommend MS?
|
| Quelle surprise.
| xmprt wrote:
| Working with Microsoft's customer facing tools and people is
| very different from working inside Microsoft. Not that you'll
| like one if you hate the other but just that they're different
| enough that you can't judge one by your experience with the
| other.
| netdur wrote:
| I never heard it was bad at twitter! why is that?
| johnwheeler wrote:
| With the rise of AI, my disdain for managers has gone up. I don't
| think it's because AI has made managers redundant. It's because
| AI is making me redundant and I'm realizing they've kind of
| _always_ been redundant.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| I am curious how do you just hire 14,000 managers at the cost of
| $3.5B yearly more than you needed?
|
| Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.
| maigret wrote:
| Also some finance guy gets rewarded for making that much cost
| savings, and they have meat to give to the shareholders, it's
| an endless cycle. The finance folks only get the gain, the
| revenue/quality loss of their actions will not be measured
| accurately and will not be traced back to their actions. Only
| upsides.
| wnevets wrote:
| The people at the level of management are god like geniuses who
| must never be questioned.
| funnyAI wrote:
| Just a few weeks ago I was contacted by Amazon recruiter and
| refused for exactly this reason. I expect more layoffs as they
| figure out they don't need this many engineers after all. They
| will turn into money pumping google search analog.
| baconbrand wrote:
| From a surface level it seems like they've operated like this
| since... forever. AWS is still a very nice product, at least
| for the use cases I have for it. I have a hard time reconciling
| those two things.
| anon776 wrote:
| If you do the maths, the average manager receives 250k a year in
| benefits.
| kadushka wrote:
| That's surprisingly low for Amazon.
| dakial1 wrote:
| I tend to agree with Amazon leadership here, as they increase the
| management layer on a company, the team accountability and
| ownership gets lost. A more horizontal company is able to do more
| (per capita) and faster.
|
| The tricky part is what to do when you scale, as you can't simply
| leave teams to their own devices as they will run their separate
| ways, so you do more and faster but in the wrong direction.
|
| But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain
| reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop
| everything from happening.
|
| It is a complex balance.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| > Amazon has launched a "bureaucracy tipline" ...
|
| Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for
| the next earnings report.
| throwanem wrote:
| Imagine mistaking this for "getting rid of management," rather
| than kicking off a battle royale to backfill those roles with
| only the most efficiently, consciencelessly bloodthirsty
| aspirants to the power vacuum so created.
| hintymad wrote:
| This is also more than just saving a few billions of dollars but
| making a giant like Amazon more efficient, especially when it
| comes to making decisions. It's just too soul crushing to have a
| dozen of people who spend all day gatekeeping each project
| instead of building anything.
| alberth wrote:
| For context: Total # of Employees: 1,556,000
| Planned # Layoff: 14,000 (or 0.9%)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
| basisword wrote:
| I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in
| this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions
| every manager has been great.
|
| They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly
| helpful, and they care about my career development.
|
| IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a
| way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career
| development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very
| honest conversations with my managers about these things
| regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I
| doubt I'd have the same success.
|
| Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the
| manager track generally has higher pay at each level.
| Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and
| dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with
| code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden.
| Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce
| the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've
| definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I
| feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
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