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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Now they can replace them without paying unemployment and pay the new workers a lower wage. This is what they wanted to happen. Mega corporations are a problem we need to solve as a society.
Quality programmers are a finite resource. Amazon chewed through the entire unskilled labor market with their warehouses and then struggled to find employees to meet their labor needs. If they try the same stunt with skilled labor they're in for a very rude awakening. They'll be able to find people, but only for well above market rates. They're highly likely to find in the long run it would have been much cheaper to hang onto the people they already had.
The whole problem with companies like Amazon is that hardly anyone in charge of them seems to care about long term sustainability. They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again. Nobody is interested in sustainability because there is no incentive to. They're playing hot potato with the collapse of the company.
Now expand that to the entire planetary economy. Unsustainable short term gains is the entire industrial revolution.
We're only 300 years in and most life and ecosystems on Earth have been destroyed and homogenized to service humanity. We're essentially a parasite. It's not surprising that the most successful corporations are the most successful parasites. It's just parasites, doing parasitic things, because they're parasites... from the top down.
We kicked "this quarter" thinking into high gear when Nixon permanently increased inflation.
Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.
100%
That's the next executive's problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.
Well then bring it on. If feels too big to fail, but if (hypothetically) Amazon were to go under, the world would be a better place.
Bold of you to think that's what they want.
They may not want them, but with how many people are switching to things like AWS, they may find they need them.
And it will ultimately cost them more to find new people when they realize that they’re pissing off their customers with their poor new hires.
I will be happy to watch them squirm when they come to this realization. Karma is a bitch, Amazon.
An awakening would mean they would analyze and understand the situation. They won’t. Amazon has and probably always had a bullish “my way or the highway” attitude - ask people what they think, pretend you care, then ignore everything they might say. Upper managers make decisions uniquely based off costs and short term vision, and are never held accountable for the consequences. I worked there for years and you really can’t imagine how bad the work culture is there, whatever you have in mind is worse in reality
Problem is for a company like Amazon, even if the brain drain will result in obviously inferior customer experience, it could take years before that happens and for it to be recognized and for the business results suffer for it. In the meantime, bigger margins and restricted stock matures and they can get their money now.
Particularly with business clients, like AWS customers, it will take a huge amount of obvious screwups before those clients are willing to undertake the active effort of leaving.
yeah, the only problem is that this results in the best talent leaving, you're stuck with people who have nowhere else to go. it's one of those short-term profits kinda things, which is why Wall St loves it so much.
They have a name for it: Dead Sea Effect.
I thought the same. Interesting strategy cutting the people who are good enough to get another job.
As long as it looks good on paper, somebody in higher management is getting a bonus for this.
This isn't what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn't the goal or objective.
Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they'll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don't get to decide who they're cutting. They don't want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.
The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they're effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.
There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn't as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.
I think they do actually want to cut the high skilled talent. High skill means high pay, and now that they've achieved market dominance in pretty much every industry they've stuck their penis into they don't need talent. Lower skilled, and therefore lower paid, employees can do just good enough to keep everything from burning down just long enough for the C-suite to get their bonuses and cash out. After that, who cares, they're on to their next grift.
To add to what others have replied, Amazon have an institutional belief that everyone who makes it through the Loop is better than 50% of existing staff.
It could be post-hoc rationalising of back-loaded share vesting, hire-to-fire, and their other many practices, but that's the position. With that kind of thinking, it makes this behaviour, including it's consequences, a no-brainer win:win to them.