Skip to content(if available)orjump to list(if available)

Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

basisword

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.

Myrmornis

My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks).

Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.

karaterobot

I worked in a University lab during grad school, then worked in the private sector for 16 years, and have been back working on research software for the last four years. All I'll say is that the software world should not look at the research world for best practices on delivering software products, except maybe to do the exact opposite of what they do.

a_bonobo

I've been in academia for 10 years, now 'out in the real world' for 3 years - I agree with your assessment, the only project management strategy academia knows is 'just work longer hours'.

donnachangstein

> in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself

That is not the real world.

Turns out working for your brother-in-law they let you manage yourself too.

tensor

Yes, it is the "real world" for research, of which industry does nearly zero. Research pushes humanity forward. The sort of anti-intellectualism in your comment is part of what is causing the decline we are seeing in society today.

noahjk

I think it all depends on finding a group of people who share the same goal of making something great together. One person who isn’t interested in that goal can be insidious to a self-managed team. And getting everyone involved means having some reward for doing well, like a validating mission or direct interactions with customers, which can be hard in some roles.

naijaboiler

imagine comparing management at a small research lab to a multi-national corporation. Such unfounded hubris.

qmmmur

If you view the university as one large company pushing research forward on many fronts then it is about the same

sgarland

Imagine refuting the idea that people are incapable of self-management.

frozenport

Imagine actually wanting to work at Amazon

steveBK123

Genuinely unique experience for you probably.

I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good.

This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.

ketzo

The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization

Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.

hnthrow90348765

The economic cards seemed more stacked against workers, so resentment for managers builds more quickly than the opposite direction. Management who resents their workers can also fire them. Workers who resent their managers must go find another job. And offshoring/nearshoring for workers happens more than managers.

Would be interested in comparing the interview processes for ICs vs. managers at Amazon. Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?

steveBK123

I don't think the good ones go unnoticed.

You remember what you learned from good managers, and you remember how bad managers made you feel. Benign ones could be replaced by an LLM.

protocolture

I think you also need to account for the amount of bad.

Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.

But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.

Like I have only seen a terrible management culture in 2 of my employees, but for 1 of them, it lead to:

30 or 40 careers damaged, internal stalinist purges. Months wasted on drama. 21 million yearly recurring in wasted IT expense. Probably close on 500 million in non recurring waste over 4 years. 4 million yearly recurring in executive waste. Significant brand damage, significant resume damage for people who worked through it. Actual end user harm.

null

[deleted]

bb88

I like the old wisdom about apples personally: "One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch".

BoorishBears

Maybe it's because this isn't about looking at other people's toupees?

At the least a bad manager can make the place you spend a majority of your waking hours a worse place to be, and at their worse they can permanently harm the trajectory of your career or even your mental (and by proxy physical) health.

Some analogies are limited by the weight their original context conveys. I wouldn't let a surgeon get away with "the ethics board will only talk about this heinous thing I did, when most of the time they don't see me at all".

jamesfinlayson

My career hasn't been as long but it's been 50% good 50% bad roughly - of the bad ones, one was a sycophant to a narcissistic product owner but didn't directly cause me any trouble, while the other two were promoted developers who tried to force their will on developers while also playing political games to try and preserve themselves.

segmondy

Do the break down for developers.

steveBK123

Developers get marked to market quite quickly in annual reviews, if not sooner. Junk PRs, bad code, tons of bugs, acting like a jerk - it catches up fast. I've seen devs walked out the door in first 90 days of probationary period, or cut in their first annual review.

For a manager there is a longer leash as the things they can impact are harder to measure with long and variable lags. So it can take 3 years easily for an obviously bad manager to be dealt with.

johnfn

A manager can put you on PIP, have you fired, and make your life miserable for months to years. What can an engineer do? Write some bad code that is a little annoying to refactor?

wnolens

Unique experience. I've had mostly useless managers in my 15y career, downright toxic ones in my 3y AWS stint.

lolinder

What makes your experience representative and theirs unique? How are you measuring this?

amrocha

You chose to work in a toxic company, of course you had toxic managers.

ta2234234242

There was that comic about org charts a decade ago:

https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

The reality is that the Microsoft style of organization is very prominent in the industry.

rawgabbit

You should count your lucky stars.

I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.

Waterluvian

I’ve experienced so many kinds in 12 years including those who were incredible to work with and those who contributed nothing, and a bunch in between.

disambiguation

One or two rare exceptions over 15 years must account for several bad years, no?

As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.

rsynnott

Yeah, I’ve been working in the industry about 20 years, and I’ve had one bad manager experience (and also a couple of not-great experiences where I didn’t really _have_ a manager).

Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.

bb88

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.

cscheid

(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”.

duskwuff

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.

rafaelmn

I read OP as change the management to change the culture, not remove it.

Freedom2

I'm not entirely sure why when one person quits, the company becomes managerless?

vkou

> There’s a good reason management arises.

Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.

It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.

dakial1

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

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.

sgarland

Those people are also dead weight. I despise the fact that I have to play politics at work. Work should be based on results, period. Spending time politicking is not producing results; at best, it’s eventually producing via cajoling what could have been accomplished in 1/4 the time if you’d been left alone and trusted.

LittleTimothy

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.

0rzech

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.

And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.

dennis_jeeves2

>failing to actively weed out these behaviours

>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.

Excellent observations.

People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.

lovich

> 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

raincom

Figuring out "bad management" is really a hard problem. The same problem exists in the government bureaucracies too.

whenc

"Management is that for which there is no algorithm. If there's an algorithm, it's administration." (Maurice Wilkes, IIRC)

potato3732842

All organizations. Nonprofits, militaries, religious orders, everything.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.

CharlieDigital

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

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

Ask tech leads who consistently deliver value who's good one and who's not – you'll get pretty accurate picture.

mmooss

> 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.

subpixel

Where I happen to work management is like the clergy in a regime that grants them much power, but no control.

They may care about each member of their 'congregation' and provide 'support' where they can, but ultimately they know their own head depends on staying true to doctrine and interpreting edicts.

jimt1234

> Amazon has launched a “bureaucracy tipline” ...

Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for the next earnings report.

ikhare

A long time ago Google used to have a program called "bureaucracy busters," where submissions were reviewed by the CFO to find internal barriers to getting things done.

UncleMeat

It was a good system. It no longer really exists and has been replaced by endless reprioritization and detailed bean counting justifying every single small action to prove to layers of management that what you are doing is worthwhile as Google slowly rots into a decayed husk of its old self.

chris_va

Slowly? :)

speed_spread

That's also my understanding. One big boss and a bunch of compliant minions. As if Amazon wasn't already dog-eat-dog enough. This won't end there.

wkat4242

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.

Kurd

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

over my 25+ years I’ve heard the exact same thing - no personal experience, just hearing other people’s

croes

The people still working at MS recommend MS?

Quelle surprise.

xmprt

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.

nomel

Expanding on this, even a little, would make your comment much more interesting.

netdur

I never heard it was bad at twitter! why is that?

hn_acc1

Seriously? After Elon bought it, you haven't heard of one bad thing about working there?

relativ575

Such as?

piecerough

What's a decent european enterprise?

lysace

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

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 which 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

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.

timc3

Then you must have grow up at a particular time which didnt have them. There was a time period where it would be unusual to have a TV or VCR without them.

bsimpson

One part of the company designed infrastructure, and another part used it. The results feel disparate because they're very separate markets.

Amazon did it on a shorter timeline and shipped the usage before the infrastructure, but it's not as wildly different as you state. The same seed grew branches in different directions, whose tips ended up very far apart from one another.

silisili

It seems weird but realizing one supports the other it kinda makes sense.

For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.

It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.

lysace

> For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card.

I guess I agree; Amazon should split up.

justmarc

So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless, but literally a drag to the company and progress?

wubrr

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.

parasense

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.

hsbauauvhabzb

Who created the policies and procedures?

lolinder

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.

dboreham

Bezos.

random3

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

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

null

[deleted]

bdangubic

this is same as saying soldiers in the military have the right to decide which orders they can disobey and which not

viccis

In my experience, the worst of them are lodged in there tighter than trichinella larvae.

hibikir

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.

wkat4242

Yeah because the good ones already left the shitshow to get a job somewhere better. Because they can.

viccis

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.

anacrolix

The best are always the first to leave

ldjkfkdsjnv

You realize alot of these managers are making seven figures? The "good ones" arent leaving. They are clinging to that money

joshstrange

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.

dyauspitr

Well come back around. We will retry the flat structure again, realize that just leads to terrible throughput, team wise political battles and defacto leaders and start hiring the managers again. Just look at older industries that have reached a steady state because they’ve been around longer. No one is constructing a large building without a project manager, foremen or architects.

DesiLurker

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

Don't forget principals. Most of them do nothing the whole day and are compensated to create BS projects that go nowhere.

VincentEvans

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.

wnevets

The people at that level of management are god like geniuses who must never be questioned.

maigret

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.

karmakaze

My experience is that most managers are between good and okay, some are great, countably few are obstacles. What's different are many layers of middle managers which I don't deal with directly. A fair number, though not much fault of their own create broken telephone communication pathways. Some are actively out for themselves and growing their little empires, alignment be damned. It's good to maintain good technical communication signals with fewer mis-translation points, so flatter orgs are more agile.

boredatoms

They’ll just hire more managers again in 18months

nomel

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

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.

nomel

I don't think it's useful to look at absolutes like this.

The question is, how many managers did they hire since the last round of layoffs, and what percent are being layed off now? Or, in other words, what's the bad hire rate? How does that unavoidable number compare to the industry?

14k people is 0.9% of their employees. Let's say they have a 16% manager ratio. That's maybe 5% of their management. What's the management/non-management ratio? Is it meant to balance for the reductions in headcount?

alberth

For context:

  Total # Employee:  1,556,000
  Planned # Layoff:     14,000  (or 0.9%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

danpalmer

This isn't the whole story though. While Amazon might have 1.5m employees, many of those are going to be in the fulfilment and distribution process, which is a very different place to being in engineering/product/finance/business/marketing working in an office.

I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more like a 4-5% layoff, a level at which people will really notice it.

nzealand

> This reduction marks a 13% drop in Amazon’s global management workforce, shrinking the number of managers from 105,770 to 91,936.

(second sentence in btw)

alberth

> “fulfillment … which is a very different place to being in … working in an office.”

Where does it say anything about this being only “office” jobs, as you put it.

null

[deleted]

abnercoimbre

Now this is proper context, thank you.

johnohara

Saving $2.1B to $3.6B means the 13,834 management positions pay between $150,000 to $260,000 per year. Plus benefits and other incentives I suppose.

These are not the workers who travel from warehouse to warehouse living in their RV's.

It makes me wonder if Amazon's AI implementations are starting to move up the food chain as was generally predicted for the U.S. economy 5 years ago.