Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly
284 comments
·March 17, 2025basisword
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'.
bithead
I worked in academia for years before moving to the commercial sector, and in academia management seemed to run on the "in the real world" mantra. Yet if the managers in academia did half of what I saw them do in the commercial sector, they'd get walked out in minutes.
sizzle
A lot of PI’s pull rank and crack the whip on post docs it’s super toxic and the hours are atrocious with weekends and expectation to work at night. I’ll take a tech middle manager over an arrogant PI every time.
david38
I have done both and agree
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.
tech_tuna
I manage a team of software engineers. While they are all quite good at what they do and care about doing the Right Thing, collectively they're not always great at working towards a common goal.
One of the many challenges I have is that some of them will literally tinker their way to nowhere i.e. they have strong cases of Shiny New Toy Syndrome. If it weren't for me, there would be piles of unfun/unsexy work that never gets done and we'd suffer for it, and it would impact the rest of our engineering org.
It's a thankless job though, I often feel like no one likes me when I'm actually doing my job well. It's OK, I actually agreed to go back into management becauseI was terrified about the prospect of reporting to some new manager my company pulled in off the street (my old manager left).
I'll say this too, while I'm not very hands on these days, I understand what my team is doing and why and can speak with them about the details. I feel like that goes a long way helping me do my job well and understanding what they need to do, to do their jobs well. Non-technical software managers don't really make sense in my worldview.
david38
These don’t even remotely compare. In academia, timelines are long, failure is extremely high, total team involvement on a project is small, motivation is different, as is team selection criteria.
Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice
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
Clubber
I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day is without taking any time to understand those team dynamics and which processes fit in those dynamics. It's like a coach that calls nothing but pass plays for a run centric team and makes the 180lb guy play lineman and the 300lb guy play defensive back while thinking 20% turnover is good. No higher understanding of software development what so ever. For me and my teams, they've mostly been a burden.
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
Here's a decent summary of how we got here:
joquarky
In my experience, most contemporary managers also think they know everything now because they can write genAI prompts without realizing the AI will tend to agree with whatever they put into it.
Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
donnachangstein
> I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day
One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Clubber
>Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Oh, I can hate both. :) The (possibly) good news is now the free money train is gone, companies will actually have to pay attention to how their teams are working. The bad news is they might just chop off heads regardless of ability.
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?
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.
johnnyanmac
It's just negativity bias. We're hardwired to remember our wounds and avoid getting them again. And apparently we're hardwired to engage with those more than praising the great ones.
For some harder numbers though: it seems to also follow the pareto principle : https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/13/most-amer...
20% of "fair/poor" management ruining the 80% of good.
(though this is from 2023. A lot has changed in sentiments since then).
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".
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.
kamaal
>>you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization
It might not be a grand conspiracy or might not come from meticulous planning, but what happens is they just work for self preservation. Its no secret that people who work on a thing are bound to know things about them better than some body who just approves leaves, or makes abstract decisions. You will get replaced if you don't assert authority often and proactively kill the biggest threat to your position. This also means maintaining pets, and rewarding them more than people who are performing better.
All of this resembles a pattern of behaviour over the years with managers sabotaging everything good around to save themselves.
Over years I have seen managers are the biggest reason why companies go down. There are few other reasons.
bb88
I like the old wisdom about apples personally: "One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch".
null
segmondy
Do the break down for developers.
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?
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.
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.
wnolens
Unique experience. I've had mostly useless managers in my 15y career, downright toxic ones in my 3y AWS stint.
amrocha
You chose to work in a toxic company, of course you had toxic managers.
lolinder
What makes your experience representative and theirs unique? How are you measuring this?
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.
johnnyanmac
You don't quit companies, you quit managers. I've fortunately had great ones who balanced being into my development with making sure the job was being done. But that's not a universal experience, sadly. I work in games so you can find plenty of horror stories on what happens under bad management without me giving second hand stories of other teams I worked next to being raked in the coals.
I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.
protocolture
Look to give you the benefit of the doubt there are some experiences you probably just havent had.
aprilthird2021
I've also had all good managers who helped me move up levels, etc. across 3 companies for about 5 years. I think you're right about the side effects, and it's sad to see. It reflects, in my mind, an acknowledgment from these companies that they won't grow as much in the future as people right now think they will
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.
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.
consteval
From what I’ve seen flatter (not flat) company structures have less politics and a healthier culture. When you get into the 7, 8, 9 layer manager hierarchy at a software company is when things have really gone to shit
Freedom2
I'm not entirely sure why when one person quits, the company becomes managerless?
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.
bookaway
>Work should be based on results
The people who play politics also have their work judged by results. Getting yourself promoted to head a project that prints money for the company with little cost doesn't necessarily cause the project to stop printing money.
null
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.
bb88
>. 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.
But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"
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.
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.
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)
apple4ever
It may be, but I've also found that very few companies try. Usually because bad management is in charge.
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.
mirekrusin
Ask tech leads who consistently deliver value who's good one and who's not – you'll get pretty accurate picture.
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.
potato3732842
All organizations. Nonprofits, militaries, religious orders, everything.
And anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
mancerayder
I'm an engineering manager (EDIT - not at Amazon or at a very large firm), and I do 10,000 bazillion things a day, usually involving fixing lousy project management, setting processes so random people on the team don't get slammed by random external demands, guiding people's careers, talking people off the ledge / therapy, matching people's skills and interests to the projects and work, creating other teams to run ops so engineers can engineer, talk to senior management in a way they need to hear to protect the people below from nonsense, proving to the people above that I need headcount (and then creating a hiring process), helping people below being new managers, helping junior people learn, and interacting with clients and business people so the engineers are protected from it.
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
apple4ever
You really nailed it. Most don't realize all the work that goes into being a manager.
Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.
kirso
Don't take it too harshly, most of HN would build facebook in a weekend and exit for billions. And usually they only see their circle of influence without actually trying to be a manager in a first place to understand what does it take.
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
iLoveOncall
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...
patternMachine
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.
Ancalagon
How do the cost savings work then?
iLoveOncall
That's a made up figure from the journalist. They estimated that managers each earn between 200-350K and came to that number.
dangus
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.
johnnyanmac
It still is big. Let's not start to treat 10's of thousands of skill labor losing their jobs through no fault of their own as an everyday occurance. We may as well leave the US at that point.
dangus
It literally is an everyday occurrence. It is statistical fact. There are 340 million people in the USA. Tens of thousands of people lose and gain jobs every day. That is normal and not particularly unusual or cruel.
While the power dynamic of employment is uneven, if you wish for a company to never be able to let you go then you're also wishing for the hiring process to be far more difficult. If you wish for companies to have unreasonable processes involved in terminating employees, you're also wishing for extreme scrutiny in the hiring process rather than being able to get a job where employers take a chance on you.
coliveira
They probably just "promoted" people under them and then immediately fired these people for "poor performance". It is an old scheme they have.
iLoveOncall
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.
coliveira
You probably don't understand what these people are capable of. You're right that the normal process can take several months, but I wouldn't discard them rushing a number of people to management just to lay them off as soon as possible.
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?
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.
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.
wnevets
The people at that level of management are god like geniuses who must never be questioned.
dlgeek
Realize they have over 1.5MM employees and who knows how many contractors.
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.
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.
TulliusCicero
Execs.
dboreham
Bezos.
danny_codes
But it is neat that the internal tooling is 15 years behind the times. It’s like being teleported to 2005. The nostalgia value surely makes up for any “inefficiency” /s
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
bdangubic
this is same as saying soldiers in the military have the right to decide which orders they can disobey and which not
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.
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
googlehater
what was the purpose of that analogy?
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.
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.
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?
snoman
> they've culled those that they deemed weren't a good fit…
I think it’s worthwhile challenging this assumption. In a layoff, with that many people, I don’t think you can say much beyond that the company doesn’t want to pay them anymore.
nomel
I can't really comprehend this, as someone involved with several layoffs (failing startup and corporate). Do you believe the layoffs are by lottery or something? If not lottery, who do you believe is selecting the individuals, and what's the criteria?
If these layoffs are any like I've been involved with, nobody is surprised by who stays. It's almost obvious. There are sometimes surprises by who lets go, usually having to do with the required headcount, where some better ones need to get let go too.
> In a layoff, with that many people
Absolute numbers are often used to appeal to emotion. It's less than 1%! Assuming 16% manager/non ratio, it's only 5% of management, so I suspect they aren't cutting too deep, or at all, into the high performing people.
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.
alberth
For context:
Total # Employee: 1,556,000
Planned # Layoff: 14,000 (or 0.9%)
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
abnercoimbre
Now this is proper context, thank you.
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.