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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

What's a decent european enterprise?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.