I've been hearing about massive Amazon layoffs for a few years now. How come the company still exists? Are these layoffs followed by hiring at cheaper regions or different parts of the company? From my perspective as an occasional Amazon customer, things are pretty much unchanged.

The simple answer is that they hire more than they fire. In a lot of cases they will fill a role immediately after they fire the last person who was in it. Average employee retention at companies like Amazon (both voluntary and forced) is ridiculously low - something like 1.5 years. PIPs, forced burnout, mass layoffs etc. are all part of the corporate strategy. The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.

Amazon has 350K corporate roles, so yearly layoffs of 16K is only 5% - if you assume some modest re-hiring in lower-cost locations, this is just a relatively standard (at least lately) pivot out of high-cost US roles into other lower-cost economies.

My company behaves similarly to Amazon and we drop the bottom % performers every year via PIP. IDK if this is what Amazon did with this layoff but it's probably intentional churn.

Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.

One disturbing possibility is us laborers aren't as important we think we are.

They hire like crazy. There is unfortunately no shortage of people wanting to work there.

They also hire to fire to meet pip quotas.

They actually still have 1,5 million employees. The number has been approximately the same since 2021, and those 16,000 won't make a dent.

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