Amazon accidentally sends email confirming layoffs

porchrat said:
While indeed most companies don't really care about the employees Amazon does seem to go above and beyond.

Employees having to pee in bottles, the encouraged backstab culture etc.
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Won't disagree, but I've had some dealings with a good number of companies and they all have varying levels of this depending on how big and how political the culture has become.
 
porchrat said:
While indeed most companies don't really care about the employees Amazon does seem to go above and beyond.

Employees having to pee in bottles, the encouraged backstab culture etc.
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100%, most companies will swing the axe when needed, but at least they keep it in the closet and only take it out when needed

Amazon doesn't even have a closet for the axe, they just roam around wielding it, whenever you don't see the axe in the halls it just means it was sent off for resharpening
 
Jet-Fighter7700 said:
Amazon just seems like the ****!est company on Earth to work for,

hire and fire people like they are numbers on a spreadsheet.
not people with lives, and families, and responsibilities and dreams,

like sheep in a pen.
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All corporates are like that, when they say "corporate hell" they mean exactly those things.

I have done amy fair share in SA corporates and they are the same.
Years ago at a major bank, my desk was right outside the boardroom for our floor so I would often see the bad things happen.
One day there was a bit of a vibe and people were in and out of that boardroom. Then for some reason they left the door open and I saw the big manager for our department (meanest person I have ever met) getting screamed at by execs from 3 floors up. They did a video conference from the same building.... I heard them sat "Don't make excuses - I want names".
Then a few days later a bunch of people got letters on their desk telling them they needed to go. It was across the board, no process or discussions - just letters. If the big boss didn't know you or what you did then your were sent packing.

Then like a month later they announced that a Chinese bank had just bought a major stake in the bank and was now a controlling shareholder.

You are even less than a number.
 
Corelli said:
I am sad to tell you, having myself worked 25 years with Ai from Knowledge Management, to Process Automation, to now Robotics and currently working with Microsoft on Copilot enhancements and helping Google with Gemini, you will be in for a shock.

A lot of industries have switched to Ai, hospitals have switched to Ai, and we are busy helping also home affairs switching to Ai.

Ai is here to stay.

This is vehicles


And a dark factory for phones


And yes humans will fight back. We processed client payment processing to run through the night, and we discovered that our robots didnt have anything to do because the teams were taking work out of the robot buckets and then doing it themself, so they look productive. Then we retrenched the entire team.

What took a benefit up to 10 days to process now happens in an under an hour and the client gets paid out immediately, same with loans etc. In Banking and Investments, you dont need workers, hell you dont need accountants. We replaced them and the auditors too. People who had done fraud 10 years ago, and who thought they could get away with it, was fired and charged with fraud. We used Ai to go back years in the past looking for anomalies.

And lets not even go to medical. You can instantaneously match one patient with tens of thousands of other patients worldwide, to see what methods work best to treat diseases and to cure cancer.

Ai learns from mistakes and can improve constantly. Best you learn how to work with them, before they replace you.

and thats why Micron (Crucial) decided that making ram for Ai systems is a far better industry than home computers.
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Them: Why is our client base shrinking?

Me: Many of your clients were worked in banking and investments and they were all fired and replaced with AI and now scrapping by doing minimum wage jobs, till that is automated, and thus they cannot afford your products anymore. Maybe you should look at selling insurance and loans to AI?
 
Are the senior managers who allowed such greatly excessive apparent bloat to occur also being laid off or are they excused because it is a big structural shift (implementation of AI)?
 
ToxicBunny said:
But even we have a problem with it when it comes to outsourcing to some parts of India/Asia in terms of lower cost. Expertise is questionable but that doesn't seem to faze some senior executives.
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Outsourcing is a bit different but yes, especially in specific sectors.

I see this more as Amazon moving their cost basis within their own company.

Easy to skirt all the retrenchment laws around rehires and so on when you move their locations.
 
supersunbird said:
Are the senior managers who allowed such greatly excessive apparent bloat to occur also being laid off or are they excused because it is a big structural shift (implementation of AI)?
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If you look at the numbers, Amazon's corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022. Since then they've really just kept it constant, which means moving some people around, but also hiring an additional 5%, and laying off another 5% as priorities change, and they filter out the overly aggressive hiring from that 5 year period.

AI may be part of the reason, but growing by that headcount means they probably hired a lot of people who didn't meet the bar and started many new efforts that no longer make business sense.
 
SauRoNZA said:
And it’s good for us because guess where they’ll re-hire at lower cost but high expertise?

Seeing this in all manner of industries.
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Most of the people I know would just retire. Those who rejoin at a significantly lower cost will only be the narrow band that's been making bank, but not long enough to be financially independent.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Outsourcing is a bit different but yes, especially in specific sectors.

I see this more as Amazon moving their cost basis within their own company.

Easy to skirt all the retrenchment laws around rehires and so on when you move their locations.
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I use "Outsource" relatively loosely but yeah.

I would tend to agree that from Amazons point of view, this is going to be predominantly about moving the positions to cheaper locales.
 
cguy said:
Most of the people I know would just retire. Those who rejoin at a significantly lower cost will only be the narrow band that's been making bank, but not long enough to be financially independent.
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No, I'm saying the re-join will happen somewhere completely different to bring the total cost of employees down.

There's no obligation or issue for them to re-hire under retrenchment rules if they re-hire somewhere else entirely.
 
Here’s a contextual summary of Amazon’s hiring activity over roughly the last ~8 years based on public workforce numbers and trends — not just layoffs from the tweet:

📊 How Many People Amazon Has Hired / Workforce Growth

📌 Amazon’s total number of employees worldwide grew dramatically over the last decade:
• Around 798,000 employees in 2019 (before the pandemic).
• 1.30M in 2020 — huge hires during pandemic demand.
• 1.61M in 2021 — peak workforce.
• ~1.54–1.56M in 2024–25 — after hiring and some layoffs.

➡️ This means Amazon added roughly ~800,000–800,000 new jobs from 2019 to early 2025 — a massive hiring wave driven by e-commerce growth, warehouse expansion, delivery network scaling, AWS cloud expansion, and seasonal demand (including holiday hiring).

🧑‍💼 Types of Positions Across These Hires

Amazon doesn’t publish hiring totals by job type, but publicly known trends show that hires were spread across:

1. Operations & Fulfillment Jobs
• Warehouse workers, package sorters, delivery drivers — core to its logistics and distribution network.
• These roles make up the largest share of Amazon’s workforce (~1.2M workers).

2. Corporate & Tech Roles
• Software engineers, product managers, AWS cloud engineers, tech support, and roles in Alexa/AI teams.
• Corporate & tech historically around ~350,000.

3. Seasonal Workers
• Amazon consistently hires large seasonal cohorts for holiday and peak periods — for example, ~250,000 seasonal recruits for 2023/2024 holiday seasons.

4. International and Support Functions
• Jobs in international markets (e.g., Spain creating 20,000+ jobs since 2019).
• Customer service, HR, marketing, finance, retail operations — more diversified roles.

🧠 Net Employment Trend Over ~8 Years

From around 800,000 total employees in 2019 to roughly ~1.55M by 2024–25, Amazon net-added roughly ~750,000 workers globally — even after layoffs in recent years (which are more concentrated in corporate/tech segments).

📌 Summary

Massive hiring growth happened during 2019–2021 (pandemic boom).

Over ~700,000 more workers were added overall by 2024/25 compared with 2019.

Hires span operations/fulfillment, logistics, delivery, tech/corporate, AWS/cloud, customer service, and seasonal peak roles.

Recent layoffs are primarily in corporate/white-collar positions, not large enough to wipe out the overall hiring growth.
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Worked at Amazon who awhile. Pay was great. But they really break you down. Most staff I interacted with, was only there for a short time. They go through staff really quick.

Would never go back.
 
xcaliber said:
Worked at Amazon who awhile. Pay was great. But they really break you down. Most staff I interacted with, was only there for a short time. They go through staff really quick.

Would never go back.
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yeah got that vibe from them when I interviewed with them,

was nice, flew me down from JHB, 4 star hotel, interview process was brutal, met 7 people in 5 hours, grilled me over and over, all asking the exact, same repetitive questions, you feel like a parrot in a cage almost, was about to squawk , polly want a cracker almost. very unpleasant, and this was just the interview part,

didnt make the grade, but maybe its for the best, Amazon gives that vibe of a battery hen cage where people are chickens laying eggs, and if the eggs aren't big enough or not frequent enough, the Chicken is dinner, plenty more chickens to fill up the cages.

I get many corporate's are like that, and I get many Banks are like that, but each place has a different culture and expectation from you,

Amazon gives me the gigantic company with Zero fxus given attitude, tough to get in, tough to stay there long term, but easily replaced should you not make the grade, selling people a dream but the reality not being up to scratch.

I read many horror stories of the fulfillment staff and even managers from amazon commenting what a soulless and terrible place to work they are.
 
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