1. dont understand ai
2. have had the same skill set for 10 years
3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks
4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics
for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money to just maintain status quo
I’m not here to defend the people in Amazon corporate, I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim. It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.
Amazon doesn't owe anybody a job. Likewise, if you buy groceries from Safeway, you can switch to buying from Walmart anytime.
> It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.
I'm sure there are a lot of things people don't buy even though they can afford it.
isn't this the American dream?
become Bezos, then exploit every last cent out of your suppliers, employees and customers
Relevant speech by SF author Charlie Stross, from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
They are aiming to layoff 30k employees this year. They are one bad earnings away from a surprise mass layoff unfortunately.
The other big tech companies are at lesser risk.
2. yes, if you're talking about basic reading skills at best.
3. correct. except "autopilot" doesn't even mean solving the basic problems they're supposed to solve as part of the role.
4. which is exactly what Amazon asked them to do.
> for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge.
Absolutely. Starting at the C-suite, VP, and director levels (L8 and above).
Source: I was there.
[0] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/apo...
[1] - https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/prime-video-india-growth-pa...
[2] - https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/prime-video-india-content-c...
But they don't really think about things from a "consumer who wants to watch something tonight" vs "shopper who we want to get money from" perspective. So the Prime Video app has been painful to navigate and use. Things like concepts of how people want to interact with TV shows - one top level entry with seasons in it, vs top-level entries per season, which took them forever to change - reflect quick and dirty shoveling of concepts over from how they'd sell box sets or such vs thinking about it from a user-first POV. Or how search will return a match for just about anything because they will happily sell it to you vs having as a default "show any free results first because I'm not looking to spend more right now."
That's a product/vision failure (or just mismatch with what you and I want) not an engineering/engineering culture thing.
- Amazon has 3 main business lines ("orgs"): Ecommerce, AWS and devices.
- Ecommerce and AWS are (now) cash cows. Devices bleeds money. TV falls into the devices organization.
- Devices was a Bezos bet. Current Amazon couldn't care less honestly.
- The devices organization is (today, after layoffs and people leaving in droves) essentially full of incompetent people, where all the leftovers of the other two orgs end up.
- It's people that was hired to build structure with the sole purpose of some higher-up promotion. They never served any other purpose, neither they have any particularly sophisticated skill.
- That's the people that makes the TV app.
1. scaling retail
2. keeping the servers running at AWS
all the low hanging fruit has been picked, they need a fundamentally different employee base
(but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)
This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.
The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.
Aside from that, you need to contribute with money for something that will not get you anything in the short term. Also the lack of transparency incentives corruption
A software engineer’s union would just kick whatever offshoring is happening into overdrive.
Where I live now in Austria, there's some union of IT workers, but it's small and toothless because they know their work can be offshored and have no leverage especially that the country is already not attractive to investors as-is due to high costs, high taxes and regulations. IT workers giving themselves even more benefits and protections through unions, like the rail workers have for example, would just mean non critical IT work leaves the country ASAP to neighboring Hungary or Slovakia or something.
In a globalized free market without trade and regulatory barriers, where the products and the "labor" travels freely over a wire with no borders or tariffs, the best value players win all, and everyone else is stuck in a race to the bottom trying to match that even if their operating costs are higher due to regulations, taxes, etc
Unions only worked in jobs where the workers could collectively use the leverage they had all along against their employer but were too afraid to use due to retaliation, but unions can't fix real world economic and trade facts that make your leverage zero to begin with. See the VFX industry for best example.
https://www.professionalsaustralia.org.au/Professionals/Prof...
United Kingdom:
https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers/
https://www.unitetheunion.org/what-we-do/unite-in-your-secto...
France: (Someone asking which of the many unions to join for SWE)
https://www.reddit.com/r/union/comments/1bcx6z6/which_union_...
It's like planting the seeds, it might not work from time to time and from places to places, but sometime the result might surprise you. But you'll never know if you don't give it a try.
It's like... (maybe an inappropriate example) how NRA brainlessly defending gun rights. They don't first spend 500 billions on gun safety research trying to prove gun is safe, no, they want guns, and then they come up reasons why guns are good.
In the recent years I'm started to think maybe this NRA-style method is actually how to set things in motion (if it's not the only effective way), as any added prerequisite or cations may eventually bog things down to a stop. You all read the CIA sabotage manual right? There's a chapter detailed how you can stop a plan by adding complexity (i.e. bigger committees etc).
I don't know about how a union would affect the standard salary being offered. I'd say that it could be higher for those essential enough to be "core staff", those that the company hires permanently knowing they'll be hard to get rid of and who drive the company forward because they're motivated with additional means.
So a union might drive the salaries and employment conditions up for the "core" team, while driving them down for the "temps". I've been through this as a unionized tech worker in both categories, and this is how it played out.
This is a boom and bust industry by nature. Projects finish or cancel, and work winds down. You can always be laid off. Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine.
Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well. Which is awesome when you're dealing with databases and the logistics of delivering packages. But it's effectively the opposite of games, movies and other creative media where you have to trust a single person or small group of people with a vision. Otherwise you get what Amazon gives, which is unappetizing slop.
If I were Jassy I'd cut off these product lines entirely. It's just not a good fit for how Amazon operates.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/king-of-meat-studio-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_ori...
On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.
Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.
Quite.
I remember when they started off flogging books in the '90s. I completely agree with you that trying to do "creative" is a bloody daft idea for a bunch of very efficient box shifters.
That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Is it mentioned anywhere that the roles eliminated are all going to be software engineers, because that’s what all the threads so far are interpreting this as. This feels more like preparing for a recession without saying it out loud. People aren’t buying as much anymore and with focus on cost savings across tech, can easily understand AWS not covering for lower retail revenue anymore.
For the last few months I still randomly get errors opening audible. You know, to buy more books.
I smell corruption in this sentence
The Meta layoff is 100% Reality Labs (they published team names, in addition to locations and roles).
Edit: parent comment removed the link, but it was https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe... .
They do not. They have no qualms about eliminating more senior roles as necessary, and generally prefer to staff in a bottom-heavy way because, among other things, it's more frugal.
> Employee separations resulting from this action are expected to be permanent. The affected employees are not represented by a union or any other collective bargaining representative.
Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1].
For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same as they would in Germany [5].
I warned people on HN for years to not be greedy with remote work (1-2 day hybrid is not the end of the world) and not be pissy to Americans of non-European heritage and derogatorily calling us H1Bs.
Either way those of us who know how to take advantage of brutal raw capitalism win - especially as this administration is helping further enhance this offshoring [6] with technology transfers [7].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/us-loses-...
[1] - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill...
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_...
[3] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
[6] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uDtm-k6JvI8
[7] - https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/04/the-india-us-tru...
It's not the end of the world, but it's also not really remote work if you have to live within commuting distance of an office.
Seems a lot of the Trump policies go exactly the opposite of what was planned. The supply people at my company are telling me that there is a huge push to move manufacturing away from the US due to tariffs.
