Miserable existence
Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of the company’s roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would represent the largest job cut at Amazon since around 27,000 jobs were eliminated starting in late 2022.
Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following notifications that will start going out via email tomorrow morning
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/
What are your thoughts on this?
Videos
I’ve heard that many BIEs and data professionals have been laid off recently. It’s quite unsettling to see, and I’m feeling anxious both as an employee, since it could happen at my company too and as a job seeker, knowing that many of those laid-off professionals will now be competing in the job market alongside me.
Today, Amazon announced 30k layoffs, most posts on LinkedIn I’ve seen were from HR/Recruiting. Curious to know if they laid off any DevOps/SRE as that would imply a lot of Amazon engineers would be coming into the market. Anyone hear anything?
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/amazon-exec-explains-layoff-california-21129467.php
In California, Amazon filed WARNs, which are generally required in the event of mass job cuts, for seven cities: Sunnyvale (391 layoffs), Irvine (333), Palo Alto (176), Culver City (152), San Diego (145), Santa Monica (130) and Santa Clara (76). It adds up to 1,403 cuts statewide — it’s unclear how the overall cuts might be affecting subsidiaries. (Amazon also owns Audible, Twitch, Goodreads, Whole Foods, Zoox and Ring.)
Who are these laid-off workers? Software development engineers make up the largest category, with hundreds of cuts listed across the documents. Amazon is also shedding recruiters, business analysts, marketers and managers. The layoffs in Irvine and San Diego, where Amazon has video game studios, include dozens of game designers and game artists.
This sheds some light on how affected SWEs were by this layoff in California at least. Not sure about other locations. The total layoff number is 14000
So Amazon just decided to yeet 30,000 corporate workers into the sun
Not warehouse folks Not seasonal hires The people who actually run the machine
And the market’s reaction
“Yessss daddy Bezos cut more costs please”
Stock goes up because apparently job losses = line go up
Here’s what’s wild
Everyone keeps saying AI is overhyped
Meanwhile Amazon is basically saying
“We don’t need humans for this anymore”
AWS slowing
Retail margins razor thin
Robots and LLMs taking the PowerPoint warriors’ jobs
Imagine being told for years
“Get a tech job it’s safe”
Then boom AI says
“You’re not even middle management material”
This feels less like cost optimization
and more like a warning shot for white-collar workers everywhere
I’m holding AMZN because tendies
but damn
Something about this doesn’t feel bullish for society
Thoughts
Is this the new normal
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engineers-in-its-record-layoffs-filings-show.html
Edit: Update link to remove AMP
Been at Amazon for 8 years, with 3 promotions and 4 lateral moves. I've watched a lot of cycles, and I'm convinced most layoffs boil down to one toxic pattern.
It all starts when a “leader” is told: “We don’t have enough scope for you to get promoted."
This one statement kicks off a vicious cycle:
Build "Scope": The Leader, needing to grow their org, gets more hands on deck.
2.Dilute Work: A project that one person could have easily done now has three people assigned to it.
3.Create Friction: Those three people now fight over their "scope" and responsibilities.
4.Add Layers: Proposal reviews and simple decisions get bogged down in these new, unnecessary layers, delaying actual business outcomes.
5. The Payoff: The L7 finally gets their promotion and immediately moves out the next quarter, leaving the bloated org behind.
These teams, built like "castles in the air" just for a promo, are the first ones under the radar when cuts are made. The only problem is, no one on the ground knows which org or which team is next.
This will never stop until leaders are rewarded for actual business outcomes, not just for building empires.
Right before the holidays is doubly brutal, hope you all are doing alright.
My friend from Amazon told me how she saw an entire team, including their manager, get laid off right in front of her eyes — all within seconds. The way they had to leave the office was honestly heartbreaking.
These layoffs are massive; entire orgs are being wiped out. The testing teams in Q3 and Q4 were the first to go. They collected company laptops on the spot, and that was it.
It’s rough out there right now.
Amazon said that they don't need so many people due to AI. We have already seen companies telling engineers to use AI project management tools,
Could Amazon be doing the same internally?
Amazon’s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers.
Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon’s home state of Washington showed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles. The data was reported by Amazon in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filings to state agencies.
The figures represent a segment of the total layoffs announced in October. Not all data was immediately available because of differences in state WARN reporting requirements.
In announcing the steepest round of cuts in its 31-year history, Amazon joined a growing roster of tech companies that have slashed jobs this year even as cash piles have mounted and profits soared. In total, there have been almost 113,000 job cuts at 231 tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi, continuing a trend that began in 2022 as businesses readjusted to life after the Covid pandemic.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been on a multiyear mission to transform the company’s corporate culture into one that operates like what he calls “the world’s largest startup.” He’s looked to make Amazon leaner and less bureaucratic by urging staffers to do more with less and cutting organizational bloat.
Amazon is expected to carry out further job reductions in January, CNBC previously reported.
The company said it’s also shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence. The technology is already poised to reshape Amazon’s white-collar workforce, with Jassy predicting in June that its corporate head count will shrink in the coming years alongside efficiency gains from AI.
Human resources chief Beth Galetti, in her memo announcing the layoffs, focused on the importance of innovating, which the company will now have to do with fewer people, specifically engineers.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti wrote. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Amazon said in a statement that AI is not the driver behind the vast majority of the job cuts, and that the bigger goal was to reduce bureaucracy and emphasize speed.
Jassy said on Amazon’s earnings call last month that the cuts were in response to a “culture” issue inside the company, spurred in part by an extended hiring spree that left it with “a lot more layers” and slower decision-making.
The layoffs impacted a mix of software engineer levels, but SDE II roles, or mid-level employees, were disproportionately affected, the WARN filings show.
The AI boom is making software development jobs harder to come by as companies adopt coding assistants or so-called vibe coding platforms from vendors like Cursor, OpenAI and Cognition. Amazon has released its own competitor called Kiro.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engineers-in-its-record-layoffs-filings-show.html
The post resonated with many users and sparked a debate about "hustle culture" and the importance of work-life balance, especially in the tech industry where layoffs have become common.
I am seeing layoffs left right centre in the past few days, post the 14,000 employee cut.
Every day is a nightmare. 4AM logins to check layoff is normal. Sleep is not part of the normal cycle and huge pile of work keeps waiting in the morning irrespective of weekday or weekend.
Every employee is either working because of - loans or emi or family commitments or they want to survive the job or may be they are the sole bread earner while cost of living is skyrocketting.
The top management is throwing lavish parties, the inner circle is enjoying as layoff have highlighted them in the news which in turn has pushed the stock prices high and have made them far rich.
Top management in the past few years have had ambitious milestones, they wanted amazon employees to innovate and take the company to the next level. The plan did not work out technically if someone fails they are either sacked or they step down because of non performance.. The harsh truth top exec have different rules than normal employees they are either made rich or they become rich.
In both positive and negative scenarios the top management is immune. But this trend has to be changed.
The top guys should resign and amazon should become what it was few years back.