Senior AWS dev claims Amazon is quietly trying to encourage employees to quit in a push to covertly cut numbers::A senior developer at AWS has claimed the tech giant is conducting a “silent sacking” campaign in a bid to covertly cut numbers and avoid negative press.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There’s quite a disparity between what’s in the headline and what’s in the article. One really good point brought up was
When you read more into what the “source” was for the article, it looks a whole lot more like an incompetent VP that’s trying to play a game to avoid accountability by lying to the people under him while his own leadership is asking what in the fucking hell is going on with their section of the company.
After reading through all that, it stinks a whole lot more of mismanagement and gross incompetence on the part of Amazon than any strategy especially if you apply Occam’s Razor. What’s more likely, that the company who misjudged and executed poorly with a string of other stupid decisions involved suddenly schemes up another “quiet firing” strategy, or that the underperforming leadership is trying to sweep something under the rug for their own accountability?
My bet would go toward the latter. I don’t see quiet firing, I see gross incompetence and fear.
It’s not just negative press. If it was just that they would pay them to go away.
They are also trying to reduce their costs of doing so, and shove it on the system instead.
The unemployment claim this generates probably hurts them more than the severance…?
Even in lost position and lower wages you can still go to work and collect unemployment on the difference.
In 2021, Amazon was hiring software engineers like mad. They would spam my inbox 3-4 times per week, each email from a different recruiter. Now they’re playing this game. It’s their own damn fault they over hired. Now they should pay these people a severance.
Everyone was doing this. Especially e-comm and delivery companies. If you worked in tech you could trip and fall into a new job before 2022.
I worked in grocery delivery company, and everyone in leadership was certain the order volume would stay once the pandemic died down. They were fucking morons.
Shocker, people actually wanted to get out of the house after being trapped inside for months.
I knew a guy who worked in wallpaper, he insisted that sales would stay up after 2020 because this was the “new normal”…would not listen to anyone who asked him what would happen when the post-pandemic housing market slowed and the government stimulus checks dried up…he couldn’t even conceive of a market turn, this guy was teaching night classes to college students…
Yeah, at least some of the delivery companies could argue, some had a reason to try their service for the first time, and some might like it.
You can only wallpaper your walls so many times a decade before people think you’re insane.
I’m so confused by this. Is this like when Big Head was being paid to hang out with the guys on the roof of Hooli? Is this guy being paid to do nothing?
Amazon has always believed in treating employees in offices like machines so a percentage turns over automatically. It’s part of their culture. They’re just not planning to replace them this time because they over hired.
You could file for unemployment over the lost wages for one of those lower roles. You’d get like 60% of the difference for like 16 months or so.
If that role “ends” before then, it’d stretch your wages out while you distanced yourself from a shitty employer.
I had a company try to get me to quit when they got rid of my role and only offered me another position in its place.
Said fuck that and made them lay me off.
We’re at the part of infinite growth. Can’t make the numbers look bad compared to pandemic numbers so fire people until they balance out. Otherwise a shareholder might not make as much money as normal this year
Some companies post fake job openings (that they have no intention of filling) so this doesn’t surprise me. They post the fake openings to learn what kinds of people are job hunting, to fluff up their optics (“we’re hiring!”) and in some rare instances, to get some free labor with mini-projects disguised as interview tests.
I’m glad the article points out the downsides of quiet layoffs. If you make work conditions miserable, your most talented folks will probably cut and run first, as they can find a new job easier than the scrubs.
It’s called Dead Sea effect and can be a killing factor to an IT company.
Sometimes though it can be good overall if company has too many seniors I guess.
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/
Holy shit that’s good, as is the earlier article about hiring like a sports team.
I used to call this The Incompetence Filter. I like this analogy better.