>It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"
If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? If a textile mill is making record profits because of new textile machinery, would you consider it reasonable for the business to keep the old workers around, even though they're not needed anymore? Yes, it always sucks to lose a job, but I don't see how Amazon did them dirty or even broke some sort of informal contract.
They absolutely didn't. It's within Amazon's legal rights to cut as many employees as they like for any reason (besides a protected one).
With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
In my opinion, chasing ever increasing profitability as a tech company is cannibalizing future earnings. By cutting over and over in pursuit of more profit, you are trading compound earnings (ie: create new products) for money today by injecting fear into your 'innovation centers'.
>With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
So going back to the textile mill example above, what should the owner do? Keep the workers around even though they're not needed until the next recession, and only then fire them? If it's a particularly profitable industry, it might even still be profitable even with a recession, so is amazon on the hook for decades, until there's some sort of industry-wide crisis (think the one that hit the American auto industry in 2008), and by then it's too late because upstarts without the burden of older employees have already overtaken them?
They should cut people when they have a down quarter, a project fails and there is no where for those people to transfer to, or poor performance.
Tossing people out as a giant tech company after a profitable quarter is non-sense. They have money to be innovative, why are they choosing not to push that back into more attempts at products.
People expect bad news if the company gets bad news. If a company cuts after good news, people are going to lose faith in either their truthfulness (ie: are they cooking the books), their loyalty to employees, or both.
>If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect?
Sure.
Too bad I don't take it at face value and know this is just more outsourcing that's smokescreened under AI. Just check their hiring in earnings calls and see if that's actually going down. Amazon did them dirty and lied about why they aren't needed.
I dunno, I got used to the weekly beatings. You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.
If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays.
I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands.
If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
If you truly believe the best people are not layed off from corporations, you must be extremely young and just starting out. Corporations are a lot less rational than you imply
>You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.
It's not the 2010's anymore. You're not fired because you did a bad job or even because you weren't productive enough. You're fired in a larger cultural wave to try and remove American labor from the American economy as they push everything overseas and pretend it's about "efficiency with AI". Nothing is hiring outside of hospitality right now.
>you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
Hope you have generational wealth. Otherwise that "capitalist" position is you delivering doordash just to survive.
I can only imagine what this will do to morale. If even positive quarters means job cuts, why even try to have a positive quarter.