Amazon Layoffs: Amazon is reportedly planning to reduce 14,000 managerial positions by early next year in a bid to save $3 billion annually, according to a Morgan Stanley report. This initiative is part of CEO Andy Jassy’s strategy to boost operational efficiency by increasing the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 per cent by March 2025.
K.
All I can say is that for many of us in people management here,
a) we could’ve paid our mortgage just as comparably on an IC track, and we do this job because we enjoy working with people and roadmap strategy, and
b) I don’t care whether you’re building a fintech bro trading app, public housing in the USSR, or are conducting an orchestra. You get enough people in one place trying to achieve a shared goal, and you need people to manage the people. Otherwise the work becomes messy and miserable.
You don’t work with people, not really. You manage them. Your job is to strategically use them for maximum productivity; workers might be allowed some small amount of input but only as long as it can be fit within your “roadmap strategy”. Your job it to discipline the workers and keep them on task. And, of course, make sure they never unionize.
These problems are structural. I don’t care what your motivations are, your class position is as an underling enforcer for the boss and you’re bourgeoisified by your position within the class structure. A manager, within this specific class structure, has every incentive to be an enemy of the workers. An individual manager can choose to become a class traitor, and people in management can be extremely powerful union organizers! But it rarely happens because it requires they betray their own class interests. It’s structural.