I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great.<p>They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.<p>IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very honest conversations with my managers about these things regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I doubt I'd have the same success.<p>Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the manager track generally has higher pay at each level. Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden. Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics.<p>I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.<p>Edited to add:<p>I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
I'm an engineering manager (EDIT - not at Amazon or at a very large firm), and I do 10,000 bazillion things a day, usually involving fixing lousy project management, setting processes so random people on the team don't get slammed by random external demands, guiding people's careers, talking people off the ledge / therapy, matching people's skills and interests to the projects and work, creating other teams to run ops so engineers can engineer, talk to senior management in a way they need to hear to protect the people below from nonsense, proving to the people above that I need headcount (and then creating a hiring process), helping people below being new managers, helping junior people learn, and interacting with clients and business people so the engineers are protected from it.<p>Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.<p>But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.<p>To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.<p>As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
This is old news and refers to the 15% figure that was announced last year (more than 6 months ago!) and for which the "layoffs" are already completed.<p>Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.<p>The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:<p><a href="https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy-latest-update-on-amazon-return-to-office-manager-team-ratio" rel="nofollow">https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...</a>
Haha a friend was just recommending I apply for a job there. I told her hell no. It's one of the worst in big tech. Probably second worst after twitter.<p>The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.<p>I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
I am curious how do you just hire 14,000 managers at the cost of $3.5B yearly more than you needed?<p>Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.
> Amazon has launched a “bureaucracy tipline” ...<p>Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for the next earnings report.
Amazon (the online retailer nowadays mostly hawking Chinese alphabet-salad-named brands) and/or AWS the cloud service behemoth?<p>I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.
Where I happen to work management is like the clergy in a regime that grants them much power, but no control.<p>They may care about each member of their 'congregation' and provide 'support' where they can, but ultimately they know their own head depends on staying true to doctrine and interpreting edicts.
SDE, just passed ten years at Amazon; opinions my own, obvs. The three best managers I've worked with in my career have all been at Amazon (you know who you are). Also the three worst (ditto). And the respective bars were pretty [high | low] coming in. Just like everywhere else I've been, it comes down to the individual. Amazon, as far as I can tell, have never tried to homogenize management. Your team delivers? You're in.
I tend to agree with Amazon leadership here, as they increase the management layer on a company, the team accountability and ownership gets lost. A more horizontal company is able to do more (per capita) and faster.<p>The tricky part is what to do when you scale, as you can't simply leave teams to their own devices as they will run their separate ways, so you do more and faster but in the wrong direction.<p>But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop everything from happening.<p>It is a complex balance.
My experience is that most managers are between good and okay, some are great, countably few are obstacles. What's different are many layers of middle managers which I don't deal with directly. A fair number, though not much fault of their own create broken telephone communication pathways. Some are actively out for themselves and growing their little empires, alignment be damned. It's good to maintain good technical communication signals with fewer mis-translation points, so flatter orgs are more agile.
This is also more than just saving a few billions of dollars but making a giant like Amazon more efficient, especially when it comes to making decisions. It's just too soul crushing to have a dozen of people who spend all day gatekeeping each project instead of building anything.
This is weird blogspam based on a Business Insider article from October of last year, which was based on a quote from Amazon's CEO in September of last year: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-could-cut-managers-save-3-billion-analysts-2024-10" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-could-cut-managers-sa...</a><p>TL;DR:<p>> CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.<p>It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a source.
Just a few weeks ago I was contacted by Amazon recruiter and refused for exactly this reason. I expect more layoffs as they figure out they don't need this many engineers after all. They will turn into money pumping google search analog.
Note that 14,000 managers amounts to 13% of all managers at Amazon. So, this isn't them flattening the hierarchy and making teams autonomous, self-organizing squads. Or, at least, this article doesn't make that claim.<p>> Amazon is set to cut around 14,000 managerial positions by early 2025, aiming to save between $2.1 billion and $3.6 billion annually.<p>If the number is $2.1 to $3.6, I wonder why the headline went with $3.5. Weird.
In India, the Amazon managers are notorious for all bad practices e.g. forced PIP quota, hire to fire, demanding to work during off hours and on holidays. Now the concern is that these managers will go, join many companies and spread the same bad management practices across the industry.
I am a bad manager, which I warn new recruits about.<p>I need my team to be independent, make decisions and challenge my (brilliant) ideas. They simply need to be good with what they know, at their level.<p>I will actively evangelize my strategy (they can challenge it, ultimately I am the accountable), I will always have their back (because I am like this, there is no profound philosophy behind this) and when they did something successful, <i>they</i> did it and present in front of the board. When they fucked up, I fucked up.<p>This is not some kind of messianic approach - just generic mortality. I spend a lot of time with them and O like to have them as "work friends".<p>I would hate to be hit by suvh layoff, and I am rather happy with the fact that they would be pissed off as well.
For what it's worth - I've been in tech for close to 30 years and honestly met 2 or 3 managers that really did their job well and truly helped.<p>The rest got jobs from mergers, takeovers, friendships, time or lack of strategy/interest from others.<p>And what happened to the good ones you may ask? They all left the places where I was to grow somewhere else.<p>Management mostly creates politics (ghost & real ones) - I would love for management to truly help teams employees and projects - but they rarely do.<p>To be a good manager you need to manage up and down - but most only manage up...
Turns out this story is bogus.
<a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/91302948/amazon-layoffs-14000-managers-false-news-spreads" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastcompany.com/91302948/amazon-layoffs-14000-ma...</a>
Saving $2.1B to $3.6B means the 13,834 management positions pay between $150,000 to $260,000 per year. Plus benefits and other incentives I suppose.<p>These are not the workers who travel from warehouse to warehouse living in their RV's.<p>It makes me wonder if Amazon's AI implementations are starting to move up the food chain as was generally predicted for the U.S. economy 5 years ago.
I've heard that the managers there aren't nearly as big a problem as the incentive structures that are imposed on managers. The competitiveness within the ranks compromises the office culture. This was explained to me as the origin of the plague of PIPs.
With the rise of AI, my disdain for managers has gone up. I don't think it's because AI has made managers redundant. It's because AI is making me redundant and I'm realizing they've kind of _always_ been redundant.
Imagine mistaking this for "getting rid of management," rather than kicking off a battle royale to backfill those roles with only the most efficiently, consciencelessly bloodthirsty aspirants to the power vacuum so created.
Good riddance, there's too many layers of management for a company that touts "It's always day 1", and once you become a manager you can only fail upwards.
Just wait until people realize that the easiest jobs to automate aren’t usually the ones that pay $9/hr. Automated performance metrics, direct monitoring of employee active screen time, so on and so forth. All the while managers were thinking how much easier it was going to make their job.<p>We’re at the point that an AI can now perform the requisite performance metric failing, sternly worded cautionary performance review, translate the verbal conversation for HR records as documentation for a subsequent firing if needed, and simply not care that your kid died and it has been a rough month.<p>Left to their own devices, the corporate dystopia is pretty bleak.
Topic seems like a bait for your typical HN user.<p>If you dislike managers generally, why would you think Amazon is firing them for all the reasons you personally dislike them as a class?<p>What is Amazon’s actual motive here?
I imagine one thread of the logic is like dang, AI is only producing mediocre work this year. What can we replace where mediocrity is acceptable... How about a role whose primary function is interhuman language.. where we can fallback on the humans involved (engineers, c levels) naturally catching and correcting mistakes?