Amazon unfortunately joins the list of technology companies that are making significant staff cuts between your templates. The most notorious cases in this regard are, of course, Twitter, which started its first batch ten days ago and today we learned that yesterday it took out the scissors again, thus reducing its workforce to less than half of what it used to be. It was just a couple of weeks ago, and also Meta, which is going to close entire divisions, with a massive layoff of around 13% of its workforce, around 11,000 workers.
These are, as I said, the most notorious cases, but in recent weeks we have also learned of major cuts at Lyft, Stripe and Snap, among others, thus confirming that we are facing a substantially contractive phase in the sector. And it is that, paradoxically, the pandemic and the confinements had positive effects for many of them, because given the global circumstances the use of their services increased substantially, but in recent months the situation has already returned to normal and, what worse, future economic forecasts are not at all reassuring.
In this way, we are seeing week after week how these companies are carrying out the biggest layoffs in their history and, in all cases, they are actions aimed, at least in principle, at improving the balance sheet. However, we have been able to see some cases, mainly those of Twitter and Facebook, in which the causes of the dismissals would be, clearly, in tremendously wrong decisions by those responsible: The bet all in by the metaverse in the case of Meta, and… well, let’s say Elon Musk’s own purchase of the social network, in the case of Twitter.
In the case of Amazon, advanced by The New York Times, Amazon to imminently begin laying off around 10,000 workers. According to the newspaper, the first ones will take place this week and will focus mainly on Amazon’s device division, as well as the one dedicated to its voice assistant, Alexa, and also on its retail and human resources division. The numbers are not yet final, this is what the anonymous source quoted by the newspaper says:
“The total number of layoffs continues to adjust. But if it stays around 10,000, that would represent about 3% of Amazon’s corporate employees, and less than 1% of its global workforce of more than 1.5 million, which is made up mostly of hourly workers.”.
Thus, with these numbers, it seems that we are talking about a large cut that, however, proportionally is lower than the cases of Meta and Twitter. But it is surprising, however, that Amazon is going to cut back on its device and Alexa divisions, since both seemed to be priorities for the company, to the point that just a few months ago the company surprised us with the acquisition of iRobot, the manufacturers of the popular Roomba vacuum cleaners and, even more recently, with the introduction of new devices and renovations of existing ones.
It will be necessary to see, therefore, the degree of incidence of layoffs in these departments, since it is somewhat strange that Amazon has decided to make a 180-degree turn in this regard. It seems more likely, as I indicated in the news about the second round of Twitter layoffs, that we will again find ourselves, at least partially, with the reduced talent retentionsomething very common so far in the sector, but which aims to change in the immediate future.
