Amazon announces massive layoffs, Google forcibly lowers performance ratings to follow graduation wave

Recently, major Silicon Valley companies have taken turns to stage "graduation" dramas.

Twitter, Meta, Salesforce, Stripe and other major companies have not escaped.

Under the overturned nest, there are no eggs left.

Today, Amazon also officially started laying off employees.

Amazon: Nearly 10,000 people welcome “graduation”

Amazon’s news of layoffs has been rumored for a long time, and today, the boots finally fell——

This Tuesday, the largest "prelude to layoffs" in Amazon's history has begun, and the specific number of layoffs is still rising.

According to previous predictions, the number of layoffs this time is likely to be close to 10,000.

Wall Street Journal

##CNBC

Insider reported that laid-off employees received mysterious invitations requiring them to hold a "mandatory" meeting with teammates, leaders and HR on Tuesday.

During the meeting, employees were told they would have 60 days to find new jobs internally. If they don't find a new job after 60 days, they can receive severance pay and leave.

How much is the severance package? Is it easy to find a new job in-house? These are all unknowns at this time.

It is reported that within Amazon, employees know very little about the entire layoff situation. Amazon did not initiate a company-wide notification, but quietly "point-to-point" notifications.

A few hours after the layoffs began, the laid-off employees had begun to post on LinkedIn, Blind, and One Third Acre to describe their "tragic situation."

Source: One-third of an acre

Based on the information issued by employees According to the post, the department most affected at this stage is indeed Alexa, as predicted.

Among them, the specific teams involved include: Everywhere, Smart Home, AI Information and Science, etc.

However, the group responsible for the core business is relatively safe at the moment.

Source: Three Acres of Land

Actually very early Someone familiar with the matter broke the news in advance, saying that Amazon is also beginning to prepare for major layoffs.

This is because Amazon CEO Andy Jassy launched a massive cost-cutting plan.

Amazon is looking at Alexa and other unprofitable units in a cost-cutting review. Documents show that the equipment division's annual operating losses reached $5 billion.

Internal sources say Amazon may begin layoffs as early as this week. The divisions most affected are the devices business unit, which includes Amazon's most popular Alexa product, as well as its human resources and retail units.

Now, Amazon has begun laying off contract workers responsible for recruiting, and in the past few weeks, they suddenly learned: The mission is over.

Also, full-time employees are not safe.

Informed sources said that it is not yet clear the specific number of layoffs, and the results of the layoffs will ultimately be decided by the team.

It is reported that the layoffs will account for about 3% of Amazon’s employees, less than 1% of its global employees.

#As of the end of September, Amazon had more than 1.5 million employees worldwide, including hundreds of thousands of workers in warehouses.

As the economic situation worsens, many major Silicon Valley companies have begun to "graduate" in turn, and companies like Amazon that have grown rapidly and over-constructed during the epidemic cannot escape. Pass.

Recently, Musk staged a 1/2 purge at Twitter, Meta also laid off 13% of its employees (more than 11,000 people), Lyft, Stripe and other technology companies are also Crazy layoffs.

And Amazon’s layoffs seem to be earlier than them.

Back in October, Amazon froze hiring across its retail division.

Employees of certain teams were assigned to more profitable departments, and many teams were disbanded.

As of the end of September, Amazon’s headcount fell by about 78,000 from the first quarter of this year.

It can be seen that under the current extremely uncertain economic outlook, Amazon is determined to control costs.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said last month that Amazon has seen signs that consumers are being affected by high inflation. It warned that financial conditions in the fourth quarter were quite poor.

Amazon’s device business Alexa is one of its innovation departments. This business is favored by the company’s founder and former CEO Bezos, and it is a star project that he values ​​​​especially.

The Alexa department now has more than 10,000 employees, and a large amount of investment funds have flowed here.

Although Amazon says it is still committed to building Alexa, current CEO Jassy obviously wants to "take action" with it.

#During the epidemic, Amazon’s expansion was too crazy.

From the end of 2019 to the end of 2021, Amazon employed more than 800,000 employees, who were mainly assigned to hundreds of warehouses, because Amazon’s online orders have been skyrocketing during the epidemic. .

According to Amazon’s report, the company’s net revenue in 2021 and 2020 was $33 billion and $21 billion, respectively, while net losses in the first nine months of this year totaled $30 One hundred million U.S. dollars.

Amazon’s last large-scale profit growth was in 2017, when the CEO was Bezos.

The new CEO Jassy has been focusing on profits and making various difficult decisions since taking office last year.

#Google: Forced to give low scores to 10% of employees!

In the recent layoffs of major Silicon Valley companies, Google has not been spared.

On the Blind community, someone has already revealed that the next round of major layoffs will be at Google.

The cloud of layoffs at Google has been brewing for a long time.

Recently, Google CEO Sudar Pichai issued a mandatory order: 10% of employees in each department must be marked as support check-in, and some VPs even asked subordinate managers to marked as 12%.

Now, many employees have discovered that their performance has been marked as "Support Check-in."

Silicon Valley has not been peaceful recently, with major companies such as Twitter and Meta taking turns to cause trouble.

And Google employees finally felt this "cold wave" for real.

You must know that in the past, Google was recognized as the "Silicon Valley nursing home."

Moreover, the salary of Google employees is unparalleled in Silicon Valley. Google’s salary is something that makes many coders jealous.

The average salary of Google engineers is 67% higher than that of Microsoft employees and 153% higher than that of the top 20 technology companies in the United States.

Christopher Hohn, Google’s major shareholder and general manager of TCI, said that this kind of salary is very unreasonable and urged Google to lay off employees as soon as possible.

TCI Fund owns more than $6 billion in shares of Google parent company Alphabet. Hohn wrote a letter to Pichai yesterday, saying Alphabet should cut costs and reduce its bets on its self-driving car unit Waymo.

Hohn said: "Google's search business has high operating leverage and is not labor-intensive. Despite strong revenue growth, operating leverage has been very high over the past five years. Small. In the third quarter of 2020, total expenses increased 18% year-over-year, while revenue increased only 6%."

##Google 2013 The number of full-time employees by this year

#To this end, he suggested that Google lay off employees. At the same time, he mentioned this "open secret" of Silicon Valley: whether at Google, Meta, Twitter or Uber, you can achieve similar income levels with far fewer people.

Indeed, as Hohn said, when there was no shortage of money, major manufacturers were expanding crazily in the early stage. But now as the cold winter approaches, major manufacturers think of this The unwritten secret begins to "graduate" employees in droves.

From the median salary chart of large U.S. technology companies from S&P Global Market Intelligence, we can see that the median salary of Alphabet employees reached $295,884. A real "one-stop rider".

Hohn stated in the letter that Alphabet does employ the most talented and brightest computer scientists and engineers, but they only make up a small proportion of its employees. part. Those working in sales and administration should be paid in line with other tech companies.

In fact, there was no need for Hohn to urge him, Pichai himself already had a sense of urgency.

In July this year, Pichai said that the company’s employees were too idle and should increase work output.

It sounded the alarm for many people at that time.

It can be seen that the seeds of today's forced low score for 10% of employees were planted a few months ago.

In September this year, Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Shopee China successfully searched for "Xiti".

According to the news on Maimai at the time, Shopee just held an all-staff meeting on the morning of September 19, and in the afternoon someone left with N2 compensation. Some employees said that the meeting started at 10:15 and ended at 10:20, and the colleague who was interviewed was instantly found in the office chat software.

In response, Shopee said in a statement that the layoffs were an effort to "optimize operational efficiency to achieve self-sufficiency in the entire business."

Although Shopee has become famous thanks to various magical operations, it and its parent company Sea have been extremely "low-key" in terms of layoffs. The overall size has not been disclosed.

Until recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Sea, Southeast Asia’s largest Internet company, had laid off more than 7,000 employees in the past six months, accounting for 10% of its total workforce. About 10%.

While the stock price soared, Sea lost a total of $3.6 billion in 2020 and 2021. By the second quarter of 2022, Sea's losses doubled to $931 million as revenue growth slowed to 29% from 64% in the first quarter.

In terms of stock price, it has fallen 87% since hitting a high last year, and its market value has been reduced from US$200 billion to the current US$20.9 billion. Even compared to the US$27 billion during the massive layoffs in September, more than 6 billion have evaporated.

However, in terms of employee size, Sea has not stopped its pace of “enrollment expansion”. Its total number of employees increased from 33,800 at the end of 2020 to 67,300 at the end of 2021. By June 2022, there will be more than 70,000 employees.

So, at the end of the second quarter, layoffs began.

In June, Sea implemented a round of layoffs that mainly affected Shopee Food and Shopee Pay, its food delivery and digital payments services. Employees laid off in that round included those working on the ground to recruit more brick-and-mortar merchants, such as restaurants and stores.

In August, the company said it would focus more on trying to make its business profitable and improve its cash flow, rather than prioritizing growth. In September, Sea implemented two rounds of large-scale layoffs, eliminating thousands more jobs. The size of the layoffs will vary by business and team. Some teams within Shopee, including one that analyzes e-commerce data, lost half their staff, according to employees.

A grain of sand of the times becomes a mountain on everyone’s head.

From the West Coast of the United States to Southeast Asia, the layoffs of major Internet companies currently seem to have no intention of stopping.

The good days of "eating a lot of meat" for many programmers seem to be coming to an abrupt end.

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