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Amazon Is Cutting Hundreds of Corporate Jobs (techcrunch.com)
According to a Seattle Times report, Amazon is laying off hundreds of corporate workers in its Seattle headquarters and elsewhere. "The corporate cuts come after an eight-year hiring spree, taking the company from 5,000 in 2010 to 40,000 in its Seattle headquarters and gobbling up several retail businesses throughout the country," reports TechCrunch. From the report: However, according to the report, Amazon's rising employee numbers over the last two years left some departments over budget and with too many staff on hand. In the last few months, the company implemented hiring freezes to stem the flow of new workers, cutting the number of open positions in half from the 3,500 listed last Summer. The layoffs will mainly focus on Amazon's Seattle office, but there have already been cuts in some of its retail subsidiaries in other parts of the country, such as the Las Vegas-based online footwear retailer Zappos, which had to lay off 30 people recently. And the company behind Diapers.com, Quidsi, had to cut more than 250 jobs a year ago. The moves suggest Amazon may be trying to rein in spending and consolidate some of its retail businesses.
Studies seem to show that it is very hard to accurately assess employees during the interview process. The only effective way of keeping quality up is to fire under-performers. If Amazon hasn't been doing this regularly enough for eight years, then I could see why this could be long overdue. To some extent you can find useful work for under-performers to do, but as some point you just get too many of them.
If you're not properly managing under-performers to turn them into performers, you're doing it wrong.
Some under-performers cannot be fixed. If you're not weeding those out in the first 90 days of employment, you're doing it wrong.
Mass firings serves one fucking purpose; abusing the bullshit tactic of fear and intimidation to keep your slaves in line. At some point, your most valuable assets leave for the competition, because you can't fucking stop doing it wrong.