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.
I’m not opposed to hierarchical organizational structures?
Under capitalism, the job of every single manager is to extract as much surplus value from the workers as possible. That’s their actual economic function. The problem isn’t the organizational model, the problem is the larger economic system they exist within.
If you had some kind of horizontal non-hierarchical collective under capitalism all that could do is turn everyone inside of it into petite-managers and force them to exploit themselves in order to hit productivity quotas. Or, more likely, it would fail because people don’t want to do that shit to themselves and need to be used and abused by a manager to make capitalism function.
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.