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.
Edited to add:
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.
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.
It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.
They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.
Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.
Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.
>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.
Excellent observations.
People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.
But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.
You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.
How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders
And anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.
They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
Middle management is also the memory of the company.
It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.
The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
How do you tell the difference?
How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?
Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much managing then the flies will start buzzing.
They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.
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.
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.
Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
That is not the real world.
Turns out working for your brother-in-law they let you manage yourself too.
Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
Here's a decent summary of how we got here:
Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good.
This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
The reality is that the Microsoft style of organization is very prominent in the industry.
I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.
As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.
Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.
That’s the point, surely
I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.
Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.
Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood.
I'm honestly interested in alternatives.
So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable.
This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.
jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.
The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.
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.
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.
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:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.
3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.
4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.
In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
A 14,000 employee cut is less than one percent.
Of course I know there are a lot of warehouse and delivery employees but they have managers, too.
They did exactly what I said they did, moving some managers to IC in the very worst case but mostly shuffling teams around.
Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?
The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.
Consider the many HN threads to the effect of "<Service> just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.
Seems.. low?
Then again, this is HN, where they say the "average" tech worker in the world makes $400K and drives a Ferrari.
I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.
You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.
Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.
But nevermind; this is not the same.
Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses: Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.
For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.
It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.
I guess I agree; Amazon should split up.
Total # Employee: 1,556,000
Planned # Layoff: 14,000 (or 0.9%)
I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more like a 4-5% layoff, a level at which people will really notice it.
(second sentence in btw)
Where does it say anything about this being only “office” jobs, as you put it.
Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.
Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for the next earnings report.
edit: I'll say, I've only ever left a job because of a manager. Shortly before leaving my current job, due to a crap manager, the previous manager was fired. The entire org benefited.
I wouldn't bet they will suddenly become good at hiring managers.
I think it’s worthwhile challenging this assumption. In a layoff, with that many people, I don’t think you can say much beyond that the company doesn’t want to pay them anymore.
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
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.
Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
TL;DR:
> 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.
It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a source.
The rest got jobs from mergers, takeovers, friendships, time or lack of strategy/interest from others.
And what happened to the good ones you may ask? They all left the places where I was to grow somewhere else.
Management mostly creates politics (ghost & real ones) - I would love for management to truly help teams employees and projects - but they rarely do.
To be a good manager you need to manage up and down - but most only manage up...
You need a good culture with proper incentives to be rewarded as a good manager. But that's not really the world most live in these days. Instead, the good get exploited by the bad and either leave to protect themselves or cause discourse as they try to do their job and inevitably be overthrown by those above.
If you dislike managers generally, why would you think Amazon is firing them for all the reasons you personally dislike them as a class?
What is Amazon’s actual motive here?
The reasons are as usual. Anticipating economic headwinds and how to make number go up despite that,s174 (sp?) changing how you amortize R&D, early attempts to incorporate AI into workflows, etc. Companies at the moment are not at all concerned with lean development nor streamlining workflows.
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.
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.
But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop everything from happening.
It is a complex balance.
> 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.
If the number is $2.1 to $3.6, I wonder why the headline went with $3.5. Weird.
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.
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, they did it and present in front of the board. When they fucked up, I fucked up.
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".
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.
These are not the workers who travel from warehouse to warehouse living in their RV's.
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.
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.
Left to their own devices, the corporate dystopia is pretty bleak.
If anyone can be replaced by AI it's the PHBs