The Modern Day Tech Worker Is Obsolete. Amazon’s CEO Just Told Us Why

It’s more than the effects of an employer-friendly labor market. That shift happens every five years.

It’s more than a technical evolution being sold as magic fairy dust that can increase productivity a jillion percent. That happens every 10 years.

It’s more than the definition of work changing from accomplishing great and unexpected things to pushing buttons until the investors are happy with the quarterly numbers. That’s a constant battle.

After Amazon announced another massive round of job cuts last week—anywhere from 14K to 30K corporate employees on the block—CEO Andy Jassy got on their quarterly earnings call—where the company announced $21 billion in profits—to give us the real reason behind all those layoffs.

And it might be the tipping point that finally destroys the notion of a tech job as anything but a short-term contract to be filled by whoever is available and cheap.

Here’s why.

Layoff Reasons Roulette

Yeah, this one is gonna be a little dark. I just wrote one on AI porn. It’s funnier. Go read that. 

Anyway, I also wrote a column a couple days ago, right after the layoffs were announced, listing the reasons I keep hearing from tech companies about why these layoffs are necessary.

I’ll try to make the layoff reasons funny:

1. AI is better than humans at most jobs, and Claude makes us feel validated.  
2. No one wants to return to the office, so those losers are 86’d. 
3. Oops. We overhired and we’re “fixing the glitch.”
4. Hey investors, we heard you like EPS so we got you a bunch of EPS.

Ugh. Humor is gonna be harder than I thought. 

But like a drunk football fan making bolder and bolder braggadocious statements as his team keeps winning, it’s only a matter of time before big tech jumps off a porta-potty through a flaming, flimsy plastic table. 

Funnier? What if I made that table the leadership table?

“Culture.” You Keep Using That Word…

From the Amazon CEO’s comments during the earnings conference call:

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven—not right now, at least,” he said. “Really, it’s culture.”

First of all, love the “not right now.” Total gangster.

Second. How? How is this a cultural move?

I mean, I’m not saying it’s not. Culture is a corporate term that has been redefined, reshaped, and smothered to death over the last two decades. It used to mean actively cultivating an environment where all the pieces—from leadership to employees to customers to partners—felt good about their relationship with the company. 

And not even in a squishy way, like it is today. The goal of culture was literally to get everyone to believe, “I like doing business with this company.” 

To call axing up to 30K of the workforce a cultural move is a little like saying, “We’re all one big happy family… so I’m gonna borrow $1,500 from you and show up drunk to your niece’s wedding.”

“It’s Not AI”

I don’t want to “yes it is” this. I really don’t.

I get it. It’s not an AI move… yet. But the “productivity gains” that are coming with AI automation are real, and they’re going to make the generative AI “chatbot” productivity gains look as silly as they turned out to be.

What the scrappy entrepreneurial class is doing with AI will make your head spin. And, once you get past the nominal chicanery, it’s not just dorm-room and garage startup stuff. These are companies getting to $1M ARR in days and $10M ARR in a couple months. Or so they say, but there are a lot of these stories around, enough to keep a megacap CEO up at night.

So if it is indeed an agility move, let’s talk about what Amazon’s CEO means when he says he wants to run Amazon like… 

The World’s Largest Startup

Amazon is not a startup. 

I got into a fight with a former big oil executive about this.

Not really. We exchanged a couple of pleasant emails, but he initially reached out because he misunderstood something I said in the layoffs reasons column, where I also referenced Amazon’s goal of “running the company like it’s the ‘world’s largest startup.’”

Big oil guy said I shouldn’t expect Amazon to run like a startup.

I didn’t say Amazon was a startup. I didn’t say Amazon should run like a startup. Them are quotes. Their CEO says this, and in fact repeated it on the earnings call. 

And when we get past the misunderstanding, I think we can all agree. Amazon is not a startup, and no amount of workforce optimization is going to make Amazon run like a startup, even the World’s Largest Startup. This includes cutting 30K on top of the 27K since 2022 out of the roughly 350K corporate employees at the heart of their 1.2M total employees.

Hell, startups have a hard time running like startups once they reach 50 employees. 

Ultimately, I have no qualm with big corporations trying to recapture the flexibility and fleetness of their startup days. In fact, I also get paid good money to help companies do just that. And while removing bloat is always a necessary evil, the 1.2M denominator here is just too high.

Damn man, even big oil agrees with me on that. 

I’m Not Judging You, I’m Begging You

I believe every time I talk about this in public, I add to the list of CEOs and leaders who get mad at me. Fine. I’ll take that. I’m a big boy and I know the kind of value that comes with doing these things the right way.

But please understand, I’m not calling anybody out here, not even Amazon. I’m not judging these moves or this messaging. I’m trying to make all of us – including them, you, and me – more successful. This isn’t about anyone’s political or business beliefs, or their methods, or ignoring what kind of pressure they’re under. 

When I coached my kid at baseball, and he kept swinging under the ball and popping up, eventually I just had to start telling him, “You’re doing it wrong.”

That’s not judgment. He’s doing it because he wants to hit the ball out of the park. I want him to hit the ball out of the park.

I’m begging these leaders to change their tone. That’s it. You run the company however you see fit. But if you don’t change the way you value and respect your workforce in public, you’re going to force more and more of that workforce to come up with a backup plan. 

We need to fix the relationship before it gets damaged beyond repair.
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