Amazon Hiring to Beat Inflation, and Mark Benioff Had to Shut Down During the Black Hole Recovery Heterogeneity
The cuts will mainly affect the corporate workforce, but not hourly warehouse workers. The number of jobs to be sold by Amazon was higher than it was thought to be, according to Jassy, and he put it at nearly 18,000.
In his Wednesday post, Jassy stated thatAmazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and would continue to do so.
Amazon was one of the latest Big Tech companies to watch growth slow down last year, as inflation was at a 40-year high.
Mark Benioff attributed the scaling back to an old line in Silicon Valley, that the boom times made the company hire overzealously. Corporate spending has been reduced and now the focus is on cutting costs.
We hired too many people before the economic downturn as our revenue accelerated, and we’re now facing it, according to a note written by Benioff.
Meta, which owns Facebook, is one of five companies that have announced major staff reductions in recent months, a reversal for an industry that has experienced gangbusters growth for over a decade.
The Amazon tech pullback: What is your impact on the future of the Amazon HQ2 campus? How will you feel when you lose your Amazon?
For Amazon, the pandemic was an enormous boon to its bottom line, with online sales skyrocketing as people avoided in-store shopping and the need for cloud storage exploded with more businesses and governments moving operations online. Over the past several years, Amazon added hundreds of thousands of jobs thanks to that.
While the company’s hiring went too far, the company intends to help cushion the blow for workers who are laid off.
Jassy said that they were working to support those who had been affected as well as giving them a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.
Amazon, which is still in the process of laying off more than 18,000 corporate workers, did not set a new date for construction to resume in Arlington, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. Arlington County board chair Christian Dorsey says the county learned “recently” of the planned pause and does not know when construction will resume.
“We’ve decided to shift the groundbreaking of PenPlace (the second phase of HQ2) out a bit,” Schoettler said in a statement. “Our second headquarters has always been a multi-year project, and we remain committed to Arlington, Virginia, and the greater Capital Region.”
Schoettler said that the company is excited to have so many employees at the first phase of their campus, dubbed Met Park, this June.
After a year-long search, Amazon decided in favor of Virginia and New York, but then backed out of New York due to community opposition.
As a tech downturn drives companies to rethink their real estate footprint, Amazon is taking the lead with a move that comes as many tech companies are rethinking their real estate investments. In recent months, Facebook-parent Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Snap have all announced plans to cut back on real estate.
The effect of those pullbacks can already be felt across the country, from Atlanta, where Microsoft paused development of a new campus, to San Francisco, where some local businesses say they are facing the ripple effects of remote work and multiple tech office closures.
Some community members have said the tech pullback feels like “broken promises” and raised concerns about the potential fallout from these moves in their neighborhoods.
The First Phase of the Crystal City Project: The Status and Expectations of Work in Arlington, Virgina, an Embedding for the High-Paying Industries
Amazon has pledged to use the project, the first phase of which already dominates the Crystal City neighborhood in which it is located, to eventually bring at least 25,000 high-paid workers to Virginia. Arlington and other cities, including Atlanta, Georgia, and Austin, Texas, competed to win the project in part to secure a tranche of elite workers and associated tax revenue. It is not certain how many people or new tax dollars Amazon will bring to Arlington.
Amazon says Metropolitan Park will open in June of this year. But the company no longer has a date for construction of the larger second phase and its signature swirl, all of which was originally planned to include about 2.8 million more square feet of office space and 115,000 square feet for retail.
Amazon has asked its employees to come back to work. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company would require corporate employees to return to the office at least three days a week, a shift from from the prior policy that allowed leaders to make the call on how their teams worked. The change, which will be effectively on May 1, has ignited some pushback from employees who say they prefer to work remotely.
Goldsztejn said the company is expecting to move forward with what he called pre-construction work on the construction in Virginia later this year, including applying for permits. He said final timing for the second phase of the project is still being determined. The company had previously said it planned to complete the project by 2025.