Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in its latest campaign to declutter the org chart, hand more “ownership” to the survivors, and bid a fond farewell to excess bureaucracy—because nothing says “lean startup” like the world’s largest retailer deciding it has too many adults in the room.
The cuts, announced Wednesday by senior vice president Beth Galetti in a company blog post, follow hot on the heels of 14,000 corporate roles eliminated last October. Together, they push Amazon’s recent white-collar purge to roughly 30,000 positions—nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate headcount. Most of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees still toil in warehouses, so the blue-collar army remains safely out of the crosshairs.
Affected U.S. employees get a generous 90-day internal job hunt window, plus severance, transition support, and the usual outplacement niceties. Galetti assured everyone this isn’t the start of a quarterly layoff tradition. “It’s not our plan to announce broad staff cuts every few months,” she wrote, which is exactly what nervous employees want to hear right after the second major round in three months.
The real culprit here is the post-pandemic hiring spree that ballooned management layers, followed by CEO Andy Jassy’s determination to run Amazon like “the world’s largest startup.” Fewer bosses, more doers, and a healthy dose of AI to handle the repetitive stuff that used to require a committee.
Jassy has long warned that artificial intelligence will shrink the corporate workforce as automation takes over. Apparently, the future arrived faster than the holiday shipping deadlines.
The timing feels almost poetic. Just as Amazon confirmed the cuts, chip giant ASML announced 1,700 managerial reductions of its own. Microsoft, Nissan, Amtrak, Meta, Pinterest, and Autodesk have all trimmed management bloat in recent memory. It’s like the entire C-suite world woke up one day and decided middle management was the new avocado toast—delicious in 2020, but now everyone’s cutting back.
Inside Amazon, the mood had been brewing for weeks. An accidental email about “Project Dawn” (complete with references to “impacted colleagues” in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica) leaked early, spreading faster than a Prime delivery van on Black Friday. Internal chats and Reddit threads lit up with speculation. When the official word dropped, it was less surprise and more weary confirmation that the bureaucracy bonfire was still raging.
For the broader tech industry, this is yet another reminder that even booming companies—Amazon’s business is thriving—are reallocating dollars toward AI arms races instead of payroll. The message is clear: adapt to the machines or let the org chart do the adapting for you.
In the end, Amazon’s corporate ranks are getting a serious haircut so the company can sprint toward an AI-powered future. Whether that makes everyone feel more “owned” or just owned remains to be seen.
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