Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective.
> The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things.
So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global).
Update: Tried to figure out whether the doubling head count was corporate employees or total. I don't have time to dig into it now but a quick search did turn up Amazon's EEO reports in which they break employees down into a number of categories including "Professionals" -- which sounds like it would include engineers. 77K in 2019, 121K in 2021. So it's reasonable to assume those did double from 2019 to the present. See https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-dat...
I am assuming the "doubling" might have come from delivery drivers and workers at warehouses mostly. Looks like the good folks who are let go are now mostly from non-engineering.
> The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things.
So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global).
Update: Tried to figure out whether the doubling head count was corporate employees or total. I don't have time to dig into it now but a quick search did turn up Amazon's EEO reports in which they break employees down into a number of categories including "Professionals" -- which sounds like it would include engineers. 77K in 2019, 121K in 2021. So it's reasonable to assume those did double from 2019 to the present. See https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/our-workforce-dat...