Technology

59708 readers

2060 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

334

Amazon Layoffs: Tech Firm To Cut 14,000 Manager Positions By 2025, Says Report (news.abplive.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Amazon Layoffs: Amazon is reportedly planning to reduce 14,000 managerial positions by early next year in a bid to save $3 billion annually, according to a Morgan Stanley report. This initiative is part of CEO Andy Jassy's strategy to boost operational efficiency by increasing the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 per cent by March 2025.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges

In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn't do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired "career managers" whose only skill was to organise things?

I'm obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don't have much time for that and there's no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I've usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.

What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I've worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I've ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn't really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.

It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn't harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.

or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn't stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples' mouths all day long. I don't think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.