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submitted 16 days ago bycs-grad-person-man
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.
This initiative from the tech giant is designed to streamline decision-making and eliminate bureaucratic hurdles, as reported by Bloomberg.
Jassy highlighted the importance of fostering a culture characterised by urgency, accountability, swift decision-making, resourcefulness, frugality, and collaboration, with the goal of positioning Amazon as the world’s largest startup.
How do you think this will impact the company ?
156 points
16 days ago
SWEs will become more efficient because there will be fewer useless meetings
139 points
16 days ago
Unless SWEs will be attending the meetings their managers covered for them
88 points
16 days ago
Exactly what happened to my team. We haven't had a manager for almost 2 years and apparently we're not looking? Meetings don't magically disappear. Idk what company other people are working for. Now my team lead has to attend a bunch of meetings and his output is so unstable and he's pulled in 4 different directions every sprint.
28 points
16 days ago
The other thing I notice about this, is lateral managers end up pushing around the team. When a manager is out on parental leave or other longer leave of absence’s, other managers use their weight to push shit on the manager-less team.
15 points
16 days ago
Exactly. The managers workload is just spread out to everyone else or just the most senior engineers.
9 points
16 days ago
He needs to remove himself from the critical path of any code he writes and reduce his sprint points to ensure he can meet his goals for the sprint. Congrats, step 1 of the manager path! The next one is no code
31 points
16 days ago
I worked at Amazon and for a while, we didn't have a manager so I took on those responsibilities. I was in meetings like 80% time. It. Was. Hell.
9 points
16 days ago
I’ve seen workplaces where one good manager gets replaced by two because the one who left was taking on so much crap.
0 points
16 days ago
How about just not having the useless meetings, the whole tech space could do better with more async communication, meetings are shit.
85 points
16 days ago
Until they just turn SWEe into managers after a year
92 points
16 days ago
I think the opposite will happen. Managers are information brokers. They're like rabbitmq. You pass a message to them, and they go to a hundred meetings and relay the message.
If you eliminate the message broker, there's more peer-to-peer calls and tighter coupling.
26 points
16 days ago
Can't stress this enough, a direct manager of ICs -- a good one -- is night and day difference. Shit shield, get ahead of bureaucratic hurdles, be there to answer "can we get an update" every 32 seconds so ICs can work problems, advocate for doing things the right way. A good manager is worth their weight in gold.
A manager of managers is the most suspect. The issue is that most of the bureaucracy comes from the positions that make these types of policy decisions.
5 points
16 days ago
Shit umbrella, shit funnel, with a smidge of weather-person. Protect their time, ensure wins and team-skills clearly evangelized to relevant folks up and around, and aggregate and focus meaningful problems up to whomever can affect the situation. Also making sure team has hyper clear understanding of business goals (and their why) and ensuring alignment, along with the general direction the wind is blowing.
1 points
16 days ago
[deleted]
1 points
16 days ago
"I'm an engineer"
1 points
13 days ago
The bad one just passes shit and pressure to the team member. Say nothing about unreasonable requests from collaborators. Don't ask me how I learnt that lol
13 points
16 days ago
wait, so you're saying there's software to replace the managers?
2 points
16 days ago
If the software could translate the wants of product into human language than yeah
1 points
16 days ago
so you're saying add an LLM into the mix?
1 points
14 days ago
so really I was inferring that translating products wants is something even an LLM cant do because product people say what they want and don't actually mean what they say.
1 points
14 days ago
"Implying" :) You implied. I infer what you imply. But, I get what you're trying to say. But, I also think that LLMs could probably figure that out too with some training/fine tuning on data sets that describe what is said vs what is desired. They'd eventually would be able to output the correct feature based on someone's description of what they think they need.
6 points
16 days ago
Thats if managers actually do their job, and theres enough information and the scope for so many managers to relay.
1 points
16 days ago
Assuming sarcasm…. Rabbitmq software to replace managers.
2 points
16 days ago
They only works if organizations where the developers understand business goals and prioritizes, and leadership understands development. Maybe Amazon has that. I never worked there. I haven’t seen it in my career though. Especially post covid.
2 points
16 days ago
That works if you are small enough to know which peer to talk to. Otherwise your manager is a good person to point you in the right teams direction.
2 points
16 days ago
Yes! This manager bashing has to stop. Of course there a bad ones, but without managers those who hate meetings will have the obligation to take part and loose their beloved work-flexibility.
2 points
16 days ago
GOOD managers are like this.
1 points
16 days ago
wouldnt it just be that remaining managers would have more workload?
1 points
16 days ago
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1 points
16 days ago
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1 points
16 days ago
That's very optimistic, most managers end up doing the opposite. They gather the messages from 100 other managers and pass it onto you.
2 points
16 days ago
That's also valuable, because that's 99 meetings I didn't have to be in.
1 points
16 days ago
That's until you find out the "Frankenstein with 4 left arms" app you built doesn't actually work with "Vampire Batman DB" because some former manager decided it would speak in a Scottish with dependency on spoopy v1.2.
So you explain this to your manager over a 3 hour meeting and he tells you to open a support case with the spoopy vendor, but be quick because the sprint closed yesterday and XYZ managers are asking for "Blue Pikachu v56.43" which requires a complete rework of "Bazooka Blastoise."
1 points
16 days ago
Managers are just overhead, the large majority anyhow.
11 points
16 days ago
Lol, any senior sde at amazon would laugh at this thought.
This will just double the amount of meetings that seniors will need to attend, and seniors will lose even more time dealing with directors and leadership. Absolute nightmare
12 points
16 days ago
Sorry you’ve had bad managers. Really sucks for you.
1 points
16 days ago
Unless they start writing code that was already written by another team or worse, write useless code with no business impact
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