re: Amazon cutting up to 30,000 corporate job. Yes 30K

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Wait a minute, they hired an extra 30,000 people for office jobs?

To do what exactly?

For frick sakes, how many people were doing the same job?

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I don’t think that’s exactly what happened here.

It’s not like a hypothetical general contractor went out and hired an electrician to do X, then forgot about that dude and hired another one to do X.

A lot of corporate jobs are for a general purpose or function, not a discrete set of easily-measurable tasks. If you have, let’s say, an “Analytics Lead” (for example), he probably has a core set of tasks but most of his work is probably coming from being moved from one project/problem/fire drill to the next. If you hire another, they don’t necessarily overlap and ideally, things get done better and faster.

Getting rid of one might mean things get done more slowly, or they’re rushed and sloppy. Or maybe that guy was kinda useless or worse, was a resource drain and you’re now better off.

In my experience, nobody really knows. Even management (especially exec level) doesn’t really know a lot of the time. I’ve seen entire teams get the RIF ax only to be replaced by a new team doing the exact same thing months later.

TL;DR: Most of the time, it’s just cold hard expense control. It doesn't seem to matter if the folks getting cut are useful. They just cut while hoping nothing critical breaks as a result.