Comment by rvz
5 hours ago
> Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it.
Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents).
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time.
Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway.
You are being scammed without knowing it.
> Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
You seem to forget that AWS exists.
They have an 11% operating margin. That is far from razor thin. Their biggest business is AWS. They have subscription income, and they sell digital downloads and streaming which are high margin.
https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/...
Yeah, nobody makes this “margins are too low” complaint about Costco, which makes the majority of its profit on memberships, the exact same business model as Amazon Prime.
Amazon the logistics company is paid for by the $100+ per year that its customers just give to Amazon to get basically nothing in return.
All thanks to previous layoffs since 2022 which they cut 27,000 jobs in 2022 to 2023 due to mass over-hiring.
Compared to the other FAANG companies, these margins not only thin, but terrible and Amazon has the worst margins out of FAANG regardless of AWS or not.