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.
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.
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.