It really depends on where they work at Amazon. The reason Amazon is the second largest employer is presumably because of the tens of thousands of warehouse/delivery employees. If they are working in a corporate setting, and there is still 10 levels of management between them and the CEO, I imagine it to be pretty bloated.

If each manager should only manage 15-20 people (https://www.yourerc.com/blog/post/span-of-control-how-many-e...)

Do the math. Amazon also has at least two major verticals - retail and AWS. Within AWS, Amazon has multiple departments and markets.

Without giving too much away, let’s start with the obvious (and I’m just guessing, I am not looking at the internal tool to see the hierarchy right now)

CEO of Amazon -> CEO of AWS -> Manager of my specific department worldwide -> manager of specific geographies -> manager of specific verticals within that market -> my manager.

That’s 6. I’m sure I’m missing a few and I just completely made up that hierarchy. But it is a logical division.

A typical McDonalds worked in a corporate owned store could probably go up 6 levels

- worker

- shift lead

- store manager

- regional manager

- district manager

- two more levels

- CEO

My impression is that a lot of the retail type workers are managed by/with a lot of automation. I've read that they can be fired simply by KPI without human review. If that's correct, I can say I wouldn't want to be the one to write that code.