But keeping people employed because "we have money" is a really good reason.

Why Amazon and not investors? Investors can pay those people to do something more useful than Amazon's best ideas at the moment.

That's a pretty inhuman way of thinking IMO. The moment a company hires people, the onus is on it to keep these people busy.

You don't "return" people like you return money.

If they were making record profits, they would be looking to expand their profitable divisions, would they not? They would likely not lay people off, but reorganize internally to move resources away from failing areas and into the clearly thriving, very profitable areas; or start something completely new.

Hiring one good employee is expensive and difficult.

I'm sure the warehouse workers can easily be retrained to work on AWS. There's even data warehousing which would be a natural transition.

The article is about corporate staff, not warehouse workers.

I feel like im stating the obvious but you can't just double the headcount on AWS and expect AWS profits to double

The profitable divisions are probably still hiring, and there might be an option for some of the 18,000 to interview internally before getting terminated, some companies gave that option (30 day internal interview deadline). But you can't just move 3,000 Alexa employees to AWS and expect things to go smoothly

Have they doubled the number of employees at AWS? During what time period?

Why then, did they make the decision to do so?

Yeah, unless you see this as a cheap opportunity to slurp up talent and ditch anyone that's seen as a "problem".

> Many of these companies have a small portion making most of the profits, and all the others eating them up (see: VR, Voice).

Depends on your time horizon. You can fire allof engineering tomorrow. Costs will drop dramatically, revenue stays where it is. But over time things will stop working and your competiton will take over with new features and being able to keep the lights on when something breaks. Same applies to many departments. Short time dispensible, long term absolutely not.

Ask the Twitter staff. First days the toilets were still clean..