Amazon is laying off another 2,200 employees as the tech industry's belt-tightening extends into a second year. The era of "growth at all costs" is definitively over.
According to American Bazaar, this latest round brings Amazon's total layoffs over the past 18 months to over 30,000 workers. That's after massive cuts at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and nearly every other major tech company.
We're now 18 months into tech's correction, and these aren't emergency pandemic adjustments anymore. This is the new normal. Companies overhired during the ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era when money was free and growth was the only metric that mattered. Now they're still unwinding those decisions.
I lived through the first part of this as a founder. In 2021 and early 2022, every tech company was hiring like mad. If you had a pulse and could write code, you had multiple offers. Salaries were absurd. Recruiters were offering signing bonuses that could buy a car. Investors were pouring money into anything with a SaaS business model and a decent pitch deck.
That world is gone. Interest rates went up, and suddenly profitable growth mattered more than just growth. Investors started asking uncomfortable questions like "when will you make money?" and "do you really need 500 employees for a product with 10,000 users?"
Amazon's case is particularly telling because they're not a struggling startup—they're one of the most profitable companies on Earth. But even Amazon is trimming. They're cutting middle management, consolidating teams, and asking hard questions about efficiency. If Amazon is doing it, everyone else will too.
The human cost here is real. 2,200 people just lost their jobs. Many of them were hired during the boom, told they were joining a rocket ship, encouraged to relocate to Seattle or Austin. Now they're job hunting in a market where everyone else is also laying off.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: a lot of these roles probably shouldn't have existed in the first place. When money is free, companies get sloppy. They hire ahead of growth that never materializes. They create layers of management that slow everything down. They fund moonshot projects that never ship.
