Report: Amazon Employees Say Restructuring Leaves Fewer Opportunities to Advance

Amazon’s efforts to restructure its workforce have reportedly left staffers with fewer opportunities to move up the corporate ladder.

These concerns result from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s plan to reduce the company’s middle management ranks and free up funds for its investments in data centers and artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Feb. 5).

To reduce costs, the company’s organizations have been told to hire recent college graduates, find reasons to remove more senior workers, and have fewer managers as compared to front-line workers, according to the report.

Most employees interviewed by Bloomberg said Amazon had become a less desirable place to work, per the report. Together with the reduction in the number of opportunities to advance their careers, some cited the company’s cutbacks on projects like cashierless checking and telehealth and its requirement to return to the office five days a week.

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told Bloomberg, per the report, that the reduction in the number of managers “impacts a relatively small subset of employees and aims to increase our team members’ ability to move fast, clarify and strengthen their sense of ownership, and drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most affects customers and the business. Each organization is determining the best way to reach this goal, and our internal surveys show that employee sentiment remains strong.”

Jassy wrote in a message shared with Amazon’s employees and posted online in September that the company planned to reduce the number of managers in each of its organizations and require employees to work primarily in an office as part of an effort to “operate like the world’s largest startup.”

In the case of managers, Jassy said Amazon aimed to flatten organizations by asking each of its senior leadership teams to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.

Amazon began a series of layoffs in November 2022, with Jassy saying at the time that the company had hired rapidly over the previous several years. In January 2023, he said the number of layoffs would amount to more than 18,000.