Amazon's offices in Commercial Bay, Auckland. Photo / Jed Bradley
Some staff at Amazon’s New Zealand operation are already looking for their next gig after the tech giant began consultations on layoffs at midday yesterday.
The consultation period on “role eliminations” runs until May 2, the Herald understands.
But Tim McNamara - a senior software development engineer with Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) - wasn’t waiting around.
Responding to the Herald’s story yesterday, McNamara tweeted, “I am directly affected by this. My role is being eliminated. I have provided expert support and training to service teams worldwide using the Rust programming language I am now looking to offer those services to other companies.”
“Rust” is the software that AWS says it has used to “write highly performant, safe infrastructure-level networking and other systems software”. Lower Hutt-based McNamara is the author of “Rust in Action”.
Another staff member confirmed their role had been axed, subject to consultation, but was too “cut up” to offer immediate comment.
The Herald understands positions being cut include 10 sales roles. Insiders say those being laid off are being offered three months’ garden leave on full pay.
Amazon has declined to address specific questions about layoffs in NZ, or how many roles were under consultation, but did confirm that its number of local AWS staff has tripled to 150 over the past three years.
With Amazon having no local e-commerce operation, but construction under way on its first data centres in NZ, AWS is the main focus of the US firm’s New Zealand operation, headquartered at Auckland’s Commercial Bay.
According to US reports, artificial intelligence (AI) software played a part in Amazon’s global push to rapidly expand its employee numbers as the pandemic drove booms in online shopping and cloud computing.
Recode said that an Amazon HR division known as the Artificial Intelligence Recruitment team tested an AI-powered Automated Applicant Evaluation technology last year. And that a leaked internal document raises the possibility that AI technology could be used to shortlist applicants for certain corporate and warehouse jobs and fast-track them to an interview - without a human recruiter’s involvement.
With many “Big Tech” layoffs, AI is also involved at the sharp end of the process.
A January survey of 300 human resources leaders at US companies revealed that 98 per cent of them say software and algorithms will help them make layoff decisions this year, according to a Washington Post report.
“There’s nothing in New Zealand employment law that says you can’t use an AI bot,” employment lawyer Jennifer Mills said.
AI could be used to build an objective set of criteria in the event of existing staff competing for a reduced number of roles, but the process of assessing which staff met those criteria would always have a degree of subjectivity, Mills said, as elements such as personality and knowledge of the wider businesses were factored in. Many would see those factors assessed better by people than software. Leaving humans out of the process would risk undermining our employment law’s requirement for a “fair and reasonable” consultation.
Using AI for the process of eliminating a position altogether - and deciding which of the incumbent’s responsibilities to shift to staff above, and which to staff below - would fall more obviously within our employment law, Mill said. “But whether it would make any commercial sense is another matter”.
An Amazon spokeswoman had no comment on questions about any AI role.
Amazon yesterday began the process of culling 9000 staff. The cuts are on top of a round of redundancies earlier this year that saw 18,000 cut.
The company employs more than 1.5 million staff worldwide, mostly warehouse and fulfilment workers. Amazon’s recent job cuts have targeted better-paid corporate roles in an effort to reshape its back-office operations.
The Financial Times has reported the majority of the new cuts will come at AWS, the video-game streaming platform Twitch, and its human resources and advertising departments.
In a Wednesday memo to employees, leaked to media, AWS’s global chief, Adam Selipsky, said:
“It is a tough day across our organization. I fully realize the impact on every person and family who is affected. We are working hard to treat everyone impacted with respect, and to provide a number of resources and touchpoints to aid in this transition. This also includes packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.”
The AWS boss blamed “the macroeconomic climate” for cuts.
“The fundamentals and the outlook for our business are strong, and we are very confident in our long-term prospects,’ he said.
Yesterday, as the Herald broke news of local layoffs, an Amazon spokeswoman declined to field specific questions, but offered the general comment that “The role reductions in AWS are driven by re-prioritisation decisions, which required us to reallocate resources. In most cases this involved people shifting projects, priorities, or teams, but in some cases we didn’t have the right skill match for these priorities. We continue to be very excited and optimistic about our AWS business, which continues to have very strong pipeline, migration and fundamentals, even in a challenging economic environment.”
She added, “In New Zealand, AWS continues to be fully committed to its $7.5 billion investment to open an AWS Region in Auckland in 2024, bringing world-class cloud computing services to Aotearoa. Our AWS Region will enable developers, start-ups and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve customers with low latency from data centres located right here in New Zealand.”
The tech downturn has seen tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Netflix, SAP and Salesforce lay off around 150,000 staff. Locally, Wellington-based Xero recently announced plans to cull around 15 per cent of its staff, with a further round of cuts possible in June. MYOB and Cin7 have also let staff go, while Sky TV offshored 170 technology, content and helpdesk roles.
The NZ sharemarket was flat while the Nasdaq hit another record high in the US.