So I was going to post a different article – had it all queued up and ready to go – but then came across this CNBC article about how 40% of the recent 14k layoffs were in engineering.

I think this further supports my hypothesis that the layoffs were about Free Cash Flow (FCF) and making sure they had cash-in-hand in the next 6-18 months. Engineers and engineering managers are among the highest paid at their level, so cutting them means saving more money relative to the size of the layoffs.

Similarly, I heard from someone still at Amazon that the layoffs targeted low performers and long-tenure / high-earning folks. That explains why I saw so many friends making “After 12 years” and “After 19 years” posts. And again, it’s consistent with Amazon’s tight-fisted approach to cash.

I was going to reach out privately to my Amazon friends and ask them, but I’ll ask ’em here: how bad was Q4 prep with fewer headcount? DM me if you want, or reply here if you’re feeling frisky.

One rule at Amazon that’s been true for 25+ years: scale only goes up. Unless you’ve made sure that your already-redlining service can add another 30%, you’re going to fall over and die come November.

Ergo, teams at Amazon work overtime during Q3 to make sure they’re scaled, WHILE STILL delivering critical feature X before the holidays or Re:Invent. It was bad in the past, when I had full teams; it’s gotta be terrifying, now, with fewer heads.

(Funny story, I was hired to lead the Email Platform team in August, and in my first Q4, the business decided to send a Black Friday email to every Amazon customer during the week before Thanksgiving. We weren’t prepared, the service fell over and died repeatedly for 3 days straight, and the first and only time Bezos ever spoke to me was asking me to explain why at the following WBR. Fun times! I got 16 more Q4s after that, so not so bad, right?)

I honestly wonder how many teams had to cut features in Q3. I suspect a lot, in order to ensure they could scale for Q4 peak. The alternative is they didn’t scale, and that’d be bad, in several different terrifying ways.

I guess we’ll know. If there’s a sudden spike in “Amazon is down” or “AWS is down” problems over the next 2 weeks, then … oopsie?

I’m genuinely curious about how things will go for Amazon this Q4. It sure seems they’re expecting to need a fair bit of cash in hand to deal with what’s coming.