The Information reports that “Amazon’s corporate headcount more than tripled over five years to hit around 415,000 by the end of 2022, according to internal figures … far outpacing growth at other big tech companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet.
“The figures seen by The Information reveal that cloud computing and advertising, which have become two of Amazon’s key profit drivers, were the fastest growing businesses by headcount from the end of 2017 through the end of 2022, but virtually every division of the company at least doubled its corporate headcount.”
The story notes that “Amazon has never consistently disclosed the size of its corporate workforce or broken down its headcount by division, frustrating investors and analysts who want to understand where it’s allocating resources and compare it to rivals. For most of its history, it has regularly disclosed a workforce number that includes the vast numbers of employees in its warehouses, a figure that totaled 1.5 million as of its third-quarter earnings report this year. After rounds of layoffs, Amazon last year gave a rare update on the figure, saying its corporate and tech workforce was more than 350,000.
“An Amazon spokesperson said: ‘In order to meet growing demand or invest for future growth, we did grow headcount over the past few years, but the headcount numbers shared with us for this story are inaccurate.’
“That may be because Amazon internally measures headcount in different ways, depending on whether its human resources or finance departments are tracking employee numbers, which creates some fuzziness in the figures. It also has a variety of subsidiaries and contract workers that are included in some counts but not others. The figures seen by The Information reflected the number of employees tracked by Amazon’s HR department for corporate performance management purposes.”
You can read the entire story here.
The Information points out that “the data from the end of 2022 don’t fully capture the extent of CEO Andy Jassy’s cost-cutting efforts, including a round of 18,000 layoffs that began in November 2022 and 9,000 layoffs starting in March 2023, as well as other smaller cuts made later last year.”
KC’s View:
The question is whether that kind of top-heavy personnel growth is in keeping with a supposedly Today-Is-Day-One organization that always has prized agility and innovation.
I suspect I’m not the only one asking that question.
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