There are not many names that are as weighty or provoke as much discussion in the high stakes arena of Big Tech as Beth Galetti. She is the woman with the most challenging mission in the business world because as the Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, she has to tell 16,000 people that they are no longer expected to have a desk at the company they were instrumental in making.
The announcement that took place this week is not another downsizing initiative of the company but the culmination of a massive 30,000-person slimming down initiative, which started late last year. However, there is more to it than cold severance packages and transition windows which is the soul of the $2 trillion giant.
Beth Galetti Engineer in an HR World
You must know the woman at the head of the layoffs to comprehend the layoffs at the moment. Beth Galetti is not an ordinary Human Resources executive. She is also a trained electrical engineer who went to college when she was 16 a literal math prodigy who worked at FedEx and then joined Amazon in 2013.
She does not administer HR on her gut feeling but on algorithms. During her tenure, Amazon developed its own software to handle the hiring and performance, among others. It is precisely this style of people engineering that makes CEO Andy Jassy confident in her ability to take down the same bureaucracy that she assisted in constructing during the pandemic boom of the company.
The Project Dawn: The Cost of Speed
Galetti in an internal memo that had a rapid leak to the press outlined a vision of a flatter Amazon. The idea is straightforward: less managers, more doers and more swift decisions.
It was internally known as Project Dawn, which is a bittersweet name to the thousands of employees who have lost their jobs. The rationale is that Amazon at this point has grown too top-heavy, with excessively many layers of middle management dragging down the “Day 1” ethos that founder Jeff Bezos popularized.
It is all about getting back to our roots, a source within the leadership team was whispering. We would like to be the biggest startup in the world again but not a sluggish utility company.
The AI Pivot: Jobs Lost, Chips Gained
The elephant in the room which Galetti only touched upon in his memo is Artificial Intelligence. As it gets rid of 16,000 positions, including numerous positions in recruitment and in-store physical retail, Amazon is also allocating a mind-boggling sum of $125 billion to AI infrastructure. It is an obvious indicator of the times. The new Amazon does not need as many people to operate processes and demands more chips to drive intelligence.
The corporation is closing different brick-and-mortar storefronts, such as a number of Amazon Fresh and Go outlets, and redirecting its investments towards a digital-first, high-tech future.
The Implications of This to the Global Talent Market
The “Amazon Effect” is real. The waves are experienced all around when 16,000 highly-paid corporate professionals come in the market at the same time:
Salary Cooling: A sudden stream of super-star talent flowing in out of Amazon, Google, and UPS (which has also recently retrenched 30,000 positions) may be putting the bidding wars over tech talent on temporary hiatus.
The Rise of the Individual Contributor: Specialization in technical skills, rather than experience in people management, will now be valued on the market by Galetti because of flattening.
The 90-Day Grace Period: Galetti has provided US-based workers with a 90-day grace period to secure jobs within the company instead of the company terminating them by the end of a specific time, which is somewhat of a safety net in an unstable business environment.
The Bottom Line
This is probably what will define the legacy of Beth Galetti. She is the designer of new corporate architecture- the one that is more speedy and AI-ready than it is staffed.
It is cold January to the 16,000 families who are affected. In the case of the tech industry, it is an exemplar of how a giant can be trying to remain nimble. The real question is whether you can really cut back to a startup culture or not in order to become a multibillion-dollar business.