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Comment by lev99 | Hacker News Reader

Seattle Times likes to give Amazon bad press. Seattle has enough other tech companies to absorb a few hundred jobs. Companies routinely end up over-hiring or having redundant positions. It appears that they are laying off less than 10% of their Seattle staff, while they are still expanding the amount of office space they occupy in Seattle.

This seems like no big deal for Seattle and Amazon.

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"less than 10% of their Seattle staff"

even less than 1%

The problem is "a few hundred" is an undefined number.

400 would be about 1%, which would be fairly reported as a few hundred. My ceiling number is very high, but I would believe more than 1% are let go.

Does amazon really employ 40,000 people in its corporate headquarters? Microsoft does, but it has a much much bigger campus.

It doesn't really, maybe by footprint on the ground, but Amazon has lots of tall buildings.

Yes they do, and the math works out. About 8k people work in their two belltown towers alone.

Yes according to [0]. Just look at their campus map [1]. It is massive and some of those buildings are dozens of stories tall.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/4kc8ovgnyf996yn

[1]: https://static.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/7...

Having to enact a layoff to deal with 400 people when you already have a reputation about being ruthless with "up or out" is interesting though. As I understand it, it's not hard to fire deadwood at Amazon. So why risk the PR hit with "layoffs"? Seems curious.

Maybe it's not bad PR with Wall St given how the stock went up after the announcement.

That seems consistent with solely short term interest.

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