Amazon is hiring a lot of people.
It’s hiring 52,886 people, to be more precise. That’s more people than you know, and it’s definitely more people than I know. It’s also more students than there are at the University of Minnesota, more members than there are in the Church of Scientology, and probably more people than there are currently using Clubhouse.
Amazon made headlines last year when it reached 36,000 open positions. Then it made headlines again when it reached 40,000 open positions. Like many companies during COVID-19, Amazon experienced a major dip in hiring during the first half of the pandemic, but now its job listing count has fully rebounded and surpassed its pandemic peak.
2020 was an intense year for Amazon that only increased its global presence and power. The pandemic quickly saw shoppers turning to the site to order necessities or satisfy stay-at-home boredom, resulting in a 200% increase in profit. Quarantine also boosted purchases of smart home devices like Alexa, accelerating Amazon’s drive to get into as many American homes as possible — a mission they’ve continued working towards with this week’s release of Sidewalk. Amazon also narrowly defeated a historic union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, solidifying a proven strategy to quash similar movements should they arise in the future.
The majority of Amazon’s open job listings are based in the United States, but its job listings for France and India have greatly increased over the past year. China and Great Britain have also received a significant increase. Still, if Sidewalk's recent job listings are any indication, teams and projects at Amazon are often worked on from across the globe. Sidewalk, for example, has job listings for the United States, Taipei and Cambridge, among other locations.
The overwhelming majority of Amazon’s current job listings are in software development. That was true even last year during a massive, industry-wide slashing of software development and engineering jobs that afflicted nearly all the FAANG companies, but it seems the decline has finally reversed. By September last year, Amazon’s job listing count for software engineers had dropped down to 204. That’s still more people than you or I know, but still a significant drop from its 2020 peak of 378 jobs.
In fact, Amazon isn’t alone in this trend. Nearly all of FAANG has reversed the pandemic trend of slashing software engineering jobs, with Google and Apple ramping up hiring significantly despite changes to their work from home policies and shifts in focus during the pandemic. The trend lasted for a considerable amount of time, and sowed concerns that the software engineering jobs which were once viewed as golden ticket to a lucrative job at a Silicon Valley tech firm were falling by the wayside. But for the time being, this hiring spree, and others like it, mean that engineers are still hot, handsomely rewarded commodity in Silicon Valley and beyond.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.