Amazon denies claims hiring freeze is slowing AWS sustainability work
Amazon has dismissed claims {that a} “few departures” from its cloud arm’s sustainability workforce, coupled with its ongoing hiring freeze, is slowing the corporate’s progress in direction of serving to its prospects curb their carbon emissions.
Sources near the corporate alerted Computer Weekly to the truth that a number of people, of various levels of seniority however all with sustainability as a part of their job roles, had departed Amazon Web Services (AWS) up to now 9 months.
The most-recent and high-profile is Christopher Wellise, who served as AWS’s director of worldwide sustainability and carbon for simply over two years earlier than departing in January 2023. He is now the vice-president of worldwide sustainability at colocation big Equinix.
His departure occurred one month after AWS’s sustainability-focused analyst relations supervisor, Derek DeShane, left the corporate one 12 months after being appointed to that place in December 2021.
Six months previous to this, in June 2022, Adrian Cockcroft, the vice-president of sustainability structure, whose remit included serving to AWS prospects make their enterprise operations extra sustainable, additionally left the enterprise.
“They haven’t replaced key staff and only seem to be recruiting front-end sustainability ‘sales’ heads, who are there to drive revenue rather than drive improvements,” stated one supply, who spoke to Computer Weekly on situation of anonymity.
Computer Weekly contacted Amazon to hunt clarification on whether or not the roles left vacant by the aforementioned people had been crammed, however the firm uncared for to straight reply the query.
In November 2022, Amazon went public with an employee letter that confirmed the company had carried out a “pause on new incremental hires” throughout its workforce that is set to final for the “next few months”.
The letter attributed the transfer to the “unusual macro-economic environment”, and stated the corporate will substitute staff who transfer on to “new opportunities” and that there’ll stay some “targeted places” the place hiring will proceed.
“This is not the first time we’ve faced uncertain and challenging economies in the past,” the letter, authored by Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of individuals expertise and expertise at Amazon, acknowledged. “While now we have had a number of years the place we’ve expanded our headcount broadly, there have additionally been a number of years the place we’ve tightened our belt and had been extra streamlined in how many individuals we added.
“With fewer people to hire at this moment, this should give each team an opportunity to further prioritise what matters most to customers and the business, and to be more productive.”
Several months after the letter was made public, in February 2023, Cockcroft printed a weblog submit on Medium that includes a round-up of the entire sustainability-focused shows made throughout the AWS Re:Invent buyer and accomplice convention, which occurred over a number of days in Las Vegas from late November 2022.
“The keynotes didn’t feature anything new on carbon, just reiterated the [company’s] existing path to 100% green energy by 2025,” he wrote. “AWS did have some new goals around sustainable water use that are quite aggressive and welcome.”
Impact on sustainability groups
The submit additionally alluded to some conversations he had with contacts from AWS, who steered the hiring freeze had impacted on the productiveness of the agency’s sustainability groups, significantly these tasked with updating the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool.
Introduced in March 2022, the instrument is freely out there to AWS prospects and designed to assist them calculate the dimensions of their cloud infrastructure’s carbon footprint.
“There was no news or updates to the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool,” wrote Cockcroft in the blog. “I asked around and heard that they are still working on it, but the AWS hiring freeze means that they don’t have the headcount they expected and are making slow progress on an API, more detailed metrics and Scope 3 [emissions measurements], which everyone is waiting for.”
Computer Weekly put Cockcroft’s claims to AWS, and in addition requested the agency for a response to the suggestion the hiring freeze was affecting the productiveness of its sustainability groups, and acquired the next assertion in response:
“Any suggestion that a few departures from the company impact our commitment to sustainability is false,” an organization spokesperson stated. “Amazon’s hiring strategy, inclusive of AWS, has no impact on our goal to build a sustainable business for our customers and reach net-zero carbon by 2040.”
To emphasise this level, the corporate reiterated that Amazon reached 85% on its purpose to energy its whole operations on 100% renewable vitality by 2025 a number of years in the past in 2021.
“And we’re making progress on our recently announced commitment to make AWS water-positive by 2030,” the spokesperson added. “These are just two examples of how we’re continuing to invest in fighting climate change and decarbonising our operations to help solve this crisis.”
