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Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

seattletimes.com

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Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#51

Post by ghaff »

mcny wrote: post #22
saturdaysaint wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveys show that Alexa is being used for basic Siri 1.0 searches ("What's the weather","Play x on Pandora", timers, alarms, novelty questions) and little else. Few people have activated a skill or ordered something. A graphical user interface is going to be a vastly richer and more useful interactive experience for a very long time.

> Few people have activated a skill or ordered something. As far as I know, I cannot enable a skill on my echo dot itself. I have to do it through the app. This is friction that I don't need to tell you is bad for engagement. I wager Amazon's first mover advantage is very much over stated.

I don't mind that so much. My issue with skills is that there is a very limited number of incantations that I can keep in my head to summon the correct behavior from Alexa.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#52

Post by jxub »

leggomylibro wrote: post #26
walrus01 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have very nearly exhausted the pool of strong technical talent that can be recruited locally within the seattle area, who are not already gainfully employed at some other tech company. Also because building new office campus space in Seattle is becoming a bottleneck. Amazon is spread out through a bunch of temporarily leased buildings until the new towers are finished. Also they have sort of exhausted the number…

Also, a lot of the people who were willing to relocate to Seattle are reluctant to stay after years of worsening ostracization and seething resentment.

Sadly we see tech as a threat more often than a promethean fire for the mankind.

Well I guess fire is a kind of chaos itself.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#53

Post by jack_h »

jxub wrote: post #47
everdev wrote: post #34

I've always wondered how companies like Amazon and Apple with piles of cash justify not giving raises or passing laying off people. I understand that you want to be smart with your money but if I'm on the business end of this decision it probably hurts more than getting laid off from a company that's struggling and has no other options.

Yes, I've also been curious about how the rainforest company can get away with treating its employees supposedly not as well as other top tech companies, and other than AWS, I don't know of any special tech they've got going on for them (maybe the stock options carrot is the materialistic but true answer). Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their…

> Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their size.

I can't speak to Amazon, but Apple has quite a few prolific OSS contributions. Off the top of my head there's llvm/clang, cups, swift, GCD, and webkit.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#54

Post by Cookingboy »

jack_h wrote: post #53
jxub wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've also been curious about how the rainforest company can get away with treating its employees supposedly not as well as other top tech companies, and other than AWS, I don't know of any special tech they've got going on for them (maybe the stock options carrot is the materialistic but true answer). Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their…

> Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their size. I can't speak to Amazon, but Apple has quite a few prolific OSS contributions. Off the top of my head there's llvm/clang, cups, swift, GCD, and webkit.

But...but those aren't JS frameworks or used by web devs, so obviously they don't count! /s

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#55

Post by jobu »

everdev wrote: post #34

I've always wondered how companies like Amazon and Apple with piles of cash justify not giving raises or passing laying off people. I understand that you want to be smart with your money but if I'm on the business end of this decision it probably hurts more than getting laid off from a company that's struggling and has no other options.

Laying off people is just a tool to get rid of low performers and cut costs. From the article:

"A manager in one unit making cuts said his team was briefed that Bezos and the Amazon brass wanted to put more pressure on managers to weed out lower performers and enforce spending discipline after the rapid growth of recent years."

Layoffs seem kinda shitty, but it's usually better than firing with cause. The worker will still qualify for unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn't have to go through the time and expense of a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#56

Post by wgjordan »

piffey wrote: post #44
seibelj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally, I cannot ever relocate to Seattle because of the weather. I live in Boston, which has its own issues, but at least it's often sunny during the winter and I can get out for a walk most days. I have a lot of family around Seattle and have visited frequently. One year I visited in May and it rained nonstop, oscillating between a soft drizzle to a torrential downpour, for 10 straight days! Too depressi…

Perception is a funny thing. Average annual precipitation for each city and sunny days per year: Boston: 43.76in / 137 days Seattle: 34.1in / 152 days https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/boston/massachusetts/u... https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/seattle/washington/uni...

From the same dataset:

Hours of sunshine during winter months (Dec + Jan + Feb): Boston: 464 Seattle: 235 (-50%)

Annual hours of sunshine: Boston: 2615 Seattle: 2019 (-23%)

so it's accurate to say that Boston is sunnier than Seattle and much sunnier during the winter.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#57

Post by sah2ed »

gamblor956 wrote: post #39
sah2ed wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon as a threat to Google in this area. LOL. That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market. You probably meant: "Google is a threat to Amazon in this area" because Amazon invented and still dominates the smart speaker category. In other words, Google didn't know a market existed for such devices until Amazon created a m…

That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market. Palm and Microsoft (through OEMs) both released touch-based smartphones years before the iPhone. They were very popular in the military, government, and legal markets, though a distant #2 and #3 to Blackberry (which did not release a touch-capable device until after the iPhone).

Do you have links to back up your claim? Palm's first touch screen smartphone effort was released in 2009 [0]. Not that it matters considering the original discussion was Google vs Apple.

Anyway, PDAs were a different device category from smartphones and many of them required a stylus for input like the HP iPAQ which ran Windows Pocket PC.

IIRC, the iPhone keynote talked about how they did away with the stylus because people frequently lost them so I wouldn't equate stylus-input PDAs with finger-input smartphones even though both device categories technically use touch-screens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#58

Post by dragonwriter »

sah2ed wrote: post #18
gargarplex wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice search is already huge and I imagine it may be even bigger. I see Amazon as a threat to Google in this area.

> Amazon as a threat to Google in this area. LOL. That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market. You probably meant: "Google is a threat to Amazon in this area" because Amazon invented and still dominates the smart speaker category. In other words, Google didn't know a market existed for such devices until Amazon created a m…

> > Voice search is already huge and I imagine it may be even bigger. I see Amazon as a threat to Google in this area.

> LOL. That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market.

Google brought voice search to the market long before Alexa.

It's true that Google was later than Amazon in incorporating voice search into the smart speaker form factor, which would be relevant if GP had identified the area of concern as “smart speakers” rather than “voice search”.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#59

Post by asah »

wgjordan wrote: post #56
piffey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perception is a funny thing. Average annual precipitation for each city and sunny days per year: Boston: 43.76in / 137 days Seattle: 34.1in / 152 days https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/boston/massachusetts/u... https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/seattle/washington/uni...

From the same dataset: Hours of sunshine during winter months (Dec + Jan + Feb): Boston: 464 Seattle: 235 (-50%) Annual hours of sunshine: Boston: 2615 Seattle: 2019 (-23%) so it's accurate to say that Boston is sunnier than Seattle and much sunnier during the winter.

And that's not silicon valley... say Mountain View, CA: - 560+ hours during winter months - 3,070 annual

https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Tem...

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#60

Post by blevin »

sah2ed wrote: post #18
gargarplex wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice search is already huge and I imagine it may be even bigger. I see Amazon as a threat to Google in this area.

> Amazon as a threat to Google in this area. LOL. That is like saying Apple (iPhones) are a threat to Google (Android) when it was Apple that first brought touch-based smartphones to market. You probably meant: "Google is a threat to Amazon in this area" because Amazon invented and still dominates the smart speaker category. In other words, Google didn't know a market existed for such devices until Amazon created a m…

It's not even about a product category. It's about control of the surface area of interfaces people use. Interfaces that aggregate other services often hang poorly, but if you can build one people seek to use, you can build a brand (a name bound to positive connotations), which becomes a durable and valuable position to control. Mental real-estate in mass awareness is hard-won.

Voice control today is somewhere between gimmick and strictly dominant, depending on the situation and provider. If you consider the trends of interface design from line console to GUI to touch, each used newly-sophisticated tech to become more broadly accessible. With this broadening the stakes go up. I think that explains the proliferation of speaker chatbot products; they are just one front in a larger competition for that space people interact with directly. That particular front may or may not turn out to matter in the long run. Concurrent battle sites are car integrations and streaming devices/USB-sticks for TV's. This is why these same companies keep showing up to the same battlefronts with more or less equivalent strategies (semi-shiny new interface tech that happens to funnel you into their marketplace regime); they all want to be your concierge at the ready, in order to steer economic activity.

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