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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

#61

Post by pascalxus »

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…

I think if they were located in the bay area they wouldn't be able to get away with treating their employees so poorly. It's all about the supply and demand for labor. Outside the bay area, the labor supply and demand are much more inbalance whereas the bay area has limited labor supply due to the housing crisis. On the penninsula there are 4 jobs for every 1 resident, this gives workers a much larger bargaining power.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#62

Post by spklin »

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...

People do form weird perceptions, especially from short trips to places they don't know well, but your numbers are wrong.

137/152 are the number of days w/ precipitation, not sunny days. ie, Seattle has less rain, but more days of precipitation. This is typical comparing Seattle with many other cities: less rain total, but spread over more days.

Those more days are concentrated in winter, more so than in is typical in other parts of the country. If you look at the "hours of sunshine" stat over a whole year in your links, the typical seasonal change people complain about in the PNW is right there: Apr - Sep are similar, but Nov - Feb Seattle gets half as much hours of sun.

The concentration of gloomy drizzly days in winter is quite real.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#63

Post by eonw »

walrus01 wrote: post #46
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…

I encourage everyone in the Seattle area to constantly remind everyone of how much it rains. Hopefully it will slightly cut down on the number of Californians moving to the PNW.

i live on the other side of the mountains, its usually nice an sunny over here for most of winter, but much colder. We also have much hotter summers and forest fires in the late summer, but hey, no grey gloom.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#64

Post by Slansitartop »

gdulli wrote: post #48
Slansitartop wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty terrible because their retail site still needs a lot of work. Sort by stars has always been broken and the problems with counterfeit products and fake reviews needs to be dealt with.

I think it's a safe assumption that search isn't broken, it's just presented whatever way optimizes revenue while still using your choice of sort column as a guideline to keep it from being too blatant a lie.

It's broken from a usability standpoint. "Search by average stars" will give me pages and pages of 5-star products with tiny numbers of ratings before I'll see what I really want: a product with 1,000 ratings and an overall rating of 4.9.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#65

Post by sah2ed »

Grazester wrote: post #23
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…

Amazon might have been the first to launch a dedicated device that can do voice search but Google was doing it(on Android) before such a device was launched by amazon.

Looks like people are completely ignoring the context of my response.

The context in the grandparent was Alexa (i.e. voice search at home) which is much much narrower than voice search in general.

Here's an excerpt of Jeff Bezos' statement regarding doubling down on Alexa so its clearer this is not about voice search in general or on smartphones but on their smart home devices using Alexa:

“We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. There are now over 30,000 skills from outside developers, customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa, and we’re seeing strong response to our new far-field voice kit for manufacturers. Much more to come and a huge thank you to our customers and partners,"

https://mashable.com/2018/02/01/amazon-earnings-2017-alexa-j...

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#66

Post by gregdunn »

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.

The amzn [0], aws[1], and awslabs[2] github pages combined have 500+ repositories. AWS contributed back to the Linux kernel[3] and Xen[4] for Spectre and Meltdown related things. There are other projects large enough that they are under their own page, like Blox[5]. There's been plenty of others I've stumbled across randomly - this list isn't meant to be exhaustive or even close to it, but just what I personally can think of off the top of my head.

(Disclaimer: I work at AWS, and contribute to an open source project as a portion of my job. This isn't an official post or anything of that nature, and opinions expressed are my own - I'm just a random dude that wants to share that a lot of cool open source stuff happens at Amazon/AWS!)

[0] https://github.com/amzn [1] https://github.com/aws [2] https://github.com/awslabs [3] https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.15.... [4] https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2018-01... [5] https://github.com/blox/blox

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#67

Post by Animats »

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.

Eventually, as in SF, they will be in the majority and will take over, after which they can ostracize the people who resent them.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#68

Post by stratelogical »

moonka wrote: post #4

I wonder what type of positions are being targeted in these layoffs? They mentioned which groups but not whom.

I think all positions (SDEs, Business Managers, Marketers) in Amazon's oldest retail businesses (books, consumer electronics, kitchen, home etc.). These are businesses where Amazon has significant market segment share (for example, according to some research out there, in books it is ~80%). So it is natural to think: how many people do you need to keep the lights on? Maybe 5 years ago these businesses needed 100s of people, but with with 80% market segment share, do these businesses need the same number of people? My thinking if I were Jeff would be: If I reduce head count in these businesses, how much more free cash flow would I generate (assuming there is not much room left for these businesses to grow)? In other words, in businesses where I have the highest market segment share, how many people do I need to continue to keep that share. And, if people can be moved elsewhere to higher growth areas, then why not? If I need to move them back to books and electronics at some point in the future, I will.

Disclaimer: I'm an Amazon employee, but the comments here are my own.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#69

Post by amznthroway »

The hiring freeze has already been horrendous. We're told to keep hitting all our goals even if we lose people and can't hire to backfill. Now we're just straight up losing people to layoffs? Keeping the lights on alone is barely possible with the resources we have.

It would be one thing if we were in dire straights as a company. Imho, this is just short-sighted nonsense so some senior leader can hit an arbitrary goal and get a bonus.

I wonder if Alexa or AWS are hiring.

Re: Amazon laying off corporate employees in rare cutback

#70

Post by jonknee »

amznthroway wrote: post #69

The hiring freeze has already been horrendous. We're told to keep hitting all our goals even if we lose people and can't hire to backfill. Now we're just straight up losing people to layoffs? Keeping the lights on alone is barely possible with the resources we have. It would be one thing if we were in dire straights as a company. Imho, this is just short-sighted nonsense so some senior leader can hit an arbitrary goa…

> I wonder if Alexa or AWS are hiring.

... The very first sentence of the article:

> as the company shifts resources into fast-growing areas like its work on voice assistant Alexa

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