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Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#191

Post by iso1631 »

serjester wrote: post #163
zackmorris wrote: post #119

Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP). Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn? The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has…

If my business is valued at a million dollars and I take out a loan for a million, my business is now valued at 0. That’s basic accounting. Amazon had a net income of 14B last year - no one will let them borrow anything close to their market cap, much less 10X it. Edit: This assumes I spend my loan on payroll which is what the OP originally suggested.

> If my business is valued at a million dollars and I take out a loan for a million, my business is now valued at 0.

No, my business would have the existing assets of $1m, new assets of $1m in cash a liability of $1m, leaving a value of $1m

(minus any interest payments)

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#192

Post by firstSpeaker »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #167

Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective. > The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things. So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global). Updat…

Is that "doubled its work force" for the corporate roles or entire amazon?

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#193

Post by san_dimitri »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #167

Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective. > The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things. So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global). Updat…

I am assuming the "doubling" might have come from delivery drivers and workers at warehouses mostly. Looks like the good folks who are let go are now mostly from non-engineering.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#194

Post by mandeepj »

bogomipz wrote: post #41
dvngnt_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the correction is happening now. the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor. The economy has since rebounded and companies are returning to previous levels. The war isn't helping however

>"the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor." This is the really surprising thing to me - many(most?) of these companies are data driven companies. Companies with teams of analytics folks, data scientists, modeling-experts and teams of engineers working on tools to do ML and large scale data analytics. Do n…

> Do none of them actually use their tools and internal expertise to model their own hiring practices and historical market trends?

This! It’s exactly what have occupied my mind since layoffs started. May they did use tools. But, remember the output is a forecast, not a shining light out of a crystal ball. Estimates/Forecasts can go wrong and clearly turned out that way.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#195

Post by dougmwne »

datavirtue wrote: post #151
lbriner wrote: post #140

This is so completely normal in these industries that it is a non-headline. Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the sharehold…

Wish I could figure out how to do an Ask HN for non-profit hiring. My previous attempts failed.

It is very simple. Pick a nonprofit that has an exciting cause. Go on their website and look for openings. It’s going to need to be a very large org to have developers on staff as almost all IT needs typically are heavily outsourced to vendors. You can also work for one of these vendors.

Expected to leave massive amounts of salary on the table. You could be talking 50-150k less.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#196

Post by dvngnt_ »

slaw wrote: post #107
dvngnt_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the correction is happening now. the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor. The economy has since rebounded and companies are returning to previous levels. The war isn't helping however

It is not pandemic pushed evaluation, it is $5T injected by Fed in stock market.

which was caused by the pandemic.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#197

Post by nblgbg »

green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

I worked for Alexa before. If I remember correctly there are only 4 use cases of it like weather, smart devices, music and timers/alarms. There used to be 10k employees at that time of which 3k were working in music alone. There was definitely a bloat at that time.

The third party ecosystem never caught up and there is no killer app for Alexa other than those 4 use cases. The API (slots/intents) is limited and hard to create any useful interaction with it. My gut feeling is many divisions will be affected in Alexa.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#198

Post by firstSpeaker »

joshuamarksmith wrote: post #137
blobbers wrote: post #128

Amazon lists employees at 1.6M employees worldwide. ( https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number... ) Even if they have 1% churn each month, that's about 16,000 turnover a month. Laying off 10,000 is not news until we find out where the cuts are happening.

This is specifically tech and corporate employees, which is a much smaller pool than the 1.6M you're quoting. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon (but also haven't stated any opinions)

What is the ballpark of corporate employees count?

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#199

Post by nojito »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #159
softwaredoug wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the value of voice devices. In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons. Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Ap…

> people want things like Apple CarPlay - a big touchscreen - not voice commands I don't know the answer, but i wonder why you say that's what people want, since the high end BMW and Audi and Mercedes cars etc now all have their own voice commands to _avoid_ using the touchscreen (presumably for driving). I wonder how they even get a survey that's representative.

Because customers are demanding CarPlay

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/29/apple-carplay-massive-succes...

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#200

Post by chasd00 »

nightski wrote: post #143

It's fascinating how there are so many layoffs going on across the economy and yet unemployment is staying so low.

i think layoffs happen much faster than reporting. also, there's just a lot of people out there and tech is only a small piece of the overall labor market.
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