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Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

wsj.com

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Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#21

Post by dymk »

malfist wrote: post #16
celestialcheese wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you don't find other work, max severance is like 28.5 weeks? Or is 20 the cap? If it's the former, almost 7 months of runway to find a new job is pretty great. The pulling of severance on job acceptance is a cheap move by Amazon, but not unexpected given their "frugality" in all aspects of their comp and perks.

If at the end of the 60 days, you get a lump sump payment of 4-20 weeks of base pay, no sign on bonus or RSUs included. Amazon famously caps base pay, so most people, even super senior people will not be making more than 160k/yr unless they were hired in the last year. If you find employment externally during those 60 days, all payments stop and you get nothing more from amazon. To get the 7 months of pay you'll have…

Amazon doubled their base cap last year, so is this still true?

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#22

Post by Shish2k »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #2

This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up. Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director. This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has pass…

> Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook

Ha, at Facebook people have been complaining that they only learned at the last-minute and only thanks to leaks, saying they would have preferred a longer-term heads-up so that they could start preparing and avoid making long-term commitments (eg that guy who was laid off one day after moving his whole life from India to the USA)

I suspect that there’s actually no great win/win way of doing mass layoffs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#23

Post by mothsonasloth »

malfist wrote: post #16
celestialcheese wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you don't find other work, max severance is like 28.5 weeks? Or is 20 the cap? If it's the former, almost 7 months of runway to find a new job is pretty great. The pulling of severance on job acceptance is a cheap move by Amazon, but not unexpected given their "frugality" in all aspects of their comp and perks.

If at the end of the 60 days, you get a lump sump payment of 4-20 weeks of base pay, no sign on bonus or RSUs included. Amazon famously caps base pay, so most people, even super senior people will not be making more than 160k/yr unless they were hired in the last year. If you find employment externally during those 60 days, all payments stop and you get nothing more from amazon. To get the 7 months of pay you'll have…

Couldn't you, y'know just get a new job offer and not tell them about it until your 60 days have elapsed?

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#24

Post by [deleted] »

malfist wrote: post #16
celestialcheese wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you don't find other work, max severance is like 28.5 weeks? Or is 20 the cap? If it's the former, almost 7 months of runway to find a new job is pretty great. The pulling of severance on job acceptance is a cheap move by Amazon, but not unexpected given their "frugality" in all aspects of their comp and perks.

If at the end of the 60 days, you get a lump sump payment of 4-20 weeks of base pay, no sign on bonus or RSUs included. Amazon famously caps base pay, so most people, even super senior people will not be making more than 160k/yr unless they were hired in the last year. If you find employment externally during those 60 days, all payments stop and you get nothing more from amazon. To get the 7 months of pay you'll have…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#25

Post by [deleted] »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #2

This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up. Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director. This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has pass…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#26

Post by vaidhy »

erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again - a completely useless work and you can be given an ever increasing quota to do it with the threat that one of the holes you dig might have your body in it (extremely stressful and ruthless).

The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matures. A large part of core services have been built over several years (and decades) and they have been architected to optimize for some operations at the cost of other operations. You can think of this as how you would design a DB schema. It is a trade-off between write speed, query speed and availability. Now, think about it happening at massive scale. As an engineer, you would spend a lot of time working/waiting on partner teams to prioritize your changes while under pressure to deliver. A lot of teams ended up building the pieces on their own into their own services leading to a larger maintenance and operational load.

From the outside, you are very likely to think that the team is bloated and slow-moving because you are assuming green field development. Internally, Amazon is a 25-year old legacy platform with almost no single vision across teams, tons of semi-duplicate functionality and heavy operational load. Keeping the lights on (KTLO) was a big ticket item on every annual plan I created when I was there.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#27

Post by nkassis »

erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

It's not necessarily individuals. From what I saw years ago there are tons of project kicked off to see if they pan out but are probably not going to succeed. The company has some core teams around retails, mobile and AWS that do the majority of the table stakes work. The rest is a lot of team doing things that may or may not have any value. My pessimistic view is that required teams are like 10% of the company leaving 90% of maybe useful. That isn't to say the 90% should be let go. If they did you'd see no growth but it's unclear how much of it is actually useful. In good times that's fine, in rougher time they have to reduce that extra a bit.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#28

Post by iLoveOncall »

erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

It's because it does not talk about employee bloat, but rather product bloat.

There are a lot of teams working on either useless or _duplicate_ products.

Amazon is a place where it is frequent to discover that another team is doing pretty much exactly the same thing as you, despite both teams existing for years.

My previous team found out that multiple of our products had equivalents built by other people (even one was just an excel sheet made by some random guy :|) and my current team has a table comparing our product with the other 15 equivalent products made by other teams...

And then there are a lot of teams working on products that do not and will never bring revenue, such as a big part of Alexa.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#29

Post by jsharf »

vaidhy wrote: post #26
erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

You can be asked to dig holes and close them up again - a completely useless work and you can be given an ever increasing quota to do it with the threat that one of the holes you dig might have your body in it (extremely stressful and ruthless). The challenge most of the people outside of Amazon do not realize is that micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination, esp. as the software matur…

I think it's actually normal for teams to have duplicate functionality. The requirements are usually never actually identical and when you try to merge them it results in services with complicated configuration that have N^2 edge cases which leads to more bugs or more complicated code. I suspect what you're describing is somewhat unavoidable, and not even a bad thing.

That being said, Google for comparison does have good code re-use for certain core resources, like spanner, cloud, tensorflow, borg, etc. If you're talking about bedrock infrastructure like that, it's quite a different picture.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#30

Post by __derek__ »

erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

Another way to be "bloated" is to have a lot of teams working very hard on systems/projects that don't add value to the overall business. Those teams will still manage out their low-performers and run a ruthless environment, but the folks that remain continue to work hard without providing value. Add new systems/projects underneath because people want more scope and responsibility, repeat through a few cycles, and you arrive at the quoted line.
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