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Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

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

#31

Post by axg11 »

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?

Context: I recently left Amazon

Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into VR/AR. The investment in Alexa was a platform play. Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform. I'm not sure results and trajectory justify the investment anymore.

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

#32

Post by mywittyname »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #23
malfist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are reporting agencies that can be used to determine who employs a person. That's not including some other shady shit I wouldn't put past the company getting up to (i.e., bribing recruiting firms to tattle on former employees). Plus, I bet there's clawback provision if you don't tell them and they find out about it.

But yeah, I'd take that gamble and just keep a low profile online. Or one could slow walk the hiring process: land a job then push your start date back out 61-x days.

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

#33

Post by RobertDeNiro »

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?

This is what happens when you optimize for a certain metric only. Yeah you might have someone's who's writing tons of high quality code, but if this code is just a duplication of another project or there is no business use for it, then it you probably would have been better off not writing it in the first place.

People talk about food waste, but how much code is wasted?

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

#34

Post by hef19898 »

socialismisok wrote: post #19
andsoitis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them? So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there…

Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.

Which, unfortunately, is only so much related performance. Feedback circles and cabals are a thing. Pkus some people are better at operating those cycles than others.

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

#35

Post by ctvo »

axg11 wrote: post #31
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?

Context: I recently left Amazon Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into…

Unlike Facebook Alexa was somewhat successful. See Alexa microwaves, cars, TVs, etc.. It looks like Amazon also knows when to move on vs. Meta.

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

#36

Post by clusterhacks »

quaffapint wrote: post #6
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…

Nothing more demoralizing than living in fear and rumorville. I was at a big bank post 2008 and it was months of messages about did you hear so and so got the tap on the shoulder. You never knew when or why, you just didn't know everyday if it was going to be your last. Not exactly how you want to live your life.

No better point re: living in fear and rumorville. Same experience for me in 2008. I also saw the same effect post dot-com bubble.

Layoffs in our industry are simply part of the long term game, part of a playbook that folks coming into it in the last decade or so probably haven't experienced. My eyes were opened in the dot-com crash - I saw too many extremely smart, hard-working, and accomplished developers get dropped and spend a year or more getting back into programming gigs.

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

#37

Post by ctvo »

socialismisok wrote: post #19
andsoitis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? If you have to fire the bottom x% of your team every year due to low performance, doesn't it mean that you have a constant low performing cadre? Otherwise, why would you get rid of them? So I don't think it being "cut throat" and there…

Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.

> Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle.

A slight correction: An organizational unit larger than a 2 pizza team -- think 50 engineers, is expected to cut 5-10%. A team within that unit may lose 0 engineers, which is how high performing teams that meet all their goals stay intact.

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

#38

Post by time_to_smile »

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?

I haven't worked at Amazon, but my experience with the world of "pip" culture is that it only really appears when value is difficult to define, which is strong evidence of bloat.

Every time you hear a story of someone at Amazon being pip'd it always comes as a surprise to the IC and, most importantly, they don't know how to avoid it.

This doesn't happen in a world where creating value is well defined. For example in the sales world nobody is confused about their performance. Sure there may be unfair reasons for having a poor sales cycle, but the sales person has zero problem identifying how they can create more value to the company: close more deals.

But I see lots of comments, both in person and online, of Amazon employees fearing a pip and not knowing the right way to keep their manager happy. This, at least to me, is evidence of the bloat. The high pressure ironically comes from the fact that nobody knows how to create real value, so they are stressed out trying to figure out how the game works.

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

#39

Post by LanceH »

__derek__ wrote: post #30
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 yo…

The biggest bloat I've found in big companies is duplicate teams. You have one problem needing to be solved and a couple VP's running a program trying to make it happen under their domain.

I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The other team just acquires as many people as possible and writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the flag pole and the solution seems to be to go with the team that already has all the people.

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

#40

Post by tinyhouse »

axg11 wrote: post #31
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?

Context: I recently left Amazon Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into…

Alexa is crazy. Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize. I understand that it's part of the Amazon flywheel but there's a limit of how much you can rely on AWS to fund you.

Alexa is full of horrible managers that only care about growing their teams so that they can get a promo.

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