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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

#41

Post by iLoveOncall »

Shish2k wrote: post #22
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 who…

The thing is that it's the same here. I saw a LinkedIn post from a guy at Amazon that got layed off 2 days after joining as well.

The difference is that not only you get no notice, you actually don't know when the wave of layoffs is done and when you can take a break from worrying.

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

#42

Post by bushbaba »

tinyhouse wrote: post #40
axg11 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alexa is funded by retail’s profits.

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

#43

Post by socialismisok »

ctvo wrote: post #37
socialismisok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair. But every manager must be prepared to put one of their people forward, even if they ultimately don't have to in the session. The pressure is still there.

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

#44

Post by ctvo »

blue039 wrote: post #20
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 takes a while to stack rank people out of the company. It's not an efficient pipeline. Moreover, smart engineers know how to game the system. So Amazon, like every other FAANG, is very bloated. I've yet to experience any sort of major layoff in the industry at large. They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat. It is sort of icing the fung…

> They seem mostly isolated to these mega-corps that got PPP money, hired way too much, and are now trimming back the fat.

I think your general point is correct: FAANG over hired during the pandemic, but I'm not sure you understand how PPP worked or how the money was distributed. Google, Amazon, and Meta weren't the primary recipients of PPP money (they directly received 0 of it).

Their stock price increased due to both performance during the pandemic, and the general loose environment created by the Federal Reserve which probably played more of a role than PPP targeting mid-size businesses.

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

#45

Post by malfist »

dymk wrote: post #21
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…

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

That's why I had a disclaimer about being hired this year.

If you weren't hired this year your base is likely still around the 160k

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

#46

Post by barbazoo »

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…

The fact that organizations have multiple teams working on overlapping or even similar things baffles me. I can't imagine how that wouldn't be immensely dissatisfying for the individual.

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

#47

Post by serioussecurity »

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?

Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.

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

#48

Post by axg11 »

ctvo wrote: post #35
axg11 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Success is relative. Voice didn't turn out to be "the next big computing platform". It's still mostly a command interface. Perhaps it still could become something bigger. Alexa isn't widely used on the iPhone/iOS/CarPlay or Android/Android Auto, the two most important places for voice. Alexa works well but doesn't have a clear technology advantage vs Google Assistant (admittedly, Siri is trash).

Contrast that to VR, which is in a much earlier stage of its technology and adoption cycle: Meta has a strong technology advantage, currently has the best overall platform and _if_ VR becomes the next big computing platform, Meta is in a strong position to capture a significant proportion of market share. It's a big if! but at least there's still a chance.

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

#49

Post by TigeriusKirk »

tinyhouse wrote: post #40
axg11 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alexa does seem like it has fantastic potential. To throw so many resources at it with so little result seems like an incredibly massive failure of management.

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

#50

Post by axg11 »

barbazoo wrote: post #46
axg11 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that organizations have multiple teams working on overlapping or even similar things baffles me. I can't imagine how that wouldn't be immensely dissatisfying for the individual.

Internally it was sold as: working together with other teams is too inefficient due to dependencies and differing priorities. It's faster to build it again independently than integrate with the existing service.
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