51–60 of 292 posts
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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
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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 fl…
Scenario A: Task a single team, staff them and let them do their thing. Cross your finger and hope they get it done.
Scenario B: Look across offices, org groups, whatever, and task 2-3 (sometimes more) teams with your task. Let them start work on it and get regular demos and updates. Eventually, pick a winner.
B looks very wasteful from the outside, until you realize that many software projects fail (like 50%). So more attempts give you a higher chance of success. Downside: Internal politics, waste, attrition from engineers throwing away code/busy work.
A is great if you can do it, but you're putting all your eggs in one basket.
A lot of times this is just bad org/bureaucracy though, but it can be done to great effect.
Disclaimer: Worked for a CEO with a large outsourced engineering base and several offices. Would see multiple attempts at different offices all the time. Eventually, grudgingly acknowledged there was a method to that madness. Trump also is famous for this (although his seemed more madness).
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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.
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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,…
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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 b…
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 people I know that worked at Meta all started interview prepping after those announcements. It should not have come as a surprise.
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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.
Or work consistently.
"Alexa play music".. Nothing... Do it a few times and it finally does play music? I could have gotten up and done it myself easier/faster at times.
the links and offering is solid. I have spotify connected to my amazon account and this is NICE..but as i said, the inconsistency is frustrating.
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?
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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.
I wonder if, within my lifetime, it will be possible to tell a digital assistant to "order all the ingredients I need to bake the cinnamon buns as detailed in the cinnamon bun baking video I watched last month with the Chinese lady that doesn't have an accent"?
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've heard about stack ranking at Amazon, but I've not seen it. Maybe it's because I work for AWS, and I'm not an SDE. But I've worked in three separate organizations within AWS, each of which have different cultures. And I have never seen any of the horror stories commonly attributed to Amazon corporate in my time at Amazon.