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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

#61

Post by lightbendover »

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?

Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn’t mean they are working on impactful projects. Directors and especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on what their orgs pursue and are in the dark on some areas of their org, which further provides frontline and middle managers a lot of authority and it’s up to them to report up stacking within their remit and defend the positioning. So while stack ranking decisions are made, it’s not always “fair” and varies greatly across orgs. All managers regardless of level are fallible and do not always make perfect decisions on what to pursue so that adds another layer to effectiveness of employees even if they are doing the best they can at what they have been given. Cuts are at the org level based on value to the business.

Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high performer in the context of a team or org may be a low performer if taking value to the overall business into account. Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).

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

#62

Post by Traubenfuchs »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #58
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'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.

If only 0.1% of Amazon employees are very unhappy and vent their horror stories online, you will hear hundreds of bad stories. If 99.9 are "just fine" with it, you won't hear a single story...

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

#63

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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.

In environments where missing deadlines can have huge cascading effects it isn't unheard of to do redundant work so that you have a better shot of meeting your deadline and in a good case you have multiple successful options to pick from. When your deadlines are potentially expensive enough (think capital investment that need to be bought in time to be built out before old ones become uneconomical to operate) this approach can be well worth it.

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

#64

Post by rapsey »

bushbaba wrote: post #42
tinyhouse wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Retail has no profits. AWS is the profit center.

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

#65

Post by jrd259 »

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?

In eight years at Amazon (in the supply chain org as SDE and SDM) I have not encountered anything close to "ruthless". It is true that there is rough stack ranking, but only in large organizations where it is statistically meaningful.

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

#66

Post by lightbendover »

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.

Not all teams are created equal. Having multiple teams with an extremely similar charter promotes competition, harder work, and deeper search for synergies elsewhere. A single team with a guarded remit is not going to try as hard and they may outright fail on their mission even if they do have internal competition.

It makes a lot of sense if you can afford it.

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

#67

Post by _rs »

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…

How is it possible to game a system like that? I thought by design it pushes more people out than even necessarily deserve it

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

#68

Post by jrd259 »

serioussecurity wrote: post #47
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…

This is absurd. As an Amazonian for eight years I can say it would be absurd to do this. First, hiring someone is a lot of work. Second, we don't get much value from people the first six months anyway. We don't hire people to do boilerplate. We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.

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

#69

Post by lightbendover »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #58
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'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.

There are absolutely quotas for every org over a certain size. If you’re not a manager and not on the chopping block, it would be hard to notice.

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

#70

Post by vaidhy »

jsharf wrote: post #29
vaidhy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I did not say it is bad. I just wanted to point out that N^2 communications are a big hit (of course we know them for long time) and people under-estimate the co-ordination effort and the fact that already running systems impose constraints that are not true for green-field efforts.

I think I am regurgitating mythical man-month here and will shut up.

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