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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

#71

Post by draw_down »

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#72

Post by francisofascii »

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.

> don't even know how to monetize

Amazon music subscriptions are $15.99/month. Doesn't that count? Sure, you can buy that without an Alexa, but that is the whole reason people do.

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

#73

Post by iLoveOncall »

_rs wrote: post #67
blue039 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's no surefire way to game the system, and I would even say there is no way to game the system at all, but you just need to understand two things:

1. Your manager is the one putting you in PIP (firing plan). If you're friends with your manager, he won't put your name, even if your performance is below the bar.

2. This is applicable in every single avenue of life, but your reputation is everything. Work hard for the first few months after joining a team and impress your leadership and your colleagues on your first few tickets, then you can dial it down and still be 100% safe and be regarded as a top tier engineer. You will be "the guy that ramped us fast and executed well" for the rest of your time in that team. If you have setbacks, you won't even need to justify yourself, they will just know that "hey if this top guy is struggling it just means it's very hard".

On the contrary, I have witnessed people being fired or looked down upon just for having a bad reputation, even when they were doing just fine or had legitimate roadblocks on some tasks. One of my good friends got fired because he was the party guy of our team, so nobody was ever taking him really seriously.

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

#74

Post by shmatt »

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.

This approach was made popular by Steve Jobs at Apple. He would have multiple teams competing to who's solution would survive, while the other teams products were thrown away

This goes all the way back to his early days (I think I remember a scene about this in The Pirates of Silicon Valley), but also reportedly multiple teams were building very different original iPhones

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

#75

Post by rurp »

jrd259 wrote: post #68
serioussecurity wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.

:eyeroll:

This reads like PR fluff and flies against the experiences shared by a lot of employees, current and former. Amazon is a huge company with a lot of variation between teams so I'm sure it's not a meat grinder for everyone, but they don't have this reputation for no reason.

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

#76

Post by runlevel1 »

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…

> micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination

This is, by far, the hardest scaling problem in SaaS: How do we divide responsibilities amongst our (code|services|teams) efficiently?

You can only grow each so much before they become unwieldy to manage.

Divide scope too much and communication becomes complex.

Divide along the wrong abstraction and you get duplication, overlap, and confusion about what's responsible for what.

And as time passes, decisions of the past constrain and complicate your options to redesign/rearchitect/reorg today.

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

#77

Post by no_wizard »

shmatt wrote: post #74
barbazoo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This approach was made popular by Steve Jobs at Apple. He would have multiple teams competing to who's solution would survive, while the other teams products were thrown away This goes all the way back to his early days (I think I remember a scene about this in The Pirates of Silicon Valley), but also reportedly multiple teams were building very different original iPhones

I think this approach makes sense for hardware but not pure software.

I think its easier to adjust pure software iteratively than hardware. So with hardware, it makes sense to have different teams working on similar but different things because variations of ideas need to be fleshed (and thoughts that spawn off those ideas) and it can be hard for one team to do this iteratively.

If you're right and this is where it came from, I think largely pure software teams doing this are wasting resources, but if its hardware I don't agree its wasteful

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

#78

Post by no_wizard »

Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do.

Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly.

Seemed like they were always hiring, and if I needed to eat, it would allow me to keep my standard of living for a 12-18 months while I figure things out. Best case: I somehow end up liking working there and stay for 4 years, worst case: I can keep my standard of living while the recession eases and move on to something else.

I will say, I got alot of recruiters from the Alexa division and I'm glad I didn't take them up now. AWS looks unaffected by this though.

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

#79

Post by josefresco »

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?

Similarly could you tell your new employer "Hey don't officially hire me for another 3 more weeks - I'll still work for you now but Amazon will pay my salary - deal?"

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

#80

Post by mrep »

uberman wrote: post #3

Note: Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a 29.28% increase from 2020. So the proposed cuts represent less than 1% of their profit (not net) from last year.

Where are you getting your numbers? They had 469 billion dollars in revenue and 38 billion dollars of income before taxes in 2021 [0].

[0]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/...

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