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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

#81

Post by andsoitis »

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…

> Amazon thought that voice would be the next big platform

It turns out that there are many interaction models where Voice is clearly inferior. Visual discovery (contrast with music) such as for videos, as well as navigation in a UI, are poorly done via voice.

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

#82

Post by bitL »

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.

You spawn multiple teams working on very similar projects without them knowing about each other, let them grow for a while, then choose the most promising one (or with the highest traction) as your default solution and kill off the rest. Pretty normal exploration strategy.

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

#83

Post by denimnerd42 »

supergeek133 wrote: post #4
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…

Unfortunately this is how it works at a lot of companies. Just a mess. I was working at Best Buy when the stock price was $8/share... we had "Tornado Thursdays" where every Thursday for months you'd hear of a small amount of people getting notice they were laid off. I suspect they did this to avoid labor rules of notification/SEC? Prior to that, we went through a LARGE layoff where they gathered everyone in a room, s…

Usually to avoid the WARN act reporting. there's a few things that can trigger it.

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

#84

Post by bitL »

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

It was way before Jobs, IBM was using it ages ago.

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

#85

Post by onion2k »

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.

Amazon has about 75,000 engineers. That's the equivalent of a large town. It's completely reasonable that many people would end up duplicating the work of other teams simply because they never communicate with them.

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

#86

Post by kenjackson »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #73
_rs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've done the stack ranking many years in multiple companies.

I rarely have seen (1) come into play. I'm sure it happens, but there is a lot of scrutiny of the stack rank, enough where I think it would be hard to pull off. I think most friend managers would tell their friend months ahead of time -- you really need to do XYZ or things are going to be tight at review time.

(2) is very true though. Reputation and perception is super important. Although I think companies now do take a harder look at delivered impact either via KPIs or OKRs.

In my experience, most engineers are pretty good. And I've struggled to find people to put in the bottom of the stack rank, because I didn't feel that their compensation would reflect the impact they had. IMO, after having to do layoffs, it is the hardest part of the job. And it sucks because there is very little way out of it for the manager. Helping person X do better, just means that now person Y is at the bottom of the stack.

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

#87

Post by tbrownaw »

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…

> 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.

I thought those news articles were about warehouse workers, not IT workers.

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

#88

Post by kenjackson »

bitL wrote: post #84
shmatt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was way before Jobs, IBM was using it ages ago.

Isn't this part of the premise of the book Hackers? Haven't read it in like 25 years, but that's what I vaguely remember.

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

#89

Post by matai_kolila »

runlevel1 wrote: post #76
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…

> 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…

So it's "bad micro-service architecture imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination", then.

...which is a fairly obvious observation. "Bad imposes a heavy penalty on team co-ordination" is generalizable.

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