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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

#91

Post by dougmwne »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #59
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think Siri and Alexa are simply at the end of their roads. To move Siri and Alexa ahead, we'd need a general AI so powerful, it would change the whole world. 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"…

Based on the capability of state of the art language models, we may get that soon. The technology largely exists, but the compute is still too expensive. Rumor has it that GTP-4 will be able to pass for human-like.

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

#92

Post by Zaheer »

Alexa is to Amazon what Metaverse is to Meta.

Both are bets to create a new platform as they feel threatened by Apple & Google's dominance on mobile.

Meta should take note. Alexa is widely adopted (# of devices) but has little engagement and still hasn't broken outside of the most primitive use-cases (play music, remind me, etc)

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

#93

Post by ronnier »

Zaheer wrote: post #92

Alexa is to Amazon what Metaverse is to Meta. Both are bets to create a new platform as they feel threatened by Apple & Google's dominance on mobile. Meta should take note. Alexa is widely adopted (# of devices) but has little engagement and still hasn't broken outside of the most primitive use-cases (play music, remind me, etc)

They'd probably get a lot more use if they opened up the API so we can send commands locally to say, play an mp3.

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

#94

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

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…

I really wish more people understood this. I'm working for a company that's in the middle of a move to the cloud and it feels like no one is acknowledging the sheer level of complexity being added.

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

#95

Post by yamtaddle »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #59
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think Siri and Alexa are simply at the end of their roads. To move Siri and Alexa ahead, we'd need a general AI so powerful, it would change the whole world. 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"…

Right, the missing step to make these assistants actually-useful beyond very simple tasks like "play [album name]" or "set a timer for 5 minutes"—which are basically just a voice-driven command line—has almost nothing to do with voice recognition per se and is more-or-less identical to the problem of "invent AGI".

It'll be useful when you can have it create, say, a menu and shopping list for your week, interact conversationally to tweak it including understanding that something like "I'm allergic to that ingredient" means never ever try to include it again while other statements of preference may be much softer, learn your preferences so those conversations get shorter every week, and order the ingredients for you, too. It barely matters if that happens over keyboard input or voice, because the hard parts of that problem have nothing to do with how the input is done.

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

#96

Post by throwaway0asd »

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…

This sounds like all but two of my software jobs. The greatest challenge of being an individual contributor is being beholden to the constraints of the environment. If they tell you to dig a hole then that’s what you do. If they tell you to waste all day digging into some unnecessary framework to make a single CSS change that should take 30 seconds plus a few minutes for deployment then that's what you do.

In front end development people NEED the world's largest application frameworks (sometimes plural) because they cannot figure out state management. State management is stupid simple and a solved problem, but whatever. It will still, at the job, take you all day (maybe a week) to make that 30 second change.

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

#97

Post by masterof0 »

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 forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind, from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away. I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on news stories.

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

#99

Post by iLoveOncall »

kenjackson wrote: post #86
iLoveOncall wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 percep…

> 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.

In Amazon you will be PIPed (or rather put in focus, which is a first step that may lead to PIP) if you are marked as "Least effective" which is the bottom 15%.

Your manager has to demonstrate why you are "Least Effective", and they have to demonstrate why you are "Top tier". However, they don't really have to justify themselves to put you in the middle of the pack, where you will be safe from PIP.

So, for sure, you may not be ranked in the top of the team if you're buddy with your boss, which means you won't get a salary increase for example, but at least you won't be PIPed, which in the end is what I assume most people care the most about.

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

#100

Post by vaidhy »

matai_kolila wrote: post #89
runlevel1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is no bad vs good micro-service architecture. It is just that micro-service architecture imposes a different kind of penalty on co-ordination and debugging. Instead of intra-component dependency, it moves it to inter-service dependency. Each service might look simple, but the complexity is moved to service communications. It is not that obvious, imho.
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