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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

#111

Post by serioussecurity »

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.

Done much crying at your desk recently?

My boss at Amazon told me he was happy that his baby was born prematurely, because it meant he could be back at work in time for a launch.

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

#112

Post by typon »

smithrj wrote: post #15
andsoitis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> World's best employer This is the first ever that I hear this label attached to Amazon. Do they claim it? I've never seen them in the #1 spot on any top employer / best place to work ranking. I just googled again just to make sure, but perhaps I missed something.

They added it as one of the two new leadership principles last year I believe. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

When I interviewed there in 2018 the recruiter specifically asked me to memorize all the leadership principles because I will be tested on them during the on-site interview. I feel bad for the candidates who now have to memorize two more of them :(

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

#113

Post by throwaway23597 »

throwaway0asd wrote: post #96
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…

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 e…

This is why I hate frontend so much. Frontend sits right at the uncomfortable intersection between overly complicated tech that's tough to understand, and demanding PMs and UXs who need the feature to look or behave a certain way. I initially enjoyed frontend because of the hands-on nature of it, being able to make something and then play around with it in my browser. But after the 100th time wrestling around with CSS and JS to make some minuscule style change, I just am done with it.

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

#114

Post by kevan »

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.

The philosophy is "1 > 2 > 0". This means ideally you'd prefer a single thing but single things often bottleneck delivery from different orgs as they have differing requirements. In that case you'll accept overlap/duplication if it keeps those orgs decoupled and both delivering faster.

I ran into this a couple years ago with partially duplicating a service that existed under another SVP org. It didn't feel good at the time but in hindsight it was probably less effort and higher chance of success than trying to align priorities across SVP orgs and making their thing work for our slightly different use cases.

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

#115

Post by foobiekr »

axg11 wrote: post #48
ctvo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Voice as an interface sucks for almost everything where choices exist. As a purely serial communications method you are forced to wait for enumerated choices.

As a primary interface voice was very widely used in the 80s and 90s in the form of IVRs and the industry was immediately destroyed by web browsers as fast as was possible. Nothing makes people angrier than having to go through a phone menu system and that’s just an organized version of your more general voice interface.

“Alexa set a timer” defines the kinds of interactions that are sensible to do with voice and it is very, very narrow.

It was never, ever going to be big.

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

#116

Post by gamblor956 »

mrep wrote: post #80
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/...

Gross profit generally means profit on sales/services after COGS (costs directly related to producing/providing those revenues) but not including other costs like admin, etc.

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

#117

Post by triceratops »

potatototoo99 wrote: post #105
insanitybit wrote: post #102

And how much is Bezos worth? If your company is posting profits and executives are rolling in unprecedented piles of money there's no excuse for layoffs.

Bezos worth is based on the company stock, and the stock going up or down does not conjure "piles of money" to the company. Executive compensation (any employees', really) is a matter to the owners of the company. I don't own any Amazon stock, do you?

You don't have a pension plan, or 401k, or holdings in some index or mutual fund?

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

#118

Post by ericmcer »

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?

If the stack ranking works then yeah they would have no bloat, but teams are just trying to demonstrate their value to someone above them who is trying to assess their value while demonstrating their own. How valuable they actually are is pretty difficult to assess. There are probably many teams sucking up millions that have a net negative impact with their contributions but how do you measure that.

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

#119

Post by throwaway0asd »

throwaway23597 wrote: post #113
throwaway0asd wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

This is why I hate frontend so much. Frontend sits right at the uncomfortable intersection between overly complicated tech that's tough to understand, and demanding PMs and UXs who need the feature to look or behave a certain way. I initially enjoyed frontend because of the hands-on nature of it, being able to make something and then play around with it in my browser. But after the 100th time wrestling around with CS…

I super enjoy pushing innovative new front end technologies in personal projects where a 30 second fix might take as much as 5 minutes after test automation and all necessary due diligence, but at past jobs I just dig that hole they tell me to dig.

If you try to bring up that the days work could be solved in less than hour if only we didn’t make all the wrong decisions and fear the platform they will look at you like you’re retarded. I have heard this mentality expressed perfectly in the movie Edge of Tomorrow: Don’t tell anybody. Are we clear? Best case scenario you’re gonna end up in a psych ward. Worse case you’ll get dissected for study

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

#120

Post by galoisscobi »

throwaway0asd wrote: post #96
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…

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 e…

Do you have any recommendations for resources/tools on state management? My background is in robotics engineering and I’m working on picking up front end so I can build end to end web apps for myself. Currently learning react with a lot of head scratching.
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