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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

ctvo wrote: post #37
socialismisok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. No matter if your team is amazing or not, 5% getting cut.

> Managers at Amazon are expected to put 5 to 10% on a PIP or manage them out every review cycle. A slight correction: An organizational unit larger than a 2 pizza team -- think 50 engineers, is expected to cut 5-10%. A team within that unit may lose 0 engineers, which is how high performing teams that meet all their goals stay intact.

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by francisofascii »

coredog64 wrote: post #53
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.

Alexa was Jeff’s pet project. Management failure, indeed.

Failure for whom? The shareholders, sure. But Alexa is pretty cool. It is the first voice interaction that I have used that actually works. So good for Jeff.

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

#104

Post by bluedevil2k »

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.

No excuse? Really? You don’t want to dial that back a notch and acknowledge the pending recession and the rash of over hiring in the tech market?

And perhaps you’ve forgotten, Bezos isn’t CEO any more and doesn’t have anything to do with day to day Amazon.

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

#105

Post by potatototoo99 »

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?

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

#106

Post by sangnoir »

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.

How about the sacred "fiduciary duty" to shareholders and the Wall street gods? Sacrificing thousands employees on the altar of cutting costs stays their wrath,and they will bless you with higher share prices.

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

#107

Post by bobthepanda »

vaidhy wrote: post #100
matai_kolila wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, what is good and bad can change over time with the business. Few judgement calls in software will last forever.

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

#110

Post by vkou »

fdye wrote: post #52
LanceH wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest bloat I've found in big companies is duplicate teams. You have one problem needing to be solved and a couple VP's running a program trying to make it happen under their domain. I generally see this play out as, one team trying to tackle the problem with a prototype and demonstration of tech. The other team just acquires as many people as possible and writes a bunch of documents. Then it gets run up the fl…

I used to see this occasionally and always see it as wasteful. However, there is another angle here. Imagine your a C-Suite or senior level manager and you have lots of resources at your disposal. Now you have identified a strategic widget you need to get to within some timeframe, say 2 years to lay into your grand strategic vision. Scenario A: Task a single team, staff them and let them do their thing. Cross your fi…

Scenario B very rarely happens.

What actually happens is Scenario C - it doesn't arise from a top-down planner mandating it, it arises from middle managers (or their subordinates) further down the food chain each trying to grow their own kingdom, who all get the same idea at roughly the same time, and each build their own solution to the same problem.

During times of plenty, or if the top-level planner is only absent-mindedly managing that part of their org, the firm will be willing to tolerate these competing implementations, but during lean times, they cut, cut and cut and consolidate down to one winning solution.

A lot of corporate politics and strategy makes a lot more sense when you start looking at the personal motivations of the participants in it.

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