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Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#121

Post by compiler-guy »

symlinkk wrote: post #21
laweijfmvo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably we are in for a prolonged stagnation, but even after 11,000 layoffs last week, Meta’s employment level is on par with early 2022, hardly a massive reduction historically.

This sounds like the realtors that say “interest rates are still historically low”

They are. What that means is open to debate, and how you should act based on the current interest rates depends a lot. But simply as a historical matter, current interest rates are lower than the majority of history.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#123

Post by philipwhiuk »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #109
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see the path to profitability for Alexa. Like, sure, it's neat, but how does it make any money? Do they sell the devices at a profit? Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?

There was some belief, I think, that there was an app space for voice apps, similar to mobile. I don't think that's necessarily true, and despite Alexa focusing on making it relatively easy for developers to create their own VUI apps, there hasn't been (as far as I know), any real killer app developed in this space.

Apps on voice are so handicapped - it's really difficult to handle any one-time setup. I wanted to see if I could make a voice app that looked for emails on my third-party mail server but it's just not practical with the stateless function requirement.

The Echo devices are way way too dumb. The user's Cloud account needs app-accessible storage.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#125

Post by supergeek133 »

sfpotter wrote: post #94
andrew_ wrote: post #33

Can't help but be reminded of this scene from "The Fifth Element" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg

"One million... fine, sir... sorry to have disturbed you." looks like kicked puppy My personal favorite Gary Oldman role.

Trivia.. he hated it and only did it as a favor to Luc Besson.

Last I knew he's never even watched the movie.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#126

Post by CydeWeys »

oceanplexian wrote: post #78
mjr00 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.

Amazon has something like 100k corporate employees, and their URA targets force managers to PIP approximately 6% of the corporate employees every year, so going from 6% to 10% isn’t exactly a massive change.

This isn't going from 6 to 10% though, this is a one-time reduction of 10% on top of the normal 6%.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#128

Post by blobbers »

Amazon lists employees at 1.6M employees worldwide. (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...)

Even if they have 1% churn each month, that's about 16,000 turnover a month. Laying off 10,000 is not news until we find out where the cuts are happening.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#129

Post by stackbutterflow »

jstx1 wrote: post #3

10 000 out of 1 500 000

Maybe the world is bigger than my brain can imagine but where are all these people going to go? If all big tech companies are having lay-offs and hiring freezes, who's going to absorb that amount of workers?

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#130

Post by kypro »

softwaredoug wrote: post #114
green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

I never got the value of voice devices. In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons. Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Ap…

Combine this with the privacy concerns and that's why I've never brought one personally. I know a lot of people who have them but rarely ever use them.

The only good use case I've seen is if you're having a conversation / debate with someone you can use them as a real-time fact checker.

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