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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

#131

Post by twelve40 »

hintymad wrote: post #121

AWS is barely touched. AWS AI even less so. A repeated lesson for me: always join a growing business for professional development, for career satisfaction, for financial reward, and for job security.

Alexa was the absolute hotness when it was first introduced. There were so many claims how it's going to take over the entire world that I started to question my own sanity. Imagine if you joined that growing business at the time? Same here, what is AWS AI and how can you tell that apart from a hyped-up diversion? Clearly, anything "AI" is extremely overhyped currently, but how can you tell which one is real.

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

#132

Post by recursive_ »

hintymad wrote: post #121

AWS is barely touched. AWS AI even less so. A repeated lesson for me: always join a growing business for professional development, for career satisfaction, for financial reward, and for job security.

Amazon has been cutting a handful of their growing businesses aswell. Take for example Amazon Care. That team tripled in size YoY and was disbanded right before these layoffs. A growing business also needs a clear path to profitability.

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

#133

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

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"…

If there was also a screen, so many more things could be done. For example it could show that list of ingredients and their prices, for your approval. Then let’s say you could interact with that screen by voice (your fingers are sticky because you’re cooking now) or touch.

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

#134

Post by throckmortra »

bgro wrote: post #123
no_wizard wrote: post #78

Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do. Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly. Seem…

Could you help explain why the general consensus seems to consider Amazon as a just given backup and easy interview path (but the hard part is the actual job crunch apparently)? They still do leetcode screening don’t they? IMO they’ve been harder than the others because the process is so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test. There’s no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they changed that re…

They clearly layout their interview process and even have a video series on YouTube explaining how to pass it. It is not difficult but time-consuming to learn their interview "language"

Leetcode screens are a matter of grinding for a couple of weeks

Source: received an offer from them in March

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

#135

Post by chairhairair »

bgro wrote: post #123
no_wizard wrote: post #78

Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do. Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly. Seem…

Could you help explain why the general consensus seems to consider Amazon as a just given backup and easy interview path (but the hard part is the actual job crunch apparently)? They still do leetcode screening don’t they? IMO they’ve been harder than the others because the process is so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test. There’s no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they changed that re…

“You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.”

No? You can actually use code to solve problems. Don’t buy into the defeatism surrounding leetcode interviews.

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

#136

Post by matai_kolila »

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.

There absolutely are bad microservice architectures, that's a weird claim to make. Good microservice architectures minimize or entirely eliminate the friction around the coordination and debugging. I'm working on splitting out a monorepo as we speak and I'm determining tradeoffs we'll need to make. If I do this wrong, there will be a lot of pain around navigating between the services, but there are choices I can make now that minimize (or eliminate in some cases) that pain.

I recommend you find a way to spend time with someone who knows how to design a quality microservices architecture. It will completely change your opinion about how microservices interact and the supposed "pain" therein.

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

#137

Post by hn_acc_2 »

bgro wrote: post #123
no_wizard wrote: post #78

Just wanted to say: I feel for anyone impacted by this I truly hope that they're able to land on their feet and Amazon does right by them and gives a healthy severance. Least they could do. Another quirk of this story in terms of how this makes me feel is that this makes me sad in a strange way: Amazon was my "fallback" job if my current job ever bit the dust and I couldn't find anything else relatively quickly. Seem…

Could you help explain why the general consensus seems to consider Amazon as a just given backup and easy interview path (but the hard part is the actual job crunch apparently)? They still do leetcode screening don’t they? IMO they’ve been harder than the others because the process is so automated that you either pass or fail on the code test. There’s no tech interviewer to give you a hint unless they changed that re…

Actually, among the MAGMA companies I've found the _least_ bias for leetcode-memorization at Amazon.

My interview with Meta was exactly as you described (a CS riddle taken from a textbook, to be solved without running the code or receiving hints). But in my interview with Amazon, each coding interview also included a couple leadership questions. If you want you can look up the exact questions that they'll give you to test what they call their "Leadership Principles"

Also the Amazon coding questions were not taken directly from Leetcode, and were easily reasoned out without prior knowledge of a special algorithm.

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

#138

Post by bogomipz »

malfist wrote: post #8

The "worlds best employer" is horribly mismanaging this layoff. It's all hush hush, and nobody is admitting anything until suddenly you have a meeting at the end of the day with a bigwig and HR. The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance. If you're unable to find another job, you get a week of severance per 6 months of employmen…

>"The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance."

Could you or someone say how this works or is enforced? Once you are no longer working for Amazon how do they know you have found external employment elsewhere? Is this a legal gray area?

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

#139

Post by cmeacham98 »

twelve40 wrote: post #131
hintymad wrote: post #121

AWS is barely touched. AWS AI even less so. A repeated lesson for me: always join a growing business for professional development, for career satisfaction, for financial reward, and for job security.

Alexa was the absolute hotness when it was first introduced. There were so many claims how it's going to take over the entire world that I started to question my own sanity. Imagine if you joined that growing business at the time? Same here, what is AWS AI and how can you tell that apart from a hyped-up diversion? Clearly, anything "AI" is extremely overhyped currently, but how can you tell which one is real.

The real trick to job safety is to join a core (but profitable) organization.

I doubt many (if any) cuts are being made in EC2/EBS/S3/etc.

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

#140

Post by giaour »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #128
bitL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Jobs gets credit for everything in computing the way Churchill gets credit for all the good quotes.

I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Hey, Churchill didn’t say that; that was me.”
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