Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 298 posts

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

#141

Post by dehrmann »

mabbo wrote: post #56
kevmo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a microphone/speaker in people's houses seems like a great way to collect a ton of data & guide their behavior.

No security researcher has ever found proof that they are "always on" and recording everything people say. If they were, it would be front-page news and Amazon would have government investigations. The devices listen for their wake word before ever transmitting data to the cloud. (This is also because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed for always-on would be un-economical even for Amazon).

I also don't think any insiders at any of these companies have leaked that they passively listen to what people say.

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

#142

Post by NineStarPoint »

mabbo wrote: post #42
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 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?

The most obvious path to me would be other businesses paying to integrate with Alexa. This would have required a level of platform buy in from consumers that never really materialized though, I think.

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

#144

Post by cmsj »

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…

CarPlay and Siri is a pretty compelling pairing though. Looking/touching is dangerous while driving, so that is minimised by also being able to talk to the robot.

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

#147

Post by z3rgl1ng »

zackmorris wrote: post #119

Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP). Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn? The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has…

My pet theory is this boils down to investor confidence. Executives get more comp in stock, cutting workers sends the right signal.

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

#148

Post by jstx1 »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #129
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?

To other companies. Some are still hiring. Remember how everyone was saying that filling positions was difficult? Well, it's getting much easier now. Keep in mind that not all of these layoffs are for tech workers (many of them are business functions) and that these examples are very visible but the numbers aren't that big in the context of the overall labor market.

Of course it could get much worse than this but we aren't there yet.

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

#150

Post by dehrmann »

dmix wrote: post #92

Did they also massively expand their staff during the pandemic like Twitter/FB did? Edit: looks like they grew headcount by 60% (+500,000 people) in 2020 and 23% (+310,000) in 2021. Today's announcement reduces headcount by 1% which is tiny compared to their growth. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

Amazon headcount numbers are different because warehouse workers are counted in that.
Post reply on HN