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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

#151

Post by leetcrew »

yamtaddle wrote: post #95
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Right, the missing step to make these assistants actually-useful beyond very simple tasks like "play [album name]" or "set a timer for 5 minutes"—which are basically just a voice-driven command line—has almost nothing to do with voice recognition per se and is more-or-less identical to the problem of "invent AGI". It'll be useful when you can have it create, say, a menu and shopping list for your week, interact conve…

even a "voice-driven command line" would still be pretty useful if it actually worked reliably. Google's implementation misinterprets my parents' address about 50% of the time, choosing some town I've never visited in another state as the most likely alternative. I navigate to that address at least once a month, and I even have it as a saved place in maps.

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

#152

Post by zwkrt »

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?

Amazon got that reputation a decade ago when they were vigorously growing in user base and revenue. They couldn't hire fast enough if they even wanted to without wrecking the organization, so there was a ton of teams/people that felt immense pressure.

These days things have leveled out a little bit and I think of Amazon as a new IBM in the making. More corporate, more cruft, more politicking. This is especially true on the retail side, as Amazon has become so complicated and specialized that you'll have specific tech teams for handling edge cases for particular types of products. I think I recall there basically being a 'shoes' team that would implement features just for selling shoes on the site, etc.

I will say though that when I was in AWS a few years ago, that I was downright shocked at how lean some of the teams were. IIRC there were less than 100 developers that maintain all of dynamodb for instance.

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

#153

Post by whimsicalism »

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're well known for having one of the lowest hiring bars of the major tech corporations, certainly out of the traditional "FAANG" they are by far the easiest to get hired at.

N > F = G > Apple > Amazon in terms of hiring difficulty, from my impression.

Until recently, their pay was also not as competitive and they had massive turnover rates.

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

#155

Post by VBprogrammer »

vaidhy wrote: post #70
jsharf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's actually normal for teams to have duplicate functionality. The requirements are usually never actually identical and when you try to merge them it results in services with complicated configuration that have N^2 edge cases which leads to more bugs or more complicated code. I suspect what you're describing is somewhat unavoidable, and not even a bad thing. That being said, Google for comparison does have…

I did not say it is bad. I just wanted to point out that N^2 communications are a big hit (of course we know them for long time) and people under-estimate the co-ordination effort and the fact that already running systems impose constraints that are not true for green-field efforts. I think I am regurgitating mythical man-month here and will shut up.

> the fact that already running systems impose constraints that are not true for green-field efforts

Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I often find that doing a new greenfield project sounds easier but by the time you deal with all of the non-functional stuff (connectivity, resilience, logging, build tools, documentation etc) you might have been quicker holding your nose and bodging it in somewhere vaguely appropriate in an existing system.

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

#156

Post by vaidhy »

matai_kolila wrote: post #136
vaidhy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it were so obvious, I am wondering why you need to worry about doing it wrong. You talk about trade-offs as if they are fixed in time. That is not the case at all in anything but toy systems. Maybe you need to find someone who can design a quality micro-service?

You have no idea what I do and what my competencies are, yet, you are assuming you know a lot more about system design than I do and I am missing something simple.

Here is another take from Bryan Cantrill [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE&t=1413s]. Very likely, he does not know anything about services either, I guess.

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

#157

Post by brewdad »

masterof0 wrote: post #97
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?

I forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind, from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away. I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on news stories.

What makes you think that isn't step two? Step one is finding the people and their stories then following up with the most promising/compelling ones.

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

#158

Post by whimsicalism »

tbrownaw wrote: post #87
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…

> Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them. I thought those news articles were about warehouse workers, not IT workers.

It's also true of their engineering - they have a terrible reputation which caused them to raise salaries a ton in the last 2 years just to try to get comparable engineers.

They easily pay 30% more for the same engineer just because of their culture/reputation.

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

#159

Post by BeetleB »

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.

> We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.

I keep hearing this, but as a customer, I don't see it.

Amazon retail experience is poor.

The layout of the site sucks (so many clicks just to see all the reviews).

They used to allow comments to reviews, which often were very useful (e.g. top review complaining about something not working, and the comments explain how to fix it). But reviewers weren't notified of the comments so they couldn't engage. And to top it all of, they recently removed all the comments.

The reviews have been gamed, not very useful.

They still let people make product pages with very different products as "formats", and that skews the reviews the wrong way.

Lots of counterfeit product issues. Perhaps more common: Problems with comingling items. I know it doesn't happen often, but being burned once is bad enough. I recently bought a toy for my daughter's birthday. The box had creases. Upon opening it was clear this was a used item. Some of the items were out of their (sealed) packaging. Perhaps my mistake for not examining it before, but whenever I buy from Walmart or Target, I don't even have to think this will be a problem. Fixing it up with a great return policy is not a solution. Oh, and I couldn't return it. They recently made it hard to contact a human, and the automated return system on their web site wouldn't let me return if I had used it. I had to open it as we couldn't change her birth date.

The search sucks. Way too many results that have nothing to do with what I searched. eBay, of all sites, is way better in this regard.

I've also been an Amazon seller (FBA). The seller portal was crap.

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

#160

Post by Macha »

Shish2k wrote: post #22
iLoveOncall wrote: post #2

This layoff is horribly mismanaged, the whole company has been living in fear for the past 3 days since the first new articles have popped up. Basically there has been no official communication about teams affected, amount of people affected, or time where it would be shared, and instead each team is randomly informed by their director. This means you can never know if you are safe or not, if the layoff wave has pass…

> Everyone would have preferred a clear "you're in / you're out" email at a fixed time like it's been done at Facebook Ha, at Facebook people have been complaining that they only learned at the last-minute and only thanks to leaks, saying they would have preferred a longer-term heads-up so that they could start preparing and avoid making long-term commitments (eg that guy who was laid off one day after moving his who…

It's not a dichotomy between "no layoffs, no layoffs, please leave the building and never come back" and "There maybe will be layoffs but we can't tell you if you're in them or not" - in both cases the problem is the lack of knowledge.

The company could also just give workers notice. Works fine here in Europe.

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