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Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

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Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#151

Post by frozenport »

naijaboiler wrote: post #144
Myrmornis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks). Sure,…

imagine comparing management at a small research lab to a multi-national corporation. Such unfounded hubris.

Imagine actually wanting to work at Amazon

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#152

Post by nzealand »

danpalmer wrote: post #105
alberth wrote: post #96

For context: Total # Employee: 1,556,000 Planned # Layoff: 14,000 (or 0.9%) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

This isn't the whole story though. While Amazon might have 1.5m employees, many of those are going to be in the fulfilment and distribution process, which is a very different place to being in engineering/product/finance/business/marketing working in an office. I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more…

> This reduction marks a 13% drop in Amazon’s global management workforce, shrinking the number of managers from 105,770 to 91,936.

(second sentence in btw)

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#153

Post by subpixel »

Where I happen to work management is like the clergy in a regime that grants them much power, but no control.

They may care about each member of their 'congregation' and provide 'support' where they can, but ultimately they know their own head depends on staying true to doctrine and interpreting edicts.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#154

Post by newAccount2025 »

beambot wrote: post #78
bb88 wrote: post #24

I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics. I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because tha…

> I'm saying get rid of bad management. How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?

I think it’s subjective like any role, but mostly you are trying to evaluate what their team is delivering, are they making effective strategic plans, how’s their 360 degree feedback and survey scores of worker satisfaction, are they making successful hires and retaining their people, are they growing the next generation of leaders, and so on?

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#155

Post by sgarland »

naijaboiler wrote: post #144
Myrmornis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks). Sure,…

imagine comparing management at a small research lab to a multi-national corporation. Such unfounded hubris.

Imagine refuting the idea that people are incapable of self-management.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#156

Post by rsynnott »

timc3 wrote: post #114
lysace wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We mostly didn't have RCA jacks in Europe when I grew up. But nevermind; this is not the same. Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses: Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.

Then you must have grow up at a particular time which didnt have them. There was a time period where it would be unusual to have a TV or VCR without them.

European TVs generally used SCART cables (a sort of 1970s analog HDMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART), from the 1980s until HDMI took over. It was, indeed, fairly common for a TV or VCR or games console to have _only_ SCART.

Odd standard; it had both composite and RGB lines, but also control lines, so, like HDMI-CEC, you could set it up so that your VCR couldn’t quite control your TV. It also supported daisy-chaining, a bit like SCSI, so you could connect your TV to your VCR and your VCR to your DVD player.

Even before SCART, European TV equipment tended to use DIN (you may remember this as the IBM AT keyboard connector) rather than RCA.

Oddly, there was a brief period where it was somewhat common for early HD TVs to have component RCA connectors; while SCART did support HD component, people apparently did not trust it.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#157

Post by razeh »

johnfn wrote: post #121
segmondy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the break down for developers.

A manager can put you on PIP, have you fired, and make your life miserable for months to years. What can an engineer do? Write some bad code that is a little annoying to refactor?

In finance a bad engineer can bankrupt the firm.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#158

Post by CharlieDigital »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #100
mirekrusin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask tech leads who consistently deliver value who's good one and who's not – you'll get pretty accurate picture.

If there's a clique or patronage, simply asking may not get you the real picture.

It's amazing how many smart people here think this is just a trivial problem that they can solve for big tech if big tech would only listen.

This is a fundamental human organization problem that many countless organizations of people have failed to perform optimally since people have started organizing into groups.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#159

Post by hn_acc1 »

netdur wrote: post #89
wkat4242 wrote: post #26

Haha a friend was just recommending I apply for a job there. I told her hell no. It's one of the worst in big tech. Probably second worst after twitter. The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it. I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.

I never heard it was bad at twitter! why is that?

Seriously? After Elon bought it, you haven't heard of one bad thing about working there?

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#160

Post by sudosysgen »

razeh wrote: post #157
johnfn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A manager can put you on PIP, have you fired, and make your life miserable for months to years. What can an engineer do? Write some bad code that is a little annoying to refactor?

In finance a bad engineer can bankrupt the firm.

If a bad engineer bankrupts the firm, it's much more the fault of many others.
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