Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by ghaff » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

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…

The voice recognition (given decent hardware and a fairly vanilla accent) is quite good. The problem is being able to integrate, present options, learn preferences, etc. even to the degree of that subpar assistant who you only keep paying because they're the daughter of your mother's best friend.

You want to be able to give a few parameters for a trip you're taking and get some choices back. But, as you say, that's far more about "intelligence" than the type of input.

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

#182

Post by matai_kolila » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

vaidhy wrote: post #156

matai_kolila wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somethin…

Can you show me where I said "building microservices is obvious"? Or if you don't believe I said that, can you describe what you think it is I'm suggesting here? Because my intent was to say, "It is obvious that microservices can be designed well and designed poorly." In fact, if you'll observe, I removed the word "microservices" from my final statement, to demonstrate that such a statement is trivially true for any given thing.

Nowhere did I say, "It is obvious how to design a good microservice." but it seems like you're arguing against that statement, not the one I made.

And for what it's worth, I don't give a hoot who you are, who Bryan Cantrill is, or what your supposed competencies are; make your argument, don't rely on your pedigree to speak for you. That should be obvious.

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

#183

Post by akira2501 » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

qqtt wrote: post #149

ronnier wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd probably get a lot more use if they opened up the API so we can send commands locally to say, play an mp3.

They have a Alexa skill development kit where you can make your own commands but yeah, as far as I know it’s all cloud based: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/ge...

The skill flow builder is a nice desktop GUI program that can help you develop interactive skills without having to engage with raw API.

https://developer.amazon.com/es-ES/blogs/alexa/alexa-skills-...

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

#184

Post by karmasimida » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

laidoffamazon wrote: post #166

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

For entry-level ... yes?

Amazon isn't selective in hiring L4s, it hires some people who simply can't code and PIP them in next 6 months.

It is just how Amazon chooses to operate.

Good ones are still there though, just varies very big from team to team, org to org.

Essentially, Amazon engineer means nothing significant, the bar isn't consistent across its body

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

#185

Post by i_love_music » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

laidoffamazon wrote: post #168

whimsicalism wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I really hope you're doing ok and seek appropriate mental health support. Don't fret over the ranking of companies - we're all dead and forgotten in a few generations anyways. This is true for every Google and Netflix engineer in existence.

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

#186

Post by akira2501 » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

insanitybit wrote: post #102

And how much is Bezos worth? If your company is posting profits and executives are rolling in unprecedented piles of money there's no excuse for layoffs.

Are you suggesting Bezos didn't earn that money yet? That he still owes some duty or service in exchange for the money he's already received? At what point can he say he's actually "earned" that money and can spend it in whatever way he pleases?

Should we apply the same logic to your life? My life? Everyone?

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

#187

Post by aserafini » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

zwkrt wrote: post #152

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…

This is totally true, I worked at Amazon when it first launched Kindle. There were multiple software engineers 100% dedicated to ‘making the Kindle product page work’ at this time.

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

#188

Post by codyb » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

Arrath wrote: post #178

laidoffamazon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

That is a fairly uncharitable reading of that post, which mentioned nothing of the (perceived) abilities or skills of the engineers. Your account name leads me to believe you've been impacted by this, and I feel for you. I am sorry. I hope you're able to find a new gig relatively stress free and find yourself in a better place.

Yea I suspect many of us know people who're terrible at LEET code problems who're great engineers. And vice versa.

I hope Parent gets the help they need. I am thankful I cannot imagine a world where... Google's "elite" engineers impacted my world in such a drastic manner.

Good luck to you friend.

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

#189

Post by elforce002 » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

The market ATM is really odd. On one side, you see these news pouring and giving us devs a little ansiety and on the other side, there are companies still trying to hire like crazy. I've received 3 emails from recruiters just today. It seems small-medium tier companies are looking to capitalize over this "downturn" by offering full WFH positions and other perks since they can't compete on salaries.

This is purely anecdotal but I shared this to give other devs that may feel like "this is the end", some hope for the future. The reality is that software development is almost ubiquitous; almost every industry is being touched by it.

We have to keep improving and wait for the whiplash when the time comes (prob. 2023Q2 at best or 2024Q2 if things get worse).

Check small-medium tier companies with WFH and try to move to a low-cost city. You'll get the best of both worlds, hehe.

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

#190

Post by Chamix » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

whoknew1122 wrote: post #58

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've heard about stack ranking at Amazon, but I've not seen it. Maybe it's because I work for AWS, and I'm not an SDE. But I've worked in three separate organizations within AWS, each of which have different cultures. And I have never seen any of the horror stories commonly attributed to Amazon corporate in my time at Amazon.

Oh my friend, there is a tool called Lift used in OLR/Talent Review by every single 50+ group at Amazon that quite literally will show your face up on a screen for everyone at the OLR meeting to discuss and rank vs your peers. If they don't have the Least Effective quota hit they will go through each face near the bottom to figure out who needs to be added. The most liberal definition possible of not stack ranking.

The simple reason why most don't notice it is people really intuitively overestimate how big 6% feels, especially when a good chunk of the people who leave and satisfy the unregretted attrition quota look just like someone leaving to another company but who were in focus or pivot when they left.

To refresh the exact rules for those not in the know:

  - Amazon requires 6% of employees who leave the company every year to be unregretted attrition aka URA

  - To be marked as URA an employee must be in Focus aka Devlist aka Devplan when they leave

  - Talent Review aka OLR must occur at least every 6 months for each leader with >=50 employees under him

    - Every employee is ranked from Least Effective - High Value 1-3 - Top Tier with quotas being 5:35:25:15:20 % respectively 

    - The 5% rated LE must be entered into Focus

    - This effectively results in 10% of employees in Focus per year 

  - Around half fail improvement plans in Focus and are presented with Pivot, which 90% results in firing. This is the oft discussed "Pip"

  - Rest either get out of Focus or leave themselves while on Focus and are still marked URA

One of the advantages of Amazon's notoriety is you can know exactly how the process works. At other FAANGS it remains more nebulous and obfuscated to my knowledge. There still is not a concrete answer on who will actually get fired under Google's new GRAD system, and Meta does not seem particularly consistent with how they target double rated meets most. I understand the least about Microsoft and Apple, despite working there.