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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

#181

Post by throwme0827349 »

ryandrake wrote: post #129
steveBK123 wrote: post #104

Interesting that the math tells us AMZN average manager compensation is $250k? Seems.. low?

$250K is low: Kind of a "Peak HN" comment :). I was actually going to say it seems kind of high. This looks like it's globally, not just in high COL areas, and across all levels of management, not just Directors and VPs. Kind of surprising the average is that high. Then again, this is HN, where they say the "average" tech worker in the world makes $400K and drives a Ferrari.

I actually thought the same thing. Maybe the misunderstanding here has to do with what kind of manager. An engineering manager making 250k would be making less than many senior software engineers, but if this also includes many managers of people putting shit in boxes, or the average of the two categories, it would make more sense?

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

#182

Post by mrcsharp »

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.

A finance institution with no code review processes is one deserving to go bankrupt.

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

#183

Post by chris_va »

UncleMeat wrote: post #150
ikhare wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long time ago Google used to have a program called "bureaucracy busters," where submissions were reviewed by the CFO to find internal barriers to getting things done.

It was a good system. It no longer really exists and has been replaced by endless reprioritization and detailed bean counting justifying every single small action to prove to layers of management that what you are doing is worthwhile as Google slowly rots into a decayed husk of its old self.

Slowly? :)

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

#184

Post by rsynnott »

bsimpson wrote: post #167
rsynnott wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-c…

I feel like the US has a history of inventing a thing and having an early version of it become popular. By the time it's mainstream in Europe, it has been improved and standardized, giving the appearance that Europe has more modern technology. Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By…

In both cases, this is due to government regulation, not first-mover disadvantage. TVs showed up at about the same time in Europe and the US (first working TV was in the UK, and first regular TV station was in the US, but you’re talking about a year or so’s difference). SCART became a thing because the French government required companies to support it from 1980 on; previously European TVs generally used DIN.

As for the cards, again you can thank France; Cartes Bancaires introduced a predecessor to EMV in the 80s, and France moved quite quickly to make chip cards standard and then mandatory. Other countries followed in the 90s and early noughties. However, by the time EMV predecessors launched, there’d been credit cards in Europe since the 1960s (usually national standards).

Incidentally, this is also indirectly why the US was so late to the party with tap to pay. With chip and pin via EMV, it became essential that card terminals be available to the customer; an employee taking the card in the back wasn’t an option. So by the time tap to pay was introduced in the late noughties, more or less all shops and restaurants already had either counter-mounted or portable terminals, so it was an easy transition. In the US, it was more common to have swipe machines not necessarily directly accessible to the customer, which made tap to pay less attractive, and it didn’t really become near-universal until Apple and Google Pay forced the issue (actually, even then it didn’t become universal; I was in SF last year and was in a surprisingly large number of places which only had swipe machines).

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

#185

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

0rzech wrote: post #92
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…

IMHO, workplace politics can happen and be caused at any level of a company. I think it's a natural thing for some people to do. Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff. What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed stra…

>failing to actively weed out these behaviours

>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.

Excellent observations.

People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.

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

#186

Post by noahjk »

Myrmornis wrote: post #135
basisword wrote: post #97

I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great. They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development. IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, prom…

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,…

I think it all depends on finding a group of people who share the same goal of making something great together. One person who isn’t interested in that goal can be insidious to a self-managed team. And getting everyone involved means having some reward for doing well, like a validating mission or direct interactions with customers, which can be hard in some roles.

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

#188

Post by lolinder »

wnolens wrote: post #106
basisword wrote: post #97

I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great. They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development. IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, prom…

Unique experience. I've had mostly useless managers in my 15y career, downright toxic ones in my 3y AWS stint.

What makes your experience representative and theirs unique? How are you measuring this?

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

#189

Post by bravetraveler »

frozenport wrote: post #151
naijaboiler wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imagine actually wanting to work at Amazon

Ahead of the game, soon we'll only be able to spend Bezos Bucks. Company Towns walked so the Company Country could innovate

edit: I've enjoyed two managers since I started working ~2008. The rest were either harmful or generally ineffective, unfortunately. We can get along well... but I know the job's not for me. It's like HR, for the business.

Contrary to GP, career development has yet to meaningfully happen within the same business. I have to move to advance, so I do.

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

#190

Post by bsimpson »

rsynnott wrote: post #184
bsimpson wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the US has a history of inventing a thing and having an early version of it become popular. By the time it's mainstream in Europe, it has been improved and standardized, giving the appearance that Europe has more modern technology. Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By…

In both cases, this is due to government regulation, not first-mover disadvantage. TVs showed up at about the same time in Europe and the US (first working TV was in the UK, and first regular TV station was in the US, but you’re talking about a year or so’s difference). SCART became a thing because the French government required companies to support it from 1980 on; previously European TVs generally used DIN. As for…

Tap to pay felt like it took off in the US as a reaction to the germ hysteria of the pandemic. Swiping a card was arguably more convenient than getting out and unlocking your phone. There wasn't much demand for it here when it was popular in e.g. Singapore.

The amount of time people spend holding (rather than pocketing) their phones is also probably higher than it was in the 2010s, so the cost of digging it out of your purse/pocket is less relevant.

[meta] Having a conversation about credit card and video standards in a thread about managerial layoffs feels apropos to how my brain works about other curious topics. We're basically cosplaying a Wikipedia hole.

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