201–210 of 292 posts
AWS is barely touched. AWS AI even less so. A repeated lesson for me: always join a growing business for professional development, for career satisfaction, for financial reward, and for job security.
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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.
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Amazon has been cutting a handful of their growing businesses aswell. Take for example Amazon Care. That team tripled in size YoY and was disbanded right before these layoffs. A growing business also needs a clear path to profitability.
My guess is they meant growing in terms of revenue, not headcount.
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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.
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You need to make a plan to find your next position, instead of looking for things on the internet to get offended by.
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The real trick to job safety is to join a core (but profitable) organization. I doubt many (if any) cuts are being made in EC2/EBS/S3/etc.
This. Be willing to do the boring, unsexy stuff that is at the foundation of the business. You'll never be the hotshot, but it's extremely unlikely that you would get caught up in layoffs like this.
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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…
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…
I have never seen or witnessed micromanaging, the holiday system is the best I have seen. Keep in mind I was a fully virtual employee, maybe things are different in office.
I know I can go back there if I like and enter at a level where I get stock compensation right away with a solid salary.
If you collect plenty of accolodates and maybe get a badge or two, they will never forget you.
I think they habe a very good screening process and a pretty good sense for hiring the right people at any level(the requirements are rather high for the salary).
The reason why they like to re hire people is often the immense onboarding cost, anything level 3 and up requires quite some learning and training time before you can even think of being productive. If I was hiring, there is no way I would hire a level 5 from outside amazon if I could give that role to an experienced level 4 employee. All teams are pretty huge, think of lets say 10 head team, within the first six months, they will habe 2-3 months of training and upskilling, and really, you have to habe that training to do things like vcs, vat etc, as you will at least have to have some fba skills for that role.
If Amazon is letting people go, it must be pretty bad, usually they are not cheap about redundancy, theu are wise enough to be ready for spikes in business. Not sure what has happened there and I strictly speak for office jobs in europe, everything else , I do not know. The whole thing is quasi subsidised by aws and this comes bit as a surprise to me.
I prefer bit more risky endeavours and chose amazon whenever my risk apetite has decreased.
Amazon is a rather solid employee if you perform, just be on time and have good adherence time, as a company with a million employees, this is understandable. It is also much less chaotic than you would imagine from such a giant corporate entity.
If they need you for programming, aws sales, language skills and tax matters, you will be doing fine there. On tax matters or newly established teams, the next level is always in sight and within reach. I hope the severance packages will be fair. I struggle to understand the bad rep for amazon seen online, working for musk or google is many times worse. Facebook used to be pretty good from what I hear.
Maybe its all individual perception and a bit of luck or misfortune.
As for the screenings, yes, they do, but they do not care about memorized things, they try to care and see how you start to deal with an issue.
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“You either memorized the solution to the random leetcode problem you get or you fail as far as I understand it.” No? You can actually use code to solve problems. Don’t buy into the defeatism surrounding leetcode interviews.
I think the point is that it can be hard to legitimately solve some of those tricky leetcode-style problems under time pressure, with no access to outside resources, and with the knowledge that somebody is judging your every move. Memorizing the common problems gives you a big leg up on being able to successfully pass an interview.
What you do need to memorize are a small group of algorithmic designs and have a good sense of when to apply each one. The main ones include divide and conquer, greedy, graph, and what seems to be the hardest of them all, dynamic programming algorithms.
It's disappointing that so few developers know these or are comfortable with these designs since employing them provides significant speedups to what would otherwise involve deeply nested loops or other naive brute force solutions. Becoming familiar with the broad set of algorithm designs is something most competent developers should invest some time in, and it's not like it requires years and years to become good at it but the benefits are enormous.
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This. Be willing to do the boring, unsexy stuff that is at the foundation of the business. You'll never be the hotshot, but it's extremely unlikely that you would get caught up in layoffs like this.
There will be multiple personal risks with this approach. First my skills may increasingly become irrelevant, as there are only "boring" work to do. Second I don't get job satisfaction. Of course, it depends on what makes one happy. To me, it is the thrill of solving new problems and knowing that I kept becoming a better problem solver. Third, an org with no growth means incumbents fight for turfs. In contrast, a gro…
There are many teams in organizations like EBS/S3/etc working on the growth and next frontier of those services - but those teams are still far less likely to be cut in a layoff than teams doing similar work in riskier organizations. Why? Because layoffs are allocated from the top first. The reliable and profitable S3 org as a whole will be required to lay off far fewer people than the Devices org that is losing $XXXXXXXX/year.
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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"…
If there was also a screen, so many more things could be done. For example it could show that list of ingredients and their prices, for your approval. Then let’s say you could interact with that screen by voice (your fingers are sticky because you’re cooking now) or touch.