Earlier quoted context omitted.
And not just because of corporate layoffs.
I'm not disagreeing, but what are you referring to specifically?
Maybe recession?
Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
221–230 of 298 posts
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never got the value of voice devices. In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons. Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Ap…
Voice devices are actually very handy for those with mobility impairments. That being said, I have yet to meet anybody who actually uses these voice assistants daily (other than the aforementioned people with mobility issues).
My family uses ours daily and they're fully integrated into our routines. They're our alarm clocks that wake us, and are how we check the weather to decide how to get dressed in the morning. I ask them to turn on the lights in the morning, and to turn them off at night. Alexa locks my front door and closes my garage before bed. In the kitchen, every time we cook, we ask Alexa to preheat the oven or air fryer, and ask her to set the timers for whatever we're cooking.
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is unnecessarily cynical. The unemployment benefits system is indeed designed to buffer against unemployment which is why both employees and employers pay into it.
What's unnecessarily cynical? They have a duty to shareholders.
I like how the word greed not got replaced with duty.
This is like how in medieval times it was your duty to serve the lord and make him rich.
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never got the value of voice devices. In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons. Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Ap…
Voice devices are actually very handy for those with mobility impairments. That being said, I have yet to meet anybody who actually uses these voice assistants daily (other than the aforementioned people with mobility issues).
We use ours daily. Primarily it's a kitchen timer and a way to add items to our grocery shopping list. We used to use it for music but now tend to stream to a tabletop system with better sound. If it dies or becomes unsupported, it won't be a major loss but it does add a bit of convenience to our lives.
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#225Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP). Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn? The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has…
Iirc, the Soviet Union used to guarantee a job. Not sure how well that worked out for them, though. Don't they have a massive alcoholism problem still?
And Hitler was Vegan, didn't work out for him either.
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#226Mass layoffs makes the news because papers depend on sensational headlines, but it's important to put into perspective. > The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record ... Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things. So it doubled its head count in the past 3 years and is now trimming by 3% (or 1% of global). Updat…
I clearly remember growing up in the 1980's and later and hearing about mass redundancies happening during a bad economy.
It was newsworthy because of the potential devastation these events would have had on an area; as in some people may never be employed _ever again_.
It's why Ireland gave so many tax breaks to Apple; they employed thousands from one city. Layoffs would have made an already bad situation far worse.
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#227This is so completely normal in these industries that it is a non-headline. Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the sharehold…
Which American company employs 100k+ DEVRLOPERS?
I'm sure in its peak IBM employed way more than that including their India and China teams.
EDIT: found a source, 130K in india in 2017... == 33% of workforce
"Today, the company employs 130,000 people in India — about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM’s businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars. One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/technology/ibm-india.html
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#228Funny, I've been getting recruiter spam every week from the same set of people, and their last email 3 weeks ago was titled "AWS - This could be the last chance to join the team!!!"
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#229This is so completely normal in these industries that it is a non-headline. Companies that have so much cash they can employ 100K+ developers on top of goodness knows how many designers, PMs, POs etc. of course they hire and fire. They can afford to offer above-average conditions when the markets need it and everyone goes flocking there only to be surprised when their job is taken away at the next point the sharehold…
> that someone's Christmas might be not as expected.
You should have sympathy for PEOPLE. Every one of the PEOPLE effected by any lay off or industry change is a person. It could be your relative, it could be you, ti could be me. Let's get out of the "I don't feel too bad for that person that's not me" and try to have compassion for fellow humans.
edit: spelling typo
Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be nice were that actually the case. However, in practice, I tend to find that doing most things just using voice with my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road ends up being a really frustrating experience. This isn't a particular knock on Siri specifically. I'm pretty sure I'd find Google or Alexa similarly annoying in the same context. As someone says up-thread, Alexa at home is fine for a few formulaic…
I'm not a big user of Siri, but I've had better luck than you describe. Siri will reliably play songs and podcasts I request; read out text messages; transcribe my response to text messages; and find directions to places. This is about as much as I really want.
I find podcasts and playlists pretty frustrating generally. But then I tend to want to listen to something fairly specific as opposed to more or less whatever as background; I've never been a big radio listener. I have used it for texts but that's very uncommon and directions can be hit and miss to make changes on the fly. It's definitely better than nothing but it's a far cru from a passenger doing that sort of thing for you.