Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 298 posts

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#231

Post by jedberg »

jdhn wrote: post #180
softwaredoug wrote: post #114

Earlier 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 might be a outlier but our family of four uses it at least 50 times a day if I look at our voice history.

Alarms, timers for the kids, playing music all day, asking for knowledge questions, etc. For example yesterday my kids asked "which is after a tortoise or a snail". The kids use it a lot because they don't have phones to google stuff but they always have Alexa to ask.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#232

Post by [deleted] »

lbriner wrote: post #140

This 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…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#233

Post by s1artibartfast »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #214
whichfawkes wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities. Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other…

> Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities. Because keeping people paid for a year during a downturn is cheaper than firing them and then rehiring and retraining someone else a year later?

Under what reasoning is it cheaper to keep them?

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#234

Post by mrtranscendence »

bogomipz wrote: post #41
dvngnt_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the correction is happening now. the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor. The economy has since rebounded and companies are returning to previous levels. The war isn't helping however

>"the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor." This is the really surprising thing to me - many(most?) of these companies are data driven companies. Companies with teams of analytics folks, data scientists, modeling-experts and teams of engineers working on tools to do ML and large scale data analytics. Do n…

I work as a data scientist in the grocery industry, specifically (at least for the past six months) on sales forecasts. Even for relatively short-term forecasts accuracy is surprisingly low, even with lots of data and the most up-to-date forecasting methods, applied by smart people (those who aren't me). I'm not at all surprised that companies can't see precisely when downturns will happen.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#235

Post by brewdad »

wastedimage wrote: post #157
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been promised for a long time, but from my perspective, I don't really see this getting any closer to reality. But for what it's worth, I think there's a conflict of interest here. No one is going to believe that Amazon won't prioritize Fresh or Whole Foods for these orders - even if they don't.

How is this any different from a physical grocery store deciding on what to position on the ends of the rows due to incentive? People love to act like these problems brought on by the internet are new but all to often it's just an evolution.

At least my grocery still is reasonably organized and well laid out. If I need ketchup, I know exactly where to go to find all of my options side by side.

If I tell Alexa to order ketchup, who knows what brand I'll get or what size? It's possible I might end up with banana ketchup or even mayonnaise given how poorly Amazon's search functions work.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#236

Post by s1artibartfast »

whichfawkes wrote: post #152
zackmorris wrote: post #119

Something 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…

Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities. Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other…

Not everything people don't like is an externality. It has a specific meaning. Fired workers are not an externality.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#237

Post by fullshark »

zackmorris wrote: post #119

Something 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…

They don't want to keep the employees and they want the remaining employees to be scared.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#240

Post by s1artibartfast »

vikramkr wrote: post #183
serjester wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my business is valued at a million dollars and I take out a loan for a million, my business is now valued at 0. That’s basic accounting. Amazon had a net income of 14B last year - no one will let them borrow anything close to their market cap, much less 10X it. Edit: This assumes I spend my loan on payroll which is what the OP originally suggested.

Your original million doesnt go anywhere. If you start with a million and borrow a million, you now have 2 million in assets and 1 million in liabilities. Your valuation is not zero.

Now, If you pay one million to workers, you are now at zero
Post reply on HN