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

251–260 of 298 posts

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

#251

Post by thoughtpeddler »

dangrossman wrote: post #249
thoughtpeddler wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not good practice to connect your security systems to your voice assistant, especially door locks. Maybe this isn't the case in your home, but in smaller apartments it's certainly possible for a malicious actor to say "Hey {voice_assistant}, unlock front door", and they gain access. It's the modern day "open sesame".

They thought of that many years ago, before adding lock support to Alexa. You can lock the door with a simple command, but unlocking or opening requires a pin code. Nobody can get into my house by shouting through the windows.

Oh wow, did not know that! Clearly I am only a recipient of this advice, and not a practitioner. I stand corrected.

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

#252

Post by gamblor956 »

serjester wrote: post #163
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…

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.

No, your edit still ignores something else: at the time you took out the loan, you already had a liability for those employee salaries of $1M, so the $1M valuation means that you had at least $2M in assets.

Acquiring the loan moves you up to $3M in assets (original assets, plus $1m cash from the loan) and $2M in liabilities (employee salaries + $1M loan)

When you pay those employee salaries, you wipe out the salary liability and the $1M cash asset from the loan. This leaves you the original $2M in assets, and the $1M loan, for a net valuation of...$1M.

Basically, the loan ends up replacing the salaries as a liability on your balance sheet.

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

#253

Post by amf12 »

thoughtpeddler wrote: post #247
dangrossman wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not good practice to connect your security systems to your voice assistant, especially door locks. Maybe this isn't the case in your home, but in smaller apartments it's certainly possible for a malicious actor to say "Hey {voice_assistant}, unlock front door", and they gain access. It's the modern day "open sesame".

> it's certainly possible for a malicious actor to say "Hey {voice_assistant}, unlock front door", and they gain access. It's the modern day "open sesame".

I use Google Home and it has a voice match feature which will only accept on commands for allowed voices. Some people might not like this for the privacy aspect though.

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

#254

Post by andrew_ »

supergeek133 wrote: post #125
sfpotter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One million... fine, sir... sorry to have disturbed you." looks like kicked puppy My personal favorite Gary Oldman role.

Trivia.. he hated it and only did it as a favor to Luc Besson. Last I knew he's never even watched the movie.

which blows my mind because without him it wouldn't be a classic.

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

#255

Post by pcthrowaway »

heavyset_go wrote: post #139
__s wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an ads vector Eventually people will say "Alexa buy my groceries" Alexa will buy from the highest bidder

The only kind of people I imagine would be okay with a 3rd party blind shopping for them would be those who haven't seen the inside of a store in years because they have help that does all of their shopping and domestic work already.

It's one banana, Alexa. What could it cost? $10?

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

#256

Post by EFreethought »

oceanplexian wrote: post #78
mjr00 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.

Amazon has something like 100k corporate employees, and their URA targets force managers to PIP approximately 6% of the corporate employees every year, so going from 6% to 10% isn’t exactly a massive change.

Somewhat OT, but I never understood why so many corporations have this hard and fast rule that they have to fire (or give no bonus to) a set percentage every year: "We must fire X% of people."

I have worked at a few firms that have done this, and I have heard from a few people their managers arbitrarily picked them to get knocked into a lower tier.

Conversely, if they hired a big cohort of bozos one year, you know they would never say, "We would like to get rid of 15%, but our plan is only to get rid of 10%." They would have no problem going beyond 10%.

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

#257

Post by patentatt »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #236
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…

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

But the unemployment that those workers receive is an externality. Now, the nature of UI does mean that it should wash out in the end, but in the near term laying off thousands of people simultaneously potentially puts a strain on the system.

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

#258

Post by dgfitz »

bolt7469 wrote: post #210
rabuse wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the thousands of people layed off and their families affected really care about that "record low unemployment".

Those people received generous severance packages, on top of government unemployment benefits.

> Those people received generous severance packages...

How do you know this? I think its a bit of a stretch to say _everyone_ who has been laid off because of a looming recession has been given a package, unless you just meant the short list of tech in the very specific area of SV. If so I would encourage you to broaden your horizons to think of more than just tech.

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

#259

Post by blobbers »

joshuamarksmith wrote: post #137
blobbers wrote: post #128

Amazon lists employees at 1.6M employees worldwide. ( https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number... ) Even if they have 1% churn each month, that's about 16,000 turnover a month. Laying off 10,000 is not news until we find out where the cuts are happening.

This is specifically tech and corporate employees, which is a much smaller pool than the 1.6M you're quoting. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon (but also haven't stated any opinions)

Yes, we know. That's why I specifically said it isn't news until we find out where those 10,000 people are being hit.

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

#260

Post by Chamix »

peplee wrote: post #238

Not sure if other states have a similar system, but Washington posts information about layoffs here: https://esd.wa.gov/about-employees/WARN . Looks like Amazon Health Services is getting cut as part of this.

The news here is that amazon is going to start the 2 month+ WARN period for a much larger set of orgs this week. Amazon Care/Health Service layoffs are old news.
Post reply on HN