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Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

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Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#271

Post by ngc248 »

barbazoo wrote: post #46
axg11 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: I recently left Amazon Some orgs within the company are fairly lean, some are hugely bloated. Amazon isn't homogeneous. For example, Alexa is very over-resourced and it's common to hear about 4+ teams working on slight variations of the same project. Lots of redundancy there. I believe Alexa as an org is losing $5b+ per year. Contrast that to all the criticism Facebook is receiving for their investment into…

The fact that organizations have multiple teams working on overlapping or even similar things baffles me. I can't imagine how that wouldn't be immensely dissatisfying for the individual.

Speculative execution .... which ever team moves fast wins ... heck sometimes its not even the team with the best features that wins ... teams with just enough features but who can move fast win sometimes and its bad for the long run. Most big companies have been doing this for a long time now.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#272

Post by ngc248 »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #233
Chamix wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fun, there are currently precisely 312 employees under DynamoDB directors/VPs that are categorized at "Software Development". Including systems engineers ups it to 348.

Do you realize how big and profitable DynamoDB is? How much data they manage?

Also DynamoDB is indeed amazing. If your usecase matches the featureset of dynamodb, it works like a charm.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#273

Post by ngc248 »

faangiq wrote: post #243
erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

Easy answer: Management is very bloated but immune, code monkey scum get the wrath of PIP.

Exactly ... In modern big software orgs it does not even matter if you are delivering value/ All that matters is Perception, Image and Exposure (PIE). Product quality, features, technical depth none of that matters, as long as you can manage your PIE.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#274

Post by tdeck »

bogomipz wrote: post #138
malfist wrote: post #8

The "worlds best employer" is horribly mismanaging this layoff. It's all hush hush, and nobody is admitting anything until suddenly you have a meeting at the end of the day with a bigwig and HR. The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance. If you're unable to find another job, you get a week of severance per 6 months of employmen…

>"The severance is a pittance. 60 days garden leave like twitter where if you find employment external you give up remaining severance." Could you or someone say how this works or is enforced? Once you are no longer working for Amazon how do they know you have found external employment elsewhere? Is this a legal gray area?

Perhaps they use The Work Number or one of the similar employment verification services to monitor you.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#275

Post by washywashy »

erehweb wrote: post #5

I found this comment from an anonymous tech industry insider interesting: "Amazon is very, very bloated. So there's lots of people there but they're not providing a lot of value so they're first on the chopping block." This is counter to what I have heard about Amazon, which is that it is a ruthless environment where low performers are stack ranked out of the company. Does anyone have any insight?

At big companies with internal mobility, switching teams at the right time is a skill. This has positives but also the potential for bloat.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#276

Post by ctvo »

whimsicalism wrote: post #153
bgro wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I’ve gotten offers at all of those places except Netflix. It’s luck of the draw. My experience:

Snap > G > F > Amzn > Apple = Stripe = Twitter = …

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#277

Post by ctvo »

newobj wrote: post #197
bgro wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The median turnover at Amazon is 18 months. They have to hire a lot. The bar is just lower.

This is the same across the entire industry.

https://insights.dice.com/2017/08/22/tech-jobs-last-2-years-...

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#279

Post by malfist »

nostrebored wrote: post #266
malfist wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our training material explicitly excludes culture fit questions or decisions since it is a source of bias.

What is culture other than the shared set of beliefs that you agree to work with? LP questions are culture fit questions. What’s excluded are things that go beyond that, for example “how do you feel about drinks with coworkers?”

Fair, though traditionally when people talk about culture fit they are a lot of times asking "is this someone I could be friends/get a drink with" which is treading dangerous waters.

Re: Amazon confirms corporate staff cuts that could hit 10k employees

#280

Post by malfist »

rplst8 wrote: post #257
turdprincess wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also signal that you got motivated and took many hours out of your busy day to do a meaningless task like memorize a path finding algorithms. This might be a good signal that you will also be motivated to spend many hours doing meaningless things at your job. Actually, if you think about it, the whole concept of getting a college degree isn't much different - its not about what you learn in the classes, it j…

What you should learn in college is how to teach yourself to always be learning. Or at least to be aware of the trap doors that await when you try to solve a problem in the real world. Learning the Big O Notation performance of algorithms that traverse data structures isn't so you memorize all the different running times in perpetuity. It's so you realize that performance and the type of operations you want to common…

The other thing college shows is that someone is capable of committing to a long term goal and seeing it through. That's important.

Note: I am not saying non-college grads cannot commit to a long term goal, there's plenty of reasons people don't or can't go to college. I'm only saying that a college degree is a signal.

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