Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

dvngnt_ wrote: post #30

noobermin wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of talk about a correction coming and a bubble bursting specifically in tech for years now. Is this it?

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 none of them actually use their tools and internal expertise to model their own hiring practices and historical market trends? Or maybe they did and always knew they would need to do mass layoffs when inevitably the cheap money pump got shut off?

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

#42

Post by mabbo » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

I just don't see the path to profitability for Alexa. Like, sure, it's neat, but how does it make any money?

Do they sell the devices at a profit?

Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?

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

#43

Post by __derek__ » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

> The company has sold hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. But Amazon has said the products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources such as voice shopping have not caught on.

This is the game, right? For the first time since Alexa launched, Amazon is looking at a painful Q4, so the rest of retail can't cover up the Devices org's big wart.

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

#44

Post by mensetmanusman » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #10

tamaharbor wrote: post #2

And they say we are not in a recession.

I get we've been cooking the books and printing money during COVID, but shouldn't there be a raw productivity explosion in the US economy with COVID restrictions lifting? Suppressed consumption, increased output, etc? This does seem like some weird massive manipulation of the economy by the elites to grab more wealth and control. Or it's just some collective revenge against the various antiwork / worker empowerment /…

There is no conspiracy, just muddling along as humans do.

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

#45

Post by bryanlarsen » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

tamaharbor wrote: post #2

And they say we are not in a recession.

3.5% unemployment is not a recession.

A couple of industries like tech are having some bubbles popped, and some places like the UK are having a recession, but the US is not in a recession. You all are just too used to 15 years of tech boom so anything different looks like a recession.

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

#46

Post by kevmo » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #42

green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

I just don't see the path to profitability for Alexa. Like, sure, it's neat, but how does it make any money? Do they sell the devices at a profit? Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?

Having a microphone/speaker in people's houses seems like a great way to collect a ton of data & guide their behavior.

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

#47

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

How is that much loss possible? Not a hardware engineer, but from the exterior it feels like there is nothing exotic about the design which would warrant extravagant development costs.

Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?

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

#48

Post by sokoloff » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

erehweb wrote: post #38

tamaharbor wrote: post #2

And they say we are not in a recession.

US GDP was up 2.6% annualized in 2022Q3 ( https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product ) and unemployment was 3.7% in Oct2022.

Worth making two observations on that GDP figure:

More importantly: that's a real (inflation backed out) not nominal (inflation ignored) figure

Less importantly: that's an advance estimate, not a final figure.

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

#49

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #35

green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

$5B is around 1% of their (current) trailing 4 quarter revenue, which I would say is "not outrageous" if voice/home assistants is an area of growth and investment for Amazon. Why would a 2022 article be citing a 2018 loss figure for a almost surely (if my house is any indication) fast-growing segment?

Amazon doesn’t release info about the Alexa category in their earnings, so any reporting can only rely on whatever figure has been leaked.

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

#50

Post by majormajor » Mon, Nov 14, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #40

UncleOxidant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably? But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point, though it probably will overshoot as these things usually do. Meta going from 47K employees in 2019 to 81K employees in about 3 years was just crazy, for example. How do you even assimilate that many new employees in such a short time?

> But it's mostly just a return to sanity at this point, That's what the word "correction" implies: That it's going down, not because the business itself is bad or anything in the market has fundamentally changed, but because it was valued "incorrectly" (where "insane" would be an extreme form of "incorrectness"), and that its value is being "corrected".

I see UncleOxidant as saying it's a 2020-2021 correction, distinct from the larger talk of a correction that's been going around for years now even pre-Covid.

I haven't seen signs of that latter, larger one yet. Fingers crossed...