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Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

nytimes.com

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

#51

Post by anikom15 »

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…

No amount of machine learning, analytics, statistics, models, and experts can predict the future.

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

#52

Post by lotsofpulp »

kevmo wrote: post #46
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it collecting that data when not spoken to?

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

#55

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

kevmo wrote: post #46
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What behavior do they hope to collect that is not a huge privacy liability with the effort? They already know where millions of people spend their money (not say they will buy, but actually follow through).

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

#56

Post by mabbo »

kevmo wrote: post #46
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No security researcher has ever found proof that they are "always on" and recording everything people say. If they were, it would be front-page news and Amazon would have government investigations.

The devices listen for their wake word before ever transmitting data to the cloud. (This is also because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed for always-on would be un-economical even for Amazon).

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

#57

Post by green-eclipse »

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's hallmark in the past has been investing big into businesses without immediate profits. Amazon gets massive revenue but has nowhere near the margins of an Apple, or Google. As you know, a net loss and revenue are not apples to apples. For full year 2018, Amazon had net income of $10B on $232B of revenue.

All of which is to say that a $5B loss is a very material number. They obviously thought it would be a big profit driver in the future, which it has not turned out to be yet.

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

#58

Post by sokoloff »

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?

When Amazon Music Unlimited was an attempted thing, that was a direct path to monetization that basically only happens if you have Alexa/Echo widely deployed. Otherwise, it seems a tenuous link to increasing sales in retail.

(I say "was" because they recently rolled part of it out as a Prime benefit a couple of weeks ago, but I can't figure out the exact difference between unlimited and what's included in Prime [and don't care enough to chase it down], but they are still offering a $9/mo unlimited offering, so there must be some difference.)

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

#59

Post by latchkey »

bena wrote: post #32

This is weird because I'm in the middle of the interview process with a division of Amazon. Disclaimer: I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice. And here we go: I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their…

Wow, you responded to one of those Amazon recruiters. I can see now that it is responses like this that encourages them to keep pushing.

I've removed everything from my linkedin, except my current position, and the only people hitting me up are Amazon recruiters. In fact, once I edited my profile, the rate increased.

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

#60

Post by __derek__ »

bena wrote: post #32

This is weird because I'm in the middle of the interview process with a division of Amazon. Disclaimer: I have a job and haven't been actively looking, but recruiters will reach out and I'll usually go through the interview process if only to practice. And here we go: I got the initial email around the middle of September for one particular division. As I went through the initial assessment, that division "met their…

You may well get an offer, but it will probably be deferred to 2023 if so. At Amazon, the interview loop makes a decision regardless of the viability/timing/placement of the actual offer made.
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