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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

#61

Post by bogomipz »

anikom15 wrote: post #51
bogomipz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

No of course not but I would think it could certainly help to temper exuberance. Especially if you were considering a spectrum of uncertainties.

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

#62

Post by mjr00 »

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 hope that if we've learned anything from the past few years, it's that you can interpret and manipulate data to make it say whatever you want to say. That's true even when analyzing data about the present, doubly so trying to predict the future.

Being data-driven is a method for justifying decisions. But it's still a human making a decision in the end.

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

#64

Post by noobermin »

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…

What do you do when the model says your favorite project (say the one that got you promoted or is getting you promoted) is a bad idea? Heck, forget fancy modeling, what does an excel sheet say?

As old as the bible, the saying, "Physician, heal thyself!"

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

#65

Post by sakopov »

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…

I remember reading somewhere that while Amazon is on a hiring freeze, they still hire to fill positions of those who left the company. So perhaps you're interviewing for one of them.

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

#66

Post by colinmhayes »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #47
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?

They’re probably selling every unit at a loss. A big part of the Amazon smart home stuff also has to be the data it collects and the way it integrates with ordering off the retail site which might not have been counted here.

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

#67

Post by mr_gibbins »

mabbo wrote: post #56
kevmo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is not strictly true. I examined a master's degree thesis last semester where the student proved conclusively that Alexa devices are periodically spamming bursts of data back to Amazon HQ even when not woken. Beyond a heartbeat, too - MBs of data, not KBs.

No clear idea what that data is, though. There's at least a small chance it isn't benign.

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

#68

Post by paxys »

green-eclipse wrote: post #20

This is just the latest round of cuts at Amazon: "From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition." Also: "Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cl…

Attrition rates at Amazon are really something else

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

#69

Post by arcturus17 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #47
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?

My intuition is that it's a) very high R&D costs coupled with b) being partly a hardware play, where unlike software, marginal cost of distribution does not tend to zero and where it's therefore much easier to lose money per unit sold.

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

#70

Post by notinfuriated »

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?

Doubtful they sell at a profit. But do they allow developers for their apps (or whatever they're called, skills I think) to charge money and then take a cut just like any other app store?

I'd imagine like any other new product, they're taking a risk and hoping the product takes off with higher adoption so they can earn more. The bet on Alexa always seemed to be that people wanted a hands-off, voice powered way to interact with the internet, and perhaps they could charge for skills (creating their own 'app store') at some point, or earn more on selling products on Amazon because people would enjoy the convenience of just asking their device to buy more detergent or whatever. Not sure I ever really got the premise here, because it was always quite easy to order stuff on my computer or phone.

Anyway, I don't work at Amazon so I'm not sure if I'm mistaken about what the idea was. I imagine only some people close to that division would really know.

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