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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

#71

Post by mrtranscendence »

Macha wrote: post #26
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 /…

Did COVID suppress consumption or just redirect it? Less restaurant meals and more PS5s, and now the pendulum swings the other way as people socialize in person again.

Good question, I suppose. I work in the grocery industry and COVID was absolutely incredible for business -- my yearly bonus doubled. Wouldn't have wanted to own a bowling alley or a movie theatre, though.

That said, we never corrected to the degree the tech industry seems to be now. I'm glad I never followed through with those Facebook recruiters ...

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

#72

Post by rglullis »

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).

Do sample recordings, reduce bitrate (you can have good voice recording and playback at less than 3kb/sec) and upload only if the device detects something worthy of notification.

Hell, don't even send the sound, just send a weekly report of events.

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

#73

Post by UncleOxidant »

majormajor wrote: post #50
gwd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Exactly. Look at graphs of employee growth at the large tech companies between 2019 and 2022 - we're lopping off some of that growth... probably will end up lopping off a lot of that growth before this is over.

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

#74

Post by hhh »

mjr00 wrote: post #31
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…

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

Why?

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

#75

Post by giraffe_lady »

mjr00 wrote: post #31
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…

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

...what is it? I really can't see a difference.

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

#76

Post by sokoloff »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #49
sokoloff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

That seems like reporting on Meta's 2022 losses in virtual reality in late 2026, which would seem absurd, even if that's the best/only information they have at that time. (At some point, you have to admit "we don't have any relevant information" rather than report on "the least irrelevant information we can find".)

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

#77

Post by derac »

paxys wrote: post #68
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

They do have 1.5 million employees (per Google)

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

#78

Post by oceanplexian »

mjr00 wrote: post #31
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…

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.

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

#79

Post by horsawlarway »

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 wager is that the devices are sold as a loss leader.

Then on top the software development is fairly novel - so they're probably spending quite a bit on development efforts related to the devices.

They're eating the costs for running the backend processing for all of these devices (they're sold as a one time fee, despite requiring services provided by Amazon servers).

Finally - they were promoting the ever loving shit out of the development tooling to app developers for a long time with a lot of seminars, development guides, free services on aws, etc.

---

My strong guess is they wanted them work out the same way Kindles have - loss leaders that more than make up for it by securing digital goods purchases. But personally - I spend lots of money on amazon for books for my Kindle, and I spend basically nothing related to Alexa (there's literally just nothing I want to buy through it).

Lately my Alexa has started inserting promotional content into the standard voice responses (bs like "Alexa what time is it" returns the time, and then a "and it's a good time to watch the new Rings of Power tv show? should I tell you about it?").

They're going to go into the trash shortly at this rate. I'll switch to a self hosted replacement like mycroft or something.

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

#80

Post by minwcnt5 »

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…

The risks of under-hiring if things had continued and not being able to keep up with competitors was probably just too great. It's much easier to simply lay people off if the bubble pops than to play catch up if it doesn't.
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