Wal-Mart to cut 200 e-commerce jobs in California | Hacker News Reader

Wal-Mart to cut 200 e-commerce jobs in California

marketwatch.com

44 pointslxe24 comments

> We don't need as many senior people and there is some aspect that is performance related.

I wasn't directly impacted by this, but from the few instances I've seen, the people being ousted seem to be those that had questioned tech. decisions. They were people who did badly during our review process.

For instance we have a brand new react server side rendering based platform. I think the performance of that framework is somewhere around 2 concurrent requests per virtual machine. And we're bragging about our performance chops publicly: https://medium.com/walmartlabs/using-electrode-to-improve-re...

Wal-Mart has many problems, I don't think too many experienced engineers is one of them.

I don't know how anybody can look at basically the entire history of Wal-Mart labor relations and think 'oh that won't happen to me'.

Created a throw away just to agree with you. Maybe 10% of the technical "talent" is worth keeping.

Are these the people that make that e-commerce site that doesn't know if its trying to be Amazon or Wal-Mart?

I shop in-store, so when I use the site it's because I want to see if they have something before I go. But they make that practically impossible and they just show me a bunch of crap they don't carry.

And now they have third party sellers or something, with these ridiculous jacked up prices just mixed in with everything else.

I'd consider the two option separate.

Even though it's not the same, I often use their grocery pickup. All the time I'm able to buy products that aren't in the same grocery store I'm picking up from; products that I know are on the shelves aren't available for pickup. I presume they're using a warehouse and distributing order to stores, using the building infrastructure, but for the most maintaining them as separate operations.

"We don't need as many senior people..." said Mr. Toporek.

Interesting. I wonder if that's management, or senior technical roles. Not surprising that there's some overlap after the jet.com acquisition though.

I'm sure it's just in general. I mean, look how well Circuit City did after getting rid of their most senior people.

How many senior developers do you need to maintain an existing e-commerce site? Not that much. The can hire entry-level / students to do the content. They can re-use the print designers to make the banners. They can automatize catalog management or dumb it down enough so that a manager can do it.

I've spent a lot of time developing e-commerce website for (smaller) companies and none of them required 200+ seniors. Most were small highly skilled teams of individuals with large skill sets.

I think maybe WalMart is back and forth on whether they want to be "Target, but Cheaper" or Amazon.

They do have some features that aren't standard ecom, like in store delivery, 3rd party seller marketplace, Vudu video, Straight Talk phones, etc, so I can see more senior staff than usual...but perhaps not what they have now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot

This time last year they were aggressively hiring - was there FY that bad in earnings?

Seems like around 2010 they had a big dev layoff in Bentonville, and then were hiring soon after, which I remember as being quite pecluliar.

Is this layoff a leading indicator of the dev job market bubble bursting?

I think it's more likely an indication that the folks in Bentonville figured out that their expensive SV shop spent a lot of time and money doing things (like, oh, writing their own app server[1]) that weren't critical to improving sales on Wal-Mart's website.

[1] http://electrode.io

I'm wondering if that's a symptom of too many people and therefore more free time for open source projects like electrode. If that's the case, I wonder if hiring decision makers are held accountable for over-hiring?

Retail sector is not going to hAve a strong 2017. 2016 ended soft and almost every retailer is losing ground to ecommerce. That being said, it does seem odd they would cut senior ecommerce folks in that climate.

From linkedin I gather they have around 3000 people. Not sure if that includes jet.com employees also. So <1% are laid off. I got a call few months back for position in Reston VA. They never proceeded after initial call.

Edit: It should <10% or ~7% as another commenter corrected me.

200 of 3000 is around 7%, not .7%

You are of course right. I was talking to my brother about some other layoffs and there it was around 1% and so I just plopped that number here without calculating.

As much as I dislike the move, it's pretty common for companies to stack rank / vitality curve and cut the bottom ~5% every year. On one hand... sure let's free up some space for better performers. On the other... not likely that new blood off the street will initially do better than staff who are already trained on your product...

walmart is a massive outlet for chinese manufacturing.

if trump interferes with chinese imports... it will not be good for walmart.

it will also be bad for those who invested billions in china for manufacturing.

Does anyone here use Jet.com?

Not "have you ever used it?", but do you use it religiously like I use Amazon.com.

On the popular ones (books/media), Jet internally matches the Amazon price consistently. So occasionally when they have a 30% cart coupon (last time on Black Friday), I'll buy a bunch of wishlist items from my Amazon and then reap the benefits of that 30% + Jet's Extra shopping cart "savings" for the more you add.

No.

A while back I did a fairly exhaustive price comparison for groceries and household goods, between Amazon and Jet.

My anecdotal experience was that Jet.com was almost never better priced. Couple that with the extremely fast delivery of Amazon, and it was a no brainer...

Also worth adding that their "price drop as you shop" felt like a gimmick. Yea, the price did drop as you added new items to your cart. But it was pennies. Literally, pennies.

I'm assuming this is out of Walmart Labs? Pretty interesting place! I had no idea they had so many people there. Unless this is referring to something bigger than WalMart Labs.

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