Amazon layoffs now expected to mount to 20k, including top managers
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
https://www.teamblind.com/post/amazon-rescinding-contract-on...
I'd be pretty nervous giving a 2 week notice atm.
I’d second this advice and add…don’t let dollar signs guide you away from stability in this economy.
Well this is completely wrong. It's hard to trust the rest of the article when they can't get the basics right.
So what is reasonably right-ish?
Well, there was no comma in his first sentence. It's hard to trust the rest of the comment if he can't get the basics right.
An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.
This type of thing goes on all over the company. Another example, a complex “data provider platform”. Which is actually just spinning up spark clusters, joining data, and making it available to downstream consumers. There’s a lot of bells and whistles, notifications built on top. Strip away the details, it’s just doing a join. Ten engineers, two senior engineers making 500k, long hours.
That’s Amazon.
Requiring everything to move KPIs is psychotic, but if your effort should have moved a KPI, and didn't, then you'd better have a damn good story about how it delivered value elsewhere instead.
Right. Maybe Elon's approach is correct, and all these layoffs are a chance for companies to trim the fat and focus on what matters.
We're only now realizing the bubble the tech industry was in, and that pursuing endless growth is not sustainable.
> But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%.
Does it, though? You're paying for full-time engineers to work on bets that might be completely misaligned even if they succeed, which also might be unlikely. And this makes up the majority of your company? It sounds ludicrous in any market.
I’ve been around the block enough to see how management can tie BS projects back into the scope of some director level “vision”. When it’s a bull market, everyone in the org wins.
And then this one project adopts it for some random reason and you're left holding the bag
It also empirically paid less, all things being equal.
Also $10 billion? Do they hemorrhage money on hardware?
You're thinking of Siri.
Rube Goldberg vs just empowering someone to design something and move on.
(I work in UX, and there is a lot of bullshit like this)
It's not often the employees fault that they leave for greener pastures or are Pivot'ed out of Amazon, they usually work 3+ years at software firms before/after Amazon. Amazon would rather light money on fire by paying to recruit talent, give them half a year to start being positively impactful, then turn up the heat in the year or so thereafter until the employee is gone, rather than treat their workforce decently.
Acting like a garbage employer is sapping Amazon of talent, slowing down projects and burning tons of money on talent. Focus more on team building exercises, invest in actual mentoring if your employees, stop pressuring managers to rank and Pivot employees needlessly and Amazon can stop letting talented people slip out of the organization.
The evaluation system is just the logical outcome of the much deeper culture that drives the company.
Capital is no longer worthless. The entire complex system is rewiring but it will be a long process. So many self interested sticky wires to break.
And knowing how Hacker News works, I'll likely have someone show up and tell me that I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about. But let's just skip that part - I have direct experience and counter examples that back up everything I'm saying that go on for years.
The smallest percentage for "needs improvement" ratings I was expected to hit was 5%, the largest was 15%.
Anyone who was needs improvement would be added to the "dev list", and many would enter into a pip. Eventually, Amazon added a system called Pivot that was designed to soften the need improvement process. It did seem to result in fewer pips.
70% of people who entered a pip failed and were terminated. Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement. The expectation was clear - fire them or fix them within 6 months.
How do you do that if you're managing a team of 5?
Any manager with an employee who had two connective needs improvement ratings was themselves given a needs improvement.
Makes sense to me. A manager's #1 job should be to ensure that the people who report to them are able to work to the full extent of their capabilities; if you're not assisting employees who need improvement, you have no business being a manager.
Law of large numbers at higher org levels, not individual teams. No one is hitting a specific 5% or 20% on a single team. Even at a sr manager scope with 25-50 people it's not going to be exact. But at a Director or VP, with 300-3,000, then you can see the performance target values come in to focus. Regardless theyre all targets and exceptions, with lots of explanation, do happen for good and ill.
If your employee had year over year “needs improvement”, they would rate the manager as “needs improvement”?
Why would a manager who has control over their employees have any incentive to keep an employee with “needs improvement”.
It seems like the manager would be incentivized to do one of the following:
1. Ensure their “needs improvement” employee is dismissed.
2. Artificially rate their employee higher than “needs improvement” in the second year. The manager has control over the rating process.
3. Encourage their employee to transfer to another team.
4. Transfer to another team themselves.
5. Help improve their employee through coaching and feedback.
Although #5 should be the preferred approach, it’s the one which requires change by the employee. 1-4 are completely under control of the manager.
Separately there are teh corporate employees in finance, tech roles, management, etc. These are teh employees in question when CEO Jassy and friends have talked about shrinking some divisions like health care or alexa. This is also where the recent 10-20k numbers are concerned.