A lot of people inside that company carrying on an illusion of providing value. Managers stacked on managers, cracking their whips on reports to build tech that never adds anything at all to the company
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.
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)
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.