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Comment by aliljet | Hacker News Reader

I'm very curious about this. Amazon appears to be squeezing more profitability from existing, very successful parts of the organization. In particular, AWS, Advertising, and Twitch are not loss leaders. I'm not really quite sure what "PXT" is as a lay person, but is Amazon essentially making a serious bet on slowing growth to squeeze profit?

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PXT is their tech team supporting HR for Amazon. It grew a ton of the last 5+ years, but from the outside looking in it appears to be mainly empire building. The major initiatives I was aware of from my time there never seem to have been completed.

What exactly have they accomplished? Are they genuinely not building things that could result in improvements to Amazon's bottom line? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think Amazon is screaming to investors, "wait, we can make money at the expense of our last twenty years of growth if that's what you want." That lens makes Amazon look like a very different company..

The scale of HR at Amazon is huge. One data point was that they hired over 800,000 people in a single month. I'm sure that number is out of date.

The idea was to build scalable solutions for HR to modernizing hiring, etc. and productize those. I'm not sure the external product piece ever panned out, but they were mainly focused on eliminated manual processes for HR inside of Amazon and migrating legacy systems to modern ones.

Don't they have an automated resume hiring bot ?

Last I had heard, advertising is still a disaster at Amazon and Twitch still costs more to run than it brings in.

AIUI, ads brings in revenue roughly equivalent to AWS. The problem is that it’s user hostile and violates the customer obsession LP (among others).

If you consider 1/4 of the revenue to be roughly equivalent.

And that's revenue. We still don't know about profitability.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-thi...

Pxt from what I gathered is like HR

I think Amazon's time is coming to an end. AWS is the last bastion. The rest has started to rot.

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