Posted by zerosizedweasle 2 days ago
Seconded only by the time he ended WFH in a stealth blog post the day after hosting the all-hands meeting.
What is this take based on?
How likely are the cuts due to overhiring for projects that are being axed, vs for projects that are continuing with automation?
And no offense to Ms Canaves, but why is an “eMarketer analyst” being called on to explain Amazon hiring decisions relating to their progress in AI?
It’s sorting out org bloat, span of control issues, and teams without a clear ROI. Normal “leadership mismanaged the company and now there’s a mess to cleanup” stuff.
aws hr reduce workforce --region us-east-1From the article:
> The cuts beginning this week may impact a variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology, devices and services and operations, among others, the people said.
They should be completely separate. If they were two independent companies, a low margin distribution and logistics company on one side and a high margin software services company on the other then nobody would suggest merging the two together.
That’s right. The trillion dollar low margin dinosaur pays cash by writing close to zero profit in the books, and signs the bonds.
AWS is the cash cow. It owns between a third and half of the world's cloud computing market. Do you think it's hard for AWS to get financing?
Which cloud company can casually find 100B cash in a year?
AWS. Because AWS reports close to $11B/quarter, which is over half Amazon's entire revenue, and AWS owns the cloud computing market, on which the whole world runs.
Probably you mean operating income.
The key number for operating a company is the free cash flow.
AWS does not have the cash flow to maintain its CAPEX. It currently uses part of Retail FCF and additional debt that the entire AMZN company takes.
NVIDIA does not offer you 10 year payment plan (like depreciation schedules assume). They ask for their cash upfront.
If it was that easy to find cash OpenAI would not have given up so much equity to dinosaurs with strong balance sheet.
Actually, they are. Perhaps what is causing your confusion is that other parts of Amazon, such as Ring or Rivian, are also separate companies, whereas parts such as Alexa and Amazon Music aren't.
No. My definition is Amazon's actual organization chart as a holding. AWS is an independent first-level branch of direct reports of Andy Jassy, who was AWS's CEO before replacing Bezos. A similar branch is Worldwide Consumer, which groups what you think Amazon actually is, which means the online store, prime, books, devices, etc.
No, it's not! Let's transfer another few $B from workers to our needy shareholders.
Upward and onward!
On this point the audience and I are on opposite sides, and that's fine by me :)
Unfortunately good folks find themselves on the wrong team at the wrong time while top leadership, which created the bloated mess, generally squeaks by.
30k, nearly 10% of their workforce, isn't a little "cleanup to reduce bloat" it's a massacre.
Who exactly do you think is saying this? Because from what I'm understanding, so far Amazon has been decimating teams at the expense of overworking them even more, and by cutting projects at the expense of cancelling maintenance and feature work.
I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.
Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?
> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.
What do you think "Kindle" is? Is it a specific device? Is it Kindle for Web? Is it the Android or iPhone apps? Is it Kindle for Windows or Kindle for Mac? Among these, can you count how many are paid?
Either way, that's in line with the true definition of "AGI" and getting closer to the timeframe of 2030 to do more with less.
This is obviously not that. This is a cut before reporting quarterly earnings.
The org suffers from several systemic issues: entrenched tenured employees coasting on accumulated RSUs who resist change, middle management engaged in territorial conflicts/fiefdom turf wars that prioritize their own self-preservation over company goals, numerous underperforming hires made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs, and leaders whose primary competencies lie in mastering the silly cliched "Amazon speak" (Amazon LP this and LP that, quoting Bezos as opening lines, day ones, etc) and the usual de rigueur rituals such as churning out obligatory, meaningless six-pagers, instead of driving genuine innovation or results.
AWS is fast becoming a parody of itself and needs a reset. The recent outage is a harbinger of things to come, if things continue as is.
So they're writing even more six-pagers to satisfy the other managers which they're no longer shielded from having to interact with directly.
Amazon as a retailer has far worse problems than AWS.
I don't disagree with the rest. But you can effect a lot of change without mass layoffs...
> numerous underperforming hires _made to meet diversity targets rather than capability needs_
/s