I accepted my AWS job offer and I'm getting my @Amazon email in a month. I've noticed that amazon has been hiring like crazy this past year and heard the same from friends st Amazon. What's the big picture for this? Just employee churn?
Amazon has been hiring like crazy since December 2015. Churn isn't unusually high. Here's a short summary. Mr. Bezos has found a way of undercutting every other business on the planet and grow this loss making enterprise(bar AWS) like crazy. Along with explosive stock ratios and kicker revenues, Mr. Bezos is on his way to change/ruin the entire economic patterns of the planet. The only roadblock is regulation/break-up. Enjoy the party while it lasts. :D
At least Bezos tries to bring prices lower in almost any category you can think of by keeping customers first. Value proposition for customers is just too high with Amazon. Quite unlike Apple which just tries to juice out more money from customers with overpriced products at obscene profit margins.
So Amazon wants to become the Reliance of America. (Reliance is an Indian company which also tries to get into pretty much everything and disrupts it with low prices. Soon it's going to get into Cloud and E-commerce hence messing with both AWS and Amazon.in. Unsurprisingly, it's chairman is the richest person in India, while Bezos is richest in the world)
Amazon is hiring more developers for Alexa alone than Google is hiring for everything. We just own more successful products, but part of it is also redundant teams and poor team discovery. It is quite possible at Amazon that 3 different teams are planning to launch the same thing without each other knowing.
Do they also layoff a lot?
They don't need lay-offs. Organic attrition is sufficient.
Pic for your reference. Amen
Need more bodies to burn, or churn
@OP: you know the rules. TC? Amazon truly intends to be the everything store. They will achieve that by combining engineering talent with various industry-specific talent and keep hiring and growing. Unlike several other businesses, amazon is not too greedy to re-invest in hiring more employees (besides TC lol). Not to say it isn't greedy, the greed just lives elsewhere
They had a bumper crop of bananas this year. True to their frugality LP, they don't want them bananas to go waste, so hiring tons of people to eat them. The VP of finance initially disagreed, but later committed to the view point of the Food & Facilities VP.
I am gonna have a backbone and disagree to that. Yes I am right, a lot.
VP of finance first disagreed but then committed