Amazon to layoff 10,000: NYT
SEATTLE - "The cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice-assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Devices and Alexa have long been seen internally as at risk for cuts. Alexa and related devices rocketed to a top company priority as Amazon raced to create the leading voice assistant, which leaders thought could succeed mobile phones as the next essential consumer interface. From 2017 to 2018, Amazon doubled staff on Alexa and Echo devices to 10,000 engineers. At one point, any engineer getting a job offer for other Amazon roles was supposed to also get an offer from Alexa." EDIT- attributed the source to NYT not CNBC SOURCE- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare This was reported by New York Times reporter Karen Weise who has been covering Amazon based out of Seattle since 2018. She has reliable albeit anonymous sources for reporting this. #layoffs
NYTimes
3% of workforce
1% of workforce. 3% of corporate workforce as per attached CNBC article.
It is a huge number of people objectively. It is 2x the 50% of twitter and on par with the 13% of meta. Keep in mind this is corporate workforce - so not the warehouse side of things. There have also been quiet layoffs going on at Amazon for awhile - such as the robotics side of things.
there is (was) a layoff proof ura policy?
Amazon's devices organization, retail division and human resources will be impacted as per reports. Any idea about the design team?
I updated the post with a couple paragraphs from the original NYT article. In it, they emphasize that the heart of the cuts appear to be targeted towards hardware and devices teams specifically Alexa.
Devices is Lab126 right? I’m surprised they don’t call that out by name.
This better include the idiots in Compensation who threw away millions of the company’s money entering a recession to pay obscene amounts to remote employees without any nearby employer competition justifying that waste of money. Competing against themselves basically. Seriously we are talking L7s in Kentucky making $700K. Like wtf? Every other company scales that pay way down for the region. Easily wasting $400-$500K a year per remote senior hire. Add that shit up and see what the loss is to the company.
Amazon L7 is equivalent to senior staffs at Meta and Google. They are 2% of the SDE population. 700k is totally justified.
Not in those markets it isn’t. That’s the whole point. What’s justified is what the market will bear, the “cost of labor”. And if you’re just making up your own market, which Amazon got stuck doing, you screwed up.
How about AWS here?
Are SWEs affected tho
Yes
Feel free to DM if you want to beat the rush and join a hedge fund
Which hedge fund(s) are we talking about?
This is ok, it is overall 1% of the total HC. They could have done it through normal attrition backfill freeze and PIP, I think they are knowingly sharing this news to the media and investors for a stock bump.
Total HC including delivery drivers? But it's not clear what pct of swe is affected.
They got a very short lived stock bump but then it went back down again. Also it wouldn't be Amazonian to do this for the stock bump. They made some overly aggressive moonshot bets and they failed. That's ok with them. They are thinking 3+ years out even though it might be hard to believe in times like this. Amazon never seeks to directly pump the stock price for short term pumps like that. It's just not a part of their corporate DNA. As we can see from the daily stock price today if that's what they were tring to do, it didn't work.
Amazon or AWS?
Guys from Amazon denied stock dropping, then denied getting layoffs . Keep on denial 🤷♂️