Up to 18,000 Amazon workers in firing line as it chops cost Amazon is set to make around 18,000 job cuts, with tech teams among those bearing the brunt of the losses. The move followed CRM giant Salesforce's decision to slash about 10 percent of its 73,000 workforce while taking a financial hit of $1.4 billion to $2.1 billion, announced yesterday. The global online retailer and cloud …
Why is this all over the news? It's just a 5% reduction, my sympathy if you're one of those affected but companies make headcount cuts all the time when economies take a downturn. Is Amazon going to continue to grow indefinitely? No. Does Bezos and co have to manage Amazon just like every other company on the planet? Yes.
Try working for companies when they state 25% headcount drop, then watch morale plumment for weeks or months at a time!
Amazon Board - Let's not sack the incompetent senior VP who created this mess with inflated / over-optimistic sales projections (and who will go on to cost us hundreds of millions in the future) . Let's lay off the economically challenged people who actually did the work to made Amazon the great company it is today.
Yeah, that makes sense. Not!
I wonder what percentage of unionised workers will be looking for a new job?
I especially wonder if Amazon UK might find they no longer need one of the warehouses and can shift the reduced delivery load to others?
Yup, We're now in a world where no-one, absolutely no-one knows more than their small broom cupboard in the company and wondering why things are going to hell in a handcart while those who cause this flit from company to company causing the same damage and yet getting paid handsomely for doing ugly.
My wife was watching NCIS the other day. The scene was in their forensics lab. There was an Amazon Alexa device there and in use. I know US TV in particular likes the money from product placement, and I have no doubt Amazon paid a pretty penny for that, but it totally killed any pretence at realism for me. I can't imagine a federal investigative agency allowing something like that on their internal networks, let alone somewhere where sensitive conversations are being had.
Well, I've not seen much of it and yes, all those type of shows require suspension of reality, but that one just struck me as even more out of touch with reality than the general run of the mill howlers they all use. I treat the tech side of TV and films as being science fiction since some of it might be possible one day :-)
After all, we laughed at the infamous "Zoom in! Enhance!" to get the car number plate from some crappy CCTV or phone footage. But with camera phones at 4K or higher these days, that's possible in some cases now :-)
This means "We, a corporation still making billions a year, are going to dump other people's workload on the remaining employees. Suck it up or you'll be in the next round of layoffs for complaining or just working your contracted hours".
But the customers are ultimately being fucked over. The service is getting worse and worse and overnight delivery to a nearby back garden is not good enough. I dont think they are very far from a tipping point they'll have difficulty recovering from. Just a few more cost savings...
Can we include the people responsible for Outlook search too?
I realize email search is an unsolved problem, and we totally didn't have a really good solution for it back in the 1980s with mbox format and grep. But still, Outlook is remarkably terrible, and getting worse.
"...It was claimed the vast majority of the losses ["...an operating loss of over $3 billion..."] were tied to Amazon's Alexa and other devices. Amazon responded that it was as committed as ever to Echo and Alexa would "continue to invest heavily in them."
Amazon's appeal to, and use of, George Orwell's doublespeak is completely expected these days, from individuals to mega-corporations; but those who engage in it need to bring a modicum of intelligence to its use. In this particular instance, might this statement not have a profound negative influence on one's inclination to invest in the corporation?
For most of us things like Alexa in the home are nothing more than a 'meh' and 'used it once and it failed' or 'hell no, not having that thing spy on me'
But how it can rack up that much of a loss is beyond me.
The only positive thing I have to say about Amazon is that their AWS teams are pretty good when one of their users decided to try to hack my blog. If Baldy Bezos is going to cull them then that is IMHO a bad move. It will only result in me changing the /32 to /16 on my firewall block rules. I've already blocked all of US company Digital Ocean for doing nowt about hacking.
Amazon responded that it was as committed as ever to Echo and Alexa would "continue to invest heavily in them."
Let me translate that into English for you. Alexa better get her resume up to date 'cause she's got no future at Amazon.
OK with me. People talking to disembodied, imaginary, entities has always seemed a bit creepy to me.
When and where will the going away party be?
Anyone else noticing that Amazon Prime's vaunted "Two-day delivery" has pretty much disappeared? A lot of "Prime" items are now 10-days to 2-weeks for delivery. And don't blame the shippers either. I've got two items right now (1/5) that were ordered 12/23 and have not shipped yet. That's all warehouse back end, not the delivery side.
Amazon Music, included with Prime...? That has pretty much been flushed down the hole too. Try to play music and all the App does is try to upsell to Amazon Music Unlimited.
Companies rise & fall. Sears & Roebuck once dominated the mail-order world, and look where they are today. I am starting to see the downhill side of Amazon's lifecycle.
Nope Amazon Prime is still next day to most of the UK, inc fronting Morrison’s Grocery Home Delivery on Prime.
The Delivery unit is far more built out than in the US where Amazon Local Delivery vans are as ubiquitous as Tesco/Asda/Sainsbury’s/Morrison’s Grocery Delivery vans.
From Lost in Cyberspace:
"I assume the cuts would allow them to get rid of the worst employees, rather than wait for (relatively talented) staff to leave?"
A rational application of statistics--whatever distribution (Gaussian; Poisson...) one chooses to use--would dictate that "Worst Employees" are distributed in a fairly consistent (equal) manner across the entire set--population--known as "Employees"; from the top of the organization to the bottom.
It is an unfortunate historical fact that organizations rarely, if ever, use situations such as this to remove "Worst Employees" consistently ('all across the board'), but as an (unfortunate) reason to remove only employees from the lower levels---while it is the "Worst Employees" at the higher/highest levels who are directly responsible for the organization's poor performance.
Firing people means also less customers for Amazon. If you don't get a wage, you don't buy stuff (or much less).
By pre-emptively laying off people because of "the uncertain macroeconomic environment" , those companies create a vicious circle making the macroeconomic environment worse and for certain.
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