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I wonder what type of positions are being targeted in these layoffs? They mentioned which groups but not whom.



My understanding is that most groups outside of Alexa and AWS are in a hiring freeze and they are trying to cut down on the amount of middle-management across the board.


Can confirm, the recruiter spam I get is now only Alexa and AWS - the retail section has all but stopped.


That's pretty terrible because their retail site still needs a lot of work. Sort by stars has always been broken and the problems with counterfeit products and fake reviews needs to be dealt with.


I think it's a safe assumption that search isn't broken, it's just presented whatever way optimizes revenue while still using your choice of sort column as a guideline to keep it from being too blatant a lie.


It's broken from a usability standpoint. "Search by average stars" will give me pages and pages of 5-star products with tiny numbers of ratings before I'll see what I really want: a product with 1,000 ratings and an overall rating of 4.9.


Maybe Bezos decided that on that front mediocre is good enough and decided to move on to other sectors where the competition is more astute than in retail...


I think all positions (SDEs, Business Managers, Marketers) in Amazon's oldest retail businesses (books, consumer electronics, kitchen, home etc.). These are businesses where Amazon has significant market segment share (for example, according to some research out there, in books it is ~80%). So it is natural to think: how many people do you need to keep the lights on? Maybe 5 years ago these businesses needed 100s of people, but with with 80% market segment share, do these businesses need the same number of people? My thinking if I were Jeff would be: If I reduce head count in these businesses, how much more free cash flow would I generate (assuming there is not much room left for these businesses to grow)? In other words, in businesses where I have the highest market segment share, how many people do I need to continue to keep that share. And, if people can be moved elsewhere to higher growth areas, then why not? If I need to move them back to books and electronics at some point in the future, I will.

Disclaimer: I'm an Amazon employee, but the comments here are my own.


Also worth noting that the article doesn't say anything about re-hiring, or transferring. Just laid off. I wonder why..


it does

“As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others,” a spokesman said. “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

disc: Amazon employee




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