this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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To literally no one’s surprise, least of all the leadership at Amazon. No unemployment when you quit.
The problem being that the ones moving on to other jobs are the actual talent. Unlike a targeted layoff, this leaves Amazon with the employees no one else wanted.
That’s assuming the real talent wasn’t secretly given exception to this. And in any case, what’s important isn’t having the best talent, it’s making the numbers look better for end of year. Amazon has become too big to fail, they don’t need top talent to deliver a superior customer experience. Anyone reliant on cloud offerings is stuck. Employees get laid off, prices go up, product gets worse, who cares. People are paying. Thats the stage of capitalism they’re in.
This is pessimistic nonsense.
No, Amazon is still very dependent on their software engineers, and no, it's actually quite easy to move cloud offerings and they face stiff competition from both Azure and GCP amongst others.
Also, virtually every single internal piece of HR, management, customer service, DevOps, random internal tool to do X, is written by other software teams at Amazon. You fundamentally do not understand how big tech companies operate if you think they can afford to hemmorage engineering talent without impacting their bottom line in a multitude of ways.
And this is not even to mention the competition that Amazon faces across all its different businesses: Kobo in ebooks, Roku, Google, and Apple TV in streaming boxes; Netflix, Disney, HBO, YouTube in streaming video; Google, Apple, Spotify, Tidal, in music streaming; Shopify, PayPal, Visa, etc in payment processing; Walmart, Best Buy, Shopify, in eretail, etc. etc. etc.
There are multiple public clouds. AWS is not the default choice a company uses for a public cloud offering anymore.
Heck, I've heard the argument "We're in retail [or insert other fittig market segments here] and Amazon is a direct competitor. Why the heck should we give them any money or any data*?" several times from several companies.
(*Where data not necessarily only meant giving them "company data" but e.g. also metadata about usage, etc. which cannot be avoided and which might give Amazon some insights)