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.
Evidently Amazon doesn’t either then since, you know, they’re literally doing it. I guess you know something Amazon doesn’t.
So your opinion is that Amazon's leadership decisions are always perfect and they have perfect insight into their company and foresight? That leadership of a tech company has never before undervalued the importance of their engineering staff, or how willing they were to quit in the face of an RTO mandate?
I think they absolutely know how willing their employees are to quit. It’s been demonstrated over and over again in the tech industry for the last couple years. It is far more likely that they’re counting on it, than are somehow all being blindsided by it. Suggesting that the latter is the case would be a… wild and practically unbelievable assertion to make.
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)
Realistically there’s AWS and Azure, and with Azure being run by Microsoft it’s not like it’s going to be better in anyone’s minds. Google’s is a VERY distant third with no real shot to take over, and everything else is a rounding error.