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> He added that the majority of the cuts are on the retail and recruiting areas of Amazon. How large would their recruiting organization be, and what percent d

> He added that the majority of the cuts are on the retail and recruiting areas of Amazon. How large would their recruiting organization be, and what percent do companies cut when they foresee that they won't need to proactively recruit for a couple years (because there will be enough job seekers who will apply to listed positions). I assume they'll still need people to process candidates, but that won't be as many as when they were reaching out to people and trying to woo them. What does retail mean? Is this a reference to Alexa? Or is this about their storefront operations?

Sparkyte 4y ago
Some of their product teams are massive and they don't need to be. Some product teams are so large it just adds too much feature creep putting development teams into development hell. One of the various reasons I left Amazon.
sparrc 4y ago
At Amazon practically everything that’s not AWS falls under “retail”. Including things like prime video and alexa.
- qqtt 4y ago
  That kind of depends on what exactly you are talking about. From a financial statement perspective, Amazon chooses to only disclose revenue from AWS separately from the rest of the business. That's more to do with reporting regulations regarding what needs to be reported once those earnings reach a certain threshold of the entire business - which AWS passed (previously to this threshold being reached, they did not even separate AWS in their earnings reports). Internally, Amazon structures their teams into divisions. There is a retail division, and part of that division works on Alexa (mainly, the shopping skills and shopping experience, trying to make shopping on Amazon with Alexa as easy as possible) - but the main Alexa organization is not under "retail" at Amazon, which includes the actual device development, hardware teams, ML related to voice processing, etc. Same story with Prime Video.

Sparkyte 4y ago

Some of their product teams are massive and they don't need to be. Some product teams are so large it just adds too much feature creep putting development teams into development hell. One of the various reasons I left Amazon.

sparrc 4y ago

At Amazon practically everything that’s not AWS falls under “retail”. Including things like prime video and alexa.

qqtt 4y ago
That kind of depends on what exactly you are talking about. From a financial statement perspective, Amazon chooses to only disclose revenue from AWS separately from the rest of the business. That's more to do with reporting regulations regarding what needs to be reported once those earnings reach a certain threshold of the entire business - which AWS passed (previously to this threshold being reached, they did not even separate AWS in their earnings reports). Internally, Amazon structures their teams into divisions. There is a retail division, and part of that division works on Alexa (mainly, the shopping skills and shopping experience, trying to make shopping on Amazon with Alexa as easy as possible) - but the main Alexa organization is not under "retail" at Amazon, which includes the actual device development, hardware teams, ML related to voice processing, etc. Same story with Prime Video.