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by motorest 230 days ago
> Not surprising given folks have been saying Amazon/AWS has been a bloated mess for a while now.

Who exactly do you think is saying this? Because from what I'm understanding, so far Amazon has been decimating teams at the expense of overworking them even more, and by cutting projects at the expense of cancelling maintenance and feature work.
1 comments
JCM9 230 days ago
Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money. Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.
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_DeadFred_ 230 days ago
Reminder 'cleaned up' means lives ruined, sick people losing the ability to afford insurance (COBRA is insanely expensive especially considering you just lost your job), homes lost, families forced to move and children losing their friends/forced to new schools, and in some cases suicide.
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motorest 230 days ago
> Like a lot of big tech companies Amazon is a small number of teams with profitable products and a whole bunch of other things that don’t make money.

I think that's a simplistic view of the issue. At Amazon, each team owns at best specific features embedded in products. Some projects such as e-readers are there as loss leaders to support cash cows such as it's ebook market. From your simplistic opinion, Amazon would have cut zero employees from it's books organization as it's business is booming and it's a profit center. But that doesn't match reality.

Also note that you are making that unfounded claim while commenting on news that Amazon is going to focus it's firing round on HR. Is HR a profit center now?

> Events like this are when the teams not contributing to the bottom line are cleaned up.

Except that's bullshit. Amazon decimated teams by firing new arrivals and by transferring projects out of the US into Europe and Asia. This hasn't anything to do with efficiency or performance in mind.

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bix6 230 days ago
Kindle is a loss leader?
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motorest 230 days ago
> Kindle is a loss leader?

What do you think "Kindle" is? Is it a specific device? Is it Kindle for Web? Is it the Android or iPhone apps? Is it Kindle for Windows or Kindle for Mac? Among these, can you count how many are paid?

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apparent 230 days ago
At $50, Kindle Fire tablets sure are. The regular Kindles, maybe less so.
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