Big Tech Layoffs 2023

“I will only take $50 million a year in comp to add to my $1.8 billion fortune” is such a sacrifice. How many would make it?

Phew thanks guys. Eat the rich!

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Word getting out that REI axed about 8% of their HQ staff in Seattle.

I mean, if you’d just give them their 475$ back they may not have to lay off so many people…

1900 more gone from Salesforce

Should be the last wave… Today was a lot of sales

Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon all had earning reports today.

Amazon lost money for the first time in a decade. The other two also dropped in revenue.

Increasing the price of Amazon Prime made a lot of people just cancel it and buy less shit imo.

“Hey this thing that you use to pay us money? It costs $20 more.”
“You know what, money is tight. I’m gonna have to pass for now.”
8 months later : “I’ve bought like 12 things in the last year from Amazon instead of 135 things.”

Your reminder that neither the tech sector nor the stock market equals the economy:

+517,000 new non-farm jobs in January (estimate: 187,000)
Unemployment falls to 3.4%, the lowest rate since 1969.

Amazon took a double hit. One from the big pile of money they (unwisely) invested in EV startup Rivian. Which is now struggling. Two from the general IT spend contraction happening right now as the pandemic tech exuberance wears off. Their core business of selling cheap knockoff crap through their website was actually up 9%. I’m not worried about Amazon.

I thought AWS was the core business? Not being cheeky or anything, my understanding was that where all the money was, not the store. Was I misinformed?

It definitely has worsened over the years, especially with the addition of 3rd party sellers, and that mixing in directly with Amazon so you have always have to remember to be aware of who the seller is.

Per CNBC in October, AWS was 16% of Amazon’s revenue. That’s definitely a pretty big chunk of it, for sure.

For a while, perhaps even now, it was the most profitable part of Amazon. The retail side has always been big on revenue, but the profit margin was either negative or less profitable than AWS. So it’s 16% of revenue, but probably a lot more than 16% of the profit comes out of AWS.

Their retail side is complete shit - an unusable front end that gives you a full page of paid results before showing what you typed in. Even then its often a knock off instead of what you’re asking for. Used goods sent out as new, incorrect goods sent out, counterfeits mixed with real goods, and haphazard shipping (is it tomorrow, next day, or next week with Prime? Who can tell anymore!).

It is ripe for a competitor with a better UX to steal their retail business.

I’ve seen multiple people say this, but it’s weird, because that’s not what I get when I search on Amazon.

Are folks exaggerating, or is there some kind of variation in the number of sponsored results being shown to different folks?

A lot of it is going to depend on the sort of thing you’re searching for. If it’s something generic with a bunch of Chinese no-brands making them, then you’ll see more ads. If you search for, I don’t know, a PS5, you’l see less.