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Amazon Is Hiring More Developers For Alexa Than Google Is Hiring For Everything (gadgetsnow.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gadgets Now: Amazon is hiring 1,147 people just for its Alexa business. To put this number in perspective, it has to be mentioned that this number is higher than what Google is hiring for technical and product roles across its Alphabet group of companies including YouTube and Waymo. According to a report published in Forbes, Amazon is hiring engineers, data scientists, developers, analysts, payment services professionals among others. The Forbes report cites information released by Citi Research in association with Jobs.com. It's clear that Amazon is betting big on the smartphone speaker market if the hiring numbers are to go by. It was the first major company to come with a smart speaker and has almost 70% market share in the U.S. Google has been making in-roads with Google Home devices but still has a lot of catching up to do. The Citi report further mentions that other notable areas where Amazon is hiring are devices, advertising and seller services. Amazon is looking at hiring a total of about 1,700 employees for other divisions.
Hopefully, the trend of voluntarily putting a bug in one's home will flop like a lead balloon. If someone gave me an Echo for free, I'd use it for softball practice.
Nowadays I mostly use it to read the time when I'm in a hurry. That's it.
Maybe 1500 fresh engineers will result in something more useful.
Like adding motion sensors to notice when you're in a hurry so your Echo Plus can proactively tell you the time.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
After Amazon burns through a few million in salaries, there will be big layoffs and they will move on to the next "big thing".
agree.
This is because their current CEO, Pichai, is doing the typical MBA thing and worrying about getting the stock prices higher. He is not worried about long-term dividends. All in all, Pichai is pulling a GE, IBM, and Yahoo on Google.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"So if we hire twice as many people features will take half the time, right?" -Manager
"*Hysterical laughter*" -Programmer
Everyone knows you can just snap your fingers and hire piles of capable engineers who deliver excellent products!
The big tech companies have each compiled a significant list of talented developers. They look at Open Source development projects, student research papers, competitors employees, etc., and compile sizeable lists of talent.
I get calls form Google roughly every 6 months, e-mails from Apple at least once a year, and Amazon a handful of times (once had two of their recruiters trying to recruit me for the same job at the same time!). For positions like these they aren't just putting up a "for hire" sign and hoping talent comes to them -- they already have the talent they want identified, and then just have to find the right set of incentives to bring them aboard.
Yaz
Google only has 80,000 full-time employees. Less than 1147 is slow growth - assuming it's net of attrition then they're actually hiring a lot more, but will plan to grow by less than 1147 engineers.
Amazon has 566,000 full-time employees (plus over 1 million hourly workers not relevant to engineering). Much larger than Google these days. Google used to be the big dog in terms of scale. Used to be. AWS passed them a couple of years ago, and just the retail side may pass them soon.
Soon enough, Google's going to be sittin' round talking `bout glory days (you know they pass you by).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In both cases, how many are related to engineering, rather than sales, logistics, etc? Google doesn't ship much physical product, so doesn't need many warehouse or distribution managers.