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Amazon Is Hiring More Developers For Alexa Than Google Is Hiring For Everything (gadgetsnow.com) 80

Posted by BeauHD from the guns-a-blazing dept.
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.
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Amazon Is Hiring More Developers For Alexa Than Google Is Hiring For Everything More

Amazon Is Hiring More Developers For Alexa Than Google Is Hiring For Everything

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  • Phut! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Friday March 16, 2018 @06:25PM (#56272755)
    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.

    • OMG, it might record you having sex

      nobody has sex you nasty dirty person you

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        No, it likely can record all you familial interactions to psychology assess you vulnerabilities to more effectively target them for manipulation. Monitored 24/7, first it supplies suggestion and with a tweak you can not control, it starts issuing instructions, which becomes orders you must obey. Until they have this installed in politicians offices, in every police department, in every government agency managers office and I can access them at any time for any reason to monitor the activity of any of those

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Old man shakes fist at cloud

  • Google is dying (Score:2, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 )
    Google is a dying company. They started dying when they started caring about other things more than technology. They can sit there drinking that sweet advertising revenue stream for a long time caring about whatever they want, but eventually it will catch up to them.
    • 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.

    • Google is dying? Do you have some data to support that claim?

      This graph [statista.com] of Google's quarterly revenues certainly doesn't look like what you would expect from a dying company. Their search engine market share has dropped [statista.com] by less than 4% in the last 7 years, to 87% (Bing has really eaten into this market, you know, topping 5.8%). In 2017, they increased their full time employee count [statista.com] by more than 15,000. Android market share [statista.com] hovers around 87%.

      What exactly makes you think that Google is "dying"?

      • Yeah, if you were running Google, it would be dying also. Why? Because you are only thinking in terms of profits. That is how a company rots from the inside.

        • I cited data. Where is yours?

          • You showed you don't even understand the problem by citing the wrong data. Kodak was plenty profitable and increasing in profit every year until the digital camera was created.

            • OK, I'll bite. What technology is about to dethrone Google?

              • A better advertising network. Is also like to point out that the quality of their search results seems to be dropping.

                • The quality of their search results has been slowly declining for years.

                  • The original people who wrote the search engine mostly left. The people who replaced them didn't understand it, so they rewrote it. Then those people left too. The main reason Google is alive is because they are able to funnel cash into their advertising business like there's no tomorrow
                • It doesn't have to be a better network. What happens to Google if governments start regulating data collection more aggressively (as the EU seems to be doing)? What happens if Microsoft sells off their advertising division and, in collaboration with Apple, pushes aggressive anti-tracking standards through W3C and into Edge and Safari?

              • OK, I'll bite. What technology is about to dethrone Google?

                Smart speakers. Duh. RTFA.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

          Hiring full time employees is a long term investment, it actually hurts short term profit.
          The first thing people do when milking a company for short term profit is to lay off as many people as they can.

      • ...again.

        This graph [statista.com] of Google's quarterly revenues certainly doesn't look like what you would expect from a dying company.

        Doesn't matter how much money you make if you are irrelevant. The money will not last forever... just ask Microsoft.

        • I'm reminded of a Yogi Berra quote. "Nobody goes to that restaurant any more, it's always too crowded."

          How exactly are Google and Microsoft irrelevant?

          If Microsoft were really irrelevant, we wouldn't be talking about them. Microsoft absolutely dominates the business world. Windows still runs on 82% of desktop computers [statcounter.com] worldwide. Microsoft Office so dominates the business market that nobody else even matters. Sure, Bing and Edge are jokes, but Microsoft hasn't exactly died either.

        • Microsoft is the 3rd largest company by market capitalization, just after Apple and Alphabet. It's 42 years old. You may not like it, but MS is an unequivocal business success.

          • You made my point. Lots of money, yet these days how do they matter?

            The decline is not yet here, but basically inevitable. No-one bases anything on what Microsoft does these days, they are not driving the industry any longer, so all they can do is follow the market and stay as affluent as possible - they can draw from the same bar IBM's been drinking at for a while now...

      • The main problem with Google is that they have ridiculous turnover. Most people stay there for a year. When that happens, it's hard to have any continuity. Actually Google has done a remarkable job at it but to my view they are losing direction. If you don't agree that's fine, maybe I'm wrong.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by esonik ( 222874 )

      except DeepMind (targeting healthcare) and Waymo

  • Everyone knows you can just snap your fingers and hire piles of capable engineers who deliver excellent products!

    • 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 h

  • And how many thousands of Staffers does Google|Alphabet have whose sole job is to hire Engineers. I would bet more than the 1147 temporary people that Amazon is hiring.

    Is there ever a decent|accurate Forbes article on Slashdot?

    • Re:LOL. Amazon, Right. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Saturday March 17, 2018 @12:39AM (#56273897) Journal

      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).

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
        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.

  • Unlike the other, Alexa actually sells stuff by the billions and not only tells you the weather you see outside the window.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Wait a minute, I thought Alexa was selling you the weather outside the window.

  • The current CEO just plain SUX and is missing opportunity after opportunity. Worst yet, by the time that larry takes action, google will not only have lost their reputation for being bleeding edge, but they will likely have lost most of their top tech ppl that make things happen.
  • Their *real* mechanical turk ... some live dudes with headsets and voice changers power Alexa!
  • They missed a golden opportunity to hire exactly 1337 employees to work on Alexa.

  • Ah the classic managerial mistake (Score:4, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Friday March 16, 2018 @09:26PM (#56273445)
    "So if we hire twice as many people features will take half the time, right?" -Manager

    "*Hysterical laughter*" -Programmer

  • The numbers in the original "report" are hilariously wrong. Just a few minutes of checking authoritative sources would have told you that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      The Slashdot summary also refers to the hires as developers but the article splits it out over a number of disciplines including "payment services" which I'd guess is the majority...
  • They maybe hiring way more, but who'll be there after a year? I doubt same %% as @ GOOG.

  • nuff said.

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