
Amazon Is Hiring More Developers for Alexa Than Google Is Hiring for Everything - eplanit
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/03/13/amazon-is-hiring-more-developers-for-alexa-than-google-is-hiring-for-everything/#e8ee25d1985a
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derefr
This comes down to the fact that each Amazon team manages its own hiring (and
so has its own job postings), whereas Google has one top-level posting per
role.

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tyingq
Good observation. If true, this story is a complete waste of time.
Apples/Oranges.

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hossbeast
Isn't it a good observation _if_ it's true?

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tyingq
Urgh. Okay. I thought it was an insightful comment but didn't invest the time
to vet it fully. Was trying to highlight the comment because (again, if true)
it basically invalidates the whole story. That doesn't happen often. The
notable part is that one short comment (could) make the story shit.

If google does indeed limit, for example, "SRE II/ Location" to one posting,
and Amazon expands that to, say, 100 postings, then the premise is worthless.
I don't know how to confirm that.

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boulos
Disclosure: I work at Google.

As others said, there's no data on how many people Google or Alphabet are
going to hire (postings are not 1:1 with individuals). Alphabet apparently
hired 8,057 people in FY 2017 [1]. Note that while HTC had ~2000 people come
over [2], that was not closed within FY 17.

[1]
[https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_releas...](https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf)

[2] [http://www.businessinsider.com/google-htc-employees-
acquisit...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-htc-employees-acquisition-
risky-2017-9)

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jey
How do they determine the number of open requisitions? Seems like number of
job postings is misleading since one posting could be used to hire multiple
people.

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CobrastanJorji
Seems like they don't.

A quick Google search (ha) seems to indicate that Alphabet's growing by about
10,000 people per year or so. Let's be fairly conservative and say 20% of
those folks are programmers. That's still much more than 1,147 people.

Besides that, the sentence "Amazon is hiring 1,147 people for its Alexa
business unit alone" is very different than the headline, which is "Amazon Is
Hiring More Developers." Not everyone working on Alexa is going to be a
developer.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but as stated, this whole article fails the sniff
test to me.

~~~
johnkoetsier
Check the link on the second page of the article about what kinds of jobs are
open in the Alexa division. Pretty solidly
development/technical/product/research jobs

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misnome
Great! Maybe in the future it’ll be able to understand, at 10pm, “Alexa wake
me up at 7” without asking if I mean “In the morning, or in the evening?”.

Considering the time this has been out and the apparent resources, so much of
the basic functionality is locked behind formal command patterns rather than
anything natural (and every “new features” email I get seems to just be
variants of “tell me a joke/fortune cookie/fact”)

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monk_e_boy
Wow, how hard is it to say 7am?

This is new tech, I think your expectations are a little too high. Remember
windows 3?

~~~
seawlf
The thing is, ALL other voice assistants I have tested get this right. I have
submitted three reports to Alexa support about this very thing and they don't
care. It's ridiculous that doing something that is so common would be so
ingratiating.

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throwaway010718
Please tell me one of those new hires will help to release an Echo/Alexa
Bluetooth Low Energy developer SDK.

For years many developers of BLE hardware have been waiting for a BLE capable
smarthome hub to win the market. Amazon has won but whenever I ask about the
BLE SDK, I am told to "stay tuned". They have used that answer for years now.

That means my company will reluctantly release a Wifi Bridge this year. I say
reluctant because we aren't motivated to collect $50 per customer on a bridge
that will become instant garbage if Amazon does finally release the SDK. We
are motivated by how much value we offer our customers, not by how much money
we can collect from them.

Does anyone know if Amazon is actively working on a BLE SDK for Echo ?

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baldeagle
I really hope that you work for a dallas based smart lighting company.

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ams6110
They must have high hopes. Alexa is not something I can ever imagine using. I
like Amazon's web store, but Alexa doesn't seem to offer anything I would ever
want. Do others find it useful?

~~~
jonknee
> Do others find it useful?

They have sold tens of millions of Alexa devices, is it really surprising that
people find them useful?

~~~
rpowers
That logic could also apply to fidget spinners.

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adventured
> That logic could also apply to fidget spinners.

Or stamps. Or shoelaces. Or umbrellas. Or wallets. Or lipstick.

All useful things to millions of people.

One fundamental difference with fidget spinners: they have already peaked and
faded in popularity, Alexa continues to grow year by year. That's the true
difference between something tens of millions of people (soon to be hundreds
of millions of people) find _useful_ , and something people temporarily find
amusing.

~~~
rpowers
... You write as if Alexa wont also 'have already peaked and faded in
popularity' in a couple of years. Growth doesn't mean shit. Retention does.

The example of fidget spinner is to highlight a counter example to the belief
that selling well is an indicator for usefulness. It isn't.

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paxy
Amazon is also laying off a lot more developers than Google is.

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mabbo
Not laying off- just reducing headcount totals. I believe I am in the org
being effected.

People keep moving to Alexa and not being back-filled.

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DannyBee
I know Google's overall headcount numbers for the next year, and while I can't
disclose them, I'll just say this article is silly uniformed nonsense. In
previous years, the reports they have produced have been off by a factor of 10
off what Google later reports in their SEC filings. So I'd take it all with a
large grain of salt.

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non_sequitur
Any insight on why Facebook hiring is surging? (13% of workforce). Is it
mostly on the AR/VR side?

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jorblumesea
How many will be there in 2 years or how many have left in the past 12 months?
They have insane churn, something like avg tenure is 16 months for an
engineer. Between burnout and pip I wonder if this is just hedging bets.

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melling
“Amazon is hiring 1,147 people for its Alexa business unit alone,...”

I’m sure Google is not going let Amazon run away with the voice assistant
market.

There’s nothing like an arm’s race between tech titans to move the needle.

With the additional efforts of Apple and Microsoft, voice as a user interface
will soon be a solved problem.

~~~
samfisher83
70% of people have bought alexa.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home-
sa...](http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-echo-vs-google-home-sales-
estimates-chart-2017-5)

I think amazon has a pretty big lead in the voice assistance market.

I know you can use google assistant on your phone, but if you have your phone
it might easier to just type it in.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 70% of people have bought alexa.

No, the claim in the source that that article is based on is that 70% of
people who interact with a “voice enabled speaker” at least once a month do so
with an Alexa.

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samfisher83
Lets supposed the true sales were 50/50\. That would indicate a majority of
google people are just buying the equipment and not ever using it.

~~~
dragonwriter
The true sales of “voice enabled speakers” could be 100% Amazon, and they
could still not lead the “voice assistance” marketplace, or reach the claimed
70% of _people_. The big issue isn't confusing usage rates with market
position (those probably are close, though in theory they could be divergent),
it's confusing the voice assistance market with the voice-enabled speaker
market (and then also confusing the current market for those products with the
whole population.) Voice assistance isn't about selling dedicated voice
devices, it's about voice-enabled services, for which dedicated devices are
simply one gateway. Dedicated devices are a small share of voice assistant
usage, far behind smartphones, and even behind the combined category of
tablets and general purpose computers [0].

[0] [https://www.voicebot.ai/2017/12/12/46-percent-americans-
use-...](https://www.voicebot.ai/2017/12/12/46-percent-americans-use-voice-
assistants-pew-research/)

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jacksmith21006
Makes sense as the Echo has some catching up to do. We started with the Echo
but since switched to the Google Home as it is far more capable and also you
can use natural language for most things versus the Echo requires much more
rigid language.

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AcerbicZero
I've just hired an extra 8 women, since me and the wife want a baby next
month. /s

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gkoberger
The Mythical Man Month doesn't mean "don't ever hire". It just means "hiring
is not a short term silver bullet," and I have a feeling Amazon is thinking
about the long term. (Bezos talks a lot about how he's currently planning 3
years out.)

