Alexa was the absolute hotness when it was first introduced. There were so many claims how it's going to take over the entire world that I started to question my own sanity. Imagine if you joined that growing business at the time? Same here, what is AWS AI and how can you tell that apart from a hyped-up diversion? Clearly, anything "AI" is extremely overhyped currently, but how can you tell which one is real.

The real trick to job safety is to join a core (but profitable) organization.

I doubt many (if any) cuts are being made in EC2/EBS/S3/etc.

This.

Be willing to do the boring, unsexy stuff that is at the foundation of the business. You'll never be the hotshot, but it's extremely unlikely that you would get caught up in layoffs like this.

> You'll never be the hotshot

It depends on your definition of hotshot. If you stay in the core part of the business and reliably contribute, your star will definitely rise and almost certainly be noticed in some capacity, even at the highest levels of the company.

You're not going to be the poster boy, and trade magazines aren't going to beat a path to your door for an interview, but if job security and absolute authority over your own environment is what you expect.. that's definitely on the table, even in the "boring" parts of the company.

This I've found to be especially true and take less time in any organization that relies on commissioned sales. There's an incentive for internal recognition in those environments that improve the calculus here quite a bit.

There will be multiple personal risks with this approach. First my skills may increasingly become irrelevant, as there are only "boring" work to do. Second I don't get job satisfaction. Of course, it depends on what makes one happy. To me, it is the thrill of solving new problems and knowing that I kept becoming a better problem solver. Third, an org with no growth means incumbents fight for turfs. In contrast, a growing org has increasingly larger pie for us to eat, which means more focus on doing, less on in-fighting. Fourth, I still want to reap some financial reward. A profitable yet non-growing company naturally concentrates its resources to the top, and the future growth is predictable. A growing company has a much better chance to have better financial returns (with higher risks as well).

I didn't say you had to be stuck working on boring maintenance work on a boring team with no problems to solve, just join a boring _organization_.

There are many teams in organizations like EBS/S3/etc working on the growth and next frontier of those services - but those teams are still far less likely to be cut in a layoff than teams doing similar work in riskier organizations. Why? Because layoffs are allocated from the top first. The reliable and profitable S3 org as a whole will be required to lay off far fewer people than the Devices org that is losing $XXXXXXXX/year.

Making contributions to the foundation, profitable parts of the business is one of the best ways to be a hotshot.

Amazon has been cutting a handful of their growing businesses aswell. Take for example Amazon Care. That team tripled in size YoY and was disbanded right before these layoffs. A growing business also needs a clear path to profitability.

My guess is they meant growing in terms of revenue, not headcount.

Yes. Growth in user demand, number of use cases, and revenue. Uber HR used to boast that Uber was the fastest growing company because it grew its headcount faster than google and facebook, which cringes me to no end.

They might just be doing division by division. AWS layoffs tomorrow.