Amazon has gone from 26,100 to 37,900 employees in just one year | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has gone from 26,100 to 37,900 employees in just one year

mashable.com

85 pointsck222 comments

I love how this article is speculating on what crazy things Amazon must be building by adding that many people. I'll tell you what they're building: fulfillment centers and call centers.

About 5 years ago when Amazon had around 15K employees worldwide and they only had 3K in Seattle and only a few small dev centers around the world. So even if every single person in Seattle was working on development that still only accounts for 20% of the workforce.

I can't find up to date numbers on the number of people in each location but considering there's now 40 FCs worldwide I don't think my math can be that far off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Locations)

If I had to bet, I'd say 2000 of 11000 new employees are either developers, dev managers, or project managers.

It might also be worth asking when the headcount for Zappos got tacked onto Amazon.com.

They are supposedly adding 9 new fulfillment centers this year after adding 11 or 12 last year to meet demand. They had over 50 fulfillment centers at the end of 2010. Thats most likely the source for the majority of their new hires.

1,900 were hired in Seattle alone. I saw that recently on /r/Seattle. Considering their orders are reported to be 40% year over year, 15k - 3k IT staff = 12k x 1.4 ^ 5 is 65k. They only have half that staff total so their efficiency and scaling improvements in distribution means they have to higher less people year over year for warehouse staff.

This is all uninformed speculation. The only public number I've seen is 1,900 hired in Seattle over a 3 month period. That means a lot more than 2k were probably hired for development, which means that Amazon is definitely up to something.

1,900 in Seattle in a 3-month span is a huge number. Knowing that, perhaps they are spending an insane amount of developer time just interviewing more developers.

There's also a forward fulfillment center in Bellevue which might count as Seattle headcount.

I started Amazon in January. It really is a great place to work. Fun projects, smart people to learn from, at least two talks on interesting subjects a week, and lots of time to write code. After working here, I wouldn't want to work anywhere else, I like it that much. The only problem is Seattle. Moving from Dallas to Seattle has resulted in a lower quality of life, but I can deal with it.

What don't you like about Seattle? I was thinking about applying and I am also in Dallas right now.

Housing: Homes are older, smaller, and much more expensive in Seattle compared to Dallas area.

Weather: It is rainy and cold most of the time making it very difficult to take kids out.

Shopping/Food: More choices in Dallas and cheaper.

The Seattle area feels small and slow moving, the exception is the heart of downtown Seattle.

And still hiring here in the Tokyo office :)

Do you work there? I checked the careers site a while ago (and now again that you mentioned it) but there were no technical positions open in Tokyo.

https://uk-amazon.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&in_iframe=1...

Thanks. I wonder why the search results aren't consistent.

Yes, I'm a developer in the mobile web team and we're one of the groups currently hiring. I really like this team and the company's infrastructure is very impressive. You should check us out. Here's the position from our jobs site: http://jp-amazon.icims.com/jobs/127264/job and other positions in Tokyo: http://www.amazon.co.jp/Search-Jobs-version2/b/ref=amb_link_...

I'm not sure where we've advertised outside of our own site, but I'll ask. It may be that recruiters are posting for us, and recruiters typically don't mention the hiring company's name until you call them.

If you send me your resume, though, I can figure out where to route it.

Oh, I was searching over at amazon.com. It does return Tokyo positions but the results seem different. Thank you.

Please let me know how to contact you.

daniel@danielsilva.org

Edinburgh too :)

http://amazondc.com/jobs

I'm curious about corporate culture in an American company in Japan. Does that mean that it's not as bad as the salaryman horror stories that we often hear about? Would you say that the corporate culture in the offices is more American or Japanese? I've always wondered how those two styles would interact with each other.

It's a mix of cultures but heavily tilted towards the culture of the headquarters. I think established businesses like Amazon attract people who fit into the culture of the company -- sure, it's an American company, but it's very different from Oracle or Twitter or Morgan Stanley.

In California a2z (subsidiary of AMZN) is hiring: http://www.a2z.com/jobs/

For those unfamiliar with the a2z name, they're the group that's been building some of the new Android apps like Amazon MP3 and the Amazon Appstore.

Please let them hire some decent people to handle communications to AWS users!

And we won't complain if they also get some engineers with world-class expertise in network attached storage.

I think you mean some more engineers with world-class expertise in network storage: the fact that EBS/S3 have worked as well as they have at scale should indicate they have some already.

Sure, they have failures/slowdowns etc, but they are pioneering the space of providing massive infrastructure to heterogeneous clients at low cost, and still manage to keep it working enough that companies entrust their business to them.

I believe it is due to AWS aka Cloud computing

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