I see lots of conjecture on the nature of voice assistants, or why they haven’t taken off.
As someone who was at Amazon, and close to this area, let me offer a simpler explanation.
Alexa has stagnated because its leadership has little to no direction. The incentive structure driving the product teams and tech falls under two categories: 1. rest and vest 2. or write documents to build your promotion portfolio and get promoted. Then leave the org to find a job in AWS.
In fact, Alexa could be used as a text book study in empire building.
* Myriad teams that maintain or increase head count each year, with absolutely no meaningful deliverables.
* Services that could be maintained by a 2-3 person on call that have an entire team of 6-8 engineers.
* Tech directors, Sr. SDMs, and SDMs in a race to build their empire to get promoted to the next level. SDMs solemnly hiring head count for the sake of having more reports. Other SDMs hiring SDMs below them, even though there’s no need for additional management (team is idle), so they can show a larger footprint and get promoted to the next level.
Voice assistant tech may as well be hitting a brick wall for technical or human computer interaction gaps that need to be thought much more in depth. But saying this was just an insanely hard technical problem is misleading and missing the bigger picture.
If you build an organization as a pet project and then throw money at it to do whatever the hell it likes, with practically no accountability, of course you won’t get meaningful results.
In recent years, Alexa became a place to chill and wait for your RSUs to vest. I personally know great engineers in Alexa, who are now stressed out of their mind about their work and visa situation because of the layoffs. But look - you decided to join a team where you basically just hang out at work, have a series of useless meetings, or half the time, your manager is complaining for some reason that his team doesn’t all show up to daily stand ups. A ton of extremely talented folks became extremely lazy, and so here we are.
To root cause: misaligned incentives, lack of accountability and a poor work ethic, shockingly poor given at least some other parts of the company are still on the other, opposite extreme.
I see lots of conjecture on the nature of voice assistants, or why they haven’t taken off.
As someone who was at Amazon, and close to this area, let me offer a simpler explanation.
Alexa has stagnated because its leadership has little to no direction. The incentive structure driving the product teams and tech falls under two categories: 1. rest and vest 2. or write documents to build your promotion portfolio and get promoted. Then leave the org to find a job in AWS.
In fact, Alexa could be used as a text book study in empire building.
* Myriad teams that maintain or increase head count each year, with absolutely no meaningful deliverables.
* Services that could be maintained by a 2-3 person on call that have an entire team of 6-8 engineers.
* Tech directors, Sr. SDMs, and SDMs in a race to build their empire to get promoted to the next level. SDMs solemnly hiring head count for the sake of having more reports. Other SDMs hiring SDMs below them, even though there’s no need for additional management (team is idle), so they can show a larger footprint and get promoted to the next level.
Voice assistant tech may as well be hitting a brick wall for technical or human computer interaction gaps that need to be thought much more in depth. But saying this was just an insanely hard technical problem is misleading and missing the bigger picture.
If you build an organization as a pet project and then throw money at it to do whatever the hell it likes, with practically no accountability, of course you won’t get meaningful results.
In recent years, Alexa became a place to chill and wait for your RSUs to vest. I personally know great engineers in Alexa, who are now stressed out of their mind about their work and visa situation because of the layoffs. But look - you decided to join a team where you basically just hang out at work, have a series of useless meetings, or half the time, your manager is complaining for some reason that his team doesn’t all show up to daily stand ups. A ton of extremely talented folks became extremely lazy, and so here we are.
To root cause: misaligned incentives, lack of accountability and a poor work ethic, shockingly poor given at least some other parts of the company are still on the other, opposite extreme.