[HN Gopher] Amazon cuts 16k jobs
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon cuts 16k jobs
Author : DGAP
Score : 429 points
Date : 2026-01-28 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| AI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in
| every recession.
| riddlemethat wrote:
| AI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management.
| Probably displacing some of those jobs.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Many of these announcements are bluffs as many users here
| have pointed out. But real LLM-driven layoffs _do_ happen,
| and from what I have anecdotally seen, they follow a pattern:
| leadership assumes the new LLM service will make human
| workers redundant. They then make cuts before the evidence is
| in. What this means is that today, there are many LLM service
| deployments that replaced humans while their actual impact
| remains a mystery. Though it won 't be a mystery to
| leadership forever.
|
| One example client that _shouldn 't_ dox me: Odom
| Corporation, a beverage distributor. They purchased an LLM-
| driven purchasing solution and immediately laid off their
| entire purchasing team, save for a few members who exist on
| the periphery. A follow-up with them showed that the system
| was ordering summer beverages coming into the winter (among
| many other bad purchasing decisions) and causing a dramatic
| increase in unsold inventory. Since they believe that LLMs
| will exponentially improve, they're dismissing it as a one-
| off because this year's models "will be so much better". We
| attempted to advise differently, but stakeholders got
| extremely emotional at even small suggestions that there was
| a fundamental problem. Good luck to them.
| Hamuko wrote:
| The US economy is mostly AI at this point.
| baxtr wrote:
| Artificially Inflated?
| bluescrn wrote:
| About to Implode
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| Afghani Insurgents
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Alarmingly indebted.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Amazing Indians.
| bluescrn wrote:
| And 'The economy' is just the disguise for getting rid of
| expensive workers and hiring cheaper workers elsewhere in the
| world.
| seinvak wrote:
| AI is definitely a solid reason. Even a 10% increase in
| developer efficiency translates to roughly 9% fewer workers
| needed to do the same job. For AI to be cost effective, it must
| reduce headcount.
| layer8 wrote:
| Amazon is mostly laying off managers, however, not
| developers.
| paxys wrote:
| Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement
| press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
| Insanity wrote:
| "Overhiring during the pandemic" was a common, senseless,
| catchphrase a few years ago.
| paxys wrote:
| Ah yeah completely forgot that one.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Amazon just recently used that excuse for their 2025 layoffs
| a few months ago iirc.
| larkost wrote:
| I think the thing to remember is that with interest rates
| being essentially 0 during the (middle/end of) pandemic that
| made it really easy for a lot of companies to finance a
| virtually free checkbook. They were at liberty to try out all
| sorts of new experiments, virally for free (at that moment).
|
| Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher
| interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to
| organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the
| interest payments), and so are cutting.
|
| Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who
| made those decision are never going to personally pay for any
| of it.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| AI is the perfect scapegoat.
|
| Insurance providers are also doing it.
|
| AI is also used in the legal space too.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Quite true. Many corporations use AI as excuse to "re-
| structure" their internal and external costs.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| yeah. pretending to innovate rather than just shed ZIRP-era
| deadweight. like IBM laid off a few thousand "due to AI" _in
| 2023_ , lol.
| trgn wrote:
| "ZIRP-era deadweight"
|
| that's 3-4 years ago now
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Yeah you cannot blame ZIRP anymore, you'd look like a fool
| at this point
| scottLobster wrote:
| You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be.
| I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune
| 500s and not be fired for over a year.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can
| be. I've seen people do zero work (...)
|
| This is the very first time I saw anyone with a straight
| face talking about Amazon workers and mentioning "people
| do zero work, quite visible".
| scottLobster wrote:
| To be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point
| they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care
| what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't
| suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I
| have a bridge to sell you.
|
| Certain sectors are high performing centers of excellence
| whose staff write blog posts that get posted to HN,
| publish papers, get put on the covers of hiring media and
| give speeches. The majority of the company is somewhere
| in the middle holding down their relatively uneventful
| but important functions, and probably a larger chunk than
| Corporate leadership would like to acknowledge are
| deadweight hiding in the cracks.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The comment was likely less about positive corporate
| spin, more about rumors of Amazon's allegedly grueling,
| PIP-centered culture.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah, if that culture is actually widespread I imagine
| their deadweight is more the variety that's figured out
| how to game the system or has connections, rather than
| the "I'm going to do literally no work and watch youtube
| all day" varieties that I've witnessed.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are people at my office who haven't really done
| anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They
| probably weren't doing anything before then either, but
| at least they were there eight hours a day.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why
| would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How
| would they stay employed if their performance review
| showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me
| is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain
| because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies
| that have people just sitting there picking their nose
| watching YouTube? I've never really seen this either in
| BigTech or MediumTech companies.
|
| Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just
| things you don't see or appreciate?
| elzbardico wrote:
| This is really complicated in big companies.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep especially where the number of reports on an org
| chart matters to a Director or AVP.
| browningstreet wrote:
| To defend ICs against middle management a bit: a lot of
| IC work is dependent on decisions that need to be made by
| upper level managers. A 2 week contiguous workstream can
| take 2+ years easy once a few managers ask a few
| questions and need 10-20 meetings to get 5 bullet points
| clarified (so many projects can't even produce that). But
| if that person gets replaced their institutional
| knowledge and work readiness evaporates.
|
| I've been on 10+ projects at big companies and have
| begged to do work. Mostly it was showing up to 3-5
| meetings/week while managers try and figure things out,
| and their VPs reconfigure budgets, priorities, and
| resources. Sometimes I do the work and hold it until
| someone wants it.
|
| There's usually no standard top-down view about what
| happens when 3 VPs change the scope on 5 projects. But in
| reality, that usually means 10-30 people downstream are
| paralyzed. This is also where the tension between "new
| work" and "scalable processes" comes into play (need a
| consultant?).
|
| Add regulatory compliance and approval gates, and then..
| scottLobster wrote:
| If you're a contractor, it's often preferable to keep
| qualified people on staff even if they have nothing to do
| because it makes bidding for future contracts easier. You
| can say "I have X people qualified in Y ready to go"
| instead of "we'll have to hire X people to do Y".
|
| But there's also just bad hires who can get through
| interviews, they won't just leave, and building a case to
| fire those people takes time and management that gives a
| shit. At a large enough program at a large enough company
| with uninvolved management (and they can afford to be
| uninvolved because the program's doing well on all
| tracked metrics), you can get away with being negligible
| deadweight for a shocking amount of time. I wouldn't
| recommend it because your team will hate you, you'll
| build no skills or relationships, and you'll be the first
| to go when cuts happen, but some people are fine with
| that trade for whatever reason.
| heliumtera wrote:
| Headcount increase means growth which means stock go up
| which means short term profit at the expense of long term
| quality of product or service. Soooo many people doing
| absolutely nothing and really no one cares. It is
| beneficial to have someone doing nothing as oppose to
| someone pro active, because doing things breaks things.
| Think about, companies optimize for inertia.
| Extraordinary levels of burocracy, governance, quality
| assurance...at some point it becomes impossible to move.
| Measures are in place not because they increase quality,
| but they reduce movement, and then this is perceived as
| safer. Think about it, less movement == safe. People
| doing absolutely fucking nothing while virtue signaling
| is a perfect fit.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I don't know your particular examples but likely your
| assessment is biased.
|
| We always tend to think that others have it easier than
| us, as we do not have the full picture.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Of course it's biased. I'm just saying I find it quite
| believable that some program was funded 5 years ago under
| different financial conditions and has remained funded
| until now despite no longer being viable.
|
| People generally don't like losing their jobs, and will
| put a positive spin on every report that might be good
| enough to pass muster with middle management bureaucracy
| at a large firm. All it takes is for enough people in the
| chain of command to shrug, sign whatever docs are needed
| and move onto something they care about more.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 10 days later: Amazon to hire 16 000 new workers in its new
| remote Indian campus
| nateglims wrote:
| The layoff includes people in India.
| finolex1 wrote:
| In this case, there might be some truth to the statement.
|
| Not in the sense that AI is replacing current jobs, but that
| they would rather invest that money in Anthropic or on Data
| Center buildouts
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Excuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why
| they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money,
| not as an act of social conformance.
|
| Global economy doesn't look that terrible. Nor is the AI story
| that believable. Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? All the guys at
| Aspen talking about what fraction they cut, just as 5 years ago
| they bragged how bloated their org chart is?
|
| TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real
| reason. I could never understand how all these companies could
| hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work
| on later-to-be-canned open source projects.
|
| But if that's really it, no idea.
| computerphage wrote:
| Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is
| getting more and more productive
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing
| productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-
| IPO marketing from AI companies?
| medvezhenok wrote:
| What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?
|
| It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus
| one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me
| at least a day to write before, for work) - although I
| would have never written this visualization before LLMs
| (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's
| Jevons Paradox in action somewhat.
|
| In order to observe the productivity increases you need a
| good scale where the productivity would really matter
| (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like
| the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model
| improvement)
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| Well you would think if there is increased productivity
| there would be at least a couple studies, some clear
| artifacts, or increased quality of software being
| shipped.
|
| Except all we have is "trust me bro, I'm 100x more
| productive" twitter/blog posts, blant pre-IPO AI company
| marketing disguised as blog posts, studies that show AI
| decreases productivity, increased outages, more CVEs,
| anecdotes without proof, and not a whole lot of shipping
| software.
| bwestergard wrote:
| "What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?"
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
|
| Productivity is by definition real output (usually
| inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could
| be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital
| + labor mix.
|
| I would accept an increase in the slope of either of
| these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase
| due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some
| other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up,
| which at present there is not).
| no_wizard wrote:
| There are two sides to this that I see:
|
| First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology
| that purports to be the next big revolution in computing
| to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the
| expansive use of desktop computing and productivity
| increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not
| been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or
| 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which
| Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following
|
| >Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-
| generation AI models could increase US labor productivity
| growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3]
|
| Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would
| fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in
| productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with
| around 2-2.5% annual gain.
|
| Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is
| multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing
| en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in
| productivity they are having is not driving overall costs
| down relative to the gains, in large part because you
| aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth
| after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different
| trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the
| relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of
| productivity.
|
| [0]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-
| congress-2007-...
|
| [1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to
| show up, particularly in the software field (in fact,
| GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance)
|
| [2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew
| up the awareness of LLMs
|
| [3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-
| productivity-g...
| mrwaffle wrote:
| Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so
| what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the
| next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very
| little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing
| employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to
| job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's
| still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts
| or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles
| it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal
| projection for this year in terms of the broader economy.
| Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that
| they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I
| still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis,
| even. So what's getting cut there?
| miltonlost wrote:
| Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of
| code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and
| 1000 npm dependencies!
| chasd00 wrote:
| and 2+2 will output 4 almost all the time.. just like a
| human would.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be
| using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use
| LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini
| Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've
| seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have
| started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going
| back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at
| Stackoverflow or reddit.
|
| I still use them but find that more of the time is spent
| arguing with it and correcting problems with it than
| actually getting any useful product.
| culi wrote:
| > Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of
| social conformance.
|
| I think you also underestimate how much hiring gives these
| large companies political leverage. A town can be completely
| destroyed when one of these companies threatens to move a
| factory or office
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?
| culi wrote:
| as a response to "Companies hire people to make money,
| not as an act of social conformance.". I've edited the
| comment to make it clear, thanks
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Right - true.
|
| So hiring people is ditching this political leverage. If
| that was the original driver, what's changes to make it not
| worth it anymore?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I could never understand how all these companies could hire
| so many people for so much money, only to have them work on
| later-to-be-cannes open source projects.
|
| Given how much of these companies runs _on_ such projects, it
| really shouldn 't be surprising. It's a numbers game for
| them; Facebook doesn't mind if 300 little OSS initiatives
| fail if it gets them React.
| rob74 wrote:
| ...or 2 years ago they agreed that employees should return to
| the office for at least 3 days per week, of course only as a
| temporary measure before full RTO?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Global economy doesn't look that terrible.
|
| It doesn't? I was born in the 90s (so admittedly 2008 was
| before I started working), but the economy is looking the
| worst it's been in my lifetime to me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The economy is currently great if your income is from your
| investments rather than from your labor. The relative
| comfort and power of the capital class vs. labor class has
| never been farther apart in my lifetime.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, that's one perspective :-) Objectively, the global
| labor market is the hottest it has been in modern history.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Which is why governments and firms in the capitalist core
| are trying to cool it down?
| jeffbee wrote:
| There is a case to be made that wage spirals are bad,
| actually.
| loeg wrote:
| Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard
| from a year before 2020, yeah.
| bdamm wrote:
| 2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think
| you're as qualified as most of us.
| hajile wrote:
| Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market
| back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the
| farce and everything collapsed.
|
| I believe that's what we have today. The economic
| indicators are all worse than they were in 2008. Our
| economy is Wile E Coyote running at full speed in midair
| until he realizes the truth then falls.
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| The fed was taking action by increasing rates up until
| the housing market collapsed, so at least some were
| taking the issues seriously.
|
| I don't have the full context of what the thinking was
| back then since I was in highschool.
| loeg wrote:
| 2008 was a lot worse.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 2008 didn't really impact tech sector much though.
| Companies continued to hire through it, and in fact those
| that didn't often had a headcount deficit afterwards.
|
| And also the worst of 2008 was confined to the US.
|
| What we have now is more like 2001.
|
| Also most of these big companies were completely
| dysfunctional on their hiring through 21/22, just going
| completely apeshit. Now they're making everyone suffer
| for it.
| paxys wrote:
| By what metrics?
| kindatrue wrote:
| There were points in 2008 where there were bank runs.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-12-fi-
| indym...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/oct/11/banking-
| cri...
|
| Italy had to buy 3% of Parmigiano Reggiano production.
|
| https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/rome-
| stage...
| rich_sasha wrote:
| US real GDP is racing ahead:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1 . Inflation is
| fine, even if you don't fully believe the official numbers:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA .
| Unemployment is increasing but below long term mean:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE . Interest rates
| are at a reasonably business-friendly level.
|
| This is all the USofA. Elsewhere, China is allegedly also
| printing GDP growth like crazy. Europe is maybe a little
| stagnant but also not, on the whole, awful.
|
| At the face of it, it's at least a C+ if not better. So if
| you'd claim it's terrible, there's some explaining to do.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It always takes 6 to 12 months for the graphs to match
| the reality on the ground. Because that's how long it
| takes most people to run out of money and credit.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I'm going to set aside GDP for a moment, which is hardly
| the full story but instead I want to zoom in on
| inflation.
|
| The Federal Reserve of St. Louis is using the CPI
| numbers, as most government agencies do. I would contend
| those numbers in and of themselves lie. The ALICE index,
| which is based on more comprehensive data[0][1] and
| closer to what CPI used to represent before the major
| adjustments in the 1990s, tells a different story[2]
|
| Inflation against the ALICE index is much higher than the
| 3% reported in by the Federal Reserve, running at a stark
| 5.9% YoY change. This honestly lines up much closer to
| the reality I see in my day to day life than the CPI
| numbers reported by the Federal Reserve do.
|
| [0]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/methodology
|
| [1]: I recommend downloading the PDF here: https://www.un
| itedforalice.org/Attachments/Methodology/ALICE...
|
| [1]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
| didibus wrote:
| > So if you'd claim it's terrible, there's some
| explaining to do
|
| Here's the explaining: - Unemployment has
| increased. - Long-Term unemployment has increased.
| - Number of gig workers is at an all time high. -
| Layoffs have continued. - Personal household dept
| is at an all time high. - Polls show most people
| have financial anxiety and feel squeezed. -
| Inflation is not under control. - Buy now pay later
| usage is up as much as consumer spending is. -
| Income and wealth inequality are near records high.
| - GDP and consumer spending were also seen peaking before
| the last 5 recessions as well...
|
| We're all talking predictions, I don't think either of us
| should pretend to know the future, but there are
| counterpoints and so the data does not all look rosy.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I'd say these are symptoms (and I'm not denying them)
| rather than causes. My point is that it's hard to find
| hard data that would say the economy is doing poorly.
| Even unemployment, which is your top line, seems... fine?
|
| I just don't understand where the squeeze is coming from.
| Either companies figured out how to do more with less
| people, or they started the cycle with too many people,
| or they don't know what they are doing. Undoubtedly they
| are laying people off, especially in tech. But I he
| symptoms you list don't explain it to me.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist?
|
| This is quite likely a big part of it. There's a lot of herd
| behavior in the financial markets. A few companies fire a
| bunch of people, stock price goes up, others follow suit.
|
| Also, in many cases, this isn't something that anyone pays
| attention to on an ongoing basis, because very few execs have
| the mandate to do it at a large scale, and their attention is
| scarce. So in practice, it tends to be done at intervals, and
| doing it when other companies are also doing it gives cover.
| paxys wrote:
| The reason is the same as always - they want to cut costs and
| increase profits. And there are no laws in America that
| prevent them from indiscriminate firing.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real
| reason. I could never understand how all these companies
| could hire so many people for so much money, only to have
| them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects._
|
| I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for
| inflation are all these do-nothing white collar
| management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money
| printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of
| course these companies tried to use the free money to grow
| when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And
| AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of
| selling AI products!
|
| It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on,
| inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt
| tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.
| pibaker wrote:
| It is an open secret among the ownership class that the labor
| market got too good for the workers around 2021-2022
| especially for tech. What you are seeing now is a possibly
| colluded squeeze on tech employment to keep the workers on
| their toes and stay docile and servile.
| John23832 wrote:
| > TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real
| reason. I could never understand how all these companies
| could hire so many people for so much money, only to have
| them work on later-to-be-cannes open source projects.
|
| The same way they hire so many people for so much money to
| work on AI projects and build datacenter which haven't
| produced actual revenue for any customers (corporate or
| otherwise). I'd rather light money on fire to employ people
| tbh.
|
| I say this as someone who has the 200 dollar Claude sub.
| themafia wrote:
| The value of money halved in the past 5 years.
|
| Salaries did not double in that same time.
|
| That's why they're doing this. They can. Laissez-faire is the
| current regime of capitalism we live in.
| oblio wrote:
| Your comment is wildly out of context.
|
| This specific company is now the 5th most profitable company
| on the planet and its FOSS projects are pitiful and 99% fully
| self serving.
| bluGill wrote:
| Economic headwinds are rarely used. There is always something
| else they blame it on. It has been this way for the 30 years
| I've been old enough to pay attention - and those older than me
| report it has been even longer. There are downturns every few
| years, in turn meaning layoffs - and they always blame
| something other than the downturn.
|
| They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| They're increasingly intertwined these days, so it's not much
| of a lie
| mahmoudhossam wrote:
| Alexa, insert David and Victoria Beckham "be honest" meme
| jimbokun wrote:
| What's the real reason for the layoffs?
| otikik wrote:
| They just wanted to do a mass layoff and (for now) it looks
| better if you say "because AI". It tranquilizes stakeholders
| because they think "AI is taking those tasks, the business
| will be unaffected"
|
| Until the business gets affected
| LunaSea wrote:
| Unstable and uncertain economy
| paxys wrote:
| To lower costs
| jandrese wrote:
| Might just be management doing that "you can cut the bottom
| 5-10% of your workforce every 5 years without impacting
| productivity at all" thing.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Amazon stock is flat over the past year. The rest of the
| "magnificent seven":
|
| - Google: +70%
|
| - Nvidia: +49% - Apple: +7%
|
| - Meta: Flat
|
| - SHOP (closest comp): +19.41%
|
| - Mercado Libre (international comp): +20.73%
|
| So basically, the "tech world" is dividing itself, in the
| eyes of investors, into two camps: companies that will
| benefit from AI tailwinds and companies that will not. And
| all the money is going to the companies that will.
|
| Amazon is more and more considered to be part of the latter
| group.
|
| This is especially concerning of Amazon because it seems like
| AWS--the cash cow--has somehow missed becoming the cloud
| provider for AI compute needs.
|
| As such, Amazon needs to give investors _some reason_ to hold
| amazon stock. If you 're not part of a rising tide, the only
| reason left is "we are very profitable."
|
| So yeah, Amazon will have to cut costs to show more
| profitability and become further investable.
|
| So yes, the layoffs have to do with AI...but not the way they
| are spinning it.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Thanks for an insightful answer!
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| From the article it seems like this is mostly corporate side -
| fulfillment appears to be OK as long as consumers continue
| consuming... or until Amazon pushes robotics side of fulfillment
| to its logical conclusion - getting rid of those pesky humans
| that require toilet breaks and dare to talk about unionization.
| alephnerd wrote:
| All functions in Amazon are heavily impacted - especially AWS
| and WWOps.
| alephnerd wrote:
| How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the
| Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it
| would bring back the jerbs and those of us who warned [1][2] it
| would incentivize mass layoffs and offshoring were hounded.
|
| Before the layoffs were announced Amazon also committed to
| expanding hiring and infra expansion in India [3], and depending
| on the org, affected employees on work visas were offered
| transfers to India in lieu of being laid off [4].
|
| The Trump admin won't do anything about offshoring either - in
| fact technology transfers to India are being encouraged by the
| admin as part of Pax Sillica [5] and GOP leaders in Purple Ag
| states like Iowa [6] and Montana [7] are lobbying for India after
| China pivoted away from American soybeans [8] and India began
| leveraging the China playbook [9].
|
| When forced to choose between swing state farmers and GOP leaning
| SWEs, it's going to be the farmers who win.
|
| [0] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-
| proclamati...
|
| [1] -
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-25/a-100-...
|
| [2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-
| finance-r...
|
| [3] - https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/economic-impact/amazon-
| econo...
|
| [4] -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_...
|
| [5] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815
|
| [6] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-
| reyno...
|
| [7] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-
| to-i...
|
| [8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-
| brazilian-s...
|
| [9] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-
| dai...
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| I thought Bezos paid enough in bribes for it to not affect
| AWS/Amazon?
|
| Sorry, donated.
| 827a wrote:
| Ignoring the reality that the higher fee has only been in play
| for four months; have you considered that there are likely H1-B
| employees in the 16,000 that Amazon laid off?
| alephnerd wrote:
| A large portion of employees on immigration visas were
| offered the ability to keep their job if they transferred to
| Amazon's India offices assuming a team was co-located there
| as well.
|
| The Indian government has been encouraging [0] the H1B rule
| change as well as it helps kick off a reverse brain drain [1]
| right as India was launching it's own version of the Thousand
| Talents [2] program.
|
| [0] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/us-loss-will-
| be-indi...
|
| [1] - https://vrfbharat.org/how-will-the-h1-b-visa-
| restriction-ena...
|
| [2] - https://theprint.in/india/education/reversing-brain-
| drain-mo...
| seneca wrote:
| > How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from
| the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind
| said it would bring back the jobs and those of us who warned
| [1][2] it would incentivize offshoring were hounded.
|
| Yep, offshoring needs to be heavily penalized as well.
| TSiege wrote:
| This poster is right. Offshoring is a growing factor as US
| companies do to white collar work what they did to
| manufacturing
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Does the H1B fee only apply to people not yet in the country? I
| have a student on a student visa who claims I can do the h1b
| sponsor without the 100k fee because they are already there
| with their student visa.
| tucnak wrote:
| Good for them
| still-learning wrote:
| I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be
| seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than
| imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.
| baxtr wrote:
| I mean maybe that's the good news. There is huge potential for
| an upswing!
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| So Putin is culling his people so the next generation can
| have more!
| energy123 wrote:
| I don't think that's how it works. It's not like coiling a
| spring it's more like starting to roll a ball down a hill,
| once you ruin it it keeps getting worse in a feedback loop as
| various systems feed on each other (populism, erosion of
| norms, etc).
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think you're grossly underestimating European naivete.
| You probably did fuck up your relationship with Canada
| though. They didn't seem happy about that one.
| otikik wrote:
| It's going to be so great. Everyone's will notice it. Just you
| wait.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The US was setting itself for quite a recovery in 2024... and
| for a class war too, so IDK what would get there first.
| apercu wrote:
| Some of these are obviously related to the closing of some of the
| retail businesses. And some might simply be middle management
| bloat that happens often at tech companies.
|
| But imagine you're one of the people who remain (e.g., not
| impacted by the eliminated companies or products) and now there
| are fewer people to do the same amount of work? I've seen that
| movie and it usually has an economic impact 6-9 months later when
| people burn out.
|
| It's almost like you can write the script:
|
| Month 0-3: Survivors are relieved, grateful, and over-perform.
| Leadership reads this as "proof the cuts worked."
|
| Month 3-6: Context loss shows up. Decision latency increases.
| Domain knowledge walked out the door.
|
| Month 6-9: Burnout, attrition, and quality failures begin. The
| "hidden layoffs" start as top performers quietly leave.
|
| Month 9-12: Rehiring or contracting resumes (usually at higher
| cost)
|
| The key misunderstanding here is assuming AI substitutes for
| organizational slack and human coordination. It doesn't.
|
| And sometimes middle management "bloat" is misdiagnosed. Remove
| them without redesigning decision rights and workflows, and the
| load doesn't disappear it redistributes to the IC's.
|
| Watch for Amazon "strategic investments" in early Q4 2026 (this
| will be a cover for the rehiring).
| jimbokun wrote:
| I've noticed at my company after a lot of layoffs and
| restructuring and moving people between projects, when I ask
| "who is responsible for X now?" there can be a lot of confusion
| getting the answer to that question.
| otikik wrote:
| "It was Bill, but he got laid off". It doesn't need to be
| confusing.
| watwut wrote:
| That is not an answer to the "who is responsible for X now"
| question. Laid off Bill is not responsible for X now.
|
| Also, it is not useful answer at all, it is an
| uncooperative answer. Whoever is asking about the
| responsible person is trying to work. They have legitimate
| question about who they should contact about X, sending
| them to someone who does not work there is less then
| useless.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was
| responsible, and now is gone. So what exactly are they
| supposed to say? In the context of the GP's post, that
| seems to be the point - there is no longer anybody there
| who is responsible for X anymore.
| watwut wrote:
| > So what exactly are they supposed to say?
|
| Several options, pretty much all of them involve being
| actually cooperative rather then intentionally unhelpful.
| If Bill was part of some other team, point to that team
| or its leader.
|
| If he was in your team, you or leader can ask about what
| the person wants and move from there. Maybe you can
| actually answer the question. Maybe the proper reaction
| involves raising jira ticket. Maybe the answer is "we are
| probably not going to do that anymore". It all depends on
| what the person who came with the question wants.
|
| > But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was
| responsible, and now is gone.
|
| The other people are still there. And the team IS
| responsible for X. And without doubt, they are fully
| responsible for helping figure out who should be
| contacted now and what should be done.
|
| That is normal part of work after any reorganization.
| otikik wrote:
| You assume too much.
|
| I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the
| thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by
| anyone.
|
| It doesn't necessarily even mean that the organization is
| "abnormal". Perhaps the reason Bill was let go was
| because X was not considered business-critical any more.
| watwut wrote:
| > I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the
| thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by
| anyone.
|
| I LITERALLY offered the "we are probably not going to do
| that anymore" option. In your situation, you can scratch
| the probably away. That answer is still actually helpful
| unlike the original answer.
| watwut wrote:
| I haven't detected overproduction after layoff I have seen. It
| was other way round, people who remained were sad, depressed
| and demotivated. What happened was general slow down of
| remaining people + organizational chaos as people did not
| figured out yet who should fill for missing positions and how.
| radicalethics wrote:
| I feel like this is the most natural layoff I've seen in twenty
| years (that is not the same as saying I feel good about it).
| Truly, most software companies need to cut their entire roster
| and re-draft quite frankly. You will need less people and have
| entirely new goals. This is beyond "economic" reality, AI has
| made it intuitive to restructure and reorient. Not doing so will
| just mean you will be blind-sided by any company that leaned down
| and re-envisioned their entire product.
|
| So many products turned into feature mill factories. If things
| can get more concentrated and directed, then I think this will be
| better for all in terms of finding their true purpose in life.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| You first.
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| This is the way I see it. A lot of people can already be
| replaced or should be doing entirely different work to boost
| productivity. It is going to be a battle between people
| fighting for inertia and those that are looking to be ahead of
| the curve.
|
| If it wasn't for an ageing society we would probably be seeing
| things move along faster but people have children to raise and
| mortgages to pay so we will see more inertia for now.
| otikik wrote:
| What's your favorite kool aid flavor? I hear mango is quite
| good
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| "radical ethics" indeed.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is where the Upton Sinclair quote comes in.
| jgbuddy wrote:
| unfortunate but true
| SkyeCA wrote:
| > I think this will be better for all in terms of finding their
| true purpose in life.
|
| I'm sure people losing their good paying jobs and being forced
| into shitty ones, or not finding replacement employment at all,
| will be just what they need to find their true purposes in life
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-
| news/amazon-layoffs...
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793906)
| glimshe wrote:
| I've been hearing about massive Amazon layoffs for a few years
| now. How come the company still exists? Are these layoffs
| followed by hiring at cheaper regions or different parts of the
| company? From my perspective as an occasional Amazon customer,
| things are pretty much unchanged.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| Amazon has 350K corporate roles, so yearly layoffs of 16K is
| only 5% - if you assume some modest re-hiring in lower-cost
| locations, this is just a relatively standard (at least lately)
| pivot out of high-cost US roles into other lower-cost
| economies.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Yea I had to Google their total headcount when I saw the
| headline since the number does sound high, but in reality is
| only 5%.
|
| When you factor in low performers and how most people here
| would view middle management in any other topic thread, it's
| not that insane. If in a pool of 20 workers around you, you
| can't find 1 worker you don't think is a step below the
| others, your hiring pipeline is better than most.
| jansan wrote:
| They actually still have 1,5 million employees. The number has
| been approximately the same since 2021, and those 16,000 won't
| make a dent.
| physicsguy wrote:
| Makes a dent when they fire at the high salary end and rehire
| at lower salaries.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I mean most of those are warehouse workers or delivery or
| customer support or something, right?
|
| Pretty big difference between corporate Amazon and retail
| business Amazon division wise I think
| bickfordb wrote:
| The 1.5M number includes non-corporate employees (warehouse).
| They likely included this number to soften the message. The
| corporate workforce is ~300K so this is actually ~4% of their
| workforce.
| paxys wrote:
| The simple answer is that they hire more than they fire. In a
| lot of cases they will fill a role immediately after they fire
| the last person who was in it. Average employee retention at
| companies like Amazon (both voluntary and forced) is
| ridiculously low - something like 1.5 years. PIPs, forced
| burnout, mass layoffs etc. are all part of the corporate
| strategy. The revolving door helps keep costs low because
| employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have
| vested.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees
| leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.
|
| I am not sure it applies to Amazon though. Amazon in the
| first year pays bonus in cash to compensate for 5% of the
| RSUs vesting. So, they actually loosing cash if people are
| let go after a year.
| fullshark wrote:
| One disturbing possibility is us laborers aren't as important
| we think we are.
| xeromal wrote:
| My company behaves similarly to Amazon and we drop the bottom %
| performers every year via PIP. IDK if this is what Amazon did
| with this layoff but it's probably intentional churn.
| lbrito wrote:
| They hire like crazy. There is unfortunately no shortage of
| people wanting to work there.
|
| They also hire to fire to meet pip quotas.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Amazon's hiring bar has historically been very low, with a
| philosophy that if it doesn't work out you can always just fire
| the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up
| teams for speculative projects. If it doesn't work out you can
| just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic
| large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| It's giving "We've tried everything except layoffs and we are all
| out of ideas"
|
| Except that's been Jassy's number one tool to try and get the
| stock price moving.
| Adiqq wrote:
| It would be too much to ask to have fair and equal society, so
| instead we observe how capitalism/fascism will ruin the world
| over and over again.
| coredog64 wrote:
| FWIW, the employees in question are at least in the 90th
| percentile of US salaries if not 99th percentile (L5 is ~
| $250K, L6 is ~ $399K, and L7 is north of $500K)
| francisofascii wrote:
| In regards to fairness, many times these cuts are based what
| group you are in, rather than performance. You wonder,
| hypothetically, would the L5s and above all agree to
| accepting a 20% pay cut in exchange for not having layoffs.
| It strange that one person keeps the job paying $500K, while
| the other unlucky one will have trouble getting a new $150K
| job due to the terrible job market.
| focusgroup0 wrote:
| >Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger
| campus in India
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Maybe the support scammers can get some real jobs as prompt
| engineers? Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Hey I 'm trying to find some upside around all this._
|
| More AWS outages means more breaks from work?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Sorry, VP says we're migrating. What? _Will they see it
| through?_ Of course not!
| oytis wrote:
| It was pretty obvious what is going to follow axing of H1B
| ferguess_k wrote:
| It's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we
| have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.
| y-curious wrote:
| I guess we just need the other shoe to drop: punish
| companies that are based in the US and outsource to India.
| It'll happen in time if this trend continues
| juujian wrote:
| Amazon has contributed enough to the current
| administration that I doubt they will face any
| consequences. Maybe another round of shakedowns and more
| financial contributions, but they have figured out pretty
| quickly how to play the game and end up on the good side
| of the current administration.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Amazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far
| on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is
| looking like its going to be a box office bomb.
| Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to
| Melania[0]
|
| [0]:
| https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-
| trump-d...
| belter wrote:
| https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230
| klipt wrote:
| Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more
| competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US
| lost the jobs _and_ the workers ' income tax _and_ the
| corporate tax.
|
| America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share
| of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's
| unsustainable.
|
| We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only
| undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.
| Jeslijar wrote:
| Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The
| billionaires can make money regardless of border by
| always moving things around and utilizing their expansive
| resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches
| while manipulating public policy.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| This is reductive and wrong. The billionares make money
| hand over fist either way. They own the companies. They
| don't care if the new campus or factory is in China or
| India. They skim their cut off it's productivity either
| way.
|
| It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies
| that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.
| batshit_beaver wrote:
| That's what the third shoe is for - aircraft carriers.
| boogrpants wrote:
| It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however.
|
| The majority don't care so long as they have enough food
| and shelter and healthcare.
|
| The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made
| up wankeroo.
|
| Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights;
| Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter
| dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the
| biologically essential logistics flowing cause that
| collapse is when the meat suits will toss aside
| socialized truths of history and go crazy primate.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however
|
| I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and
| whether it has been used to make a single valid economic
| argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded)
|
| Just kidding, I know it has not.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The whole point of it seems to be to dismiss the entire
| economic system in favor of something that almost nobody
| has bought in to like bullion or cryptocurrency or
| somesuch for the benefit of the speaker. Currency, even
| paper currency, is one of the most pervasive societal
| "grand illusions" that we share. But that isn't
| necessarily a bad thing as it greases the entire system
| of exchange for literally everyone everywhere.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| The judges of validity will be the architects of the
| current system.
| vidarh wrote:
| Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of
| the business will be a subsidiary.
|
| This is an old, and well tested strategy.
|
| E.g. Commodore International formally had its head office
| in The Bahamas, but the entire leadership team worked out
| of the US.
|
| You can try putting more constraints on what will get a
| company considerd a US company to catch those kinds of
| structures, but as you indirectly point out, there are
| really only downsides to playing that game.
| znpy wrote:
| You don't have to dig commodore from the grave, there are
| current-day examples of companies doing the same.
|
| Just to name one (even if it's not American): Canonical.
|
| It (canonical) is registered in the isle of Man, a fairly
| known tax haven.
| repstosb wrote:
| Also pretty much every company with a "headquarters" of
| some kind in Ireland, notoriously including Apple.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
| hluska wrote:
| Canada's industrial economy was also undamaged. And so,
| by definition, the US was not the only one.
| reactordev wrote:
| No, I think companies that want to stay competitive will
| leave the US.
| drecked wrote:
| Conveniently India and the EU just signed a major trade
| deal.
| no_wizard wrote:
| It would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce
| continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged
| college education and is a symptom of a larger problem:
| As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive
| over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from
| 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is,
| unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense
| contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training
| programs, continual education, robust workforce
| displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We
| lack all of this (and more).
|
| Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are
| better handled by the collective of society, via the
| government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed
| benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books
| of a huge number of companies, from the auto
| manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much
| easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy
| healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also
| has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it
| as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended
| side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase
| in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who
| would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of
| health insurance.
|
| Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill
| was not that the government providing robust funding of
| social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That
| part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the
| conversation around the 'good times past' that many
| Americans romanticize.
|
| Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own
| short term gains over the long term health of the
| community and society in which they were empowered by to
| get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater
| quite spectacularly bad.
| fragmede wrote:
| > employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs.
|
| I think you misunderstand the point of the system.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the
| pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored
| incumbent, like defense contractors).
|
| It would surprise you to know that Booz Allen laid off 3k
| people last month then, huh?
|
| Or Boeing laid off 3200 people in September 2025.
|
| You should look these things up before you pop off like
| that. Three minutes of research is all it takes.
| ra7 wrote:
| If you want American companies to not outsource any jobs
| AND have full foreign market access, get ready to get
| market access revoked from places like India. They'll
| just incentivize their local companies to compete, and
| Amazon has plenty of local competition there already.
|
| Amazon themselves have experienced in the past how heavy-
| handed Indian regulators can be.
|
| It's not a zero-sum game anymore. You cannot have only
| one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.
| greenavocado wrote:
| > You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture
| 100% of the value.
|
| This is the value prop of the US military
| oytis wrote:
| It was, at least it worked for Europe, but Trump has
| seemingly managed to ruin that too.
| 15155 wrote:
| > They'll just incentivize their local companies to
| compete
|
| They already do.
| oytis wrote:
| How do you punish them? Have ICE raid their offices?
| There is already a significant tax benefit for hiring
| developers domestically.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > [p]unish companies that are based in the US and
| outsource to India. It'll happen in time if this trend
| continues
|
| They ain't doing squat.
|
| The Trump admin is encouraging technology transfer to
| India as part of Pax Silica [0] and GOP politicans in Ag
| heavy Purple States like Iowa [1] and Montana [2] are
| trying to mollify India after China pivoted from American
| to Brazilian soybeans [3] and India began tariffing
| pulses/lentils [4].
|
| Additonally, Indian ONG majors like Reliance are
| negotiating with the Trump admin to purchase Venezuelan
| oil now that Maduro is in custody [5] and India SOEs have
| starting creating partnerships with ExxonMobil [6],
| Chevron [7], and Phillips66 [7] to "drill baby drill".
|
| As such, what are you going to do lol - Agriculture and
| Ag adjacent industries employs 22 million Americans [8]
| and the Energy sector employs 7 million Americans [9]
| mostly in Red and Purple states. Software only employs
| around 2 million Americans [10] in either Blue states or
| Blue pockets of Red States.
|
| [0] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815
|
| [1] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-
| release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno...
|
| [2] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-
| travels-to-i...
|
| [3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-
| brazilian-s...
|
| [4] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-
| releases/cramer-dai...
|
| [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-
| reliance-talk...
|
| [6] - https://www.livemint.com/companies/ongc-exxonmobil-
| collabora...
|
| [7] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chevron-
| phillips-66-...
|
| [8] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-
| gallery/chart-d...
|
| [9] - https://usafacts.org/articles/renewable-energy-
| jobs-grew-in-...
|
| [10] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
| technology/...
| boelboel wrote:
| Fire h1b positions, make them leave the US and rehire them
| back in their home country. They can train their new co-
| workers.
|
| I'm not serious but I'm sure some people on H1B have had
| similar happen. From a business POV this would be an ideal
| situation.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B
| visa.
| rat9988 wrote:
| I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough
| american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
|
| I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the
| potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current
| folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass
| interview loops at top tech employers.
| varjag wrote:
| Quality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow
| lacklustre despite all that.
| Xirdus wrote:
| They are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000
| people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass
| firings last year.
| Sevii wrote:
| FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now.
| How can you possibly make the claim that there is a
| surplus of people who can pass the interview loops?
| Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who
| passed those loops.
| drecked wrote:
| You're ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired
| in the years preceding.
|
| Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years
| of the pandemic.
|
| Others like Google increased by 60+%.
|
| You're also forgetting about this little thing popularly
| called AI that happened in the intervening years.
|
| There may be an argument that H1B isn't fit to purpose in
| a post AI world (although that argument is also false if
| we think software engineering will remain a viable job
| going forward, but that's a different topic).
|
| But it's much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers
| when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B
| employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw
| some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously
| posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have
| been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand
| people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher
| increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS
| data doesn't factor compensation in the form of stock
| options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW
| engineers relative to other workers).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >You're ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired
| in the years preceding.
|
| Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify
| layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this.
| If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally
| while down in the US?
|
| >You're also forgetting about this little thing popularly
| called AI that happened in the intervening years.
|
| What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly
| not replacing workers as of now.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've
| got a shortage of.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Ok, then hire them on an O-1 visa. H1B is the problem as
| it creates a indentured servitude class that is going to
| work for less.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| H1B workers cost more on average than permanent
| residents. That's just based on salary. Once you account
| for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration
| process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these
| visas can be transferred between companies.
|
| There's no such thing as an indentured servitude class
| here - this is just part of the giant racist
| misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like
| shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a
| favor. In reality it'll hurt the entire country.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://layoffs.fyi/
|
| The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it
| or be punished financially for attempting to "contain
| labor costs" through leveraging visa workers.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better
| / treatment.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify
| not needing H1B.
|
| As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all
| candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated
| in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really
| doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans
| for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of
| candidates, the better.
| pickleRick243 wrote:
| Better for whom?
| mattnewton wrote:
| Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the
| global workforce.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and
| higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum
| moves of jobs from one place to another.
| snerbles wrote:
| The company itself might not discriminate as a policy,
| but some hiring managers certainly have their
| preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their
| overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's
| consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name
| universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big
| tech companies were much more likely to go through the
| effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your
| candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.
| drecked wrote:
| All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by
| walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of
| biomedical engineering...which makes me think this may be
| related to how Americans demonize math) and observing
| that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second
| generation immigrants.
|
| This ratio gets worse because American students are
| disproportionately more likely to follow up their
| engineering undergrad with law or business school, so
| even if they may be engineers they'll get into business
| and/or something like patent attorney going forward.
| circus1540 wrote:
| The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on
| primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we
| are unable to produce competitive college students. And
| we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling
| into our economy by... importing students and workers.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| 1) There's a very reasonable chance the company
| discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One
| company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops
| a reputation.
|
| 2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's
| 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
|
| 3) If you think there must be something wrong with those
| 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is
| going wrong.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > There's a very reasonable chance the company
| discriminates
|
| I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a
| memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to
| favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
| ipaddr wrote:
| They pay the top Indian firms for candidate referrals.
| And a CEO would say we need more diversity and make that
| a company goal.
| coliveira wrote:
| It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing
| only people who passed an initial filter which at this
| point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some
| characteristics they want in a candidate, and most
| probably the filter is giving you the people you
| mentioned.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "foreigners who often graduated in the US"
|
| This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are
| some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian
| and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business
| schools.
| a99p wrote:
| > And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates,
| the better.
|
| More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it
| necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose
| arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just
| masochism.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India.
| They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.
| weaksauce wrote:
| you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a
| lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company
| that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in
| the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to
| find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go
| back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it
| for twitter.
| square_usual wrote:
| H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an
| employer.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's
| a pretty strong lever.
| square_usual wrote:
| How is that related to a transfer? If you have a job on
| an H1b, you can get another job and switch to it any time
| with a transfer.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| re-read OOP, not your own jump to "transfer"
| SilverElfin wrote:
| It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is
| spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out
| rkomorn wrote:
| I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy,
| but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your
| current job and enduring whatever you have to.
|
| You're not beholden to your employer, but you have
| borderline coercive reasons to stay.
| boelboel wrote:
| Even a 5% chance you and your partner/kids have to uproot
| their life is a bigger sacrifice than a 30% wage
| increase, at least to some people.
| square_usual wrote:
| Great, yes, but you sure as hell don't have "absolute
| loyalty" to a company.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Its all relative. A burned out American can drop out
| tomorrow with no short term plan. H1Bs cannot fo that
| unless they are ready to go back to their previous
| country.
| Rijanhastwoears wrote:
| > it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in
| CS to justify not needing H1B.
|
| Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle
| here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders
| self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the
| starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American
| friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding
| friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for
| jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a
| certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in
| mind already.
|
| Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders
| are desperate.
| x0x0 wrote:
| > as visa holders are desperate
|
| That is the point of most of these programs. If we (as a
| country) do h1b, those people should be on an automatic
| path to a green card.
| profdevloper wrote:
| Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress
| wages for native Americans in an environment where tech
| leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B
| needs to be cancelled and companies should incur
| financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut
| American workers.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >native Americans I know you don't mean indigenous
| people, so what's the cutoff?
|
| Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about
| naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they
| screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in
| when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a
| continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed? Or, in the other
| direction, does your family need to have been here a
| couple of generations for you to count?
| fragmede wrote:
| However many generations it takes for your skin tone to
| be white. See also: the President's wife.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Making h1b an automatic track to a green card (partially)
| removes the ability for employers to exploit employees on
| an h1b.
| profdevloper wrote:
| Hiring American workers at current market wages avoids
| this problem entirely.
| ge96 wrote:
| I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech
| people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are
| under $50K
|
| I will say my first tech job was $40K and now I have to
| have a six-fig job just because of my debt.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech
| people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are
| under $50K
|
| Indeed. The median salary in America for full time
| employment is a little over $63K.
|
| Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to
| voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our
| superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its
| unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when
| blaming foreigners is in vogue.
|
| 1. Or a laid-off American tech worker
| dheera wrote:
| > there are enough american job seekers in CS
|
| To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names
| of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many
| are American.
|
| When you get bullied in American public schools for being a
| "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't
| exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM
| professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional
| people who overcame the adversity but that's it.
|
| The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top
| 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need
| the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > When you get bullied in American public schools for
| being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country
| doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM
| professionals.
|
| Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found
| that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it
| came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to
| other countries and finding that my chosen profession
| made me high value proposition to most women.
| rune-dev wrote:
| As an American this does not match my experience at all.
|
| What profession were those women looking for?
| johntarter wrote:
| Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones
| they marry.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Ha yeah. "You're a really interesting person and a great
| fuck, but you don't make enough money for this to be
| serious"
|
| _the same person, a short while later_
|
| "Why doesn't anyone love me!?"
| mghackerlady wrote:
| They tend to have personality, which I and most women
| consider more important than looks or money in my
| experience
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't think most professional athletes are lauded for
| their "personality".
|
| The other 3, sure. Bartenders need to be good at talking
| to people to succeed, and artists need to be more
| eccentric (in a different way from nerds) for their own
| success.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental
| lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and
| influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also
| want their partner to make more than them.
|
| Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or
| construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer
| of higher status.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Has it ever occurred to you that all those fields have
| one thing in common? it's empathy. The people in those
| positions tend to not be the kind to murder you when you
| say no. Not saying that's true for blue collar men, but
| the odds are significantly higher. Also doctors and
| lawyers naturally tend to be around doctors and lawyers,
| that's hardly the crazy observation you seem to think it
| is
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sure but that doesn't fit the notion of "being a software
| engineer is a turnoff".
| triceratops wrote:
| > climate change scientists
|
| They aren't known for making a lot of money, but I guess
| "I'm saving the world" is an attractive quality in a
| mate.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm
| not most women though.
|
| Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best
| I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related
| to why they're in the field to begin with)
| shimman wrote:
| Tech industry has no problems working with state police
| forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just
| generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.
|
| We should applaud those women for not willing to date
| people that inflict misery and death upon them.
|
| Maybe the kids are alright after all?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| What industry has put actual resistance to these in these
| times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes
| (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the
| knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms
| capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive
| profit margins over the health care stuff.
|
| No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of
| health. You as an individual can only choose to not work
| with the most evil ones.
| tmoertel wrote:
| > When you get bullied in American public schools for
| being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country
| doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM
| professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional
| people who overcame the adversity but that's it.
|
| Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace
| when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common
| that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the
| Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and
| geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the
| level-ups not happen?
| dheera wrote:
| > But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks
| had leveled up a few times since then.
|
| Only in places like Palo Alto, Boston, Seattle, etc.
|
| Not in most of the cornfield country.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied
| but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most
| students in the US do not care about academics more than
| they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math
| and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with
| these people or even is able to have a meaningful
| conversation without being told something along the lines
| of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past
| 3 years, not too many are American.
|
| There are plenty of Americans who don't have a European
| names.
| hajile wrote:
| Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9%
| of STEM jobs.
|
| I won't talk about other fields, but American devs
| (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate
| about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to
| be much better at their job than those from the big-name
| outsourcing countries.
|
| I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I
| lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview.
| (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing
| interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but
| settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped
| between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave
| automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening
| questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality
| in any real way. I caught more people than I could count
| cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how
| they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at
| anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but
| less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz
| (and some of them accidentally showed that they were
| using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they
| didn't have a clue).
|
| It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite
| large and we are a F500 company with the ability to
| attract talent, so I think its likely that we were
| attracting better-than-average candidates too.
|
| EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an
| observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they
| had the same problem. Across our company, we've had
| massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because
| the people they hired did such poor work.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| tell us more about your racial-based hiring
| dheera wrote:
| > I won't talk about other fields, but American devs
| (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate
| about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to
| be much better at their job than those from the big-name
| outsourcing countries.
|
| Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my
| hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA
| provider send a request of documentation to the wrong
| e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken?
| Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge
| me?
|
| > Indian recruiting firms
|
| There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs
| via recruiting firms.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Why is everything broken? American MBA culture. PE wealth
| extraction. A bought and paid for political class.
|
| Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my
| hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA
| provider send a request of documentation to the wrong
| e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken?
| Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge
| me?
|
| Well... you may be answering your own question if you
| think about it really, really hard.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Sorry man, American raised autists beat chinese 996 every
| day of the week. _shrug_.
|
| I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC
| autists are S tier too.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. The most
| important paper in the AI era was written by a team of
| immigrants.
| boelboel wrote:
| Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not
| even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school
| anymore.
|
| Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds"
| because the people getting good grades and into great
| universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just
| strivers instead of nerds.
|
| "Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country
| and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US,
| it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've
| noticed.
| efskap wrote:
| What's an American name? Are you referring to WASP
| (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) names?
| pdntspa wrote:
| bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11
| oytis wrote:
| Very related IMO. Even before Trump US workforce was
| expensive, now limit the influx of new workforce and hiring
| abroad looks like a logical decision
| nerdponx wrote:
| Imagine that! It's almost like it's coordinated. Surely the
| US government would never do something like that on
| purpose.
| oytis wrote:
| I can't imagine Donald Trump would harm the US on
| purpose.
| nerdponx wrote:
| He absolutely would harm some people in the US to benefit
| other people in the US. The same is true for many many
| other businesspeople and politiciansl
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| Nothing to do with it, just following a trend before the
| attacks: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-
| pledges-3-b...
| hajile wrote:
| There haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When
| running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good
| for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American
| people.
|
| Today, he's claiming that we need H1b because we don't know
| how to build computer chips (~75% come from India with zero
| advanced production and another ~12% come from China which is
| also far behind).
|
| His "massive" $100k increase over 7 years is just a bit over
| $14k/yr. I had a former H1b programmer (now legal immigrant)
| I worked with tell me about his experience. Getting paid less
| than $40k to live in Austin, TX and living with a half-dozen
| other H1b indenured servants/slaves in a tiny shared
| apartment just so they could survive the 7 years and get on
| the path to citizenship.
|
| Do you think those companies would bat an eye about
| increasing their expenses from $40k to $54k per year when
| median dev salary back then (2015) was around $92k/yr? After
| a decade of inflation, that $14k is even less important.
|
| Over-immigration with H2b and illegal immigration suppresses
| blue-collar wages (Bernie Sanders famously called open
| borders a "Koch brothers proposal"). H1b and outsourcing to
| India centers suppresses white-collar wages.
|
| Do you see prices dropping as they cut worker salaries and
| outsource? Can you even buy things when you don't have a job?
|
| Trump (and the rest of the uniparty) has enabled corporate
| theft on a scale that's never been seen before and the
| chickens are going to be coming home to roost really soon.
| pram wrote:
| Sorry but making around $40k in 2015 would not, under any
| circumstance, require you to live with 6 roommates in
| Austin. That is EXTREME hyperbole lol
|
| My first IT job in Austin in 2010 paid $18 an hour and I
| had my own apartment and car.
| hajile wrote:
| Maybe they wanted to live together to save money
| (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but
| that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way
| less than half the going rate in that city (I remember
| his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored
| on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told
| me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who
| am I to say his experience isn't real?
| malshe wrote:
| If you read this person's comments, looks like they are
| just making up crap. Apparently this one person has met
| or interviewed all the Indian H1Bs in the US.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor
| underneath.
|
| I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because
| of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the
| code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years
| ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so
| important in an economy where gaining favor from those who
| already have money is far better than just selling a good or
| service.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that
| it was actually just a big team of data people and
| programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they
| would pretend like the AI came up with it.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI
| products", and a good portion of them _do_ have actual LLMs
| attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle
| wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
| browningstreet wrote:
| The AI of ten years ago is not the AI of now...
| sifar wrote:
| But the scam is still the same.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The AI of today _can_ do more, yes. But the path to funding
| and success doesn 't require actual AI use, just the
| appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or
| service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with
| money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and
| you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual
| product.
|
| The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and
| thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started
| his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built
| on a lie that made the company look good.
| conductr wrote:
| "do things that don't scale" and what not
| fuckinpuppers wrote:
| AI = actually Indians
| belter wrote:
| For who does not know, in tech Amazon has always been the
| biggest H1B shop.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...
| Hasz wrote:
| Just Walk Out was actually 1000 people in India.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
|
| This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while
| being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".
| cobolcomesback wrote:
| Where are you seeing "American" jobs? Amazon workers in India
| were laid off too.
|
| There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American
| cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating
| their office in India is ingenuine.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you
| are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big
| corporate presence in that country.
| ericmay wrote:
| > if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will
| have a big corporate presence in that country.
|
| Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in
| other countries, like the United States, without a big
| corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"?
| 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
| OJFord wrote:
| It's not really on them to think of an example to disprove
| themselves? Do _you_ have one in mind?
| ericmay wrote:
| Ok let's try this another way:
|
| if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will
| _not_ have a big corporate presence in that country.
|
| Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me,
| certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove
| myself.
|
| Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim
| all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to
| go do all this work to refute my claims. Something
| claimed without evidence can be dismissed without
| evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or
| not, because in my mind there are a number of large
| online retailers that operate in the United States for
| example, without a large corporate presence here.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > because in my mind there are a number of large online
| retailers that operate in the United States for example,
| without a large corporate presence here.
|
| Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in
| India. You're making claims yourself, so I'd like to see
| examples of companies that operate at that scale in a
| country without corporate presence.
|
| Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn't make
| sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let's
| assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an
| example of A being not true. If someone else claims that
| A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true,
| instead of demanding such evidence.
|
| And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having
| big corporate presence is based on all the big online
| retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and
| others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the
| country.
| ericmay wrote:
| Here was the OP's claim:
|
| > if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will
| have a big corporate presence in that country.
|
| They made a general claim that a big retailer in a
| country will have a big corporate presence in that
| country. I don't know if that's true or not - hence my
| response.
|
| They didn't claim that a big retailer in India will have
| a big corporate presence, nor did claim that a retailer
| approaching 35% of e-commerce must have a large corporate
| presence in the country. It was an ambiguous claim, which
| is why I asked a few follow up questions.
|
| > You're making claims yourself, so I'd like to see
| examples of companies that operate at that scale in a
| country without corporate presence.
|
| I didn't make this claim so there's nothing for me to
| provide.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Here's the claim you made:
|
| because in my mind there are a number of large online
| retailers that operate in the United States for example,
| without a large corporate presence here.
| ericmay wrote:
| That was commentary on the poor format of the arguments
| that were made by the OP and you. It's not a "claim".
|
| But sure, if you insist, Temu is a large online retailer
| that operates in the United States without a large
| corporate presence here. QED.
| oblio wrote:
| Places like Temu are the exception and they should be
| banned. Garbage dumpers.
| OJFord wrote:
| Sure, they've already done it, Amazon, in India.
| ericmay wrote:
| Thanks, let me make some other claims and then you can
| spend time disproving them. Does that sound like a good
| idea?
| kburman wrote:
| I realize it's easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in
| India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having
| worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts
| happen there too.
|
| Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every
| region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so
| much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts
| are happening globally, India included.
| dmix wrote:
| Amazon also employs 1.5 million people globally, 350k of
| which are in corporate. These 16k were corporate. Still sucks
| for everyone involved, I know a corporate sales guy who got
| laid off Microsoft and it disrupted his life pretty
| seriously. As Stalin says one's a tragedy, a millions a
| statistic.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about
| blaming H1B, here's a few more things the headline misses:
|
| 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B
| employees 3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech
| related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those
| roles 4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a
| big retailer in India. Understandably if you're seeing
| revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence
| in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it
| will hire EU nationals in EU. That's not shipping jobs to
| EU.
| echelon wrote:
| Shouldn't we all _want_ H1B rather than offshoring?
|
| That keeps the facilities here, the local employment
| options here, the growth here, the tax base here...
|
| We should want more smart people moving to this country.
| More business creation, more capital, more labor, more
| output.
|
| Immigration is total economic growth for America, non
| zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but
| second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended
| time frame.
| autokad wrote:
| I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home
| prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having
| to pay more for everything. While more taxes are
| collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of
| the economic pain induced by the people living there.
|
| and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in
| university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as
| its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not
| getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being
| hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these
| numbers and %s.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| You could use this exact argument to say nobody should
| ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home
| prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go
| specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if
| nobody had any children.
|
| The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be
| copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having
| children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid.
| To understand why, you might start with the fact that
| immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence
| pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country
| employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
| mc32 wrote:
| Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents
| who were not a tax burden --net positive tax
| contribution. People without Children benefit from the
| taxes paid by the children of people who rear children
| -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their
| tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to
| other retirees.
| repstosb wrote:
| And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen
| immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just
| income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-
| the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes
| (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying
| landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs,
| etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and
| services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-
| citizens.
|
| So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/
| economic deal for the public than children are. At the
| end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people
| were born if they're contributing to society, and the
| grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is
| stupid.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Sales tax is actually paid by the vendor, they just pass
| the cost along. The landlord pays the property tax, they
| just pass the cost along.
|
| It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to
| meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any
| meaningful way.
| lovich wrote:
| Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their
| employer does. I guess we're all just mooches on society
| and only the company owners do anything.
| milch wrote:
| Immigrants pay social security taxes, unemployment taxes,
| ... that they also will never be able to benefit from.
| Those are purely for the benefit of US citizens
| mc32 wrote:
| There is a good case for vetted legal immigration (there
| is need and they fill that unmet need), no question;
| however, that should not be at the expense of the local
| population, regardless of country. In other words, the
| locals should not suffer a depressed job market because
| of immigration. The whole reason for a state to exist is
| to first and foremost look after the wellbeing of its
| citizens that elect the bodies of government.
| 15155 wrote:
| The vast majority of adults and their children will
| _never_ pay their tax burden proportionately.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| How do you figure that?
| 15155 wrote:
| Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top
| 5% pay >61% of all income taxes.
|
| You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and
| "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-
| capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their
| labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but
| the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a
| small percentage of individuals.
| echelon wrote:
| Companies want to cut costs. They will.
|
| If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the
| jobs will be offshored.
|
| Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023.
| The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the
| streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened.
|
| Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern
| Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in
| Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are
| now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies -
| unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia.
|
| Software development will escape to other cheaper
| countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will
| accelerate this.
|
| Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've
| decided that was a very bad idea.
|
| We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce
| means more economic opportunities for startups and
| innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the
| infrastructure is here.
|
| De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is
| rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market
| dominance.
|
| All those people start buying from businesses here. They
| start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local
| economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more
| money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second
| order effects.
|
| America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we
| can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building.
|
| I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million
| citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on
| their education. I want capital to fund their startup
| ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies
| to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor
| capital.
|
| That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of
| opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly
| industrializing America.
|
| Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People
| aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants.
| We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything
| will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.
| dzonga wrote:
| > We need to move the cheaper labor here
|
| Very smart & pragmatic.
|
| however political sentiment is going the other way -
| which is an own goal
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you really think that companies are moving out of
| country because "there's not enough talent", despite
| having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most
| talented universities here: well, sure. That would be
| hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil.
|
| They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I
| don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to
| change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty
| of talent to fill the void.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| We should _want_ open borders. Immigration is a
| significant net positive. But we can settle for
| controlled immigration with liberal limits.
|
| H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me
| that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be
| filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
| jandrese wrote:
| > H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me
| that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be
| filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
|
| The job description is a senior full stack product
| developer fluent in all programming languages and
| frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can
| never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on
| Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and
| don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made
| up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand
| 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
| echelon wrote:
| Our competitors in another country will have no problem
| building those products.
|
| Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers.
|
| Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on
| cost or labor scale / innovation.
|
| If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our
| goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of
| competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they
| become domestically uncompetitive.
|
| So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at
| the cost of killing the future.
|
| I think all of these conversations are especially
| pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to
| accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to
| encourage offshoring.
| jandrese wrote:
| Turns out this is a difficult problem with no one good
| solution. Subjecting labor to a race to the bottom is
| probably the most efficient individual system from a
| capitalist standpoint, but it destroys itself just as
| much as your customers can no longer afford to buy most
| of the products made. The selfish strategy ruins the
| entire system if everybody does it.
|
| Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems.
| Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down
| approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic
| problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency
| because there is far too much information that doesn't
| make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the
| decisions down to where the information is, allowing for
| excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic
| problems.
|
| So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle
| approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual
| arguments over where lines should be drawn.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| If my job is shipped to India today why would I care that
| twenty years later the boss is Indian instead of
| American?
| echelon wrote:
| > If my job is shipped to India today
|
| Immigration isn't "shipping the job to India". It's
| bringing the labor here and contributing to our economy.
| This might have a suppressive force on wages, but it
| lifts the overall economy and creates more opportunity
| and demand.
|
| Offshoring is permanent loss. It causes whatever jobs and
| industry are still here to atrophy and die. The overall
| economy weakens. Your outlook in retirement will be
| bleaker.
|
| If you have to pick between the two, it's obvious which
| one to pick.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > This might have a suppressive force on wages
|
| And that's the general problem. People don't care about
| the overall economy when wages are going down and cost of
| living is going up. Even myself, I couldn't care less
| about the overall health of the economy. I care about
| being able to subsist mine and my family's life style,
| put food on the table, someday own a home, not live
| paycheck to paycheck because all the jobs are paying
| below a living wage, etc.
|
| I'm extremely fortunate to make the salary that I do, but
| I know plenty of others not so fortunate, in other fields
| that don't pay nearly as well as tech does, and probably
| never will. The answer can't be "go into tech" nor should
| it be "let's suppress wages so labor isn't so expensive
| for our domestic companies." And obviously offshoring
| isn't great either.
|
| We can still import talent without suppressing wages, by
| not abusing the program and actually only importing for
| roles that truly, beyond all reasonable doubt, could not
| be filled by a domestic worker.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Innovation is why american salaries in tech are so high.
| They funded trillion dollar companies.
|
| If that becomes so much of a commodity that some other
| countries can do it for pennies on the dime, then yes.
| Salaries will deflate. But we sure aren't offshoring (nor
| using most H1bs) to see more innovation. Quite the
| opposite.
|
| Tech isn't manufacturing where the biggest supply line
| wins by default. That's why I'm not holding my breath
| that the US isn't going to be outcompeted on talent
| anytime soon. Of anything, its own greed will consume it.
| draygonia wrote:
| That seems low. Is it a corporate strategy to set a low
| salary and when nobody local fills it (because it's below
| the competitive rate) they get to hire H1-B?
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| Yes.
| esseph wrote:
| That's the commonly used method for more than a decade,
| yes.
| milch wrote:
| No, because H1B has pay requirements. As someone who went
| through the process with Amazon I can confirm that they
| definitely do offer you a salary that is in line with the
| local market. There might be lower incentive for raises
| down the line, but that's a conspiracy theory at best
| cyberax wrote:
| > Salary is $70,000/year
|
| The lowest allowed limit for such a job is around $140k
| in areas like Seattle.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Allowed by whom?
| cyberax wrote:
| By law. H1b requires the wages to be greater than the
| prevailing wage for similar positions in the region. They
| are published by DoL: https://flag.dol.gov/wage-
| data/wage-search
|
| For this kind of experience, you'd be looking for level 2
| _minimum_ and likely level 3. For King County in WA it's
| right now $149240 and $180710 respectively. Level 4 wage
| is $212202, btw.
| pc86 wrote:
| Link the job description because I don't believe this is
| real.
| pc86 wrote:
| You say "we should want open borders" then argue for
| something that is objectively _not_ open borders. "Open
| borders" and "controlled immigration" are diametrically
| opposed things, regardless of whatever liberal limits
| you're imagining. Almost nobody is arguing for zero
| immigration.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using
| them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage
| suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring
| managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and
| the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we
| really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear
| engineering).
|
| Trump made the cost change some months ago to address
| those concerns but I haven't seen any studies showing
| whether or not those changes had a positive effect or
| not.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?
|
| That's my opinion.
|
| However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If
| you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of
| hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the
| other hand whats the difference for someone in San
| Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey?
| Not much.
|
| And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
| learingsci wrote:
| Guy in San Francisco can move to NJ easier than Mumbai.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great
| concept to get foreign talent that found domestically.
| But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way
| to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts
| both groups in the long run.
| dlahoda wrote:
| would job hop allowance help?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not fully, the problem is much deeper than compensation.
| Let's not have large companies game around the slots
| allotted and using various means to get more slots. And
| put some serious enforcement on how they justify their
| H1b's to begin with as a start.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes, but also salary minimum at top industry percentile
| to prevent use for wage suppression domestically.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 (Top 40
| H-1B employers)
|
| _Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US
| citizens_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719
| - September 2025 (526 comments)
|
| _Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So
| Americans Can Apply_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August
| 2025 (108 comments)
|
| _H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June
| 2025 (4 comments)
|
| _Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 -
| December 2024 (65 comments)
|
| _How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024
| (57 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional
| citations)
| incr_me wrote:
| Wait why doesn't India get to have these things, too?
| learingsci wrote:
| GDP matters very little when I'm homeless.
| belter wrote:
| Many Software Engineers gone. At L6 and L7 level.
|
| Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/
| yojat661 wrote:
| The parent comment is obviously cherry picking news and
| trying to push an agenda.
|
| Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-
| creation-and-investme...
|
| Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-
| invest-50-billion-ai
| stuaxo wrote:
| The US investment link is broken, and most of the UK jobs
| are in "fullfillment", some of the least fullfilling jobs -
| piss bottles all round.
| locusofself wrote:
| Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a
| thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can
| understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker
| in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in
| headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I
| live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I
| work with people in India almost every day and have been to
| India three times on business. When parts of my department's
| work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was
| nervous about that.
| jajuuka wrote:
| As is the case with many mass layoffs. AI just makes a good
| reason to claim. It makes you look progressive to investors and
| it doesn't make you look bad to the public. If AI didn't exist
| it would be some other excuse to spin this as a positive for
| the company and not bad for the affected workers.
| conductr wrote:
| This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting
| inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity
| is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?
|
| I say that as an American that is concerned with our local
| economies and employment but that's not looking through rose
| colored glasses.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the
| basis of cost differential, that's a sure sign the company
| believes the function has been commoditized and is immune
| from competitive selection.
|
| That's a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
| conductr wrote:
| How small can that slice be though?
|
| It's only really needed on true blue ocean innovation and
| where the company has to find the skills where they exist.
| If that's the US, then sure they'll continue some small
| slice of employment here for those projects. But as you
| said, a majority of software is a commodity now (has been
| for a long time, really). I don't feel like many companies
| are doing much innovative anymore and I feel people
| severely underestimate the talent present in other
| countries. So, even if you pointed to 10 innovation
| projects at Amazon then I could counter by saying even 85%
| of those teams could be in India.
| hintymad wrote:
| People may have forgotten what happened back in early 2000s.
| Outsourcing was all the rage, and people in the US were really
| concerned. And then it came the explosive growth of internet,
| of mobile, of cloud, of social network, and etc. And then
| discussion died or at least dwindled enough that we stopped
| paying attention.
|
| It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn
| to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid
| communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been
| growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up
| and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of
| time for them to own more R&D.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Outsourcing in the 90's/2000's failed because you didn't want
| to deskill engineers and reduce their scope, you wanted Jeff
| Dean building pagerank and building Google.
| axpy906 wrote:
| Based on what Amazon team you are in more than half are born in
| India. Makes sense they'd be moving operations there.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by
| circular AI deals and speculation.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| From March 16, 2020 (Covid scare reality / market-drop), the
| marketcaps of Top 10,000 traded companies has doubled (from low
| $70 Trillion USD to low $140 T)
|
| But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
|
| So -- extrapolating -- I'd recon the USD is inflating away its
| problems (mostly: itself).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
|
| No wonder, people are fed up with the US administration and
| its constant firehose of bullshit. But there are no viable
| contenders to the US Dollar as reserve asset - the Eurozone
| is too fractured, China is under currency controls, Germany
| on its own outclasses India, and Japan's economy is headed
| for some serious BS once it follows their population age
| graph.
|
| That only leaves gold... the question is, is it physical
| gold? (And my opinion is: as long as it's not in a vault
| under your control, you're buying IOUs, not gold)
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I think _not physically holding your bullion_ is equivalent
| to _not your keys, not your crypto_.
|
| I do small amounts of both.
| batshit_beaver wrote:
| What's interesting is that the strength of US dollar vs other
| currencies is barely budging in the meantime. Seems like
| everyone else is inflating away their problems too, so it all
| evens out in the end (unless you're poor with no assets, in
| any country).
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Swiss franc is _strongest of fiats_ -- but still _fiat_.
|
| Many historians of many generations contend that debased
| currencies fail first slowly, then fast.
|
| Watching gold has been eye-opening to all living
| generations. Just a few months ago my lawyer didn't believe
| me when I told him "gold just broke four thousand dollars!"
| [day of this post gold hit ATH of $5400]
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't think it's low-key at all, it's plainly obvious that
| there's a recession "on the ground" except that people's stock
| portfolios are being spared. If you're looking for employment
| right now or at prices for staples it's pretty dim.
| kleiba wrote:
| The one phrase I've come to despise is "entrepreneurial risk",
| especially when it's used to justify exorbitant salaries of the
| higher ranks. Because, really, that "risk" for the most part is
| trickled down to the peasants who get laid off at a heartbeat
| whenever business is bad. They're not people with families and
| liabilities and lives, they're commodities.
|
| I'd say your risk of losing your livelihood is higher as a simple
| employee than as a CEO when we're talking about post-startup
| companies.
| maximedupre wrote:
| 10% cut of the corporate workforce in 2 months is wild lol
|
| Crazy most of it is programmers (and/or various other white
| collar jobs) tbh
| bjt12345 wrote:
| Doesn't say it's programmers though but middle management:
|
| > Amazon slashed 14,000 white-collar jobs in late October, with
| CEO Andy Jassy stressing the need for the company to eliminate
| *excessive bureaucracy* by trimming operational levels and
| reducing the number of managers.
| maximedupre wrote:
| Ah thanks for clearing that up.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Yes but this is a lie, a vast majority of the cuts in both
| rounds from October and today have been individual
| contributors, not managers.
| petersellers wrote:
| Do you have a source for that?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Seems sus, even if they got rid of half the managers, would
| that add up to the layoffs they've done?
| justinlords wrote:
| amazon is really doing it's things now, i say to stay cautious
| tchalla wrote:
| Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon
|
| https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198
| volkk wrote:
| is it me or is this ai slop
| Sevii wrote:
| 100%
| volkk wrote:
| it's insane. people just don't want to use their brains to
| communicate anymore i guess. you've just experienced
| something traumatic like a layoff, and you can't even just
| take a few hours to internalize it and be vulnerable
| online, rather than jumping immediately onto social media
| to use the opportunity to sound like a market analyst
| nabbed wrote:
| I am doomed, I guess. I didn't detect that. I thought this
| was sincere expression from an actual person, but an actual
| person who is also running for office and thus needs to tweak
| his writing accordingly.
|
| Although I did note that it was a bit long (I guess I am out
| of the loop on tweets as well. I thought tweets were supposed
| to be short "hot takes". But this is practically an essay).
| paganel wrote:
| It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty
| fast.
| tannerc wrote:
| What exactly indicates the post was AI generated?
| volkk wrote:
| i've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if
| you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make
| you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written
| patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing
| isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it
| to you. IYKYK.
| tannerc wrote:
| I have also used GPTs since 2020. I am also a writer.
| Much of the writing equated with "generated by AI" is so
| precisely because it's broadly trained on real writing.
|
| So the claim of "AI slop" without proof is little more
| than heresy. It would be helpful to have any evidence.
|
| It's not about just the writing in one example, it's
| about writing patterns--which are common--being equated
| with AI simply because they're common.
| volkk wrote:
| if you're a writer, and you're using GPT for so long and
| you can't see it as obvious, i dunno what to tell you at
| this point. i guess LLMs are trained particularly on this
| guy's writing.
| tannerc wrote:
| So you have zero evidence to convey something you claim
| is "obvious"? Got it.
| volkk wrote:
| here's your evidence, tanner https://xcancel.com/PlumbNic
| k/status/2016590894485385347#m
|
| I'm not going to say i told you so, but you should
| utilize these tools more before you start arguing,
| especially when it's so goddamn obvious
| layer8 wrote:
| If you can't explain it, then you don't actually
| understand it.
| volkk wrote:
| i just don't feel like enumerating all of the common
| patterns ai slop produces. again, if you don't see this
| as obvious, i can tell you're clearly not using this
| stuff often enough (which might be a good thing)
| layer8 wrote:
| The thing is, these stylistic patterns existed before AI,
| and weren't completely atypical. Maybe you're using LLMs
| so much that you're over-associating them with AI now. Or
| maybe the author is using LLMs so much that he's
| unconsciously adopted some of the patterns in his own
| writing.
| volkk wrote:
| i think the much higher probability isn't that this guy
| wrote literally like an LLM before LLMs came out, but
| rather that he just used an LLM to write all of it. You
| can see even more of these examples directly on his
| campaign site.
| toraway wrote:
| And despite the downvotes, you were correct.
|
| https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#
| m
| toraway wrote:
| Well he literally confirms it was from ChatGPT in a later
| reply, so there's that.
|
| And his original draft is conspicuously missing the
| telltale "it's not X -- it's Y" and overall breathless
| dramatic flair that people like the poster you're
| replying to (correctly) picked up on.
|
| https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#
| m
| esseph wrote:
| I've been writing in a contrasting style like that since
| probably 5th or 6th grade.
|
| ... I wonder how much the writings of a lot of autistic /
| borderline folks impacted the LLM writing style.
| duckmysick wrote:
| > i dunno how else to prove it to you
|
| A prompt to generate similar output would be a good
| start.
| volkk wrote:
| how's this for your prompt, pal https://xcancel.com/Plumb
| Nick/status/2016590894485385347#m
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| $foo isn't just $bar, it's actually $baz
| khazhoux wrote:
| It's pretty sad that when people write well now, others
| dismiss it as AI.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| It's also a pretty clear indication of AI undeniably
| passing the turing test in case that was in debate still.
|
| No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not
| anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting
| it wrong.
| paganel wrote:
| It's not written "well", it lacks that human touch,
| especially when writing about such a sensible subject, such
| as getting fired. It's too cold, actually too well written
| from a syntactic pov, which makes it inauthentic hence most
| probably AI.
| shimman wrote:
| The author literally admits to using AI in the preceding
| comments...
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > I saw this coming and that's why I'm running for Congress.
|
| Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
| malfist wrote:
| Be the change you want to see in the world. Honestly, it'd be
| good to have passionate congressfolk who aren't overtly
| corrupt or beholden to corporate interests
| tclancy wrote:
| If this is AI slop as the knee jerk comments next to me
| suggest, it's goin to be a hell of a surprise if he gets
| elected this year! https://www.nleeplumb.com/about
| gamegoblin wrote:
| While reading the text, my mental AI alarm bells were going
| off, sent it all to pangram.com and it flags both the layoff
| post and his campaign website text as being 100% AI generated
| evanelias wrote:
| Yikes, the "[contraction] just" phrases on that campaign
| website alone are really over the top. Horrendously
| inauthentic writing, whether it's AI or not:
|
| "wasn't just a job; it was a profound responsibility"
|
| "This isn't just a statistic; it's a sign that we need to
| re-evaluate how we support those who serve"
|
| "My experience isn't just about past success; it's about
| understanding the logistics, technology, and economic
| realities that shape the job market _now_ and how we can
| create _future_ opportunities right here. "
|
| "This experience didn't just teach me about law and order;
| it taught me about managing complex operations under
| pressure, the critical need for clear strategy, and the
| importance of unwavering integrity when the stakes are high
| - lessons desperately needed in Congress today."
|
| "This campaign isn't just about me; it's about us."
|
| All from the same page. Pretty nauseating.
| volkk wrote:
| can someone even prove that this guy is real and not an
| AI persona at this point? like, at what point do we have
| AI agents running for govt with a warm meatsack acting on
| behalf of them?
| ericmcer wrote:
| "moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that
| had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle
| them."
|
| A screenshot later on shows he was a manager who spent his
| entire career in Houston. So... he didn't move and I associate
| "untangling difficult problems" as something an engineer should
| brag about not a manager.
|
| Reads like AI generated slop that doesn't correlate with the
| actual situation.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I took "moved wherever the company needed me" as hopping from
| troubled project to project to help fix. This is often what
| the most senior engineers do, and also the Manager label
| doesn't necessarily mean much in this context.
|
| Not AI.
| albatross79 wrote:
| Yeah these bums better get with the program. If The Company
| needs you to uproot your life and move to Timbuktu start
| packing or hit the bricks pal.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| We must do something about labor offshoring to india. It's too
| much. I want my children to have opportunities here in the
| country they were born in.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Factory workers said that in the 90s too. Didn't work out to
| well for them.
| albatross79 wrote:
| It didn't, but it got us Trump too, so there's that. Let's
| see what happens this time.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Generally speaking the boomer generation has a different
| set of ideals from gen-x/millennials, and they are on the
| way out of shot calling. I don't think things repeat.
| paxys wrote:
| He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution.
|
| How do you stop multinational companies like Amazon from using
| the global talent pool as they see fit and pay whatever wages
| the local market will bear?
|
| Without that it comes off as the standard "elect me because
| foreigners are bad".
| al_borland wrote:
| They need to understand that their profits depend on people
| with disposable income. The US has some of the most
| profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living
| hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon's sales?
| frogperson wrote:
| That is obviously a problem for next quarter.
| mcntsh wrote:
| He says:
|
| 1. Strong data governance 2. Tax implications for layoffs
| (offshoring?)
| mettamage wrote:
| The solution according to the poster is regulation made by
| experts which is why he's running for Congress. It's maybe
| not the solution you were hoping for but it is the solution
| he proposes :)
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Unions that can negotiate contracts that have consequences
| for mass layoffs.
| nateglims wrote:
| I would wager being remote made him a target. It seems like a
| stretch to say it's just the global job market when the layoffs
| are global.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This and being based in Houston, TX, where as far as I know
| no organization has a hub location.
|
| Besides entire teams or business units, the targets were
| people who did not comply to RTO or were not sitting with
| their teams.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Inconsistent jingoistic nationalism.
|
| On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been
| sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And
| on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor
| market with almost no guardrails."
|
| So which is it: did he really work on problems _no one else_
| could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor?
|
| Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is one of two
| things:
|
| a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone
| truly valuable.
|
| b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems
| were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million
| dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon).
|
| What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap,
| foreign, plug-and-play replacement.
|
| It all makes sense when you realize the point of his tweet is
| that he's plugging his run for congress: so yeah, of course
| he's tapping in to the absolute worst nationalistic sentiment.
| Shame on him.
| layer8 wrote:
| Or c) Amazon knew about his running for Congress.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| I don't see a clean solution here. The price/craft distinction
| matters - companies competing on price (Amazon retail) have
| different incentives than those competing on quality and craft
| (Notion, Linear). If you're in the price business, replacing
| expensive US labor with cheaper global labor is rational. If
| you're in the craft business, it usually isn't.
|
| But that framing is incomplete. Amazon isn't just retail - AWS,
| logistics tech, and AI enablement are craft-heavy. Cutting
| experienced people in those areas might be short-term thinking
| dressed up as strategy, not actual optimization. The policy
| question is where I get stuck. Regulate this, and US companies
| risk losing ground to foreign competitors who don't follow
| those rules. Do we want Alibaba as the default American
| retailer? But do nothing, and experienced workers keep getting
| squeezed while "efficiency" narratives provide cover.
|
| What's the intervention that doesn't just shift the problem
| somewhere else?
| guerrilla wrote:
| I'm not reading all that. I thought tweets were supposed to be
| short. What the hell happened?
| maxbond wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_limit#On_Twitter
|
| > In November 2017, Twitter increased its character limit
| from 140 to 280 characters. In 2023, Twitter boosted the
| character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, it
| was increased to 4000. In April, it was again increased to
| 10,000, and in June, to 25,000.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I remember 280, but jesus things clearly got out of
| control.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| The sink got let in.
| Fokamul wrote:
| "AI" - "Always Indian" :D
| webdoodle wrote:
| This is great news! Hopefully so many people have stopped buying
| crap from Amazon, that a tipping point is near, and there entire
| business will fold.
|
| I personally haven't bought anything from Amazon or Ebay in 4
| years, and will never again. I only buy local, or I don't buy.
| Starving the beast one purchase at a time.
| paganel wrote:
| One thing I don't understand when it comes to these big data-
| center investments in India is what will they do when the water
| runs out? Because I do not think that this is environmentally
| sustainable.
| jgbuddy wrote:
| Water consumption is not what the headlines lead you to
| believe- using water for cooling doesn't "consume" the water
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Looping water through a closed heat exchanger doesn't consume
| the water, but using water to evaporatively cool a condenser
| in an industrial chiller does.
| madduci wrote:
| So new AWS outages can be expected
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am beginning to dislike AI more and more.
|
| Though, I think the title is a bit of a misnomer here. In part
| the axing of jobs was done to reduce costs; now AI also may
| relate here or be even a main driver, but I think the title
| oversimplifies it a bit.
| romanovcode wrote:
| - September 2025: US imposes additional 100k USD per visa as a
| condition to eligibility. (previous was 5k - 20k USD)
|
| - October 2025: Amazon cuts 14k jobs
|
| - December 2025: Amazon announces additional 35b USD investment
| to India (total 75b USB by 2030); promises to create ~1m jobs
| there
|
| - December 2025: Random H1B lottery is dismantled, giving
| preference to higher company salary spending e.g. the more salary
| H1B applicant would receive, the better the chances
|
| - January 2026: Amazon cuts 16k additional jobs (30k jobs cut in
| total)
|
| You really don't have to be a detective to figure out that this
| has nothing to do with AI.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| Can you explain in more details how changing h1b rules leads to
| layoffs?
| antonyh wrote:
| I'm outside the US, and boycotting Amazon for anything I can get
| elsewhere (which turns out isn't everything, but best efforts and
| all that). The shift towards AI is either a very bad thing (as
| per Microslop and the raft of recent articles about quality
| dropping), or just a cheap excuse to replace expensive staff with
| cheaper people.
|
| Alternatively they may be using AI in HR as part of the decision
| making, and it's made the determination that these folk can go
| "because of AI" based on past firings and performance since then.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I find it very hard to believe you can't boycott Amazon
| completely. They don't even exist in my country and it has
| never been a struggle to find anything you might get there.
| esseph wrote:
| > They don't exist in my country ... it has never been a
| struggle to find anything.
|
| Amazon absolutely crushed a lot of physical brick-and-mortar
| stores. Drove them out of business.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No, you and people like you drove them out of business by
| switching to Amazon.
| krustyburger wrote:
| But what if you want Amazon Basics brand batteries or
| counterfeit health products?
| Loughla wrote:
| I have yet to find something on Amazon that I can't find on
| either eBay, straight from the retailer, or B&H. And usually
| for less money.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Sometimes yes but this not apple-to-apples unfortunately.
| Shipping and support are two places where Amazon _currently_
| reigns supreme. Getting an item fast and returning an item
| easily are often lacking in alternative marketplaces.
|
| I do try to buy stuff directly but so many times I order it
| and then it comes 10+ days later and often very little info
| upfront or during about when I will receive the order. I
| ordered from a website the other day where it said Dec 22nd
| delivery, it came mid-January and support was unhelpful
| (parroting the FAQ, might have been a LLM).
|
| Now, I've head great experiences purchasing directly as well.
| The Smartest House [0] is where I buy everything I can smart-
| home-related. Their pricing is excellent, their shipping is
| fast, and their support is top-notch. I had a problem with 1
| device, they got on a call and tried to fix it, then when
| that didn't work, they shipped me a replacement.
|
| So I agree, there are great alternative out there and I also
| like B&H. I just wish it was easier to be (more) sure about
| how quick something will ship or how easy returns will
| actually be. Finding consistently good merchants online
| sometimes feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
|
| [0] https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/
| 16mb wrote:
| I have been noticing recently that the level of quality of
| Amazon support has been dropping steadily. And I've also been
| trying to do the same, shopping elsewhere.
| shartshooter wrote:
| This summer I went camping and at the campground next to me was a
| middle manager at Amazon. I've been out of the workforce for
| about a year, so I asked him how much of an impact AI was having
| in his role.
|
| He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would
| replace effectively all of the middle management function that he
| was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him,
| distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
|
| His hope was that he would be retained to maintain the system
| that he built, knowing that every other manager at his level was
| going to be terminated.
|
| It felt like watching someone who is about to be executed be
| responsible for building the gallows. He should've been so aware
| that his job was going to be the first one cut, and he was
| responsible for building a tool to cut his own job. But he was
| optimistic that the cuts wouldn't come for him
|
| Makes me wonder how he's doing today
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Undoubtedly his tool turned out to suck, and his managers
| realized that it made him faster but didn't eliminate the need
| for his role. "Every other manager" is a pipe dream and if it's
| true it means that group is pathetically inefficient and
| underutilizing the talents of even an average manager.
|
| That's what I'd say in 2026. 2-3 years from now, not sure. But
| right now, AI can't run a vending machine without selling too
| many tungsten cubes.
| theusus wrote:
| Source: Trust me bro
| vile_wretch wrote:
| Yes that is how anecdotes work
| mayhemducks wrote:
| If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the
| fact that we all have to earn a living, why would anyone want a
| job where you distill a bunch of input from those "below you"
| and relay it to those "above you"? That sounds like a job I
| would never want to get out of bed to do. If I were one of the
| people fired, I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do
| this BS job anymore.
| samus wrote:
| > If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument,
| the fact that we all have to earn a living
|
| Congrats for making an argument completely disassociated from
| reality.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I guess people need money to buy food to survive?
|
| > I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job
| anymore.
|
| Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no
| money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or
| say have hobbies which costs money.
|
| I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit
| that there is just no way that one can purely just exist
| without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want
| you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you
| like.
|
| Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are
| talking about might not have saved enough money so they were
| a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job
| still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through
| such transition.
|
| I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at
| times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am
| single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a
| wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by
| when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your
| children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.
|
| Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through
| when single before getting married.
|
| Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within
| society & getting the prospectus of some good dating
| connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look
| for any jobs.
|
| I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer
| to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider
| I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly
| like/enjoy fwiw)
| nxm wrote:
| Actual effective managers do much more than "gathering
| information from folks below him, distilling it down and
| reporting that to people above him."
| m0llusk wrote:
| might be able to get a fat contract fee from letting Amazon
| know about that
| conscion wrote:
| > Actual effective managers do much more
|
| And how many managers are effective vs. only information
| funnels?
| BobbyJo wrote:
| The bad ones tend not to be information funnels.
| avalys wrote:
| Firing a bunch of ineffective managers because they can
| easily be replaced by AI seems like a net improvement to
| me.
| varjag wrote:
| Where are the failed programmers supposed to go then?
| pc86 wrote:
| Product Management.
| signal11 wrote:
| Even "only" information funnels have value if they seek out
| valuable info, filter, curate. In reality some funnels in
| this context mutate the message they're supposed to pass on
| :-)
| zwaps wrote:
| LLMs do all that pretty well :-)
| Ancalagon wrote:
| "What would you say you do here?"
| nitwit005 wrote:
| In some organizations, the upper management generates a real
| burden on people below them with ever changing demands for
| information.
|
| I have to assume some of it serves a social, rather than
| practical purpose, like having people re-assure them that
| projects are going well. If that's the case, automation may
| just not make sense.
| paxys wrote:
| Did you copy paste this from LinkedIn?
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| lol thank you I was trying to see if anyone else also read
| this with a raised eyebrow. "Yes so these ICs and other non-
| management staff are going to be reporting to this LLM and
| then _magic_ and executives are informed of everything they
| need to know."
| varispeed wrote:
| > gathering information from folks below him
|
| I thought that information is only available through organic
| conversations by the watercooler and cross polination of teams.
|
| Does it mean you no longer will have to come to office as long
| as you talk to AI over Slack?
|
| Or are they going to slap laptop on a Roomba and still mandate
| office attendance?
| mrtksn wrote:
| TBH the last 20-30 years was exactly like that but computers
| were eliminating other peoples jobs for really good profits for
| the investors and really good salaries for the workers doing
| the elimination. Before that people were eliminating blue colar
| workers with highly productive machines and industrial robots.
|
| I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different.
| Software ate the world and now AI will eat the "software
| professionals".
|
| When this is over, just like the rust belts there will be code
| belts where once highly valued software developers will be
| living in decaying neighborhoods and the politicians will be
| promising to create software jobs by banning AI.
| carlcortright wrote:
| this is a very pessimistic take
|
| could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways
|
| it's hard to be sure
| izzydata wrote:
| It feels more like a really optimistic take on AI. I won't
| say it is impossible, but I haven't seen anything that
| suggests AI is going to do what OpenAI and Nvidia claims it
| will.
| chrysoprace wrote:
| There might be a time when software developers become
| obsolete, and I don't pretend to know the future, but if
| today's models are anything to go by then it won't happen any
| time soon.
|
| At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly
| skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.
| geodel wrote:
| > At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for
| highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks
| like.
|
| Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people
| of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of
| _highly skilled_ successful people of today could soon be
| below average category, jobless and can be called clueless,
| stuck in old ways who didn 't simply see what is happening
| in the world.
|
| And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming
| even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously
| trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did
| decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| I kill jobs for a living, and always wondered when the
| promise of "Low code" would kill my job.
|
| Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for
| competent managers and clerks to automate their own
| processes.
|
| Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make
| it to retirement.
| robotswantdata wrote:
| No offence, but this is 5% of what a middle manager does. We
| automated this task years back without LLMs too.
| baxtr wrote:
| Oh dear. I wish middle management was simply "gathering
| information" from the decks below and reporting it to the
| bridge.
| aorloff wrote:
| Tell you what, why don't we get rid of management altogether
| and just have a flat org ?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Been there, done that. It brings its own set of chaos and
| office politics. The shadow org structures can be worse
| than the official ones.
| oblio wrote:
| Because social animals have hierarchical social structures.
| Bhilai wrote:
| > A few years into the company's life, founders Larry Page
| and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any
| managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a
| completely flat organization, eliminating engineering
| managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea
| development and to replicate the collegial environment
| they'd enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted
| only a few months: They relented when too many people went
| directly to Page with questions about expense reports,
| interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And
| as the company grew, the founders soon realized that
| managers contributed in many other, important ways--for
| instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees
| prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting
| career development, and ensuring that processes and systems
| aligned with company goals.
|
| https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-
| man...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| IMO, this could be solved by having a finance team with
| good workflows and a real human resources
| team/psychologist on staff that would handle all of the
| interpersonal drama. It's an interesting anecdote but I
| don't think it was that great of an attempt or structured
| well enough to work.
| buran77 wrote:
| > this could be solved
|
| With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate
| a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to
| tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that
| away and brings no insight.
|
| Human beings will _always_ organically organize
| hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative,
| one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the
| end informally you will end up with the same structure.
| And it 's hell to deal with that when formally all have
| the same authority so none can override each other, but
| one guy just gathered enough support to do whatever he
| wants.
|
| Do you think someone far away from everything you do will
| have a magic "workflow" that tells them what to do about
| the budget you requested, about the strategic decision
| you need, or about your conflicts, about who has to do
| the nice jobs or the shitty ones? And why would they have
| any say, they're not the boss.
|
| Your logic is no better that those pretending today that
| a team of AI agents "with good workflows" can just
| replace all the programmers.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| He probably still lives there
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It felt like watching someone who is about to be executed be
| responsible for building the gallows
|
| Perilaus of Athens designed the Brazen Bull, a hollow bronze
| statue used to roast victims alive. When he presented it to the
| tyrant Phalaris, Phalaris was so disgusted by the cruelty of
| the device that he ordered Perilaus to be the first person
| tested inside it.
| toddmorey wrote:
| "He should've been so aware that his job was going to be the
| first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool to
| cut his own job"
|
| That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone
| else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while
| actively looking elsewhere.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > "He should've been so aware that his job was going to be
| the first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool
| to cut his own job"
|
| > That tool was going to get built whether he did it or
| someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building
| it while actively looking elsewhere.
|
| This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain.
| It really feels like an I was only following orders command
| just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this
| stick as they was hoping for
|
| At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like
| some form of active suffering for someone to write the
| replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete
| dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).
|
| All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so
| even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight
| really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN
| or other websites.
|
| So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords
| like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train
| better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.
|
| All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks
| about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.
|
| Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate
| where things are going if they are net positive for humanity
| itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.
|
| Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are
| lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay
| to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.
|
| Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise
| them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout
| the world?) be established.
|
| I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I
| always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's
| lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much
| throughout the world)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would
| replace effectively all of the middle management function that
| he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below
| him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
|
| Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time
| anyway.
|
| I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire
| to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this.
| retinaros wrote:
| lol. it does. its a good description of about 90% of the mgrs
| simianparrot wrote:
| Seems like Amazon is doing the right thing cutting down its
| corporate workforce then.
| jdmg94 wrote:
| you would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep
| failing upwards in organizations like Amazon
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Fake management is far more common than real management. Most
| of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like
| activities.
| babyoil wrote:
| You should watch this movie:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527793/
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine
| once.
|
| At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We
| no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe
| makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have
| telephone operators.
|
| Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution
| to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service
| work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
|
| I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so
| you have to find something to do with them. But that also has
| negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because
| they can't make the guarantees big companies can.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX
| Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a
| great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my
| house up for sale and received an offer.
|
| Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a
| nurse.
|
| My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Sorry to hear that.
|
| But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable
| seeing the difference between these two types of things
|
| On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $
| of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be
| riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into
| fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative)
|
| I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5
| million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money.
|
| My point is that all of these companies burn massive
| amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it
| and then some of these same companies go the other way and
| then fire people working.
|
| I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You
| worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting
| anyone new up and running would be hard especially given
| you had customer relations.
|
| Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you
| off? I mean, is the company doing _really_ bad (I am
| considering something like tailwind happening here?) or
| what exactly.
|
| But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their
| business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your
| (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more
| specifics if possible.
| esseph wrote:
| > Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable
| solution to me.
|
| That's what the TSA is in the US
| Shocka1 wrote:
| IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a
| big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which
| gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one
| of them being automation, with really good examples in the
| past of labor saving machines like the printing press being
| created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my
| profession might be like the printing press, but it's
| definitely in the crosshairs now.
|
| If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable
| to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan
| ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and
| I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad
| things happen and we have to make the best of them and move
| on.
| BigHatLogan wrote:
| What is your repurposing plan, if you don't mind my asking?
| I am trying to think of alternatives too, but it's quite
| stressful.
| greekrich92 wrote:
| What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most
| loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it.
|
| If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is
| necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer
| is obvious.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from
| layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having
| to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on
| the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger
| underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls.
| "At least the companies will be more efficient" is such a
| cucked take, insane
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have
| since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation
| revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior
| economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled
| industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive,
| diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy
| will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two.
|
| Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service
| industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software
| engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of
| millions of jobs in the US alone.
|
| COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream
| politics about improving the welfare system of the country to
| prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the
| profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-
| wealthy shareholders and owners.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable
| solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training,
| UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
|
| If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the
| US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly
| posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any
| current American politician is considering, and the overton
| window is speeding in the opposite direction.
|
| You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I
| don't know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be
| UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial
| price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly
| disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI
| bans) are out there, and if you don't fight for the thing you
| want, you're gonna get one of those.
| learingsci wrote:
| Where was he from? Recent hires are sometimes the first to go,
| depending on certain other factors.
| aprdm wrote:
| If that's his value add as a manager then that's a problem in
| itself
| diyseguy wrote:
| I have always felt that if I could do a job really well, do
| work that required no maintenance, was basically 'self-healing'
| so to speak, with documentation so clear and easy to understand
| that someone could pick up where I left off without asking me a
| single question. For me that was always my aesthetic and goal
| in any work I did.
|
| Yet, here I am, an experienced software engineer, unemployed
| for over a year now. It still seems to me the right ideal, so
| the 'karmic' outcome feels unjust really.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Amazon is flailing at this point and now in a pattern of mass
| layoffs every 3-6 months. Not good.
|
| Leadership can't even gets its story straight about why... "It's
| AI" correction "Pandemic over-hiring" correction "delayering"
| correction "restoring our culture" correction "actually AI!".
|
| There's a whole mess of rando projects and teams with bloated
| management layers and often little to show for it revenue wise.
|
| While on the one hand it's obvious that mess needs to be cleaned
| up, on the other hand the top leadership has been in place for a
| while so the very people that created/oversaw the mess are
| struggling to position themselves as the one to fix it. That
| seems unlikely to work and the best talent in areas like AI seems
| to be fleeing voluntarily.
|
| Everything I hear from the inside says moral is in the toilet and
| the once proud "culture of innovation" is in shambles with teams
| focused on politics, infighting, and endless reorgs.
|
| Frankly, sounds like a s*itshow and what Jeff Bezos predicted as
| "Day 2" for the company's eventual slow decline.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| "Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum's
| annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would
| spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used
| as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway."
| arjie wrote:
| The difference between the reaction on HN to the Amazon layoffs
| and the ASML layoffs is interesting. Perhaps it's driven by the
| fact that people here are employed by US companies and not by
| ASML, so we're able to admire how ASML is cutting 4% of its
| workforce as reducing the number of managers but Amazon cutting
| 1%^H^H 4% of its corporate workforce so that they can get to
| "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy"
| is considered to be because of other secret causes that are a
| sign of the company failing.
| fishingisfun wrote:
| dont count warehouse works and corp folks in the same bucket.
| thats like mixing commercial and residential real estate
| markets in one report without diff
| arjie wrote:
| A reasonable correction. Apparently 25% of Amazon employees
| are in corporate or AWS[0]. So they're both roughly 4%
| layoffs.
|
| 0: https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-
| amaz...
| franktankbank wrote:
| Amazon has 150k in India alone, presumably corporate? So
| now you are looking at closer to 7%.
| seinvak wrote:
| Who said employees in India are unaffected by these
| layoffs?
| franktankbank wrote:
| ASML isn't laying off their blue collar labor and neither is
| Amazon. Apples to Apples would be US based corporate numbers.
| nielsbot wrote:
| I like to think about this story from years ago when Nintendo
| wasn't doing so well and there was talk of layoffs
|
| "Nintendo CEO's refusal to layoff staff goes viral following
| industry-wide cuts"
|
| https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/nintendo-ceos-refusal-t...
|
| I realize these companies aren't identical, but interesting to
| compare approaches. I also expect Amazon hires and fires more
| easily instead of growing more slowly and steadily.
| ikamm wrote:
| Bear in mind Nintendo has ~0.005% of the employees Amazon does
| caminante wrote:
| It's also ... Nintendo's share price was stagnant, Japanese
| business culture...
|
| FWIW, 8,000 (nintendo) / 1,600,000 (Amazon) is 0.005, so
| 0.5%.
| bgirard wrote:
| Revenue per corporate employee are both ~1.5m/corp
| employee. I think it really comes down to how the company
| is managed and culture.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Nintendo Japan pays its engineers ~$62k a year
|
| https://www.portal.e2r.jp/fixurl/nintendo_career_job/id/4
| /2?...
|
| Amazon starts at 3x that and goes up
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries
| virtue3 wrote:
| Some additional context to explain the numbers:
|
| Game industry in general pays like shit - japanese
| software engineering pays even worse, so double negative
| modifiers on salaries in this comparison.
|
| source: worked in games, worked at japanese tech company
| with us division.
| malfist wrote:
| If you exclude non-corporate it's only ~300k.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Wow.. that sounds like a huge number..
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Only off by a factor of 100.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Nintendo stock is up 7.5x since 1998, compare that to amazon
| which is up like 200x. Nintendo shareholders would be pissed
| about its performance if they were american, cant say how
| Japanese feel about it given cultural differences.
| etchalon wrote:
| Nintendo shareholders seem to have a fundamentally different
| value set.
|
| I'd argue it's a better one.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| not better for making money
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Yes, that's the point.
| msabalau wrote:
| Yeah, sure, starting from 1998 just a year after Amazon went
| public, when it was still just a glorified online bookstore,
| is the most relevant and honest comparison one could make to
| Nintendo.
| 33MHz-i486 wrote:
| having worked there. Amazon has toxic managers, culture that turn
| ICs against each other. no tech vision. insane politics. low
| caliber people gatekeeping.
|
| Their stock will go up the next year or two only because of their
| luck of partnering with Anthropic (back when they were a distant
| second choice to OpenAPI)
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| but the partnership is fake marketing. Amazon uses TPUs more
| than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP, and Google owns a
| larger percentage because they were much earlier investors,
| despite amazon investing more money.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on
| GCP
|
| Can you share a source for this claim? Graviton is a CPU, it
| would be strange to train LLM (I assume you meant LLMs) on a
| CPU.
| deadbabe wrote:
| "If you're not laying off tons of workers, do you even _know_ to
| use AI? Shitty companies still use human labor... don't invest in
| them."
| elzbardico wrote:
| The problem is that Amazon cuts a lot of jobs all the time, then
| re-hire. This could just be just regular, routine amazon evil,
| and they are leveraging this to make Wall Street happy
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| you always hear about a stream of layoffs but It doesn't give the
| full picture. what i'm more interested in is what is their total
| employee count over time. that represents the net hiring net lay
| offs, is what counts at the end of the day
| stego-tech wrote:
| Again, I feel like the general comments are missing the forest
| for the trees by relying on witty quips about AI or retreading
| (legitimate) outsourcing grievances, instead of actually
| addressing the root problem on display:
|
| Companies, be they highly profitable global conglomerates like
| Amazon or smaller Mom and Pop shops, have _zero incentive
| whatsoever_ to retain staff. _None_. In fact, they have _every_
| incentive to axe as many workers as possible, as often as
| possible, _profit be damned_. So long as governments and
| shareholders reward job cuts with stock price or compensation
| bumps, this trend will continue.
|
| To simplify: _we have built a global society where 99% of people
| must work to survive but have zero mandates that employers
| provide jobs with livable wages and benefits_. That is, and will
| remain, the crux of the issue at hand.
|
| I don't think it's a controversial idea to impose broad and
| lenient regulations on companies to prevent this sort of
| activity. Made a profit last year? No layoffs allowed without a
| year's worth of severance and benefits is such an immense
| deterrent that most employers will find ways to repurpose staff
| internally rather than fire them for a quick share bump - though
| with the consequence of slower hiring, as companies don't want to
| be burdened with too much unnecessary talent. There are literally
| hundreds of policy ideas out there that nobody wants to pull
| because it'd inconvenience Capital, but we're at a crossroads
| where we either mandate Capital behave with the barest of
| minimums of decency and respect for the workforce they mandate
| exist through Capitalist markets, or we break their arm outright
| and tax the absolute shit out of them to provide a high quality
| of life for every worker regardless of present employment.
|
| Right now, they get to keep all the money while outsourcing risks
| to the workforce, and all that's done is create shit like this:
| thousands let go not out of business need, but of business greed.
| wanderr wrote:
| My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.
|
| Yet another round of layoffs being blamed on AI. As with last
| time, this is not due to productivity gains from AI, rather it's
| due to wanting to reallocate budget towards investing in AI. (and
| maybe an excuse for something they already wanted to do)
|
| I think some productivity gains from AI are real, and I've
| experienced some firsthand, but reductions in force being ENABLED
| by AI are not, and I don't think we will see much of that for a
| good while still.
|
| AI is attracting a lot of investment dollars because it's seen as
| disruptive; the capabilities it potentially unlocks for people
| are enormous. The problem is that general intelligence is still
| far away (fundamentally cannot be reached with the current
| approaches to AI, in my opinion), and the level of investment
| required is so high that the only way folks are getting that
| money back is if it does enable a level of layoffs that would be
| crippling to the economy.
|
| Additionally, there is not a huge difference between the top
| models, and thanks to the massive investments the models are
| incrementally improving. It seems obvious from the outside that
| AI models are going to be a commodity, and good free models put
| downward pressure on prices, which they are already losing money
| on. So I think it's going to be a race to the bottom, and is very
| unlikely to be a winner-takes-all situation.
|
| I think this means that the reward for big tech companies pouring
| insane amounts of money into AI will be maintaining their current
| position, or maybe stealing a bit of business from each other.
| That's why I think AI is more of a tax on big tech than a real
| investment opportunity.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| Another article about this:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ywzxlxnlo
|
| > In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon
| one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to
| be in the office full-time.
|
| With this kind of employee hostile policies and threat of job
| cut, how does it manage to be the A of FANG (or as they call it,
| MANGA)? But apparently people still want to get a job there? The
| pay is a little less than other companies in the same league. So
| pay can't be the reason. Or is it? Honestly want to know what it
| is that make IT people get a job there?
| varispeed wrote:
| > what it is that make IT people get a job there?
|
| The job market is toast, so people take whatever they can.
| dh2022 wrote:
| I think a lot of laid-off programmers would settle for any job
| in this environment... It is a employer market definitely.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Tech is dead. Has been since 2020.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Denial everyone. Amazon will have the same profits running on AI
| and robots with minimal expenses. All the other companies will
| follow. Wake up to reality.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| We've had crazy covid years where every new grad was making
| 250k+, and now every 3-6 months we have layoffs which has not
| surprisingly been paired with blaming it on offshoring, H1b etc.
| Clearly the current system can't withstand much of a shock,
| what's going to happen if we get a full 2007 style recession,
| will the blame game go even higher on steroids, some times it
| feels like it's quite bad already. I don't look forward to that.
|
| I think and I know HN commentators are going to hate this, but
| Thiel was right when he wrote that the current system only works
| with fast continuous growth. Ideally multiple growing sectors,
| contributing to the economy. Anything else, and everyone
| immediately starts fighting for scraps joining their tribal
| identity or whatnot. The only way out, would be more rapid growth
| in multiple sectors, not just AI, or a complete breakdown of the
| existing system which does not leave me hopeful for anything
| better. I in fact like the existing system quite a bit, but maybe
| that's just me.
| dzonga wrote:
| Insightful Comment from X -
| https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=2...
|
| I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems
| executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and
| fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one
| else could untangle them.
|
| And I was still cut.
|
| Here's the part we're all supposed to politely ignore: in the
| U.S. right now, experience isn't an asset, it's a liability. And
| if you're expensive because you're good at what you do, the
| system eventually "optimizes" you out.
|
| We're now in the realm of hold onto your nuts -- sink or swim --
| ownership of your own company is the only way out
| andai wrote:
| Yeah, it looks to me like the best time to be a business owner,
| and the worst time to be employed.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| Americans pay a pretty hefty health insurance penalty when
| they leave steady employment to start their own business.
| There have definitely been better times to be an entrepreneur
| in this country.
| kg wrote:
| Finding investment is harder than usual in this current
| economic climate, too. At least in some industries like
| mine.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Finding investment is harder than usual in this current
| economic climate, too. At least in some industries like
| mine.
|
| If I may ask, what industry are you referring to?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Europe/ (Anecdotally India, I have seen some good health
| insurances for what 50$ here?) might have a better time for
| being business owners as well.
|
| One of the issues in these countries is usually Funding. I
| am unable to understand how people get money to fund the
| projects & have people be willing to pay when there are
| alternatives which will cut you down as well probably
| burning through their funding in the first place.
|
| Suppose, I want to create a cloud provider, A) ownership
| costs went up due to ramflation, B) there are now services
| which are using VC money which will burn _insane_ amount of
| money to give users for free.
|
| As a person without VC money or without wishing to seek VC
| money to simply burn it, (I personally much much prefer
| seedstrapping and bootstraping), the idea of business
| ownership becomes difficult as well.
|
| Plus don't forget the fact that the idea of getting a
| customer becomes hard in the first place given how organic
| mediums are being overwhelmed (like Show HN etc.) and
| personally the idea of marketing doesn't really click with
| me of things like paying for this as if its a rent to the
| overlords like google and facebook smh but I guess if
| someone's a business owner, they might be forced to play
| this game.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I wonder what a few years of this mentality will do. Greed is
| never reasonable. This will have consequences.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That person's pinned message shows that he started his campaign
| for Congress almost 2 months ago. He says he was laid off
| today. He's been Tweeting non-stop daily and appears to be
| working hard on his campaign.
|
| I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from
| this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time
| commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with
| being an L7 manager at Amazon. It's not something you do in
| your free time.
|
| His campaign platform also appears to be about AI taking jobs,
| so I'm more than a little suspicious that getting laid off was
| part of the plan rather than an actual surprise.
|
| The claim that he "built systems" should also be taken in the
| context of his job title, which was in product management. I've
| held the Product Manager title for a few years, but I wouldn't
| claim "I built" during those times, because I was not the one
| doing the building. This strikes me as a little misleading.
|
| Also that post is full of classic LLM-ism from beginning to
| end. Note the overuse of the "It's not this, it's that" format
| and other LLM tells. I might give someone the benefit of the
| doubt if they were immersed in LLMs so long that they started
| speaking like an LLM, but given all of the other context
| surrounding this post I have a high suspicion it was written by
| AI.
| dymk wrote:
| 7 years at Amazon without being laid off (promoted, in fact)
| and you blame it on 2 months of what you assume is poor
| performance
| geodel wrote:
| From my LinkedIn feed I feel those Nigerian princes of past
| are now Amazon L7 managers.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Was the X poster saying in a very long winded way that his job
| was taken and lots of our jobs will be taken by foreigners who
| cost less?
| levocardia wrote:
| What's especially funny is that the post reads exactly like it
| was written by an AI.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Why pay people when you can steal from foss projects and use both
| forms of ai (Actually indians and Artificially Inflated)
| brewdad wrote:
| Funny enough, I have an acquaintance who has been job hunting for
| almost a year. They are expecting an offer from Amazon Corporate
| later this week or early next week. They are early in their
| career and will cost less to hire, so it still makes sense I
| guess.
| kjsingh wrote:
| If you have to post this, you are the reason for fear factor:
|
| Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm -
| where we announce broad reductions every few months. That's not
| our plan.
| taswellian wrote:
| What do you mean? Who is "we" and "our"?
| sp1982 wrote:
| My data is a bit incomplete for amazon but here is some analysis
| on where they seem to be focusing based on job postings:
|
| https://jobswithgpt.com/company-profiles/amazon/
| robaato wrote:
| Is it a coincidence that my Amazon (UK) checkout is repeatedly
| hitting an error page at the moment?!
| albatross79 wrote:
| What a shithole of a company, why does anyone work there, is it
| just all H1B slaves there now?
| tonymet wrote:
| > Leave your affordable neighborhood with good schools to keep
| your job
|
| > RTO to Seattle / Bay Area to a dingy condo , with diligence ,
| at enormous personal expense
|
| > Laid off a 18 mo later. CEO says "i'm taking responsibility" ,
| no responsibility taken.
| brandensilva wrote:
| They called it project dawn which is telling what they have in
| mind with these layoffs.
| criddell wrote:
| This always feels like the result of leadership too scared to
| build. It's so much safer and easier to tear down.
|
| Amazon spent a lot of time and money and built a top-tier
| workforce. But now they are out of ideas for what these people
| can do? They don't have any untapped opportunities left? No
| projects that never quite made it to the top of the stack? No
| deferred maintenance that could be taken care of now?
| gonzo41 wrote:
| They could put that engineering effort to unifying the AWS
| console. :D.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| I'm currently hiring engineering roles in SF for my startup. I am
| in the middle of closing my $1.5M pre-seed this week so I don't
| have job descriptions posted yet. But, here's a short pitch:
|
| AI agents are about to orchestrate trillions in commerce, but
| today they shop on thin data: product specs, studio photos, and
| text reviews. Agents need evidence, not marketing. Today, the
| most influential product evidence lives on TikTok and Reels,
| outside the surfaces brands control and agents can use. Vidably
| puts verified buyer video directly onto e-commerce product pages
| through a lightweight widget. We capture that video post-purchase
| and link it to real purchasing outcomes. Every video is SKU-
| linked and structured so shopping agents can reason over it. The
| widget is the wedge, the dataset is the moat.
|
| We're already live with brands and are seeing pull from both
| brands and creators and I would love for anyone interested to DM
| me!
|
| Edit: I'm an idiot, HN doesn't have DMs. Email me at hn at
| vidably dot com.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| There's no DM capacity on HN.
| max_ wrote:
| Your likely talking to an AI agent
| mkw5053 wrote:
| Just an actual human trying to be helpful.
| rballpug wrote:
| NES to the other. Drink to the only with cyanide.
| hit8run wrote:
| I've seen Bezos's yacht and can tell you he is creating new jobs!
| His yacht is accompanied by a supply vessel that carries staff,
| food, etc. At least 20 people work on the secondary boat!
| yearesadpeople wrote:
| It does have the feel of a tactical crouch and hold position by
| Amazon. AI / LLM for the masses is still just a bet, and perhaps
| an overly invested bet
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-28 23:00 UTC)