>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...
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Amazon cuts 16k jobs
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
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?
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The comment was likely less about positive corporate spin, more about rumors of Amazon's allegedly grueling, PIP-centered culture.
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.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#144This 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
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
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.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#146>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...
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".
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
> 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.
Yeah, that's one perspective :-) Objectively, the global labor market is the hottest it has been in modern history.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.
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
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.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?
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)
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.
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
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.