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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#151

Post by [deleted] »

snerbles wrote: post #111
yodsanklai wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#152

Post by cobolcomesback »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #37

>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...

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#154

Post by cmiles8 »

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#155

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mattnewton wrote: post #113
pickleRick243 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better for whom?

Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#156

Post by GoatInGrey »

Buttons840 wrote: post #78
focusgroup0 wrote: post #37

>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...

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 sell…

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#157

Post by dheera »

rat9988 wrote: post #76
yodsanklai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.

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 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%.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#159

Post by ryandrake »

SoftTalker wrote: post #79
scottLobster wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#160

Post by bdamm »

nicoburns wrote: post #121
rich_sasha wrote: post #68

Earlier 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.

2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think you're as qualified as most of us.
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