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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard from a year before 2020, yeah.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#172
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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#173
post #167

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 r…

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

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#174

>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...

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#175
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#177
post #157
post #76

Earlier 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 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 a…

> 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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#178
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.

> 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.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#179
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)

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#180
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess. No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like med…

You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR

>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)

This is outdated -- it surpassed 2007 levels in 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...

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