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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#221

Post by hluska »

klipt wrote: post #150
y-curious wrote: post #126

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.

Canada’s industrial economy was also undamaged. And so, by definition, the US was not the only one.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#222

Post by kindatrue »

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.

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...

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#223

Post by a99p »

yodsanklai wrote: post #94
rat9988 wrote: 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 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.

> 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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#224

Post by ihsw »

romanovcode wrote: post #132

- 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 applic…

[dead]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#225

Post by scottLobster »

ryandrake wrote: post #159
SoftTalker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#226

Post by [deleted] »

Rijanhastwoears wrote: post #124
rat9988 wrote: 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.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#227

Post by GoatInGrey »

riddlemethat wrote: post #3
1970-01-01 wrote: post #2

AI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in every recession.

AI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management. Probably displacing some of those jobs.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#228

Post by ra7 »

y-curious wrote: post #126
ferguess_k wrote: post #117

Earlier 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

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#229

Post by watwut »

otikik wrote: post #44
jimbokun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“It was Bill, but he got laid off”. It doesn’t need to be confusing.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#230

Post by sejje »

zug_zug wrote: post #55
sejje wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think the talk was significant inflation, because everything will cost more. And it does.

My costs are falling.

I buy a lot of groceries for my business, so I have decent records. Beef is way up, though.

Gas is way down as well.

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