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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

231–240 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#231

We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#232
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 ov…

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#233
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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AI investment/datacenter construction was roughly 1% of US GDP in 2025 all by itself. That and people were expecting the tariffs to be consistently applied as stated, instead we got... this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr7OVWgqDIM&t=27s

So it wasn't what they expected?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#234

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 re…

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#235
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Sure, when the arbitrary tarriff formula was announced for every nation, the stock markets were down thousands, and the bond market was fluctuating. Then you had the short term trade war with China were both countries set tarrifs so high no imports/exports between the two happened for a month, and there was a concern about empty shelves in major department stores. But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also…

So Trump's tariffs didn't tank the economy because everyone outsmarted him?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#236

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 re…

[flagged]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#237
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly indicates the post was AI generated?

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.

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#239

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 re…

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.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#240
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…

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.

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