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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#271

Post by VirusNewbie »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #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)

but the partnership is fake marketing. Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP, and Google owns a larger percentage because they were much earlier investors, despite amazon investing more money.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#272

Post by derf_ »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75
sejje wrote: 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…

> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average...

This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous.

Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).

[0] https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term...

[1] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/01/historical-returns-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rmiller/2024/06/20/90-years-of-...

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#273

Post by hypeatei »

sejje wrote: post #246
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking. Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah. That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications,…

The initial dip was bought up by retail investors then everyone realized TACO (Trump always chickens out) so the markets don't really care about tariff threats anymore.

What benefit have we gotten from the chaotic tariff policy? Any trade deals?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#274

Post by liveoneggs »

square_usual wrote: post #130
weaksauce wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.

H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.

You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#275

Post by SilverElfin »

square_usual wrote: post #130
weaksauce wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.

H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.

It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#276

Post by throwaway150 »

Another article about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ywzxlxnlo

> In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.

With this kind of employee hostile policies and threat of job cut, how does it manage to be the A of FANG (or as they call it, MANGA)? But apparently people still want to get a job there? The pay is a little less than other companies in the same league. So pay can't be the reason. Or is it? Honestly want to know what it is that make IT people get a job there?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#277

Post by mvdtnz »

antonyh wrote: post #136

I'm outside the US, and boycotting Amazon for anything I can get elsewhere (which turns out isn't everything, but best efforts and all that). The shift towards AI is either a very bad thing (as per Microslop and the raft of recent articles about quality dropping), or just a cheap excuse to replace expensive staff with cheaper people. Alternatively they may be using AI in HR as part of the decision making, and it's ma…

I find it very hard to believe you can't boycott Amazon completely. They don't even exist in my country and it has never been a struggle to find anything you might get there.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#278

Post by vile_wretch »

theusus wrote: post #236
shartshooter wrote: post #144

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]

Yes that is how anecdotes work

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#279

Post by liveoneggs »

hajile wrote: post #240
dheera wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 interv…

tell us more about your racial-based hiring

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#280

Post by AnotherGoodName »

khazhoux wrote: post #256
paganel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.

It’s pretty sad that when people write well now, others dismiss it as AI.

It's also a pretty clear indication of AI undeniably passing the turing test in case that was in debate still.

No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting it wrong.

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