Tech is dead. Has been since 2020.
Amazon cuts 16k jobs
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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#292Earlier 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"…
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit.
I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#293Earlier 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's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.
https://layoffs.fyi/
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#294Denial everyone. Amazon will have the same profits running on AI and robots with minimal expenses. All the other companies will follow. Wake up to reality.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?
Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and 1000 npm dependencies!
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#296How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jerbs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize mass layoffs and offshoring were hounded. Before the layoffs were announced Amazon also committed to expanding hiring and infra expansion in India [3], and depending on the org, affected employees on work visa…
Does the H1B fee only apply to people not yet in the country? I have a student on a student visa who claims I can do the h1b sponsor without the 100k fee because they are already there with their student visa.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#297Earlier 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…
> 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.
Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
> Indian recruiting firms
There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dollar is losing value by the day, gold and silver on record high and somehow this is not an indicator for huge uncertainty? China is beating the US on pretty much every stage and this only accelerates this.
And yet prices are marginally up while all the "economists" expected major inflation. Dollar vs Euro is at same level now as it was in 2019 - there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong.
> "economists" expected major inflation
Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)
> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong
Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#299Earlier 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.
bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11
Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs
#300Earlier 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.
I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.
You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.