Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#331

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dheera wrote: post #297
hajile wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 add…

Why is everything broken? American MBA culture. PE wealth extraction. A bought and paid for political class.

Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#332

Post by vitaflo »

sergiotapia wrote: post #211
tchalla wrote: post #97

Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198

We must do something about labor offshoring to india. It's too much. I want my children to have opportunities here in the country they were born in.

Factory workers said that in the 90s too. Didn’t work out to well for them.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#333

Post by [deleted] »

greenavocado wrote: post #290
ra7 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value. This is the value prop of the US military

[deleted]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#334

Post by boelboel »

SilverElfin wrote: post #287
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…

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.

Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.

Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.

"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#335

Post by duckmysick »

volkk wrote: post #168
tannerc wrote: post #158

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 dunno how else to prove it to you

A prompt to generate similar output would be a good start.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#336

Post by al_borland »

paxys wrote: post #244
tchalla wrote: post #97

Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198

He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution. How do you stop multinational companies like Amazon from using the global talent pool as they see fit and pay whatever wages the local market will bear? Without that it comes off as the standard "elect me because foreigners are bad".

They need to understand that their profits depend on people with disposable income. The US has some of the most profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon’s sales?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#337

Post by dodobirdlord »

glimshe wrote: post #27

I've been hearing about massive Amazon layoffs for a few years now. How come the company still exists? Are these layoffs followed by hiring at cheaper regions or different parts of the company? From my perspective as an occasional Amazon customer, things are pretty much unchanged.

Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#338

Post by Loughla »

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 have yet to find something on Amazon that I can't find on either eBay, straight from the retailer, or B&H. And usually for less money.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#339

Post by linksnapzz »

johntarter wrote: post #269
rune-dev wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American this does not match my experience at all. What profession were those women looking for?

Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?

Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#340

Post by jandrese »

KerrAvon wrote: post #328
echelon wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring? That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here... We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output. Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity…

We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits. H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.

> H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.

The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.

Post reply on HN