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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#701

Post by GibbonBreath »

volkk wrote: post #621
toraway wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And despite the downvotes, you were correct. https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m

thank you. even without this tweet, i was willing to die on this hill. certainly feels nice to place these obnoxious HN know-it-alls into their place.

> certainly feels nice to place these obnoxious HN know-it-alls into their place.

You don't have to take the time to explain your reasoning if you don't want to, but "obnoxious know it all" is not a stone you should throw while at the same time refusing to explain yourself and saying anyone who can't see what you see is necessarily missing the obvious.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#702

Post by jabedude »

kburman wrote: post #693
pm90 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now. It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.

You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over. If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.

"Exchanging goods and services for money to a locale" is not a colonial model.

I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#703

Post by sfink »

LPisGood wrote: post #683
risyachka wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> AI will eat the "software professionals" you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software. And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.

That’s the thing here. Software engineering is an intelligence-complete problem. If AI can solve it, then it can solve any sort of knowledge work like accounting, financial analysis, etc

Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything.

Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.

Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.

"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."

Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#704

Post by brikym »

socalgal2 wrote: post #507
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…

I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once. At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the onl…

I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine.

For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#705

Post by esseph »

sejje wrote: post #653
esseph wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impact to social bonds between the US and other Western nations has been thrown completely off track, and now they are looking for exits from anything US related. These tarrifs were the absolutely dumbest thing imaginable, and have brought the post WWII period of US economic prosperity to a point it can never recover. It's only down from here. We pissed off our friends.

I agree, social credit is changing. We're not as friendly with other western nations anymore, we're dictating terms. When will we start seeing the downtrend?

When will we start?

Did you miss the thread about us losing 10,000 PhDs already because of these policies?

Or the threads about people looking for and starting to build alternatives for US tech?

These are wounds that will take a long time to play out, but your kids generation will feel it, though they may never realize what we lost.

Also, we already are: https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#706

Post by HaloZero »

_heimdall wrote: post #684
Aurornis wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That person's pinned message shows that he started his campaign for Congress almost 2 months ago. He says he was laid off today. He's been Tweeting non-stop daily and appears to be working hard on his campaign. I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at A…

Unless I'm mistaken, isn't it illegal to base layoffs on individual performance? My understanding was that it can't legally be considered a layoff unless it meets pretty strict selection requirements at the group level (cutting orgs, cutting a "random" % of a role or org to reduce headcount, etc).

Not sure why that would illegal? Your own performance isn’t protected in anyway as a class that you can’t control. I know Lyft 100% laid off people not hitting meets expectations in 2020 first

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#707

Post by esseph »

mvdtnz wrote: post #466
esseph wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't exist in my country ... it has never been a struggle to find anything. Amazon absolutely crushed a lot of physical brick-and-mortar stores. Drove them out of business.

No, you and people like you drove them out of business by switching to Amazon.

Yes, please tell me about how it's my personal responsibility that a corporation that has millions of employees took over so much.

Was it the laws I passed to make them more profitable? Did I just start burning down the neighboring bookstores?

Absolutely not. In fact, if I were never even born, Amazon would be just as big and powerful today.

Wait, maybe it was all the time they bought out a small company and I told them they could!

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#709

Post by Chronoz99 »

_heimdall wrote: post #688
seinvak wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is definitely a solid reason. Even a 10% increase in developer efficiency translates to roughly 9% fewer workers needed to do the same job. For AI to be cost effective, it must reduce headcount.

Jevon's Paradox will show up too though. When employees get more efficient companies just demand more of them. You really have to be in "the room where it happens" to know the motivations behind any one layoff.

I have noticed this while working in a startup, how efficiency gains impacted work in the last 3 months with better coding models coming in. If you have someone senior that is effective at using these tools and can own the outputs and be capable of correcting things that are sloppy, you are immensely more valuable than 2-3 more developers in the same area of work. It's actually faster to empower fewer people than try to have 3 fast guys where there would be coordination overhead, which would become a bottleneck and bring down a lot of the efficiency gains. A good full stack engineer who can work with these tools at speed with caution is more valuable similarly as it requires less coordination. 3 junior devs shipping 90% good code and 10% slop would make the senior who is reviewing everything the bottleneck.
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