721–730 of 1001 posts
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Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.
Ha yeah. “You’re a really interesting person and a great fuck, but you don’t make enough money for this to be serious” the same person, a short while later “Why doesn’t anyone love me!?”
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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…
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Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have b…
I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be. Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new m…
Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!
I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.
If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.
>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.
Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.
Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.
>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.
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…
Most experienced devs already know writing code is the easy part, it's really understanding the business requirements that takes time (I think a lot of junior devs don't understand this so they get overly enthusiastic about AI). But it turns out that most middle managers were already churning out slop to begin with so replacing them with AI is a big improvement.
As an engineer, roughly speaking, every task AI helps me get done faster is roughly negated by someone else's AI slop I need to clean up. But when it comes to middle management, I can't tell the difference. I'm pretty sure most product roadmaps generated by AI are actually more sensible than those generated by clueless managers.
I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.
The US was setting itself for quite a recovery in 2024... and for a class war too, so IDK what would get there first.
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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.
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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 mi…
There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.
>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too. Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India inc…
It’s not a pattern it’s a plan.
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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…
IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely…
I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.