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Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

mynorthwest.com

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Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#141
post #68
post #41

That is why software engineers also need unions. (but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)

Unions are only going to be effective in a domain where the job can’t be done just as well by someone on the other side of the planet. Think plumbers, electricians, etc. The fact that the work has to be done “here and now” is the leverage those workers have. A software engineer’s union would just kick whatever offshoring is happening into overdrive.

Why so self-defecting? Even some of the job could be out-sourced, some positions just cannot. If those people can unionize, it might starts to grow from there.

It's like planting the seeds, it might not work from time to time and from places to places, but sometime the result might surprise you. But you'll never know if you don't give it a try.

It's like... (maybe an inappropriate example) how NRA brainlessly defending gun rights. They don't first spend 500 billions on gun safety research trying to prove gun is safe, no, they want guns, and then they come up reasons why guns are good.

In the recent years I'm started to think maybe this NRA-style method is actually how to set things in motion (if it's not the only effective way), as any added prerequisite or cations may eventually bog things down to a stop. You all read the CIA sabotage manual right? There's a chapter detailed how you can stop a plan by adding complexity (i.e. bigger committees etc).

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#142
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everywhere is in America you know... And non-H1B workers are probably precisely the kinds of workers that should be the ones rocking the boat.

Rocking the boat so much as to get fired, fail to find another employer before the visa expires, and be sent back home? A terrifying perspective for many.

Just to clarify that the parent may have edited, but wrote "non-H1B" workers, so they would be speaking about domestic / citizen employees, not ones on visa.

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#143
post #25

10% over a year, split into two waves isn't that extreme. It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.

> Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million. Is it mentioned anywhere that the roles eliminated are all going to be software engineers, because that’s what all the threads so far are interpreting this as. This feels more like preparing for a recession without saying it out loud. People aren’t buying as much anymore and with focus on cost savings across tech, can…

It's almost never only SWEs.

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#144
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? I've been working in tech for 15 years and FAANG for 5. We've always had layoffs.

I don't intend to be dismissive by sharing a bunch, I ate a bunch of downvotes so I should share something. But, there's no singular, like, Wikipedia article for "tech layoffs spiked significantly in 2022 and have stayed elevated" - so this is a mix of informal and formal and academic and business news that treats that knowledge as implicit while discussing it. (I am deeply curious what valhalla you are at that skipp…

Sure, it waxes and wanes. 2022-2023 were probably above average layoff years, while 2020-2021 before that were probably below average years. I think layoffs have fallen since 2023 rather than staying elevated, but I haven't attempted to quantify that.

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a non-h1b engineer and I declare it is in my best interest to advocate for h1-b engineers. Otherwise management would simply calculate why would they hire me and treat me well when they can hire a more desperate h1b holder and treat them like trash.

Have you looked at who brought in the most H1B workers recently?

Who?

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you buy services, is your bar good enough, or do you look for best value for money? And are those who try to optimise bigots merely for not buying from their local provider? But anyway, the decrease in hiring in the US will be mostly driven by foreigners that will still be hired, but now not relocate to the US. Why hire someone on a H1-B at an extra cost of 100k when you can hire the same person in some other of…

That’s just another way of admitting that H1-B was always about lowering costs rather than lack of talent.

No, it's about being able to hire more people at the same hiring bar and comp for companies hiring at scale, like (pre-2022) big tech. If you limit yourself to only hiring Americans in your US office, then you are at a talent disadvantage unless/until you open another office in a more friendly jurisdiction. And if you open such a satellite office and hire there, then that's worse for the US than if you had hired them in the US, because the US misses out on the income tax.

Many other countries have the exact same sorts of visas, because it is good to attract talented, high-paid workers to your country.

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#147
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the low hanging fruit has been picked, they need a fundamentally different employee base As anyone in software development can tell you, this does not compute. You cannot do things this way, and any experienced software engineer can tell you it doesn't work. Besides, it's not how Amazon worked at all. Amazon is famous for having systematically verified ("mathematically proved") how it's core systems operated. W…

Publishing a paper (in 2025) about formal verification is miles different than implementing it company wide. Anyone who has talked to an Amazonian SWE knows they’re not building their systems like this. The Amazon way is to quickly grind something out, and build on as many layers of AWS abstractions as possible. They’re famous for the hustle and grind not the stellar engineering acumen of formal verification.

Goes back quite a bit further: https://www.amazon.science/tag/formal-verification

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is real. I work at one of the big tech and have access to their internal head count breakdowns. The overall headcount is mostly stagnant but the US headcount is decreasing with a corresponding increase in Europe and mostly India based HC.

The company I just left is firing as many people in the US as possible and rehiring primarily in India, with Dublin and Toronto by exception. FedRAMP requires US persons on US soil, and so as far as Americans are concerned, only senior management and people working on the federal business are safe.

> requires US persons on US soil

Is that true for everyone involved in the project? One of my friends works on a FedRamp project from Pune. Most engg and PMs are in Pune. Maybe the top mgmt and VPs need to be US-based?

Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I just left is firing as many people in the US as possible and rehiring primarily in India, with Dublin and Toronto by exception. FedRAMP requires US persons on US soil, and so as far as Americans are concerned, only senior management and people working on the federal business are safe.

> requires US persons on US soil Is that true for everyone involved in the project? One of my friends works on a FedRamp project from Pune. Most engg and PMs are in Pune. Maybe the top mgmt and VPs need to be US-based?

No, just the people with privileged access to the system because of the way the data residency, personnel screening and other requirements interact.

You can have PMs or software engineers writing code from anywhere you like, but your engineers in Pune can’t go poking around your FedRAMP High prod environment.

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