That is why software engineers also need unions. (but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)
but unions are one of the many reasons why it is cheaper just to hire in India instead of the US
Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
151–160 of 169 posts
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm. That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Why would you explain this with a conspiracy theory of collusion instead of Occam's razor -- that they were responding to similar changes in market conditions, with input from similar shareholders?
Because he's not naive?
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not some global conspiracy, it just aligns with the end of the ZIRP era. Companies could ignore headcount and hire endlessly just to singla growth to investors, while free money was raining from the sky.
Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. That is, they made so much money they couldn't find any way to spend over five BILLION per month even with this 'excess' headcount.
>Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone.
I think investors would prefer if they made $20 billion profit next quarter. Hence the layoffs.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You’re sort of airily dismissing it repeatedly. It wasn’t small or a wax and wane thing.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Unions might be able to bargain against h1b because they can have an honest conversation with management about the "we just can't FIND anybody" lie.
> "Unions might be able to bargain against h1b..."
Remember, H1-Bs and immigrants, that a union would be not be on your side. They would have a large percentage of pro-nativists that affect their policies, regardless of what they say officially. There's a long, long history of unions in the United States opposing immigrant labor that is worth reading up on and, even on supposedly worldly and well educated HN, you will see that there isn't much pushback against posts with anti-H1-B sentiment.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Responding to identical market conditions in similar ways based on input from overlapping shareholders does not require collusion between execs.
Right, but I'm contending there is a form of collusion. Here's a paraphrased conversation I had with someone who's in the exec class when I remarked on all the layoffs happening at the same time: "Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead." When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually…
A "form of collusion" that requires no coordination between participants and no secrecy simply isn't collusion.
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#157Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's comments like this that make those of us who are of immigrant origins or the children of immigrants indifferent to losses even if we are impacted as well. Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off. If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k…
That was not my intent. H1-B visas were sold as helping talent shortage. There are many genuinely talented immigrants and always have been. Fantastic! A previous company hired an H1-B visa and he was truly a talent in robotics. However that doesn't mean that the real political support for masses of H1-Bs was ever about talent. It was about lowering labor costs by semi-exploiting large numbers of immigrants willing to…
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Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#159The only AWS service I still use is SES, for sending emails from client applications. Surely that can be self hosted? Can anyone reccommend a competitor?
Postmark
Re: Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but I'm contending there is a form of collusion. Here's a paraphrased conversation I had with someone who's in the exec class when I remarked on all the layoffs happening at the same time: "Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead." When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually…
A "form of collusion" that requires no coordination between participants and no secrecy simply isn't collusion.
Even if we're being charitable and assuming it's group-think, it is still a form of collusion. The group of competitors collectively decides on specific outcomes that are beneficial to the group as a whole even if they know that the individual outcomes are sub-optimal.
Look at the evidence: Most of these companies had been highly and ever-increasingly profitable even before the layoffs, and they knew they were burning employee goodwill. Are you saying their actions haven't been coordinated and just accidentally happened to all follow the same practices at the same time? Including things like RTO, which their own internal data proves does not improve productivity and industry data actually shows increases attrition?
Sure, there's not been a written industry-wide memo laying out a playbook (that we know of), but everyone is following the same steps. And you would assume there is no secrecy, rather than (as sibling comments point out) "they have learned from the last time they got caught colluding"?
That's more charitable than I would be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯