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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#301

Post by drecked »

Sevii wrote: post #110
adamsb6 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.

FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.

You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.

Others like Google increased by 60+%.

You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).

But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#302

Post by culi »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #207
culi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance. I think you also underestimate how much hiring gives these large companies political leverage. A town can be completely destroyed when one of these companies threatens to move a factory or office

how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?

as a response to "Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.". I've edited the comment to make it clear, thanks

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#303

Post by ipaddr »

rune-dev wrote: post #213
cultofmetatron wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value…

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

Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.

Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#304

Post by conscion »

nxm wrote: post #243
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…

Actual effective managers do much more than "gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him."

> Actual effective managers do much more

And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#305

Post by AnotherGoodName »

derf_ wrote: post #272
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess. No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like med…

> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average... This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous…

For rate rises that are enacted to slow inflation (which slows stock market growth as you said) i think you have the cause and effect reversed.

The best way to see how inflation and stocks are linked is to look at economies where inflation is not intentionally slowed by rate rises. The stocks go up more or less with inflation (and some small % of gains they may have on top as you say). When you have rate rises that slow inflation you do indeed slow stock growth. But this is also inline with the link between inflation and stock price.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#306

Post by energy123 »

baxtr wrote: post #20
still-learning wrote: post #11

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.

I mean maybe that's the good news. There is huge potential for an upswing!

I don't think that's how it works. It's not like coiling a spring it's more like starting to roll a ball down a hill, once you ruin it it keeps getting worse in a feedback loop as various systems feed on each other (populism, erosion of norms, etc).

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#307

Post by no_wizard »

klipt wrote: post #150
y-curious wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we just need the other shoe to drop: punish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues

Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax. America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's unsustainable. We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.

It would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged college education and is a symptom of a larger problem: As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training programs, continual education, robust workforce displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We lack all of this (and more).

Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are better handled by the collective of society, via the government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books of a huge number of companies, from the auto manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of health insurance.

Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill was not that the government providing robust funding of social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the conversation around the 'good times past' that many Americans romanticize.

Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own short term gains over the long term health of the community and society in which they were empowered by to get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater quite spectacularly bad.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#308

Post by hajile »

bdamm wrote: post #160
nicoburns wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Global economy doesn't look that terrible. It doesn't? I was born in the 90s (so admittedly 2008 was before I started working), but the economy is looking the worst it's been in my lifetime to me.

2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think you're as qualified as most of us.

Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the farce and everything collapsed.

I believe that's what we have today. The economic indicators are all worse than they were in 2008. Our economy is Wile E Coyote running at full speed in midair until he realizes the truth then falls.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#309

Post by echelon »

darth_avocado wrote: post #260
dmix wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon also employs 1.5 million people globally, 350k of which are in corporate. These 16k were corporate. Still sucks for everyone involved, I know a corporate sales guy who got laid off Microsoft and it disrupted his life pretty seriously. As Stalin says one's a tragedy, a millions a statistic.

Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses: 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees 3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles 4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India,…

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 over an extended time frame.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#310

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

conductr wrote: post #201
focusgroup0 wrote: post #37

>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...

This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent? I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.

If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the basis of cost differential, that’s a sure sign the company believes the function has been commoditized and is immune from competitive selection.

That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.

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