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

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

#61

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

tayo42 wrote: post #50
mjr00 wrote: post #29

There's some stuff that, culturally, I don't think Amazon will ever do well. Amazon Games should be shuttered entirely. Their latest game was a really embarrassing flop; "King of Meat", which they expected to have 100,000 daily concurrent players, reached a max of 320 concurrents during a free weekend[0]. Have you heard of a single Amazon Prime Original Movie[1]? Likely only one -- 2025's War of the Worlds , which be…

Fallouts been pretty good. Not sure what they did right there

Nolan and Joy are in charge of that one, they likely had the power to negotiate keeping control rather than letting Amazon fuck it up with algorithms. That's my best guess about why it's good and everything else on Amazon is crap.

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

#62

Post by nebula8804 »

GolfPopper wrote: post #28
Lammy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations exist to support the lives of humans, not the other way around.

From the corporations' point of view, humans are computing substrate . Relevant speech by SF author Charlie Stross, from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

Wow 34c3, what a blast from the past! I still don't fully understand what "tuwat" meant ha ha. The best I could come up with was "Do something. Don't ask for permission".

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

#63

Post by cobolcomesback »

mjr00 wrote: post #29

There's some stuff that, culturally, I don't think Amazon will ever do well. Amazon Games should be shuttered entirely. Their latest game was a really embarrassing flop; "King of Meat", which they expected to have 100,000 daily concurrent players, reached a max of 320 concurrents during a free weekend[0]. Have you heard of a single Amazon Prime Original Movie[1]? Likely only one -- 2025's War of the Worlds , which be…

That list of movies is just the movies that Amazon Studios has been the distributor for via Prime Video. Amazon didn’t necessarily produce or fund all of the movies in that list. It’s a bunch of cheap movies that are likely meant to be loss leaders for Prime Video subscriptions, which is something that very much does fit the style of Amazon. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV all have a similar list of D-tier garbage just to fill their catalogs.

On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.

Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.

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

#64

Post by bpt3 »

int_19h wrote: post #41

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

If there was a union in place, the massive over hiring that led to this wouldn't have happened and the competent developers would have made less money. So how exactly does everyone come out ahead there?

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

#65

Post by Mountain_Skies »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #9
alephnerd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're fine expanding in India. Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1]. For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same a…

“ Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Gold Card leads to a reserve brain drain” Seems a lot of the Trump policies go exactly the opposite of what was planned. The supply people at my company are telling me that there is a huge push to move manufacturing away from the US due to tariffs.

The United States has a labor pool of over 170 million people. If you can't find Amazon workers in a country of that size, it's due to one thing and one thing only: you're a bigot who hates Americans. We can dance around it and dress it up like we have for the past thirty years but it's time to call it for what it is: bigotry and hatred wearing a dress of openness. Just admit what you are instead of continuing this absurd dance that pretends 170 million people are all defective. Now mash that down vote button to feel good about your bigotry that you've written "VIRTUE" all over to hide the destructive force it truly is.

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

#66

Post by loeg »

Lammy wrote: post #35
loeg wrote: post #25

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

> 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?

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

#67

Post by groundzeros2015 »

int_19h wrote: post #41

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

What will the union do?

This is a boom and bust industry by nature. Projects finish or cancel, and work winds down. You can always be laid off. Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine.

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

#68

Post by xienze »

int_19h wrote: 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.

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

#69

Post by loeg »

malfist wrote: post #58
loeg wrote: post #25

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

10% over a year on top of Amazon's 10% rank and yank. Thats a huge cut.

What makes you think this is on top of some other layoff process?

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

#70

Post by loeg »

refulgentis wrote: post #31
loeg wrote: post #25

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

Not sure of your familiarity with FAANG pre-2022, but this is absolutely not the norm.

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