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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#641

Post by pydry »

jasondigitized wrote: post #582
Aurornis wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reporting that to people above him. Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway. I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work do…

Fake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities.

My experience with ex Amazon managers is that they brought a toxic culture and destroyed more value than they created.

Some people are so focused on whether they could automate their work output with an LLM to ask themselves if they even should.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#642

Post by michaelt »

dymk wrote: post #603
Aurornis wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That person's pinned message shows that he started his campaign for Congress almost 2 months ago. He says he was laid off today. He's been Tweeting non-stop daily and appears to be working hard on his campaign. I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at A…

7 years at Amazon without being laid off (promoted, in fact) and you blame it on 2 months of what you assume is poor performance

In my experience, big corporate employers get extremely nervous when their employees start doing anything high profile (i.e. successful) in the political sphere.

After all, if 250 people report to me, probably some of them are going to have opinion A and some are going to have opinion B. If I take a strong public stance in support of A and against B, some of the more nervous B supporters are going to worry I hate them personally and fear I'm a threat to their career - and they're probably going to go to HR about it.

And even if my job doesn't give me any hiring-and-firing powers - if I'm high profile enough that a load of random haters decide they're going to try to get me fired by subjecting my employer to a campaign of harassment, well, now folks like HR and customer services are getting harassed.

Obviously, though, I've never seen a corporation have a blanket policy saying employees can't engage with the political system - that would be pretty bad as a policy. Instead they'll quote policies about 'bringing the company into disrepute' and similar.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#643

Post by motbus3 »

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…

If he was a middle manager it wasn't him doing the work anyway

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#644

Post by VirusNewbie »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #546
VirusNewbie wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the partnership is fake marketing. Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP, and Google owns a larger percentage because they were much earlier investors, despite amazon investing more money.

> Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP Can you share a source for this claim? Graviton is a CPU, it would be strange to train LLM (I assume you meant LLMs) on a CPU.

oops I meant tranium.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#645

Post by tokioyoyo »

socalgal2 wrote: post #507
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…

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…

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#646

Post by cobolcomesback »

stuaxo wrote: post #404
yojat661 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is obviously cherry picking news and trying to push an agenda. Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme... Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai

The US investment link is broken, and most of the UK jobs are in "fullfillment", some of the least fullfilling jobs - piss bottles all round.

And the original link about investment in India is also about fulfillment jobs and even worse, “investing in AI”, aka building data centers, which contribute essentially no jobs at all.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#647

Post by johnnyanmac »

shimman wrote: post #635
johnnyanmac wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What industry has put actual resistance to these in these times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive profit margins over the health care stuff. No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to n…

Industries don't, people do. One thing to keep in mind is that corporations have always worked with fascism, they will never resist but workers can. Sabotage takes many forms and one can just look at how Dutch resistance worked against the Nazis. You can do many things to sabotage that are nonviolent and also highly effective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance I'd also be weary with your examples; many h…

>I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

Well yes. That was partially my point. Tech is no different; there's a lot of companies capitulating but I see a huge surge of people speaking out against this. Even people you largely think of as non-partisan previously. I don't think it's fair to pit me into some fascist state because of a company I no longer work for nor perhaps never worked for.

But tech lacks the unions that other industries have and by its nature is a lot more scattered out. I can't do much more than the ones criticizing the companies with regards to providing a "Dutch resistance"; I don't work for them (heck, I don't even have a full time job as of now) and I've done a lot of culling of what I use over the decade. Probably more than what many have done, but still seemingly insignificant in terms of their bottom line.

I'm all for collective action, but I'm still looking for that collection. It seems like things need to get as bad as Minneapolis before that collection emerges.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#648

Post by snafferty »

i_love_retros wrote: post #528
dzonga wrote: post #375

Insightful Comment from X - https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=2... I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them. And I was still cut. Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an…

Was the X poster saying in a very long winded way that his job was taken and lots of our jobs will be taken by foreigners who cost less?

Yes, and he is running for office on an anti-immigration platform, so I'd take anything he posts with a heap of salt.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#650

Post by sejje »

xpe wrote: post #465
sejje wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Smart people talk about differential impact; i.e compare what we’re seeing today against the counterfactual. / I’m not aware of solid reasoning that argues in favor of tariffs, differentially speaking. / I’m happy to look at models that aren’t a waste of time.

I guess you mean informed people. There's a whole lot of smart people in this thread who aren't talking about differentials.

I don't know shit about tariffs, except what everyone said in the news. It was going to tank the economy. Everyone's retirement was going to poof into smoke. Everything was going to cost 2 or 3x previous prices. None of that came to pass.

I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.

I'm just a dummy though, so I can't glean some expert insight into the differential. I don't have a model for you, just the real world.

How do you think the economy is doing? What do the differential impact models, that aren't a waste of time, say about it?

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