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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

On the other hand the Japanese economy has been quite stagnant since 1990, and the yen is right now on a downwards spiral, so I don't think it is such a good solution. And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.

Every country has their own problems. Honestly, there aren't a single large country where everything is perfect. Too many opinions, too many needs, increase median age of the politicians and the population, and etc. causes imperfect solution to every problem. At the end of the day, you have to prioritize and figure out what's important to you.

I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue per corporate employee are both ~1.5m/corp employee. I think it really comes down to how the company is managed and culture.

Nintendo Japan pays its engineers ~$62k a year https://www.portal.e2r.jp/fixurl/nintendo_career_job/id/4/2?... Amazon starts at 3x that and goes up https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries

You need to compare the US division to get a more accurate comparison. Nintendo US pays quite well.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not reading all that. I thought tweets were supposed to be short. What the hell happened?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_limit#On_Twitter > In November 2017, Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 characters. In 2023, Twitter boosted the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, it was increased to 4000. In April, it was again increased to 10,000, and in June, to 25,000.

The character limit is just whatever the longest tweet Musk wants to send.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too. Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India inc…

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 AI investment is largely earmarked for data centers. Low staff but expensive because the hardware is currently very expensive.

It's not equivalent in the least. They aren't expanding headcount by 20K, they're building more expensive AI tailored servers

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's especially funny is that the post reads exactly like it was written by an AI.

> in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability this is a HUGE red flag for this comment being written be AI. Before 2025, nobody talked like this.

Uhm, plenty of phrases like this existed before 12 months ago.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#717
post #581

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you would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep failing upwards in organizations like Amazon

Happens in the Govt too. I think it's pretty common that if you can "sell a story" you're in a better spot than simply doing well at the job.

That's literally the current president

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm mistaken, isn't it illegal to base layoffs on individual performance? My understanding was that it can't legally be considered a layoff unless it meets pretty strict selection requirements at the group level (cutting orgs, cutting a "random" % of a role or org to reduce headcount, etc).

Not sure why that would illegal? Your own performance isn’t protected in anyway as a class that you can’t control. I know Lyft 100% laid off people not hitting meets expectations in 2020 first

In the US, saying that "your job has been eliminated" mitigates various legal risks (discrimination lawsuits for example). So although companies can do pretty much WTF they want, they also don't like being sued.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#719

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…

> 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. That sounds an organizational issue. I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as…

> I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible.

LOL, reality is very different. Manager first of all is working to keep his position, second to get promoted. Most of them. For keeping he need to become irreplaceable. For that they create kill zone around eliminating competitors. Working against those with brain, not promoting, giving negative reviews, creating 'cases', taking credits for others job. Making those who can leave. I've seen a lot of this shit. This creates a local depressive shithole. It can go for decades in monopolies and in low competition markets.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#720
post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding sk…

I still don’t understand why people oppose that rather than enthusiastically desire it. The end state you’re describing is the culmination of the enlightenment project. Automating labor is the point! Then you can paint, or play chess, or eat amazing food, or do whatever you want. Work isn’t the end, it’s the means. Products and services is the end. If we can achieve the end via technology, who cares about the work?
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