Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#831

Post by piperswe »

coffeemug wrote: post #720
brikym wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Once the rich own machines that do everything for them, they have no need for us and we have no leverage over them. What's left for us then?

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#832

Post by hattmall »

booleandilemma wrote: post #784
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…

Actually I've worked at companies where management is exactly like this. Literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished. I have no respect for middle managers whatsoever. These people are a parasite on the industry.

Ok, Ok, I get the disdain for middle management. It's basically exactly like you described, but middle management didn't come about for no reason. There really is a value and the idea of automating it away with AI is extremely dubious.

One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also what gave rise to things like Dilbert and the idea of rising to the level of your own incompetence.

Middle management is like the lug nuts on a wheel. If you start with 5, you can take one away and be OK, even two and no issues with normal driving. You can go down to two and as long as you aren't hitting large bumps and they aren't adjacent you mostly likely will be fine for a short trip. You could even remove ALL of the lug nuts and if you travel in straight line over a smooth road you can still drive.

After all they mostly just sit there, the tire, the transmission, all the other parts of the car are doing the work. But it's not fair to say that any of the removed lug nuts were doing nothing.

The point of middle management isn't really to do anything spectacular on a daily basis. If the company is working well, middle management effectively has no function. It's when things get out of line. Even then though, it's not really middle management that's calling the shots or fixing the problem, but they are critical in noticing the problems and directing resources. Middle management's role is in reducing the time that things are out of line.

At least that's the idea, and much like any position, the bulk of the group benefits are overwhelmingly produced by the groups most effective producers.

Middle management is the hardest role to hire while simultaneously being the hardest to gauge employee effectiveness.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#833

Post by E-Reverance »

levocardia wrote: post #547
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…

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

They admitted to it, with a pic of their original draft https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016666185949962309#m

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#834

Post by apsurd »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #798
apsurd wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value your weird rant. Yes it did go on as a thought stream, but there's sense in there. I've been thinking a lot around a kind of smart-people paradox: very intellectual arguments all basically plotting a line toward some inevitable conclusion like super intelligence or consciousness. Everything is a raw compute problem. While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is…

> While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear. What scientific problems are non-computable? ANNs are designed to handle non-linearities BTW, thats the entire point of activation functions and multi layer networks

non computable, non-linear as in given known input parameters you can determine the output parameters.

we can't do that for mostly any complex physical system, as would be for something like living organisms.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#835

Post by hattmall »

AngryData wrote: post #826
snowwrestler wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the point is here because highly skilled seamstress is still a well-paying job, and all the mass-produced clothes are also still sewn by hand.

Where do you live that skilled seamstress is such a valuable job? Just because a handful of people make bank doesn't mean there is some large unfilled market for those skills. I can find some highly paid blacksmiths too, but 99% of people who know how to blacksmith well will never make more than a paltry sum if anything at all off of it.

Pretty much anywhere being a competent seamstress pays well. The difference between highly skilled and competent is open to interpretation. The difference between being competent and the very basics that can assemble cut and sew patterns is huge though. Pretty much anyone can do cut and sew with like a week of training which is all the mass produced clothes.

But someone who is competent and can do quality alterations, mending, customize patterns etc, is going to make decent money. But I'm pretty sure where ever you live there are seamstress working and making good money.

I'm not even really sure where automation would have impacted being a seamstress. Sewing machines have been around since the 1700's and if anything the demand for textiles has increased more than the speed of production.

Maybe you are thinking more of knitting, which is highly automated and used to be a big job, now it's basically just a hobby.

Blacksmiths just evolved to modern day welders, iron workers, boilermakers etc. Still pays well.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#836

Post by Uehreka »

slibhb wrote: post #815
Uehreka wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 only way forward. If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is spee…

> UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction. That will change real quick if everyone loses their job to AI. But until then, yeah, it's not going to happen, and it shouldn't.

> That will change real quick if everyone loses their job to AI.

No, this is exactly my point: they will be angry, unreasonable, and thirsty for revenge. They’ll hand over freedoms like Halloween candy. How about a law where the government gets to survey your hard drive to make sure you’re not harboring an AI model? Sounds crazy, sounds insane, but in the current political climate I’d rate it more likely than UBI.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#837

Post by Der_Einzige »

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…

That comment he wrote was written with AI :)

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#838

Post by hattmall »

LPisGood wrote: post #793
sfink wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything. Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the mi…

> Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers It’s not, but if software engineering is solved then of course so is financial analysis, because a program could be written to do it. If the program is not good enough, then software engineering is not solved. I think this what you were getting at with this part, but it’s not clear to me, because…

I don't think software engineering is ever going to be solved, but financial analysis will definitely never be solved. It's impossible, the nature of it dictates that, whatever changes happen will further change the results. Financial analysis requires novel thinking, and even if you have AGI that can engage in novel thought they will just be another input into the system.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#839

Post by 1shooner »

WalterBright wrote: post #730
Shocka1 wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely…

The printing press also led to books changing from being something only rich people had to everyone having books. This also enabled the industrial revolution, as books made literacy worth having, newspapers, and became a great storehouse of knowledge. I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.

I have not heard even the most enthusiastic AI booster describe net job creation as a possible outcome. If you have any details on that prediction, I'd be interested to hear what they are.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#840

Post by WalterBright »

cptroot wrote: post #830
WalterBright wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math doesn't work out for UBI.

Would you like to elaborate why the math doesn't work out? An article explaining your position would be nice, but I'd settle for some broad gestures.

342,000,000 people in the US. Multiply by $10,000/yr.

Cost of UBI: 3,420,000,000,000

Where is $3.5 trillion going to come from?

Post reply on HN