871–880 of 1001 posts
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when you consider AMZN's p/e ratio is under 35 and WMT is closer to 45, what makes you think this?
P/E isn't a future projection. There is literally no analysis that asserts Amazon will achieve the same growth rate in the future that it achieved in the past. It will retain stock value by eating itself for a while (could be a long time), then die.
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…
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"AI detectors" are notoriously unreliable. Perhaps more importantly here, when it comes to writing, "AI slop" is basically management speak - it's all about waxing poetically about simple things in ways that make you sound complicated (and useful!). And this guy is a career manager. So I bet this is actually human slop, the kind from which ChatGPT et al learned to speak the way they do.
AI detectors in general are unreliable, but there are a few made by serious researchers that have only 1-in-10000 false positive rate, e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873 Having worked in a bigcorp, I've read my fair share of management-speak, and none of it sounds quite as empty as the allegedly AI text. The AI sounds like someone conjuring a parody emulation of management speak instead of actual management speak.…
This is most succinct description of my brain's slop detection algorithm.
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> 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.
A few times I took my hands off the wheel to see if I was truly redundant. Let's just say, I wasn't.
At worst, I was the only one looking at the schedule.
At best, I was a support mechanism for people working on an absolutely boring product.
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Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of the business will be a subsidiary. This is an old, and well tested strategy. E.g. Commodore International formally had its head office in The Bahamas, but the entire leadership team worked out of the US. You can try putting more constraints on what will get a company considerd a US company to catch those kinds of structures, but as you indirectly point out, th…
You don’t have to dig commodore from the grave, there are current-day examples of companies doing the same. Just to name one (even if it’s not American): Canonical. It (canonical) is registered in the isle of Man, a fairly known tax haven.
>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...
Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too. There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.
2026: 16,000
2025: 14,000
2024: 500
2023: 18,000
2022: 10,000
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IMO, this could be solved by having a finance team with good workflows and a real human resources team/psychologist on staff that would handle all of the interpersonal drama. It's an interesting anecdote but I don't think it was that great of an attempt or structured well enough to work.
> this could be solved With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that away and brings no insight. Human beings will always organically organize hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative, one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the end informally you will end up with the…
Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure from what I've heard, and it's working pretty well for them, but they've also had it for a long time.
So if you have a company, that works like that from the start, that people know it works like that, that it has support for it. You could make it work.
I agree that forcing this structure everywhere wouldn't work, some people can work like this, others can't.
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It depends if the immigrant is hired because the native worker is deemed too expensive. In this case, it contributes to reducing contributions through wage suppression.
If you have access to data that shows big tech is preferentially hiring visa holders over US citizens you should get on that class action lawsuit right away. That's probably hundreds of thousands or even millions per person in lost wages, and even after lawyers take their 30% cut, that's still a sizable chunk.
Given that the company sponsors them and come from lower incomes countries, they are ready to accept lower wages. If they do it I don't see why everyone wouldn't be doing the same.
It's of course hard to prove formally as those companies will comply with regs to make it look like they aren't discriminating (fake job ads, etc...). By the way in the US Indian consultancies got busted for this.
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AI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management. Probably displacing some of those jobs.
Many of these announcements are bluffs as many users here have pointed out. But real LLM-driven layoffs do happen, and from what I have anecdotally seen, they follow a pattern: leadership assumes the new LLM service will make human workers redundant. They then make cuts before the evidence is in. What this means is that today, there are many LLM service deployments that replaced humans while their actual impact remai…
I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs).
Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.
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Mass layoffs started in 2022, there was no setting for recovery in 2024.
Mass layouts started when the government increased the interest rate to fight inflation. By 2024, inflation was already under control, the interest rate was falling slowly, and companies were starting to hire.