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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#931

Post by poulpy123 »

risyachka wrote: post #623
mrtksn wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH the last 20-30 years was exactly like that but computers were eliminating other peoples jobs for really good profits for the investors and really good salaries for the workers doing the elimination. Before that people were eliminating blue colar workers with highly productive machines and industrial robots. I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different. Software ate the world and now AI will eat th…

>> AI will eat the "software professionals" you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software. And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.

You're right. I think the current AI direction is a dead end for real artificial intelligence, so it is not the thing that will replace all jobs, but the day a machine with the real cognitive capacity of a 5 year old exists is the day almost all of humanity becomes useless.

And before that the current direction is still enough to massively hurt the world because there will be less and less places for us humans.

Another point I noticed that nobody is talking around us is the technology adoption rates. When the car industry started, decades happened between the early users and cars being ubiquitous in the population (especially taking into account the world and not the richest countries). So a sizeable part of the transportation industry that was ultimately replaced by cars had the time to adapt, move to other jobs or arrive at the end of their work life.

But now the technology goes from its few first users to being used by everyone and their cats in years if not months. There is absolutely no time to adapt, love over or endure things until you don't work anymore.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#932

Post by poulpy123 »

ChoGGi wrote: post #691
chrysoprace wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be a time when software developers become obsolete, and I don't pretend to know the future, but if today's models are anything to go by then it won't happen any time soon. At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

I'll be curious to see how the next generation of highly skilled technical experts will be raised.

That's an interesting paradox of the current AI: useful enough to make the industry less competent (either directly by helping students to not learn or indirectly by replacing people in entry level formative jobs) while not being smart enough to replace all the chain to the top

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#933

Post by poulpy123 »

15155 wrote: post #516
irishcoffee wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure that?

Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top 5% pay >61% of all income taxes. You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a small percentage of individuals.

Which is a very stupid way to look at things since it only means they are able to get the majority of the richest made by the country

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#934

Post by techblueberry »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #929
techblueberry wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress. "Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I…

You want Victorian healthcare? Or privacy? No air conditioning? Dirty air? Horse shit everywhere? No different, people stink, can't shower, and it takes hours of labor to wash clothes without a washing machine?

No, it’s 2026, we can create a hybrid, that’s the point! The ability to choose our destiny!

Also - Horse shit doesn’t sound that bad. People stink in 2026 too.

But I do think, I dunno if inflection point is precisely the right concept, there will plenty of future developments I’ll be glad , but I think less and less of a percentage of our innovation is positive for general human happiness.

Big tech ceos even often talk about this sort of longtermist perspective where today’s human happiness doesnt matter, just progress toward an unknown future.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#935

Post by WalterBright »

izacus wrote: post #914
WalterBright wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From cancelling pointless military projects?

The entire defense budget is $874b.

As I remarked, the UBI math doesn't work.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#936

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

Ex Amazon here. Left as an SD6.

Basically, I wouldn't trust accounts of people who got cut from Amazon in terms of their work experience. Most employees at Amazon, engineering and others are salary seekers - their only goal is to get into higher brackets. None of what they do is as impactful at they make it sound, especially in management. And there is false sense of achievement created when people do annual reviews and most of the time, you are never going to try to fuck over your coworker so you embellish their accomplishments (again because you want them to do the same for your higher paid position).

The thing is, for software at least, most of Amazon software engineering follows a predefined template, and you don't need a lot of management to organize engineering. As for engineers themselves, there is quite a bit of friction for the vast majority of them to do anything impactful because of lack of experience, and LLMs haven't bridged that gap because they don't even know what questions to ask.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#937

Post by kg »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #610
kg wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine.

> Finding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine. If I may ask, what industry are you referring to?

Game development has been seeing cuts on the order of 10k+ jobs/year for a couple years now and investment in studios/titles has dried up. It's extremely competitive now and the deals being signed are for smaller amounts of money with worse terms.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#938

Post by zdragnar »

drecked wrote: post #312
zdragnar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.

All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants. This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering underg…

There wasn't any demonization of math when I was in school, but no shortage of "you can grow up to be anything" and "do what you love" rather than "get a job that will pay for doing all the things you love".

There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.

There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#939

Post by circlefavshape »

techblueberry wrote: post #659
socalgal2 wrote: post #507

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…

> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress. "Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I…

> Why can't we architect the world we want to have? Side effects. Society is not planned, it evolves

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#940

Post by volkk »

jannyfer wrote: post #805
volkk wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think that's what this means. it just means to me a certain population of people are clueless and don't use these tools enough. what's _actually_ damaging/obnoxious are the ones arguing that this guy is a good writer and that this isn't AI. IMO, telling the difference can be as simple as looking for the common giveaways, or as complex as reading between the lines of the structure of sentences, the terrible ad…

I agree with you and I definitely noticed the “it’s not just X, it’s Y” pattern. But I find your comment funny because it ironically has the same “not that, this” pattern in a more verbose and less polished & less formulaic pattern.

yep, that's my signature way of writing -- "unpolished & verbose" :D
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