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

951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#951

Post by Bhilai »

aorloff wrote: post #843
Bhilai wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They r…

Yes this was a joke. Apparently not a well enough known joke, because a bunch of people took me seriously

haha thanks for clarifying mate.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#952

Post by unreal6 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #904
petersellers wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for that?

I work at Amazon and I see who got cut. You can also check the WARN notice in WA.

You can find the warn notices here. [0] From a quick script I wrote up, it seems that ~60% of layoffs noted on 1/26/2026 are from individual contributors

[0]: https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe...

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#953

Post by Shocka1 »

poulpy123 wrote: post #923
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…

Your repurposing plan would work only if it is not automated too and if the numbers of people that would choose a similar plan is low enough

Agreed, supply and demand - there are some negatives, but this is the only way I would choose for it to be.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#954

Post by 93po »

mrandish wrote: post #829
tills13 wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Before 2025, nobody talked like this. I enjoy writing posts online and I've been doing it since the days of BBSs and 300 baud modems, transitioning to Usenet and nowadays mostly just here on HN. People seem to find my posts generally informative and sometimes even mention they're well written. In school I always got good marks on creative and essay writing and in the early days of my startups I wrote some of the us…

I can't tell if this is satire or not because it reads just how LLMs think before giving their final output

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#955

Post by caminante »

fireant wrote: post #814
ad8e wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suspicion is right; it is 100% AI-generated. https://www.pangram.com/history/8b593dcc-6a7d-496f-8c80-a588...

Oh wow, the guy used the word "versatility"... he even dared "narrative" and "just" - the latter one two times! Astonishing, does he have no shame copy pasting this obvious AI slop? It is obvious that no person in their right mind would utter such things!

>Pangram can detect AI-generated content in both short-form and long-form written content, with up to 99% accuracy. [0]

Yeah, 0% accuracy is still "up to 99%"!

[0] https://www.pangram.com/

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#956

Post by caminante »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #261
sejje wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My costs are falling. I buy a lot of groceries for my business, so I have decent records. Beef is way up, though. Gas is way down as well.

Oil prices have fallen. And likely will through the rest of the year. And the US conspicuously didn't apply tariffs on oil from Canada (while simultaneously saying "we don't need anything from Canada" and threatening our sovereignty and tariffing everything else) which is a huge amount of imports into the US. Oil prices down isn't necessarily a good thing for an oil exporter like the US though. In aggregate. If the U…

Really?

Canadian crude imports are about 20-25% of crude feedstock for gasoline in the US. Put a 10% import tax on top. Keeping things the same, that's <5% increase in domestic wholesale prices.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#957

Post by caminante »

layer8 wrote: post #394
el_nahual wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inconsistent jingoistic nationalism. On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor market with almost no guardrails." So which is it: did he really work on problems no one else could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor? Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is…

Or c) Amazon knew about his running for Congress.

I'm sure someone in HR is writing him into the next round of mandatory training regarding code of conduct on social media.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#958

Post by NicoJuicy »

hvb2 wrote: post #863
reaperducer wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he might be the greatest person at failing up who has ever lived. Went bankrupt six times and is still hailed by his followers as an economic genius. Few people can pull that off.

Married 4 times, still seen as a saint

Buried his wife on his property alone to get tax breaks as a cemetery for mar a lago

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#959

Post by boogrpants »

ghurtado wrote: post #252
boogrpants wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however. The majority don't care so long as they have enough food and shelter and healthcare. The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made up wankeroo. Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights; Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the biologically essential logistics flowing cause that c…

> It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and whether it has been used to make a single valid economic argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded) Just kidding, I know it has not.

[dead]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#960

Post by Aerbil313 »

taurath wrote: post #897
cmiles8 wrote: post #154

Amazon is flailing at this point and now in a pattern of mass layoffs every 3-6 months. Not good. Leadership can’t even gets its story straight about why… “It’s AI” correction “Pandemic over-hiring” correction “delayering” correction “restoring our culture” correction “actually AI!”. There’s a whole mess of rando projects and teams with bloated management layers and often little to show for it revenue wise. While on…

Meanwhile the core public use products and platforms are pretty poor. Tried shopping for clothes or anything on Amazon? 9/10ths of any page is ads, you can’t find anything you’re looking for. It’s getting real close to “we’re customer obsessed, and our shareholders are our real customers”

Hey taurath, I'd like to ask a question to you, could you possibly shoot me an email (in my bio)?
Post reply on HN