Amazon cuts 16k jobs
(reuters.com)702 points by DGAP 4 days ago
702 points by DGAP 4 days ago
> 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 doesn't operate like this.
Fake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities.
No, this is exactly how Amazon management works.
Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.
This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.
These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.
Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.
The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.
I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.
And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.
Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).
It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.
The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
Also, if you bite them after telling them five times "please don't touch me", it's somehow your fault.
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.
> management ... literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished.
True. But there are many people whose productivity slumps unless they are asked for progress updates every day. You have to offset this against the people whose productivity slumps BECAUSE they are asked for updates every day. In large orgs with unknown quality of people I guess it's not impossible that middle managers add value.
In the past, my job has been exactly this.
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.
>> gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
> Real management work doesn't operate like this.
I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.
I left amazon, in part, because of this realization: Much of management was exactly doing that. That was back in the BERT days and even then writing was on the wall.
I’m more surprised that it’s not believable for some of management depending on how process driven there job is.
I’ve definitely had roles where I sadly realized I’m automating the QA person next to me well before LLMs were mainstream.
In my experience I think, you would automate enough of a mid manager role that upper management doesn’t care for, and whatever left over responsibilities that couldn’t be automated is split between a high level IC and the next above. Then the bureaucracy sells is as a success.
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.
Seems like Amazon is doing the right thing cutting down its corporate workforce then.
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 the "software professionals".
When this is over, just like the rust belts there will be code belts where once highly valued software developers will be living in decaying neighborhoods and the politicians will be promising to create software jobs by banning AI.
I kill jobs for a living, and always wondered when the promise of "Low code" would kill my job.
Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.
Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.
>> 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.
That’s the thing here. Software engineering is an intelligence-complete problem. If AI can solve it, then it can solve any sort of knowledge work like accounting, financial analysis, etc
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.
Software was already at its limits on automation, the last thing automated will be writing code that does the required thing but automating other stuff that wasn’t already automated by software will take some time because will require AI advances in those particular domains.
Once an AI runs a single company well, all publicly traded companies will have a legal obligation to at least consider replacing the C-suite with AI. In theory. I'll believe it when I see it.
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.
> software developers become obsolete
> there’ll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts
Two different things.
Yes, many, many software developers will become obsolete in certain industries. It’s already happening. Putting on blinders doesn’t make it go away.
Yes, highly skilled technical experts will absolutely still be needed.
> At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.
Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of highly skilled successful people of today could soon be below average category, jobless and can be called clueless, stuck in old ways who didn't simply see what is happening in the world.
And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.
> At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.
Why? There was a time when there was a need for highly skilled seamstresses. And we never developed the technology to do their jobs as well as they could. But people just learned to deal with mass produced clothes that didn’t fit perfectly because it was so much cheaper.
this is a very pessimistic take
could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways
it's hard to be sure
Ha, that was exactly my thoughts to! Code is turning into a commodity. Nothing special anymore or something you need to protect. It's turning into cheap coal.
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 only way forward.
I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.
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 in the crosshairs now.
If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.
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.
What is your repurposing plan, if you don't mind my asking? I am trying to think of alternatives too, but it's quite stressful.
> If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go.
Get back to me when you need to execute that plan with millions of others joining the bread line.
Your plan, whatever it is is still predicated on the world as it is today being more or less as it is today. The problem with anything truly disruptive is that it may very well cause your plan to become infeasible for a variety of reasons. For your sake I hope that you were aware of that little detail and made your plan bullet proof or flexible enough that that is not going to cause you any headaches.
All very well to have a plan, and I'm sure some people manage to successfully "repurpose" themselves, but historically the way this plays out is that redundant workers live out their days in relative poverty and it's their children/grandchildren who find new opportunities out of economic necessity. Usually takes 2-3 generations for the impact on workers to fully shake out.
> 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 speeding in the opposite direction.
You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.
> 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.
> I don’t know what the answer here is
Blood. If things don’t reverse course this trajectory historically leads to bloodshed.
In many respects it already has. How many people have died just this year already because businesses didn’t do what they were suppose to? Because cutting costs with no consequences is seen as the norm?
Of course nobody wants to account for those externalities and when that blood comes back on them they become scared and use government force instead. You’re seeing the trial run with ICE as we write our comments on this forum
> 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.
As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.
The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.
Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.
> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two.
Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.
COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.
Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer.
Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.
My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.
Sorry to hear that.
But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things
On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative)
I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money.
My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working.
I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations.
Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly.
But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.
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 skills or trade skills will be fine.
For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
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?
> 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 mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."
But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.
> Why can't we architect the world we want to have? Side effects. Society is not planned, it evolves
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.
> 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 not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.
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.
I was going to comment the same thing.
The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably).
Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.
have been hearing from several ex-AWS colleagues about the job losses within their teams and the number of people impacted since yesterday. it’s depressing, but also symptomatic of a much larger obvious shift already underway for some time now, now being further accelerated by new technology.
AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.
harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.
beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.
Thinking that because in the past the effect of progress was a net positive after a while it will always be like that is a cognitive bias. When looking at the large scale, in previous cases, people replaced by automation would go into jobs that were not automated.
But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?
> 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
Everyone works 20 hours/week.
The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.
They are right. Hence the stalemate.
This is exactly how I feel. I entered the software industry right before GPGPU programming was becoming a thing. I was aware of AI and neural nets back then and saw the future and decided I wanted to be part of it.
So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.
There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.
People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.
Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol
The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane
This is goofy. Your job isn't special and this already happened to a lot of other people while coders were laughing in libertarian. It doesn't suddenly get real when it happens to you.
The people whose jobs were shipped overseas were physically stronger and less sheltered than you. If they couldn't stop it, your pencil arms and retreat into revolutionary cosplay fantasy certainly doesn't bode well for you. They weren't even fired because of an advance in technology, they were fired because we just dismantled workers rights and allowed every job to be shipped to China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines. And literally, now, the "opposition" is angrily protesting for free trade and for illegal workers with no rights; you all still don't get it.
Automation raises productivity, and creates wealth that we can choose to share, even though "we" don't. Not lowering labor standards and not allowing jobs to be shipped out to poverty stricken countries with low labor standards would have just taken compassion and not being completely self-centered for at least 5 minutes a day. Fighting when you had something to lose rather than waiting until you have nothing. I'm supposed to make up a fake job for you?
There won't even be Oxy for you to turn to. You'd better be happy with legal weed, even if you can barely afford it on your Taskrabbit income.
What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it.
If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.
The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs.
But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.
And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.
I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.
Actual effective managers do much more than "gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him."
In some organizations, the upper management generates a real burden on people below them with ever changing demands for information.
I have to assume some of it serves a social, rather than practical purpose, like having people re-assure them that projects are going well. If that's the case, automation may just not make sense.
It's interesting that the AI is taking job story is so prevalent in these sorts of posts even though there's zero indication of it in any financial analysis. Amazon and big tech companies like it are using AI as the smoke screen to cover up the obvious, which is these companies have lost their ability to grow exponentially. Since their stock price and debt demands this impossible growth, they are now starting the dying process. It will probably take years and maybe even decades, but they will continue to cut costs until they become the next Sears.
I agree and I also think a lot of what used to require the cloud is now becoming local and private.
Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.
I have always felt that if I could do a job really well, do work that required no maintenance, was basically 'self-healing' so to speak, with documentation so clear and easy to understand that someone could pick up where I left off without asking me a single question. For me that was always my aesthetic and goal in any work I did.
Yet, here I am, an experienced software engineer, unemployed for over a year now. It still seems to me the right ideal, so the 'karmic' outcome feels unjust really.
Oh dear. I wish middle management was simply "gathering information" from the decks below and reporting it to the bridge.
Tell you what, why don't we get rid of management altogether and just have a flat org ?
> 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 relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals.
https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...
Why not get rid of job titles and just have people do whatever needs to be done?
Because no one person is good at everything, and even if you managed to build a team of people who were good at everything, it is inefficient to make everyone keep up with all details of every aspect of the company so that they can be productive in an arbitrary role at the drop of a hat. Giving people a role allows them to specialize their knowledge and concentrate all their efforts into their area of expertise/competence.
Managers fill a role. Sure, some managers are bad, and some workplaces have seemingly mostly bad managers, and it leads to cynical opinions about how managers are busy-work-making dolts who don't understand anything. Some employers have mostly good managers and I feel sorry for you if you have never had the experience.
I'm 40 years into my EE career and I have always deflected efforts to make me a people manager or a project manager. I like being a grunt in the trenches solving problems at the bottom level, and a good manager increases their reports' productivity by shielding them from needing to deal with project management crap. I would have retired already except I've been blessed to have good managers for the past 20 years, while my managers have been attending umpteen resource allocation meetings and all the attendant report-making that requires.
lol thank you I was trying to see if anyone else also read this with a raised eyebrow. “Yes so these ICs and other non-management staff are going to be reporting to this LLM and then magic and executives are informed of everything they need to know.”
> gathering information from folks below him
I thought that information is only available through organic conversations by the watercooler and cross polination of teams.
Does it mean you no longer will have to come to office as long as you talk to AI over Slack?
Or are they going to slap laptop on a Roomba and still mandate office attendance?
Let's split the difference and put a brain on a Roomba like in Fallout.
“He should’ve been so aware that his job was going to be the first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool to cut his own job”
That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.
> “He should’ve been so aware that his job was going to be the first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool to cut his own job”
> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.
This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for
At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).
All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.
So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.
All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.
Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.
Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.
Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.
I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)
There is a lot of middle management. I would include PMs in this. Salesforce does planning from Benioff down. Goals -> each report goals, etc. Planning based off goals - much horse trading. Planning from the lead/pm level - weekly - more horse trading. Reality was urgent stuff got taken care of. Literally over a two year period, outside fancy wording, the technical component of the initial goals maybe completed 30%.
There are a lot of inefficiencies I can see what this manager at AWS was trying to optimize for.
I'm in a well funded somewhat greenfield org - not a startup - we use mcp servers of that specific ticket tracking system within the coding tools to handle ticket creation, assignment, tracking, status, completion, updated by what code is being hit. mostly inheriting existing workflows like git comments, pull requests, tickets referenced in those already, just AI writes those commit messages and PR comments too. reports about all of that are made by AI as well to the stakeholder that needs to see that distilled in their language.
We won't be hiring middle management, no product managers, no engineering managers, VPs
The only aspect we don't have solved is a buffer between sales/execs and engineers, but all other functions are automated away alongside other AI assisted coding that there actually is bandwidth for the schizophrenic ideas. Things that used to be tech debt and not prioritized by engineers without management suddenly are all solved, AI makes the cleanest REST API's I've ever seen, obscure verbs properly implemented immediately. Test cases all done.
It's working really well and the friction with non technical PMs and hierarchies is gone
its a 1 liner to add relevant mcp servers to Claude Code, and every ticket tracker already has an mcp server out
for triaging between UX designers, we also just don't. we use an mcp server for UX, I can point playwright - which is usually used for testing your own site - at a competitor's website and feed all the UX information and implementation into Claude Code to promote the synthesis of an extremely advanced and already engaging design pattern into the project
at this point, I would say its a lack of competence to manage a software project or org, any other way. Amazon's deep cuts are a shot across the bow to others that know they need to "do the needful", and will be watched closely
> 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 fairly as possible. That is, a combination of the job of a general and a PM. Controlling the information may be necessary for survival, but it should not be the job description.
> 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.
You should watch this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527793/
Or Office Space (warning, Rated R for some language and crude distractions / conversations.) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804
Still, it documents the typical work culture of the US in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's sad and amazing how much of that remains the same.
So much conversation is around AI replacing developers, but I've been to so many meetings where a middle-manager (gleefully) shows me some AI slop they produced to do their job and I think to myself "If you did this with AI, why don't I do this with AI and replace you?"
Most experienced devs already know writing code is the easy part, it's really understanding the business requirements that takes time (I think a lot of junior devs don't understand this so they get overly enthusiastic about AI). But it turns out that most middle managers were already churning out slop to begin with so replacing them with AI is a big improvement.
As an engineer, roughly speaking, every task AI helps me get done faster is roughly negated by someone else's AI slop I need to clean up. But when it comes to middle management, I can't tell the difference. I'm pretty sure most product roadmaps generated by AI are actually more sensible than those generated by clueless managers.
Where was he from? Recent hires are sometimes the first to go, depending on certain other factors.
Undoubtedly his tool turned out to suck, and his managers realized that it made him faster but didn't eliminate the need for his role. "Every other manager" is a pipe dream and if it's true it means that group is pathetically inefficient and underutilizing the talents of even an average manager.
That's what I'd say in 2026. 2-3 years from now, not sure. But right now, AI can't run a vending machine without selling too many tungsten cubes.
> It felt like watching someone who is about to be executed be responsible for building the gallows
Perilaus of Athens designed the Brazen Bull, a hollow bronze statue used to roast victims alive. When he presented it to the tyrant Phalaris, Phalaris was so disgusted by the cruelty of the device that he ordered Perilaus to be the first person tested inside it.
No offence, but this is 5% of what a middle manager does. We automated this task years back without LLMs too.
If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the fact that we all have to earn a living, why would anyone want a job where you distill a bunch of input from those "below you" and relay it to those "above you"? That sounds like a job I would never want to get out of bed to do. If I were one of the people fired, I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
I guess people need money to buy food to survive?
> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.
I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.
Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.
I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.
Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.
Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.
I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)
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 asset, it’s a liability. And if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out.
We're now in the realm of hold onto your nuts -- sink or swim -- ownership of your own company is the only way out
That person's pinned message shows that he started his campaign for Congress almost 2 months ago. He says he was laid off today. He's been Tweeting non-stop daily and appears to be working hard on his campaign.
I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at Amazon. It's not something you do in your free time.
His campaign platform also appears to be about AI taking jobs, so I'm more than a little suspicious that getting laid off was part of the plan rather than an actual surprise.
The claim that he "built systems" should also be taken in the context of his job title, which was in product management. I've held the Product Manager title for a few years, but I wouldn't claim "I built" during those times, because I was not the one doing the building. This strikes me as a little misleading.
Also that post is full of classic LLM-ism from beginning to end. Note the overuse of the "It's not this, it's that" format and other LLM tells. I might give someone the benefit of the doubt if they were immersed in LLMs so long that they started speaking like an LLM, but given all of the other context surrounding this post I have a high suspicion it was written by AI.
> Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at Amazon.
Does that matter? If people vote for him, he'll end up in Congress, regardless of "it matching" or not. The current president is a TV celebrity who ran a bunch of failed businesses, some middle manager from Amazon could surely be in Congress then?
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that planning and running his campaign for Congress is incompatible with being in a demanding position at a FAANG company because campaigning and fundraising is a job in itself.
If you scroll through his timeline, he's been gaining publicity by releasing videos critical of Amazon, too. There's too much of a conflict of interest involved with letting someone like that remain in a high position within the company.
I think you missed what GP was implying, which is that the tweeter must have been slacking at their Amazon job and spending company time on their congressional run.
Ah, yes, that might be, that'd make sense too. Thanks.
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).
Your suspicion is right; it is 100% AI-generated. https://www.pangram.com/history/8b593dcc-6a7d-496f-8c80-a588...
>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%"!
In my experience, big corporate employers get extremely nervous when their employees start doing anything high profile (i.e. successful) in the political sphere.
After all, if 250 people report to me, probably some of them are going to have opinion A and some are going to have opinion B. If I take a strong public stance in support of A and against B, some of the more nervous B supporters are going to worry I hate them personally and fear I'm a threat to their career - and they're probably going to go to HR about it.
And even if my job doesn't give me any hiring-and-firing powers - if I'm high profile enough that a load of random haters decide they're going to try to get me fired by subjecting my employer to a campaign of harassment, well, now folks like HR and customer services are getting harassed.
Obviously, though, I've never seen a corporation have a blanket policy saying employees can't engage with the political system - that would be pretty bad as a policy. Instead they'll quote policies about 'bringing the company into disrepute' and similar.
> and you blame it on 2 months of what you assume is poor performance
The official registration and launch of the campaign was 2 months ago, but he started long before that. If you read his timeline he didn't just wake up one day and decide to run for Congress 2 months ago.
What's especially funny is that the post reads exactly like it was written by an AI.
He's writing in the academic/upper-class style that it's training data focused on.
I'm convinced that one of the largest frictions to common use of LLMs is that it translates everyone's writing to the that same style. Having it punch-up or flesh-out your proposal or outline, or whatever, isn't really adding any new material, but it's translating it to a writing style that has historically been exclusive and difficult to learn, and that difference in style is what made the original text sub-par, from the perspective of academia and members the upper class.
Uhm, plenty of phrases like this existed before 12 months ago.
> 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 user documentation and all the advertising copy (one of which won an advertising award). So, I think I'm at least a bit better than average at writing. And I've never used AI for writing anything.
But in the last few months I've had posts accused of being "AI writing" TWICE (once here on HN and the other was on a retro-computing forum). So I Googled through a random sampling of around 50-ish of my own posts going back a couple decades. Damn. 90s me was naive about a few things. And I found three examples which are kind of like that pattern you described. I guess I'm screwed because apparently that's just how I sometimes write and no one ever minded before. And I have proof I wrote that way long before AI did... oh.
It just occurred to me that maybe some of my Usenet posts could be a small part of why AI writes like that. But I was here first! I should have dibs on writing like me. Regardless, I definitely don't want anyone here to think my writing is AI output - using AI would be disrespectful to the community I enjoy participating in. Recently, I've noticed a few times where I start second guessing something I wrote before hitting "Reply" which makes writing not fun. Once, I just hit delete and logged off without posting. It wasn't that good of a post anyway.
Now it occurs to me I'm not really sure what my point is other than venting. So much for being a better-than-average writer. I guess I'd like people to at least be really careful about making accusations - unless you're very sure. I mean, I get it. I hate AI slop too. I enjoy reading good posts here even more than writing posts. Slop sucks. But errant accusations can have a chilling effect or they've had some effect on me.
Oh, wait was that last sentence too much like THE pattern? No... it's an either/or so I think it's probably okay.
And, to be clear, I promise I didn't plan that sentence as some kind of example. I wrote it and only then did I wonder if it might be too much like THE pattern. Maybe this is one of the ways AI destroys community. Simply by making us second guess each other - and then that gets some of us second-guessing ourselves. Shit, I just noticed I used a dash in the last sentence... but at least it's not an em dash, so I should be good. I just suck at semicolons and started using dashes as a lazy shortcut. My freshman comp teacher complained about it too. Wait, did I use dashes anywhere else? Checking... Shit. I did. Now anyone reading this will definitely think I planned that both times or that maybe I'm an LLM. Because no one writes like that. Fuck.
They admitted to it, with a pic of their original draft https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016666185949962309#m
Americans pay a pretty hefty health insurance penalty when they leave steady employment to start their own business. There have definitely been better times to be an entrepreneur in this country.
Europe/ (Anecdotally India, I have seen some good health insurances for what 50$ here?) might have a better time for being business owners as well.
One of the issues in these countries is usually Funding. I am unable to understand how people get money to fund the projects & have people be willing to pay when there are alternatives which will cut you down as well probably burning through their funding in the first place.
Suppose, I want to create a cloud provider, A) ownership costs went up due to ramflation, B) there are now services which are using VC money which will burn insane amount of money to give users for free.
As a person without VC money or without wishing to seek VC money to simply burn it, (I personally much much prefer seedstrapping and bootstraping), the idea of business ownership becomes difficult as well.
Plus don't forget the fact that the idea of getting a customer becomes hard in the first place given how organic mediums are being overwhelmed (like Show HN etc.) and personally the idea of marketing doesn't really click with me of things like paying for this as if its a rent to the overlords like google and facebook smh but I guess if someone's a business owner, they might be forced to play this game.
It's strange when upper-middle-class workers finally realize what life has been like for lower-class workers for 40 years
The two major US parties are in the midst of another swap of which is conservative and which is liberal.
Marin County California, probably the area most heavily voting for the Democrat party, is clearly the most classically conservative part of the country, allowing almost no development and strongly objecting to even the slightest offenses in speech, whereas rural counties in the south want classically liberal safety nets and protections and heavily vote for the Republican party.
> if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out.
This is how layoffs have always worked. The pretext changes.
Was the X poster saying in a very long winded way that his job was taken and lots of our jobs will be taken by foreigners who cost less?
I wonder what a few years of this mentality will do. Greed is never reasonable. This will have consequences.
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.
> experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability
Weirdly impressive. This guy just invented galaxy-brained AI slop.
I like to think about this story from years ago when Nintendo wasn't doing so well and there was talk of layoffs
"Nintendo CEO’s refusal to layoff staff goes viral following industry-wide cuts"
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/nintendo-ceos-refusal-t...
I realize these companies aren't identical, but interesting to compare approaches. I also expect Amazon hires and fires more easily instead of growing more slowly and steadily.
Bear in mind Nintendo has ~0.005% of the employees Amazon does
Corp or total? Amazon employees a lot of labor for fulfillment centers and other labor jobs.
Nintendo stock is up 7.5x since 1998, compare that to amazon which is up like 200x. Nintendo shareholders would be pissed about its performance if they were american, cant say how Japanese feel about it given cultural differences.
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 reporting that to people above him.
His hope was that he would be retained to maintain the system that he built, knowing that every other manager at his level was going to be terminated.
It felt like watching someone who is about to be executed be responsible for building the gallows. He should’ve been so aware that his job was going to be the first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool to cut his own job. But he was optimistic that the cuts wouldn’t come for him
Makes me wonder how he’s doing today