Amazon cuts 16k jobs
(reuters.com)702 points by DGAP 4 days ago
702 points by DGAP 4 days ago
The US was setting itself for quite a recovery in 2024... and for a class war too, so IDK what would get there first.
Yeah, and as part of the "class war", a majority of the lower classes decided to elect a billionaire whose first order of business was to implement giant tax cuts for the richest Americans while cutting programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
Class war will never work in America because we're too stupid.
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.
I'm talking more about intra-country dynamics, rather than inter-country. Momentum, good or bad, is a thing. It's not that mysterious, we can trace it to things that feed off each other, like the inflation <-> populism loop, which makes civic institutions progressively worse over time. Turkey is a modern case study. This is the opposite of the "coiled spring" analogy, where if a country get worse it is bound to get better even stronger.
So Putin is culling his people so the next generation can have more!
Dollar is losing value by the day, gold and silver on record high and somehow this is not an indicator for huge uncertainty?
China is beating the US on pretty much every stage and this only accelerates this.
And yet prices are marginally up while all the "economists" expected major inflation. Dollar vs Euro is at same level now as it was in 2019 - there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong.
It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess.
No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) and employment figures.
You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)
This is outdated -- it surpassed 2007 levels in 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average...
This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous.
Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).
[0] https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term...
[1] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/01/historical-returns-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rmiller/2024/06/20/90-years-of-...
> and employment figures
Just to add onto your point, bad employment numbers can actually be bullish for stocks due to a higher chance of Fed rate cuts. Obviously there is a threshold there because if too many people are unemployed then no one can buy stuff, but it just highlights how disconnected stocks are from the economy.
> No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing
On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking.
Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah.
That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications, etc.
Then it just never happened. Things went up.
Since the administration have stopped releasing some data that usually is released, how fast would people be able to notice that the economy tanked, if it did?
Well technically, the economy has tanked (sort of), people say that the economy's doing great but the figures that we see in (q4?) are extrapolated from the previous quaters in which the only thing (from what people tell me) is keeping the "illusion" of economy doing good is the spending within AI datacenters. But a huge part of that is shrouded within mystery as well (Stargate project is really suspicious in my honest opinion though I can be wrong)
Also wasn't there some BLS figure which was pushed by the Administration to try to have good numbers or similar. I mean speaking from a different countries pov, Personally I wouldn't trust the numbers the current administration gives.
I don't know if this is the same belief that Americans within America also hold though.
AI investment/datacenter construction was roughly 1% of US GDP in 2025 all by itself.
That and people were expecting the tariffs to be consistently applied as stated, instead we got... this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr7OVWgqDIM&t=27s
I guess you mean informed people. There's a whole lot of smart people in this thread who aren't talking about differentials.
I don't know shit about tariffs, except what everyone said in the news. It was going to tank the economy. Everyone's retirement was going to poof into smoke. Everything was going to cost 2 or 3x previous prices. None of that came to pass.
I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.
I'm just a dummy though, so I can't glean some expert insight into the differential. I don't have a model for you, just the real world.
How do you think the economy is doing? What do the differential impact models, that aren't a waste of time, say about it?
It sounds like you are interested, noticing some inconsistencies, and trying to get to the bottom of it, which is a good place to start!
> I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.
Comparing Metric(t=0) to Metric(t=1) is a tempting but incorrect way to assess the quality of an intervention. Lots of people think this way, but it is a flawed heuristic that should be avoided whenever possible. Instead, one should compare: PredictedMetric(action=A, time=1) to PredictedMetric(action=B, time=1). This is obvious when one thinks about it, but people get lazy.
To state in another way: when assessing economic policies, it is smarter to compare the observed outcome against the counterfactual outcome. Forgetting or overlooking this is common, but I won't defend or excuse such sloppy thinking.
--
The problem with stating it that way is that I don't think it really drives the point home. Think about someone in a hurry or someone who doesn't know what "counterfactual means... will they stop and _think_? I wouldn't bet on it. So, I'm a fan of hitting people over the head. Show a table:
Intervention: A (no tariffs) B (tariffs + retaliation)
time=1 time=1
-------------- --------------
GDP: .... ....
prices: .... ....
income: .... ....
unemployment: .... ....
sectoral growth: .... ....
fiscal effects: .... ....
Will people agree on the models? To say it bluntly (using the "hit them over the head principle"), asking the question like that is bone-headed. Asking it like that is the wrong question, and it misses the whole f-ing point. How on earth we claim to have an educated society when people pose questions like that? We really need to step it up a notch. We've all heard "good journalism gives equal weight to both sides". Fine. But in practice this doesn't get us very far. First, there are more than two sides. Second, hearing out all sides is only the beginning, not the end. Third, practically speaking, if we actually want to make sense of the world in real situations, we're going to discount and possibly completely toss out a whole lot of extraneous, uninformed crap. (Very few serious economists take Trump's economic plans seriously, and there are good reasons for throwing them in the trash! Once one understands what is happening, even mentioning them is usually a waste of time.)
But I digress.
A better question is: on what bases do reasonable people agree and disagree? Using quantitative and substantive models, how can we move forward on making actual testable predictions? Assessing the error in a prediction must not be a matter of opinion. Unless there is a tie, someone is going to be less wrong than the other person. There is no wiggling out of it due to vague language or "miscommunication". That's one key advantage of models. People that care and seek the truth are more likely to share their models. Done right, this will shift the discussion into model specifics and people will have to show their work. This tends to weed out unserious people pretty quickly. (Unfortunately, in many cases, closed models are valuable and so are not shared openly.)
--
I don't often find mainstream journalism that covers any technical topic very well, and this includes economics. I'm not here to blame anyone -- many journalists operate in contexts where time constraints and audience expectations are unlikely to meet my quality bar. Sometimes I will give business analysts a bit more credence, but not much. The world lacks good systems for (a) disseminating clear, testable predictions that (b) lay out their counterfactuals. Heck, I'm surprised when I find even one of the two.
Here's my unsolicited advice. Don't bother reading what "most people" say about economic issues. Ask various friends and network for high quality sources and explore on your own. On this topic, I suggest starting with "When Are Tariffs Optimal?" by Thomas Lubik [1].
Once you have an understanding of what economic models predict, then you can dig a bit deeper. I put close to zero weight when reading mainstream writing on technical topics. If you don't go to the primary sources, you are delegating your thinking. It doesn't take that much work to read the summary from the source material.
[1]: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b... Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond - Economic Brief - May 2025, No. 25-21
That's because Trump gave many extensions and concessions to so many countries. Remember there was 125% on China in May 2025 before Xi decided to use rare earth minerals to fight back. Maybe you have heard of TACO. So the tariffs as threatened never panned out in reality.
Sure, when the arbitrary tarriff formula was announced for every nation, the stock markets were down thousands, and the bond market was fluctuating. Then you had the short term trade war with China were both countries set tarrifs so high no imports/exports between the two happened for a month, and there was a concern about empty shelves in major department stores.
But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also chickens out", so Wall Street learned he would backdown on any tariffs that had too much negative economic impact.
The impact to social bonds between the US and other Western nations has been thrown completely off track, and now they are looking for exits from anything US related.
These tarrifs were the absolutely dumbest thing imaginable, and have brought the post WWII period of US economic prosperity to a point it can never recover.
It's only down from here. We pissed off our friends.
When will we start?
Did you miss the thread about us losing 10,000 PhDs already because of these policies?
Or the threads about people looking for and starting to build alternatives for US tech?
These are wounds that will take a long time to play out, but your kids generation will feel it, though they may never realize what we lost.
Also, we already are: https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...
The difference between the reaction on HN to the Amazon layoffs and the ASML layoffs is interesting. Perhaps it's driven by the fact that people here are employed by US companies and not by ASML, so we're able to admire how ASML is cutting 4% of its workforce as reducing the number of managers but Amazon cutting 1%^H^H 4% of its corporate workforce so that they can get to "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy" is considered to be because of other secret causes that are a sign of the company failing.
dont count warehouse works and corp folks in the same bucket. thats like mixing commercial and residential real estate markets in one report without diff
A reasonable correction. Apparently 25% of Amazon employees are in corporate or AWS[0]. So they're both roughly 4% layoffs.
0: https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-amaz...
ASML isn't laying off their blue collar labor and neither is Amazon. Apples to Apples would be US based corporate numbers.
- September 2025: US imposes additional 100k USD per visa as a condition to eligibility. (previous was 5k - 20k USD)
- October 2025: Amazon cuts 14k jobs
- December 2025: Amazon announces additional 35b USD investment to India (total 75b USB by 2030); promises to create ~1m jobs there
- December 2025: Random H1B lottery is dismantled, giving preference to higher company salary spending e.g. the more salary H1B applicant would receive, the better the chances
- January 2026: Amazon cuts 16k additional jobs (30k jobs cut in total)
You really don't have to be a detective to figure out that this has nothing to do with AI.
Can you explain in more details how changing h1b rules leads to layoffs?
It's actually both.
1. Ramp up offshore hiring and relocate jobs in low-cost-of-living (LCOL) countries (India) to avoid paying the 100K H1-B visa charge.
2. Train their AI and robotics by researchers in LCOL countries (to eventually replace the high-cost-of-living (HCOL) warehouse labor workforce)
3. Deploy robots and AI agents to then layoff more people in HCOL environments and repeat (1) until their margins improve and they achieve AGI.
except they planned the January layoff in October or even earlier over the summer.
Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
Excuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.
Global economy doesn't look that terrible. Nor is the AI story that believable. Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? All the guys at Aspen talking about what fraction they cut, just as 5 years ago they bragged how bloated their org chart is?
TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects.
But if that's really it, no idea.
> Global economy doesn't look that terrible.
It doesn't? I was born in the 90s (so admittedly 2008 was before I started working), but the economy is looking the worst it's been in my lifetime to me.
US real GDP is racing ahead: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1 . Inflation is fine, even if you don't fully believe the official numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA . Unemployment is increasing but below long term mean: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE . Interest rates are at a reasonably business-friendly level.
This is all the USofA. Elsewhere, China is allegedly also printing GDP growth like crazy. Europe is maybe a little stagnant but also not, on the whole, awful.
At the face of it, it's at least a C+ if not better. So if you'd claim it's terrible, there's some explaining to do.
There were points in 2008 where there were bank runs.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-12-fi-indym...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/oct/11/banking-cri...
Italy had to buy 3% of Parmigiano Reggiano production.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/rome-stage...
> I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-cannes open source projects.
Given how much of these companies runs on such projects, it really shouldn't be surprising. It's a numbers game for them; Facebook doesn't mind if 300 little OSS initiatives fail if it gets them React.
> Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist?
This is quite likely a big part of it. There's a lot of herd behavior in the financial markets. A few companies fire a bunch of people, stock price goes up, others follow suit.
Also, in many cases, this isn't something that anyone pays attention to on an ongoing basis, because very few execs have the mandate to do it at a large scale, and their attention is scarce. So in practice, it tends to be done at intervals, and doing it when other companies are also doing it gives cover.
It is an open secret among the ownership class that the labor market got too good for the workers around 2021-2022 especially for tech. What you are seeing now is a possibly colluded squeeze on tech employment to keep the workers on their toes and stay docile and servile.
> Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.
I think you also underestimate how much hiring gives these large companies political leverage. A town can be completely destroyed when one of these companies threatens to move a factory or office
Right - true.
So hiring people is ditching this political leverage. If that was the original driver, what's changes to make it not worth it anymore?
how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?
The US economy is struggling heavily. Population shrank for the first time in a long time that will reduce economic demand. The USD has gotten a lot weaker in the past few years. The regulatory environment is unpredictable and so risk being priced in is high. Every company is chasing scarcer and scarcer energy and chip resources. And then add on top irrational and constantly changing tariffs.
This causes companies to constantly review costs and look for ways to trim, which they're doing.
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?
Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?
If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit.
I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
> I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
I feel the same. They're better at some things yes, but also worse at other things. And for me, they're worse at my really important use cases. I could spend a month typing prompts into Codex or AntiGravity and still be left holding the bag. Just yesterday I had a fresh prompt and Geminin bombed super hard on some basic work. Insisting the problem was X when it wasn't. I don't know. I was super bullish but now I'm feeling far from sold on it.
Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?
> TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-cannes open source projects.
The same way they hire so many people for so much money to work on AI projects and build datacenter which haven't produced actual revenue for any customers (corporate or otherwise). I'd rather light money on fire to employ people tbh.
I say this as someone who has the 200 dollar Claude sub.
> TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects.
I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products!
It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.
Amazon just recently used that excuse for their 2025 layoffs a few months ago iirc.
I think the thing to remember is that with interest rates being essentially 0 during the (middle/end of) pandemic that made it really easy for a lot of companies to finance a virtually free checkbook. They were at liberty to try out all sorts of new experiments, virally for free (at that moment).
Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.
Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.
yeah. pretending to innovate rather than just shed ZIRP-era deadweight. like IBM laid off a few thousand "due to AI" in 2023, lol.
You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune 500s and not be fired for over a year.
Economic headwinds are rarely used. There is always something else they blame it on. It has been this way for the 30 years I've been old enough to pay attention - and those older than me report it has been even longer. There are downturns every few years, in turn meaning layoffs - and they always blame something other than the downturn.
They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
They're increasingly intertwined these days, so it's not much of a lie
AI is the perfect scapegoat.
Insurance providers are also doing it.
AI is also used in the legal space too.
Quite true. Many corporations use AI as excuse to "re-structure" their internal and external costs.
Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_limit#On_Twitter
> In November 2017, Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 characters. In 2023, Twitter boosted the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, it was increased to 4000. In April, it was again increased to 10,000, and in June, to 25,000.
This and being based in Houston, TX, where as far as I know no organization has a hub location.
Besides entire teams or business units, the targets were people who did not comply to RTO or were not sitting with their teams.
He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution.
How do you stop multinational companies like Amazon from using the global talent pool as they see fit and pay whatever wages the local market will bear?
Without that it comes off as the standard "elect me because foreigners are bad".
This is possible in the first place because labor cannot freely move across borders, but corporations can freely shop around.
You can either open borders to both people and goods, or you can have restrictions on both that go hand in hand. But one without the other is a massive gift to corporations who can and do cash in on that disparity.
They need to understand that their profits depend on people with disposable income. The US has some of the most profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon’s sales?
Unions that can negotiate contracts that have consequences for mass layoffs.
> I saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress.
Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
I don't see a clean solution here. The price/craft distinction matters - companies competing on price (Amazon retail) have different incentives than those competing on quality and craft (Notion, Linear). If you're in the price business, replacing expensive US labor with cheaper global labor is rational. If you're in the craft business, it usually isn't.
But that framing is incomplete. Amazon isn't just retail - AWS, logistics tech, and AI enablement are craft-heavy. Cutting experienced people in those areas might be short-term thinking dressed up as strategy, not actual optimization. The policy question is where I get stuck. Regulate this, and US companies risk losing ground to foreign competitors who don't follow those rules. Do we want Alibaba as the default American retailer? But do nothing, and experienced workers keep getting squeezed while "efficiency" narratives provide cover.
What's the intervention that doesn't just shift the problem somewhere else?
We must do something about labor offshoring to india. It's too much. I want my children to have opportunities here in the country they were born in.
It didn't, but it got us Trump too, so there's that. Let's see what happens this time.
Generally speaking the boomer generation has a different set of ideals from gen-x/millennials, and they are on the way out of shot calling. I don't think things repeat.
At least in the US, we've spent the better part of 80 years building a huge amount of wealth and growth on the backs of debt and externalized costs.
Its interesting, in a morbid humor kind of way, to see people realize that these costs always come due.
Globalization allows a huge amount of growth and many benefits you simply can't get with smaller or stronger borders. It also comes with risks, chief among them the risk that any one country loses self sufficiency and competitive advantage.
I do hope that the heaviest cost we (in the US) pay anytime soon is the cost of outsourcing jobs. We don't know how to manufacture anymore, our populace is extremely unhealthy in historical standards, and both political parties are toying with different forms of socialism. There are a lot of bad outcomes that can come where we're heading, we'd get off easy if it stops at outsourcing some of our high paid jobs to cheaper foreign labor.
"moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them."
A screenshot later on shows he was a manager who spent his entire career in Houston. So... he didn't move and I associate "untangling difficult problems" as something an engineer should brag about not a manager.
Reads like AI generated slop that doesn't correlate with the actual situation.
I thought it was fairly obvious too. We have a few of the most senior engineers being assigned to multiple critical initiatives just because they've led others successfully
Yeah these bums better get with the program. If The Company needs you to uproot your life and move to Timbuktu start packing or hit the bricks pal.
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 one of two things:
a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone truly valuable.
b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon).
What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap, foreign, plug-and-play replacement.
It all makes sense when you realize the point of his tweet is that he's plugging his run for congress: so yeah, of course he's tapping in to the absolute worst nationalistic sentiment. Shame on him.
If this is AI slop as the knee jerk comments next to me suggest, it’s goin to be a hell of a surprise if he gets elected this year! https://www.nleeplumb.com/about
While reading the text, my mental AI alarm bells were going off, sent it all to pangram.com and it flags both the layoff post and his campaign website text as being 100% AI generated
Yikes, the "[contraction] just" phrases on that campaign website alone are really over the top. Horrendously inauthentic writing, whether it's AI or not:
"wasn't just a job; it was a profound responsibility"
"This isn't just a statistic; it's a sign that we need to re-evaluate how we support those who serve"
"My experience isn't just about past success; it's about understanding the logistics, technology, and economic realities that shape the job market now and how we can create future opportunities right here."
"This experience didn't just teach me about law and order; it taught me about managing complex operations under pressure, the critical need for clear strategy, and the importance of unwavering integrity when the stakes are high – lessons desperately needed in Congress today."
"This campaign isn't just about me; it's about us."
All from the same page. Pretty nauseating.
"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.
It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.
It's also a pretty clear indication of AI undeniably passing the turing test in case that was in debate still.
No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting it wrong.
i've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it to you. IYKYK.
I am doomed, I guess. I didn't detect that. I thought this was sincere expression from an actual person, but an actual person who is also running for office and thus needs to tweak his writing accordingly.
Although I did note that it was a bit long (I guess I am out of the loop on tweets as well. I thought tweets were supposed to be short "hot takes". But this is practically an essay).
it's insane. people just don't want to use their brains to communicate anymore i guess. you've just experienced something traumatic like a layoff, and you can't even just take a few hours to internalize it and be vulnerable online, rather than jumping immediately onto social media to use the opportunity to sound like a market analyst
having worked there. Amazon has toxic managers, culture that turn ICs against each other. no tech vision. insane politics. low caliber people gatekeeping.
Their stock will go up the next year or two only because of their luck of partnering with Anthropic (back when they were a distant second choice to OpenAPI)
but the partnership is fake marketing. Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP, and Google owns a larger percentage because they were much earlier investors, despite amazon investing more money.
> Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP
Can you share a source for this claim? Graviton is a CPU, it would be strange to train LLM (I assume you meant LLMs) on a CPU.
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 the one hand it’s obvious that mess needs to be cleaned up, on the other hand the top leadership has been in place for a while so the very people that created/oversaw the mess are struggling to position themselves as the one to fix it. That seems unlikely to work and the best talent in areas like AI seems to be fleeing voluntarily.
Everything I hear from the inside says moral is in the toilet and the once proud “culture of innovation” is in shambles with teams focused on politics, infighting, and endless reorgs.
Frankly, sounds like a s*itshow and what Jeff Bezos predicted as “Day 2” for the company’s eventual slow decline.
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”
This always feels like the result of leadership too scared to build. It's so much safer and easier to tear down.
Amazon spent a lot of time and money and built a top-tier workforce. But now they are out of ideas for what these people can do? They don't have any untapped opportunities left? No projects that never quite made it to the top of the stack? No deferred maintenance that could be taken care of now?
10% cut of the corporate workforce in 2 months is wild lol
Crazy most of it is programmers (and/or various other white collar jobs) tbh
Doesn't say it's programmers though but middle management:
> Amazon slashed 14,000 white-collar jobs in late October, with CEO Andy Jassy stressing the need for the company to eliminate *excessive bureaucracy* by trimming operational levels and reducing the number of managers.
Yes but this is a lie, a vast majority of the cuts in both rounds from October and today have been individual contributors, not managers.
Seems sus, even if they got rid of half the managers, would that add up to the layoffs they've done?
I've been hearing about massive Amazon layoffs for a few years now. How come the company still exists? Are these layoffs followed by hiring at cheaper regions or different parts of the company? From my perspective as an occasional Amazon customer, things are pretty much unchanged.
The simple answer is that they hire more than they fire. In a lot of cases they will fill a role immediately after they fire the last person who was in it. Average employee retention at companies like Amazon (both voluntary and forced) is ridiculously low - something like 1.5 years. PIPs, forced burnout, mass layoffs etc. are all part of the corporate strategy. The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.
> The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.
I am not sure it applies to Amazon though. Amazon in the first year pays bonus in cash to compensate for 5% of the RSUs vesting. So, they actually loosing cash if people are let go after a year.
Yea I had to Google their total headcount when I saw the headline since the number does sound high, but in reality is only 5%.
When you factor in low performers and how most people here would view middle management in any other topic thread, it's not that insane. If in a pool of 20 workers around you, you can't find 1 worker you don't think is a step below the others, your hiring pipeline is better than most.
Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.
Makes a dent when they fire at the high salary end and rehire at lower salaries.
I'm outside the US, and boycotting Amazon for anything I can get elsewhere (which turns out isn't everything, but best efforts and all that). The shift towards AI is either a very bad thing (as per Microslop and the raft of recent articles about quality dropping), or just a cheap excuse to replace expensive staff with cheaper people.
Alternatively they may be using AI in HR as part of the decision making, and it's made the determination that these folk can go "because of AI" based on past firings and performance since then.
Sometimes yes but this not apple-to-apples unfortunately. Shipping and support are two places where Amazon _currently_ reigns supreme. Getting an item fast and returning an item easily are often lacking in alternative marketplaces.
I do try to buy stuff directly but so many times I order it and then it comes 10+ days later and often very little info upfront or during about when I will receive the order. I ordered from a website the other day where it said Dec 22nd delivery, it came mid-January and support was unhelpful (parroting the FAQ, might have been a LLM).
Now, I've head great experiences purchasing directly as well. The Smartest House [0] is where I buy everything I can smart-home-related. Their pricing is excellent, their shipping is fast, and their support is top-notch. I had a problem with 1 device, they got on a call and tried to fix it, then when that didn't work, they shipped me a replacement.
So I agree, there are great alternative out there and I also like B&H. I just wish it was easier to be (more) sure about how quick something will ship or how easy returns will actually be. Finding consistently good merchants online sometimes feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
But what if you want Amazon Basics brand batteries or counterfeit health products?
Yes, please tell me about how it's my personal responsibility that a corporation that has millions of employees took over so much.
Was it the laws I passed to make them more profitable? Did I just start burning down the neighboring bookstores?
Absolutely not. In fact, if I were never even born, Amazon would be just as big and powerful today.
Wait, maybe it was all the time they bought out a small company and I told them they could!
We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.
From March 16, 2020 (Covid scare reality / market-drop), the marketcaps of Top 10,000 traded companies has doubled (from low $70 Trillion USD to low $140 T)
But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
So — extrapolating — I'd recon the USD is inflating away its problems (mostly: itself).
What's interesting is that the strength of US dollar vs other currencies is barely budging in the meantime. Seems like everyone else is inflating away their problems too, so it all evens out in the end (unless you're poor with no assets, in any country).
Swiss franc is strongest of fiats — but still fiat.
Many historians of many generations contend that debased currencies fail first slowly, then fast.
Watching gold has been eye-opening to all living generations. Just a few months ago my lawyer didn't believe me when I told him "gold just broke four thousand dollars!" [day of this post gold hit ATH of $5400]
> But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
No wonder, people are fed up with the US administration and its constant firehose of bullshit. But there are no viable contenders to the US Dollar as reserve asset - the Eurozone is too fractured, China is under currency controls, Germany on its own outclasses India, and Japan's economy is headed for some serious BS once it follows their population age graph.
That only leaves gold... the question is, is it physical gold? (And my opinion is: as long as it's not in a vault under your control, you're buying IOUs, not gold)
I think not physically holding your bullion is equivalent to not your keys, not your crypto.
I do small amounts of both.
I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.