Comment by Aurornis

Comment by Aurornis 4 days ago

19 replies

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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.

geodel 4 days ago

From my LinkedIn feed I feel those Nigerian princes of past are now Amazon L7 managers.

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embedding-shape 4 days ago

> 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?

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  • Aurornis 4 days ago

    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.

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    • freehorse 4 days ago

      Regardless what one may think of this guy, we are talking about mass layoffs. I doubt this mattered, or that they were very personally targeted.

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  • wasabi991011 4 days ago

    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.

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_heimdall 4 days ago

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).

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  • HaloZero 4 days ago

    Not sure why that would illegal? Your own performance isn’t protected in anyway as a class that you can’t control. I know Lyft 100% laid off people not hitting meets expectations in 2020 first

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    • _heimdall 3 days ago

      Again I am no expert here, this is just my understanding after being in the industry for a couple decades.

      As far as I'm aware, there's a fine line between layoffs or reductions in force and firing for poor performance. Its legal to cut an entire division, or to cut some percentage of a division's head count and come up with some way of distributing it across the org. It is not legal to find your worst performers, fire them all at once, and call it a layoff.

      Happy to be wrong here though, just trying to be clear with the line as I understand it. Someone coming by may know for sure.

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      • polski-g 2 days ago

        Every single employee can be fired for any reason that is not a protected class. All professionals are hired at will.

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    • dboreham 4 days ago

      In the US, saying that "your job has been eliminated" mitigates various legal risks (discrimination lawsuits for example). So although companies can do pretty much WTF they want, they also don't like being sued.

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ad8e 4 days ago

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

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  • fireant 4 days ago

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

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    • caminante 3 days ago

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

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

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

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greazy 2 days ago

Check the Twitter comments, he had an llm 'improve' his draft.

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dymk 4 days ago

7 years at Amazon without being laid off (promoted, in fact) and you blame it on 2 months of what you assume is poor performance

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  • michaelt 4 days ago

    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.

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    • Aurornis 4 days ago

      It's simpler than that. In his timeline he's showing how he's getting headlines for releasing videos critical of Amazon, his own employer. He was using his position at Amazon to lend more credibility to his platform.

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  • Aurornis 4 days ago

    > 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.

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