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Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.
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[1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs
Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".
Going to go wash my hands after typing that.
"Job losses" isn't passive voice. "Jobs were lost" would be passive voice.
Why are people so hung up on "job losses", as if we don't hear this every day? Who cares?
Loss happens, firings are a decision.
They aren’t accidents, it’s an inherent part of how we designed cars and roads and we decided as society that we are ok with thousands of people killed by cars.
So it's much more faithful to truth to talk about accidents than by killing, even if both terms are semantically correct.
I agree that it’s a hard pill to swallow especially if you are US American.
Can you point me to countries that don't deflect agency in accident reporting?
Here's a headline from just today in the UK:
> Man airlifted to hospital after pedestrian hit
First line in of the story:
> A man has been airlifted to hospital after a vehicle hit a pedestrian.
While the built environment is inanimate, it was designed and is maintained by humans.
In what role does public policy play? Who hasn't had a few traffic-related close calls in their life? Accidents are 3rd most common cause of death, 1st for young adults. Among accidents, substance related deaths (overdoses) are first, then traffic deaths. This doesn't count life altering injuries.
See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:
> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.
[…]
> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...
For automobiles specifically:
* https://crashnotaccident.com
* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...
* https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...
I suppose there's at least one example of someone being hit by a car that slipped off a car transporter too. "Had car thrown at him by negligent shipping company" would be a more click worthy headline though
job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job
(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")
“Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice.
“14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the passive voice.
There is not a 1:1 relationship between being vague about agency and using the passive voice.
It's passive but crystal clear.
"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.
People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.
This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.
"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.
Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.
The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.
All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.
And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?
Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.
But yeah, no risk. No risk at all.
Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.
And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Still wouldn't be close to the level of inequality we have today: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guarante...
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.
Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.
And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.
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The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.
1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.
2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.
In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.
They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.
Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes. Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.
Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.
Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?
Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.
I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:
- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.
- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA
- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools
- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.
In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.
Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.
Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!
> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures
The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.
In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.
As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.
Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.
Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.
Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse?
You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.
Or, as you said, firings.
(Not like, you know, some people getting divorced soon, some people biting a revolver soon)
I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.
People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.
“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.
This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years
OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)
How would you describe that, in British English?
Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry.
But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost".
If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.
While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.
Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.
So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.
The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
It's the same as language like "officer involved shooting" to avoid saying "an officer shot a person" or calling a "murder" a "loss of life".
Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."
And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."
Ah I see, your beef is with the BBC, not Amazon.
In Hungary, where I’m originally from, one of my friends sent me an article, which was about immigration in 2015, because she thought that the local district government wanted to move “migrants” (dog whistle for non white people over there) into her district. The headline said that, the body said the exact opposite… and it worked.
Also there are a ton of comments here, on Reddit, and really everywhere, that makes it quite obvious that a lot of people don’t read just headlines.
I can only imagine what this will do to morale. If even positive quarters means job cuts, why even try to have a positive quarter.
If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays. I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands. If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
To me everything else is weasel words.
You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here.
/s
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).
That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.
[1] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-expects-global-unemplo... [2] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-annual-jobs-report-say... [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.
I think the relevant number here is working age population.
The leaked plan is to fire up to 600,000 people. So roughly up to 40% of their workforce.
Amazon is not firing up to 600,000 people, they plan to automate jobs to avoid hiring 600,000 people projected out to 2033.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons...
Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?
For others: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeff-bezos-day-1-versus-2-com...
> “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by death. And that’s why it’s always Day 1.”
Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep
(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)
Sharks eat sheep?
If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.
But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:
1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.
2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.
3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.
Local TV says it's because too many people caved in to the return-to-work demand.
We are already in it.
(most of their money is from AWS, though. I wonder if AI is making that less stock-relevant.)
People mistook ZIRP for genius for 25 years.
And they did kind of successfully roll out a global logistics network, at a time when no one thought anyone could compete with Walmart. And they became leaders in the cloud computing space.
These aren't trivial accomplishments solely enabled by ZIRP.
As soon as the AI bubble pops and the true definition of AGI has been achieved i.e (30% increase in global unemployment by 2035) then it will mean the gradual decrease in many BS tech salaries.
We will certainly get a huge financial crash along the way.
So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?
I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI
Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment
People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.
It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.
They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.
These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.
Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.
Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.
I’m fairly ignorant to these things, but why does Amazon need 350k corporate employees?
People losing jobs always sucks, but I can’t help but think that a company of this size inevitably has bloat that they do not need.
At this point it really does feel like a corporate welfare program.
This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down.
I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere
I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.
Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
Rather than trying to “negotiate” with these entities, regulations should be wielded to stop min-maxing beyond a certain point or in bad faith, and firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.
Countries used to be overwhelmingly autocratic - often ruled by hereditary dictators called kings. People realized unchecked power will always lead to abuse and overthrew them.
Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].
If only we had a system of rules we could vote on which would make this arrangement forbidden...
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[0]: You can't legally overthrow a government either but if you do it successfully anyway, then you are the government and you decide what is legal.
Ironically, no democratic countries I know of have clauses in their ruleset ("laws") which declare that people are allowed to overthrow the government if it's no longer democratic, even if those democratic governments were created by overthrowing a previous dictatorship.
Related to your second point about autocracy - I mean the good thing is you can, today, go start a company with the exact governance structure you propose and go compete in the market.
It won’t work not because it wouldn’t work - you’re also assuming 100% military compliance and, as a veteran who served in active duty I can tell you not everyone agrees or disagrees with the current administration and people really do care about the Constitution, but it wouldn’t work because when you sit down and really think about it, the status quo for 90% of people is pretty good and they’re not going to take up arms over the vast majority of things a government does.
Yeah? How's that working out right now, when the government is unquestionably violating the Constitution left and right?
Nearly every publicly trade company has a very well defined method by which executives can be replaced.
Companies are a dictatorship appointed by an oligarchy that is appointed by the democratic votes of shareholders.
That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.
Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.
the unfortunate fact is that the people forced to be sellers of their time on the market have livelihoods and families to support, so the market is in most places very heavily regulated, some would say overregulated. OTOH capitalism really did pull out many countries out of extreme poverty, so it isn't globally bad, but outcomes for individual participants aren't always... that great.
And the reverse? We literally just went through a phase where tech companies over hired like crazy, at ridiculous salaries. We had people remote working 3 or more jobs at a time. And yet, people still act like companies have all the power?
This stuff ebbs and flows. The reality is the value of your labour fluctuates, despite the inconvenience of that to you.
They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/copays/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.
but you just assuming the vacancies position stayed the same which is never happen
I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.
But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.
Layoffs are very tricky because just the act of laying people off can trigger good employees who remain to start looking elsewhere. It can trigger a sort of evaporative cooling of your whole workforce. A strategy of offering reduced pay instead of being laid off would exacerbate it.
at first that just meant many of us adopted a middle-aged-coasting career strategy after covid and/or having kids
but now management is agreeing
By the way, could Amazon not even bother to proofread a mass layoff announcement? "We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly"
At least we know this was written by a human, because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake. Maybe they fired the proofreaders already.
To be fair, an Amazon model might, so if they're using those.. /s
Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to slim down HR.
> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.
Numbers are all in the black and up year over year and compared to previous quarter.
Double digit revenue growth in both retail and AWS.
Often I wonder whether corporate leaders took any kind of logic class in college or if they just have a fetish for harming people for no reason. Either that or whatever business school they went to believes that poor customer service and bad products increase revenue.
Because of that experience (and lots of other anecdotal evidence), I see no reason for anybody to ever work at amazon unless they are ok with being a contractor.
It's this sort of thing that has me re-thinking the fairness of employees giving employers the customary (in the United States) two week notice before leaving.
Employees don't get two weeks notice before being fired without cause.
It's supposed to be because replacing an employee is so difficult for the company. Well, it's a hell of a lot more difficult for an employee to lose a job than it is for a company to lose a worker.
If I'm employer "at will" then my employer should also be retained "at will." If they want to negotiate another arrangement, that's fine.
Of course if you're willing to burn bridges with your employer, there's nothing stopping you from quitting immediately. Have at it.
1. 14k was the net change in “corporate headcount” which is PR puffery speak saying they’re firing a lot more but when you net out folks let go slotting into open roles elsewhere the net change today would be a 14k reduction
2. It also says that “looking ahead” “we expect to… find additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.” That’s PR puffery speak for “there will be more layoffs coming soon.”
Amazon has really struggled under Andy Jassy’s tenure as CEO. Innovation has slowed, and there were huge misses on areas like AI.
What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership. Andy Jassy preaches about company culture and efficiency but the culture went to crap and the company became bloated on his watch so…
Amazon likely needs new leadership to get it past the Andy Jassy chapter and move to a new phase of innovation and growth. It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.
Honest question. What could they have possibly gained from AI? What did they miss out on by not getting into AI?
They had a bridgehead device of the type that OpenAI are struggling to create with Jonny Ive in Alexa... but nothing seems to be happening with Alexa now.
right now I have no idea what Alexa is for anymore. It pings me when a package arrives but so does my phone. I can't order from it, because it makes me open the app. I can manage a shopping list I guess? I ask it the temp outside from time to time b/c I don't want to go look at the thermometer outside my window?
A proper device would discuss with me product options and Q&A, or something. Even piping Grok/GPT5 through to answer questions would be light years ahead of the current crap answers I get when I ask questions. And why doesn't it do a good job of identifying songs that are playing? That's trivial software, and it could recommend some songs like this (which is something I use GPT for).
I don't know I'm just a trad software engineer, but it sure seems like it's low risk / high improvement to at least have a modern LLM feature in that product.
Again, the privacy concerns need to be addressed. However there is a lot of potential for an AI in my house if it works.
I don't get why they just don't do it. There are jailbreaks, making it talk trash and so on, but is that the majority of users? I doubt it.
Amazon had Alexa (Echos) everywhere and that was teed up to knock it out of the park putting a real AI assistant in every home. Then the devices team totally blew it and did almost nothing to take advantage of that huge lead. Folks are now basically just throwing these things in the trash and the devices unit is a huge pit of cash on fire.
The list goes on…
Never seen a single person use AWS for this.
The silver lining for Amazon is that nobody is making a profit by actually providing that service. It's just massive valuations and VC money flowing freely instead of a sustainable business model, and Amazon plays a much longer game - they can recover even if being so far behind is a "bad look" for their current management.
It's not hard to switch between OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure/Google/whatever and Amazon can surely eventually compete well in this space.
Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.
I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?
I guess this has just become kind of a feature of our times.
Greed is good?
you're fired.
Fired?
W-W-What do you mean,
fired?
Um, how else
can I say it?
You're being let go,
your department's
being downsized,
you're part of
an outplacement,
we're going in a
different direction,
we're not picking
up your option...
Take your pick.
I got more.
"The Emperor's new groove"
> we want to operate like the world’s largest startup
This is a phrase I hear repeated by leadership a lot, and it's usually code for "why doesn't everyone else just make the business grow faster?" It is almost always, as in this case, followed by statements that suggest they don't understand what is actually different about the way a start up functions and why they stopped operating that way at some point in the first place.
code4life•1h ago
johnebgd•1h ago
reactordev•1h ago
formerly_proven•1h ago
bell-cot•1h ago
nemomarx•1h ago
array_key_first•1h ago
The S&P 500 is almost 10% Nvidia. Just Nvidia. Y'all that's scary.
piva00•42m ago
The same cycle just goes around and around...
lotsofpulp•1h ago
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
noir_lord•1h ago
It's pretty clear what happens next.
Over 42 million people are about to lose their SNAP payments in 4 days[1] and millions more medical care.
It's gonna get bad.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7d9j7p5qo
drstewart•30m ago
drstewart•32m ago
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCAD
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXJPY
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCNY
Hmm, might have you cherry-picked some data?
HelloMcFly•46m ago
It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.
softwaredoug•1h ago
actionfromafar•1h ago
markus_zhang•1h ago
ericmay•1h ago
deaux•42m ago
softwaredoug•1h ago
adestefan•59m ago
conception•30m ago
nbaugh1•24m ago
The system/ideology you're looking for starts with an "F" and ends with "ascism"
drstewart•27m ago
JKCalhoun•1h ago
(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)
z3dd•44m ago
boilerupnc•30m ago
“ Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512317
gjm11•1h ago
The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.
(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)
The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.
I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.
philipallstar•1h ago
dep_b•1h ago
mattmaroon•1h ago
whobre•1h ago
kasey_junk•1h ago
MangoToupe•1h ago
carlosjobim•1h ago
jalapenos•36m ago
aesh2Xa1•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession
> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]
_fizz_buzz_•1h ago
Employment is an important indicator according NBER.
lycopodiopsida•1h ago
It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.
rvz•1h ago
einrealist•1h ago