Insurance providers are also doing it.
AI is also used in the legal space too.
that's 3-4 years ago now
This is the very first time I saw anyone with a straight face talking about Amazon workers and mentioning "people do zero work, quite visible".
Certain sectors are high performing centers of excellence whose staff write blog posts that get posted to HN, publish papers, get put on the covers of hiring media and give speeches. The majority of the company is somewhere in the middle holding down their relatively uneventful but important functions, and probably a larger chunk than Corporate leadership would like to acknowledge are deadweight hiding in the cracks.
Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just things you don't see or appreciate?
I've been on 10+ projects at big companies and have begged to do work. Mostly it was showing up to 3-5 meetings/week while managers try and figure things out, and their VPs reconfigure budgets, priorities, and resources. Sometimes I do the work and hold it until someone wants it.
There's usually no standard top-down view about what happens when 3 VPs change the scope on 5 projects. But in reality, that usually means 10-30 people downstream are paralyzed. This is also where the tension between "new work" and "scalable processes" comes into play (need a consultant?).
Add regulatory compliance and approval gates, and then..
But there's also just bad hires who can get through interviews, they won't just leave, and building a case to fire those people takes time and management that gives a shit. At a large enough program at a large enough company with uninvolved management (and they can afford to be uninvolved because the program's doing well on all tracked metrics), you can get away with being negligible deadweight for a shocking amount of time. I wouldn't recommend it because your team will hate you, you'll build no skills or relationships, and you'll be the first to go when cuts happen, but some people are fine with that trade for whatever reason.
We always tend to think that others have it easier than us, as we do not have the full picture.
People generally don't like losing their jobs, and will put a positive spin on every report that might be good enough to pass muster with middle management bureaucracy at a large firm. All it takes is for enough people in the chain of command to shrug, sign whatever docs are needed and move onto something they care about more.
Not in the sense that AI is replacing current jobs, but that they would rather invest that money in Anthropic or on Data Center buildouts
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.
It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat.
In order to observe the productivity increases you need a good scale where the productivity would really matter (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model improvement)
Except all we have is "trust me bro, I'm 100x more productive" twitter/blog posts, blant pre-IPO AI company marketing disguised as blog posts, studies that show AI decreases productivity, increased outages, more CVEs, anecdotes without proof, and not a whole lot of shipping software.
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 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
So hiring people is ditching this political leverage. If that was the original driver, what's changes to make it not worth it anymore?
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.
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.
I believe that's what we have today. The economic indicators are all worse than they were in 2008. Our economy is Wile E Coyote running at full speed in midair until he realizes the truth then falls.
And also the worst of 2008 was confined to the US.
What we have now is more like 2001.
Also most of these big companies were completely dysfunctional on their hiring through 21/22, just going completely apeshit. Now they're making everyone suffer for it.
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...
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.
The Federal Reserve of St. Louis is using the CPI numbers, as most government agencies do. I would contend those numbers in and of themselves lie. The ALICE index, which is based on more comprehensive data[0][1] and closer to what CPI used to represent before the major adjustments in the 1990s, tells a different story[2]
Inflation against the ALICE index is much higher than the 3% reported in by the Federal Reserve, running at a stark 5.9% YoY change. This honestly lines up much closer to the reality I see in my day to day life than the CPI numbers reported by the Federal Reserve do.
[0]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/methodology
[1]: I recommend downloading the PDF here: https://www.unitedforalice.org/Attachments/Methodology/ALICE...
Here's the explaining:
- Unemployment has increased.
- Number of gig workers is at an all time high.
- Layoffs have continued.
- Polls show most people have financial anxiety and feel squeezed.
- Inflation is not under control.
- Buy now pay later usage is up as much as consumer spending is.
- Income and wealth inequality are near records high.
- GDP and consumer spending were also seen peaking before the last 5 recessions as well...
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.
More and more I think companies do whatever creates news hype to attract cheap investment capital and pump the stock price. Whether any of that translates into actually making money is not even considered. You can have your accounting department make that aspect of it look like whatever you want.
They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
Until the business gets affected
Before the layoffs were announced Amazon also committed to expanding hiring and infra expansion in India [3], and depending on the org, affected employees on work visas were offered transfers to India in lieu of being laid off [4].
The Trump admin won't do anything about offshoring either - in fact technology transfers to India are being encouraged by the admin as part of Pax Sillica [5] and GOP leaders in Purple Ag states like Iowa [6] and Montana [7] are lobbying for India after China pivoted away from American soybeans [8] and India began leveraging the China playbook [9].
When forced to choose between swing state farmers and GOP leaning SWEs, it's going to be the farmers who win.
[0] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-25/a-100-...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
[3] - https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/economic-impact/amazon-econo...
[4] - https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_...
[5] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815
[6] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno...
[7] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i...
[8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-s...
[9] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-dai...
Sorry, donated.
The Indian government has been encouraging [0] the H1B rule change as well as it helps kick off a reverse brain drain [1] right as India was launching it's own version of the Thousand Talents [2] program.
[0] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/us-loss-will-be-indi...
[1] - https://vrfbharat.org/how-will-the-h1-b-visa-restriction-ena...
[2] - https://theprint.in/india/education/reversing-brain-drain-mo...
Yep, offshoring needs to be heavily penalized as well.
Because all the talk was how the tariffs would tank the economy.
I buy a lot of groceries for my business, so I have decent records. Beef is way up, though.
Gas is way down as well.
Oil prices down isn't necessarily a good thing for an oil exporter like the US though. In aggregate.
If the US had actually applied tariffs on Canadian oil your gas pump prices would be up very significantly.
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.
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.
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.
>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...
*SPX and no, it's down 2% when denominated in Euros while up 15% when denominated in dollars. I wouldn't say the USD has fared well so far.
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.
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.
What benefit have we gotten from the chaotic tariff policy? Any trade deals?
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-...
The best way to see how inflation and stocks are linked is to look at economies where inflation is not intentionally slowed by rate rises. The stocks go up more or less with inflation (and some small % of gains they may have on top as you say). When you have rate rises that slow inflation you do indeed slow stock growth. But this is also inline with the link between inflation and stock price.
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
So yeah, the tariffs are still a net negative on the economy, but have been so erratically and poorly implemented that they're not nearly as bad as they could have been. It's like a plastered drunk guy swinging a knife at you. It's a lethal threat, but he's tripping over himself constantly and can barely stand so it's easy to dodge for now. Could be a more serious issue if he ever sobers up.
Trump's a lethal threat that is too incompetent to be lethal? Okay. So quit with the FUD then.
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you didn't feel any of that in the previous year you haven't been paying attention or don't have any serious responsibilities.
China is beating the US on pretty much every stage and this only accelerates this.
Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)
> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong
Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
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.
But imagine you're one of the people who remain (e.g., not impacted by the eliminated companies or products) and now there are fewer people to do the same amount of work? I've seen that movie and it usually has an economic impact 6-9 months later when people burn out.
It's almost like you can write the script:
Month 0–3: Survivors are relieved, grateful, and over-perform. Leadership reads this as “proof the cuts worked.”
Month 3–6: Context loss shows up. Decision latency increases. Domain knowledge walked out the door.
Month 6–9: Burnout, attrition, and quality failures begin. The “hidden layoffs” start as top performers quietly leave.
Month 9–12: Rehiring or contracting resumes (usually at higher cost)
The key misunderstanding here is assuming AI substitutes for organizational slack and human coordination. It doesn’t.
And sometimes middle management "bloat" is misdiagnosed. Remove them without redesigning decision rights and workflows, and the load doesn’t disappear it redistributes to the IC's.
Watch for Amazon "strategic investments" in early Q4 2026 (this will be a cover for the rehiring).
Also, it is not useful answer at all, it is an uncooperative answer. Whoever is asking about the responsible person is trying to work. They have legitimate question about who they should contact about X, sending them to someone who does not work there is less then useless.
So many products turned into feature mill factories. If things can get more concentrated and directed, then I think this will be better for all in terms of finding their true purpose in life.
If it wasn't for an ageing society we would probably be seeing things move along faster but people have children to raise and mortgages to pay so we will see more inertia for now.
I'm sure people losing their good paying jobs and being forced into shitty ones, or not finding replacement employment at all, will be just what they need to find their true purposes in life
Pretty big difference between corporate Amazon and retail business Amazon division wise I think
They also hire to fire to meet pip quotas.
Except that’s been Jassy’s number one tool to try and get the stock price moving.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
More AWS outages means more breaks from work?
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-d...
America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's unsustainable.
We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.
It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.
The majority don't care so long as they have enough food and shelter and healthcare.
The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made up wankeroo.
Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights; Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the biologically essential logistics flowing cause that collapse is when the meat suits will toss aside socialized truths of history and go crazy primate.
I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and whether it has been used to make a single valid economic argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded)
Just kidding, I know it has not.
This is an old, and well tested strategy.
E.g. Commodore International formally had its head office in The Bahamas, but the entire leadership team worked out of the US.
You can try putting more constraints on what will get a company considerd a US company to catch those kinds of structures, but as you indirectly point out, there are really only downsides to playing that game.
Just to name one (even if it’s not American): Canonical.
It (canonical) is registered in the isle of Man, a fairly known tax haven.
Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are better handled by the collective of society, via the government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books of a huge number of companies, from the auto manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of health insurance.
Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill was not that the government providing robust funding of social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the conversation around the 'good times past' that many Americans romanticize.
Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own short term gains over the long term health of the community and society in which they were empowered by to get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater quite spectacularly bad.
Amazon themselves have experienced in the past how heavy-handed Indian regulators can be.
It’s not a zero-sum game anymore. You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.
This is the value prop of the US military
In a world with China and Europe, using the military to bully allies is the fastest way to lose those allies. If the US plays that card, nations will just accelerate their move to domestic or non-US stacks. It's a self-defeating strategy.
I'm not serious but I'm sure some people on H1B have had similar happen. From a business POV this would be an ideal situation.
I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.
Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.
Others like Google increased by 60+%.
You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.
There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).
But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).
There’s no such thing as an indentured servitude class here - this is just part of the giant racist misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a favor. In reality it’ll hurt the entire country.
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.
2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.
I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
This is still the case in US Comp Sci programs. There are some Americans in these programs but it's mostly Indian and Chinese. The American kids gravitate to the business schools.
More competition is not inherently "better" nor does it necessarily yield greater innovation. Trying to impose arbitrary competition as some abstract principle is just masochism.
You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.
Anecdotal so hold on to your salt but in my social circle here in the US natural-born US citizens vs visa-holders self-select for types of jobs. For example, if my the starting pay is < $80k most of my natural-born American friends don't bother applying. Whereas, my visa-holding friends routinely go well below $50k when searching for jobs or "2 year internships". So, when a company posts a certain type of a job they have a certain demographic in mind already.
Not saying my US friends are uppity as much as visa holders are desperate.
That is the point of most of these programs. If we (as a country) do h1b, those people should be on an automatic path to a green card.
Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed? Or, in the other direction, does your family need to have been here a couple of generations for you to count?
I will say my first tech job was $40K and now I have to have a six-fig job just because of my debt.
To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.
When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it.
The top 0.1% are perhaps mostly American-educated. The top 10% on the other hand are mostly not American. And you need the top 10% to code for the top 0.1%.
Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value proposition to most women.
What profession were those women looking for?
Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.
Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds.) But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then. Did the level-ups not happen?
Only in places like Palo Alto, Boston, Seattle, etc.
Not in most of the cornfield country.
There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.
I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.
I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).
It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.
EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.
Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?
> Indian recruiting firms
There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.
I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC autists are S tier too.
Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.
"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.
Today, he's claiming that we need H1b because we don't know how to build computer chips (~75% come from India with zero advanced production and another ~12% come from China which is also far behind).
His "massive" $100k increase over 7 years is just a bit over $14k/yr. I had a former H1b programmer (now legal immigrant) I worked with tell me about his experience. Getting paid less than $40k to live in Austin, TX and living with a half-dozen other H1b indenured servants/slaves in a tiny shared apartment just so they could survive the 7 years and get on the path to citizenship.
Do you think those companies would bat an eye about increasing their expenses from $40k to $54k per year when median dev salary back then (2015) was around $92k/yr? After a decade of inflation, that $14k is even less important.
Over-immigration with H2b and illegal immigration suppresses blue-collar wages (Bernie Sanders famously called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal"). H1b and outsourcing to India centers suppresses white-collar wages.
Do you see prices dropping as they cut worker salaries and outsource? Can you even buy things when you don't have a job?
Trump (and the rest of the uniparty) has enabled corporate theft on a scale that's never been seen before and the chickens are going to be coming home to roost really soon.
My first IT job in Austin in 2010 paid $18 an hour and I had my own apartment and car.
I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...
This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".
There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.
Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India included.
1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees 3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles 4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it will hire EU nationals in EU. That’s not shipping jobs to EU.
That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here...
We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output.
Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.
and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.
H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme...
Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai
I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.
That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
So — extrapolating — I'd recon the USD is inflating away its problems (mostly: itself).
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'd say your risk of losing your livelihood is higher as a simple employee than as a CEO when we're talking about post-startup companies.
Crazy most of it is programmers (and/or various other white collar jobs) tbh
> 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.
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).
So the claim of “AI slop” without proof is little more than heresy. It would be helpful to have any evidence.
It’s not about just the writing in one example, it’s about writing patterns—which are common—being equated with AI simply because they’re common.
... I wonder how much the writings of a lot of autistic / borderline folks impacted the LLM writing style.
A prompt to generate similar output would be a good start.
No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting it wrong.
Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
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.
Not AI.
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".
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 (Happens all the time).
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-replacement.
It all makes sense when you realize he's really plugging his run for congress: so yeah, of course he's tapping in to the absolute worst nationalistic sentiment. Shame on him.
I personally haven't bought anything from Amazon or Ebay in 4 years, and will never again. I only buy local, or I don't buy. Starving the beast one purchase at a time.
Though, I think the title is a bit of a misnomer here. In part the axing of jobs was done to reduce costs; now AI also may relate here or be even a main driver, but I think the title oversimplifies it a bit.
- 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.
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.
Amazon absolutely crushed a lot of physical brick-and-mortar stores. Drove them out of business.
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
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.
And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?
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.
0: https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-amaz...
"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.
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)
Companies, be they highly profitable global conglomerates like Amazon or smaller Mom and Pop shops, have zero incentive whatsoever to retain staff. None. In fact, they have every incentive to axe as many workers as possible, as often as possible, profit be damned. So long as governments and shareholders reward job cuts with stock price or compensation bumps, this trend will continue.
To simplify: we have built a global society where 99% of people must work to survive but have zero mandates that employers provide jobs with livable wages and benefits. That is, and will remain, the crux of the issue at hand.
I don’t think it’s a controversial idea to impose broad and lenient regulations on companies to prevent this sort of activity. Made a profit last year? No layoffs allowed without a year’s worth of severance and benefits is such an immense deterrent that most employers will find ways to repurpose staff internally rather than fire them for a quick share bump - though with the consequence of slower hiring, as companies don’t want to be burdened with too much unnecessary talent. There are literally hundreds of policy ideas out there that nobody wants to pull because it’d inconvenience Capital, but we’re at a crossroads where we either mandate Capital behave with the barest of minimums of decency and respect for the workforce they mandate exist through Capitalist markets, or we break their arm outright and tax the absolute shit out of them to provide a high quality of life for every worker regardless of present employment.
Right now, they get to keep all the money while outsourcing risks to the workforce, and all that’s done is create shit like this: thousands let go not out of business need, but of business greed.
Yet another round of layoffs being blamed on AI. As with last time, this is not due to productivity gains from AI, rather it's due to wanting to reallocate budget towards investing in AI. (and maybe an excuse for something they already wanted to do)
I think some productivity gains from AI are real, and I've experienced some firsthand, but reductions in force being ENABLED by AI are not, and I don't think we will see much of that for a good while still.
AI is attracting a lot of investment dollars because it's seen as disruptive; the capabilities it potentially unlocks for people are enormous. The problem is that general intelligence is still far away (fundamentally cannot be reached with the current approaches to AI, in my opinion), and the level of investment required is so high that the only way folks are getting that money back is if it does enable a level of layoffs that would be crippling to the economy.
Additionally, there is not a huge difference between the top models, and thanks to the massive investments the models are incrementally improving. It seems obvious from the outside that AI models are going to be a commodity, and good free models put downward pressure on prices, which they are already losing money on. So I think it's going to be a race to the bottom, and is very unlikely to be a winner-takes-all situation.
I think this means that the reward for big tech companies pouring insane amounts of money into AI will be maintaining their current position, or maybe stealing a bit of business from each other. That's why I think AI is more of a tax on big tech than a real investment opportunity.
> In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.
With this kind of employee hostile policies and threat of job cut, how does it manage to be the A of FANG (or as they call it, MANGA)? But apparently people still want to get a job there? The pay is a little less than other companies in the same league. So pay can't be the reason. Or is it? Honestly want to know what it is that make IT people get a job there?
1970-01-01•2h ago
riddlemethat•2h ago
GoatInGrey•1h ago
One example client that shouldn't dox me: Odom Corporation, a beverage distributor. They purchased an LLM-driven purchasing solution and immediately laid off their entire purchasing team, save for a few members who exist on the periphery. A follow-up with them showed that the system was ordering summer beverages coming into the winter (among many other bad purchasing decisions) and causing a dramatic increase in unsold inventory. Since they believe that LLMs will exponentially improve, they're dismissing it as a one-off because this year's models "will be so much better". We attempted to advise differently, but stakeholders got extremely emotional at even small suggestions that there was a fundamental problem. Good luck to them.
Hamuko•2h ago
baxtr•2h ago
bluescrn•1h ago
knowitnone3•1h ago
cucumber3732842•1h ago
bluescrn•1h ago
seinvak•56m ago