Amazon's Silent Sacking
justingarrison.com
justingarrison.com
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
1. Those "employee-appreciations" were a cost-saving measure to retain talent. 20% time towards projects that benefit the employer vs getting paid 20% more, or free food at an incremental cost of $100/mo/employee instead of paying $2000/mo/employee for equivalent comp-based retention.
2. We are no longer in a severe labor demand deficit. Quality of life will converge on the American norm - treating employees like disposable cogs, under layers of brutal middle-management politics.
3. "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The only examples that come to my mind are niche companies that market based on such an ethos, like Patagonia. Of course there are stable European companies, and US union shops, but those aren't disruptive. WeWork had that ethos for a little while I guess.
You can make a killing in a quarter by firing all your workers. You won't be around for the next quarter.
A day of reckoning will come triggered by spectacular failures of big corporations that pawned their future + infusion of cash as the economy "recovers". At that point in time the pendulum will swing and hopefully people will not forget the absurd way they were treated.
I'm already seeing a significant uptick in demand for senior+ engineers. This is me talking to multiple companies and recruiters, headcounts are going up again and thankfully their for products that actually provide real value to customers. I haven't heard from a crypto/nft company (see: scam) in a looooong time.
The company with the largest market cap in the world, Apple. Steve Jobs believed in recruiting great people, and he entrusted in them and expected of them to create sustainably disruptive products. From Steve Wozniak all the way to Jony Ive. I don't know if I'd say Jobs was caring for all people working at Apple in my conception of things, but he did not look at the people working on an important Apple project as disposable cogs, and he didn't look at the products they were making as junk commodities to raise next quarter's revenue.
Whatever it boils down to, and whether it can continue creating things like the M2, there is a reason the company with the largest market cap in the world is Apple.
"Don't do evil" comes to mind, though the company ethos changed a lot since then.
I remember back in 2002 (?) when the 2-pizza team idea was introduced. My manager said he would find out how we could expense the pizza. It turns out that the pizza was merely theoretical: the team should be sized so that, if there were pizza, then 2 pizzas would be enough for the team. But that doesn't mean that pizza would ever be ordered or expensed.
Every day around lunchtime, hungry Amazon workers from adjacent floors would quietly try to slip in to get a sandwich or a kebab or whatever, or would surreptitiously attempt to get a bag of chips.
Eventually the Twitch side started to complain: there was never enough food to go around at lunch time. If you were more than ten minutes late, all the food would be gone.
The Amazon management’s response? Lock off the Twitch floor so it required special badges for access. Let the Amazonians starve!
It’s not subtle. It’s overt & being externally communicated.
Wall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies.
The pendulum has swung back from the years where growth was all that mattered.
It’s now back to focus on profitability.
The pendulum will swing back again at some point as well.
It’s cyclical.
i.e. people stopped buying shares in non-profitable companies.. would you want stock in non-profitable companies in your retirement account? I wouldn't
> Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed.
We all have better angels and worse; there's nothing special about the our worse ones that means they are somehow more fundamental or necessary.
We actually can do much better - not perfectly, of course, that is a strawperson; but we can do much better.
You sound really confident so I'm assuming there is some substance here.
Based on our reality: We were born into a world built by it, free and prosperous and safe far beyond any of our ancestors. Generations before us actually built that (and what are we building for the next?). Look what King and Einstein and Keynes (and Friedman) and Steinum and all those people built - none profiting much from it.
Do you really doubt that humans have better angels and worse - inside every one of us, and that we have a choice? It's hardly a novel idea, though I can see that it's outre, it's disruptive and outside the pale, in this (uber-reactionary?) moment. Otherwise, who would want to deny that reality?
From what I understand of modern biology even newborn babies are not entirely blank slates, there's some amount of genetic and epigenetic influence so that many 'choices' are not really up to the individual to decide.
And certainly by adulthood, which is the vast majority of passing HN readers, many many permanent life altering choices have occurred.
For a real world example, the children and grandchildren of those who suffered severe starvation in the Netherlands during WW2 have noticeably worse characteristics on average, in terms of a shorter lifespan, less healthy, etc.., compared to families that didn't undergo that. Even their personalities and behaviours, on average, were affected.
I think you are taking the influences we all have - emotional, physical, environmental, etc. - to an extreme. It's not blank slate or automaton. People still make lots of choices, even if there are drives and other influences one way or the other. You don't have to do bad things, and you can choose to deal with your natural drives, emotions, etc. in many ways.
The Dutch example suggests the opposite, that to noticeably move the needle for large groups of people like that, in a positive direction, would take many lifetimes to occur.
Even to get them back to the population average would likely take at least a half dozen generations.
Life is too short for such diversions, and those things have cause far, far to much harm to too many people, in ways we know very well. In fact, I might assert that nothing has caused more harm to humanity: stop acting on racial/ethnic/nationalistic biases, and we'd have a far more peaceful, free, prosperous world.
Lots of people have that bias, everyone to some degree. Everyone has anger too, but we don't all punch or neighbors or believe we are self-righteous. You could change how you deal with your biases right now - you don't need generations, and don't accept that excuse for yourself. We have a choice; we can do so much more - right now.
Or is there confusion about the term 'Dutch'?
This is another term to refer to the Netherlands.
Considering this is the third deflection in a row, I'm going to have to insist on solid proof of this 'overwhelming evidence' going forwards, instead of hand-waving and easily seen through innuendos.
Those men knew exactly what they wanted and spent every waking moment working towards it. Money.
SV earnestness has always been a con.
Again, people love to say it, like it sounds smart. Humans are earnest and deceitful, to varying degrees at varying times. We do acheive earnest goods; we have human rights, for example, democracy, and lots of peace (but not enough). We have a choice, free will, the moral choice of thousands of years of (much) religion and philosophy.
I don't recall "believing" in an employer since maybe my early 30's.
I may have some level of loyalty to those around me but even that comes with a healthy bit of cynicism.
> I don't recall "believing" in an employer since maybe my early 30's.
Not even a small one? Where everyone knows everyone?
There have been teams, especially small ones, where I trusted everyone on the team to act like a true friend, and to strive to do good things for the company.
I don't recall ever working for an organization where I 100% cared about their goals, or believed 100% in the righteousness of their goals, or where I was 100% sure they'd succeed.
Plug in your own appropriate interpretation of the Liberal/Conservative labels.
If those people care about those things (and aren't in a system that pressurises them not to or selects for people who do) then the "company" will also care about those things.
The solution to avoid this Kafkaesque trap multitudes are willing to saddle around their necks is worker-owned co-ops.
Sadly, one of the best options is to - as the author is more-or-less doing - resign yourself to cynically playing your side of the game, in order to extract the best possible concessions. While being mindful of the personal cost of protraction.
I've been through it, and, again sadly, one of the more lasting regrets was that I showed any legal or financial mercy or restraint at the time - regret for the significant concessions that I had made from of a sense of personal 'decency'. None whatsoever was shown to me.
"Managed out" would be much more humane, at least to me. If I'm put in a role I don't like, I have time to find another job. Ideally, this would be explicit ("We don't like you, so we're giving you the shit work, but if you find a better offer, please take it.").
If you want me out, stick me in a box writing test cases or documentation or something until I leave. Heck, cut my salary by 30%. I'll be much more happy than if I suddenly have zero income and no job. It can be good for the company too. If there's someone to do the crappy work while they do the job, no one else has to.
* I've had one "it's complicated" as a founder, but that's a longer story. It didn't involve losing my salary overnight like a layoff or firing, through.
That entirely depends on whether they give you those 3-6 months of severance they’re supposed to give. I’d rather have that money without the need to spend my days killing my motivation by writing pointless docs.
Part of it also depends on your employability.
A generalized, fungible skillset makes finding jobs relatively quick. If I were a SWE in SFO, I'd take the severance.
For me, good jobs come up once every 1-2 years. When they do, they're AWESOME, but if I were ever laid off, I could expect to either:
- Have no income for a long time;
- Take a job which made me miserable; or
- Perhaps do consulting or a startup
I have a very non-fungible skill set. That means there are very rarely people who want to hire me in an appropriate role, but when they come up, they're often very desperate to hire me.
I’m an entrepreneur in France, and I had one employee I would have like to say that to, but it can so easily be turned against the employer… Unions and litigations have basically made honesty the worst choice in every situation. Only to discover afterwards that the person had been willing to go since 6 months already. The entire experience is stupid, stupid humans working (or not working) together.
1) Specialized skills often do not necessarily equate with high-pay. For example, a school social worker specializing in a specific disability, or a laboratory glassblower (makes custom instruments for chemistry and physics labs) are almost irreplaceable, but only command slightly higher pay (if at all)
2) Many sectors (such as non-profit) do not have high pay
3) Many people don't have savings for other reasons (e.g. recent immigrant from a low-income country, recent divorce, major medical issue, graduate still paying off school debt, etc.)
Etc.
I thought about providing more background about my specific situation, but I prefer to remain anonymous. As a footnote, if you have a 1-2 year F-U fund, being laid off (or quitting) and being unemployed that long means your life savings are gone.
That's not good.
Until and unless my fund is enough to retire on, I would still rather work than not work, even if that's writing documentation, handling IT tickets, or debugging someone else's code.
That combines with math+SWE to make a nice bundle, at least for what I enjoy.
That's a path I often advise. Intersect a skillset like that with SWE + math, and there's a very nice set of niches one can slot. For each of the above:
- Doctor + SWE + math = medical imaging, computational biology, etc.
- Construction/engineering + SWE = industrial robotics, CAD, etc.
- Teacher + SWE = edtech, e-learning, etc.
- Military + SWE = a ton of hard tech
However, the air gets very thin as you specialize, and especially as you move towards the top. If you intersect the above with director-level or C-suite level positions, there might be literally just a handful of jobs out there. Narrow that by geographic region is you have a family, and it becomes more and more of a problem.
What's interesting is that I've seen more than a 10x spread in compensation from jobs I've applied for (which is extreme, but not as extreme as it sounds; a research scientist at FAANG might earn $600k, and $60k at a university or a non-profit for the same qualifications). The higher-paying positions also weren't better, holistically.
I'm not sure I quite following your argument. How is it harder to get a job when unemployed vs when being given shit work from 9-5? If it's financial anxiety, then severance is the best of both worlds: ex-employee gets paid and time to find a new job
1) Your lack of any sort of leverage. This means the potential employers will try to take advantage of your situation, and it will take some time to find an employer who does not.
2) Prejudice against those who were laid-off.
The second of those is huge. Unfortunately, it's well-founded prejudice too; a lot of people who are jobless are jobless for a reason. Many "layoffs" are a euphemism for being fired, and interviews are imperfect to say the least. If I don't catch the reason you're unemployable, there are two possibilities:
(1) You don't have a reason, and you're perfectly employable
(2) You do, and it slipped past the interview process.
The longer you're jobless, the less employable you are. Employable people will snatch up new jobs very quickly. If you've sent 10,000 resumes and flunked 100 interviews, and pass mine, odds aren't that you've magically improved, but that you got lucky. If you've been unemployed for the past two years without good reason, you're very likely in that bin, so for most hiring managers, the longer you've been unemployed, the harder it is to pass an interview screen.
On the other hand, shit work 9-5 looks the same on a resume or in an interview as real work. A hiring manager won't know any better.
As a footnote, leverage is a real issue, but is easier to manage. Many companies will try to take advantage. However, at least as often:
- The hiring manager (personally) doesn't care about how much you cost. They want a good team, and it's not their money.
- The employer has fixed salary grades. There's little room to negotiate. If you do negotiate, the impact is generally transitory (if you're hired at the top of your salary grade, you can expect to have no raises for a few years without a promotion).
- The company compensates fairly, since they don't want a revolving door of people.
I'm not going to argue whether that's a majority or minority of companies, but it's manageable. At that kind of employer, you might get a few thousand extra with leverage than without, but it won't be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and nowhere near "being taken advantage of."
I've only tried this once. In the process of trying, something dawned upon me. If you think you can run a company better than your management does, go start one.
So I did! One of the best decisions of my life.
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s.
If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture.
If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process.
If you don't like a process, kill it.
This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".
In pretty much any big enough company with enough people, the issue is that you have a general sense of direction at higher levels, and if you go against the grain, it makes other people criticize you because they want to be seen as going with the grain for their career paths. If you want to see the biggest example of effect in action, go work for the US government.
So at certain point, you just stop caring to do anything because the paychecks are worth more to you.
But advocating for my direct reports instead of happily figuring out which one to fire next is what made the experience so dreadful and career-limiting when the L8 and L10 herd's jobs depend on continually hiring and firing to look busy.
Pro-tip: if it's an abusive culture, leave ASAP.
I chose to "disagree and commit" to "The Law of Two Feet" and left. One L8 claimed he would be blacklist me and my direct reports (who also left) from ever returning. He got a harassment claim later and I asked in return for my input that HR investigate that claim. Nope, not blacklisted, he was just a lying PoS.
Between high paying job, stability, and culture, you can only pick 2.
My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.
It's not the fault of the individual engineers, but there just aren't enough positions to fill.
Leadership is accountable to shareholders, the board, and other stakeholders to ensure financial viability.
It sucks, but it is what it is.
I don’t mind eye popping executive pay for exceptional performance, I mind that those positions have zero accountability.
CEOs get fired if the board loses trust in their abilities.
Was that very difficult to see at the time? Sure, but what are those astronomical comp packages buying? Making very difficult calls correctly is their jobs.
The CEO hires the employees assuming ZIRP continues. ZIRP ends. He fires all the extra employees, and gets to fire employees he doesn't need from other departments too along the way. Shareholders benefit either way, and the expendable ex-employees' well-being, visa status, healthcare, etc. is someone else's problem. Market is bad so the remaining employees can't really complain either.
And why is some manager not being publicly flogged for letting that happen?
Timing "we need this new team" with "We don't need this team" is a challenge. It is rare that both occur at the same time, or even the existing team's skill set matches with the new challenge.
Shifting SREs to do machine learning is set up for failure.
As an engineer, the deeper the experience in a field, the more business value you can create (all else being equal). So when you switch speciality, value creation is going to take a hit. Some skills carry across directly, others take months/years to acquire.
This is why companies can simultaneously be hiring teams and firing teams at the same time.
If the team is doing something critical for the business strategy, they need to be on-point straight off the bat. That normally is achieved by buying start-ups or doing deep partnerships. (MSFT + OpenAI comes to mind).
There’s this idea that tech companies are laying off folks to boost their stock prices by cutting operating expenses. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of investors think about these types of companies and what determines their worth.
Unlike other kinds of businesses, these companies face very little pressure to control costs. They can overhire, and do. They can overpay employees, and do. They can incinerate cash on wacky projects, and do.
This is not because the fundamental constraints of accounting don’t apply to them, but rather because they’re able to optimize for other outcomes because their critical personnel costs are such a tiny portion of what they’re able to bring in: they’re hoarding human resources, they’re trying to develop second acts, they’re able to tolerate bloat and process if they think that’s worth it.
When Amazon turns up the heat, it’s not primarily because they’re worried about costs. It’s because they want to get people out of there who don’t belong there, and because return to office in their minds is a good way to make the org more productive over the long term.
These companies are trying to get a culture they perceive as being a little over staffed, too bureaucratic, maybe lacking in focus, to turn around.
Fixing that has a much bigger impact on long term shareholder value creation — it’s the exact same rationale as overpaying staff, over staffing and spending generously on wacky new bets. Ship faster.
To be competitive in distribution you need to be ruthless about costs. I've consulted for a few of these sort of companies and it's insane what they will do to save a few pennies. They are utterly miserable places to work as their frugal attitude spills over into all their interactions. It starts with using doors as desks and progresses to making staff piss in a bottle.
I suspect this culture is what makes Amazon as a whole such a difficult employer.
If they were two independent businesses then it would never make sense for them to merge, just as you wouldn't expect Microsoft to buy Walmart. It would probably be better for both sides if they divorced.
Right. Engineers aren't hired to run trains, but to build the train you'll need next year.
When does innovation stop? It's not usually for lack of innovative people. Most commonly, it's when the existing architecture and workflows are constrained to the point where a significant change is not worth it.
The reasons for that are typically lost to history, so there's no negative feedback for the error.
And there's no incentive to cut or transition existing customers. So what remains is to operationalize the function: reduce it to running the old train.
Developers concerned about their careers need to realize this evolution is natural. The solution is to migrate to innovative teams before you get left with the duty of managing the winding-down.
This is not really true anymore and is exactly why Google and Amazon are doing big layoffs. Money isn't free anymore. The "just grow at all costs" couldn't last forever and it's finally coming to an end
Investors are specifically expecting profitability now and not just growth of customers. The end of what you're talking about is precisely what is happening now
My point is this behavior is better explained by the actor’s belief in something like the following proposition:
“The present value of the opex avoidance is dwarfed by the present value of a leaner org’s ability to focus, ship and execute.”
Keep The Lights On effort was typically around 10% of total capacity. The rest of the effort was because the goal is not to maintain, it’s to drive improvements to the business.
This is currently false, or at least very up to debate.
If WFH destroys long term value creation, then why didn't the stock market punish every tech company when they all announced permanent WFH?
None of it makes a dent on the valuation in the way that better focus and execution do, and investors expect the managers to set up the culture to do that without having to make a determination about the specifics of WFH in Amazons particular circumstances.
That is exactly what Amazon thinks it’s doing. Yes, costs are getting cut, but by far the more significant impact would be 5 or 10% better execution on stuff that really moves the needle than a 2% cost reduction.
When margins are high the returns to growing revenue are much greater than cutting costs.
>When margins are high the returns to growing revenue are much greater than cutting costs.
Margins aren't necessarily high and growing revenue isn't always an option. Certain products/services just aren't in demand, no matter how well you execute.
AWS is high margin but retail isn't. For better or worse the two businesses are merged and considered together by Wall St. which means management also has to look at it that way.
Have you used AWS before? The complexity of the site alone should tell you this side of the business would need more than a "very few" people to run it. And that's just their web services side, never mind retail.
What we're talking about is a sort if hybrid between a Tech Lead and Architect, but not quite like either. You have less direct responsibility, but people come to you independently with questions and review requests, because you can quickly generate detailed and accurate answers.
I've never been hired because of my resume, though that definitely helps with an interview. There was always a skills test.
I suppose you could grind leetcode or otherwise cram for a skills test, though. You definitely have enough time during the week.
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You are more likely tasked with things that require spinning your wheels. Boring, pointless, and directionless work that doesn't challenge you. It just melts your brain.
While you can't work on many projects - due to IP rules - you can often improve your skills and learn. Do you have a personal improvement/education budget? Use it to take relevant courses, buy books, etc. Do you have an equipment budget? Use it to upgrade to the ergonomic keyboard.
The worst case is you still get laid off but now you have things you can take forward. A better case is that you find another role at the company with the new understanding.
Either way, follow the policy exactly. Don't screw around and give them grounds to fire you.
I don't miss my Silicon Valley job, though...
My understanding has always been that the line is simply to do my own projects on my time with my hardware.
Addendum:
Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.
There YouTube channels, blogs, website tuned to pass these interviews in India.
Lower tier colleges have gotten much better in quality too.
I remember Indraprashta came to recruit Indian PhD students at my Ivy League tier college to become tenure track CS/ECE/EE professors.
Plenty of lower tier IIITs and regional engineering colleges are getting Western or Top Tier IIT trained faculty, and students are higher quality now as well.
As the child of a dad who attended one of these no name RECs who ended up becoming tech leadership here in the Bay, I'm glad that this democratization has occurred. The BITS Pilani and IITian uncles were very snobby and annoying.
Facebook doesn't have a Engineering office in India.
Microsoft has also explicitly expanded their hiring in India robustly for dev positions.
When companies tell you how infeasible remote work is and that you need to come in to the office, take it with a grain of salt that it is solely infeasible for you to wfh at your billing rate.
Amazon always had a policy to not judge candidate based on their universities. It's not new.
> expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.
Please don't call hyd low CoL if you don't know about it.
> Also, the Indian branches are fairly remote work friendly
3 days from office like all the other office.
> Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k
Covid time is long gone.
Lower than Bangalore or Gurgaon. It's easier to operate a tech company from HYD financially than in Haryana or Karnataka.
> Covid time is long gone
Well, tell that to my cousins who are still working remotely in tech from their ancestral villages in Himachal/Jammu/Punjab.
What I can say is that there is no special treatment for SDEs working from India, especially regarding the WFH policy.
They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.
Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
Rents are $1.5-2K/month in nice neighborhoods (buy range $250K up); taxes are high with a 16% VAT across the board, income taxes are high as well for this bracket; and don't get me started with schools, cars, insurance and the like.
Yeah probably half the population would 'kill' for a $70k job, but they want English fluent, highly-educated, middle-class people, cherry on top, with top notch tech skills. Those candidates either want, U.S. SDE level packages or can make more with run of the mill no-name companies remotely.
I still don't know anyone who has worked for U.S. level pay as a FTE or contractor, take a position with a subsidiary office in Mexico, the salary discrepancy is too great.
One end game may well be that a lot of people who are today "product managers" will use increasingly capable AI assistants to "create software" without writing much, if any, code. But in that world, I think a lot of people who are today "programmers" will also be very well suited to creating software in that way, and will have no trouble transitioning into those roles if that's where the opportunities are.
If you prevent talent from coming to the US, companies will follow the talent.
This is why American cybersecurity and networking has almost entirely been outsourced to Israel and India and chip manufacturing to Taiwan and South Korea.
It’s really a sign of how weak the U.S. government has become, which is heartbreaking. US has found it too expensive to invest in its own citizens. It’s almost a ticking time bomb.
Let that sink in.
I'd be shocked if China isn't assassinating people too. They definitely have established "police stations" here and are conducting operations against dissidents and their families, but maybe it hasn't crossed into actual murder. If it has, the US and Canada aren't talking about it; they're barely talking about, or doing anything about, the secret police stations.
I've clearly missed something here. Where can I learn more about what you're referencing here, or what Google search would point me in the right direction?
Here’s the first hit for “India assassinate Canada” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/canada/india-assass...
Financing the Abraham Accords [0], using American engines in tanks [1], American fighter jet engines in Indian fighter jets [2], and being a part of 2 bilateral treaty organizations [3][4] absolutely puts India in the US Sphere of Influence.
> has not even voted to condemn Russia
India will never piss off Russia, because India doesn't want Russia to join the Chinese camp [5]. By keeping trade and defense ties with Russia, India minimizes the chances of Russia becoming pro-China instead of neutral during an India-China war (which almost happened in 2020) [6].
Mistreatment of Indian students in Ukraine during the war made a vote in favor of Ukraine politically untenable during election season [7]
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2023/09/07/saudi-india-uae-us-railway-...
[1] - https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/ameri...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/why-ge-pl...
[3] - https://www.state.gov/i2u2/
[4] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
[5] - https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/06/india-in-emerging-w...
[6] - https://theprint.in/defence/nearing-breaking-point-gen-narav...
[7] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ukraine-crisis-stra...
Any development in a country that has not washed its hands of Russia should be illegal for selling in the us.
In addition, the recent argument with Canada over the killing over a citizen on Canadian soil comes into play here. That is not what s country under western influence does.
I'm American.
> are going to buy Russian oil and not side with the us (sic) in Ukraine
Well,
1. That oil goes to the EU. If there's a buyer, there's going to be a seller [0]
2. It's at margins barely above the cost to extract, which is as big a financial hit you make make [1]
3. As pointed above, China is the bigger bad to India instead of Russia. It's better to keep countries neutral in a future India-China war
> Any development in a country that has not washed its hands of Russia should be illegal for selling in the us.
Thank god you don't work at the State Department. That's how you alienate every country that isn't in North America and Europe.
China would have the pick of the litter.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-27/europe-is...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/revenues-russias...
However, the us is operating from weakness here which is not okay and the situation should have never been allowed to develop to this point. Ironically it may be outsourcing and offshoring in the first place that led us here.
US critical infrastructure development should not be outsourced to countries who have any contact with countries that are we are in a proxy war with.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1751o2e/comment/k4dr... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/xssv8o/c...
India is nearly unassailable. Nobody can really conquer a country of 1 billion people anyway, economically they have the size (and therefore power) to be independent-minded, and geographically there is no neighbor that is now a serious threat: China can bicker and skirmish but would have to cross the Himalayas to fight a war, which is impossible. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, but those are useless other than to deter an existential attack by India - using them would be suicide. Bangladesh lacks economic, political, and military power. Others are too small.
India doesn't need to be in the US 'sphere' and serve US interests.
I never read Roman history beyond 6th and 7th grade history and AoE 1's campaigns, but I think Roman analogies would make it easier to drive my point to a couple people.
The reality is that if you work on a banking product for instance you might find an exploit you can use and keep secret and use to your countries benefit. That’s why these positions need clearance controls.
Even a benign program like a text editor could have a back door installed to spy on the us.
I am curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
There's no possible way to decouple without reversing 30 years of development.
The only solution is to justify to Israel and India why they should continue to align to the US, instead of hacking it on their own.
This justification comes from the carrot (FDI, IP Transfers) and the stick (bad press, cultivating alternative allies, tarriffs)
The era of Hyperpower is over. Regional Powers have returned.
The US Policy world has recognized this for a decade and is operating under those assumptions. The issue is the type of person who gets their news from CNN, Fox, Reddit, Zeihan, Telegram, etc isn't exactly the kind to read policy papers or watch C-SPAN
> Even a benign program like a text editor could have a back door installed to spy on the us.
It goes both ways. Meta is an American company with development done in the US. Everyone uses WhatsApp at the senior levels outside of North America. Everyone other than China uses Google as their primary search engine. Everyone uses MS or Apple as their primary OS
I also think that in sourcing is an investment in the us citizen, something that all companies operating in the us should be obliged to do.
Our problem doesn't really seem like a lack of encouragement for immigration. We have plenty of people trying to come here, we either don't want the people attempting to come or don't want immigration at scale at all.
Social programs and entitlements are really all the encouragement needed for immigration, as long as you're legally allowed to immigrate and get a job at all. Is the question really how do we encourage the "right" kind of immigrants for the skills or roles we want to expand?
Remove a decade long backlog for Indian nationals coming to work in Skilled fields (STEM, Accounting, Healthcare, Finance, Law) by speeding up processing times by hiring more bodies at USCIS Processing Centers.
And also maybe not forcing every Chinese national who studied STEM in China to go through enhanced background checks [0].
And also hiring more immigration judges (I knew a former Immigration Judge with the DHS - they de facto had a hiring freeze since the 2010s, leading to case backlogs).
Tl;dr - stop defunding the DHS and USCIS
[0] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/06/04/2020-12...
0 - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
The incentives exist, we just need to get out of peoples' way and let people immigrate here.
Alternatively, we could alter the statue of liberty and remove the poem if we collectively don't want to welcome immigrants of all skills and situations.
Skilled Immigration is already encouraged by the salary bump.
The issue is skilled immigration has been backlogged, as the existing system hasn't been reformed since the 2000s.
It's the backlog that pushed Chinese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and now Indian immigrants to consider staying put instead of spending 5-10 years living under the fact that you might be asked to leave in 60 days.
Our system would indeed implode if many went unemployed. Companies would go down with it though, they need people employed so they can spend money and keep the gears of capitalism turning.
I know I sound very cynical here but I don't even mean it as a bad thing. Its just the way this works, for anyone looking to down vote a cynical sounding take I'd be really interested to hear what I might be misrepresenting.
Companies will absolutely continue paying large numbers of employees to do unnecessary jobs, they're incentivized to do so. A growing company is often seen as a good sign by shareholders and no one can really tell whether the new roles are any more or less productive. Existing employees and managers have the benefit of growing teams and getting promoted before anyone sees if the teams over-hired. Holding expendable positions also has the benefit of making for an easy layoff when investors get spooked.
Meaning the company and employees have good reason to hire and keep unnecessary jobs, don't have many short-term downsides as long as it doesn't directly cause a drop in key metrics, and have a built-in backup plan when things turn south and they can show good leadership by trimming the fat.
Not saying those aren't real jobs (many certainly are), but I think the scope & number of those jobs can be expanded to fill the void left by more "productive" / "survival" jobs.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...
Companies have been quick to cut DEI jobs as soon as the outside political pressure died down.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/tech/google-meta-other-tech-gi...
The military has been cutting personnel. The number of divisions has gone down. Higher military spending has been going towards procurement programs, not towards more uniformed jobs (although some defense contractors have expanded a bit).
I mean its great to make more money than anyone where you are. However I've known a number of Indian people that have moved to the US that say they will never go back to India unless they are forced to even though comparatively make less money here.
Money is only good if it can buy things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut. Sure you can now pay people to build you a nice house but you will be paying much more due to the lack of infrastructure. When your plumbing breaks it takes 6mo for someone to come fix it. Still you probably have lots of money. But now you have a visibly nice house. In other words a target in a poor area that is likely crime prone. Now you need to hire security. As expenses pile up it becomes just like in the US where people making $500k+ complain about barely being able to afford their life.
I guess I'm just saying I'm still not worried about India salaries being the magic bullet that companies need to kill high tech salaries.
Yep! My parents and I are the same. The QoL in even a 3rd tier cow town in the US will be better than an economically vibrant city in India or China. Having clean tap water is (imo) the pinnacle of a developed country.
> things. If all your village has is mud huts you are still living in a mud hut
True, but most Indian villages aren't like that anymore. They have all fairly developed now with electricity, WiFi, decent schools, etc. Go use Google street view - Indian villages may seem messy by Western standards, but they've gotten much better now.
If you're someone who lived in small town or village India your whole life, and go to college to get a good job, if you have the option to earn a big city salary in your small town while being close to your family can be hard to beat.
It's the same reason you see plenty of Techies take remote jobs and live near their families in the Midwest.
Traditionally, Delhi NCR and Bangalore were the big 2 tech hubs since the 80s-90s, but politicians who were also massive landlords in Hyderabad [0][1][2] began giving tech companies tax incentives to move to Hyderabad in the early 2000s
It began as low tier Infosys type work, but began climbing up the value chain in the 2010s
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Chandrababu_Naidu
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Chandrashekar_Rao
[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._S._Rajasekhara_Reddy
Indore is becoming the next Hyderabad now as well. It's in the same position that Hyderabad was in the early 2000s.
If it truly were free trade then we could choose to live there and accept a lesser salary.
Eventually offshoring to South America will probably hurt India as that is poised to expand and has overlapping timezones.
They don’t want other countries citizens competing for jobs in their own country, which is effectively what is happening in the us now.
Though, IME, it tends to be Japanese, Israeli, Singaporean, and Korean expats who can hack it in India. Western European and Americans are too soft.
I doubt a visa for generic remote based web dev work would get approved. In fact, I believe the visa even states you have to have a skill that is not readily available in India.
The reality is your generic dev would probably not qualify especially if they are outside of a company.
The first candidate to promise an outlawing of outsourcing gets my vote.
Because PH used to an American territory until 1946, the education system is largely the same [0].
PH is to the US Medical system as India/Pakistan/Bangladesh are to the UK NHS
[0] - https://nursing.uw.edu/article/filipinos-and-filipinos-ameri...
https://news.mit.edu/2020/philippines-us-military-alliance-0...
But I'm not sure how well the history of the US in the Philippines is taught even in gen-ed college history classes, let alone, say, high school. One of those topics I think most folks learn about either through personal interest, or as part of a history or politics major in college, apart from maybe a passing mention when covering the tail end of 19th century US history, or maybe a low-context entry in coverage of WWII. I guess it's not as bad as mistaking Puerto Ricans for "foreigners", at least.
Depends on the state. I grew up in California, so Asian American history is extremely prominent since 1st grade.
Too bad we can't import doctors. That's the worst bottleneck.
We're all gonna spend our twilight years being cared for almost exclusively by people who speak English with a heavy accent. The ball's been rolling that way for some time and it's got enough momentum that making anything else happen will take many decades.
Anyway, worker visas don't have to be a path to citizenship, so this may fall, for better or worse, under "not our problem", depending on how it's all structured.
Honestly when the current crop of adults from the 'healthy at any size' era get old it's going to be a medical shit show, I'm pretty sure governments will end up resorting to Canadian style MAID for the poor, sick, and old as no-one will have the money for proper care.
Science might be about to rescue us from that with Ozempic and friends, assuming those don’t turn out to do horrific things to a person over time. Once some of those go generic and the prices plummet, anyway. But failing that, yeah, it’s gonna be a lot of skinny immigrants helping obese, diabetic 70-year-olds with shot knees & backs get to the bathroom. Or maybe we’ll get robots for that, by then, go full Wall-E, who knows.
I’m actually quite hopeful that ozempic mainly works by helping reverses hormonal damage caused by bad diets. Ozempic causes low gut motility which can be very unpleasant and potentially dangerous, there are already conditions with the same effects so it’s possible to benchmark what long term effects will be like (It’s not great). I think there are safe ways to do it and that will be figured out. I think it has already changed the culture for the better. I’m hopeful this high BMI era turns out to just be a phase instead of a one way ratchet. Where I live there are few overweight people so it’s always a bit of a shock to me whenever I travel.
I'd be surprised if the same weren't true for MDs.
Edit: it's an O-1 visa. To get one you need to show "special skills" in your area. For an academic (and I presume for physicians) that would be things like good research publications and so on. You have to be above the norm in some way.
The advantage of this visa class is apparently that it feeds directly into the green card system.
?
My current two doctors appear to be native speakers of English, but the previous four or five were all clearly from the Subcontinent or East Asia.
Note that I'm not criticizing them in any way... they were all perfectly fine doctors. I'm just wondering where OP is from that there aren't tons of imported doctors on staff.
The government definitely cannot afford , with the national debt, to lose tax dollars or to subsidize high levels of unemployment.
As much as I would like labor laws to be improved Globally, I doubt governments will allow this.
That said, I am dying to see some country try something similar again. There is something beautiful when voters hold politicians up to their values, and politicans fail to explain the competitive realities to their voters.
Making outsourcing economically unviable is a magnicificent contender.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/2083/do-the-...
Is that still true? If the goal of the company was to move from loud, scary, expensive "layoffs" to push people to quit (cheaper, less scary to the market), surely, "we're firing this one person who published a modest amount of info about internal communications, which is a violation of policies in our employee handbook" is cheap, not scary to the market, and sends a nice warning to other employees to not publish this sort of thing in the future?
Isn't this the author's goal though?
I happen to have first hand experience with Amazon’s PIP process…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963423
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988
(I seem to have done something to anger the HN gods)
Firing for cause is something else. Like, stealing from the company. Or punching a coworker, disclosing trade secrets to the press, failing a cocaine drug test, or deliberately violating workplace conduct rules. Poor performance is not a cause, and failing a PIP does not lead to firing for cause.
And did you read my write up about how PIPs work at Amazon?
You’re heavily incentivized to press “Leave Amazon” button when they send you the link.
The chance of making it through a PIP is almost 0 - I read some of the internal Slack channels and I know from my own experience.
This isn't unique to Amazon. I've been at other companies that will give some period of time after a role is eliminated to find another job within the company -- sometimes it's a bullshit move, a soft layoff, other times it's a legit "we really don't need this role anymore, but we would like to retain you. You're free to look around and interview for other open roles."
Sounds like he's looked around and doesn't want what's available and they're not offering severance. Which sucks. If they don't need that position anymore they should cough up severance and send him on his way rather than dragging it out and hoping he quits or takes a worse job than he had before.
There were entire disbanded teams that resulted in roving packs of feral engineers showing up to the otherwise business casual office wearing sandals, baseball caps, and tees.. basically screwing around all day but showing up 10-3.
Some of them were offered up to existing teams "for free" for the rest of the year, but most of them were so far gone that it wasn't worth assigning them any tasks you actually needed done.
It's interesting that AMZN has gotten to this point so quickly from peak.
The stuff they are getting rid of now are things that they had money to spend on previously, but now don't. AWS is still raking in massive profit margins and the leader, retail is the largest source of revenue, and none of that is going away any time soon.
looks like a typo. did you mean something else?
When you tie leadership incentives to short-term profits, that's the only type of decision making that will be done.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...
Compare to Alphabet/Microsoft/Apple/Meta’s 20%+ profit margins.
Last sentence is pure bullshit
Do people really believe that engineers have to sit there and constantly commit code to keep servers from crashing?
I wonder why it was not so expensive in Netflix, when Netflix also centralized few and decentralized by default. And I have a different perspective: AWS org charts may look expensive to insiders, but man, it is lean compared to many other companies of much smaller size most likely because AWS strategically chose which components to centralize and which not.
The reason to choose one public cloud provider over another, or over on-perm, isn't their AI strength or the technical qualities of their SaaS offering.
You can “help” your friend who is bootstrapping his startup. You can even book a room in the office and meet with your friend there. As long as you are available for work in the office, it can count as “training”. Just don’t be blatant about it. Like, reserve rooms on a different floor every day. Or I imagine that is how it would be done, I definitely didn’t do this when I was benched on this big company for months.
I am genuinely at awe at how out of touch people seem to be. We're talking about software engineers given nothing to do and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars... Yes this is not ideal but let's not act that they're torturing these people or forcing them to clean bathrooms or something.
And no, the company won't cease to exist after you and your colleagues are fired or forced to quit - a new group of fresh faced recruits will take your place and the cycle will continue. There is a reason the company has among the lowest average tenures in tech. This is simply its normal operation.
Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.
Heard that multiple times during my short tenure. Always smelled like bs to me.
I've been working there for 6 years and the scale at which layoffs have been happening since 2022 is unparalleled to what has happened in the past.
There may have been some rare team closures here and there before, but people could easily join another team and it was a rare event anyway.
Now, since 2022 it has been massive team shutdowns with hundreds of people laid off every time, while there is a hiring freeze in the whole company. And this will continue in 2024.
Amazon always had a cutthroat culture but at least if you were good (aka not PIPed) you knew you'd fine another team and weren't worried about not having a job the next day. This is not the case anymore.
It seems to me that you can have high levels of reliability, a great working culture and high levels of staffing, but if you mess with any one of these elements you will find the wheels start falling off the train.
- You aren't told you're being targeted to be managed out when it starts. Managers often do not tell you that you're beginning phase 1 of getting managed out, whatever it's called.
- You've always known this could happen to you or anyone else, so you are always guessing if that email from your boss is just a normal email or was it the beginning of a paper trail? You sense something different, but is that just in your head?
- You might think you'd realize you're being managed out, reading the room, but that assumes there's a rational foreseeable reason to PIP you. Often there is not. Management gets PIP targets and someone has to get PIPed. It can be you for political reasons above your head that you are oblivious to.
- You are subtlely being setup to fail, and even if you don't explicitly fail, finding a reason to frame your performance as deficient is always possible.
- There is always something you could have done better, and nothing ever goes 100% perfectly. Those things will be magnified 100x. Are they being over magnified? Or were you delusional to minimize them?
- To be on the receiving end of this is totally disorienting. It's basically gas lighting. Suddenly everything you do is somehow deficient in some way, even when you thought you were doing well. How could you have not realized this? Is this proof you can't trust your own judgment? That you're incompetent?
- Your paper trails are useless. You can always be criticized for subjective reasons, like your style of communication, some 20/20 hindsight way you arguably could have done things even better, you're "not showing enough leadership", yes you're doing your core job but at your level we also expect XYZ, etc.
- This can go on for months, working 60-80 hour weeks, on little sleep, with constant stress. You start to question your ability to assess reality. What else are you missing if you didnt realize you were screwing up so badly? Are you doing this outside of work too?
- You think, wait, this has never happened to me before, but maybe it was just luck until now. Was imposter syndrome not a syndrome this whole time? Was I actually an imposter and this is what it feels like to be found out?
At the end of this gas lighting psychological manipulation marathon, you have a hard time knowing up from down and you're fired.
Who do you talk to about this to get your bearings back? You are ashamed this happened, and yet you're also not because bullshit PIPing is famous. It's not your fault. Or is it? Anyway you probably should find a way to process this right? Or maybe it's best to shove it deep into your subconscious and move on.
Isn't this what therapists are for? Sure, go explain that your mind is vaguely screwed up from getting fired from a $300k/year job for...reasons? Did you screw up? Well no, but technically yes, but in reality no? Maybe? How the hell do you even articulate this without sounding like an incoherent spoiled brat?
$175k/year starting salary for new grads, which is INSANE. Keep in mind that for the first year, at Amazon, you also get this in cash.
If you took a young, competent, blue collar worker that makes $65k a year with honest work, and said, hey would you like to do your job at 3 times the salary, but there may be some stressful weeks, and you may have to deal with some managerial bullshit that may get you laid off, he would be head over heels excited. He would take the job, save every extra penny he could get, ride it out for as long as he can, and if shit got too rough, he would just walk away with a nice downpayment for a house and a smile on his face.
But modern software engineers seem to think that they not only MUST make that money, but continue making it, all for being able to write some extremely simple OOP code, pass some leetcode questions that one can memorize, and know the difference between relational and non relational database.
Bottom line is, if you can't manage your money/expenses to the point where you have enough runway to walk away at your job at any time because of stress, or you can't figure out what is going on with your role and manager and be able to navigate around that, then you simply don't deserve these high salaries. Plenty of lower paying jobs around.
Thank you for the enlightening insight.
If you job is taking a toll on you, just quit - if you are making 175k a year, after one year you should have enough runway to do so quite easily.
People who make less and depend on their jobs can't.
First, you conveniently ignore COL which matters a lot. Doesn't matter how much money you make if you spend most of it on rent and food.
Second, I don't think you really appreciate the cognitive toll software engineering takes on you. It's not simple OOP and leetcode that is complicated. It's understanding and enhancing legacy code, it's dealing with unrealistic expectations, it's having to continuously pretend that the emperor has clothes and brag about bullshit things like productivity.
Third, I am going to let you in on a secret: if blue collar workers could do what sw engineers do they would go for it. Who wouldn't want to be paid more? Writing code is hard. Try explaining basic shit to someone who is not a software developer and let me know how it goes.
In every single place, there are people that live stably at much lower salaries than what SDEs make. Nobody is entitled to a nice high rise 2 bedroom apt for themselves and eating out all the time. My first software job I made 80k a year in Northern Virginia which has a very high COL including state income tax, and still managed to have enough money left over for some recreation as well as a safety net.
>Second, I don't think you really appreciate the cognitive toll software engineering takes on you. It's not simple OOP and leetcode that is complicated. It's understanding and enhancing legacy code, it's dealing with unrealistic expectations, it's having to continuously pretend that the emperor has clothes and brag about bullshit things like productivity.
I absolutely do. My point is that if you are stressed, quit. Simple as that. And again, if you can't quit because you spend too much money or don't want to quit because you don't want to give up that lifestyle, then don't complain. There are people who have more stressfull jobs that make half as much and don't have the luxury to just quit.
>if blue collar workers could do what sw engineers do they would go for it.
Completely missed the point.
For the actual work that majority of CS people do, especially new grads, it is not that hard. There are plenty of lower paying CS jobs compared to FAANG where the bar to get in may be much lower, but you pretty much do the same basic tasks day to day. The reason FAANG pays that much is because they have (or realistically had) the funds to recruit talent en masse in expectation that statistically something profitable would come out of it, whereas other smaller companies that are ran much more conservatively tend to pay closer to market value.
If FAANG jobs came with a explicit disclaimer on which every single new hire had to sign off: "Hey, we are going to pay you way more above market rate, but you accept the risk of being overworked, potentially being piped out due to quota, and layoffs in cases of economic recession", I don't think people would be complaining about mental health in regards to jobs. But people shouldn't need that disclaimer to understand this.
For most people out there it's hard as fuck. Overworking people is the norm in the US
Software engineers have comparatively VERY cushy lives if you go by any real metric. I understand that some people find the job hard, but again, they are compensated well for it. Asking 175k/year and also your job being easy is entitlement to its core.
Back on Earth, if there is a reduced set a people that can do a job and the demand for that job greatly outweighs the supply, the wages will grow. It's economics 101. It applies in the US, it applies everywhere (look it up, software engineers are paid better no matter what the geography).
Fundamentally we disagree on the job being easy part. It is not easy. We are paying for the "cushy" living with our mental health.