Amazon cuts 16k jobs
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.
Congrats for making an argument completely disassociated from reality.
> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.
I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.
Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.
I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.
Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.
Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.
I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)
And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?
1) understand what success means for their area 2) assemble a team and remove roadblocks for them to achieve 1.
I have to assume some of it serves a social, rather than practical purpose, like having people re-assure them that projects are going well. If that's the case, automation may just not make sense.
I thought that information is only available through organic conversations by the watercooler and cross polination of teams.
Does it mean you no longer will have to come to office as long as you talk to AI over Slack?
Or are they going to slap laptop on a Roomba and still mandate office attendance?
I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different. Software ate the world and now AI will eat the "software professionals".
When this is over, just like the rust belts there will be code belts where once highly valued software developers will be living in decaying neighborhoods and the politicians will be promising to create software jobs by banning AI.
could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways
it's hard to be sure
At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.
Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of highly skilled successful people of today could soon be below average category, jobless and can be called clueless, stuck in old ways who didn't simply see what is happening in the world.
And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.
I would bet for the opposite. In a huge rush to optimization and job elimination, early career people suffer the most. However it also makes it impossible to switch careers, start from scratch, and etc.
As another commenter said, we'll likely see a big change on the junior end, which will affect the more experienced hire pool as time goes on.
Why? There was a time when there was a need for highly skilled seamstresses. And we never developed the technology to do their jobs as well as they could. But people just learned to deal with mass produced clothes that didn’t fit perfectly because it was so much cheaper.
But someone who is competent and can do quality alterations, mending, customize patterns etc, is going to make decent money. But I'm pretty sure where ever you live there are seamstress working and making good money.
I'm not even really sure where automation would have impacted being a seamstress. Sewing machines have been around since the 1700's and if anything the demand for textiles has increased more than the speed of production.
Maybe you are thinking more of knitting, which is highly automated and used to be a big job, now it's basically just a hobby.
Blacksmiths just evolved to modern day welders, iron workers, boilermakers etc. Still pays well.
> there’ll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts
Two different things.
Yes, many, many software developers will become obsolete in certain industries. It’s already happening. Putting on blinders doesn’t make it go away.
Yes, highly skilled technical experts will absolutely still be needed.
Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.
Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.
you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software.
And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.
Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.
Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.
"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."
Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.
</end-of-weird-rant>
There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.
Thats a really odd take. Software is merely a way of ingesting data and producing information. And information often has intrinsic value. This can scale from simple things like minor annoyances of forgetting your umbrella, to avoiding deaths/millions of dollars in losses due to ships sinking in storms.
Now the long term value of software does approach zero, because it can usually be duplicated quite easily.
I've been thinking a lot around a kind of smart-people paradox: very intellectual arguments all basically plotting a line toward some inevitable conclusion like super intelligence or consciousness. Everything is a raw compute problem.
While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.
What scientific problems are non-computable?
ANNs are designed to handle non-linearities BTW, thats the entire point of activation functions and multi layer networks
we can't do that for mostly any complex physical system, as would be for something like living organisms.
These two words do not mean the same thing.
Non-linear functions do not mean you cannot determine the output for a given input.
All non-linear means is that the condition f(x+y) = f(x) + f(y) and f(kx) = kf(x) do not hold for arbitrary x,y,k
For example f(x) = x^2 is a non-linear function. Can you determine what f(x) for arbitrary x?
Perhaps you meant what used to be called "chaotic systems", those which were highly sensitive to initial conditions. Yes, they are non-linear but they are completely deterministic. A classic example would be the n-body problem in physics under most conditions.
And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.
Most real numbers are non-computable, such as the square root of 2 or Pi.
Practically speaking however, we can get approximations as close as we want. In other cases, such as the Busy Beaver function, we can set bounds
> And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.
In practice, yes, as I understand it, modern science is all about stochastic approximations and for all intents and purposes it's quite reliable.
I probably should stop using "non-linear" terminology. I really just mean that it's not 1:1. You mention how systems can be deterministic and I looked it up and yes wave function collapse specifically says:
> The observable acts as a linear function on the states of the system
Thanks for the reply, this is much more interesting to me as it approaches philosophy, so admittedly I too loosely throw words-that-mean-things around.
It’s not, but if software engineering is solved then of course so is financial analysis, because a program could be written to do it. If the program is not good enough, then software engineering is not solved.
I think this what you were getting at with this part, but it’s not clear to me, because it seems like you were disagreeing with my thesis: “ because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things”
I’m not sure if you’re saying that people weren’t using computers to solve problems before, but that’s pretty much everything they do. Some people were specifically trained to make computers solve problems, but if computers can solve X problem without a programmer, then both the computer programmer and the X problem solver are replaced.
I've never felt comfortable with the devs who just want some Jira ticket with exactly what to do. That's basically what AI/LLMs can do pretty well.
And before that the current direction is still enough to massively hurt the world because there will be less and less places for us humans.
Another point I noticed that nobody is talking around us is the technology adoption rates. When the car industry started, decades happened between the early users and cars being ubiquitous in the population (especially taking into account the world and not the richest countries). So a sizeable part of the transportation industry that was ultimately replaced by cars had the time to adapt, move to other jobs or arrive at the end of their work life.
But now the technology goes from its few first users to being used by everyone and their cats in years if not months. There is absolutely no time to adapt, love over or endure things until you don't work anymore.
https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...
With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that away and brings no insight.
Human beings will always organically organize hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative, one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the end informally you will end up with the same structure. And it's hell to deal with that when formally all have the same authority so none can override each other, but one guy just gathered enough support to do whatever he wants.
Do you think someone far away from everything you do will have a magic "workflow" that tells them what to do about the budget you requested, about the strategic decision you need, or about your conflicts, about who has to do the nice jobs or the shitty ones? And why would they have any say, they're not the boss.
Your logic is no better that those pretending today that a team of AI agents "with good workflows" can just replace all the programmers.
Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure from what I've heard, and it's working pretty well for them, but they've also had it for a long time.
So if you have a company, that works like that from the start, that people know it works like that, that it has support for it. You could make it work.
I agree that forcing this structure everywhere wouldn't work, some people can work like this, others can't.
Valve has ~300 employees and operates in a field where they can afford more freedoms (try building large infrastructure projects with flat structures). Valve struck a good balance between autonomy for employees while still having some informal central coordination. Formally there are few bosses but in practice project managers and some people with seniority also act in those roles. At scale it can't work if you don't delegate any of the authority to smaller units.
It's bad to have too many or too few layers. Sometimes the result looks the same, lack of coordination and inability to deliver consistently.
Amazon has 1.5M workers. Can't imagine a flat structure working but I'm sure they were overdoing it with layers of management.
Because no one person is good at everything, and even if you managed to build a team of people who were good at everything, it is inefficient to make everyone keep up with all details of every aspect of the company so that they can be productive in an arbitrary role at the drop of a hat. Giving people a role allows them to specialize their knowledge and concentrate all their efforts into their area of expertise/competence.
Managers fill a role. Sure, some managers are bad, and some workplaces have seemingly mostly bad managers, and it leads to cynical opinions about how managers are busy-work-making dolts who don't understand anything. Some employers have mostly good managers and I feel sorry for you if you have never had the experience.
I'm 40 years into my EE career and I have always deflected efforts to make me a people manager or a project manager. I like being a grunt in the trenches solving problems at the bottom level, and a good manager increases their reports' productivity by shielding them from needing to deal with project management crap. I would have retired already except I've been blessed to have good managers for the past 20 years, while my managers have been attending umpteen resource allocation meetings and all the attendant report-making that requires.
Perilaus of Athens designed the Brazen Bull, a hollow bronze statue used to roast victims alive. When he presented it to the tyrant Phalaris, Phalaris was so disgusted by the cruelty of the device that he ordered Perilaus to be the first person tested inside it.
That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.
> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.
This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for
At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).
All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.
So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.
All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.
Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.
Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.
Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.
I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)
Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway.
I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this.
After this he’ll probably become the literal king of the world.
Went bankrupt six times and is still hailed by his followers as an economic genius. Few people can pull that off.
My guess is that it also helps to owe lots of money to lots of banks at the same time. That way when one goes after you, the others will help you out or risk losing their money, too.
( And produce a show "the apprentice" to also pretend to be successful)
He's pretty lucky that he needed to pretend to be successful to at least let his name lease as a brand.
Basically the only thing that worked out in business.
Some people are so focused on whether they could automate their work output with an LLM to ask themselves if they even should.
Yeah, I've been in one of such places.
Why did you leave Amazon?
> I couldn't stand the management culture
Sooo... Why are you trying to bring it with you
I thought at some point I'd get to talk to a human who would immediately say "Oh this is ridiculous, sorry." Nope. I just got passed around between either more bots or offshore customer support employees, with I assume a gigantic incentive to not go against the fraud detection bot, until I ran out of appeals.
One of the most soul-sucking experiences I've ever gone through. I can't imagine the toxic culture that produced that system.
Don't know about Amazon but my experience with middle management is that it's exactly like that.
One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also what gave rise to things like Dilbert and the idea of rising to the level of your own incompetence.
Middle management is like the lug nuts on a wheel. If you start with 5, you can take one away and be OK, even two and no issues with normal driving. You can go down to two and as long as you aren't hitting large bumps and they aren't adjacent you mostly likely will be fine for a short trip. You could even remove ALL of the lug nuts and if you travel in straight line over a smooth road you can still drive.
After all they mostly just sit there, the tire, the transmission, all the other parts of the car are doing the work. But it's not fair to say that any of the removed lug nuts were doing nothing.
The point of middle management isn't really to do anything spectacular on a daily basis. If the company is working well, middle management effectively has no function. It's when things get out of line. Even then though, it's not really middle management that's calling the shots or fixing the problem, but they are critical in noticing the problems and directing resources. Middle management's role is in reducing the time that things are out of line.
At least that's the idea, and much like any position, the bulk of the group benefits are overwhelmingly produced by the groups most effective producers.
Middle management is the hardest role to hire while simultaneously being the hardest to gauge employee effectiveness.
Having worked at some dysfunctional companies where that didn't happen (and a few companies that were amazing at it), it makes a difference at scale.
Nothing is more disheartening than working your ass off as an IC, shipping, then finding out that your VP pivoted approach and your project won't be used.
The Peter Principle is of course well-known, but one of the insidious things is that once you have enough incompetent management and they are entrenched for a while, they will teach all the wrong lessons to an entire generation of new hires coming in. Due to the incentives and optics of large orgs, managers tend to spin everything in a positive light publicly, and the real unfiltered discussions of failure happen in tighter circles. At some point a lot of "successful" folks can have job hopped their way through a bunch of brand name companies just cargo culting on what they've seen done before with no real understanding of how their work actually impacts the company's bottom line.
This is one of the reasons I'm incredibly thankful to have spent most of my early career in small companies and startups where the big picture was so much easier to see.
Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit.
Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said about any leadership role. There is a reason for the hierarchy, if you think you have a better approach to structuring a company, have at it.
A few times I took my hands off the wheel to see if I was truly redundant. Let's just say, I wasn't.
At worst, I was the only one looking at the schedule.
At best, I was a support mechanism for people working on an absolutely boring product.
True. But there are many people whose productivity slumps unless they are asked for progress updates every day. You have to offset this against the people whose productivity slumps BECAUSE they are asked for updates every day. In large orgs with unknown quality of people I guess it's not impossible that middle managers add value.
> Real management work doesn't operate like this.
I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.
Yeah, this sounds like the guy was just exaggerating for effect. Haven't we all joked before, "I'm writing a tool to automate my own job away."
I’ve definitely had roles where I sadly realized I’m automating the QA person next to me well before LLMs were mainstream.
In my experience I think, you would automate enough of a mid manager role that upper management doesn’t care for, and whatever left over responsibilities that couldn’t be automated is split between a high level IC and the next above. Then the bureaucracy sells is as a success.
Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.
This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.
These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.
Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.
The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.
I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.
And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.
Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).
It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.
The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
At least at companies where the upper management is aware enough of the details to make good judgements, and the business is critical enough for some reason that low level management can't just be entrusted to yeet/yolo-things into production?
Still, it documents the typical work culture of the US in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's sad and amazing how much of that remains the same.
At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.
Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.
Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.
My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.
But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things
On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative)
I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money.
My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working.
I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations.
Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly.
But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.
The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.
> The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.
Thanks for providing more context, This feels much the govt. faults than the contractor but I feel like moves like these will come to bite the govt. sooner than later.
I feel like though contracting companies also might've overhyped. Like yea sure for basic things AI's fine but AI won't be fine for govt. projects & shouldn't be fine.
Govt.'s can spends an unknown amount of money on defense with literally no accountability with billions of $ literally not knowing where they went but they will try to price squeeze thigns here only to some years down the line have catastrophic event.
I mean LLM's still hallucinate and they can be poisoned. If govt.'s use LLM the aspect of poisioning becomes really important.
Chatgpt still pulls grokipedia whose primary source is X where bots can be created and spread and a certain narrative can be established.
I am pretty sure that if we see govt.s in any capacity have AI generated websites then the idea of poisoning the whole web to negatively impact the other nation becomes a good strategy for agressions between countries.
Although I may have gotten off topic but sorry to hear this that you were in such a weird and messy chopping block due to mistakes from the govts in general.
Wishing you the best in your future that things get better for ya :hug:
That's what the TSA is in the US
If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.
At the same time I'd be applying to senior software engineering positions geared towards anything energy/nuclear and possibly datacenter tech/engineering positions as well, but I would be extremely picky. Since everyone is so obsessed with AI/productivity, the electrical grid is going to be more stressed than ever. I'd target positions with no H1B competition, cleared positions and whatnot - this isn't a crack on H1B, but I would imagine there is higher probability in getting interviews without them in the picture. BUT I'm at the whim of hiring managers and whiteboards at that point, which isn't ideal, hence the trades route mentioned first.
I love software so much and have spent the majority of my life doing it, spent all that time getting a CS Master degree and whatnot. It would be a sad day for me, but you do what you have to do. I have a family as well, so not as much mobility and time to burn as a person without.
I think this plan is specific to my situation, but I hope it helps getting a few ideas kicking around in your mind. It is definitely a stressful thing if you think about it too deeply, but I try to distance myself from that mental mode and focus more on what I would have to do if that time comes.
I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.
After all, Gutenberg had only a modest goal of printing and selling indulgences. He didn't understand what the printing press was good for, either.
Pretty much all the jobs today did not exist before the printing press that enabled them.
It's apparently not obvious that mode access to books , learning, and literacy will improve lives
Get back to me when you need to execute that plan with millions of others joining the bread line.
Life is actually very good here and there is a lot of mobility if you have even a small amount of motivation. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here though jacquesm - if I recall correctly (I'm not going to look at your comment history), I feel like I read once that you come from a family of first gen immigrants that experienced conditions similar to what I did when I was younger, and I would love to hear more about their/your perspective on being in a place like the USA and the opportunities it did/didn't bring.
If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.
The people whose jobs were shipped overseas were physically stronger and less sheltered than you. If they couldn't stop it, your pencil arms and retreat into revolutionary cosplay fantasy certainly doesn't bode well for you. They weren't even fired because of an advance in technology, they were fired because we just dismantled workers rights and allowed every job to be shipped to China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines. And literally, now, the "opposition" is angrily protesting for free trade and for illegal workers with no rights; you all still don't get it.
Automation raises productivity, and creates wealth that we can choose to share, even though "we" don't. Not lowering labor standards and not allowing jobs to be shipped out to poverty stricken countries with low labor standards would have just taken compassion and not being completely self-centered for at least 5 minutes a day. Fighting when you had something to lose rather than waiting until you have nothing. I'm supposed to make up a fake job for you?
There won't even be Oxy for you to turn to. You'd better be happy with legal weed, even if you can barely afford it on your Taskrabbit income.
I stand by my point that there is no political will among the current elites for meaningful distributional policies.
For the record I am a staunch defender of worker rights in all industries and deeply despise neoliberal economics.
Geez man
Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.
COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.
If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction.
You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.
Cost of UBI: 3,420,000,000,000
Where is $3.5 trillion going to come from?
As I remarked, the UBI math doesn't work.
Blood. If things don’t reverse course this trajectory historically leads to bloodshed.
In many respects it already has. How many people have died just this year already because businesses didn’t do what they were suppose to? Because cutting costs with no consequences is seen as the norm?
Of course nobody wants to account for those externalities and when that blood comes back on them they become scared and use government force instead. You’re seeing the trial run with ICE as we write our comments on this forum
That will change real quick if everyone loses their job to AI. But until then, yeah, it's not going to happen, and it shouldn't.
No, this is exactly my point: they will be angry, unreasonable, and thirsty for revenge. They’ll hand over freedoms like Halloween candy. How about a law where the government gets to survey your hard drive to make sure you’re not harboring an AI model? Sounds crazy, sounds insane, but in the current political climate I’d rate it more likely than UBI.
It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.
And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.
I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.
The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably).
Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.
I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.
"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."
But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.
Also - Horse shit doesn’t sound that bad. People stink in 2026 too.
But I do think, I dunno if inflection point is precisely the right concept, there will plenty of future developments I’ll be glad , but I think less and less of a percentage of our innovation is positive for general human happiness.
Big tech ceos even often talk about this sort of longtermist perspective where today’s human happiness doesnt matter, just progress toward an unknown future.
And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.
I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.
Everyone works 20 hours/week.
The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.
They are right. Hence the stalemate.
As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.
The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.
Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.
> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
We see it in worker replacement, in vestigial organic structures that shrink over millinea, and in the tools and objects we keep with us in our lives.
The question, once achieving this grandiose goal, is how long, and by what mechanism, will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor?
Perhaps there will be a time when we may enjoy this world without the pressure of being a cog within it, but ultimately this time may be short if we are able to manifest it at all.
The unease comes from the power we lose when we cease to be the means of production, and instead become a vestigial organ on a beast much more complex than ourselves.
And that same class of people who own everything would rather kill everyone else and also destroy the planet than give up their position or allow any of the socioeconomic changes necessary to change the distribution of wealth.
Any more room as part of the painting and chess class this time, or are we all maintenance again?
Food continues to go downhill the more agritech progresses and the planets population grows. Proteins are replaced by carbs with savoury flavouring, fats are replaced by thickeners etc. Eating good food like a good cut of steak requires out bidding other people which requires income.
But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.
harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.
beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.
So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.
There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.
People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.
Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol
But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?
Yet, here I am, an experienced software engineer, unemployed for over a year now. It still seems to me the right ideal, so the 'karmic' outcome feels unjust really.
That sounds an organizational issue. I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible. That is, a combination of the job of a general and a PM. Controlling the information may be necessary for survival, but it should not be the job description.
LOL, reality is very different. Manager first of all is working to keep his position, second to get promoted. Most of them. For keeping he need to become irreplaceable. For that they create kill zone around eliminating competitors. Working against those with brain, not promoting, giving negative reviews, creating 'cases', taking credits for others job. Making those who can leave. I've seen a lot of this shit. This creates a local depressive shithole. It can go for decades in monopolies and in low competition markets.
There are a lot of inefficiencies I can see what this manager at AWS was trying to optimize for.
We won't be hiring middle management, no product managers, no engineering managers, VPs
The only aspect we don't have solved is a buffer between sales/execs and engineers, but all other functions are automated away alongside other AI assisted coding that there actually is bandwidth for the schizophrenic ideas. Things that used to be tech debt and not prioritized by engineers without management suddenly are all solved, AI makes the cleanest REST API's I've ever seen, obscure verbs properly implemented immediately. Test cases all done.
It's working really well and the friction with non technical PMs and hierarchies is gone
its a 1 liner to add relevant mcp servers to Claude Code, and every ticket tracker already has an mcp server out
for triaging between UX designers, we also just don't. we use an mcp server for UX, I can point playwright - which is usually used for testing your own site - at a competitor's website and feed all the UX information and implementation into Claude Code to promote the synthesis of an extremely advanced and already engaging design pattern into the project
at this point, I would say its a lack of competence to manage a software project or org, any other way. Amazon's deep cuts are a shot across the bow to others that know they need to "do the needful", and will be watched closely
Most experienced devs already know writing code is the easy part, it's really understanding the business requirements that takes time (I think a lot of junior devs don't understand this so they get overly enthusiastic about AI). But it turns out that most middle managers were already churning out slop to begin with so replacing them with AI is a big improvement.
As an engineer, roughly speaking, every task AI helps me get done faster is roughly negated by someone else's AI slop I need to clean up. But when it comes to middle management, I can't tell the difference. I'm pretty sure most product roadmaps generated by AI are actually more sensible than those generated by clueless managers.
Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.
I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them.
And I was still cut.
Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. And if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out.
We're now in the realm of hold onto your nuts -- sink or swim -- ownership of your own company is the only way out
If I may ask, what industry are you referring to?
One of the issues in these countries is usually Funding. I am unable to understand how people get money to fund the projects & have people be willing to pay when there are alternatives which will cut you down as well probably burning through their funding in the first place.
Suppose, I want to create a cloud provider, A) ownership costs went up due to ramflation, B) there are now services which are using VC money which will burn insane amount of money to give users for free.
As a person without VC money or without wishing to seek VC money to simply burn it, (I personally much much prefer seedstrapping and bootstraping), the idea of business ownership becomes difficult as well.
Plus don't forget the fact that the idea of getting a customer becomes hard in the first place given how organic mediums are being overwhelmed (like Show HN etc.) and personally the idea of marketing doesn't really click with me of things like paying for this as if its a rent to the overlords like google and facebook smh but I guess if someone's a business owner, they might be forced to play this game.
I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at Amazon. It's not something you do in your free time.
His campaign platform also appears to be about AI taking jobs, so I'm more than a little suspicious that getting laid off was part of the plan rather than an actual surprise.
The claim that he "built systems" should also be taken in the context of his job title, which was in product management. I've held the Product Manager title for a few years, but I wouldn't claim "I built" during those times, because I was not the one doing the building. This strikes me as a little misleading.
Also that post is full of classic LLM-ism from beginning to end. Note the overuse of the "It's not this, it's that" format and other LLM tells. I might give someone the benefit of the doubt if they were immersed in LLMs so long that they started speaking like an LLM, but given all of the other context surrounding this post I have a high suspicion it was written by AI.
After all, if 250 people report to me, probably some of them are going to have opinion A and some are going to have opinion B. If I take a strong public stance in support of A and against B, some of the more nervous B supporters are going to worry I hate them personally and fear I'm a threat to their career - and they're probably going to go to HR about it.
And even if my job doesn't give me any hiring-and-firing powers - if I'm high profile enough that a load of random haters decide they're going to try to get me fired by subjecting my employer to a campaign of harassment, well, now folks like HR and customer services are getting harassed.
Obviously, though, I've never seen a corporation have a blanket policy saying employees can't engage with the political system - that would be pretty bad as a policy. Instead they'll quote policies about 'bringing the company into disrepute' and similar.
The official registration and launch of the campaign was 2 months ago, but he started long before that. If you read his timeline he didn't just wake up one day and decide to run for Congress 2 months ago.
Does that matter? If people vote for him, he'll end up in Congress, regardless of "it matching" or not. The current president is a TV celebrity who ran a bunch of failed businesses, some middle manager from Amazon could surely be in Congress then?
If you scroll through his timeline, he's been gaining publicity by releasing videos critical of Amazon, too. There's too much of a conflict of interest involved with letting someone like that remain in a high position within the company.
As far as I'm aware, there's a fine line between layoffs or reductions in force and firing for poor performance. Its legal to cut an entire division, or to cut some percentage of a division's head count and come up with some way of distributing it across the org. It is not legal to find your worst performers, fire them all at once, and call it a layoff.
Happy to be wrong here though, just trying to be clear with the line as I understand it. Someone coming by may know for sure.
Yeah, 0% accuracy is still "up to 99%"!
this is a HUGE red flag for this comment being written be AI. Before 2025, nobody talked like this.
I enjoy writing posts online and I've been doing it since the days of BBSs and 300 baud modems, transitioning to Usenet and nowadays mostly just here on HN. People seem to find my posts generally informative and sometimes even mention they're well written. In school I always got good marks on creative and essay writing and in the early days of my startups I wrote some of the user documentation and all the advertising copy (one of which won an advertising award). So, I think I'm at least a bit better than average at writing. And I've never used AI for writing anything.
But in the last few months I've had posts accused of being "AI writing" TWICE (once here on HN and the other was on a retro-computing forum). So I Googled through a random sampling of around 50-ish of my own posts going back a couple decades. Damn. 90s me was naive about a few things. And I found three examples which are kind of like that pattern you described. I guess I'm screwed because apparently that's just how I sometimes write and no one ever minded before. And I have proof I wrote that way long before AI did... oh.
It just occurred to me that maybe some of my Usenet posts could be a small part of why AI writes like that. But I was here first! I should have dibs on writing like me. Regardless, I definitely don't want anyone here to think my writing is AI output - using AI would be disrespectful to the community I enjoy participating in. Recently, I've noticed a few times where I start second guessing something I wrote before hitting "Reply" which makes writing not fun. Once, I just hit delete and logged off without posting. It wasn't that good of a post anyway.
Now it occurs to me I'm not really sure what my point is other than venting. So much for being a better-than-average writer. I guess I'd like people to at least be really careful about making accusations - unless you're very sure. I mean, I get it. I hate AI slop too. I enjoy reading good posts here even more than writing posts. Slop sucks. But errant accusations can have a chilling effect or they've had some effect on me.
Oh, wait was that last sentence too much like THE pattern? No... it's an either/or so I think it's probably okay.
And, to be clear, I promise I didn't plan that sentence as some kind of example. I wrote it and only then did I wonder if it might be too much like THE pattern. Maybe this is one of the ways AI destroys community. Simply by making us second guess each other - and then that gets some of us second-guessing ourselves. Shit, I just noticed I used a dash in the last sentence... but at least it's not an em dash, so I should be good. I just suck at semicolons and started using dashes as a lazy shortcut. My freshman comp teacher complained about it too. Wait, did I use dashes anywhere else? Checking... Shit. I did. Now anyone reading this will definitely think I planned that both times or that maybe I'm an LLM. Because no one writes like that. Fuck.
I'm convinced that one of the largest frictions to common use of LLMs is that it translates everyone's writing to the that same style. Having it punch-up or flesh-out your proposal or outline, or whatever, isn't really adding any new material, but it's translating it to a writing style that has historically been exclusive and difficult to learn, and that difference in style is what made the original text sub-par, from the perspective of academia and members the upper class.
Oh no, it's much worse. It's a global market working efficiently problem.
Bad news for jobs that can flow over the intertubes...
This is how layoffs have always worked. The pretext changes.
Marin County California, probably the area most heavily voting for the Democrat party, is clearly the most classically conservative part of the country, allowing almost no development and strongly objecting to even the slightest offenses in speech, whereas rural counties in the south want classically liberal safety nets and protections and heavily vote for the Republican party.
Weirdly impressive. This guy just invented galaxy-brained AI slop.
Idk how insightful that is. It’s not even entertaining anymore.
Basically, I wouldn't trust accounts of people who got cut from Amazon in terms of their work experience. Most employees at Amazon, engineering and others are salary seekers - their only goal is to get into higher brackets. None of what they do is as impactful at they make it sound, especially in management. And there is false sense of achievement created when people do annual reviews and most of the time, you are never going to try to fuck over your coworker so you embellish their accomplishments (again because you want them to do the same for your higher paid position).
The thing is, for software at least, most of Amazon software engineering follows a predefined template, and you don't need a lot of management to organize engineering. As for engineers themselves, there is quite a bit of friction for the vast majority of them to do anything impactful because of lack of experience, and LLMs haven't bridged that gap because they don't even know what questions to ask.
"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.
FWIW, 8,000 (nintendo) / 1,600,000 (Amazon) is 0.005, so 0.5%.
https://www.portal.e2r.jp/fixurl/nintendo_career_job/id/4/2?...
Amazon starts at 3x that and goes up
Game industry in general pays like shit - japanese software engineering pays even worse, so double negative modifiers on salaries in this comparison.
source: worked in games, worked at japanese tech company with us division.
I'd argue it's a better one.
I guess this is part of the problem. There is a term for this & it's called greed in such sense.
I will admit that I would love juicy returns on my investments as well but this doesn't make me not (admire?) the value set that Nintendo shareholders might have.
But I do feel like the fact that such options exist where pure capitalist greed can operate is the issue in the first place because if you have this option, then it becomes too lucrative for many to ignore not realizing the inner costs (like currently the AI bubble weights but also before that the moral and social implications of something like amazon let's say where workers had to pee in bottles and were so anti against Union that people were shocked when its videos were released in Youtube and effectively has really impacted all the local shops in your local communities impacting the income of members of your local community.
I guess some sort of regulatory action should be called out on but the govt. is lobbied by these mega-corps again as well so :/
Although that being said, Nintendo's really price jacking and becoming EA. and unironically EA is having a turnover and (actually listening to users?)
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.
I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs).
Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.
You really have to be in "the room where it happens" to know the motivations behind any one layoff.
Now, this is extremely short-sighted and frankly it makes me question the intelligence of these BigCos' executives, because unless they're utterly incompetent at this whole "business" and "living on the planet earth" thing they should have realized that the economy fluctuates and this infinite free money wouldn't last.
Now that AI is around, these companies finally have a way to do these layoffs while not looking quite as idiotic.
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.
Good point, i had not thought of that!
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.
I think you misunderstand the point of the system.
It would surprise you to know that Booz Allen laid off 3k people last month then, huh?
Or Boeing laid off 3200 people in September 2025.
You should look these things up before you pop off like that. Three minutes of research is all it takes.
You missed the point entirely, and if you were to take a few minutes to look this up you’d know that
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
They already do.
They ain't doing squat.
The Trump admin is encouraging technology transfer to India as part of Pax Silica [0] and GOP politicans in Ag heavy Purple States like Iowa [1] and Montana [2] are trying to mollify India after China pivoted from American to Brazilian soybeans [3] and India began tariffing pulses/lentils [4].
Additonally, Indian ONG majors like Reliance are negotiating with the Trump admin to purchase Venezuelan oil now that Maduro is in custody [5] and India SOEs have starting creating partnerships with ExxonMobil [6], Chevron [7], and Phillips66 [7] to "drill baby drill".
As such, what are you going to do lol - Agriculture and Ag adjacent industries employs 22 million Americans [8] and the Energy sector employs 7 million Americans [9] mostly in Red and Purple states. Software only employs around 2 million Americans [10] in either Blue states or Blue pockets of Red States.
[0] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815
[1] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno...
[2] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-s...
[4] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-dai...
[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-reliance-talk...
[6] - https://www.livemint.com/companies/ongc-exxonmobil-collabora...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chevron-phillips-66-...
[8] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d...
[9] - https://usafacts.org/articles/renewable-energy-jobs-grew-in-...
[10] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
The issue is fractured fundraising basically undermines the local organization by funding challenger candidates, which alienates local Dems and depresses turnout (TDP is notorious for this).
Iowa is going to be a competitive race hence why Joni Ernst decided to not run for reelection.
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).
Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this. If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally while down in the US?
>You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.
What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly not replacing workers as of now.
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.
H1B supposedly is designed to address "shortages", but there are no actual shortages.
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.
There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.
There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.
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.
Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.
Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.
1. Or a laid-off American tech worker
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?
the same person, a short while later
“Why doesn’t anyone love me!?”
The other 3, sure. Bartenders need to be good at talking to people to succeed, and artists need to be more eccentric (in a different way from nerds) for their own success.
Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.
The answer is woman value status.
Getting murdered is a hollywood / news fear that rarely happens. People should be worried about deadly things that happen often like cancer or heart attacks. Those are rarely the leading story on the nightly news.
Programmers are around programmers but the rate they marry another programmer is much less. Even with a gender imbalance women programmers are not seeking male programmers like women doctors.
They aren't known for making a lot of money, but I guess "I'm saving the world" is an attractive quality in a mate.
Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)
We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.
Maybe the kids are alright after all?
No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to not work with the most evil ones.
You can do many things to sabotage that are nonviolent and also highly effective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance
I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.
Well yes. That was partially my point. Tech is no different; there's a lot of companies capitulating but I see a huge surge of people speaking out against this. Even people you largely think of as non-partisan previously. I don't think it's fair to pit me into some fascist state because of a company I no longer work for nor perhaps never worked for.
But tech lacks the unions that other industries have and by its nature is a lot more scattered out. I can't do much more than the ones criticizing the companies with regards to providing a "Dutch resistance"; I don't work for them (heck, I don't even have a full time job as of now) and I've done a lot of culling of what I use over the decade. Probably more than what many have done, but still seemingly insignificant in terms of their bottom line.
I'm all for collective action, but I'm still looking for that collection. It seems like things need to get as bad as Minneapolis before that collection emerges.
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.
We had to let people go who had been great contributors. Some of them were actually CHEAPER than the Indians who replaced them. I tried very hard to keep one of these people and after much politics up and down the management chain ultimately got "yes, he's a proven coder who does great work and costs less than all our recent Indian hires, but you have to let him go anyway because he's not based in India". I've never encountered something like that and it tells me that money wasn't the primary driving factor at all.
It's really gross but I'd never been in the position to be told explicitly to find a $whatever. That's illegal in the US but appears to be unenforced.
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.
Well… you may be answering your own question if you think about it really, really hard.
I can't speak to all of those, but Doordash has extensively outsourced its software teams to India. I also know that lots of hospital software companies also outsource to India. Your FSA provider probably had someone in a call center transcribe an email incorrectly and we all know most call centers aren't in the US either...
> There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
You'd need to prove this statement. F500 companies have more money than most companies and pretty much exclusively hire through recruiters. If you were top talent and wanted to work for a top overseas company, it seems like working with a recruitment agency would be a no-brainer.
In any case, I had zero say in who to use. I was handed some contacts and told to make it work.
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.
The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.
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.
2026: 16,000
2025: 14,000
2024: 500
2023: 18,000
2022: 10,000
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?
if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will not have a big corporate presence in that country.
Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me, certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove myself.
Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to go do all this work to refute my claims. Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or not, because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.
Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.
And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
They made a general claim that a big retailer in a country will have a big corporate presence in that country. I don't know if that's true or not - hence my response.
They didn't claim that a big retailer in India will have a big corporate presence, nor did claim that a retailer approaching 35% of e-commerce must have a large corporate presence in the country. It was an ambiguous claim, which is why I asked a few follow up questions.
> You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.
I didn't make this claim so there's nothing for me to provide.
because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
But sure, if you insist, Temu is a large online retailer that operates in the United States without a large corporate presence here. QED.
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.
The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.
It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any meaningful way.
Disrespectfully, get fucked.
I enjoy both fucking and getting fucked, I shall take you up on that.
Have a nice day!
This is sophistry. Ultimately the tax is paid by the person that brings their money to the table.
It's not a dichotomy of maintaining the status quo or getting rid of H1b completely. At least in big tech companies, they do follow labor market tests and prevailing wage tests and so on that are designed to vet that there is an unmet need and that visa holders aren't underpaid. I won't deny there are visa mills and consultancies that game the system and pretty much explicitly just hire cheap foreign labor, but this is a thread about H1B in the context of Amazon layoffs, not InfoSys layoffs.
Given that the company sponsors them and come from lower incomes countries, they are ready to accept lower wages. If they do it I don't see why everyone wouldn't be doing the same.
It's of course hard to prove formally as those companies will comply with regs to make it look like they aren't discriminating (fake job ads, etc...). By the way in the US Indian consultancies got busted for this.
You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a small percentage of individuals.
This is a nonsense comparison unless you include the proportion of income that said taxpayers earn.
The government would not be able to fund every social program or services if it weren't for these receipts, which, most people cannot afford to pay. Even 100% of the majority of salaries can't cover this amount.
Pretty cut and dry.
It matters because we don't know if these people are being taxed more proportionately or less. Like, Elon Musk pays more tax than you or I, but he probably pays at a much lower rate.
What you don't want (from an equity and fairness perspective) is for people with more money to pay a lower rate of tax. That will cause problems.
From a total population perspective, given some amount of money S it doesn't really matter who pays it (except for downstream impacts around fairness and elections).
However, your original point was:
> The vast majority of adults and their children will never pay their tax burden proportionately.
I would argue that this is incorrect, everyone pays some proportion of their income in income/sales/property/estate taxes. And really, your point about who pays the majority of US federal taxes doesn't actually support your point.
Finally, I would note that I mostly replied because I really hate those top x% comparisons as they're deceptive without looking at the proportion of income earned.
Government could not afford to provide the services they provide if these taxes weren't paid, full stop.
Progressive taxation or 'fairness' doesn't change this reality.
Of course they could. Taxation is not necessary in the short term for a government to provide services (especially if we're talking about the US which both issues its own currency and benefits from massive foreign demand for its debt).
Over the long term, taxation needs to at least pay back the debt but that long-term appears to be much longer than I would have expected (when was the last time the US government ran a surplus?).
If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.
Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened.
Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia.
Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this.
Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea.
We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here.
De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance.
All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects.
America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building.
I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital.
That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America.
Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.
Very smart & pragmatic.
however political sentiment is going the other way - which is an own goal
They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.
The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones. There are some smart and sharp kids everywhere in even the lowest ranked schools. But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.
Like any other country, yes.
>But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.
Compared to India? Or is it fine to lower standards of quality when you are paying an 8th of the cost and it turns out most people don't need to be from MIT to contribute?
That's perfectly fine and dandy. But that's not what H1Bs are for.
And no, the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well. We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.
Go to any FAANG in the US and you will see people on H1B from all over Europe, Africa, South America, etc. but Indians and Chinese are the largest group because they are the largest population countries with established pipelines from schools there to schools here to jobs here.
So we are talking H1Bs. Does that mean this small pool of "best foreign talent" also all happen to speak English and are able to communicate their ideas on a team?
>the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well.
Well you're already shifting your point:
> But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low.
You're criticizing America as an excuse to find people overseas and bring them in. Thanks for proving the fact that H1B is being abused. So you're telling me your fine taking the time to find the finest H1B workers but not Americans?
If we have say 1M job openings in a field, and only 250k American citizens can pass a screen for that job, then we need to find other people for it, no? Those people will be likely to most common from the most populous countries in the world...
I'm convinced that the code screen functions as a somewhat arbitrary filter/badge of honor.
FAANG and equivalents get tens of thousands of applicants and they cannot hire them all
If too many pass the code screen, they will just make it harder, even though the job hasn't gotten any more difficult.
Or they get failed at system design. Which is BS in many cases.
By design of FAANG, yes. They put down any attempts to certify SWEs
Offshoring is not always a substitute for an employee chained to the job by a visa. I'm sure you can get a million and one anecdotes here on HN about the perils of working across timezones, cultures, and legal systems.
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.
Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers.
Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation.
If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive.
So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future.
I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.
Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems. Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency because there is far too much information that doesn't make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the decisions down to where the information is, allowing for excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic problems.
So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual arguments over where lines should be drawn.
Immigration isn't "shipping the job to India". It's bringing the labor here and contributing to our economy. This might have a suppressive force on wages, but it lifts the overall economy and creates more opportunity and demand.
Offshoring is permanent loss. It causes whatever jobs and industry are still here to atrophy and die. The overall economy weakens. Your outlook in retirement will be bleaker.
If you have to pick between the two, it's obvious which one to pick.
And that's the general problem. People don't care about the overall economy when wages are going down and cost of living is going up. Even myself, I couldn't care less about the overall health of the economy. I care about being able to subsist mine and my family's life style, put food on the table, someday own a home, not live paycheck to paycheck because all the jobs are paying below a living wage, etc.
I'm extremely fortunate to make the salary that I do, but I know plenty of others not so fortunate, in other fields that don't pay nearly as well as tech does, and probably never will. The answer can't be "go into tech" nor should it be "let's suppress wages so labor isn't so expensive for our domestic companies." And obviously offshoring isn't great either.
We can still import talent without suppressing wages, by not abusing the program and actually only importing for roles that truly, beyond all reasonable doubt, could not be filled by a domestic worker.
In France, being a cook used to pay very well, now that most cooks in Paris are from India or Sri Lanka, often without a proper visa or at the minimum wage, no local wants to do this anymore (working conditions are awful).
The industry then whines loudly about "the lack of qualified (cheap) workers"
If that becomes so much of a commodity that some other countries can do it for pennies on the dime, then yes. Salaries will deflate. But we sure aren't offshoring (nor using most H1bs) to see more innovation. Quite the opposite.
Tech isn't manufacturing where the biggest supply line wins by default. That's why I'm not holding my breath that the US isn't going to be outcompeted on talent anytime soon. Of anything, its own greed will consume it.
The lowest allowed limit for such a job is around $140k in areas like Seattle.
For this kind of experience, you'd be looking for level 2 _minimum_ and likely level 3. For King County in WA it's right now $149240 and $180710 respectively. Level 4 wage is $212202, btw.
Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.
That's my opinion.
However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.
And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 (Top 40 H-1B employers)
Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)
Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)
Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)
How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)
I agree abusers (employers) should be put on he H1B visa blacklist which already exists.
H1B already mandates that employees be paid within the wage window of their peers. And anecdotally I know several who make more than their citizen peers in the same company same level
There are no loopholes on H1B, it's working exactly as it was intended - replace, not just supplement - American workers with cheaper, more obedient tech slave workers dependent of their master-employer for their survival.
The talent visa is called O-1 not H1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=envbbUc4LhU
At least in the latter scenario the job is still here for you to get back one day
If we were a growing manufacturing-based economy that wouldn't be the case as much.
I'd also recommend you read this. Many government reports since Trump took over and fired long standing professionals and hired loons are suspect: https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_1...
Hell no, Amazon has been a top 10 filer of H1-B LCAs for decades. The only H1-Bs being laid off, if any, are the older ones (over 39) to be replaced with cheaper models https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q
Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/
Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme...
Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai
It's not equivalent in the least. They aren't expanding headcount by 20K, they're building more expensive AI tailored servers
Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new money is.
To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets. If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.
If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.
I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.
Case in point - US actively forced TSMC and Samsung to build $65B+ of factories in Arizona and Texas to secure domestic interests.
Meta try very very hard to avoid having any data within Indian borders, because of their privacy laws.
This necessitates not hiring product or data people there.
Source: worked there for five years many moons ago.
The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.
That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.
Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!
I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.
If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.
>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.
Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.
Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.
>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.
Companies hiring more in cheap labor countries is quite obvious for long time. In case of Amazon I feel most of the stuff that was cutting edge 2 decades back is now low value work where cost is the only edge.
It’s not a pattern it’s a plan.
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.
It’s only really needed on true blue ocean innovation and where the company has to find the skills where they exist. If that’s the US, then sure they’ll continue some small slice of employment here for those projects. But as you said, a majority of software is a commodity now (has been for a long time, really). I don't feel like many companies are doing much innovative anymore and I feel people severely underestimate the talent present in other countries. So, even if you pointed to 10 innovation projects at Amazon then I could counter by saying even 85% of those teams could be in India.
It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of time for them to own more R&D.
Class war will never work in America because we're too stupid.
0: https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-amaz...
- 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.
Higher cost h1b employees incentives offshoring where average employee cost is reduced.
Less h1b employees incentives offshoring.
Offshoring.
1. Ramp up offshore hiring and relocate jobs in low-cost-of-living (LCOL) countries (India) to avoid paying the 100K H1-B visa charge.
2. Train their AI and robotics by researchers in LCOL countries (to eventually replace the high-cost-of-living (HCOL) warehouse labor workforce)
3. Deploy robots and AI agents to then layoff more people in HCOL environments and repeat (1) until their margins improve and they achieve AGI.
Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.
Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix.
I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).
First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology that purports to be the next big revolution in computing to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the expansive use of desktop computing and productivity increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following
>Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3]
Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with around 2-2.5% annual gain.
Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in productivity they are having is not driving overall costs down relative to the gains, in large part because you aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of productivity.
[0]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-...
[1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to show up, particularly in the software field (in fact, GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance)
[2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew up the awareness of LLMs
[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-g...
I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
I feel the same. They're better at some things yes, but also worse at other things. And for me, they're worse at my really important use cases. I could spend a month typing prompts into Codex or AntiGravity and still be left holding the bag. Just yesterday I had a fresh prompt and Geminin bombed super hard on some basic work. Insisting the problem was X when it wasn't. I don't know. I was super bullish but now I'm feeling far from sold on it.
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.
I don't have the full context of what the thinking was back then since I was in highschool.
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.
The market is mature now, and most sectors of the economy are getting hammered at the same time: tariffs have most industries cautious about new commitments if they aren’t already cutting, academia is reeling from grants being rescinded, large chunks of federal spending are gone or frozen, and state/local governments are getting less federal funding at the same time everything else is affecting tax revenue and increasing demand for social services. With so much uncertainty affecting the entire economy, you hear from people who have hundreds of interviews because even established companies in stable industries are unsure what tomorrow will look like after the next whim of an unstable octogenarian.
We're still on our way to hit the bottom for this round, and by all accounts it's likely to be much bigger when we finally do.
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.
- Long-Term unemployment has increased.
- Number of gig workers is at an all time high.
- Layoffs have continued.
- Personal household dept is at an all time high.
- 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...
I just don't understand where the squeeze is coming from. Either companies figured out how to do more with less people, or they started the cycle with too many people, or they don't know what they are doing. Undoubtedly they are laying people off, especially in tech. But I he symptoms you list don't explain it to me.
> Even unemployment, which is your top line, seems... fine
My lines were in no particular order. The issue with unemployment data is it counts gig workers as "employed." What doesn't add up is that there are fewer job openings, mass layoffs, and rising long-term unemployment (people who can't find work past 6 months).
> I just don't understand where the squeeze is coming from.
Nobody really knows. It's hard to model the economy and identify cause and effect. But likely candidates are low competition, businesses with coercive leverage on pricing/pay since buyers and workers have no alternatives. Essentials like housing, health, and food have skyrocketed, and we haven't scaled them as demand grew. Companies have abandoned stakeholders, they only care about shareholders. They're squeezing record profits, sustained because buyers are supplementing with gig work, have all adults working, are taking on more debt (and there are more ways to get credit than before), or are abandoning their savings (YOLO).
> Undoubtedly they are laying people off, especially in tech. But the symptoms you list don't explain it to me.
My list wasn't about layoffs, just signals the economy may be doing poorly. One reason for layoffs is companies believe the economy is at risk. They're avoiding hyper-growth and cutting fat. In tech specifically, I think a lot of it is undoing the mess of Covid, such as ventures that didn't profit, hiring before knowing what to use people for, workers distributed across too many places. Even if one part is growing, redistributing is hard. Easier to lay off and rehire where needed. There's probably some offshoring too. But in general, cost-cutting happens when companies feel they need to be conservative.
The unemployment one is interesting because if you look at that graph, the universal pre-2022 pattern is basically a spike of unemployment during recessions followed by a gradual drop.
The recent pattern is a gradual increase.
I'm not a big fan of "numerical only / shape of graphs" analyses, but this does seem strange. Of course, the 2020 Covid spike is also unusual, so...
(Well, at least the GPs 1st number. The 2nd ends in 2024, and the 3rd has questionable precision after September.)
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.
I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products!
It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.
The same way they hire so many people for so much money to work on AI projects and build datacenter which haven't produced actual revenue for any customers (corporate or otherwise). I'd rather light money on fire to employ people tbh.
I say this as someone who has the 200 dollar Claude sub.
Salaries did not double in that same time.
That's why they're doing this. They can. Laissez-faire is the current regime of capitalism we live in.
This specific company is now the 5th most profitable company on the planet and its FOSS projects are pitiful and 99% fully self serving.
This causes companies to constantly review costs and look for ways to trim, which they're doing.
They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
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'm not going to say i told you so, but you should utilize these tools more before you start arguing, especially when it's so goddamn obvious
I don’t think your point is as strong as you believe it is.
Lastly, I work directly with AI models and utilize all popular generators every single day, so I don’t know why you think you’re the expert here.
You don't have to take the time to explain your reasoning if you don't want to, but "obnoxious know it all" is not a stone you should throw while at the same time refusing to explain yourself and saying anyone who can't see what you see is necessarily missing the obvious.
"When replacement is cheaper than retention, the decision gets framed as strategy instead of consequence."
This sentence is tight and on paper reads well, but it's robotic. It's kind of like taking a dead simple if/else statement that's pleasurable to read into a one line ternary statement. Technically a one line sentence, but now I have to re-read it like 5 times to understand it. The flow is dead.
Another example:
'AI becomes the excuse, not the cause. It’s the clean narrative that hides what’s actually happening: experienced workers being swapped out through global labor substitution while leadership talks about “efficiency” and “the future of work.”'
Starts off with a short & trite sentence (LLMs loves this if you don't steer it away). The other thing LLMs _love_ to do unprompted is: "It's the X: _insert_next_loaded_statement_here"
It's hard to get my point across, and I hope you kinda see it? I'm not a linguist, but these patterns are literally in every piece of LLM writing I've ever seen.
Saying nothing is an option. Other people who agree with you will be happy to explain their reasoning. Or maybe they won't and the conversation quietly fades away. Both are preferable.
That's just my two cents, ultimately it's your business.
And his original draft is conspicuously missing the telltale "it's not X -- it's Y" and overall breathless dramatic flair that people like the poster you're replying to (correctly) picked up on.
... 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.
hopefully that's enough of a good start and a good end for this conversation
No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting it wrong.
But I find your comment funny because it ironically has the same “not that, this” pattern in a more verbose and less polished & less formulaic pattern.
Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
"wasn't just a job; it was a profound responsibility"
"This isn't just a statistic; it's a sign that we need to re-evaluate how we support those who serve"
"My experience isn't just about past success; it's about understanding the logistics, technology, and economic realities that shape the job market now and how we can create future opportunities right here."
"This experience didn't just teach me about law and order; it taught me about managing complex operations under pressure, the critical need for clear strategy, and the importance of unwavering integrity when the stakes are high – lessons desperately needed in Congress today."
"This campaign isn't just about me; it's about us."
All from the same page. Pretty nauseating.
Perhaps more importantly here, when it comes to writing, "AI slop" is basically management speak - it's all about waxing poetically about simple things in ways that make you sound complicated (and useful!). And this guy is a career manager. So I bet this is actually human slop, the kind from which ChatGPT et al learned to speak the way they do.
Having worked in a bigcorp, I've read my fair share of management-speak, and none of it sounds quite as empty as the allegedly AI text.
The AI sounds like someone conjuring a parody emulation of management speak instead of actual management speak.
More broadly — and I feel this way about AI code at well as AI prose — I find that part of my brain is always trying to reverse engineer what kind of person wrote this, what was their mental state when writing it?
And when reading AI code or AI prose, this part of my brain short circuits a little. Because there is no cohesive human mind behind the text.
It's kind of like how you subconsciously learn to detect emotion in tiny facial movements, you also subconsciously learn to reverse engineer someone's mind state from their writing.
Reading AI writing feels like watching an alien in skinsuit try to emulate human face emotional cues — it's just not quite right in a hard-to-describe-but-easy-to-detect way.
This is most succinct description of my brain's slop detection algorithm.
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".
1. Strong data governance 2. Tax implications for layoffs (offshoring?)
You can either open borders to both people and goods, or you can have restrictions on both that go hand in hand. But one without the other is a massive gift to corporations who can and do cash in on that disparity.
Besides entire teams or business units, the targets were people who did not comply to RTO or were not sitting with their teams.
On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor market with almost no guardrails."
So which is it: did he really work on problems no one else could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor?
Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is one of two things:
a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone truly valuable.
b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon).
What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap, foreign, plug-and-play replacement.
It all makes sense when you realize the point of his tweet is that he's plugging his run for congress: so yeah, of course he's tapping in to the absolute worst nationalistic sentiment. Shame on him.
But that framing is incomplete. Amazon isn't just retail - AWS, logistics tech, and AI enablement are craft-heavy. Cutting experienced people in those areas might be short-term thinking dressed up as strategy, not actual optimization. The policy question is where I get stuck. Regulate this, and US companies risk losing ground to foreign competitors who don't follow those rules. Do we want Alibaba as the default American retailer? But do nothing, and experienced workers keep getting squeezed while "efficiency" narratives provide cover.
What's the intervention that doesn't just shift the problem somewhere else?
> In November 2017, Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 characters. In 2023, Twitter boosted the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, it was increased to 4000. In April, it was again increased to 10,000, and in June, to 25,000.
Its interesting, in a morbid humor kind of way, to see people realize that these costs always come due.
Globalization allows a huge amount of growth and many benefits you simply can't get with smaller or stronger borders. It also comes with risks, chief among them the risk that any one country loses self sufficiency and competitive advantage.
I do hope that the heaviest cost we (in the US) pay anytime soon is the cost of outsourcing jobs. We don't know how to manufacture anymore, our populace is extremely unhealthy in historical standards, and both political parties are toying with different forms of socialism. There are a lot of bad outcomes that can come where we're heading, we'd get off easy if it stops at outsourcing some of our high paid jobs to cheaper foreign labor.
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)
Can you share a source for this claim? Graviton is a CPU, it would be strange to train LLM (I assume you meant LLMs) on a CPU.
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.
It’s getting real close to “we’re customer obsessed, and our shareholders are our real customers”
Amazon spent a lot of time and money and built a top-tier workforce. But now they are out of ideas for what these people can do? They don't have any untapped opportunities left? No projects that never quite made it to the top of the stack? No deferred maintenance that could be taken care of now?
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.
You can also check the WARN notice in WA.
[0]: https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe...
> RTO to Seattle / Bay Area to a dingy condo , with diligence , at enormous personal expense
> Laid off a 18 mo later. CEO says "i'm taking responsibility" , no responsibility taken.
When you factor in low performers and how most people here would view middle management in any other topic thread, it's not that insane. If in a pool of 20 workers around you, you can't find 1 worker you don't think is a step below the others, your hiring pipeline is better than most.
Pretty big difference between corporate Amazon and retail business Amazon division wise I think
I am not sure it applies to Amazon though. Amazon in the first year pays bonus in cash to compensate for 5% of the RSUs vesting. So, they actually loosing cash if people are let go after a year.
They also hire to fire to meet pip quotas.
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.
Was it the laws I passed to make them more profitable? Did I just start burning down the neighboring bookstores?
Absolutely not. In fact, if I were never even born, Amazon would be just as big and powerful today.
Wait, maybe it was all the time they bought out a small company and I told them they could!
I do try to buy stuff directly but so many times I order it and then it comes 10+ days later and often very little info upfront or during about when I will receive the order. I ordered from a website the other day where it said Dec 22nd delivery, it came mid-January and support was unhelpful (parroting the FAQ, might have been a LLM).
Now, I've head great experiences purchasing directly as well. The Smartest House [0] is where I buy everything I can smart-home-related. Their pricing is excellent, their shipping is fast, and their support is top-notch. I had a problem with 1 device, they got on a call and tried to fix it, then when that didn't work, they shipped me a replacement.
So I agree, there are great alternative out there and I also like B&H. I just wish it was easier to be (more) sure about how quick something will ship or how easy returns will actually be. Finding consistently good merchants online sometimes feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
But 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 do small amounts of both.
Many historians of many generations contend that debased currencies fail first slowly, then fast.
Watching gold has been eye-opening to all living generations. Just a few months ago my lawyer didn't believe me when I told him "gold just broke four thousand dollars!" [day of this post gold hit ATH of $5400]
Until the business gets affected
- Google: +70%
- Nvidia: +49% - Apple: +7%
- Meta: Flat
- SHOP (closest comp): +19.41%
- Mercado Libre (international comp): +20.73%
So basically, the "tech world" is dividing itself, in the eyes of investors, into two camps: companies that will benefit from AI tailwinds and companies that will not. And all the money is going to the companies that will.
Amazon is more and more considered to be part of the latter group.
This is especially concerning of Amazon because it seems like AWS--the cash cow--has somehow missed becoming the cloud provider for AI compute needs.
As such, Amazon needs to give investors some reason to hold amazon stock. If you're not part of a rising tide, the only reason left is "we are very profitable."
So yeah, Amazon will have to cut costs to show more profitability and become further investable.
So yes, the layoffs have to do with AI...but not the way they are spinning it.
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.
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.
Several options, pretty much all of them involve being actually cooperative rather then intentionally unhelpful. If Bill was part of some other team, point to that team or its leader.
If he was in your team, you or leader can ask about what the person wants and move from there. Maybe you can actually answer the question. Maybe the proper reaction involves raising jira ticket. Maybe the answer is "we are probably not going to do that anymore". It all depends on what the person who came with the question wants.
> But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was responsible, and now is gone.
The other people are still there. And the team IS responsible for X. And without doubt, they are fully responsible for helping figure out who should be contacted now and what should be done.
That is normal part of work after any reorganization.
I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by anyone.
It doesn't necessarily even mean that the organization is "abnormal". Perhaps the reason Bill was let go was because X was not considered business-critical any more.
I LITERALLY offered the "we are probably not going to do that anymore" option. In your situation, you can scratch the probably away. That answer is still actually helpful unlike the original answer.
https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/amazon-dot-com-services-l...
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.
Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.
> 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?
The job market is toast, so people take whatever they can.
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.
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.
Except that’s been Jassy’s number one tool to try and get the stock price moving.
I think and I know HN commentators are going to hate this, but Thiel was right when he wrote that the current system only works with fast continuous growth. Ideally multiple growing sectors, contributing to the economy. Anything else, and everyone immediately starts fighting for scraps joining their tribal identity or whatnot. The only way out, would be more rapid growth in multiple sectors, not just AI, or a complete breakdown of the existing system which does not leave me hopeful for anything better. I in fact like the existing system quite a bit, but maybe that’s just me.
They’d scale to zero if they could!
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.
Every single individual on Earth does not like spending more money than they have to. Just because I hire a crew of landscapers for my house doesn’t mean I will retain them if I think a better offer comes around and can do the same job for half the price.
> I don’t think it’s a controversial idea to impose broad and lenient regulations on companies to prevent this sort of activity.
This is extremely inefficient and opens avenues for corruption, as well as increases costs for policing the corruption.
The far better solution is governments collecting the appropriate taxes and providing the appropriate benefits it deems are necessary for a minimum quality of life. Let businesses do business however they want, let governments provide the public services.
In fact, the US does have that in some form via unemployment insurance payroll taxes and unemployment benefits, but obviously they need to be better and consistent.
And by love, I mean “am sick and tired of the same old CorpoSlop Bootlicking”.
Let me show you what I mean. You proudly kneel down and lick the boots of Capital by saying:
> Just because I hire a crew of landscapers for my house doesn’t mean I will retain them if I think a better offer comes around and can do the same job for half the price.
You are deliberately conflating business operations with consumer transactions. I see this happen in exactly two different arguments: someone deliberately trying to mislead the reader into conflating the two in an effort to confuse them into supporting Capital (because the two are not the same thing, and the speaker knows it), or by someone who doesn’t understand market transactions are fundamentally different from business operations. I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ve not done your reading and therefore are just making a misinformed argument until your very next line:
> This is extremely inefficient and opens avenues for corruption, as well as increases costs for policing the corruption.
Ahh, the old “inefficiency” chestnut, as if the sole goal in life for any organism should be optimal efficiency of capital distribution and business operations as opposed to, I dunno, a higher quality of life for the organism? Then you throw on scare tactics like “corruption” and “policing”, and I can see you’ve already started digesting the first bites of those thick laissez-faire Capitalist wellies with a bit of Randian dressing:
Proving you’re not an idiot, but just a manipulative shyster, is the next paragraph:
> The far better solution is governments collecting the appropriate taxes and providing the appropriate benefits it deems are necessary for a minimum quality of life.
Gee whiz, now where have I heard that before? Oh, right, I literally just wrote it:
> …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.
This is what really grinds my gears about you lot: you storm into the comments, insult others with flowery Randian arguments about the infallibility of business and Capital as if they’re gods, and then parrot back watered-down forms of the arguments of your opponents in an effort to seem smart and/or reasonable. Forgive me if I do not tolerate your naked bullshit in the current era anymore.
> Let businesses do business however they want, let governments provide the public services.
For what it’s worth, this is where you ultimately footgunned your entire argument. You cannot simultaneously “let businesses do business however they want” while also trusting governments to provide public services, and you have centuries of evidence proving this. Letting business operate freely means they will destroy government, while handing total power to governments will destroy business. It has always been a delicate balancing act, and the modest proposals of people like myself is that, y’know, the scale seems so heavily weighted towards business right now that it risks toppling the government. Your entire counter-argument is some form of “this is fine, actually”, which it might be for you at the moment but won’t be forever, and certainly isn’t fine for the majority of your countrymen or working classes.
I am sick and tired of allowing misguided or actively manipulative chuds shout over calls for reasonableness and decency in life and defend themselves with this naive fantasy that if we just let people do what they want, everything will be sunshine and roses.
If you’re that naive, grow up and join reality. If instead you’re that manipulative, fuck off into the sea.
I refuse to entertain otherwise anymore, because the evidence is insurmountably opposed to such a perspective.
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.
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
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