I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too.
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.
Amazon also employs 1.5 million people globally, 350k of which are in corporate. These 16k were corporate. Still sucks for everyone involved, I know a corporate sales guy who got laid off Microsoft and it disrupted his life pretty seriously. As Stalin says one's a tragedy, a millions a statistic.
Since the HN to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses:
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.
Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).
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.
I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there.
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.
We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.
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.
> 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.
Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
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?
Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too.
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.
I guess we just need the other shoe to drop: punish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues
Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax.
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 would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged college education and is a symptom of a larger problem: As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training programs, continual education, robust workforce displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We lack all of this (and more).
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.
Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of the business will be a subsidiary.
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.
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)
The whole point of it seems to be to dismiss the entire economic system in favor of something that almost nobody has bought in to like bullion or cryptocurrency or somesuch for the benefit of the speaker. Currency, even paper currency, is one of the most pervasive societal "grand illusions" that we share. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing as it greases the entire system of exchange for literally everyone everywhere.
Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.
This is reductive and wrong. The billionares make money hand over fist either way. They own the companies. They don't care if the new campus or factory is in China or India. They skim their cut off it's productivity either way.
It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.
If you want American companies to not outsource any jobs AND have full foreign market access, get ready to get market access revoked from places like India. They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete, and Amazon has plenty of local competition there already.
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.
I didn't realize the US Military mission statement included 'Forcing foreign regulators to approve AWS licenses.'
In a world with China and Europe, using the military to bully allies is the fastest way to lose those allies. If the US plays that card, nations will just accelerate their move to domestic or non-US stacks. It's a self-defeating strategy.
Amazon has contributed enough to the current administration that I doubt they will face any consequences. Maybe another round of shakedowns and more financial contributions, but they have figured out pretty quickly how to play the game and end up on the good side of the current administration.
Amazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is looking like its going to be a box office bomb. Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to Melania[0]
I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
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.
> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
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.
Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.
>native Americans
I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff?
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?
you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.
I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.
You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.
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%.
Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.
Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.
> 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.
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?
Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.
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.
FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.
You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.
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).
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
H1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies.
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.
> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
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.
Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.
All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.
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.
> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
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.
It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.
The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.
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.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
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.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
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.
The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.
There haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American people.
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.
Maybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?
This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?
I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.
If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the basis of cost differential, that’s a sure sign the company believes the function has been commoditized and is immune from competitive selection.
That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
As is the case with many mass layoffs. AI just makes a good reason to claim. It makes you look progressive to investors and it doesn't make you look bad to the public. If AI didn't exist it would be some other excuse to spin this as a positive for the company and not bad for the affected workers.
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.
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.
Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.
I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
This summer I went camping and at the campground next to me was a middle manager at Amazon. I’ve been out of the workforce for about a year, so I asked him how much of an impact AI was having in his role.
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
Undoubtedly his tool turned out to suck, and his managers realized that it made him faster but didn't eliminate the need for his role. "Every other manager" is a pipe dream and if it's true it means that group is pathetically inefficient and underutilizing the talents of even an average manager.
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.
If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the fact that we all have to earn a living, why would anyone want a job where you distill a bunch of input from those "below you" and relay it to those "above you"? That sounds like a job I would never want to get out of bed to do. If I were one of the people fired, I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
Excuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.
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.
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.
The economy is currently great if your income is from your investments rather than from your labor. The relative comfort and power of the capital class vs. labor class has never been farther apart in my lifetime.
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.
I'm going to set aside GDP for a moment, which is hardly the full story but instead I want to zoom in on inflation.
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.
> So if you'd claim it's terrible, there's some explaining to do
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...
We're all talking predictions, I don't think either of us should pretend to know the future, but there are counterpoints and so the data does not all look rosy.
It always takes 6 to 12 months for the graphs to match the reality on the ground. Because that's how long it takes most people to run out of money and credit.
Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the farce and everything collapsed.
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.
2008 didn't really impact tech sector much though. Companies continued to hire through it, and in fact those that didn't often had a headcount deficit afterwards.
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.
> 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-cannes open source projects.
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.
More and more I think companies do whatever creates news hype to attract cheap investment capital and pump the stock price. Whether any of that translates into actually making money is not even considered. You can have your accounting department make that aspect of it look like whatever you want.
> Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.
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
The reason is the same as always - they want to cut costs and increase profits. And there are no laws in America that prevent them from indiscriminate firing.
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.
Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?
If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit.
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.
What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?
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)
Well you would think if there is increased productivity there would be at least a couple studies, some clear artifacts, or increased quality of software being shipped.
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.
...or 2 years ago they agreed that employees should return to the office for at least 3 days per week, of course only as a temporary measure before full RTO?
You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune 500s and not be fired for over a year.
There are people at my office who haven't really done anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They probably weren't doing anything before then either, but at least they were there eight hours a day.
I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How would they stay employed if their performance review showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies that have people just sitting there picking their nose watching YouTube? I've never really seen this either in BigTech or MediumTech companies.
Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just things you don't see or appreciate?
To defend ICs against middle management a bit: a lot of IC work is dependent on decisions that need to be made by upper level managers. A 2 week contiguous workstream can take 2+ years easy once a few managers ask a few questions and need 10-20 meetings to get 5 bullet points clarified (so many projects can't even produce that). But if that person gets replaced their institutional knowledge and work readiness evaporates.
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..
If you're a contractor, it's often preferable to keep qualified people on staff even if they have nothing to do because it makes bidding for future contracts easier. You can say "I have X people qualified in Y ready to go" instead of "we'll have to hire X people to do Y".
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.
Headcount increase means growth which means stock go up which means short term profit at the expense of long term quality of product or service.
Soooo many people doing absolutely nothing and really no one cares.
It is beneficial to have someone doing nothing as oppose to someone pro active, because doing things breaks things.
Think about, companies optimize for inertia. Extraordinary levels of burocracy, governance, quality assurance...at some point it becomes impossible to move. Measures are in place not because they increase quality, but they reduce movement, and then this is perceived as safer. Think about it, less movement == safe.
People doing absolutely fucking nothing while virtue signaling is a perfect fit.
Of course it's biased. I'm just saying I find it quite believable that some program was funded 5 years ago under different financial conditions and has remained funded until now despite no longer being viable.
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.
To be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I have a bridge to sell you.
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.
Yeah, if that culture is actually widespread I imagine their deadweight is more the variety that's figured out how to game the system or has connections, rather than the "I'm going to do literally no work and watch youtube all day" varieties that I've witnessed.
Economic headwinds are rarely used. There is always something else they blame it on. It has been this way for the 30 years I've been old enough to pay attention - and those older than me report it has been even longer. There are downturns every few years, in turn meaning layoffs - and they always blame something other than the downturn.
They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
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.
I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.
And yet prices are marginally up while all the "economists" expected major inflation.
Dollar vs Euro is at same level now as it was in 2019 - there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong.
Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)
> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong
Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess.
No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) and employment figures.
> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average...
This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous.
Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).
For rate rises that are enacted to slow inflation (which slows stock market growth as you said) i think you have the cause and effect reversed.
The best way to see how inflation and stocks are linked is to look at economies where inflation is not intentionally slowed by rate rises. The stocks go up more or less with inflation (and some small % of gains they may have on top as you say). When you have rate rises that slow inflation you do indeed slow stock growth. But this is also inline with the link between inflation and stock price.
You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)
Just to add onto your point, bad employment numbers can actually be bullish for stocks due to a higher chance of Fed rate cuts. Obviously there is a threshold there because if too many people are unemployed then no one can buy stuff, but it just highlights how disconnected stocks are from the economy.
> No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing
On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking.
Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah.
That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications, etc.
The initial dip was bought up by retail investors then everyone realized TACO (Trump always chickens out) so the markets don't really care about tariff threats anymore.
What benefit have we gotten from the chaotic tariff policy? Any trade deals?
Oil prices have fallen. And likely will through the rest of the year. And the US conspicuously didn't apply tariffs on oil from Canada (while simultaneously saying "we don't need anything from Canada" and threatening our sovereignty and tariffing everything else) which is a huge amount of imports into the US.
Oil prices down isn't necessarily a good thing for an oil exporter like the US though. In aggregate.
If the US had actually applied tariffs on Canadian oil your gas pump prices would be up very significantly.
Since the administration have stopped releasing some data that usually is released, how fast would people be able to notice that the economy tanked, if it did?
Well technically, the economy has tanked (sort of), people say that the economy's doing great but the figures that we see in (q4?) are extrapolated from the previous quaters in which the only thing (from what people tell me) is keeping the "illusion" of economy doing good is the spending within AI datacenters. But a huge part of that is shrouded within mystery as well (Stargate project is really suspicious in my honest opinion though I can be wrong)
Also wasn't there some BLS figure which was pushed by the Administration to try to have good numbers or similar. I mean speaking from a different countries pov, Personally I wouldn't trust the numbers the current administration gives.
I don't know if this is the same belief that Americans within America also hold though.
You're accusing people of moving the goalposts on the tariff conversation, the goal posts were doing backflips and jazzercise from the day they were announced.
So yeah, the tariffs are still a net negative on the economy, but have been so erratically and poorly implemented that they're not nearly as bad as they could have been. It's like a plastered drunk guy swinging a knife at you. It's a lethal threat, but he's tripping over himself constantly and can barely stand so it's easy to dodge for now. Could be a more serious issue if he ever sobers up.
I agree they've been very erratic. What does that have to do with whether or not our economy tanked as a result? It didn't, the prophecies were FUD, everything he does is bad, blah blah.
Trump's a lethal threat that is too incompetent to be lethal? Okay. So quit with the FUD then.
So you'd turn your back on the knife wielding drunk guy and turn on Netflix because he hasn't managed to stab you yet?
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you didn't feel any of that in the previous year you haven't been paying attention or don't have any serious responsibilities.
Sure, when the arbitrary tarriff formula was announced for every nation, the stock markets were down thousands, and the bond market was fluctuating. Then you had the short term trade war with China were both countries set tarrifs so high no imports/exports between the two happened for a month, and there was a concern about empty shelves in major department stores.
But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also chickens out", so Wall Street learned he would backdown on any tariffs that had too much negative economic impact.
The impact to social bonds between the US and other Western nations has been thrown completely off track, and now they are looking for exits from anything US related.
These tarrifs were the absolutely dumbest thing imaginable, and have brought the post WWII period of US economic prosperity to a point it can never recover.
It's only down from here. We pissed off our friends.
I don't think that's how it works. It's not like coiling a spring it's more like starting to roll a ball down a hill, once you ruin it it keeps getting worse in a feedback loop as various systems feed on each other (populism, erosion of norms, etc).
I don't see a clean solution here. The price/craft distinction matters - companies competing on price (Amazon retail) have different incentives than those competing on quality and craft (Notion, Linear). If you're in the price business, replacing expensive US labor with cheaper global labor is rational. If you're in the craft business, it usually isn't.
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?
He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution.
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".
They need to understand that their profits depend on people with disposable income. The US has some of the most profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon’s sales?
Be the change you want to see in the world. Honestly, it'd be good to have passionate congressfolk who aren't overtly corrupt or beholden to corporate interests
On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor market with almost no guardrails."
So which is it: did he really work on problems no one else could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor?
Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is one of two things:
a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone truly valuable (Happens all the time).
b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon).
What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap, foreign, plug-and-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.
"moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them."
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.
I took “moved wherever the company needed me” as hopping from troubled project to project to help fix. This is often what the most senior engineers do, and also the Manager label doesn’t necessarily mean much in this context.
If this is AI slop as the knee jerk comments next to me suggest, it’s goin to be a hell of a surprise if he gets elected this year! https://www.nleeplumb.com/about
While reading the text, my mental AI alarm bells were going off, sent it all to pangram.com and it flags both the layoff post and his campaign website text as being 100% AI generated
i've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it to you. IYKYK.
I have also used GPTs since 2020. I am also a writer. Much of the writing equated with “generated by AI” is so precisely because it’s broadly trained on real writing.
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.
if you're a writer, and you're using GPT for so long and you can't see it as obvious, i dunno what to tell you at this point. i guess LLMs are trained particularly on this guy's writing.
I am doomed, I guess. I didn't detect that. I thought this was sincere expression from an actual person, but an actual person who is also running for office and thus needs to tweak his writing accordingly.
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).
it's insane. people just don't want to use their brains to communicate anymore i guess. you've just experienced something traumatic like a layoff, and you can't even just take a few hours to internalize it and be vulnerable online, rather than jumping immediately onto social media to use the opportunity to sound like a market analyst
Many of these announcements are bluffs as many users here have pointed out. But real LLM-driven layoffs do happen, and from what I have anecdotally seen, they follow a pattern: leadership assumes the new LLM service will make human workers redundant. They then make cuts before the evidence is in. What this means is that today, there are many LLM service deployments that replaced humans while their actual impact remains a mystery. Though it won't be a mystery to leadership forever.
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.
AI is definitely a solid reason. Even a 10% increase in developer efficiency translates to roughly 9% fewer workers needed to do the same job. For AI to be cost effective, it must reduce headcount.
I'm outside the US, and boycotting Amazon for anything I can get elsewhere (which turns out isn't everything, but best efforts and all that). The shift towards AI is either a very bad thing (as per Microslop and the raft of recent articles about quality dropping), or just a cheap excuse to replace expensive staff with cheaper people.
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.
I find it very hard to believe you can't boycott Amazon completely. They don't even exist in my country and it has never been a struggle to find anything you might get there.
The difference between the reaction on HN to the Amazon layoffs and the ASML layoffs is interesting. Perhaps it's driven by the fact that people here are employed by US companies and not by ASML, so we're able to admire how ASML is cutting 4% of its workforce as reducing the number of managers but Amazon cutting 1%^H^H 4% of its corporate workforce so that they can get to "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy" is considered to be because of other secret causes that are a sign of the company failing.
dont count warehouse works and corp folks in the same bucket. thats like mixing commercial and residential real estate markets in one report without diff
We’ve had crazy covid years where every new grad was making 250k+, and now every 3-6 months we have layoffs which has not surprisingly been paired with blaming it on offshoring, H1b etc. Clearly the current system can’t withstand much of a shock, what’s going to happen if we get a full 2007 style recession, will the blame game go even higher on steroids, some times it feels like it’s quite bad already. I don’t look forward to that.
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.
I've been hearing about massive Amazon layoffs for a few years now. How come the company still exists? Are these layoffs followed by hiring at cheaper regions or different parts of the company? From my perspective as an occasional Amazon customer, things are pretty much unchanged.
The simple answer is that they hire more than they fire. In a lot of cases they will fill a role immediately after they fire the last person who was in it. Average employee retention at companies like Amazon (both voluntary and forced) is ridiculously low - something like 1.5 years. PIPs, forced burnout, mass layoffs etc. are all part of the corporate strategy. The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.
Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.
Amazon has 350K corporate roles, so yearly layoffs of 16K is only 5% - if you assume some modest re-hiring in lower-cost locations, this is just a relatively standard (at least lately) pivot out of high-cost US roles into other lower-cost economies.
My company behaves similarly to Amazon and we drop the bottom % performers every year via PIP. IDK if this is what Amazon did with this layoff but it's probably intentional churn.
The 1.5M number includes non-corporate employees (warehouse). They likely included this number to soften the message. The corporate workforce is ~300K so this is actually ~4% of their workforce.
having worked there. Amazon has toxic managers, culture that turn ICs against each other. no tech vision. insane politics. low caliber people gatekeeping.
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)
but the partnership is fake marketing. Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP, and Google owns a larger percentage because they were much earlier investors, despite amazon investing more money.
Amazon is flailing at this point and now in a pattern of mass layoffs every 3-6 months. Not good.
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.
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.
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.
They just wanted to do a mass layoff and (for now) it looks better if you say “because AI”. It tranquilizes stakeholders because they think “AI is taking those tasks, the business will be unaffected”
Doesn't say it's programmers though but middle management:
> 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.
The problem is that Amazon cuts a lot of jobs all the time, then re-hire. This could just be just regular, routine amazon evil, and they are leveraging this to make Wall Street happy
- September 2025: US imposes additional 100k USD per visa as a condition to eligibility. (previous was 5k - 20k USD)
- 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.
From March 16, 2020 (Covid scare reality / market-drop), the marketcaps of Top 10,000 traded companies has doubled (from low $70 Trillion USD to low $140 T)
But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
So — extrapolating — I'd recon the USD is inflating away its problems (mostly: itself).
What's interesting is that the strength of US dollar vs other currencies is barely budging in the meantime. Seems like everyone else is inflating away their problems too, so it all evens out in the end (unless you're poor with no assets, in any country).
> But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
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 don't think it's low-key at all, it's plainly obvious that there's a recession "on the ground" except that people's stock portfolios are being spared. If you're looking for employment right now or at prices for staples it's pretty dim.
The one phrase I've come to despise is "entrepreneurial risk", especially when it's used to justify exorbitant salaries of the higher ranks. Because, really, that "risk" for the most part is trickled down to the peasants who get laid off at a heartbeat whenever business is bad. They're not people with families and liabilities and lives, they're commodities.
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.
> 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?
My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.
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.
"Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway."
From the article it seems like this is mostly corporate side - fulfillment appears to be OK as long as consumers continue consuming... or until Amazon pushes robotics side of fulfillment to its logical conclusion - getting rid of those pesky humans that require toilet breaks and dare to talk about unionization.
Denial everyone. Amazon will have the same profits running on AI and robots with minimal expenses. All the other companies will follow. Wake up to reality.
you always hear about a stream of layoffs but It doesn't give the full picture. what i'm more interested in is what is their total employee count over time. that represents the net hiring net lay offs, is what counts at the end of the day
Again, I feel like the general comments are missing the forest for the trees by relying on witty quips about AI or retreading (legitimate) outsourcing grievances, instead of actually addressing the root problem on display:
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.
Some of these are obviously related to the closing of some of the retail businesses. And some might simply be middle management bloat that happens often at tech companies.
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).
I've noticed at my company after a lot of layoffs and restructuring and moving people between projects, when I ask "who is responsible for X now?" there can be a lot of confusion getting the answer to that question.
That is not an answer to the "who is responsible for X now" question. Laid off Bill is not responsible for X now.
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.
I haven't detected overproduction after layoff I have seen. It was other way round, people who remained were sad, depressed and demotivated. What happened was general slow down of remaining people + organizational chaos as people did not figured out yet who should fill for missing positions and how.
One thing I don't understand when it comes to these big data-center investments in India is what will they do when the water runs out? Because I do not think that this is environmentally sustainable.
Looping water through a closed heat exchanger doesn't consume the water, but using water to evaporatively cool a condenser in an industrial chiller does.
This is great news! Hopefully so many people have stopped buying crap from Amazon, that a tipping point is near, and there entire business will fold.
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.
FWIW, the employees in question are at least in the 90th percentile of US salaries if not 99th percentile (L5 is ~ $250K, L6 is ~ $399K, and L7 is north of $500K)
In regards to fairness, many times these cuts are based what group you are in, rather than performance. You wonder, hypothetically, would the L5s and above all agree to accepting a 20% pay cut in exchange for not having layoffs. It strange that one person keeps the job paying $500K, while the other unlucky one will have trouble getting a new $150K job due to the terrible job market.
How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jerbs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize mass layoffs and offshoring were hounded.
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.
Ignoring the reality that the higher fee has only been in play for four months; have you considered that there are likely H1-B employees in the 16,000 that Amazon laid off?
A large portion of employees on immigration visas were offered the ability to keep their job if they transferred to Amazon's India offices assuming a team was co-located there as well.
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.
Does the H1B fee only apply to people not yet in the country? I have a student on a student visa who claims I can do the h1b sponsor without the 100k fee because they are already there with their student visa.
> How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jobs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize offshoring were hounded.
Yep, offshoring needs to be heavily penalized as well.
I feel like this is the most natural layoff I've seen in twenty years (that is not the same as saying I feel good about it). Truly, most software companies need to cut their entire roster and re-draft quite frankly. You will need less people and have entirely new goals. This is beyond "economic" reality, AI has made it intuitive to restructure and reorient. Not doing so will just mean you will be blind-sided by any company that leaned down and re-envisioned their entire product.
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.
> I think this will be better for all in terms of finding their true purpose in life.
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
This is the way I see it. A lot of people can already be replaced or should be doing entirely different work to boost productivity. It is going to be a battle between people fighting for inertia and those that are looking to be ahead of the curve.
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.
>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too.
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.
The parent comment is obviously cherry picking news and trying to push an agenda.
Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme...
Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai
Amazon also employs 1.5 million people globally, 350k of which are in corporate. These 16k were corporate. Still sucks for everyone involved, I know a corporate sales guy who got laid off Microsoft and it disrupted his life pretty seriously. As Stalin says one's a tragedy, a millions a statistic.
Since the HN to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses:
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.
Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?
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.
Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).
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.
I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there.
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.
We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.
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.
> 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.
Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
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?
It's not really on them to think of an example to disprove themselves? Do you have one in mind?
AI = actually Indians
Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too.
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.
It was pretty obvious what is going to follow axing of H1B
It's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.
I guess we just need the other shoe to drop: punish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues
Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax.
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 would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged college education and is a symptom of a larger problem: As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training programs, continual education, robust workforce displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We lack all of this (and more).
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.
> employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs.
I think you misunderstand the point of the system.
Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of the business will be a subsidiary.
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.
You don’t have to dig commodore from the grave, there are current-day examples of companies doing the same.
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.
It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however.
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.
> It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however
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.
The whole point of it seems to be to dismiss the entire economic system in favor of something that almost nobody has bought in to like bullion or cryptocurrency or somesuch for the benefit of the speaker. Currency, even paper currency, is one of the most pervasive societal "grand illusions" that we share. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing as it greases the entire system of exchange for literally everyone everywhere.
Conveniently India and the EU just signed a major trade deal.
No, I think companies that want to stay competitive will leave the US.
That's what the third shoe is for - aircraft carriers.
Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.
This is reductive and wrong. The billionares make money hand over fist either way. They own the companies. They don't care if the new campus or factory is in China or India. They skim their cut off it's productivity either way.
It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.
Canada’s industrial economy was also undamaged. And so, by definition, the US was not the only one.
If you want American companies to not outsource any jobs AND have full foreign market access, get ready to get market access revoked from places like India. They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete, and Amazon has plenty of local competition there already.
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.
> You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.
This is the value prop of the US military
I didn't realize the US Military mission statement included 'Forcing foreign regulators to approve AWS licenses.'
In a world with China and Europe, using the military to bully allies is the fastest way to lose those allies. If the US plays that card, nations will just accelerate their move to domestic or non-US stacks. It's a self-defeating strategy.
It was, at least it worked for Europe, but Trump has seemingly managed to ruin that too.
Amazon has contributed enough to the current administration that I doubt they will face any consequences. Maybe another round of shakedowns and more financial contributions, but they have figured out pretty quickly how to play the game and end up on the good side of the current administration.
Amazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is looking like its going to be a box office bomb. Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to Melania[0]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-d...
Fire h1b positions, make them leave the US and rehire them back in their home country. They can train their new co-workers.
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 wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.
I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
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.
> it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
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.
I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K
I will say my first tech job was $40K and now I have to have a six-fig job just because of my debt.
> 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.
Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.
>native Americans I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff?
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?
However many generations it takes for your skin tone to be white. See also: the President's wife.
Making h1b an automatic track to a green card (partially) removes the ability for employers to exploit employees on an h1b.
The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.
you see the reason h1b is so popular with the c-suite in a lot of cases is that you get absolute loyalty to a company that holds all the power of your being allowed to stay in the us. you lose the h1b job and you have limited time to find a new valid employer to sponsor you or else you go back to your country. it's one of the reasons musk loves it for twitter.
H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.
You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.
I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.
You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.
Even a 5% chance you and your partner/kids have to uproot their life is a bigger sacrifice than a 30% wage increase, at least to some people.
It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out
bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11
> there are enough american job seekers in CS
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%.
Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why is everything broken? American MBA culture. PE wealth extraction. A bought and paid for political class.
Zero situational awareness, DGAF as long as number go up.
tell us more about your racial-based hiring
> 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.
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.
As an American this does not match my experience at all.
What profession were those women looking for?
Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them.
Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.
Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?
Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.
> Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American.
There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.
> 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.
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?
> But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then.
Only in places like Palo Alto, Boston, Seattle, etc.
Not in most of the cornfield country.
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.
Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.
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.
Sorry man, American raised autists beat chinese 996 every day of the week. shrug.
I mean that in the cultural sense, not racially. ABC autists are S tier too.
There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.
They are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000 people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass firings last year.
FAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.
You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.
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).
Quality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.
https://layoffs.fyi/
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
Ok, then hire them on an O-1 visa. H1B is the problem as it creates a indentured servitude class that is going to work for less.
H1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies.
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.
Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.
Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.
> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
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.
Big tech companies are biased to sourcing from big name universities that have a lot of foreign students, and big tech companies were much more likely to go through the effort of H1B than smaller companies. As such your candidate pool is more heavily skewed than elsewhere.
All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.
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.
> And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
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.
It's really easy to see that big tech is interviewing only people who passed an initial filter which at this point is AI based. They're clearly filtering for some characteristics they want in a candidate, and most probably the filter is giving you the people you mentioned.
Better for whom?
Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.
The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.
"foreigners who often graduated in the US"
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.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
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.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
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.
They pay the top Indian firms for candidate referrals. And a CEO would say we need more diversity and make that a company goal.
The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.
Nothing to do with it, just following a trend before the attacks: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-pledges-3-b...
There haven't been any meaningful attacks on H1b visa. When running for office, Trump said very clearly that H1b was good for his companies (saving money), but bad for the American people.
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.
Sorry but making around $40k in 2015 would not, under any circumstance, require you to live with 6 roommates in Austin. That is EXTREME hyperbole lol
My first IT job in Austin in 2010 paid $18 an hour and I had my own apartment and car.
Maybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?
Very related IMO. Even before Trump US workforce was expensive, now limit the influx of new workforce and hiring abroad looks like a logical decision
Imagine that! It's almost like it's coordinated. Surely the US government would never do something like that on purpose.
This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?
I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.
If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the basis of cost differential, that’s a sure sign the company believes the function has been commoditized and is immune from competitive selection.
That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
Just Walk Out was actually 1000 people in India. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".
As is the case with many mass layoffs. AI just makes a good reason to claim. It makes you look progressive to investors and it doesn't make you look bad to the public. If AI didn't exist it would be some other excuse to spin this as a positive for the company and not bad for the affected workers.
For who does not know, in tech Amazon has always been the biggest H1B shop.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.
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.
Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.
I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
The AI of ten years ago is not the AI of now...
But the scam is still the same.
"do things that don't scale" and what not
Maybe the support scammers can get some real jobs as prompt engineers? Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.
> Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.
More AWS outages means more breaks from work?
Sorry, VP says we're migrating. What? Will they see it through? Of course not!
This summer I went camping and at the campground next to me was a middle manager at Amazon. I’ve been out of the workforce for about a year, so I asked him how much of an impact AI was having in his role.
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
Actual effective managers do much more than "gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him."
> Actual effective managers do much more
And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?
might be able to get a fat contract fee from letting Amazon know about that
> gathering information from folks below him
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?
Did you copy paste this from LinkedIn?
Undoubtedly his tool turned out to suck, and his managers realized that it made him faster but didn't eliminate the need for his role. "Every other manager" is a pipe dream and if it's true it means that group is pathetically inefficient and underutilizing the talents of even an average manager.
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.
Source: Trust me bro
Yes that is how anecdotes work
If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the fact that we all have to earn a living, why would anyone want a job where you distill a bunch of input from those "below you" and relay it to those "above you"? That sounds like a job I would never want to get out of bed to do. If I were one of the people fired, I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
[delayed]
Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
Excuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.
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.
> Global economy doesn't look that terrible.
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.
The economy is currently great if your income is from your investments rather than from your labor. The relative comfort and power of the capital class vs. labor class has never been farther apart in my lifetime.
US real GDP is racing ahead: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1 . Inflation is fine, even if you don't fully believe the official numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA . Unemployment is increasing but below long term mean: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE . Interest rates are at a reasonably business-friendly level.
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.
I'm going to set aside GDP for a moment, which is hardly the full story but instead I want to zoom in on inflation.
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...
[1]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
> So if you'd claim it's terrible, there's some explaining to do
Here's the explaining:
We're all talking predictions, I don't think either of us should pretend to know the future, but there are counterpoints and so the data does not all look rosy.It always takes 6 to 12 months for the graphs to match the reality on the ground. Because that's how long it takes most people to run out of money and credit.
There were points in 2008 where there were bank runs.
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...
2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think you're as qualified as most of us.
Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the farce and everything collapsed.
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.
2008 was a lot worse.
2008 didn't really impact tech sector much though. Companies continued to hire through it, and in fact those that didn't often had a headcount deficit afterwards.
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.
By what metrics?
Yeah, that's one perspective :-) Objectively, the global labor market is the hottest it has been in modern history.
Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard from a year before 2020, yeah.
Which is why governments and firms in the capitalist core are trying to cool it down?
There is a case to be made that wage spirals are bad, actually.
> 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-cannes open source projects.
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.
> Companies hire people to make money
More and more I think companies do whatever creates news hype to attract cheap investment capital and pump the stock price. Whether any of that translates into actually making money is not even considered. You can have your accounting department make that aspect of it look like whatever you want.
> Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.
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
Right - true.
So hiring people is ditching this political leverage. If that was the original driver, what's changes to make it not worth it anymore?
how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?
as a response to "Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.". I've edited the comment to make it clear, thanks
The reason is the same as always - they want to cut costs and increase profits. And there are no laws in America that prevent them from indiscriminate firing.
> Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist?
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.
Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive
Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?
If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit.
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.
Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?
What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?
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)
Well you would think if there is increased productivity there would be at least a couple studies, some clear artifacts, or increased quality of software being shipped.
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.
Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?
Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and 1000 npm dependencies!
...or 2 years ago they agreed that employees should return to the office for at least 3 days per week, of course only as a temporary measure before full RTO?
10 days later: Amazon to hire 16 000 new workers in its new remote Indian campus
The layoff includes people in India.
“Overhiring during the pandemic” was a common, senseless, catchphrase a few years ago.
Amazon just recently used that excuse for their 2025 layoffs a few months ago iirc.
Ah yeah completely forgot that one.
yeah. pretending to innovate rather than just shed ZIRP-era deadweight. like IBM laid off a few thousand "due to AI" in 2023, lol.
"ZIRP-era deadweight"
that's 3-4 years ago now
You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune 500s and not be fired for over a year.
There are people at my office who haven't really done anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They probably weren't doing anything before then either, but at least they were there eight hours a day.
I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How would they stay employed if their performance review showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies that have people just sitting there picking their nose watching YouTube? I've never really seen this either in BigTech or MediumTech companies.
Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just things you don't see or appreciate?
To defend ICs against middle management a bit: a lot of IC work is dependent on decisions that need to be made by upper level managers. A 2 week contiguous workstream can take 2+ years easy once a few managers ask a few questions and need 10-20 meetings to get 5 bullet points clarified (so many projects can't even produce that). But if that person gets replaced their institutional knowledge and work readiness evaporates.
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..
If you're a contractor, it's often preferable to keep qualified people on staff even if they have nothing to do because it makes bidding for future contracts easier. You can say "I have X people qualified in Y ready to go" instead of "we'll have to hire X people to do Y".
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.
This is really complicated in big companies.
Headcount increase means growth which means stock go up which means short term profit at the expense of long term quality of product or service. Soooo many people doing absolutely nothing and really no one cares. It is beneficial to have someone doing nothing as oppose to someone pro active, because doing things breaks things. Think about, companies optimize for inertia. Extraordinary levels of burocracy, governance, quality assurance...at some point it becomes impossible to move. Measures are in place not because they increase quality, but they reduce movement, and then this is perceived as safer. Think about it, less movement == safe. People doing absolutely fucking nothing while virtue signaling is a perfect fit.
I don't know your particular examples but likely your assessment is biased.
We always tend to think that others have it easier than us, as we do not have the full picture.
Of course it's biased. I'm just saying I find it quite believable that some program was funded 5 years ago under different financial conditions and has remained funded until now despite no longer being viable.
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.
> You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work (...)
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".
To be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I have a bridge to sell you.
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.
The comment was likely less about positive corporate spin, more about rumors of Amazon's allegedly grueling, PIP-centered culture.
Yeah, if that culture is actually widespread I imagine their deadweight is more the variety that's figured out how to game the system or has connections, rather than the "I'm going to do literally no work and watch youtube all day" varieties that I've witnessed.
Yeah you cannot blame ZIRP anymore, you’d look like a fool at this point
In this case, there might be some truth to the statement.
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
Economic headwinds are rarely used. There is always something else they blame it on. It has been this way for the 30 years I've been old enough to pay attention - and those older than me report it has been even longer. There are downturns every few years, in turn meaning layoffs - and they always blame something other than the downturn.
They also always claim the layoff will enable more efficiency.
They're increasingly intertwined these days, so it's not much of a lie
AI is the perfect scapegoat.
Insurance providers are also doing it.
AI is also used in the legal space too.
Quite true. Many corporations use AI as excuse to "re-structure" their internal and external costs.
I like to think about this story from years ago when Nintendo wasn't doing so well and there was talk of layoffs
"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.
Bear in mind Nintendo has ~0.005% of the employees Amazon does
Sad for people who lost their jobs. Happy for Amazon's self sabotage.
I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.
Is this where the goalpost went?
Because all the talk was how the tariffs would tank the economy.
Dollar is losing value by the day, gold and silver on record high and somehow this is not an indicator for huge uncertainty?
China is beating the US on pretty much every stage and this only accelerates this.
And yet prices are marginally up while all the "economists" expected major inflation. Dollar vs Euro is at same level now as it was in 2019 - there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong.
> "economists" expected major inflation
Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)
> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong
Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
Isn't China currently stuck in a deflation loop?
It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess.
No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) and employment figures.
> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average...
This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous.
Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).
[0] https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term...
[1] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/01/historical-returns-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rmiller/2024/06/20/90-years-of-...
For rate rises that are enacted to slow inflation (which slows stock market growth as you said) i think you have the cause and effect reversed.
The best way to see how inflation and stocks are linked is to look at economies where inflation is not intentionally slowed by rate rises. The stocks go up more or less with inflation (and some small % of gains they may have on top as you say). When you have rate rises that slow inflation you do indeed slow stock growth. But this is also inline with the link between inflation and stock price.
You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)
This is outdated -- it surpassed 2007 levels in 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
> SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR
*SPX and no, it's down 2% when denominated in Euros while up 15% when denominated in dollars. I wouldn't say the USD has fared well so far.
> and employment figures
Just to add onto your point, bad employment numbers can actually be bullish for stocks due to a higher chance of Fed rate cuts. Obviously there is a threshold there because if too many people are unemployed then no one can buy stuff, but it just highlights how disconnected stocks are from the economy.
> No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing
On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking.
Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah.
That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications, etc.
Then it just never happened. Things went up.
The initial dip was bought up by retail investors then everyone realized TACO (Trump always chickens out) so the markets don't really care about tariff threats anymore.
What benefit have we gotten from the chaotic tariff policy? Any trade deals?
I think the talk was significant inflation, because everything will cost more. And it does.
My costs are falling.
I buy a lot of groceries for my business, so I have decent records. Beef is way up, though.
Gas is way down as well.
Oil prices have fallen. And likely will through the rest of the year. And the US conspicuously didn't apply tariffs on oil from Canada (while simultaneously saying "we don't need anything from Canada" and threatening our sovereignty and tariffing everything else) which is a huge amount of imports into the US.
Oil prices down isn't necessarily a good thing for an oil exporter like the US though. In aggregate.
If the US had actually applied tariffs on Canadian oil your gas pump prices would be up very significantly.
if you look at non ai / tech stuff, isn't the economy pretty bad? they stopped reporting unemployment numbers and BLS statistics and all
Since the administration have stopped releasing some data that usually is released, how fast would people be able to notice that the economy tanked, if it did?
Well technically, the economy has tanked (sort of), people say that the economy's doing great but the figures that we see in (q4?) are extrapolated from the previous quaters in which the only thing (from what people tell me) is keeping the "illusion" of economy doing good is the spending within AI datacenters. But a huge part of that is shrouded within mystery as well (Stargate project is really suspicious in my honest opinion though I can be wrong)
Also wasn't there some BLS figure which was pushed by the Administration to try to have good numbers or similar. I mean speaking from a different countries pov, Personally I wouldn't trust the numbers the current administration gives.
I don't know if this is the same belief that Americans within America also hold though.
AI investment/datacenter construction was roughly 1% of US GDP in 2025 all by itself.
That and people were expecting the tariffs to be consistently applied as stated, instead we got... this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr7OVWgqDIM&t=27s
So it wasn't what they expected?
You're accusing people of moving the goalposts on the tariff conversation, the goal posts were doing backflips and jazzercise from the day they were announced.
So yeah, the tariffs are still a net negative on the economy, but have been so erratically and poorly implemented that they're not nearly as bad as they could have been. It's like a plastered drunk guy swinging a knife at you. It's a lethal threat, but he's tripping over himself constantly and can barely stand so it's easy to dodge for now. Could be a more serious issue if he ever sobers up.
I agree they've been very erratic. What does that have to do with whether or not our economy tanked as a result? It didn't, the prophecies were FUD, everything he does is bad, blah blah.
Trump's a lethal threat that is too incompetent to be lethal? Okay. So quit with the FUD then.
So you'd turn your back on the knife wielding drunk guy and turn on Netflix because he hasn't managed to stab you yet?
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you didn't feel any of that in the previous year you haven't been paying attention or don't have any serious responsibilities.
Sure, when the arbitrary tarriff formula was announced for every nation, the stock markets were down thousands, and the bond market was fluctuating. Then you had the short term trade war with China were both countries set tarrifs so high no imports/exports between the two happened for a month, and there was a concern about empty shelves in major department stores.
But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also chickens out", so Wall Street learned he would backdown on any tariffs that had too much negative economic impact.
So Trump's tariffs didn't tank the economy because everyone outsmarted him?
Because the advertised quantity of tariffs exceeded the actual reality.
The impact to social bonds between the US and other Western nations has been thrown completely off track, and now they are looking for exits from anything US related.
These tarrifs were the absolutely dumbest thing imaginable, and have brought the post WWII period of US economic prosperity to a point it can never recover.
It's only down from here. We pissed off our friends.
I mean maybe that's the good news. There is huge potential for an upswing!
I don't think that's how it works. It's not like coiling a spring it's more like starting to roll a ball down a hill, once you ruin it it keeps getting worse in a feedback loop as various systems feed on each other (populism, erosion of norms, etc).
So Putin is culling his people so the next generation can have more!
I think that’s basically the story he’s telling his people tbh
It’s going to be so great. Everyone’s will notice it. Just you wait.
Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon
https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198
I don't see a clean solution here. The price/craft distinction matters - companies competing on price (Amazon retail) have different incentives than those competing on quality and craft (Notion, Linear). If you're in the price business, replacing expensive US labor with cheaper global labor is rational. If you're in the craft business, it usually isn't.
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?
He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution.
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".
He says:
1. Strong data governance 2. Tax implications for layoffs (offshoring?)
They need to understand that their profits depend on people with disposable income. The US has some of the most profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon’s sales?
I would wager being remote made him a target. It seems like a stretch to say it's just the global job market when the layoffs are global.
> I saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress.
Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Honestly, it'd be good to have passionate congressfolk who aren't overtly corrupt or beholden to corporate interests
Inconsistent jingoistic nationalism.
On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor market with almost no guardrails."
So which is it: did he really work on problems no one else could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor?
Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is one of two things:
a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone truly valuable (Happens all the time).
b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon).
What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap, foreign, plug-and-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.
"moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them."
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.
I took “moved wherever the company needed me” as hopping from troubled project to project to help fix. This is often what the most senior engineers do, and also the Manager label doesn’t necessarily mean much in this context.
Not AI.
If this is AI slop as the knee jerk comments next to me suggest, it’s goin to be a hell of a surprise if he gets elected this year! https://www.nleeplumb.com/about
While reading the text, my mental AI alarm bells were going off, sent it all to pangram.com and it flags both the layoff post and his campaign website text as being 100% AI generated
It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.
It’s pretty sad that when people write well now, others dismiss it as AI.
It's also a pretty clear indication of AI undeniably passing the turing test in case that was in debate still.
No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting it wrong.
What exactly indicates the post was AI generated?
i've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it to you. IYKYK.
> i dunno how else to prove it to you
A prompt to generate similar output would be a good start.
I have also used GPTs since 2020. I am also a writer. Much of the writing equated with “generated by AI” is so precisely because it’s broadly trained on real writing.
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.
if you're a writer, and you're using GPT for so long and you can't see it as obvious, i dunno what to tell you at this point. i guess LLMs are trained particularly on this guy's writing.
So you have zero evidence to convey something you claim is “obvious”? Got it.
I've been writing in a contrasting style like that since probably 5th or 6th grade.
... I wonder how much the writings of a lot of autistic / borderline folks impacted the LLM writing style.
is it me or is this ai slop
I am doomed, I guess. I didn't detect that. I thought this was sincere expression from an actual person, but an actual person who is also running for office and thus needs to tweak his writing accordingly.
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).
100%
it's insane. people just don't want to use their brains to communicate anymore i guess. you've just experienced something traumatic like a layoff, and you can't even just take a few hours to internalize it and be vulnerable online, rather than jumping immediately onto social media to use the opportunity to sound like a market analyst
We must do something about labor offshoring to india. It's too much. I want my children to have opportunities here in the country they were born in.
Factory workers said that in the 90s too. Didn’t work out to well for them.
AI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in every recession.
AI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management. Probably displacing some of those jobs.
Many of these announcements are bluffs as many users here have pointed out. But real LLM-driven layoffs do happen, and from what I have anecdotally seen, they follow a pattern: leadership assumes the new LLM service will make human workers redundant. They then make cuts before the evidence is in. What this means is that today, there are many LLM service deployments that replaced humans while their actual impact remains a mystery. Though it won't be a mystery to leadership forever.
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.
And 'The economy' is just the disguise for getting rid of expensive workers and hiring cheaper workers elsewhere in the world.
AI is definitely a solid reason. Even a 10% increase in developer efficiency translates to roughly 9% fewer workers needed to do the same job. For AI to be cost effective, it must reduce headcount.
The US economy is mostly AI at this point.
Artificially Inflated?
About to Implode
Afghani Insurgents
Alarmingly indebted.
I'm outside the US, and boycotting Amazon for anything I can get elsewhere (which turns out isn't everything, but best efforts and all that). The shift towards AI is either a very bad thing (as per Microslop and the raft of recent articles about quality dropping), or just a cheap excuse to replace expensive staff with cheaper people.
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.
I have yet to find something on Amazon that I can't find on either eBay, straight from the retailer, or B&H. And usually for less money.
I find it very hard to believe you can't boycott Amazon completely. They don't even exist in my country and it has never been a struggle to find anything you might get there.
But what if you want Amazon Basics brand batteries or counterfeit health products?
> They don't exist in my country ... it has never been a struggle to find anything.
Amazon absolutely crushed a lot of physical brick-and-mortar stores. Drove them out of business.
The difference between the reaction on HN to the Amazon layoffs and the ASML layoffs is interesting. Perhaps it's driven by the fact that people here are employed by US companies and not by ASML, so we're able to admire how ASML is cutting 4% of its workforce as reducing the number of managers but Amazon cutting 1%^H^H 4% of its corporate workforce so that they can get to "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy" is considered to be because of other secret causes that are a sign of the company failing.
dont count warehouse works and corp folks in the same bucket. thats like mixing commercial and residential real estate markets in one report without diff
A reasonable correction. Apparently 25% of Amazon employees are in corporate or AWS[0]. So they're both roughly 4% layoffs.
0: https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-amaz...
Amazon has 150k in India alone, presumably corporate? So now you are looking at closer to 7%.
Who said employees in India are unaffected by these layoffs?
ASML isn't laying off their blue collar labor and neither is Amazon. Apples to Apples would be US based corporate numbers.
We’ve had crazy covid years where every new grad was making 250k+, and now every 3-6 months we have layoffs which has not surprisingly been paired with blaming it on offshoring, H1b etc. Clearly the current system can’t withstand much of a shock, what’s going to happen if we get a full 2007 style recession, will the blame game go even higher on steroids, some times it feels like it’s quite bad already. I don’t look forward to that.
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.
I've been hearing about massive Amazon layoffs for a few years now. How come the company still exists? Are these layoffs followed by hiring at cheaper regions or different parts of the company? From my perspective as an occasional Amazon customer, things are pretty much unchanged.
The simple answer is that they hire more than they fire. In a lot of cases they will fill a role immediately after they fire the last person who was in it. Average employee retention at companies like Amazon (both voluntary and forced) is ridiculously low - something like 1.5 years. PIPs, forced burnout, mass layoffs etc. are all part of the corporate strategy. The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.
Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.
Amazon has 350K corporate roles, so yearly layoffs of 16K is only 5% - if you assume some modest re-hiring in lower-cost locations, this is just a relatively standard (at least lately) pivot out of high-cost US roles into other lower-cost economies.
One disturbing possibility is us laborers aren't as important we think we are.
My company behaves similarly to Amazon and we drop the bottom % performers every year via PIP. IDK if this is what Amazon did with this layoff but it's probably intentional churn.
They hire like crazy. There is unfortunately no shortage of people wanting to work there.
They also hire to fire to meet pip quotas.
They actually still have 1,5 million employees. The number has been approximately the same since 2021, and those 16,000 won't make a dent.
The 1.5M number includes non-corporate employees (warehouse). They likely included this number to soften the message. The corporate workforce is ~300K so this is actually ~4% of their workforce.
Makes a dent when they fire at the high salary end and rehire at lower salaries.
I mean most of those are warehouse workers or delivery or customer support or something, right?
Pretty big difference between corporate Amazon and retail business Amazon division wise I think
having worked there. Amazon has toxic managers, culture that turn ICs against each other. no tech vision. insane politics. low caliber people gatekeeping.
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)
but the partnership is fake marketing. Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP, and Google owns a larger percentage because they were much earlier investors, despite amazon investing more money.
Amazon is flailing at this point and now in a pattern of mass layoffs every 3-6 months. Not good.
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.
I am beginning to dislike AI more and more.
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.
Alexa, insert David and Victoria Beckham "be honest" meme
What's the real reason for the layoffs?
Amazon stock is flat over the past year. The rest of the "magnificent seven":
- 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.
They just wanted to do a mass layoff and (for now) it looks better if you say “because AI”. It tranquilizes stakeholders because they think “AI is taking those tasks, the business will be unaffected”
Until the business gets affected
Might just be management doing that "you can cut the bottom 5-10% of your workforce every 5 years without impacting productivity at all" thing.
To lower costs
Unstable and uncertain economy
10% cut of the corporate workforce in 2 months is wild lol
Crazy most of it is programmers (and/or various other white collar jobs) tbh
Doesn't say it's programmers though but middle management:
> 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.
Ah thanks for clearing that up.
The problem is that Amazon cuts a lot of jobs all the time, then re-hire. This could just be just regular, routine amazon evil, and they are leveraging this to make Wall Street happy
- September 2025: US imposes additional 100k USD per visa as a condition to eligibility. (previous was 5k - 20k USD)
- 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.
We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.
From March 16, 2020 (Covid scare reality / market-drop), the marketcaps of Top 10,000 traded companies has doubled (from low $70 Trillion USD to low $140 T)
But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
So — extrapolating — I'd recon the USD is inflating away its problems (mostly: itself).
What's interesting is that the strength of US dollar vs other currencies is barely budging in the meantime. Seems like everyone else is inflating away their problems too, so it all evens out in the end (unless you're poor with no assets, in any country).
> But bullion has done even better (particularly past month).
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 don't think it's low-key at all, it's plainly obvious that there's a recession "on the ground" except that people's stock portfolios are being spared. If you're looking for employment right now or at prices for staples it's pretty dim.
The one phrase I've come to despise is "entrepreneurial risk", especially when it's used to justify exorbitant salaries of the higher ranks. Because, really, that "risk" for the most part is trickled down to the peasants who get laid off at a heartbeat whenever business is bad. They're not people with families and liabilities and lives, they're commodities.
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.
Another article about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ywzxlxnlo
> 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?
So new AWS outages can be expected
My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.
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.
"Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway."
From the article it seems like this is mostly corporate side - fulfillment appears to be OK as long as consumers continue consuming... or until Amazon pushes robotics side of fulfillment to its logical conclusion - getting rid of those pesky humans that require toilet breaks and dare to talk about unionization.
All functions in Amazon are heavily impacted - especially AWS and WWOps.
Denial everyone. Amazon will have the same profits running on AI and robots with minimal expenses. All the other companies will follow. Wake up to reality.
Tech is dead. Has been since 2020.
you always hear about a stream of layoffs but It doesn't give the full picture. what i'm more interested in is what is their total employee count over time. that represents the net hiring net lay offs, is what counts at the end of the day
amazon is really doing it's things now, i say to stay cautious
Again, I feel like the general comments are missing the forest for the trees by relying on witty quips about AI or retreading (legitimate) outsourcing grievances, instead of actually addressing the root problem on display:
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.
Official post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793906)
It’s giving “We’ve tried everything except layoffs and we are all out of ideas”
Except that’s been Jassy’s number one tool to try and get the stock price moving.
Some of these are obviously related to the closing of some of the retail businesses. And some might simply be middle management bloat that happens often at tech companies.
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).
I've noticed at my company after a lot of layoffs and restructuring and moving people between projects, when I ask "who is responsible for X now?" there can be a lot of confusion getting the answer to that question.
“It was Bill, but he got laid off”. It doesn’t need to be confusing.
That is not an answer to the "who is responsible for X now" question. Laid off Bill is not responsible for X now.
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.
I haven't detected overproduction after layoff I have seen. It was other way round, people who remained were sad, depressed and demotivated. What happened was general slow down of remaining people + organizational chaos as people did not figured out yet who should fill for missing positions and how.
One thing I don't understand when it comes to these big data-center investments in India is what will they do when the water runs out? Because I do not think that this is environmentally sustainable.
Water consumption is not what the headlines lead you to believe- using water for cooling doesn't "consume" the water
Looping water through a closed heat exchanger doesn't consume the water, but using water to evaporatively cool a condenser in an industrial chiller does.
This is great news! Hopefully so many people have stopped buying crap from Amazon, that a tipping point is near, and there entire business will fold.
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.
It would be too much to ask to have fair and equal society, so instead we observe how capitalism/fascism will ruin the world over and over again.
FWIW, the employees in question are at least in the 90th percentile of US salaries if not 99th percentile (L5 is ~ $250K, L6 is ~ $399K, and L7 is north of $500K)
In regards to fairness, many times these cuts are based what group you are in, rather than performance. You wonder, hypothetically, would the L5s and above all agree to accepting a 20% pay cut in exchange for not having layoffs. It strange that one person keeps the job paying $500K, while the other unlucky one will have trouble getting a new $150K job due to the terrible job market.
“If you’re not laying off tons of workers, do you even know to use AI? Shitty companies still use human labor… don’t invest in them.”
How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jerbs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize mass layoffs and offshoring were hounded.
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...
This poster is right. Offshoring is a growing factor as US companies do to white collar work what they did to manufacturing
Ignoring the reality that the higher fee has only been in play for four months; have you considered that there are likely H1-B employees in the 16,000 that Amazon laid off?
A large portion of employees on immigration visas were offered the ability to keep their job if they transferred to Amazon's India offices assuming a team was co-located there as well.
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...
I thought Bezos paid enough in bribes for it to not affect AWS/Amazon?
Sorry, donated.
Does the H1B fee only apply to people not yet in the country? I have a student on a student visa who claims I can do the h1b sponsor without the 100k fee because they are already there with their student visa.
> How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jobs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize offshoring were hounded.
Yep, offshoring needs to be heavily penalized as well.
"AI" - "Always Indian" :D
Good for them
I feel like this is the most natural layoff I've seen in twenty years (that is not the same as saying I feel good about it). Truly, most software companies need to cut their entire roster and re-draft quite frankly. You will need less people and have entirely new goals. This is beyond "economic" reality, AI has made it intuitive to restructure and reorient. Not doing so will just mean you will be blind-sided by any company that leaned down and re-envisioned their entire product.
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.
> I think this will be better for all in terms of finding their true purpose in life.
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
This is the way I see it. A lot of people can already be replaced or should be doing entirely different work to boost productivity. It is going to be a battle between people fighting for inertia and those that are looking to be ahead of the curve.
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.
You first.
This is where the Upton Sinclair quote comes in.
"radical ethics" indeed.
unfortunate but true
What’s your favorite kool aid flavor? I hear mango is quite good