Amazon cuts 16k jobs

Posted by DGAP 7 hours ago

Comments

Comment by shartshooter 6 hours ago

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

Comment by Aurornis 2 hours ago

> 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.

Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway.

I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this.

Comment by jasondigitized 1 hour ago

Fake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities.

Comment by pydry 4 minutes ago

My experience with ex Amazon managers is that they brought a toxic culture and destroyed more value than they created.

Some people are so focused on whether they could automate their work output with an LLM to ask themselves if they even should.

Comment by jdmg94 1 hour ago

you would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep failing upwards in organizations like Amazon

Comment by retinaros 2 hours ago

lol. it does. its a good description of about 90% of the mgrs

Comment by simianparrot 1 hour ago

Seems like Amazon is doing the right thing cutting down its corporate workforce then.

Comment by complianceowl 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by mrtksn 2 hours ago

TBH the last 20-30 years was exactly like that but computers were eliminating other peoples jobs for really good profits for the investors and really good salaries for the workers doing the elimination. Before that people were eliminating blue colar workers with highly productive machines and industrial robots.

I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different. Software ate the world and now AI will eat the "software professionals".

When this is over, just like the rust belts there will be code belts where once highly valued software developers will be living in decaying neighborhoods and the politicians will be promising to create software jobs by banning AI.

Comment by 3acctforcom 1 hour ago

I kill jobs for a living, and always wondered when the promise of "Low code" would kill my job.

Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.

Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.

Comment by carlcortright 2 hours ago

this is a very pessimistic take

could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways

it's hard to be sure

Comment by izzydata 1 hour ago

It feels more like a really optimistic take on AI. I won't say it is impossible, but I haven't seen anything that suggests AI is going to do what OpenAI and Nvidia claims it will.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by chrysoprace 1 hour ago

There might be a time when software developers become obsolete, and I don't pretend to know the future, but if today's models are anything to go by then it won't happen any time soon.

At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

Comment by geodel 45 minutes ago

> At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of highly skilled successful people of today could soon be below average category, jobless and can be called clueless, stuck in old ways who didn't simply see what is happening in the world.

And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.

Comment by tokioyoyo 7 minutes ago

> Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine.

I would bet for the opposite. In a huge rush to optimization and job elimination, early career people suffer the most. However it also makes it impossible to switch careers, start from scratch, and etc.

Comment by risyachka 24 minutes ago

>> AI will eat the "software professionals"

you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software.

And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.

Comment by Buttons840 14 minutes ago

Once an AI runs a single company well, all publicly traded companies will have a legal obligation to at least consider replacing the C-suite with AI. In theory. I'll believe it when I see it.

Comment by socalgal2 2 hours ago

I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once.

At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.

Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.

Comment by tokioyoyo 3 minutes ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

Comment by Shocka1 1 hour ago

IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely in the crosshairs now.

If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.

Comment by BigHatLogan 41 minutes ago

What is your repurposing plan, if you don't mind my asking? I am trying to think of alternatives too, but it's quite stressful.

Comment by Uehreka 34 minutes ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction.

You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.

Comment by paul7986 1 hour ago

Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer.

Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.

My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago

Sorry to hear that.

But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things

On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative)

I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money.

My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working.

I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations.

Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly.

But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.

Comment by unethical_ban 43 minutes ago

The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two.

Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.

COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.

Comment by esseph 1 hour ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

That's what the TSA is in the US

Comment by greekrich92 1 hour ago

What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it.

If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.

Comment by throwaway-11-1 58 minutes ago

The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane

Comment by motbus3 3 minutes ago

If he was a middle manager it wasn't him doing the work anyway

Comment by diyseguy 49 minutes ago

I have always felt that if I could do a job really well, do work that required no maintenance, was basically 'self-healing' so to speak, with documentation so clear and easy to understand that someone could pick up where I left off without asking me a single question. For me that was always my aesthetic and goal in any work I did.

Yet, here I am, an experienced software engineer, unemployed for over a year now. It still seems to me the right ideal, so the 'karmic' outcome feels unjust really.

Comment by hintymad 17 minutes ago

That sounds an organizational issue. I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible. That is, a combination of the job of a general and a PM. Controlling the information may be necessary for survival, but it should not be the job description.

Comment by nxm 6 hours ago

Actual effective managers do much more than "gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him."

Comment by nitwit005 1 hour ago

In some organizations, the upper management generates a real burden on people below them with ever changing demands for information.

I have to assume some of it serves a social, rather than practical purpose, like having people re-assure them that projects are going well. If that's the case, automation may just not make sense.

Comment by conscion 5 hours ago

> Actual effective managers do much more

And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?

Comment by signal11 2 hours ago

Even “only” information funnels have value if they seek out valuable info, filter, curate. In reality some funnels in this context mutate the message they’re supposed to pass on :-)

Comment by zwaps 1 hour ago

LLMs do all that pretty well :-)

Comment by achenatx 19 minutes ago

the key for managers is like business owners

1) understand what success means for their area 2) assemble a team and remove roadblocks for them to achieve 1.

Comment by avalys 2 hours ago

Firing a bunch of ineffective managers because they can easily be replaced by AI seems like a net improvement to me.

Comment by varjag 2 hours ago

Where are the failed programmers supposed to go then?

Comment by pc86 1 hour ago

Product Management.

Comment by BobbyJo 2 hours ago

The bad ones tend not to be information funnels.

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by Ancalagon 1 hour ago

"What would you say you do here?"

Comment by m0llusk 5 hours ago

might be able to get a fat contract fee from letting Amazon know about that

Comment by baxtr 2 hours ago

Oh dear. I wish middle management was simply "gathering information" from the decks below and reporting it to the bridge.

Comment by aorloff 2 hours ago

Tell you what, why don't we get rid of management altogether and just have a flat org ?

Comment by Bhilai 2 hours ago

> A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals.

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...

Comment by candiddevmike 1 hour ago

IMO, this could be solved by having a finance team with good workflows and a real human resources team/psychologist on staff that would handle all of the interpersonal drama. It's an interesting anecdote but I don't think it was that great of an attempt or structured well enough to work.

Comment by buran77 1 hour ago

> this could be solved

With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that away and brings no insight.

Human beings will always organically organize hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative, one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the end informally you will end up with the same structure. And it's hell to deal with that when formally all have the same authority so none can override each other, but one guy just gathered enough support to do whatever he wants.

Do you think someone far away from everything you do will have a magic "workflow" that tells them what to do about the budget you requested, about the strategic decision you need, or about your conflicts, about who has to do the nice jobs or the shitty ones? And why would they have any say, they're not the boss.

Your logic is no better that those pretending today that a team of AI agents "with good workflows" can just replace all the programmers.

Comment by Aurornis 2 hours ago

Been there, done that. It brings its own set of chaos and office politics. The shadow org structures can be worse than the official ones.

Comment by oblio 2 hours ago

Because social animals have hierarchical social structures.

Comment by toddmorey 2 hours ago

“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”

That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.

Comment by achenatx 18 minutes ago

the answer is build it again and start selling it to other companies.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 51 minutes ago

> “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”

> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.

This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for

At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).

All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.

So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.

All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.

Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.

Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.

Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.

I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)

Comment by paxys 5 hours ago

Did you copy paste this from LinkedIn?

Comment by datsci_est_2015 1 hour ago

lol thank you I was trying to see if anyone else also read this with a raised eyebrow. “Yes so these ICs and other non-management staff are going to be reporting to this LLM and then magic and executives are informed of everything they need to know.”

Comment by babyoil 2 hours ago

You should watch this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527793/

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by aprdm 1 hour ago

If that's his value add as a manager then that's a problem in itself

Comment by learingsci 1 hour ago

Where was he from? Recent hires are sometimes the first to go, depending on certain other factors.

Comment by tshaddox 2 hours ago

> It felt like watching someone who is about to be executed be responsible for building the gallows

Perilaus of Athens designed the Brazen Bull, a hollow bronze statue used to roast victims alive. When he presented it to the tyrant Phalaris, Phalaris was so disgusted by the cruelty of the device that he ordered Perilaus to be the first person tested inside it.

Comment by robotswantdata 2 hours ago

No offence, but this is 5% of what a middle manager does. We automated this task years back without LLMs too.

Comment by SpaceNoodled 2 hours ago

He probably still lives there

Comment by varispeed 4 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by shermantanktop 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by theusus 6 hours ago

Source: Trust me bro

Comment by vile_wretch 5 hours ago

Yes that is how anecdotes work

Comment by dingnuts 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by mayhemducks 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by samus 4 hours ago

> If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the fact that we all have to earn a living

Congrats for making an argument completely disassociated from reality.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 43 minutes ago

I guess people need money to buy food to survive?

> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.

Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.

I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.

Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.

I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.

Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.

Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.

I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)

Comment by dzonga 4 hours ago

Insightful Comment from X - https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=2...

I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them.

And I was still cut.

Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. And if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out.

We're now in the realm of hold onto your nuts -- sink or swim -- ownership of your own company is the only way out

Comment by Aurornis 1 hour ago

That person's pinned message shows that he started his campaign for Congress almost 2 months ago. He says he was laid off today. He's been Tweeting non-stop daily and appears to be working hard on his campaign.

I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at Amazon. It's not something you do in your free time.

His campaign platform also appears to be about AI taking jobs, so I'm more than a little suspicious that getting laid off was part of the plan rather than an actual surprise.

The claim that he "built systems" should also be taken in the context of his job title, which was in product management. I've held the Product Manager title for a few years, but I wouldn't claim "I built" during those times, because I was not the one doing the building. This strikes me as a little misleading.

Also that post is full of classic LLM-ism from beginning to end. Note the overuse of the "It's not this, it's that" format and other LLM tells. I might give someone the benefit of the doubt if they were immersed in LLMs so long that they started speaking like an LLM, but given all of the other context surrounding this post I have a high suspicion it was written by AI.

Comment by embedding-shape 20 minutes ago

> Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at Amazon.

Does that matter? If people vote for him, he'll end up in Congress, regardless of "it matching" or not. The current president is a TV celebrity who ran a bunch of failed businesses, some middle manager from Amazon could surely be in Congress then?

Comment by wasabi991011 6 minutes ago

I think you missed what GP was implying, which is that the tweeter must have been slacking at their Amazon job and spending company time on their congressional run.

Comment by embedding-shape 5 minutes ago

Ah, yes, that might be, that'd make sense too. Thanks.

Comment by dymk 45 minutes ago

7 years at Amazon without being laid off (promoted, in fact) and you blame it on 2 months of what you assume is poor performance

Comment by michaelt 4 minutes ago

In my experience, big corporate employers get extremely nervous when their employees start doing anything high profile (i.e. successful) in the political sphere.

After all, if 250 people report to me, probably some of them are going to have opinion A and some are going to have opinion B. If I take a strong public stance in support of A and against B, some of the more nervous B supporters are going to worry I hate them personally and fear I'm a threat to their career - and they're probably going to go to HR about it.

And even if my job doesn't give me any hiring-and-firing powers - if I'm high profile enough that a load of random haters decide they're going to try to get me fired by subjecting my employer to a campaign of harassment, well, now folks like HR and customer services are getting harassed.

Obviously, though, I've never seen a corporation have a blanket policy saying employees can't engage with the political system - that would be pretty bad as a policy. Instead they'll quote policies about 'bringing the company into disrepute' and similar.

Comment by geodel 37 minutes ago

From my LinkedIn feed I feel those Nigerian princes of past are now Amazon L7 managers.

Comment by Havoc 11 minutes ago

>>This is a rules problem

Oh no, it's much worse. It's a global market working efficiently problem.

Bad news for jobs that can flow over the intertubes...

Comment by levocardia 1 hour ago

What's especially funny is that the post reads exactly like it was written by an AI.

Comment by andai 4 hours ago

Yeah, it looks to me like the best time to be a business owner, and the worst time to be employed.

Comment by allknowingfrog 2 hours ago

Americans pay a pretty hefty health insurance penalty when they leave steady employment to start their own business. There have definitely been better times to be an entrepreneur in this country.

Comment by kg 1 hour ago

Finding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 41 minutes ago

> Finding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine.

If I may ask, what industry are you referring to?

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 36 minutes ago

Europe/ (Anecdotally India, I have seen some good health insurances for what 50$ here?) might have a better time for being business owners as well.

One of the issues in these countries is usually Funding. I am unable to understand how people get money to fund the projects & have people be willing to pay when there are alternatives which will cut you down as well probably burning through their funding in the first place.

Suppose, I want to create a cloud provider, A) ownership costs went up due to ramflation, B) there are now services which are using VC money which will burn insane amount of money to give users for free.

As a person without VC money or without wishing to seek VC money to simply burn it, (I personally much much prefer seedstrapping and bootstraping), the idea of business ownership becomes difficult as well.

Plus don't forget the fact that the idea of getting a customer becomes hard in the first place given how organic mediums are being overwhelmed (like Show HN etc.) and personally the idea of marketing doesn't really click with me of things like paying for this as if its a rent to the overlords like google and facebook smh but I guess if someone's a business owner, they might be forced to play this game.

Comment by i_love_retros 1 hour ago

Was the X poster saying in a very long winded way that his job was taken and lots of our jobs will be taken by foreigners who cost less?

Comment by snafferty 1 minute ago

Yes, and he is running for office on an anti-immigration platform, so I'd take anything he posts with a heap of salt.

Comment by thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago

I wonder what a few years of this mentality will do. Greed is never reasonable. This will have consequences.

Comment by nielsbot 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by ikamm 5 hours ago

Bear in mind Nintendo has ~0.005% of the employees Amazon does

Comment by caminante 4 hours ago

It's also ... Nintendo's share price was stagnant, Japanese business culture...

FWIW, 8,000 (nintendo) / 1,600,000 (Amazon) is 0.005, so 0.5%.

Comment by bgirard 2 hours ago

Revenue per corporate employee are both ~1.5m/corp employee. I think it really comes down to how the company is managed and culture.

Comment by socalgal2 1 hour ago

Nintendo Japan pays its engineers ~$62k a year

https://www.portal.e2r.jp/fixurl/nintendo_career_job/id/4/2?...

Amazon starts at 3x that and goes up

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries

Comment by virtue3 1 hour ago

Some additional context to explain the numbers:

Game industry in general pays like shit - japanese software engineering pays even worse, so double negative modifiers on salaries in this comparison.

source: worked in games, worked at japanese tech company with us division.

Comment by WheatMillington 57 minutes ago

Only off by a factor of 100.

Comment by malfist 3 hours ago

If you exclude non-corporate it's only ~300k.

Comment by nielsbot 2 hours ago

Wow.. that sounds like a huge number..

Comment by HDThoreaun 1 hour ago

Nintendo stock is up 7.5x since 1998, compare that to amazon which is up like 200x. Nintendo shareholders would be pissed about its performance if they were american, cant say how Japanese feel about it given cultural differences.

Comment by msabalau 40 minutes ago

Yeah, sure, starting from 1998 just a year after Amazon went public, when it was still just a glorified online bookstore, is the most relevant and honest comparison one could make to Nintendo.

Comment by etchalon 1 hour ago

Nintendo shareholders seem to have a fundamentally different value set.

I'd argue it's a better one.

Comment by HDThoreaun 1 hour ago

not better for making money

Comment by citizenkeen 37 minutes ago

Yes, that’s the point.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 30 minutes ago

> not better for making money

I guess this is part of the problem. There is a term for this & it's called greed in such sense.

I will admit that I would love juicy returns on my investments as well but this doesn't make me not (admire?) the value set that Nintendo shareholders might have.

But I do feel like the fact that such options exist where pure capitalist greed can operate is the issue in the first place because if you have this option, then it becomes too lucrative for many to ignore not realizing the inner costs (like currently the AI bubble weights but also before that the moral and social implications of something like amazon let's say where workers had to pee in bottles and were so anti against Union that people were shocked when its videos were released in Youtube and effectively has really impacted all the local shops in your local communities impacting the income of members of your local community.

I guess some sort of regulatory action should be called out on but the govt. is lobbied by these mega-corps again as well so :/

Although that being said, Nintendo's really price jacking and becoming EA. and unironically EA is having a turnover and (actually listening to users?)

Comment by focusgroup0 7 hours ago

>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...

Comment by kburman 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by locusofself 1 hour ago

Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have been to India three times on business. When parts of my department's work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was nervous about that.

Comment by kburman 28 minutes ago

I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.

Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new money is.

To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets. If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.

Comment by geodel 24 minutes ago

True. This is Globalism at work. If these companies were not selling goods and services globally then they wouldn't have to deal with setting up offices, staff, pressure from local politicians to hire locals around the world.

Companies hiring more in cheap labor countries is quite obvious for long time. In case of Amazon I feel most of the stuff that was cutting edge 2 decades back is now low value work where cost is the only edge.

Comment by yojat661 6 hours ago

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

Comment by stuaxo 4 hours ago

The US investment link is broken, and most of the UK jobs are in "fullfillment", some of the least fullfilling jobs - piss bottles all round.

Comment by cobolcomesback 3 minutes ago

And the original link about investment in India is also about fulfillment jobs and even worse, “investing in AI”, aka building data centers, which contribute essentially no jobs at all.

Comment by dmix 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by darth_avocado 6 hours ago

Since the HN reaction 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.

Comment by echelon 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by learingsci 1 hour ago

GDP matters very little when I’m homeless.

Comment by incr_me 1 hour ago

Wait why doesn't India get to have these things, too?

Comment by johnnyanmac 3 hours ago

I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.

Comment by dlahoda 2 hours ago

would job hop allowance help?

Comment by toomuchtodo 2 hours ago

Yes, but also salary minimum at top industry percentile to prevent use for wage suppression domestically.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 (Top 40 H-1B employers)

Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)

Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)

H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)

Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)

How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)

Comment by johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

Not fully, the problem is much deeper than compensation. Let's not have large companies game around the slots allotted and using various means to get more slots. And put some serious enforcement on how they justify their H1b's to begin with as a start.

Comment by autokad 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by echelon 4 hours ago

Companies want to cut costs. They will.

If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.

Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened.

Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia.

Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this.

Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea.

We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here.

De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance.

All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects.

America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building.

I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital.

That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America.

Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.

Comment by johnnyanmac 3 hours ago

If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here: well, sure. That would be hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil.

They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.

Comment by dzonga 4 hours ago

> We need to move the cheaper labor here

Very smart & pragmatic.

however political sentiment is going the other way - which is an own goal

Comment by Analemma_ 4 hours ago

You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children.

The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.

Comment by mc32 4 hours ago

Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.

Comment by repstosb 4 hours ago

And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs, etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-citizens.

So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.

Comment by irishcoffee 1 hour ago

Sales tax is actually paid by the vendor, they just pass the cost along. The landlord pays the property tax, they just pass the cost along.

It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any meaningful way.

Comment by lovich 1 hour ago

Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their employer does. I guess we’re all just mooches on society and only the company owners do anything.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by milch 3 hours ago

Immigrants pay social security taxes, unemployment taxes, ... that they also will never be able to benefit from. Those are purely for the benefit of US citizens

Comment by Saline9515 16 minutes ago

It depends if the immigrant is hired because the native worker is deemed too expensive. In this case, it contributes to reducing contributions through wage suppression.

Comment by mc32 2 hours ago

There is a good case for vetted legal immigration (there is need and they fill that unmet need), no question; however, that should not be at the expense of the local population, regardless of country. In other words, the locals should not suffer a depressed job market because of immigration. The whole reason for a state to exist is to first and foremost look after the wellbeing of its citizens that elect the bodies of government.

Comment by 15155 2 hours ago

The vast majority of adults and their children will never pay their tax burden proportionately.

Comment by irishcoffee 2 hours ago

How do you figure that?

Comment by 15155 1 hour ago

Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top 5% pay >61% of all income taxes.

You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a small percentage of individuals.

Comment by Gibbon1 4 hours ago

> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?

That's my opinion.

However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.

And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.

Comment by learingsci 1 hour ago

Guy in San Francisco can move to NJ easier than Mumbai.

Comment by KerrAvon 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by jandrese 5 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by pc86 1 hour ago

Link the job description because I don't believe this is real.

Comment by draygonia 4 hours ago

That seems low. Is it a corporate strategy to set a low salary and when nobody local fills it (because it's below the competitive rate) they get to hire H1-B?

Comment by milch 3 hours ago

No, because H1B has pay requirements. As someone who went through the process with Amazon I can confirm that they definitely do offer you a salary that is in line with the local market. There might be lower incentive for raises down the line, but that's a conspiracy theory at best

Comment by breakpointalpha 3 hours ago

Yes.

Comment by esseph 3 hours ago

That's the commonly used method for more than a decade, yes.

Comment by cyberax 2 hours ago

> Salary is $70,000/year

The lowest allowed limit for such a job is around $140k in areas like Seattle.

Comment by ThePowerOfFuet 2 hours ago

Allowed by whom?

Comment by cyberax 53 minutes ago

By law. H1b requires the wages to be greater than the prevailing wage for similar positions in the region. They are published by DoL: https://flag.dol.gov/wage-data/wage-search

For this kind of experience, you'd be looking for level 2 _minimum_ and likely level 3. For King County in WA it's right now $149240 and $180710 respectively. Level 4 wage is $212202, btw.

Comment by echelon 4 hours ago

Our competitors in another country will have no problem building those products.

Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers.

Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation.

If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive.

So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future.

I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.

Comment by bluecheese452 4 hours ago

If my job is shipped to India today why would I care that twenty years later the boss is Indian instead of American?

Comment by echelon 4 hours ago

> If my job is shipped to India today

Immigration isn't "shipping the job to India". It's bringing the labor here and contributing to our economy. This might have a suppressive force on wages, but it lifts the overall economy and creates more opportunity and demand.

Offshoring is permanent loss. It causes whatever jobs and industry are still here to atrophy and die. The overall economy weakens. Your outlook in retirement will be bleaker.

If you have to pick between the two, it's obvious which one to pick.

Comment by Saline9515 10 minutes ago

Usually the next step of this failed discourse is to explain that locals are so entitled that they don't want to do hard jobs for the minimum wage, due to decades of wage suppression done thanks to immigration.

In France, being a cook used to pay very well, now that most cooks in Paris are from India or Sri Lanka, often without a proper visa or at the minimum wage, no local wants to do this anymore (working conditions are awful).

The industry then whines loudly about "the lack of qualified (cheap) workers"

Comment by thewebguyd 2 hours ago

> This might have a suppressive force on wages

And that's the general problem. People don't care about the overall economy when wages are going down and cost of living is going up. Even myself, I couldn't care less about the overall health of the economy. I care about being able to subsist mine and my family's life style, put food on the table, someday own a home, not live paycheck to paycheck because all the jobs are paying below a living wage, etc.

I'm extremely fortunate to make the salary that I do, but I know plenty of others not so fortunate, in other fields that don't pay nearly as well as tech does, and probably never will. The answer can't be "go into tech" nor should it be "let's suppress wages so labor isn't so expensive for our domestic companies." And obviously offshoring isn't great either.

We can still import talent without suppressing wages, by not abusing the program and actually only importing for roles that truly, beyond all reasonable doubt, could not be filled by a domestic worker.

Comment by jandrese 4 hours ago

Turns out this is a difficult problem with no one good solution. Subjecting labor to a race to the bottom is probably the most efficient individual system from a capitalist standpoint, but it destroys itself just as much as your customers can no longer afford to buy most of the products made. The selfish strategy ruins the entire system if everybody does it.

Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems. Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency because there is far too much information that doesn't make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the decisions down to where the information is, allowing for excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic problems.

So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual arguments over where lines should be drawn.

Comment by johnnyanmac 3 hours ago

Innovation is why american salaries in tech are so high. They funded trillion dollar companies.

If that becomes so much of a commodity that some other countries can do it for pennies on the dime, then yes. Salaries will deflate. But we sure aren't offshoring (nor using most H1bs) to see more innovation. Quite the opposite.

Tech isn't manufacturing where the biggest supply line wins by default. That's why I'm not holding my breath that the US isn't going to be outcompeted on talent anytime soon. Of anything, its own greed will consume it.

Comment by pc86 1 hour ago

You say "we should want open borders" then argue for something that is objectively not open borders. "Open borders" and "controlled immigration" are diametrically opposed things, regardless of whatever liberal limits you're imagining. Almost nobody is arguing for zero immigration.

Comment by jimbob45 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by belter 4 hours ago

Many Software Engineers gone. At L6 and L7 level.

Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/

Comment by cahgnifop 3 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by darth_avocado 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by ericmay 5 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by OJFord 4 hours ago

It's not really on them to think of an example to disprove themselves? Do you have one in mind?

Comment by ericmay 4 hours ago

Ok let's try this another way:

if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will not have a big corporate presence in that country.

Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me, certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove myself.

Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to go do all this work to refute my claims. Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or not, because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

Comment by darth_avocado 4 hours ago

> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.

Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.

And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.

Comment by ericmay 4 hours ago

Here was the OP's claim:

> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.

They made a general claim that a big retailer in a country will have a big corporate presence in that country. I don't know if that's true or not - hence my response.

They didn't claim that a big retailer in India will have a big corporate presence, nor did claim that a retailer approaching 35% of e-commerce must have a large corporate presence in the country. It was an ambiguous claim, which is why I asked a few follow up questions.

> You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.

I didn't make this claim so there's nothing for me to provide.

Comment by darth_avocado 3 hours ago

Here’s the claim you made:

because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

Comment by ericmay 2 hours ago

That was commentary on the poor format of the arguments that were made by the OP and you. It's not a "claim".

But sure, if you insist, Temu is a large online retailer that operates in the United States without a large corporate presence here. QED.

Comment by oblio 1 hour ago

Places like Temu are the exception and they should be banned. Garbage dumpers.

Comment by OJFord 3 hours ago

Sure, they've already done it, Amazon, in India.

Comment by ericmay 3 hours ago

Thanks, let me make some other claims and then you can spend time disproving them. Does that sound like a good idea?

Comment by hintymad 4 hours ago

People may have forgotten what happened back in early 2000s. Outsourcing was all the rage, and people in the US were really concerned. And then it came the explosive growth of internet, of mobile, of cloud, of social network, and etc. And then discussion died or at least dwindled enough that we stopped paying attention.

It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of time for them to own more R&D.

Comment by mips_avatar 1 hour ago

Outsourcing in the 90's/2000's failed because you didn't want to deskill engineers and reduce their scope, you wanted Jeff Dean building pagerank and building Google.

Comment by axpy906 1 hour ago

Based on what Amazon team you are in more than half are born in India. Makes sense they’d be moving operations there.

Comment by fuckinpuppers 6 hours ago

AI = actually Indians

Comment by oytis 7 hours ago

It was pretty obvious what is going to follow axing of H1B

Comment by ferguess_k 6 hours ago

It's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.

Comment by y-curious 6 hours ago

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

Comment by klipt 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by no_wizard 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by fragmede 5 hours ago

> employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs.

I think you misunderstand the point of the system.

Comment by irishcoffee 1 hour ago

> 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 would surprise you to know that Booz Allen laid off 3k people last month then, huh?

Or Boeing laid off 3200 people in September 2025.

You should look these things up before you pop off like that. Three minutes of research is all it takes.

Comment by vidarh 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by znpy 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by repstosb 2 hours ago

Also pretty much every company with a "headquarters" of some kind in Ireland, notoriously including Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

Comment by boogrpants 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by ghurtado 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by throwway120385 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by bluecheese452 4 hours ago

The judges of validity will be the architects of the current system.

Comment by drecked 6 hours ago

Conveniently India and the EU just signed a major trade deal.

Comment by reactordev 6 hours ago

No, I think companies that want to stay competitive will leave the US.

Comment by batshit_beaver 6 hours ago

That's what the third shoe is for - aircraft carriers.

Comment by Jeslijar 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by cucumber3732842 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by hluska 6 hours ago

Canada’s industrial economy was also undamaged. And so, by definition, the US was not the only one.

Comment by ra7 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 15155 2 hours ago

> They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete

They already do.

Comment by greenavocado 5 hours ago

> You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.

This is the value prop of the US military

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by oytis 5 hours ago

It was, at least it worked for Europe, but Trump has seemingly managed to ruin that too.

Comment by juujian 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by belter 1 hour ago

https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230

Comment by no_wizard 5 hours ago

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...

Comment by oytis 4 hours ago

How do you punish them? Have ICE raid their offices? There is already a significant tax benefit for hiring developers domestically.

Comment by alephnerd 4 hours ago

> [p]unish companies that are based in the US and outsource to India. It’ll happen in time if this trend continues

They ain't doing squat.

The Trump admin is encouraging technology transfer to India as part of Pax Silica [0] and GOP politicans in Ag heavy Purple States like Iowa [1] and Montana [2] are trying to mollify India after China pivoted from American to Brazilian soybeans [3] and India began tariffing pulses/lentils [4].

Additonally, Indian ONG majors like Reliance are negotiating with the Trump admin to purchase Venezuelan oil now that Maduro is in custody [5] and India SOEs have starting creating partnerships with ExxonMobil [6], Chevron [7], and Phillips66 [7] to "drill baby drill".

As such, what are you going to do lol - Agriculture and Ag adjacent industries employs 22 million Americans [8] and the Energy sector employs 7 million Americans [9] mostly in Red and Purple states. Software only employs around 2 million Americans [10] in either Blue states or Blue pockets of Red States.

[0] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815

[1] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno...

[2] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-s...

[4] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-dai...

[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-reliance-talk...

[6] - https://www.livemint.com/companies/ongc-exxonmobil-collabora...

[7] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chevron-phillips-66-...

[8] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d...

[9] - https://usafacts.org/articles/renewable-energy-jobs-grew-in-...

[10] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Comment by boelboel 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by cobolcomesback 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by Hasz 6 hours ago

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".

Comment by yodsanklai 7 hours ago

I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.

Comment by rat9988 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by Rijanhastwoears 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by ge96 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by overfeed 3 hours ago

> 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

Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.

Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.

1. Or a laid-off American tech worker

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by x0x0 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by profdevloper 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by BobaFloutist 6 hours ago

>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?

Comment by fragmede 4 hours ago

However many generations it takes for your skin tone to be white. See also: the President's wife.

Comment by x0x0 5 hours ago

Making h1b an automatic track to a green card (partially) removes the ability for employers to exploit employees on an h1b.

Comment by profdevloper 41 minutes ago

Hiring American workers at current market wages avoids this problem entirely.

Comment by weaksauce 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by square_usual 6 hours ago

H1B transfers are easy. You aren't beholden to an employer.

Comment by rkomorn 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by boelboel 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by square_usual 4 hours ago

Great, yes, but you sure as hell don't have "absolute loyalty" to a company.

Comment by johnnyanmac 3 hours ago

Its all relative. A burned out American can drop out tomorrow with no short term plan. H1Bs cannot fo that unless they are ready to go back to their previous country.

Comment by liveoneggs 5 hours ago

You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.

Comment by square_usual 4 hours ago

How is that related to a transfer? If you have a job on an H1b, you can get another job and switch to it any time with a transfer.

Comment by liveoneggs 2 hours ago

re-read OOP, not your own jump to "transfer"

Comment by SilverElfin 5 hours ago

It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out

Comment by ProllyInfamous 6 hours ago

The "problem" is that you have to compensate natives better / treatment.

Comment by adamsb6 6 hours ago

There's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.

Comment by Xirdus 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by Sevii 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by drecked 5 hours ago

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).

Comment by johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

>You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Yes, because overhiring is a lie generated to justify layoffs. I'd hope by year 3 that we'd see through this. If they "overhired", why is hiring still up globally while down in the US?

>You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

What about it? Hiring numbers are still up. Its clearly not replacing workers as of now.

Comment by varjag 6 hours ago

Quality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.

Comment by VirusNewbie 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by SilverElfin 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by toomuchtodo 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by eli_gottlieb 6 hours ago

Then why all the layoffs? You don't fire people you've got a shortage of.

Comment by waynesonfire 6 hours ago

Just look at the open roles for these companies, all India. They're not hiding it. Don't even need H1B.

Comment by pdntspa 5 hours ago

bUt wE wAnT tHe BeSt oF tHe BeSt!!!11

Comment by dheera 6 hours ago

> 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%.

Comment by hajile 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by dheera 5 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by TheOtherHobbes 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by irishcoffee 59 minutes ago

> 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?

Well… you may be answering your own question if you think about it really, really hard.

Comment by liveoneggs 5 hours ago

tell us more about your racial-based hiring

Comment by cultofmetatron 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by rune-dev 6 hours ago

As an American this does not match my experience at all.

What profession were those women looking for?

Comment by johntarter 6 hours ago

Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?

Comment by mghackerlady 4 hours ago

They tend to have personality, which I and most women consider more important than looks or money in my experience

Comment by johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

I don't think most professional athletes are lauded for their "personality".

The other 3, sure. Bartenders need to be good at talking to people to succeed, and artists need to be more eccentric (in a different way from nerds) for their own success.

Comment by linksnapzz 5 hours ago

Those are the ones they fool around with; not the ones they marry.

Comment by irishcoffee 56 minutes ago

Ha yeah. “You’re a really interesting person and a great fuck, but you don’t make enough money for this to be serious”

the same person, a short while later

“Why doesn’t anyone love me!?”

Comment by ipaddr 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 3 hours ago

> climate change scientists

They aren't known for making a lot of money, but I guess "I'm saving the world" is an attractive quality in a mate.

Comment by mghackerlady 4 hours ago

Has it ever occurred to you that all those fields have one thing in common? it's empathy. The people in those positions tend to not be the kind to murder you when you say no. Not saying that's true for blue collar men, but the odds are significantly higher. Also doctors and lawyers naturally tend to be around doctors and lawyers, that's hardly the crazy observation you seem to think it is

Comment by johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

Sure but that doesn't fit the notion of "being a software engineer is a turnoff".

Comment by shimman 4 hours ago

Tech industry has no problems working with state police forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.

We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.

Maybe the kids are alright after all?

Comment by johnnyanmac 2 hours ago

What industry has put actual resistance to these in these times? Plenty of Hollywood has wool over their eyes (though a few are starting to speak out), Sports bent the knee for a full year (especially FIFA), law firms capitulated, hospitals aren't gonna lose their massive profit margins over the health care stuff.

No industry is coming out of this with a clean bill of health. You as an individual can only choose to not work with the most evil ones.

Comment by shimman 14 minutes ago

Industries don't, people do. One thing to keep in mind is that corporations have always worked with fascism, they will never resist but workers can. Sabotage takes many forms and one can just look at how Dutch resistance worked against the Nazis.

You can do many things to sabotage that are nonviolent and also highly effective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance

I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

Comment by johnnyanmac 2 minutes ago

[delayed]

Comment by mghackerlady 4 hours ago

I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm not most women though.

Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)

Comment by vineyardmike 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by tmoertel 6 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by mghackerlady 4 hours ago

Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"

Comment by dheera 5 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by efskap 3 hours ago

What's an American name? Are you referring to WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) names?

Comment by SilverElfin 5 hours ago

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The most important paper in the AI era was written by a team of immigrants.

Comment by boelboel 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by VirusNewbie 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by yodsanklai 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by zdragnar 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by drecked 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by circus1540 45 minutes ago

The conspiracy here is that somehow US spending on primary/secondary education ranks among the top, yet we are unable to produce competitive college students. And we mask this very serious problem from directly rippling into our economy by... importing students and workers.

Comment by a99p 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by coliveira 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by pickleRick243 6 hours ago

Better for whom?

Comment by mattnewton 6 hours ago

Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.

Comment by eli_gottlieb 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by eli_gottlieb 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by yodsanklai 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by ipaddr 5 hours ago

They pay the top Indian firms for candidate referrals. And a CEO would say we need more diversity and make that a company goal.

Comment by SoftTalker 6 hours ago

"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.

Comment by snerbles 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by hajile 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by pram 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by hajile 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by malshe 4 hours ago

If you read this person's comments, looks like they are just making up crap. Apparently this one person has met or interviewed all the Indian H1Bs in the US.

Comment by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 6 hours ago

Nothing to do with it, just following a trend before the attacks: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-nadella-pledges-3-b...

Comment by oytis 7 hours ago

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

Comment by nerdponx 6 hours ago

Imagine that! It's almost like it's coordinated. Surely the US government would never do something like that on purpose.

Comment by oytis 4 hours ago

I can't imagine Donald Trump would harm the US on purpose.

Comment by nerdponx 4 hours ago

He absolutely would harm some people in the US to benefit other people in the US. The same is true for many many other businesspeople and politiciansl

Comment by conductr 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by unyttigfjelltol 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by conductr 1 hour ago

How small can that slice be though?

It’s only really needed on true blue ocean innovation and where the company has to find the skills where they exist. If that’s the US, then sure they’ll continue some small slice of employment here for those projects. But as you said, a majority of software is a commodity now (has been for a long time, really). I don't feel like many companies are doing much innovative anymore and I feel people severely underestimate the talent present in other countries. So, even if you pointed to 10 innovation projects at Amazon then I could counter by saying even 85% of those teams could be in India.

Comment by jajuuka 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by Buttons840 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by nerdponx 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by GoatInGrey 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by browningstreet 6 hours ago

The AI of ten years ago is not the AI of now...

Comment by Buttons840 37 minutes ago

The AI of today can do more, yes. But the path to funding and success doesn't require actual AI use, just the appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual product.

The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.

Comment by sifar 6 hours ago

But the scam is still the same.

Comment by conductr 6 hours ago

"do things that don't scale" and what not

Comment by belter 6 hours ago

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...

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by indigodaddy 7 hours ago

Maybe the support scammers can get some real jobs as prompt engineers? Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.

Comment by throwup238 7 hours ago

> Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.

More AWS outages means more breaks from work?

Comment by bravetraveler 7 hours ago

Sorry, VP says we're migrating. What? Will they see it through? Of course not!

Comment by still-learning 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by marcosdumay 2 hours ago

The US was setting itself for quite a recovery in 2024... and for a class war too, so IDK what would get there first.

Comment by baxtr 7 hours ago

I mean maybe that's the good news. There is huge potential for an upswing!

Comment by energy123 5 hours ago

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).

Comment by guerrilla 1 hour ago

I think you're grossly underestimating European naivete. You probably did fuck up your relationship with Canada though. They didn't seem happy about that one.

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by knowitnone3 6 hours ago

So Putin is culling his people so the next generation can have more!

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by sejje 7 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by notTooFarGone 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by nxm 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by threecheese 3 hours ago

I keep seeing this “marginally higher” statement about prices, usually as part of a “things are actually fine” argument, but everything in my life has increased in cost in a way I just don’t understand. Is it that these are counterbalanced in some way making it not macroeconomically relevant?

Comment by hypeatei 5 hours ago

> "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.

Comment by caminante 3 hours ago

> I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon

This is moving the goalpost because you know economists (the critics) forecasted major inflation sooner/now, and it hasn't happened.

> Care to list those? [...] it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.

You're not making sense or making coherent thoughts. The US is still the #2 exporting country in the world in absolute terms despite importing a relatively higher amount.

Comment by hypeatei 3 hours ago

> This is moving the goalpost because you know economists (the critics) forecasted major inflation sooner/now

Yes, because no one expected him to chicken out as hard as he did. It also came out that people in his cabinet (specifically Howard Lutnick) were betting against tariffs while simultaneously advocating for them. The legal opinion is heavily leaning towards them being illegal after many lower court decisions. Do you care to explain how tariffs wouldn't be inflationary if the actions matched the rhetoric?

> The US is still the #2 exporting country

Are you being intentionally obtuse? Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more than it exports? A ___ based economy?

Comment by caminante 3 hours ago

> Do you care to explain how tariffs wouldn't be inflationary if the actions matched the rhetoric?

It's like you're asking people to explain something that happened as if there's no explanation beyond your hatred of Trump. Why do you choose to dismiss drivers like stockpiling inventory, increased USMCA compliance, broader economic offsets (AI/tech boom, energy production) that could explain how tariffs aren't necessarily inflationary?

> Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more...

You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.

Comment by hypeatei 2 hours ago

> Why do you choose to dismiss drivers like stockpiling inventory, increased USMCA compliance, broader economic offsets (AI/tech boom, energy production)

Okay, so you're admitting that they're inflationary but choose to rattle off a list of random stuff that somehow, magically, offsets the increased costs from tariffs. Please go into detail on one of those, including what you're talking about (e.g. what is "increased USCMA compliance"?)

AI datacenters have increased energy costs in the localities where they're based and raised memory prices by eating up all the supply.

> You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.

So.. you were agreeing with my point then? I don't understand why you'd call my thoughts "not coherent" then agree with it.

Comment by caminante 2 hours ago

> Okay, so you're admitting that they're inflationary but choose to rattle off a list of random stuff that somehow, magically, offsets the increased costs from tariffs.

Haha! I haven't seen someone try to dismiss counterarguments as "magic." I should've said that more when I got answers wrong on my tests in high school.

> So.. you were agreeing with my point then?

If not "magic," then the objector "actually agrees" with you.

Comment by hypeatei 2 hours ago

I asked you to elaborate since you didn't explain anything, hence the use of "magic" which is sometimes referred to as hand waving. I'll take your non-response as a sign that you're not interested in elaborating for reasons.

Comment by lovich 1 hour ago

You’re arguing that tariffs aren’t inflationary by bringing up other events affecting the economy, which I agree with ‘hypeatei needs explaining, but even assuming those do offset the tariffs you’re still incorrect.

Tariffs definitionally are inflationary.

Comment by caminante 23 minutes ago

>You’re arguing that tariffs aren’t inflationary by bringing up other events affecting the economy

Huh? You're not reading what I said and instead are relying on accusations. It's also weird to say direct behaviors triggered by tariffs don't play into realized inflation. That's mental gymnastics.

>Tariffs definitionally are inflationary.

No. Weird thing to be confidently incorrect about. Tariffs are price increasing (colloquially "inflationary"), but not definitionally inflationary in the economic meaning. Look it up.

Comment by dragonwriter 15 minutes ago

> Tariffs are price increasing (colloquially "inflationary"), but not definitionally inflationary in the economic meaning. Look it up.

Weird (okay, not all that weird, but ironic, in context) thing to be confidently incorrect about.

Outside of the overtly ideology-over-description Austrian School of economics, which has a different jargon designed to advance their ideology, the general definition of (unqualified) inflation in economics is a sustained increase in general price levels.

And belief that the Austrian School usage is just the “economic meaning” is a pretty good sign that someone doesn't understand even Austrian School economics beyond rote recitation of doctrines and aphorisms.

Comment by crims0n 6 hours ago

Isn't China currently stuck in a deflation loop?

Comment by AnotherGoodName 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by rsanek 6 hours ago

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...

Comment by hypeatei 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by derf_ 5 hours ago

> 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-...

Comment by AnotherGoodName 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by caminante 3 hours ago

I thought you were joking with you earlier comments.

> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health

> The stock market [] tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average

Now, you're saying the following, when there's no strong positive link.

> The stocks go up more or less with inflation

Comment by hypeatei 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by sejje 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by hypeatei 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by zug_zug 7 hours ago

I think the talk was significant inflation, because everything will cost more. And it does.

Comment by sejje 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by embedding-shape 7 hours ago

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?

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by nemomarx 7 hours ago

if you look at non ai / tech stuff, isn't the economy pretty bad? they stopped reporting unemployment numbers and BLS statistics and all

Comment by scottLobster 6 hours ago

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

Comment by sejje 6 hours ago

So it wasn't what they expected?

Comment by scottLobster 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by sejje 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by scottLobster 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by sejje 4 hours ago

I felt it, because I believed the tariffs would tank the economy.

Now I'm rethinking my position.

Comment by rozap 3 hours ago

Bröther look at the value of USD.

People are fleeing to gold.

Comment by xpe 2 hours ago

Smart people talk about differential impact; i.e compare what we’re seeing today against the counterfactual. / I’m not aware of solid reasoning that argues in favor of tariffs, differentially speaking. / I’m happy to look at models that aren’t a waste of time.

Comment by malshe 4 hours ago

That's because Trump gave many extensions and concessions to so many countries. Remember there was 125% on China in May 2025 before Xi decided to use rare earth minerals to fight back. Maybe you have heard of TACO. So the tariffs as threatened never panned out in reality.

Comment by goatlover 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by sejje 6 hours ago

So Trump's tariffs didn't tank the economy because everyone outsmarted him?

Comment by cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago

Because the advertised quantity of tariffs exceeded the actual reality.

Comment by esseph 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by otikik 7 hours ago

It’s going to be so great. Everyone’s will notice it. Just you wait.

Comment by 1970-01-01 7 hours ago

AI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in every recession.

Comment by riddlemethat 7 hours ago

AI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management. Probably displacing some of those jobs.

Comment by GoatInGrey 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by bluescrn 7 hours ago

And 'The economy' is just the disguise for getting rid of expensive workers and hiring cheaper workers elsewhere in the world.

Comment by seinvak 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by layer8 4 hours ago

Amazon is mostly laying off managers, however, not developers.

Comment by Hamuko 7 hours ago

The US economy is mostly AI at this point.

Comment by baxtr 7 hours ago

Artificially Inflated?

Comment by bluescrn 7 hours ago

About to Implode

Comment by knowitnone3 6 hours ago

Afghani Insurgents

Comment by cucumber3732842 6 hours ago

Alarmingly indebted.

Comment by yakshaving_jgt 1 hour ago

Amazing Indians.

Comment by jhatemyjob 1 minute ago

Looks like they laid off a bunch of bean counters. Raw skills are still in demand

Comment by tchalla 6 hours ago

Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon

https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198

Comment by guerrilla 1 hour ago

I'm not reading all that. I thought tweets were supposed to be short. What the hell happened?

Comment by maxbond 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_limit#On_Twitter

> In November 2017, Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 characters. In 2023, Twitter boosted the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, it was increased to 4000. In April, it was again increased to 10,000, and in June, to 25,000.

Comment by guerrilla 1 hour ago

I remember 280, but jesus things clearly got out of control.

Comment by ribosometronome 1 hour ago

The sink got let in.

Comment by paxys 6 hours ago

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".

Comment by mettamage 3 hours ago

The solution according to the poster is regulation made by experts which is why he's running for Congress. It's maybe not the solution you were hoping for but it is the solution he proposes :)

Comment by al_borland 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by frogperson 1 hour ago

That is obviously a problem for next quarter.

Comment by ThrowawayTestr 1 hour ago

Unions that can negotiate contracts that have consequences for mass layoffs.

Comment by mcntsh 5 hours ago

He says:

1. Strong data governance 2. Tax implications for layoffs (offshoring?)

Comment by nateglims 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by iLoveOncall 2 hours ago

This and being based in Houston, TX, where as far as I know no organization has a hub location.

Besides entire teams or business units, the targets were people who did not comply to RTO or were not sitting with their teams.

Comment by MonkeyClub 6 hours ago

> I saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress.

Well, that's one way to go for that next job.

Comment by malfist 6 hours ago

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

Comment by stephencoyner 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by el_nahual 5 hours ago

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.

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.

Comment by layer8 4 hours ago

Or c) Amazon knew about his running for Congress.

Comment by tclancy 6 hours ago

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

Comment by gamegoblin 4 hours ago

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

Comment by evanelias 2 hours ago

Yikes, the "[contraction] just" phrases on that campaign website alone are really over the top. Horrendously inauthentic writing, whether it's AI or not:

"wasn't just a job; it was a profound responsibility"

"This isn't just a statistic; it's a sign that we need to re-evaluate how we support those who serve"

"My experience isn't just about past success; it's about understanding the logistics, technology, and economic realities that shape the job market now and how we can create future opportunities right here."

"This experience didn't just teach me about law and order; it taught me about managing complex operations under pressure, the critical need for clear strategy, and the importance of unwavering integrity when the stakes are high – lessons desperately needed in Congress today."

"This campaign isn't just about me; it's about us."

All from the same page. Pretty nauseating.

Comment by volkk 2 hours ago

can someone even prove that this guy is real and not an AI persona at this point? like, at what point do we have AI agents running for govt with a warm meatsack acting on behalf of them?

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by ericmcer 6 hours ago

"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.

Comment by albatross79 3 hours ago

Yeah these bums better get with the program. If The Company needs you to uproot your life and move to Timbuktu start packing or hit the bricks pal.

Comment by khazhoux 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by sergiotapia 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by vitaflo 5 hours ago

Factory workers said that in the 90s too. Didn’t work out to well for them.

Comment by albatross79 2 hours ago

It didn't, but it got us Trump too, so there's that. Let's see what happens this time.

Comment by sergiotapia 2 hours ago

Generally speaking the boomer generation has a different set of ideals from gen-x/millennials, and they are on the way out of shot calling. I don't think things repeat.

Comment by paganel 6 hours ago

It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.

Comment by tannerc 6 hours ago

What exactly indicates the post was AI generated?

Comment by Rebelgecko 39 minutes ago

$foo isn't just $bar, it's actually $baz

Comment by volkk 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by tannerc 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by volkk 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by tannerc 5 hours ago

So you have zero evidence to convey something you claim is “obvious”? Got it.

Comment by volkk 1 hour ago

here's your evidence, tanner https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m

I'm not going to say i told you so, but you should utilize these tools more before you start arguing, especially when it's so goddamn obvious

Comment by layer8 4 hours ago

If you can’t explain it, then you don’t actually understand it.

Comment by volkk 4 hours ago

i just don't feel like enumerating all of the common patterns ai slop produces. again, if you don't see this as obvious, i can tell you're clearly not using this stuff often enough (which might be a good thing)

Comment by layer8 3 hours ago

The thing is, these stylistic patterns existed before AI, and weren’t completely atypical. Maybe you’re using LLMs so much that you’re over-associating them with AI now. Or maybe the author is using LLMs so much that he’s unconsciously adopted some of the patterns in his own writing.

Comment by toraway 1 hour ago

Well he literally confirms it was from ChatGPT in a later reply, so there's that.

And his original draft is conspicuously missing the telltale "it's not X -- it's Y" and overall breathless dramatic flair that people like the poster you're replying to (correctly) picked up on.

https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m

Comment by volkk 1 hour ago

i think the much higher probability isn't that this guy wrote literally like an LLM before LLMs came out, but rather that he just used an LLM to write all of it. You can see even more of these examples directly on his campaign site.

Comment by toraway 1 hour ago

And despite the downvotes, you were correct.

https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m

Comment by volkk 28 minutes ago

thank you. even without this tweet, i was willing to die on this hill. certainly feels nice to place these obnoxious HN know-it-alls into their place.

Comment by duckmysick 5 hours ago

> i dunno how else to prove it to you

A prompt to generate similar output would be a good start.

Comment by volkk 1 hour ago

how's this for your prompt, pal https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m

hopefully that's enough of a good start and a good end for this conversation

Comment by esseph 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by khazhoux 6 hours ago

It’s pretty sad that when people write well now, others dismiss it as AI.

Comment by shimman 1 hour ago

The author literally admits to using AI in the preceding comments...

Comment by AnotherGoodName 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by volkk 20 minutes ago

i don't think that's what this means. it just means to me a certain population of people are clueless and don't use these tools enough. what's _actually_ damaging/obnoxious are the ones arguing that this guy is a good writer and that this isn't AI. IMO, telling the difference can be as simple as looking for the common giveaways, or as complex as reading between the lines of the structure of sentences, the terrible adjectives, and the soullessness of it. If you have half a brain and are well read, you can _probably_ tailor these LLMs to write in a way that reads better. But, it requires people to read a lot of content and literature to understand what good writing is, and this contrived, overly convoluted soulless soup of words is certainly not an example of it.

Comment by paganel 4 hours ago

It's not written "well", it lacks that human touch, especially when writing about such a sensible subject, such as getting fired. It's too cold, actually too well written from a syntactic pov, which makes it inauthentic hence most probably AI.

Comment by volkk 6 hours ago

is it me or is this ai slop

Comment by nabbed 6 hours ago

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).

Comment by Sevii 6 hours ago

100%

Comment by volkk 6 hours ago

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

Comment by arjie 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by fishingisfun 6 hours ago

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

Comment by arjie 6 hours ago

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...

Comment by franktankbank 6 hours ago

Amazon has 150k in India alone, presumably corporate? So now you are looking at closer to 7%.

Comment by seinvak 6 hours ago

Who said employees in India are unaffected by these layoffs?

Comment by franktankbank 6 hours ago

ASML isn't laying off their blue collar labor and neither is Amazon. Apples to Apples would be US based corporate numbers.

Comment by criddell 1 hour ago

This always feels like the result of leadership too scared to build. It's so much safer and easier to tear down.

Amazon spent a lot of time and money and built a top-tier workforce. But now they are out of ideas for what these people can do? They don't have any untapped opportunities left? No projects that never quite made it to the top of the stack? No deferred maintenance that could be taken care of now?

Comment by gonzo41 53 minutes ago

They could put that engineering effort to unifying the AWS console. :D.

Comment by paxys 7 hours ago

Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".

Comment by rich_sasha 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by nicoburns 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by ryandrake 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by kindatrue 6 hours ago

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...

Comment by rich_sasha 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by didibus 5 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by rich_sasha 4 hours ago

I'd say these are symptoms (and I'm not denying them) rather than causes. My point is that it's hard to find hard data that would say the economy is doing poorly. Even unemployment, which is your top line, seems... fine?

I just don't understand where the squeeze is coming from. Either companies figured out how to do more with less people, or they started the cycle with too many people, or they don't know what they are doing. Undoubtedly they are laying people off, especially in tech. But I he symptoms you list don't explain it to me.

Comment by nicoburns 18 minutes ago

Cause wise, we probably shouldn't ignore the delayed hangover from covid. But also the longer term trends towards an economy that is extractive rather than productive, and increasingly unequal, neither of which are sustainable.

Comment by no_wizard 5 hours ago

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

Comment by TheOtherHobbes 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by bdamm 6 hours ago

2008/09 was the worst this xennial ever saw so I think you're as qualified as most of us.

Comment by hajile 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by JohnnyMarcone 2 hours ago

The fed was taking action by increasing rates up until the housing market collapsed, so at least some were taking the issues seriously.

I don't have the full context of what the thinking was back then since I was in highschool.

Comment by loeg 6 hours ago

2008 was a lot worse.

Comment by cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by paxys 6 hours ago

By what metrics?

Comment by jeffbee 6 hours ago

Yeah, that's one perspective :-) Objectively, the global labor market is the hottest it has been in modern history.

Comment by loeg 6 hours ago

Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard from a year before 2020, yeah.

Comment by eli_gottlieb 6 hours ago

Which is why governments and firms in the capitalist core are trying to cool it down?

Comment by jeffbee 6 hours ago

There is a case to be made that wage spirals are bad, actually.

Comment by ceejayoz 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by culi 6 hours ago

> 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

Comment by rich_sasha 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by DiggyJohnson 6 hours ago

how does that relate to the comment you're replying to?

Comment by culi 5 hours ago

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

Comment by pibaker 4 hours ago

It is an open secret among the ownership class that the labor market got too good for the workers around 2021-2022 especially for tech. What you are seeing now is a possibly colluded squeeze on tech employment to keep the workers on their toes and stay docile and servile.

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by paxys 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by themafia 1 hour ago

The value of money halved in the past 5 years.

Salaries did not double in that same time.

That's why they're doing this. They can. Laissez-faire is the current regime of capitalism we live in.

Comment by oblio 1 hour ago

Your comment is wildly out of context.

This specific company is now the 5th most profitable company on the planet and its FOSS projects are pitiful and 99% fully self serving.

Comment by John23832 2 hours ago

> 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-cannes open source projects.

The same way they hire so many people for so much money to work on AI projects and build datacenter which haven't produced actual revenue for any customers (corporate or otherwise). I'd rather light money on fire to employ people tbh.

I say this as someone who has the 200 dollar Claude sub.

Comment by computerphage 6 hours ago

Why isn't the AI story believable? It seems to me that AI is getting more and more productive

Comment by mrwaffle 6 hours ago

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?

Comment by chankstein38 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by bopbopbop7 6 hours ago

Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?

Comment by medvezhenok 6 hours ago

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)

Comment by bwestergard 4 hours ago

"What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?"

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix.

I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).

Comment by no_wizard 4 hours ago

There are two sides to this that I see:

First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology that purports to be the next big revolution in computing to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the expansive use of desktop computing and productivity increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following

>Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3]

Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with around 2-2.5% annual gain.

Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in productivity they are having is not driving overall costs down relative to the gains, in large part because you aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of productivity.

[0]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-...

[1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to show up, particularly in the software field (in fact, GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance)

[2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew up the awareness of LLMs

[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/estimating-productivity-g...

Comment by bopbopbop7 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by miltonlost 6 hours ago

Ai is definitely able to sling out more and more lines of code, yes. Whether those LOC are productive...?

Comment by chankstein38 5 hours ago

Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and 1000 npm dependencies!

Comment by chasd00 1 hour ago

and 2+2 will output 4 almost all the time.. just like a human would.

Comment by antonvs 6 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by rob74 6 hours ago

...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?

Comment by JeremyNT 4 hours ago

I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products!

It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.

Comment by lm28469 7 hours ago

10 days later: Amazon to hire 16 000 new workers in its new remote Indian campus

Comment by nateglims 5 hours ago

The layoff includes people in India.

Comment by Insanity 7 hours ago

“Overhiring during the pandemic” was a common, senseless, catchphrase a few years ago.

Comment by larkost 2 hours ago

I think the thing to remember is that with interest rates being essentially 0 during the (middle/end of) pandemic that made it really easy for a lot of companies to finance a virtually free checkbook. They were at liberty to try out all sorts of new experiments, virally for free (at that moment).

Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.

Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.

Comment by thewebguyd 7 hours ago

Amazon just recently used that excuse for their 2025 layoffs a few months ago iirc.

Comment by paxys 7 hours ago

Ah yeah completely forgot that one.

Comment by b65e8bee43c2ed0 7 hours ago

yeah. pretending to innovate rather than just shed ZIRP-era deadweight. like IBM laid off a few thousand "due to AI" in 2023, lol.

Comment by trgn 7 hours ago

"ZIRP-era deadweight"

that's 3-4 years ago now

Comment by scottLobster 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by SoftTalker 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by ryandrake 6 hours ago

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?

Comment by browningstreet 6 hours ago

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..

Comment by scottLobster 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by elzbardico 6 hours ago

This is really complicated in big companies.

Comment by SoftTalker 4 hours ago

Yep especially where the number of reports on an org chart matters to a Director or AVP.

Comment by heliumtera 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by whatever1 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by scottLobster 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by locknitpicker 7 hours ago

> 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".

Comment by scottLobster 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by Apocryphon 6 hours ago

The comment was likely less about positive corporate spin, more about rumors of Amazon's allegedly grueling, PIP-centered culture.

Comment by scottLobster 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by Ancalagon 7 hours ago

Yeah you cannot blame ZIRP anymore, you’d look like a fool at this point

Comment by finolex1 7 hours ago

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

Comment by bluGill 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by micromacrofoot 6 hours ago

They're increasingly intertwined these days, so it's not much of a lie

Comment by 29athrowaway 7 hours ago

AI is the perfect scapegoat.

Insurance providers are also doing it.

AI is also used in the legal space too.

Comment by shevy-java 6 hours ago

Quite true. Many corporations use AI as excuse to "re-structure" their internal and external costs.

Comment by maximedupre 6 hours ago

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

Comment by bjt12345 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by Rebelgecko 37 minutes ago

Seems sus, even if they got rid of half the managers, would that add up to the layoffs they've done?

Comment by iLoveOncall 2 hours ago

Yes but this is a lie, a vast majority of the cuts in both rounds from October and today have been individual contributors, not managers.

Comment by petersellers 1 hour ago

Do you have a source for that?

Comment by maximedupre 5 hours ago

Ah thanks for clearing that up.

Comment by antonyh 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 16mb 4 hours ago

I have been noticing recently that the level of quality of Amazon support has been dropping steadily. And I’ve also been trying to do the same, shopping elsewhere.

Comment by Loughla 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by joshstrange 1 hour ago

Sometimes yes but this not apple-to-apples unfortunately. Shipping and support are two places where Amazon _currently_ reigns supreme. Getting an item fast and returning an item easily are often lacking in alternative marketplaces.

I do try to buy stuff directly but so many times I order it and then it comes 10+ days later and often very little info upfront or during about when I will receive the order. I ordered from a website the other day where it said Dec 22nd delivery, it came mid-January and support was unhelpful (parroting the FAQ, might have been a LLM).

Now, I've head great experiences purchasing directly as well. The Smartest House [0] is where I buy everything I can smart-home-related. Their pricing is excellent, their shipping is fast, and their support is top-notch. I had a problem with 1 device, they got on a call and tried to fix it, then when that didn't work, they shipped me a replacement.

So I agree, there are great alternative out there and I also like B&H. I just wish it was easier to be (more) sure about how quick something will ship or how easy returns will actually be. Finding consistently good merchants online sometimes feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

[0] https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/

Comment by mvdtnz 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by krustyburger 5 hours ago

But what if you want Amazon Basics brand batteries or counterfeit health products?

Comment by esseph 5 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by mvdtnz 2 hours ago

No, you and people like you drove them out of business by switching to Amazon.

Comment by 33MHz-i486 6 hours ago

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)

Comment by VirusNewbie 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by reliabilityguy 1 hour ago

> Amazon uses TPUs more than it uses graviton, it trains on GCP

Can you share a source for this claim? Graviton is a CPU, it would be strange to train LLM (I assume you meant LLMs) on a CPU.

Comment by VirusNewbie 3 minutes ago

oops I meant tranium.

Comment by cmiles8 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by glimshe 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by paxys 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by reliabilityguy 1 hour ago

> The revolving door helps keep costs low because employees leave before the bulk of their stock grants have vested.

I am not sure it applies to Amazon though. Amazon in the first year pays bonus in cash to compensate for 5% of the RSUs vesting. So, they actually loosing cash if people are let go after a year.

Comment by aoeusnth1 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by ApolloFortyNine 1 hour ago

Yea I had to Google their total headcount when I saw the headline since the number does sound high, but in reality is only 5%.

When you factor in low performers and how most people here would view middle management in any other topic thread, it's not that insane. If in a pool of 20 workers around you, you can't find 1 worker you don't think is a step below the others, your hiring pipeline is better than most.

Comment by dodobirdlord 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by xeromal 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by fullshark 7 hours ago

One disturbing possibility is us laborers aren't as important we think we are.

Comment by lbrito 6 hours ago

They hire like crazy. There is unfortunately no shortage of people wanting to work there.

They also hire to fire to meet pip quotas.

Comment by jansan 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by bickfordb 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by physicsguy 7 hours ago

Makes a dent when they fire at the high salary end and rehire at lower salaries.

Comment by nemomarx 7 hours ago

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

Comment by lightbendover 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by yearesadpeople 45 minutes ago

It does have the feel of a tactical crouch and hold position by Amazon. AI / LLM for the masses is still just a bet, and perhaps an overly invested bet

Comment by brandensilva 2 hours ago

They called it project dawn which is telling what they have in mind with these layoffs.

Comment by mahmoudhossam 7 hours ago

Alexa, insert David and Victoria Beckham "be honest" meme

Comment by jimbokun 7 hours ago

What's the real reason for the layoffs?

Comment by el_nahual 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by jimbokun 3 hours ago

Thanks for an insightful answer!

Comment by otikik 7 hours ago

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

Comment by jandrese 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by LunaSea 7 hours ago

Unstable and uncertain economy

Comment by paxys 6 hours ago

To lower costs

Comment by lightbendover 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by siliconc0w 7 hours ago

We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.

Comment by ProllyInfamous 6 hours ago

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).

Comment by batshit_beaver 6 hours ago

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).

Comment by ProllyInfamous 1 hour ago

Swiss franc is strongest of fiats — but still fiat.

Many historians of many generations contend that debased currencies fail first slowly, then fast.

Watching gold has been eye-opening to all living generations. Just a few months ago my lawyer didn't believe me when I told him "gold just broke four thousand dollars!" [day of this post gold hit ATH of $5400]

Comment by mschuster91 6 hours ago

> 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)

Comment by ProllyInfamous 1 hour ago

I think not physically holding your bullion is equivalent to not your keys, not your crypto.

I do small amounts of both.

Comment by Spivak 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by shevy-java 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by kjsingh 4 hours ago

If you have to post this, you are the reason for fear factor:

Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.

Comment by taswellian 2 hours ago

What do you mean? Who is "we" and "our"?

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by sp1982 4 hours ago

My data is a bit incomplete for amazon but here is some analysis on where they seem to be focusing based on job postings:

https://jobswithgpt.com/company-profiles/amazon/

Comment by rballpug 1 hour ago

NES to the other. Drink to the only with cyanide.

Comment by madduci 6 hours ago

So new AWS outages can be expected

Comment by kleiba 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by wanderr 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by romanovcode 6 hours ago

- 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.

Comment by reliabilityguy 1 hour ago

Can you explain in more details how changing h1b rules leads to layoffs?

Comment by ihsw 6 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by tonymet 2 hours ago

> Leave your affordable neighborhood with good schools to keep your job

> RTO to Seattle / Bay Area to a dingy condo , with diligence , at enormous personal expense

> Laid off a 18 mo later. CEO says "i'm taking responsibility" , no responsibility taken.

Comment by elzbardico 6 hours ago

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

Comment by hit8run 1 hour ago

I’ve seen Bezos’s yacht and can tell you he is creating new jobs! His yacht is accompanied by a supply vessel that carries staff, food, etc. At least 20 people work on the secondary boat!

Comment by stego-tech 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by sashank_1509 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by Ronsenshi 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by alephnerd 7 hours ago

All functions in Amazon are heavily impacted - especially AWS and WWOps.

Comment by robaato 3 hours ago

Is it a coincidence that my Amazon (UK) checkout is repeatedly hitting an error page at the moment?!

Comment by throwaway150 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by dh2022 2 hours ago

I think a lot of laid-off programmers would settle for any job in this environment... It is a employer market definitely.

Comment by varispeed 4 hours ago

> what it is that make IT people get a job there?

The job market is toast, so people take whatever they can.

Comment by WoodenChair 6 hours ago

"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."

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by justinlords 6 hours ago

amazon is really doing it's things now, i say to stay cautious

Comment by albatross79 2 hours ago

What a shithole of a company, why does anyone work there, is it just all H1B slaves there now?

Comment by brewdad 4 hours ago

Funny enough, I have an acquaintance who has been job hunting for almost a year. They are expecting an offer from Amazon Corporate later this week or early next week. They are early in their career and will cost less to hire, so it still makes sense I guess.

Comment by heathrow83829 6 hours ago

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

Comment by arisAlexis 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 7 hours ago

Official post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793906)

Comment by Ancalagon 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by apercu 7 hours ago

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).

Comment by jimbokun 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by otikik 7 hours ago

“It was Bill, but he got laid off”. It doesn’t need to be confusing.

Comment by watwut 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by GrinningFool 4 hours ago

But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was responsible, and now is gone. So what exactly are they supposed to say? In the context of the GP's post, that seems to be the point - there is no longer anybody there who is responsible for X anymore.

Comment by watwut 2 hours ago

> So what exactly are they supposed to say?

Several options, pretty much all of them involve being actually cooperative rather then intentionally unhelpful. If Bill was part of some other team, point to that team or its leader.

If he was in your team, you or leader can ask about what the person wants and move from there. Maybe you can actually answer the question. Maybe the proper reaction involves raising jira ticket. Maybe the answer is "we are probably not going to do that anymore". It all depends on what the person who came with the question wants.

> But it doesn't change that Bill was the person who was responsible, and now is gone.

The other people are still there. And the team IS responsible for X. And without doubt, they are fully responsible for helping figure out who should be contacted now and what should be done.

That is normal part of work after any reorganization.

Comment by otikik 1 hour ago

You assume too much.

I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by anyone.

It doesn't necessarily even mean that the organization is "abnormal". Perhaps the reason Bill was let go was because X was not considered business-critical any more.

Comment by watwut 1 hour ago

> I have seen it many times that when Bill leaves, the thing he was responsible for doesn't get picked up by anyone.

I LITERALLY offered the "we are probably not going to do that anymore" option. In your situation, you can scratch the probably away. That answer is still actually helpful unlike the original answer.

Comment by watwut 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by paganel 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by jgbuddy 6 hours ago

Water consumption is not what the headlines lead you to believe- using water for cooling doesn't "consume" the water

Comment by SoftTalker 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by webdoodle 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by deadbabe 6 hours ago

“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.”

Comment by Adiqq 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by coredog64 7 hours ago

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)

Comment by francisofascii 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by alephnerd 7 hours ago

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...

Comment by TSiege 6 hours ago

This poster is right. Offshoring is a growing factor as US companies do to white collar work what they did to manufacturing

Comment by 827a 7 hours ago

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?

Comment by alephnerd 7 hours ago

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...

Comment by 650REDHAIR 7 hours ago

I thought Bezos paid enough in bribes for it to not affect AWS/Amazon?

Sorry, donated.

Comment by PlatoIsADisease 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by seneca 7 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by coolThingsFirst 5 hours ago

Tech is dead. Has been since 2020.

Comment by Fokamul 6 hours ago

"AI" - "Always Indian" :D

Comment by tucnak 7 hours ago

Good for them

Comment by radicalethics 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by SkyeCA 5 hours ago

> 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

Comment by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by Ancalagon 7 hours ago

You first.

Comment by SoftTalker 7 hours ago

This is where the Upton Sinclair quote comes in.

Comment by GuinansEyebrows 7 hours ago

"radical ethics" indeed.

Comment by jgbuddy 6 hours ago

unfortunate but true

Comment by otikik 7 hours ago

What’s your favorite kool aid flavor? I hear mango is quite good

Comment by mghackerlady 4 hours ago

Why pay people when you can steal from foss projects and use both forms of ai (Actually indians and Artificially Inflated)

Comment by mkw5053 1 hour ago

I'm currently hiring engineering roles in SF for my startup. I am in the middle of closing my $1.5M pre-seed this week so I don't have job descriptions posted yet. But, here's a short pitch:

AI agents are about to orchestrate trillions in commerce, but today they shop on thin data: product specs, studio photos, and text reviews. Agents need evidence, not marketing. Today, the most influential product evidence lives on TikTok and Reels, outside the surfaces brands control and agents can use. Vidably puts verified buyer video directly onto e-commerce product pages through a lightweight widget. We capture that video post-purchase and link it to real purchasing outcomes. Every video is SKU-linked and structured so shopping agents can reason over it. The widget is the wedge, the dataset is the moat.

We're already live with brands and are seeing pull from both brands and creators and I would love for anyone interested to DM me!