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
> 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.
Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.
This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.
These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.
Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.
The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.
I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.
And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.
Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).
It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.
The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
Actually I've worked at companies where management is exactly like this. Literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished. I have no respect for middle managers whatsoever. These people are a parasite on the industry.
>> gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
> Real management work doesn't operate like this.
I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.
I left amazon, in part, because of this realization: Much of management was exactly doing that. That was back in the BERT days and even then writing was on the wall.
Amazon in particular has a highly formalized ritual for reporting up and down that consumes managers entirely. If you don't play, youll be humiliated and fired. The engineers self-organize while the managers are working in their own, different universe.
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.
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.
Ha, that was exactly my thoughts to! Code is turning into a commodity. Nothing special anymore or something you need to protect. It's turning into cheap coal.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.
The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.
Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.
> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
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.
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.
I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on.
Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain.
Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine.
For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
> 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.
> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens.
I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.
"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."
But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.
have been hearing from several ex-AWS colleagues about the job losses within their teams and the number of people impacted since yesterday. it’s depressing, but also symptomatic of a much larger obvious shift already underway for some time now, now being further accelerated by new technology.
AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.
harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.
beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.
> 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
Everyone works 20 hours/week.
The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.
Thinking that because in the past the effect of progress was a net positive after a while it will always be like that is a cognitive bias. When looking at the large scale, in previous cases, people replaced by automation would go into jobs that were not automated.
But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?
This is exactly how I feel. I entered the software industry right before GPGPU programming was becoming a thing. I was aware of AI and neural nets back then and saw the future and decided I wanted to be part of it.
So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.
There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.
People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.
Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol
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
The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs.
But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
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.
It's interesting that the AI is taking job story is so prevalent in these sorts of posts even though there's zero indication of it in any financial analysis. Amazon and big tech companies like it are using AI as the smoke screen to cover up the obvious, which is these companies have lost their ability to grow exponentially. Since their stock price and debt demands this impossible growth, they are now starting the dying process. It will probably take years and maybe even decades, but they will continue to cut costs until they become the next Sears.
I agree and I also think a lot of what used to require the cloud is now becoming local and private.
Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.
I 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.
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.”
“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.
> “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)
There is a lot of middle management. I would include PMs in this. Salesforce does planning from Benioff down. Goals -> each report goals, etc. Planning based off goals - much horse trading. Planning from the lead/pm level - weekly - more horse trading. Reality was urgent stuff got taken care of. Literally over a two year period, outside fancy wording, the technical component of the initial goals maybe completed 30%.
There are a lot of inefficiencies I can see what this manager at AWS was trying to optimize for.
I'm in a well funded somewhat greenfield org - not a startup - we use mcp servers of that specific ticket tracking system within the coding tools to handle ticket creation, assignment, tracking, status, completion, updated by what code is being hit. mostly inheriting existing workflows like git comments, pull requests, tickets referenced in those already, just AI writes those commit messages and PR comments too. reports about all of that are made by AI as well to the stakeholder that needs to see that distilled in their language.
We won't be hiring middle management, no product managers, no engineering managers, VPs
The only aspect we don't have solved is a buffer between sales/execs and engineers, but all other functions are automated away alongside other AI assisted coding that there actually is bandwidth for the schizophrenic ideas. Things that used to be tech debt and not prioritized by engineers without management suddenly are all solved, AI makes the cleanest REST API's I've ever seen, obscure verbs properly implemented immediately. Test cases all done.
It's working really well and the friction with non technical PMs and hierarchies is gone
its a 1 liner to add relevant mcp servers to Claude Code, and every ticket tracker already has an mcp server out
for triaging between UX designers, we also just don't. we use an mcp server for UX, I can point playwright - which is usually used for testing your own site - at a competitor's website and feed all the UX information and implementation into Claude Code to promote the synthesis of an extremely advanced and already engaging design pattern into the project
at this point, I would say its a lack of competence to manage a software project or org, any other way. Amazon's deep cuts are a shot across the bow to others that know they need to "do the needful", and will be watched closely
> 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.
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.
> 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.
LOL, reality is very different. Manager first of all is working to keep his position, second to get promoted. Most of them. For keeping he need to become irreplaceable. For that they create kill zone around eliminating competitors. Working against those with brain, not promoting, giving negative reviews, creating 'cases', taking credits for others job. Making those who can leave. I've seen a lot of this shit. This creates a local depressive shithole. It can go for decades in monopolies and in low competition markets.
People have had jobs where their entire job function was figuring out how to outsource work overseas. When there's no one left to outsource then it's your turn. Tale as old as time.
So much conversation is around AI replacing developers, but I've been to so many meetings where a middle-manager (gleefully) shows me some AI slop they produced to do their job and I think to myself "If you did this with AI, why don't I do this with AI and replace you?"
Most experienced devs already know writing code is the easy part, it's really understanding the business requirements that takes time (I think a lot of junior devs don't understand this so they get overly enthusiastic about AI). But it turns out that most middle managers were already churning out slop to begin with so replacing them with AI is a big improvement.
As an engineer, roughly speaking, every task AI helps me get done faster is roughly negated by someone else's AI slop I need to clean up. But when it comes to middle management, I can't tell the difference. I'm pretty sure most product roadmaps generated by AI are actually more sensible than those generated by clueless managers.
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.
> 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.
Honestly he's probably doing fine
That man is clearly very smart and proactive. I'd be worried for the poor middle manager caught completely off guard.
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.
> 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)
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
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.
> 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?
Unless I'm mistaken, isn't it illegal to base layoffs on individual performance? My understanding was that it can't legally be considered a layoff unless it meets pretty strict selection requirements at the group level (cutting orgs, cutting a "random" % of a role or org to reduce headcount, etc).
He's writing in the academic/upper-class style that it's training data focused on.
I'm convinced that one of the largest frictions to common use of LLMs is that it translates everyone's writing to the that same style. Having it punch-up or flesh-out your proposal or outline, or whatever, isn't really adding any new material, but it's translating it to a writing style that has historically been exclusive and difficult to learn, and that difference in style is what made the original text sub-par, from the perspective of academia and members the upper class.
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.
The two major US parties are in the midst of another swap of which is conservative and which is liberal.
Marin County California, probably the area most heavily voting for the Democrat party, is clearly the most classically conservative part of the country, allowing almost no development and strongly objecting to even the slightest offenses in speech, whereas rural counties in the south want classically liberal safety nets and protections and heavily vote for the Republican party.
Basically, I wouldn't trust accounts of people who got cut from Amazon in terms of their work experience. Most employees at Amazon, engineering and others are salary seekers - their only goal is to get into higher brackets. None of what they do is as impactful at they make it sound, especially in management. And there is false sense of achievement created when people do annual reviews and most of the time, you are never going to try to fuck over your coworker so you embellish their accomplishments (again because you want them to do the same for your higher paid position).
The thing is, for software at least, most of Amazon software engineering follows a predefined template, and you don't need a lot of management to organize engineering. As for engineers themselves, there is quite a bit of friction for the vast majority of them to do anything impactful because of lack of experience, and LLMs haven't bridged that gap because they don't even know what questions to ask.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think AI is the scapegoat for the massive overhiring that happened in 2021 and 2022. These corporations kept thinking that the nearly-interest-free loans were going to keep on going forever, and since no one really knows how to grow a business they spent the money the only way they know how: hiring more people. It didn't really matter if they were filling jobs that were "necessary", just as long as they were filled.
Now, this is extremely short-sighted and frankly it makes me question the intelligence of these BigCos' executives, because unless they're utterly incompetent at this whole "business" and "living on the planet earth" thing they should have realized that the economy fluctuates and this infinite free money wouldn't last.
Now that AI is around, these companies finally have a way to do these layoffs while not looking quite as idiotic.
AI is definitely a solid reason. Even a 10% increase in developer efficiency translates to roughly 9% fewer workers needed to do the same job. For AI to be cost effective, it must reduce headcount.
I 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.
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.
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.
Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
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.
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.
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.
Outsourcing happens when the economy forces companies to cut costs. When innovations return substantial growth, most companies don't think much about the costs. We have a rough economy, bad tariff policy, a weakening dollar, and immigration policy that's reducing the overall US population (and with it, spend in the economy). All those factors push companies to need to cut costs
Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too.
There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.
I'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.
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.
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.
I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.
Back when IBM Watson was a thing, the rumor I heard was that it was actually just a big team of data people and programmers who would bang out stuff in a hurry and then they would pretend like the AI came up with it.
I've sat on many meetings and gotten to trial many "AI products", and a good portion of them do have actual LLMs attempting to perform work. Though most of them are brittle wrappers of the big AI labs, with an aspirational markup.
This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?
I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.
If a company is looking to offshore a function purely on the basis of cost differential, that’s a sure sign the company believes the function has been commoditized and is immune from competitive selection.
That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
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.
Yeah, and as part of the "class war", a majority of the lower classes decided to elect a billionaire whose first order of business was to implement giant tax cuts for the richest Americans while cutting programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
Class war will never work in America because we're too stupid.
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).
The difference between the reaction on HN to the Amazon layoffs and the ASML layoffs is interesting. Perhaps it's driven by the fact that people here are employed by US companies and not by ASML, so we're able to admire how ASML is cutting 4% of its workforce as reducing the number of managers but Amazon cutting 1%^H^H 4% of its corporate workforce so that they can get to "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy" is considered to be because of other secret causes that are a sign of the company failing.
dont count warehouse works and corp folks in the same bucket. thats like mixing commercial and residential real estate markets in one report without diff
- 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.
1. Ramp up offshore hiring and relocate jobs in low-cost-of-living (LCOL) countries (India) to avoid paying the 100K H1-B visa charge.
2. Train their AI and robotics by researchers in LCOL countries (to eventually replace the high-cost-of-living (HCOL) warehouse labor workforce)
3. Deploy robots and AI agents to then layoff more people in HCOL environments and repeat (1) until their margins improve and they achieve AGI.
Readit News
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
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.
Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.
This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.
These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.
Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.
The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.
I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.
And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.
Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).
It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.
The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
Don't know about Amazon but my experience with middle management is that it's exactly like that.
> Real management work doesn't operate like this.
I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.
Yeah, this sounds like the guy was just exaggerating for effect. Haven't we all joked before, "I'm writing a tool to automate my own job away."
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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.
Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.
Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.
you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software.
And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.
At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.
could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways
it's hard to be sure
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.
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.
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.
As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.
The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.
Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.
> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.
I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
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.
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.
For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
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.
I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.
"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."
But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.
AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.
harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.
beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.
Everyone works 20 hours/week.
The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.
They are right. Hence the stalemate.
But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?
So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.
There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.
People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.
Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol
That's what the TSA is in the US
If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.
But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.
I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.
And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?
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.
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Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.
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.
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?
That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.
> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.
This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for
At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).
All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.
So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.
All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.
Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.
Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.
Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.
I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)
There are a lot of inefficiencies I can see what this manager at AWS was trying to optimize for.
We won't be hiring middle management, no product managers, no engineering managers, VPs
The only aspect we don't have solved is a buffer between sales/execs and engineers, but all other functions are automated away alongside other AI assisted coding that there actually is bandwidth for the schizophrenic ideas. Things that used to be tech debt and not prioritized by engineers without management suddenly are all solved, AI makes the cleanest REST API's I've ever seen, obscure verbs properly implemented immediately. Test cases all done.
It's working really well and the friction with non technical PMs and hierarchies is gone
its a 1 liner to add relevant mcp servers to Claude Code, and every ticket tracker already has an mcp server out
for triaging between UX designers, we also just don't. we use an mcp server for UX, I can point playwright - which is usually used for testing your own site - at a competitor's website and feed all the UX information and implementation into Claude Code to promote the synthesis of an extremely advanced and already engaging design pattern into the project
at this point, I would say its a lack of competence to manage a software project or org, any other way. Amazon's deep cuts are a shot across the bow to others that know they need to "do the needful", and will be watched closely
That sounds an organizational issue. I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible. That is, a combination of the job of a general and a PM. Controlling the information may be necessary for survival, but it should not be the job description.
LOL, reality is very different. Manager first of all is working to keep his position, second to get promoted. Most of them. For keeping he need to become irreplaceable. For that they create kill zone around eliminating competitors. Working against those with brain, not promoting, giving negative reviews, creating 'cases', taking credits for others job. Making those who can leave. I've seen a lot of this shit. This creates a local depressive shithole. It can go for decades in monopolies and in low competition markets.
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Still, it documents the typical work culture of the US in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's sad and amazing how much of that remains the same.
Most experienced devs already know writing code is the easy part, it's really understanding the business requirements that takes time (I think a lot of junior devs don't understand this so they get overly enthusiastic about AI). But it turns out that most middle managers were already churning out slop to begin with so replacing them with AI is a big improvement.
As an engineer, roughly speaking, every task AI helps me get done faster is roughly negated by someone else's AI slop I need to clean up. But when it comes to middle management, I can't tell the difference. I'm pretty sure most product roadmaps generated by AI are actually more sensible than those generated by clueless managers.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Congrats for making an argument completely disassociated from reality.
> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.
I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.
Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.
I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.
Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.
Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.
I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)
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
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.
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?
I'm convinced that one of the largest frictions to common use of LLMs is that it translates everyone's writing to the that same style. Having it punch-up or flesh-out your proposal or outline, or whatever, isn't really adding any new material, but it's translating it to a writing style that has historically been exclusive and difficult to learn, and that difference in style is what made the original text sub-par, from the perspective of academia and members the upper class.
this is a HUGE red flag for this comment being written be AI. Before 2025, nobody talked like this.
Marin County California, probably the area most heavily voting for the Democrat party, is clearly the most classically conservative part of the country, allowing almost no development and strongly objecting to even the slightest offenses in speech, whereas rural counties in the south want classically liberal safety nets and protections and heavily vote for the Republican party.
This is how layoffs have always worked. The pretext changes.
Idk how insightful that is. It’s not even entertaining anymore.
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Oh no, it's much worse. It's a global market working efficiently problem.
Bad news for jobs that can flow over the intertubes...
Basically, I wouldn't trust accounts of people who got cut from Amazon in terms of their work experience. Most employees at Amazon, engineering and others are salary seekers - their only goal is to get into higher brackets. None of what they do is as impactful at they make it sound, especially in management. And there is false sense of achievement created when people do annual reviews and most of the time, you are never going to try to fuck over your coworker so you embellish their accomplishments (again because you want them to do the same for your higher paid position).
The thing is, for software at least, most of Amazon software engineering follows a predefined template, and you don't need a lot of management to organize engineering. As for engineers themselves, there is quite a bit of friction for the vast majority of them to do anything impactful because of lack of experience, and LLMs haven't bridged that gap because they don't even know what questions to ask.
Weirdly impressive. This guy just invented galaxy-brained AI slop.
"Nintendo CEO’s refusal to layoff staff goes viral following industry-wide cuts"
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/nintendo-ceos-refusal-t...
I realize these companies aren't identical, but interesting to compare approaches. I also expect Amazon hires and fires more easily instead of growing more slowly and steadily.
FWIW, 8,000 (nintendo) / 1,600,000 (Amazon) is 0.005, so 0.5%.
I'd argue it's a better one.
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.
Now, this is extremely short-sighted and frankly it makes me question the intelligence of these BigCos' executives, because unless they're utterly incompetent at this whole "business" and "living on the planet earth" thing they should have realized that the economy fluctuates and this infinite free money wouldn't last.
Now that AI is around, these companies finally have a way to do these layoffs while not looking quite as idiotic.
You really have to be in "the room where it happens" to know the motivations behind any one layoff.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
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.
Uk investment: https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/job-creation-and-investme...
Us investment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-invest-50-billion-ai
It’s not a pattern it’s a plan.
Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
It 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.
There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.
2026: 16,000
2025: 14,000
2024: 500
2023: 18,000
2022: 10,000
This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...
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.
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.
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.
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I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.
That’s a specific slice of the workforce, not all of it.
More AWS outages means more breaks from work?
Class war will never work in America because we're too stupid.
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0: https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-amaz...
- October 2025: Amazon cuts 14k jobs
- December 2025: Amazon announces additional 35b USD investment to India (total 75b USB by 2030); promises to create ~1m jobs there
- December 2025: Random H1B lottery is dismantled, giving preference to higher company salary spending e.g. the more salary H1B applicant would receive, the better the chances
- January 2026: Amazon cuts 16k additional jobs (30k jobs cut in total)
You really don't have to be a detective to figure out that this has nothing to do with AI.
Higher cost h1b employees incentives offshoring where average employee cost is reduced.
Less h1b employees incentives offshoring.
Offshoring.
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