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Amazon cuts 16k jobs
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoAI is just the disguise. It's the economy, just like it is in every recession.
- riddlemethat 8mo agoAI is genuinely good at hallucinating. So is middle management. Probably displacing some of those jobs.
- GoatInGrey 8mo agoMany 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.
- caconym_ 8mo agoYeah. I keep running into LLMs in customer service functions where I would previously have been talking to a human, and in literally every case they're beyond worthless and I end up talking to a human anyway.
- dntrkv 8mo agoI think the execs are either using it as an excuse to reduce opex to boost share prices or they're actually buying into this delusion that the productivity improvements are right around the corner. Though I don't really buy into that second option since any reasonably intelligent person would wait to see concrete evidence of said improvements before crippling your company based on some hope. I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs). Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.
- dlcarrier 8mo agoIt's also great at writing programs that kind-of, sort-of mostly work, just like human programmers: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- Hamuko 8mo agoThe US economy is mostly AI at this point.
- baxtr 8mo agoArtificially Inflated?
- bluescrn 8mo agoAbout to Implode
- knowitnone3 8mo agoAfghani Insurgents
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoAlarmingly indebted.
- yakshaving_jgt 8mo agoAmazing Indians.
- tombert 8mo agoArtichoke Influencers
- octoberfranklin 8mo agoAsinine Idiocracy
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bluescrn 8mo agoAnd 'The economy' is just the disguise for getting rid of expensive workers and hiring cheaper workers elsewhere in the world.
- seinvak 8mo agoAI 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.
- layer8 8mo agoAmazon is mostly laying off managers, however, not developers.
- _heimdall 8mo agoJevon's Paradox will show up too though. When employees get more efficient companies just demand more of them. You really have to be in "the room where it happens" to know the motivations behind any one layoff.
- Chronoz99 8mo agoI have noticed this while working in a startup, how efficiency gains impacted work in the last 3 months with better coding models coming in. If you have someone senior that is effective at using these tools and can own the outputs and be capable of correcting things that are sloppy, you are immensely more valuable than 2-3 more developers in the same area of work. It's actually faster to empower fewer people than try to have 3 fast guys where there would be coordination overhead, which would become a bottleneck and bring down a lot of the efficiency gains. A good full stack engineer who can work with these tools at speed with caution is more valuable similarly as it requires less coordination. 3 junior devs shipping 90% good code and 10% slop would make the senior who is reviewing everything the bottleneck.
- bwestergard 8mo agoTo help us use your anecdote, could you tell us what product area is your startup is working in?
- tombert 8mo agoI 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.
- paxys 8mo agoEvery large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
- Insanity 8mo ago“Overhiring during the pandemic” was a common, senseless, catchphrase a few years ago.
- paxys 8mo agoAh yeah completely forgot that one.
- thewebguyd 8mo agoAmazon just recently used that excuse for their 2025 layoffs a few months ago iirc.
- larkost 8mo agoI 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.
- 29athrowaway 8mo agoAI is the perfect scapegoat. Insurance providers are also doing it. AI is also used in the legal space too.
- shevy-java 8mo agoQuite true. Many corporations use AI as excuse to "re-structure" their internal and external costs.
- mahmoudhossam 8mo agoAlexa, insert David and Victoria Beckham "be honest" meme
- jimbokun 8mo agoWhat's the real reason for the layoffs?
- otikik 8mo agoThey 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
- LunaSea 8mo agoUnstable and uncertain economy
- lightbendover 8mo ago[dead]
- paxys 8mo agoTo lower costs
- jandrese 8mo agoMight just be management doing that "you can cut the bottom 5-10% of your workforce every 5 years without impacting productivity at all" thing.
- el_nahual 8mo agoAmazon 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.
- Ronsenshi 8mo agoFrom 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.
- alephnerd 8mo agoAll functions in Amazon are heavily impacted - especially AWS and WWOps.
- philipwhiuk 8mo agoI think by corporate they mean 'not people picking physical items' rather than just 'HR, Finance, etc'.
- alephnerd 8mo agoHow'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-proclamation-that-adds-100k-annual-fee-to-h-1b-visas-for-high-skilled-workers https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati... [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-25/a-100-000-fee-on-h-1b-visas-for-high-skill-workers-could-push-jobs-overseas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-25/a-100-... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/silicon-valley-hiring-turmoil-after-new-h-1b-visa-fees-move-spurs-offshoring-2025-09-23/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r... [3] - https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/economic-impact/amazon-economic-impact-india-40-billion-dollar-investment https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/economic-impact/amazon-econo... [4] - https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_years_at_amazon_on_h1b_and_currently_on_wwops/ https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_... [5] - https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815 https://x.com/USAmbIndia/status/2010718052992618815 [6] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reynolds-and-iowa-delegates-return-india-trade-and-investment-mission https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno... [7] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-india-to-advocate-for-montanas-pulse-crops-and-reaffirm-u-s-india-strategic-partnership/ https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i... [8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-soybean-imports-h1-despite-renewed-us-inflows-2026-01-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-s... [9] - https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-daines-urge-president-trump-to-secure-favorable-pulse-crop-trade-deal-with-india https://www.cramer.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cramer-dai...
- tucnak 8mo agoGood for them
- still-learning 8mo agoI 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.
- baxtr 8mo agoI mean maybe that's the good news. There is huge potential for an upswing!
- knowitnone3 8mo agoSo Putin is culling his people so the next generation can have more!
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- energy123 8mo agoI 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).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- guerrilla 8mo agoI 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.
- energy123 8mo agoI'm talking more about intra-country dynamics, rather than inter-country. Momentum, good or bad, is a thing. It's not that mysterious, we can trace it to things that feed off each other, like the inflation <-> populism loop, which makes civic institutions progressively worse over time. Turkey is a modern case study. This is the opposite of the "coiled spring" analogy, where if a country get worse it is bound to get better even stronger.
- apercu 8mo agoSome 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).
- jimbokun 8mo agoI'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.
- otikik 8mo ago“It was Bill, but he got laid off”. It doesn’t need to be confusing.
- watwut 8mo agoThat 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.
- radicalethics 8mo agoI 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.
- Ancalagon 8mo agoYou first.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- otikik 8mo agoWhat’s your favorite kool aid flavor? I hear mango is quite good
- GuinansEyebrows 8mo ago"radical ethics" indeed.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoThis is where the Upton Sinclair quote comes in.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoOfficial post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs-corporate-jan-2026 https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793906)
- glimshe 8mo agoI'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.
- aoeusnth1 8mo agoAmazon 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.
- ApolloFortyNine 8mo agoYea 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.
- jansan 8mo agoThey 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.
- physicsguy 8mo agoMakes a dent when they fire at the high salary end and rehire at lower salaries.
- nemomarx 8mo agoI 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
- Ancalagon 8mo agoIt’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.
- Adiqq 8mo agoIt 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.
- coredog64 8mo agoFWIW, 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)
- francisofascii 8mo agoIn 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.
- focusgroup0 8mo 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-additional-35b-in-india-by-2030-taking-total-planned-spending-to-75b/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
- indigodaddy 8mo agoMaybe the support scammers can get some real jobs as prompt engineers? Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.
- throwup238 8mo ago> Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this. More AWS outages means more breaks from work?
- bravetraveler 8mo agoSorry, VP says we're migrating. What? Will they see it through? Of course not!
- oytis 8mo agoIt was pretty obvious what is going to follow axing of H1B
- ferguess_k 8mo agoIt's even less expensive! Problem solved. Mr. President, we have successfully axed all H1B positions, as you have wished.
- y-curious 8mo agoI 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
- siliconc0w 8mo agoWe're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoFrom 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).
- mschuster91 8mo 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)
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoI think not physically holding your bullion is equivalent to not your keys, not your crypto. I do small amounts of both.
- batshit_beaver 8mo agoWhat'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).
- ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
- kleiba 8mo agoThe 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.
- maximedupre 8mo ago10% 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
- bjt12345 8mo agoDoesn'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.
- maximedupre 8mo agoAh thanks for clearing that up.
- iLoveOncall 8mo agoYes but this is a lie, a vast majority of the cuts in both rounds from October and today have been individual contributors, not managers.
- petersellers 8mo agoDo you have a source for that?
- iLoveOncall 8mo agoI work at Amazon and I see who got cut. You can also check the WARN notice in WA.
- unreal6 8mo agoYou can find the warn notices here. [0] From a quick script I wrote up, it seems that ~60% of layoffs noted on 1/26/2026 are from individual contributors [0]: https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employee-notifications/worker-adjustment-and-retraining-notification-warn-layoff-and-closure-database https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe...
- justinlords 8mo agoamazon is really doing it's things now, i say to stay cautious
- tchalla 8mo agoInteresting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198 https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198
- volkk 8mo agois it me or is this ai slop
- Sevii 8mo ago100%
- volkk 8mo agoit'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
- nabbed 8mo agoI 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).
- paganel 8mo agoIt certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.
- tannerc 8mo agoWhat exactly indicates the post was AI generated?
- Fokamul 8mo ago"AI" - "Always Indian" :D
- webdoodle 8mo agoThis 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.
- paganel 8mo agoOne 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.
- jgbuddy 8mo agoWater consumption is not what the headlines lead you to believe- using water for cooling doesn't "consume" the water
- SoftTalker 8mo agoLooping water through a closed heat exchanger doesn't consume the water, but using water to evaporatively cool a condenser in an industrial chiller does.
- madduci 8mo agoSo new AWS outages can be expected
- shevy-java 8mo agoI 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- romanovcode 8mo 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.
- ihsw 8mo ago[dead]
- reliabilityguy 8mo agoCan you explain in more details how changing h1b rules leads to layoffs?
- not_jassy 8mo agoI'll take a stab: Higher cost h1b employees incentives offshoring where average employee cost is reduced. Less h1b employees incentives offshoring. Offshoring.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- rvz 8mo agoIt's actually both. 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. It's not that hard to see.
- 8mo ago
- antonyh 8mo agoI'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.
- mvdtnz 8mo agoI 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.
- esseph 8mo 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.
- mvdtnz 8mo agoNo, you and people like you drove them out of business by switching to Amazon.
- esseph 8mo agoYes, please tell me about how it's my personal responsibility that a corporation that has millions of employees took over so much. Was it the laws I passed to make them more profitable? Did I just start burning down the neighboring bookstores? Absolutely not. In fact, if I were never even born, Amazon would be just as big and powerful today. Wait, maybe it was all the time they bought out a small company and I told them they could!
- krustyburger 8mo ago
- shartshooter 8mo agoThis 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
- shermantanktop 8mo agoUndoubtedly 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.
- theusus 8mo ago[flagged]
- vile_wretch 8mo agoYes that is how anecdotes work
- dingnuts 8mo ago[dead]
- mayhemducks 8mo agoIf 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.
- cmiles8 8mo agoAmazon 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.
- taurath 8mo agoMeanwhile the core public use products and platforms are pretty poor. Tried shopping for clothes or anything on Amazon? 9/10ths of any page is ads, you can’t find anything you’re looking for. It’s getting real close to “we’re customer obsessed, and our shareholders are our real customers”
- WoodenChair 8mo 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."
- arjie 8mo agoThe 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.
- fishingisfun 8mo agodont count warehouse works and corp folks in the same bucket. thats like mixing commercial and residential real estate markets in one report without diff
- arjie 8mo agoA 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-amazon/ https://redstagfulfillment.com/how-many-people-work-for-amaz...
- franktankbank 8mo agoAmazon has 150k in India alone, presumably corporate? So now you are looking at closer to 7%.
- seinvak 8mo agoWho said employees in India are unaffected by these layoffs?
- franktankbank 8mo agoASML isn't laying off their blue collar labor and neither is Amazon. Apples to Apples would be US based corporate numbers.
- nielsbot 8mo agoI 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-to-lay-off-staff-goes-viral-following-industry-wide-cuts-3577675 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.
- _vqpz 8mo agoBear in mind Nintendo has ~0.005% of the employees Amazon does
- caminante 8mo agoIt'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%.
- bgirard 8mo agoRevenue per corporate employee are both ~1.5m/corp employee. I think it really comes down to how the company is managed and culture.
- socalgal2 8mo agoNintendo Japan pays its engineers ~$62k a year https://www.portal.e2r.jp/fixurl/nintendo_career_job/id/4/2?ki=job00149 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 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries
- virtue3 8mo agoSome 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.
- 33MHz-i486 8mo agohaving 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)
- VirusNewbie 8mo agobut 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.
- reliabilityguy 8mo 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.
- VirusNewbie 8mo agooops I meant tranium.
- deadbabe 8mo 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.”
- elzbardico 8mo agoThe 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
- heathrow83829 8mo agoyou 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
- stego-tech 8mo agoAgain, 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.
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago> 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. Every single individual on Earth does not like spending more money than they have to. Just because I hire a crew of landscapers for my house doesn’t mean I will retain them if I think a better offer comes around and can do the same job for half the price. > I don’t think it’s a controversial idea to impose broad and lenient regulations on companies to prevent this sort of activity. This is extremely inefficient and opens avenues for corruption, as well as increases costs for policing the corruption. The far better solution is governments collecting the appropriate taxes and providing the appropriate benefits it deems are necessary for a minimum quality of life. Let businesses do business however they want, let governments provide the public services. In fact, the US does have that in some form via unemployment insurance payroll taxes and unemployment benefits, but obviously they need to be better and consistent.
- wanderr 8mo agoMy 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.
- throwaway150 8mo agoAnother article about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ywzxlxnlo 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?
- coolThingsFirst 8mo agoTech is dead. Has been since 2020.
- arisAlexis 8mo agoDenial 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.
- sashank_1509 8mo agoWe’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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dzonga 8mo agoInsightful Comment from X - https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=20 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
- andai 8mo agoYeah, it looks to me like the best time to be a business owner, and the worst time to be employed.
- allknowingfrog 8mo agoAmericans 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.
- kg 8mo agoFinding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo 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?
- kg 8mo ago
- mghackerlady 8mo agoWhy pay people when you can steal from foss projects and use both forms of ai (Actually indians and Artificially Inflated)
- brewdad 8mo agoFunny 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.
- kjsingh 8mo agoIf 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.
- taswellian 8mo agoWhat do you mean? Who is "we" and "our"?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- syspec 8mo agoI think its what was sent out
- _tgxm 8mo agoMy 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/ https://jobswithgpt.com/company-profiles/amazon/
- robaato 8mo agoIs it a coincidence that my Amazon (UK) checkout is repeatedly hitting an error page at the moment?!
- albatross79 8mo agoWhat a shithole of a company, why does anyone work there, is it just all H1B slaves there now?
- tonymet 8mo 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- brandensilva 8mo agoThey called it project dawn which is telling what they have in mind with these layoffs.
- criddell 8mo agoThis 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?
- gonzo41 8mo agoThey could put that engineering effort to unifying the AWS console. :D.
- mkw5053 8mo agoI'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! Edit: I'm an idiot, HN doesn’t have DMs. Email me at hn at vidably dot com.
- KittenInABox 8mo agoThere's no DM capacity on HN.
- rballpug 8mo agoNES to the other. Drink to the only with cyanide.
- hit8run 8mo agoI’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!
- yearesadpeople 8mo agoIt 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
- jhatemyjob 8mo agoLooks like they laid off a bunch of bean counters. Raw skills are still in demand
- cute_boi 8mo agoThe government should start putting tariffs on outsourcing; otherwise, the U.S. job market will be in a bloodbath forever.
- philipwhiuk 8mo agoThey're not outsourcing they're "buying a service from Amazon India"
- rvz 8mo ago"AGI" at Amazon has been achieved internally and as predicted. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741246
- qwertyuiop_ 8mo agoBut Amazon says there shortage of skilled labor and is the highest user of H1B visas https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/amazon-dot-com-services-llc-x237343nkg https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/amazon-dot-com-services-l...
- newgames 8mo agoa16k anyone?
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoAnother case of “Corporate Autoscaling”! Don’t need so many worker instances right now? Just return some to the pool. They’d scale to zero if they could!
- everdev 8mo agoWho needs jobs anymore? We have AI now! Oh and everyone can be an entrepreneur so everything will be fine.
- wangyu_yc 8mo agoThe start of the end.
- demirbey05 8mo agoI have always been saying: don't be optimistic about AI. Software people prepared their end with this optimism without knowing how the economy works. "AI will make our jobs easier, I will have more time with my family," blah blah. Now we will see more news like that in the coming years. I am okay with supporting AI for curing cancer, but I am against supporting AI for disrupting the white-collar economy without a proper government plan.
- eshan6 8mo ago[dead]