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>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
by 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
- juujian 8mo agoAmazon has contributed enough to the current administration that I doubt they will face any consequences. Maybe another round of shakedowns and more financial contributions, but they have figured out pretty quickly how to play the game and end up on the good side of the current administration.
- no_wizard 8mo agoAmazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is looking like its going to be a box office bomb. Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to Melania[0] [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-documentary-amazon-release https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-d...
- belter 8mo agohttps://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230 https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230
- klipt 8mo agoThen the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax. America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's unsustainable. We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.
- Jeslijar 8mo agoPretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.
- cucumber3732842 8mo ago
- boelboel 8mo agoFire h1b positions, make them leave the US and rehire them back in their home country. They can train their new co-workers. I'm not serious but I'm sure some people on H1B have had similar happen. From a business POV this would be an ideal situation.
- yodsanklai 8mo agoI wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.
- rat9988 8mo agoI'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.
- adamsb6 8mo agoThere's not a surplus of American developers that can pass interview loops at top tech employers.
- varjag 8mo agoQuality outcomes of top tech employers are still somehow lacklustre despite all that.
- Xirdus 8mo agoThey are creating this very surplus by firing 16,000 people who already did. And that's on top of all the mass firings last year.
- Sevii 8mo agoFAANG has been engaged in mass layoffs for two years now. How can you possibly make the claim that there is a surplus of people who can pass the interview loops? Obviously, there isn't because they are firing people who passed those loops.
- drecked 8mo agoYou’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding. Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic. Others like Google increased by 60+%. You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years. There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic). But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).
- Buttons840 8mo agoOnce 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.
- nerdponx 8mo agoBack 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.
- GoatInGrey 8mo agoI'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.
- browningstreet 8mo agoThe AI of ten years ago is not the AI of now...
- sifar 8mo agoBut the scam is still the same.
- Buttons840 8mo agoThe AI of today can do more, yes. But the path to funding and success doesn't require actual AI use, just the appearance of AI. No need to actually sell a good or service in a profitable manner. Just convince those with money that you have some secret-scaling-AI-sauce, and you'll be a success without ever having to sell an actual product. The founder I mentioned earlier sold the company and thanked us all for the amazing journey, and then started his next thing in his multi-million dollar house. All built on a lie that made the company look good.
- fuckinpuppers 8mo agoAI = actually Indians
- belter 8mo agoFor who does not know, in tech Amazon has always been the biggest H1B shop. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-us-technology-companies-dominate-h-1b-visa-list-in-2025/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Hasz 8mo agoJust Walk Out was actually 1000 people in India. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual... This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".
- cobolcomesback 8mo agoWhere 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.
- dntrkv 8mo agoI don't understand this overreaction to this news. Amazon does massive layoffs every fucking year. 2026: 16,000 2025: 14,000 2024: 500 2023: 18,000 2022: 10,000
- darth_avocado 8mo agoAmazon 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.
- ericmay 8mo ago> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country. Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
- OJFord 8mo agoIt's not really on them to think of an example to disprove themselves? Do you have one in mind?
- ericmay 8mo agoOk let's try this another way: if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will not have a big corporate presence in that country. Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me, certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove myself. Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to go do all this work to refute my claims. Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or not, because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
- darth_avocado 8mo ago> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here. Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence. Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence. And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.
- kburman 8mo agoI 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.
- dmix 8mo agoAmazon 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.
- darth_avocado 8mo agoSince the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses: 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees 3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles 4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it will hire EU nationals in EU. That’s not shipping jobs to EU.
- echelon 8mo agoShouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring? That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here... We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output. Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.
- 8mo ago
- jajuuka 8mo agoAs 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.
- conductr 8mo agoThis 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.
- unyttigfjelltol 8mo agoIf 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.
- conductr 8mo agoHow small can that slice be though? It’s only really needed on true blue ocean innovation and where the company has to find the skills where they exist. If that’s the US, then sure they’ll continue some small slice of employment here for those projects. But as you said, a majority of software is a commodity now (has been for a long time, really). I don't feel like many companies are doing much innovative anymore and I feel people severely underestimate the talent present in other countries. So, even if you pointed to 10 innovation projects at Amazon then I could counter by saying even 85% of those teams could be in India.
- hintymad 8mo agoPeople 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.
- mips_avatar 8mo agoOutsourcing 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.
- aprilthird2021 8mo agoOutsourcing 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
- dymk 8mo agoConvenient how you absolve Amazon of responsibility. They were forced to do it!
- aprilthird2021 8mo agoThey aren't the only company in their sector laying off. It stands to reason the economy as an outside factor is heavily involved
- axpy906 8mo agoBased on what Amazon team you are in more than half are born in India. Makes sense they’d be moving operations there.
- nova22033 8mo agoAmazon's entire business model depends on importing cheap Chinese made goods so this isn't a real surprise.
- locusofself 8mo agoAWS accounts for more than 50% of Amazon net profit though