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Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198 https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/20165
by tchalla 9mo ago
Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon
https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198 https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198
- volkk 9mo agois it me or is this ai slop
- Sevii 9mo ago100%
- volkk 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo agoIt certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.
- tannerc 9mo agoWhat exactly indicates the post was AI generated?
- volkk 9mo agoi've been using AI for as long as GPT has been out, so if you can't see through the rambling, overly complex to make you sound smarter kind of text, as well as the written patterns that are always used ad nauseam like "this thing isn't JUST this, it's THIS" -- i dunno how else to prove it to you. IYKYK.
- tannerc 9mo agoI have also used GPTs since 2020. I am also a writer. Much of the writing equated with “generated by AI” is so precisely because it’s broadly trained on real writing. So the claim of “AI slop” without proof is little more than heresy. It would be helpful to have any evidence. It’s not about just the writing in one example, it’s about writing patterns—which are common—being equated with AI simply because they’re common.
- volkk 9mo agoif you're a writer, and you're using GPT for so long and you can't see it as obvious, i dunno what to tell you at this point. i guess LLMs are trained particularly on this guy's writing.
- tannerc 9mo agoSo you have zero evidence to convey something you claim is “obvious”? Got it.
- volkk 9mo agohere's your evidence, tanner https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016590894485385347#m I'm not going to say i told you so, but you should utilize these tools more before you start arguing, especially when it's so goddamn obvious
- khazhoux 9mo agoIt’s pretty sad that when people write well now, others dismiss it as AI.
- AnotherGoodName 9mo agoIt's also a pretty clear indication of AI undeniably passing the turing test in case that was in debate still. No one can really tell if what's AI generated or not anymore. We're all going by vibes and undoubtedly getting it wrong.
- volkk 9mo agoi don't think that's what this means. it just means to me a certain population of people are clueless and don't use these tools enough. what's _actually_ damaging/obnoxious are the ones arguing that this guy is a good writer and that this isn't AI. IMO, telling the difference can be as simple as looking for the common giveaways, or as complex as reading between the lines of the structure of sentences, the terrible adjectives, and the soullessness of it. If you have half a brain and are well read, you can _probably_ tailor these LLMs to write in a way that reads better. But, it requires people to read a lot of content and literature to understand what good writing is, and this contrived, overly convoluted soulless soup of words is certainly not an example of it.
- jannyfer 9mo agoI agree with you and I definitely noticed the “it’s not just X, it’s Y” pattern. But I find your comment funny because it ironically has the same “not that, this” pattern in a more verbose and less polished & less formulaic pattern.
- volkk 8mo agoyep, that's my signature way of writing -- "unpolished & verbose" :D
- paganel 9mo ago
- MonkeyClub 9mo ago> I saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress. Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
- malfist 9mo agoBe the change you want to see in the world. Honestly, it'd be good to have passionate congressfolk who aren't overtly corrupt or beholden to corporate interests
- tclancy 9mo agoIf this is AI slop as the knee jerk comments next to me suggest, it’s goin to be a hell of a surprise if he gets elected this year! https://www.nleeplumb.com/about https://www.nleeplumb.com/about
- gamegoblin 9mo agoWhile reading the text, my mental AI alarm bells were going off, sent it all to pangram.com and it flags both the layoff post and his campaign website text as being 100% AI generated
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- evanelias 9mo agoYikes, the "[contraction] just" phrases on that campaign website alone are really over the top. Horrendously inauthentic writing, whether it's AI or not: "wasn't just a job; it was a profound responsibility" "This isn't just a statistic; it's a sign that we need to re-evaluate how we support those who serve" "My experience isn't just about past success; it's about understanding the logistics, technology, and economic realities that shape the job market now and how we can create future opportunities right here." "This experience didn't just teach me about law and order; it taught me about managing complex operations under pressure, the critical need for clear strategy, and the importance of unwavering integrity when the stakes are high – lessons desperately needed in Congress today." "This campaign isn't just about me; it's about us." All from the same page. Pretty nauseating.
- volkk 9mo agocan someone even prove that this guy is real and not an AI persona at this point? like, at what point do we have AI agents running for govt with a warm meatsack acting on behalf of them?
- int_19h 9mo ago"AI detectors" are notoriously unreliable. Perhaps more importantly here, when it comes to writing, "AI slop" is basically management speak - it's all about waxing poetically about simple things in ways that make you sound complicated (and useful!). And this guy is a career manager. So I bet this is actually human slop, the kind from which ChatGPT et al learned to speak the way they do.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ericmcer 9mo ago"moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." A screenshot later on shows he was a manager who spent his entire career in Houston. So... he didn't move and I associate "untangling difficult problems" as something an engineer should brag about not a manager. Reads like AI generated slop that doesn't correlate with the actual situation.
- khazhoux 9mo agoI took “moved wherever the company needed me” as hopping from troubled project to project to help fix. This is often what the most senior engineers do, and also the Manager label doesn’t necessarily mean much in this context. Not AI.
- lewisleclerc 9mo agoI thought it was fairly obvious too. We have a few of the most senior engineers being assigned to multiple critical initiatives just because they've led others successfully
- albatross79 9mo agoYeah these bums better get with the program. If The Company needs you to uproot your life and move to Timbuktu start packing or hit the bricks pal.
- sergiotapia 9mo agoWe must do something about labor offshoring to india. It's too much. I want my children to have opportunities here in the country they were born in.
- vitaflo 9mo agoFactory workers said that in the 90s too. Didn’t work out to well for them.
- albatross79 9mo agoIt didn't, but it got us Trump too, so there's that. Let's see what happens this time.
- sergiotapia 9mo agoGenerally speaking the boomer generation has a different set of ideals from gen-x/millennials, and they are on the way out of shot calling. I don't think things repeat.
- paxys 9mo agoHe is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution. How do you stop multinational companies like Amazon from using the global talent pool as they see fit and pay whatever wages the local market will bear? Without that it comes off as the standard "elect me because foreigners are bad".
- al_borland 9mo agoThey need to understand that their profits depend on people with disposable income. The US has some of the most profitable consumers for retailers. If they are all living hand to mouth, what happens to Amazon’s sales?
- frogperson 9mo agoThat is obviously a problem for next quarter.
- mcntsh 9mo agoHe says: 1. Strong data governance 2. Tax implications for layoffs (offshoring?)
- mettamage 9mo agoThe solution according to the poster is regulation made by experts which is why he's running for Congress. It's maybe not the solution you were hoping for but it is the solution he proposes :)
- ThrowawayTestr 9mo agoUnions that can negotiate contracts that have consequences for mass layoffs.
- int_19h 9mo agoThis is possible in the first place because labor cannot freely move across borders, but corporations can freely shop around. You can either open borders to both people and goods, or you can have restrictions on both that go hand in hand. But one without the other is a massive gift to corporations who can and do cash in on that disparity.
- nateglims 9mo agoI would wager being remote made him a target. It seems like a stretch to say it's just the global job market when the layoffs are global.
- iLoveOncall 9mo agoThis and being based in Houston, TX, where as far as I know no organization has a hub location. Besides entire teams or business units, the targets were people who did not comply to RTO or were not sitting with their teams.
- el_nahual 9mo agoInconsistent jingoistic nationalism. On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor market with almost no guardrails." So which is it: did he really work on problems no one else could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor? Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is one of two things: a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone truly valuable. b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon). What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap, foreign, plug-and-play replacement. It all makes sense when you realize the point of his tweet is that he's plugging his run for congress: so yeah, of course he's tapping in to the absolute worst nationalistic sentiment. Shame on him.
- stephencoyner 9mo agoI don't see a clean solution here. The price/craft distinction matters - companies competing on price (Amazon retail) have different incentives than those competing on quality and craft (Notion, Linear). If you're in the price business, replacing expensive US labor with cheaper global labor is rational. If you're in the craft business, it usually isn't. But that framing is incomplete. Amazon isn't just retail - AWS, logistics tech, and AI enablement are craft-heavy. Cutting experienced people in those areas might be short-term thinking dressed up as strategy, not actual optimization. The policy question is where I get stuck. Regulate this, and US companies risk losing ground to foreign competitors who don't follow those rules. Do we want Alibaba as the default American retailer? But do nothing, and experienced workers keep getting squeezed while "efficiency" narratives provide cover. What's the intervention that doesn't just shift the problem somewhere else?
- guerrilla 9mo agoI'm not reading all that. I thought tweets were supposed to be short. What the hell happened?
- maxbond 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_limit#On_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_limit#On_Twitter > In November 2017, Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 characters. In 2023, Twitter boosted the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, it was increased to 4000. In April, it was again increased to 10,000, and in June, to 25,000.
- ribosometronome 9mo agoThe sink got let in.
- _heimdall 9mo agoAt least in the US, we've spent the better part of 80 years building a huge amount of wealth and growth on the backs of debt and externalized costs. Its interesting, in a morbid humor kind of way, to see people realize that these costs always come due. Globalization allows a huge amount of growth and many benefits you simply can't get with smaller or stronger borders. It also comes with risks, chief among them the risk that any one country loses self sufficiency and competitive advantage. I do hope that the heaviest cost we (in the US) pay anytime soon is the cost of outsourcing jobs. We don't know how to manufacture anymore, our populace is extremely unhealthy in historical standards, and both political parties are toying with different forms of socialism. There are a lot of bad outcomes that can come where we're heading, we'd get off easy if it stops at outsourcing some of our high paid jobs to cheaper foreign labor.