From yesterday, "Amazon secures $8 billion term loan": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240271. So Amazon does seem to want to have extra cash on hand for some reason.

Probably to add it to their Scrooge McDuck cash vault.

Amazon and all of these companies are laying people off based on future forecasts, not based on the current economy. Regardless of if people are first, no company wants teams sitting around not doing anything. I've been laid off, it sucks, but just because Amazon is making money today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow.

What’s unusual about this cycle though is that it’s the fear of a recession due to fed policy that is causing companies to cut back. In past cycles fed policy caused a recession nobody predicted and companies suddenly found their earnings in the toilet and made enormous cuts in head count, R&D spending, etc.

Something about this cycle and these cuts feels I dunno, manufacturered or something. Like are 7k high paying jobs at a salesforce indicative of an economy collapsing while the overall labor market is still extremely tight and you’re not hearing about similar layoffs throughout all industries?

All of these cuts seem to be follow the leader because we’re worried and I would not be that surprised to see the reality in the overall economy be much better than feared and these same companies hiring again before year end. It probably doesn’t hurt from the c level perspective that Wall Street tends to welcome job cuts at least in the short term. Although it can certainly do lasting damage to morale within a company.

There’s preliminary data that shows a recession is currently underway. This is reactionary. if the fed cuts rates and stop’s quantity tightening then sure, Amazon will likely u-turn. But that’s due to a situational change.

I think a great deal of this situation is narrative based. People are generally terrible at predicting earnings six months out as well as recessions and if we get a major recession it would easily be the most widely anticipated recession in history.

First it starts with higher than expected CPI followed by hawkish fed policy. People learned their lesson last cycle and became worried that rate hikes as in past cycles would cause a deep recession and began adjusting immediately rather than wait for a recession. This is evidenced by the fact that the S&P peaked about four months before the Fed even hiked one time.

That’s a very important point that I think many overlook. When you are completely ignorant of impending danger you are most susceptible to damage. When you’re terrified of getting punched in the face you’re going to take drastic measures to protect yourself and in the process likely not get punched at all.

Meanwhile rates have moved very little in 3 months indicating (to me at least) that the bond market believes rate hikes are ending very soon.

When the fed commits to hiking rates to slow the economy, it almost always leads to recession. You'd have to be a hyper optimist to not plan for a recession, as an individual, or a business.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/29/federal-reserve-rec...

They have very little credibility currently because of past miscues beginning in 2018. The fed has to talk tough because if they were to say “we probably aren’t going to hike much more” markets would likely rebound, easing liquidity and making their job of reducing inflation harder if not impossible.

The problem is that it seems the bond market sees through this and isn’t buying the tough talk. I think most people believe the fed and buy into the popular narrative that taking rates from zero to 4.5% will decimate the economy (even though 4% is actually very normal historically and anything under 4 was considered quite low).

Watch what happens with fed policy if CPI comes in well beneath expectations next Thursday.

Going from zero to 4% is a lot harder that going from 8% to 4%

> They have very little credibility currently because of past miscues beginning in 2018.

Citation for above: https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/161072868776647475...

Exactly and this is because unofficial fed policy is to follow the popular narrative. When it shifts to they have to stop hiking believe me, they will stop hiking.

A lot of recessions are relatively short, and don't affect big tech companies much in the long run: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

Someone tell Apple there was a "Great Recession". A little thing called iPhone made that irrelevant for them.

I started my career during the Great Recession. Wasn't a problem for me. A recession is an aggregate, but during every economic condition there are both losers and winners. You don't want to overreact to every shift in the wind.

Tech has been one of the most affected by the grow at all costs mentality that is untenable when capital is not essentially free.

In other words, tech saw the largest and fastest inflationary valuation period in decades under loose fed policy. It’s now seeing a similarly fast contraction.

The reason we’re not seeing similar cuts across the board (or at least as significant) is that they also didn’t grow as significantly in the years prior.

That’s true and a lot of enterprise customers are similarly cutting spending in anticipation of the recession which I’m sure is having impacts on these companies now. But again I believe that is based on fear as opposed to a strict need to cut spending.

"It's a recession when your neighbor loses their job. It's a depression when you lose yours."

I think this is just availability bias. Ordinary people - the ones who aren't glued to CNBC or the WSJ - tend to measure the strength of the economy by the job market for their friends and neighbors. The job market, right now, is pretty strong for ordinary people. Hence it "feels" like boom times, and that all the chicken littles are nuts.

Here in Silicon Valley, working for a FAANG, it's definitely recession time. And interestingly, it seems like the higher you get up the corporate ladder, the more you're worried. The ordinary employees basically just do their jobs and gripe about how bonuses are smaller this year, holiday parties are wimpier, and travel budgets have been cut. Managers complain about how we have to stack-rank employees and fret about whether we'll eventually have to execute a layoff. Directors worry about how their headcount and budgets have been cut. Our CEO seems visibly anxious.

I've learned that it's a bad sign when the people with the most information are the most worried. My cue to stock up on toilet paper pre-COVID was when I heard a leak that the CDC had told all their own employees to make sure they had at least a 3 month stock of everything. I realized the Ukraine war was serious when Biden snapped "We're trying to avoid WW3 here" while the official party line was that this was a regional conflict that would be over in a couple weeks. I'm a bit worried about this Bay Area storm going on right now because the meteorologists seem more freaked out than the general public. Similarly, it's worrying when CEOs are more anxious than their employees about economic conditions.

The popular narrative is that these are just a bunch of bloated tech companies laying off surplus employees that don't do anything useful. I don't buy that. I think the American populace has no idea what's about to hit them, and the economy's going to go straight off a cliff in 2023H1.

I agree with the rationale overall ( people at helm being worried as a signal ). I try to look for similar clues.

Still, as far as tech goes, for some companies that relied on cheap money, the ride may well be over ( I think of weird products like Peleton, which is a niche product, but was scaled as if it was going to become a thing in every house ). I am not sure it translates to everything going out with a bang.

Today's news were that job market[1] is still fine despite clear attempts to make it employer's market again.

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/jolts-report-november-2022.h...

> The popular narrative is that these are just a bunch of bloated tech companies laying off surplus employees that don't do anything useful.

Wrong. not only surplus employees but surplus elites.

in recent years, big tech paid bloated compensations to people producing little or no economic value. saw first hand professional managers dont understand tech get hired by friends and collectively engage in empire building and building head count. easy promotion game.

engineers create complexity for smallest problem and launch new services. get promoted. then they get hell out and move to new team. managers willingly accept tech debt to justify more head count hire more managers and engineers under them.

you tell us what innovation come out of amazon fire alexa kindle. same thing they sold 5 years ago same hardware maybe little bit better speaker. why pay for increasing army of engineers? and me just discussing amazon devices.

how many engineers you need to run website? has shopping gotten better in 5 years? No! it way worse, too many ads.

this a massive grift. Most value amazon gets is these people don’t start their own company and threat amazon with competition.

big tech took advantage of cheap or free money from US Fed and created class of elites. Now the game ending for now anyway

> Something about this cycle and these cuts feels I dunno, manufactured or something.

It's absolutely manufactured to the extent that the Fed is intentionally trying to slow demand (aka: cause a recession) in order to stop inflation. The problem is, a large portion of inflation (some indicators are half) is simple price gouging, which Fed measures won't impact, and another large portion is simple ongoing supply chain problems, which the Fed also can't really fix. All they can do is force a recession.

What I mean is that in past cycles companies suddenly found themselves in distress they did not expect.

This time however, everyone is calling for a recession so are battening down the hatches while earnings are still very strong. It’s unprecedented and shows how societies adapt as they learn and focus on new factors.

When the yield curve and the relationship between fed policy and the economy was little known and ignored and instead most people focused on trends in earnings or real estate or whatever the hot thing of the day was, the significance of fed policy and rates was huge. Now everyone is laser focused on the fed which changes behavior which changes outcomes.

The worst recessions blindside virtually everyone and are so severe precisely because people are taking the most risk when things are most dire. Think the lead up to 1929, 2000, 2008, the Florida real estate boom of the 1920’s, etc.

Price gouging is another word for a supply shock due to far fewer workers and a strong subsidized demand.

The Fed is trying to trigger a recession, although they'll never come out and say it, because they want to increase the unemployment rate. Increased unemployment will put a stop to both price and wage inflation. At this point the Fed is trying to prevent a wage price spiral and a resetting of expectations among the public towards more inflation.

> The Fed is trying to trigger a recession, although they'll never come out and say it

Oh, they are not shy about it, it's just a little obfuscated by the jargon they use. One of the Fed's explicit goal is to lower "consumer demand", i.e. make people buy less stuff. Employment numbers are a function of demand, and the Fed has no means of directly tweaking employment numbers, but they can nudge demand (indirectly) by raising or lowering interest rates.

Nah it’s more complicated than that. The fed is saying that because it’s currently a populist view. However their will to actually cause widespread distress and a severe recession will be tested when the populist view shifts back which we are likely not far from.

If you look at this fed from 2018 on it’s readily apparent that everything they do is to appease the popular narrative. Economy needs rescuing from covid? Okay let’s take rates to zero and pump in liquidity until we’re told to stop.

Fast forward to end of 2021- okay stop stop stop! Inflation is getting out of control! Sure, no problem we will raise rates until you tell us to stop, just signal to us before each meeting exactly how much to do.

That sounds silly but does nobody find it at all odd that every fomc rate decision is entirely arbitrary whether they go 25, 50, 75 or more and yet cnbc predicts the exact rate decision every time? Believe this fed has a modicum of independence at your own peril.

Besides, the Fed’s actions don’t align- if they really wanted a recession why the gradual hikes from 25 when inflation was spiking? Why not a sudden move to say, 7%? It’s been almost a year since the first hike and over a year since they first announced they would be hiking and we’re still sub 5%. The rate hikes they’re doing are way overblown in terms of driving the economy into recession given the tailwind of liquidity we had. Most companies aren’t cutting back because their short term borrowing costs went up 100 bps in six months.

> That sounds silly but does nobody find it at all odd that every fomc rate decision is entirely arbitrary whether they go 25, 50, 75 or more and yet cnbc predicts the exact rate decision every time?

That's because the Fed communicates what their next steps are likely to be beforehand. And if circumstances change and predictions are no longer correct, the Fed leaks information before their meeting to make them correct. That's what happened with the first 75 hike in this cycle.

In my recollection the fed actually ruled out a 75 bps hike back in the summer for basically no reason which many thought was a huge mistake then quickly reversed course when cpi came in much higher than expected and did hike 75. Yet another reason why they have very little credibility.

Link for reference: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/unhinged-markets-followed-...

Fed funds futures predict what they will do -> cnbc talking heads use fed funds futures in their predictions -> the fed does what everyone thinks they will, rinse and repeat

Companies are in the business of predicting the market in a quarter, a year, 5 years, etc.

They got it wrong and overhired. There's ample evidence of that, and of cooling demand - now and in the future.

They got sucked into the "new normal" that never was, and was never going to be.

We are seeing a massive return to the old normal, which means people are going back to offices (not WFH) people are going back to shopping in person not online, people are going back to eating in restaurants not using Grub Hub or ordering online. etc etc etc

I think you are wrong. Not completely, but I think you missed the massive change in attitudes that took place the past few years. WFH is likely going to stay in some shape or form since it is clear it can work ( and heavens know emplopyers full remote positions have their pick of qualified candidates ) and likely some RTO will follow ( with another round of - likely muted due to recession - resignations ), but I would hesitate to conclude that good old days are here again. I am not going back.

WFH and ft remote was always a thing. It was not invented for COVID.

So of course some WFH positions will still exist but based on my alerts for different roles the number of full time WFH jobs have dropped off the cliff back down to what I would consider precovid levels

Can they beat the Dow Jones also?

No company has the slightest clue what the economic environment will look like in 3 years, much less 5.

So true. Which company predicted there would be a global pandemic starting at the end of 2019? None. Impossible to predict. Which company predicted 9/11? None. Shit happens, and nobody is a prophet.

It’s a good thing the only cost of their prediction capabilities is human welfare and security, small potatoes in the end.

Hence the layoffs. They still have to try though

Do they really need to "try" by laying peole off? Why is this the standard move despite the business and finances are still booming? It's a weird MBA monkey mimicry game.

How many layoff announcements have you seen where the company says "We'd love to keep pursuing this but we flat out can't afford to pay you, we are out of money"? I've seen zero. I understand some of this is prudent financial planning, especially for SMBs, but SFDC and AMZN.. they must be using different calculus.

Amazon appears less dependent on the nearly-free-money-gravy-train compared to most businesses, especially VC and startups.

Edit: dkrich's comment said it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34254450

Companies, especially tech companies, invest in their future. Sometimes those bets don’t pay off, sometimes it’s because of external factors. That doesn’t mean those were bad bets necessarily, they just got unlucky. It does mean investors want them to move on to something else though, even if the company as a whole isn’t in a crisis.

If your best guess for what the market is going to be in 3-5 years is now half what you were guessing last week, surely that means you make some changes, and past a certain point you want to make a bigger change than what's going to happen by just freezing hiring and waiting for natural attrition. I'm no fan of companies doing this, but the logic makes sense.

Both parties treating the transaction as simply a business transaction is a good thing for society.

Pretending that there is some value to "loyalty" in a vendor/customer relationship is silly, and only hurts you.

Job hopping is a good thing for price discovery, and keeps wages for skilled workers going up as inflation eats away at them. Layoffs in downturns are an expected consequence of workers getting more expensive (ie capturing more of their economic value in their paychecks).

> Both parties treating the transaction as simply a business transaction is a good thing for society.

Maybe. But not when Healthcare is on the line. That part still need to be fixed.

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”?

Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results. It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically. They are adjusting as appropriate.

Also, these people will be laid off with severance. They were compensated toward the top of market (considering all tech companies) while they were employed. They have Amazon on their resume, which makes future job easier than average. I’m really not concerned about laid off (with severance) FAANG employees relative to the people earning literally 1/10th their comp who are losing jobs without severance.

> people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc.

I really don’t think this is an appropriate comparison. The whole “quiet quitting” thing isn’t going to hurt companies like Amazon because they’ll just PIP the person out and replace them with the tens of thousands of qualified people wanting to get hired at Amazon and do good work. When some “quiet quits” it’s usually their peers who pay the price because the absentee coworker isn’t get their part of the team project done. Makes more work for everyone else, makes groups projects late, and potentially brings down performance reviews of people depending on their work to get their own work done. It’s not fair to write “quiet quitting” off as only affecting the company, because the company is going to be fine. It’s the coworkers who bear the brunt.

(Source: Had some “quiet quit” team members over my career, suffered greatly during those times)

The idea behind quiet quitting is based around the idea of shooting for a 3 on a scale of 1-to-5 instead of shooting for a 4 or 5: AFTER management has dropped the ball and failed to acknowledge their efforts. People have twisted this to mean "I am going to do the bare minimum without getting fired" -- these people very quickly end up on PIPs or equivalent at many other companies, not just stricter employers like Amazon.

As an aside, it doesn't really make sense to quiet quit as a SWE for the sole reason of there still a ton of career upside for those who do good work[1]. If you're thinking of quiet quitting you probably just need a better employer.

[1] "Good work" as in people who actually get stuff done and produce good software, not those who merely just grind long hours to impress founders.

"I have six bosses bob, my only real motivation is not to get hassled that and fear of losing my job. But here's the thing bob, that gets someone to work just hard enough to avoid getting fired." - Office Space

8, not 6 :) [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwlZQJyKZ2A

(I am pedantic, but also I just watched Office Space two days ago.)

“Quiet Quitting” is a wildly over-dramatic name for just doing your job at a “meets-expectations” level.

Thank you for this sentence that helps to correct my perspective. Not everyone is aiming high, some just want to go home and tend e.g. to their garden or walk the dog.

Or, you know, have energy leftover for their family

> They were compensated toward the top of market (considering all tech companies) while they were employed.

Yea but no. This isn’t about Amazon, it’s about business culture writ large. Also not everyone at Amazon is a software engineer, and therefore it paid crazy amounts.

> When some “quiet quits” it’s usually their peers who pay the price because the absentee coworker isn’t get their part of the team project done

Quiet quitting is simply doing your job but not being a “try-hard” and not trying to get ahead or go above-and-beyond. It’s a lack of loyalty and treating your job as a trade of exactly 8hrs with a paycheck. If your coworker wasn’t doing their work, they didn’t quiet quit.

> It’s the coworkers who bear the brunt.

Sounds like a manager (company) treating workers poorly. If a factory had people quit and expected everyone else work extra hours, it’d be a labor violation. If they’re doing that to knowledge workers we say it’s laziness?

Conversely, if you had a coworker who worked 8 hours a day, did their job, and didn’t try to give extra, you shouldn’t fall behind unless management had exploitative expectations.

(Source: I have a soul and work. Managers tried to make me suffer greatly at times).

>If a factory had people quit and expected everyone else work extra hours

Extra hours to cover is fairly common in factory work. What differentiated it in my experience is there was a union to ensure people were adequately compensated for overtime.

And that means that companies are incentivised to hire adequately. Whereas companies see no immediate (and attributable, this is important) problems when exempt employees are pushed to work overtime.

Ehh…from my experience, overtime was the rule, not the exception so I don’t know how strong that incentive was.

Isn't getting PIP'd and then fired not, "bare minimum to not get fired" though?

Sounds like those folks are doing much less than required not to be fired.

My understanding of "quiet quitting" was

a) it's a stupid term made up to give people a sense that they're in control of something they're not - needing to work to survive and;

b) you were explicitly not trying to climb any ladder and merely doing your job as it was described, not shooting for promotions or accolades of any kind.

"Quiet quit" team members are 100% fine to have around IMO, as long as they stay out of the way of the folks trying to take on the larger/harder problems. That's the thing I reject about modern workplaces: this idea that everyone has to be "progressing" or "climbing" all the time.

It's totally cool to punch in/punch out 9-5, it just needs to be clear that's what the role is, and how much that reduces your ability to determine what it is you work on during those hours.

I’m pretty sure I first saw “quiet quitting” coming from, like, the productivity fetishist LinkedIn set, or something along those lines (although I could be wrong, this was not allocated a high-priority sector of memory). Which is to say, I think it is a term originally intended to shame employees who are simply fulfilling their responsibilities. I guess it has been reclaimed or something, though?

"Quiet quitting" is just derogatory term to say "not working unpaid overtime"

> Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results. It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically. They are adjusting as appropriate.

It goes both ways. If you planned so poorly and hired so fast that a minor perturbation in the market causes you to fire 17,000 people, you're still communicating that you putting profits above people.

17K people is about 1% of total employees. While each of these job losses matters a lot to the people involved, a 1% reduction in the face of what is surely more than a 10% change in medium-term projections is hardly proof of crazy over-hiring or terrible planning.

There’s no doubt that Amazon puts profits over people. They’re a profit-seeking enterprise (and a fairly effective one at that).

>minor perturbation

What are you defining as a "minor perturbation"? Because if they're responding to the last 12 mos., the NASDAQ is down 33%. Definitely not minor.

> They have Amazon on their resume

the parent comment talks about "these companies". what happens when less prominent companies take a cue from fangs and start booting people out, only with crappier severance and crappier resumes? this is far from the last layoff.

You make sure you have savings and don’t depend on the benevolence of any company…

And network, network, network!

In my whole career it was very rare that someone from my network helped. All calls for help would be met with a polite "sure" and then went missing. Some give me a lecture on how to lower my expectations or something else.

My “network” includes external recruiters. I’ve met them for lunch, in their office etc.

Mostly boutique shops. I only dealt with local recruiters in my former city (Atlanta) before remote work got to be big. I haven’t looked for a job post Covid.

Hopefully, I will never have to look for a job again. When I leave my current job - hopefully by choice - I will be semi-retired and doing consulting gigs (not staff augmentation).

Ironically, I work for the very company that this article is about. But, I work in the consulting department at AWS. There is a direct easy to measure metric of how much my work contributes to the bottom line compared to my compensation - I’m a billable consultant.

I think people have differing opinions on what a "network" means.

Some people define their network as professionals they know, even casually. That type of network isn't particularly useful. Other networks are people that you've provided some value to in some way so they know you're a valuable resource. Often, this means going out of your way to show value when there's little in it for you. That type of network is much more valuable because you've formed a relationship that goes beyond just "knowing a guy."

> Companies plan for where the market is going, not last quarter’s results.

Yet all of these companies overhired, which led to the current problem.

> It’s fully clear to everyone that the economy has shifted dramatically.

I don't think that's fully clear.

> They have Amazon on their resume

resumes.LastOrDefault();

> (Source: Had some “quiet quit” team members over my career, suffered greatly during those times)

Quiet quitting are people doing their job. If you suffered, it's because you were expecting slave labor.

I don't understand why Netflix is part of FAANG. We should take it out of the acronym.

This is why: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...

It's only one product that does one thing: shows videos. It's huge and great but I still think we should replace it with AirBnb, which also has high salaries, in the acronym.

The number of products produced by a given company has never been part of the definition of FANG. And the exact companies in the acronym don't really matter anymore anyway; the overall 'vibe' of it is simply top-tier tech companies, i.e. those that pay the most. Agreed that AirBnb should also qualify, but the exact companies that fit are fluid and it doesn't make sense to keep changing the acronym all the time as the constituent companies change, as the overall idea doesn't change. E.g. consider the Dow Jones index; the constituent companies have changed over time but the name of the index doesn't.

So FAANG is defined by nothing more than tech + high salary? Why wouldn't, say, a high paying fintech be included?

I think the real answer is that those companies were all high growth/high cap stocks. The guy who originally coined the term (Jim Cramer) has dropped Netflix from the list because their capitalization hasn't kept pace. (He also changed the acronym when Facebook was changed to meta)

It has a life of its own way beyond Jim Cramer these days (also Jim Cramer is pretty terrible at being a pundit overall).

As for fintech companies, it's just a different field, with different norms, expectations, and overall pay structure. It's also a much smaller field in total.

Or maybe the MBA graduates are just fixing the sinking ship that engineering teams created with over-promising technology and demanding growth for their teams so that they could get bigger budgets: VR, meal delivery, AI, etc. ?

I have an MBA man I wish I was one of these master of the universes deciding to hire and fire 17,000 people at a company. Do you need the Stanford MBA, Harvard, Wharton? Does Berkeley suffice these days or do you still need the private Ivy League degree first?

I thought product teams were responsible for that. Engineers just do.

In the business world the engineers are like the Wehrmacht.

This was covered in ArsTechnica [1] and it seems like they are laying off a large portion of the Alexa team because it doesn't make a profit. I bought the Alexa when it first came out and it had and still has a great UI. When the Alexa launched I made a skill on the platform which I don't think anyone really downloaded. What confused me the most was Amazon never allowed for paid skills (which I really think was an extremely bad move) and it appears they just internally justified it as a loss leader but no developer would touch it from a ten foot pole. Cutting something that is a cost center is pretty much standard if you aren't showing as much growth that is expected for you. Therefore, cutting something that costs you ten billion dollars sounds pretty justified to me when they could have profited from it instead.

EDIT: Guess I didn't do my research about paid skills...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

This is a newer layoff than the one previously covered.

Knowing Amazon, they probably needed people to handle the holiday stress, and now they’re laying off more people.

Alexa is a bit of a mystery. The plan apparently was:

1. Sell millions of devices at cost. Unrelenting sales on Echo devices

2. ???

3. Profit

And Step 2 was never filled in. Maybe it was "if people can re-order paper towels by shouting at Alexa, we'll sell more paper towels". But that plan has its limits.

What's the mystery? It was to get in on the device platform game: walled garden, app store, ads, subscriptions, control, etc., same as Google, Apple, Meta, and even Microsoft and Sony.

??? was "monetize skills" to which they could take a cut of it.

The problem was that it was rather difficult to do for a while and the "here's a great ecosystem of games and tools" never materialized for echo devices.

Part of that is that people really don't know how to to do voice interfaces well.

Another part is that it has to run on AWS which has all the AWS sizing and billing problems that need to be solved by programmers (we're programmers - not SREs - and its really easy to rack up a too large bill on AWS).

As such, in order to try to monetize a skill (which wasn't possible at first) you needed to commit to spending some AWS money to try to get it. Discovery of Alexa skills was poor at best. Free skills normally end up costing money (and not just time) for the programmer.

And so, a possible revenue stream for Alexa has never realized.

> Part of that is that people really don't know how to to do voice interfaces well.

Maybe that'll change now with ChatGPT. The problem I have with voice interfaces is you need something at the level of AGI to make it compelling. I could have an hours-long engaging voice-only conversation with a real person, but what the hell am I going to do with a dumb "smart" speaker that will be even a fraction as engaging as, say, a videogame? 99% of my smart speaker use cases are: Setting timers/alarms, querying the weather, turning on/off the lights, playing songs/podcasts/videos. For anything more interesting/interactive than that, you need more intelligence than existing systems actually have.

I believe that GPT is an enormous step forward for the voice interface. My favorite example is to give a csv of hourly weather data and it comes back with a human-esque interpretation of it. Not just the rules engine approach that you get from websites...

    Summarize the following weather forecast for tomorrow
    
    12 am, 2° F, clear, 15 mph
    1 am, 2° F, clear, 15 mph
    2 am, 1° F, clear, 14 mph

    Tomorrow's forecast will be cold and clear with temperatures dropping from 2°F to 1°F and winds of around 15mph decreasing to 14mph.

That's a small token example - give it the full 24h and its right on.

Give it the proper data in a machine reasonable format and as it to make it into a human summary, and that's where its strength appears to be.

The problem is that GPT would be too expensive for Amazon Alexa right now.

I always thought Alexa was just a play to get more data, especially data about apps/services outside Amazon's ecosystem. Every time you tell Alexa to play a song (on Spotify) or turn up the temperature (on the smart thermostat), Amazon is analyzing that data. Maybe they'll start showing you ads for sweaters since they know you're always cold. LOL

Also, the more you ask Alexa a question, the less you search on Google. And that's gotta be worth a bunch to Amazon. At least I thought it was.

Being able to easily lay off employees means that the companies are much happier hiring, too. Most of those fired will likely land another job soon, precisely because their new employer does not have to treat their hiring as a multi-year commitment.

Europe, which makes it very hard to let an employee go, tends to have significantly higher unemployment than the US, which is much more cavalier about layoffs. My 2c.

Almost as if TANSTAAFL.

First encounter with this initialism.

TANSTAAFL / TINSTAAFL

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp

Also, if I may add: I wish there were more substance in your comment. This non-sequitur was disappointing.

Yeah, there could have been a lot more substance but to be honest a disappointingly large number participants here don't seem to understand that very basic principle when they engage in discussions here.

To be clear, the parent to my comment seemed to completely understand TANSTAAFL. My comment was very obliquely directed at other participants in the larger conversation who seem to think that there is no legitimate reason for an employer to ever let a single employee go because any competent business will work like an oracle and make perfect business decisions always. Any unexpected outcome must be because they are greedy corporate monsters that don't care about their employees. (my apologies for the exaggeration but you should have seen what I wrote and deleted previously :-)

Most hackers would already know TANSTAFFL through Robert Heinlein's works?

Japan makes it very hard to lay off employees too, but unemployment is very low.

Also Australia. From the outside (and this could well be the wrong take), it seems as though “at will employment” leads to cultural problems. People are afraid to speak their mind, and hierarchy becomes dominant.

I like that Australia is a bit more egalitarian, and people can “speak truth to power”.

Having worked salary jobs in tech in both countries, I can tell you that hierarchies are a much bigger thing in Germany than in the U.S. In tech companies as well as in academia, FWIW. Her Professor, Herr Direktor, these are actually still a thing in Germany.

You might want to rephrase that because the way you stated it just seems kinda silly, as if somehow titled-obsessed idiots don't exist in US companies or something...

I have worked in UK/Aus and for US owned/run and French owned/run (from aus) and aus owned/run (and others, I’m getting old). There definitely seemed to be a cultural difference with US based employees being much more reluctant to say anything negative (but this may have been nothing to do with at-will). I had assumed this was because they were afraid of losing their jobs by pissing off the wrong person, but it may well be something else entirely causing that.

In Australia, you have the opposite problem of randoms going “that’ll never work” to a CEO (which is not exactly endearing).

Japan also has a stagnant or declining labor pool size.

So does the U.S...

Yep, a lower-than-replacement birthrate combined with a hostile immigration policy that is against permanency will do that.

> a hostile immigration policy that is against permanency will do that.

Why are you spreading lies? Permanent residency is really, really easy to get in Japan, unlike the US where you have to win a lottery.

Wages for SWEs are lower than other comparable countries in Europe, Canada, and APAC (SG, AU, NZ) and Japanese fluency (not a PR requirement but still needed to live in Japan) is hard to acquire. Why deal with the headache of learning a hard to learn language not spoken outside of a handful of islands in the Northern Pacific with a very insular culture when you can become a German or Canadian national for much less effort.

The things you complain about do not equate to a "hostile immigration policy that is against permanency".

SWE wages are lower than the US, yes, but not Europe in my experience. Japanese fluency is not needed for PR or even citizenship (you do need a little ability for naturalization). You don't need to be fluent to live in Japan; most of the expats I know are not fluent at all.

German is also a very difficult language to learn, and you won't go far in Germany without it. It's much easier to be English-only in Japan than in Germany, in my experience.

I'll copy an earlier comment I made on a separate thread specifically with South Asia in mind, but I've seen similar dynamics in ASEAN as well. Also, I think you are an L1 Japanese speaker. If you're L1 is Indo-European, other Indo-European languages tend to be easier to learn.

Why go to Japan (in reality only Tokyo) where median software TC is around $60k [0] when you can go to Canada where median software TC is around $90k [1] and English speaking, let alone other English speaking and relatively easy to immigrate Western countries with large South Asian communities like the UK (95k) [2], Netherlands (87k) [3], Germany (77k) [4], Australia (100k) [5], Norway ($74k) [6], or Singapore (73k) [7].

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/canada

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...

[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/netherl...

[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany

[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/austral...

[6] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/norway

[7] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/singapo...

I don't see a huge difference between $60k and $77k for instance, and it all depends on your actual job offers.

Regardless, while I don't disagree with your facts, the original claim (not by you) was that Japan had a "hostile immigration policy that is against permanency". This is false, and sounds like a lie in fact, unless the OP just woke up from cryo-sleep after being frozen in 1985. Sure, there are real challenges to working and living in Japan if you're a native English speaker (which I am), but my whole point here is that legally, immigration here is actually very easy, contrary to the anti-Japan posts like the OP's that I frequently see on forums like this one. Immigration policy here is far, far more inviting than the US which claims to be open to immigration, yet has severe limits on visas and green cards and is legally extremely difficult and expensive to emigrate to.

Agreed that GP's comment is innacurate on that point, but...

Are you White? That's the differentiatng factor. If you're of South Asian or Chinese or SE Asian origin (not even nationality, origin), you face much less microagressions in other countries than you do in Japan. In general, factoring in CoL and the insular culture, Europe and other Asian countries tend to make sense. Heck, when I was backpacking out in Isan, while a number of people did go work in assembly lines or pick mushrooms in Japan on the JET visa, they preferred South Korea and Taiwan due to a (relatively) less insular culture than Japan, though Germany, the US, and Australia was the more popular option. This is reflected in diaspora demographics as well.

"Microaggressions"? Asian people in the US are getting physically attacked, brutally, in the streets. That doesn't happen in Japan.

Anyway, I don't know why you keep talking about this kind of thing. I'm addressing ease of immigration, not how welcoming people are in particular countries. The whole thread was started because someone outright lied about immigration laws, and you keep talking about culture, which has nothing to do with the discussion.

That's not what GP was critizising tough.

Europe makes it _costly_ to let an employee go.

You can get rid of 20 people for next monday if you want to, you’ll just pay the due amount as defined in the contract and the law. It’s also not some astronomical amount, worst case scenario I think it’s around 6 months of pay, which isn’t that far from what you’d pay for a non compete for instance.

PS: also unemployment is a complicated figure, it’s hard to tell how much any specific variable impacts it. Unemployment rate goes up and down while laws stay mostly the same, so singling out labor laws is mostly an opinion at this point.

Lot of devs in Europe do contract work though. It's an employee disguised as a contractor so mostly as grey area, but it's becoming more common.

Yes. Companies having that choice is also interesting in that they get to decide if it's worth to have people come and go, as a replaceable resource.

For some company it totally works and they plan their staffing in 6 months spans (seen a small web agency basically having an "on" and "off" season, with half of the staff during the dead part), removing or adding people as they see fit. For others it's more difficult and they're pretty happy to have staff that can't just disappear within a month if they decide to go tour the Silk Road on a bike.

In Finland its actually easy and cheap to do massive layoffs at once. But very difficult and costly to let single employee go.

Has the relationship between employer and employee ever felt more transactional?

I’ve worked professionally since 1996. There has never been a day in my professional career that I thought of any job as any more than a means to support my addiction to food and shelter

> addiction to food and shelter

well put :)

I long ago concluded that the way to make pots o' money is to:

1. go out for a walk. Offer the first good looking man a CEO-ship of your new company.

2. pay him $$$$$

3. hire loads of people

4. fire them all

5. goto 3

In this scheme, where do the pots 'o money come from?

Not that bright a plan.

Alexa integration?

Steps 2 and 4 are what the internet tells me are the moneymakers.

I have no opinion on the MBA bit, but I think you're spot on about people starting to treat companies the way the companies are treating them.

~10 years ago, when I got my first job, I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource", how important is the company "culture" and all of that corporate kumbaya. And, at that point, the vast majority of people around me cared and wanted to do a good job, going up and beyond.

Fast forward to now, and pretty much everyone has the attitude of "f**k these guys", doesn't want to be there and will do the bare minimum to get by. And that's exactly what companies have demonstrated that they deserve.

People are tired of job hopping to get market pay, dealing with bulls**t, and being thrown under the bus at the slightest hint of an economic downturn.

>I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource"

You tread in strange circles. I'd think a cursory look at history ought to be enough to put the lie to such claims.

It's crazy to think but people do drink the kool-aid, despite history.

Some companies operate differently too. Obviously they still watch the bottom line, but some aren't as reactionary and are willing to take more pain to keep employees because they understand the value of that goodwill. More commonly private companies with a strong-willed founder/leader.

Agreed. I work for a privately held company and am a bit less jaded about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the company is my friend or anything… but I know how much the owner hates layoffs on an emotional level and have seen the company do things like shifting everybody to 4.5 day weeks temporarily to avoid the need for layoffs. So I respect that.

I don't even think "pain to keep employees" is the right word here - Amazon for instance is still highly profitable, it's just that the profits went down a bit (which is to be expected if the economy is worse). But they're still laying off people just to make the bottom line look even better...

Believe it or not, Amazon is not a charity. I don't know why you expect them to hold on to employees who are evidently a loss to their bottom line.

That's assuming the downturn is 100% explained by employees underperforming. It's more likely that market forces outside of these employees control caused the downturn.

The correct wording is “Amazon will do anything they deem necessary to make their shareholders happy, no matter if it’s profitable or not.”

I am convinced they have zero data indicating firing these people will be profitable on the long run, only that short term it is, and that’s all that shareholders are interested in.

I’m a big fan of any measure making stock exchange less volatile, like some form of tax on every transaction, to slow down the machine, make short term investments (speculation) less rewarding. This may help in reducing the appetite of shareholders for such short sighted measures.

Your argument is flawed. Reactionary firing tends to be inefficient, but makes shareholders happy on the short term.

Should a company prioritise shareholder happiness over efficiency is the real question here. Their losses don’t originate from these employees nor initiatives; it originates from market conditions.

> Some companies operate differently too.

Can you give some examples? Of big companies with more than a few thousand employees I mean.

Personally I'm doubtful that they exist.

I think it has more to do with the fact that @i_have_an_idea's blinders fell off. Also, at the same time, due to COVID and consequently mandatory WFM, many other people had the same epiphany, leading to so-called quiet-quitting.

Honestly I also feel there's another factor of a lot of depression as people look around and see that cynical view was the truth all along.

I see this too. The Covid restrictions led to people seeing through a lot of the false or thinly veiled assumptions that we live under. After that you are left with a more cynical and apathetic view of the world.

Could be also an age thing. I don't know how old you are but maybe ten years ago most of your colleagues were twenty somethings and now they are in their thirties or forties?

well salaries also went up significantly in the last decade

as per levels.fyi Senior Principal SDE at Amazon makes about a million $$$. Entry level salary is $168K

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

Inflation is a thing you know?

> ~10 years ago, when I got my first job, I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource"

Tell that to Johnny Paycheck.

Difference here is that Johnny Paycheck was signing about the common man being screwed.

White collar STEM jobs have historically been very lucrative and most Dev / IT types have had a good incentive to shut up and play ball.

eh what? even 15 years ago it was common knowledge to just jump around every few years to advance your career. maybe it wasn't all out "f* these guys" but we definitely had no illusions about employer "loyalty" lol.

Likely depends on your age and/or experience.

Indeed. Similar discussions were held when the dotcom bubble burst. I doubt it was the first time.

> People are tired of job hopping to get market pay

If nobody moved from job to job, there would be no market.

There would be a lot fewer recruiters, and more experienced engineers.

Also a less monolithic tech culture. Right now every employee is more or less compatible across every company because we all seek to be transferable

It would be bad for the industry and would mean greater concentration of talent in one or two corporations.

An interesting thing that I have experienced is that a lot of recruiters and companies don’t care about your experience. All they care about is the exact experience they are looking for. In a world where most people stay in a position for a while, it’s only natural to gain a lot of experience and responsibility but not necessarily broad experience. So in that case, it would be very hard to switch jobs, industries, etc.

So what I am curious about is, did companies used to hire in less myopic ways?

Definitely yes. Over 25 years ago I started a second career, in tech. After 6 months in a Microsoft academic program I got hired by a Big Six accounting firm to do desktop support. My previous education was completely nontechnical (a BA and MA in history, and a JD), as was my experience (10 years as a trial lawyer). No way was I the most qualified on paper for that job, but the people who hired me saw something and acted. A year later I was able to move into a new job with better pay at a Fortune 200 company, originally hired to do applications analysis but shortly after found myself a lead desktop engineer and later a Unix sysadmin. At every turn I was fortunate to have hiring managers that looked beyond my resume to see the potential there.

Sure, in 1997 an HR person told me they needed someone with at least 5 years experience in Windows NT, but in general most interviews I had in the late 90s and early 00s were way less myopic. I'm not sure I'd have the same experience if starting out today.

You would think so but too many people get really comfortable and never expand their skills beyond the minimum required to do their current job. Last year I had an SRE position open I had to interview over three dozen people before I found one guy who could explain anything he had done in any detail. Everybody else was probably in the room when someone else did something, but could not give details of what was done, why it was done a particular way, or what they might do the same or differently if they did it again.

Some of the people I had to be honest with - if they are paying you the kind of money you say to reset passwords and stare at the wall, you should stay where you are and make sure that wall never leaves your sight.

I always wonder how people who are only in the room when things happen have any pride in their work and aren't embarrassed at their lack of production. A couple jobs ago was people who put most of their effort in to making sure their group of shitty engineers wasn't found out. It was a lot of work! Since they were all about quantity of people over any quality, they had to keep hiring more people, so there was a lot of time and effort in to interviewing to make sure they only hired other shitty engineers of their same ilk. I was hired outside of their scheme so we weren't best of friends lets say.

I’ve never understood the people who make no effort to better themselves - they work in technology, everything has a 3-5 year engineering life, they should always be preparing for the next thing.

People often can’t control what technologies their employer uses, but if they have solid fundamentals and I can tell they have tried to learn things on their own, more often then not I’ll give them a chance, and it usually works out because they are doing what they really want to do, and they are always looking for ways to build upon and improve what they’ve worked on.

How excellent do you want to be at generic enterprise CRUD apps?

Somebody has to build and maintain them.

Have you considered that maybe they’re fine with their level of responsibility and can leave work at the office?

That is usually the part where I shake their hands and wish them luck in their next endeavor.

If they are not there because they love working with technology, there are other places for them to be.

Agreed. I personally have seen divorces and breakdowns of entire families and friend groups of my colleagues, but what is most important is making sure that they stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and look to further improve themselves for the company.

Dang you didn't have to do em like that!

Dystopias happening right in front of us!

Or… am I hearing a new web3 startup?

(If I ever end up doing this; this comment will age super well)

Most definitely! There is nothing more glorious than sacrificing your health, soul, and personal relationships to perfect that CRUD application your users are forced to use to keep their job.

Most programming jobs are utterly boring. You are hoarding yes men and people who are good at lying.

Cringe.

Some people have a family, or otherwise time consuming personal lives, which does limit the ability to learn new things outside of work. I wouldn’t really blame them for not ”bettering themselves” if they don’t get to do that on paid company time.

I have never had an engineering (or really any!) job where learning on company time was absent. A lot of people like to grow and a lot of people don't. And a lot of the latter realize their waning usefulness and how they're one algorithm update away from being obsolete so they put time and effort in to masking that.

I enjoy being the dumbest person in the room. Others find it threatening.

And for those who are so busy outside of work that they can't grow inside of work, I feel for them because that sounds like an exhausting life.

>everything has a 3-5 year engineering life

This isn’t true for all industries. Some have software systems with engineering life measured in decades

True, but what percentage of software engineers work on those?

The only pool of software that both employs a large number of engineers, has an engineering life measured in decades and isn't rewritten every 3-5 years to a large degree is enterprise software, in my experience. Think C/C++/Java/.NET middleware type stuff.

And I imagine 90% of HN actively runs away from those jobs :-)

I wouldn't know. But I imagine there's an availability bias.

I've worked in more 'traditional' engineering fields (manufacturing, energy, healthcare, aerospace) and the vast, vast majority are long tenured systems built for dedicated systems. For those in SV, I imagine it's the opposite.

Sure there's a market for cheap disposable stuff hastily thrown together by people who barely know what they're doing because they're always using the latest tools for the first time to pad their resume.

But there's also a place for durable things of lasting value, built by people who enjoy perfecting their skills, technique, and craftsmanship with mature tools to solve problems well, learn the domain well, and build lasting relationships with customers who are big spenders.

It's kind of naive to assume that those people are making no effort to better themselves just because they're not always chasing after the latest hot new thing.

> everything has a 3-5 year engineering life

Nope. 30+ years of experience here working for different software companies in 5 different countries. I still use most of the knowledge today that I learned 30 years ago.

Software development fundamentally changes very rarely. However software development fashion changes all the time. But the latest fashion is just a slightly different implementation of the same underlying fundamental things I already understand. It is just a slightly different flavour of ice cream.

You've been reiterating this across a few threads this month, right?

Perhaps it IS the widespread case that a lot of us are getting paid as SRE for much less than you believe an SRE should know. Ultimately, where you've set the bar is arbitrary

There also would be less innovation as there would be less cross-pollination.

Arguable. Too much cross pollination leads to super-monoculture.

It's important to have distinct subcultures to progressultiple fronts sometimes.

> People are tired of job hopping to get market pay, dealing with bulls*t, and being thrown under the bus at the slightest hint of an economic downturn.

So it's cool for employees to quit and job hop to get better pay, leaving their former employers with the effort and expense of replacing them, but not cool for companies to lay off employees to save money when markets contract?

The main motivation for job hopping is that it's usually easier to get a raise or promotion than staying around for too long at your company.

A lot of employers have the unfortunate tendency to see their most loyal employees as furniture.

yes, it is cool for employees to do so because of balance of power.

Companies have more power than employees when thinking about the size of the event:

they can fire you unexpectedly (with/without severance) so for your life (and probably your family) this is the main event happening.

But if you leave for a company that is usually a minor event that will probably not have any effect (or very limited) on their "life" (income/profit/culture ...)

Nearly 20 years ago, when I was trying to find HR for my first day, there was an older man talking with them already. He said, and I quote, 'Fuck you all, I got your exit interview right here' while grabbing his crotch. He turned to walk away, smirked at me, and said 'what? I'm retired now.'

Point being, I don't think you were the only one who didn't love the company 10 years ago.

Plenty of folks didn't, but even in the 90s and 2000s there was still a good reason to play ball, esp. if you were in a white collar STEM field.

Dude might have grabbed his crotch on the way out, but he probably made $$$$$ for 20-30 years. Modern hires deal with just as much BS but often for lower pay and less long-term stability.

What, your company doesn’t give a pension?

> Modern hires deal with just as much BS but often for lower pay and less long-term stability.

New hires in tech these days make much much higher wages, inflation adjusted, than ever in the past. Stability is down, granted, though it was never great.

No matter what happened, this is not a mature way to talk to people. Even in the face of disagreements, why can't people be decent?

> Fast forward to now, and pretty much everyone has the attitude of "f*k these guys", doesn't want to be there and will do the bare minimum to get by.

And anybody with that attitude should rightfully be let go. It's mutual.

(I don't want co-workers who act like that.)

Or...the strongest survive. Amazon being one of the strongest, obviously. That is, and MBAs thinking longer term would know, it's not a downturn. It's opportunity. Opportunity to come out the otherside even strong.

Jeff is saying "save your money." Amazon is saying "we're cutting." It's self-fulfilling. And once it's over Amazon rein will be even further solidified.

Bro Ive been on some "business is business, it's strictly financial..." energy with employers since day zero. I pity the fool that never took a financial relationship for anything more than what it is.

This is a wonderful observation.

When I was a kid my dad said "companies won't think twice about dumping you, don't worry about dumping them."

But he worked in the same place for forty years. Sometimes he was treated well, sometimes he wasn't.

It occurs to me what a relic that world is but also how it sounded bizarre when my dad said that to me in the early 00s. At that time there were still "lifers" all over that place. Or people who spent 10-20 years working up in the same company.

That's all gone now. Everything is more ephemeral, more disposable. I'm not sure if it's a good thing but I'm pretty sure signing up to be a "company man" wasn't, either.

The other day I heard on here the phrase "cattle, not pets" used as how to treat servers. This seems useful in this context too.

Replaceable cogs, yes, that's been the push regarding programmers since the 80s? Earlier? Plenty of articles and rants online to read about the phenomenon as it specifically relates to programming going back to the 90s, also probably earlier, too.

The reason you have to pay for a cloud of virtual chickens, is because you can’t get decent bandwidth on a few free range beef & dairy cattle.

A single well tended rack in a closet on-site, with a few single cpu servers hosting multiple applications, a SAN, and a fat data pipe could replace hundreds of Kubernetes clusters — if there wasn’t a cartel on network speed.

“Quiet quitting” = rational behavior

For me I've decided to avoid US companies as much as I can.

It does not help our societies to facilitate the siphoning of our local wealth to enrich foreign companies. Especially ones that have such disregard for their own, imagine their view of the rest of us.

I believe that there is a power swing about to happen where talented individuals may get a lot more powerful and influential in relation to institutions and corporations.

I liken it to how MANPADS allow individual soldiers to overpower tanks for far cheaper, flipping the script on 100 years of war.

It hasn’t fully come to pass yet but corporations hire way too many “credential dead weight.”

In my career I have often been completely outraged at how bad credentialed people are in the pure talent department. Some of the most credentialed people who automatically get top roles really are not that smart versus some of the other people I know.

Corporations and institutions favor credentials. Individuals who have talent are very different and hopefully will go much further in current market.

MANPADS is for shooting down aircraft ("ADS" = air defense system). You're thinking of the Javelin and NLAW anti-tank weapons. Anti-tank rockets have been around for many decades; they're nothing new, but the latest ones are just more effective and have better range. IIRC, the Javelin itself was designed and first deployed back in the 1990s, so it's not exactly new either. What's new in the Ukraine conflict is that Russians apparently don't know how to (or just can't) properly operate tank battalions.

Back to MANPADS: man-portable anti-aircraft weapons aren't new either. The US was giving Stingers to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s to shoot down Soviet aircraft.

I am in the Ukrainian army. Sometimes, for fun, we shoot MANPADS at the tanks because we already took down all the jets. It’s super fun you should try enlisting.

The “ADS” part of MANPADS stands for “air defense system,” so kind of a malformed analogy.

Air defense is to MANPADS as cloud is to Individual developer?

Having been on both sides of the table, credentials are shortcuts for expected minimum knowledge base for technical understanding.

One should likely never use credentialing to substitute or proxy as a marker for creativity or capacity. Credentials only show a snapshot of knowledgebase at a specific point in time.

> What happened to “people are our most important resource”?

That is a line that is exclusively used by dishonest businesses. If people are more important than money the business will cease to exist eventually.

> but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it?

I'm not sure if this is the way a company thinks, even if they wouldn't have pressure from investors or worries for future survival (they would, BTW). Instead, some companies, likely Amazon too, view such cut as necessity for two reasons: bloated organizations slow everyone down, while diluting the company's culture; it's a great chance to trim the low performers. Not saying this is good or bad, just trying to explain the underlying logic.

> people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results

Reid Hoffman wrote a book, The Alliance, which advocates that employees and companies are not family, but for an alliance. When they both have the right goal, they work towards the goal. When they don't, they part ways. Similarly, Netflix's Reed Hastings advocated that companies are like professional sports teams. A professional sports team is brutal when it comes to trading its players, but it does not mean the players will not pull their weights. I personally think the two views are more realistic and help employees advance their careers.

Most workers at large companies are seen as fungible cogs. Even the engineers. What you describe feels, unfortunately, like an antiquated idea from the 1900s.

I think we need more unions, more automation, and more social security. We are racing towards a future where there simply won’t be enough “jobs” for everyone and the companies sure as heck aren’t going to look out. Companies have no soul and the humans that run them have worked hard to insulate themselves from that being responsible for the actions of that lack of soul they instilled.

I disagree. What you describe is Western Europe with depressed wages and less innovation and dynamic economy. You can’t regulate/unionize into prosperity.

And yet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028087

What's "prosperity"? I feel much better off with a decent work-life balance and the assurance that I won't arbitrarily lose my job than I would with a larger number in my bank account but none of that protection.

you can literally start a company with the coworkers you would have unionized with and created security for yourself and them. you just want to make things worse for other people

> you can literally start a company with the coworkers you would have unionized with and created security for yourself and them.

I can, but we'd still be taking on a bunch of risk - we'd have to put the capital into the company, as owners we would no longer be eligible for unemployment insurance if the company did fold, we have the possibility of one of us kicking another out so internal politics suddenly matters - when the whole point of the exercise was to get stability even at the cost of some upside.

Your sarcasm is appreciated…

At the cost of upside to OTHER people.

> Are they in danger of running out of money?

Have we been in a bubble so long that people have forgotten that the raison d'etre for publicly traded companies existing is not to simply exist, but rather make profit and ideally continually expanding profit for share holders?

For a startup runway and growth of whatever nature are all that matter. You need to exist long enough for the exit event, and grow in a way that makes this more possible. If you have a two year runway, you have two more years to win your investors back their money and more. But this is not true for publicly traded companies. Simply surviving or, even worse, slowly burning reserves is not enough.

I know so many post-IPO startup employees that dismiss layoffs because "the company has tons of cash!"

Do you invest in a company because you think it won't go out of business for a decade? No you invest because their profit margins are healthy and you think they'll continue to grow in a sustainable, net revenue positive way.

I still remember the dotcom bubble, which was much shorter than what we've been in, and the public debate among investors was about the "new economy" and claims that "things are different now". However those old fuddy-duddies that kept arguing that companies need to make more than they spend were proven right in just a few years.

Today I see CEOs and executive leadership at companies genuinely surprised that they're being asked to prove that they can be profitable. I see generations of tech workers sincerely confused about the very idea of what it means to run a successful business.

Amazon is doing massive layoffs because they need to show investors that the know how to create value, and become more profitable. At least Amazon has shown periodically that they can make profit. There are plenty of post-IPO startups that have never proven that they are even capable of not running at a loss.

> “the raison d'etre for publicly traded companies existing is not to simply exist, but rather make profit and ideally continually expanding profit for share holders”

Should be noted the ideology that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize the profits for shareholder above all else is a modern obsession, and always takes a short term view. Starving a company just for a few good years of share prices is is dumb but often what that ideology leads to. Making profit is part or what a corporation should do, maximizing it above all else is not.

Similarly HOAs are supposed to maximize house value but funny how some of the highest property values are places like Palo Alto that aren’t known for HOAs.

The goal is to maximize shareholder value, which is not the same as maximizing short term profits.

Amazon famously did not turn a profit for years as its stock price rose. It was able to do so because the market largely trusted the management.

The reason why the stock market demands profit from most companies is that many, many managers and directors are bad at their job. Demanding profits is a way to keep management disciplined and focused, and avoiding years long boondoggles and fiascos. This is important since they are playing with other peoples money.

What people’s money? People put money when amazon ipo’ed decades ago. These people got their money back in multiples.

Now there are just speculators exchanging pieces of papers themselves. These have not connection whatsoever with the company’s cash flow.

>the purpose of a corporation is to maximize the profits for shareholder above all else is a modern obsession

It is not "modern", depending on how you define the term. Ford v. Dodge was a case about it over 100 years ago.

No problem hiring and firing. Hiring for no reason. Setting a random employee growth target and then hiring to that level to only then fire the same amount of people a couple of years later. It is irresponsible growth targets followed by irresponsible cut backs.

> “people are our most important resource”

Did you ever believe it?

It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource.

I have been around for long enough and I have learned that a job is just a contract between parties and it exists for as long as both parties can benefit from it.

Don't get caught up in the whole companies family kind of bs or get too emotionally and culturally attached to your employer. Always be on the look up for opportunities and take them.

Never stop learning and investing in yourself. Knowledge and experience are your most important asset, keep nurturing them.

Also, I wanted to believe that a good chunk of these layoffs should have seen this coming. One must be aware at all time of how valuable (if at all) are for their employer.

> It makes me throw up every time I see corporate messages speaking of family and employees being their most important resource.

Relevant joke:

An engineer is messaging with her boss on Slack after hours. The boss is talking about how his brother is in the hospital.

The engineer asks "What are you gonna do?" and the boss responds "Well, he is family..."

The engineer says "You're gonna make him come in on weekends?!"

"The engineer says 'What? Should I just let him go?'"

There might be a joke in there somewhere. But your version have bugs.

> it’s not personal, it’s just good business

What message does that send to the employees who stick it out who are expected to "give a part of their lives" for the company? Sacrifice, go the extra mile, "what can you do for the company versus what can the company do for you"?

I hate to break this to you, but the decline of company-employee loyalty started 40 years ago, and even before that it only existed as a result of unprecedented post-war prosperity and lack of global competition.

This doesn't mean that it's all downside for employees though. Amazon grew a huge business and paid their corporate employees top of market with huge upside over the last 20 years due to their phenomenal growth. It was a very good deal for those who worked in Amazon corporate over the last 20 years—a lot of people got richer than their parents ever could have gotten in the previous generation of more stable corporate jobs.

But make no mistake, Amazon is not a magic pot of gold, they still have a P&L like any other company. 17,000 employees are not cheap. Amazon grew from 800k employess to 1.3m and then 1.6m at the end of 2019, 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic. It is to be expected that their forecasts were not completely accurate in light of the generational event and tech sea change that the pandemic brought. The fact that people are scandalized by this is indicative of how insane the 12-year bull run for tech really was.

For reference check out the wiki for largest employers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers Amazons hiring growth has been insane.

> they still have a P&L like any other company

Amazon's quarterly reports have all been good so far (Q3 2022 is the latest). Sales are up 15% YoY, and they are profitable.

The coldest view would be the holiday buying surge is over and they can shed some excess to pad that margin until next fall.

Wall St demands growth. Their revenue in 2019 was up 20%.

Some of their investments are boat anchors pulling the companies profits down.

15% in Q3 2022 is a larger dollar amount than 20% in Q3 2019...

Simple growth does not indicate that Amazon's quarterly reports are "all good" - Amazon like all other companies are valued based on their future earning potential. Amazon in particular has given very soft revenue and growth guidance compared to what they were earlier expecting, hence, they are one of the worst performing tech stocks right now. In absolute terms, both Amazon and Apple are first place for evaporating 800 billion dollars in market cap EACH over the last year.

Amazon in particular has a longstanding problem of ops costs rising quickly giving the constant potential to eat into profit margins. If a company does not have a path to profitability, at the scale to justify it's market cap, it will continue to lose investor money.

TL:DR; - reducing an earnings report to "sales grew, all good" is wildly misleading.

> In absolute terms, both Amazon and Apple are first place for evaporating 800 billion dollars in market cap EACH over the last year.

In relative terms, Apple is in first place for the largest market cap in the world of any company, and Amazon is in fifth place.

They're totally fine.

Think of it this way: Amazon is still more than twice as valuable now as it was 5 years ago. Short-term investors will live by the sword or die by the sword, but long-term investors are fine.

> Short-term investors will live by the sword or die by the sword, but long-term investors are fine.

Well, and also some of the employees there, regardless of their length of service. This whole thread is more from the POV of the tech workers getting laid off than investment performance.

Net profit margin is down 21% and diluted EPS is down 10% though. Increased revenue with decreased profit/earnings would indicate a loss of efficiency. I imagine layoffs are one signal to shareholders that they’re trying to get that efficiency back.

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money?

That's not the logic we should expect from companies in a competitive market economy. Companies that think like that will eventually pile up so many bad decisions that they will fail -- and then everyone gets laid off!

>"What happened to “people are our most important resource”?"

Nothing. But one particular group believes that is is more "equal" than the others.

>Somehow at some point, in what perhaps could be blamed on the ever-hated mass produced MBAs - companies got really comfortable with the “it’s not personal, it’s just good business” of letting go of their employees for a slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all - just to make it look to their investors like they got their shit together.

Financial services (banks, investment firms, etc.) have been doing this for decades. It might feel revolutionary to a comfortable recent tech company existence, but I'm afraid to say this is the norm. Companies can hire quickly when they think they'll grow, and fire en masse when the tide turns.

I have an MBA and I actually agree. I currently only have some anecdata to back it up ( most of my younger coworkers have a more combative if not ronin-like approach to employers ). Personally, I get it. I had company decide to close doors in our state and I was forced to looks elsewhere, but the management there did make a difference ( acceptable severance based on seniority, help with finding new jobs and so on ) and certainly did see some uncool behavior in my career.

That said, I had some minor hopes for the current post-Covid world, because it, however briefly, looked like employees understood what standing together meant and that WFH is something that can easily be done in some positions ( and is artificially dosed as a reward to special ones ).

For better or worse, the coming recession will confirm whether I had hoped for too much.

FWIW, I am staying mostly remote ( as is most of my team now ). I already told no HR once. I am getting more and more comfortable daily with more otherwise uncomfortable situations despite clearly changing winds and better corporate propaganda ( they did learn from initial fiascos ).

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”?

People are an important resource, certainly for a company like Amazon, and probably the most expensive too. But I don't understand the argument -- you don't just throw money around like that on any other resource.

Certainly up until this year it was a seller's market in tech and I saw a lot of movement to chase bigger salaries (which is fine and people should try to get what they want while the getting's good).

> And this brings me to my main point - I think years of this has had an unexpected side-effect the companies never signed up for: people started treating companies they way companies treating people and we are starting to see the results - quiet quitting, oft bemoaned lack of loyalty, job hopping, etc. Now I am not saying it’s all new, but at least in my observation it’s peaking now and my thesis is these things are connected.

I'm not sure it is, and I'm not sure if you can assign the "blame" (if there is any) to one side.

I think as I said the workers have had a red hot run for quite a few years and it was those peaking conditions that drove the peak in their dissatisfaction. Conditions are going the other way now and people will try to hold their jobs a bit more I expect.

And what started the trend from people being lifetime company men to almost no loyalty? I doubt the ruling class one day got together and decided they'd stop treating workers well. It's surely a lot of factors on all sides. People have far more generational wealth including the investment in education, than in the early 1900s, and there are at least some social safety nets, so job loss might be considered less risky. It has become increasingly easier to advertise, search, apply, recruit for jobs outside the local region with telephone, fax, then internet, email.

I'm not sure what you'd prefer. Certainly people shouldn't be tied down to companies. Should corporations be made to keep people on long after they're costing more than they're producing? When you look at government and places with undue union power (police comes to mind), you get a lot of incompetence, corruption, and just poor organizations where crap floats to the top and they could never compete without enforced monopolies. Unfortunately it never turns places into egalitarian utopias.

Software unions are starting to seem inevitable.

Both parties should see the relationship as bi-directional and symbiotic. Sometimes you have to find a different symbiotic relationship after the one you have has run its course.

It does not need to be interpreted as adversarial where you want to get as much out of them as you can for as little effort as possible and neither should they see it as an opportunity to suck the employee dry. It only works while your goals align with the company's goals.

There should be a mutual understanding --a meeting of the minds. I give you this for that. But, yes, ultimately, the company is not your friend. HR is definitely not your friend. You should have friends outside the company. At work you have colleagues and co-workers. It's not to say you cannot cultivate friendships at work that last beyond your time there, but don't presume it to be your source of friends.

> it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money? What happened to “people are our most important resource”?

Amazon just had to take out an $8B unsecured loan to be paid back in a year to cover operating and capital expenses. Despite what the government is telling you, things are really bad and about to get a lot worse. The lowest hanging fruit/the least valuable employees get cut first. That's how they stay in business. That's the smart business move unless they can pivot.

Companies can't just borrow and spend anymore they actually have to be sustainable. Amazon gets loans to buy inventory and equipment and pay employees so they can stock their warehouse and then they pay back those loans later after it's sold. If they don't sell that inventory because consumers have no money they still have to make loan payments so it becomes more costly to them over time and if they want to break even they have to raise prices. This is inflation.

The Fed raising interest rates makes borrowing money to do this more expensive so they don't do it or do it less. Money in the economy evaporated in November 2021 with the announcement of Quantitative Tightening and the end of Quantitative Easing. That means getting loans and free money became expensive and private investment in the markets/companies evaporated. This forces inflation to come down because they can't keep borrowing and inflating. They have to stock just what they can easily sell or they find themselves imploding as they can't pay back their loans. Pretty much every industry is going through this, hence all the industries collapsing. You will see a lot of companies that have been struggling go out of business.

Why is this happening? Free money basically. Our government pandered to political interests (voters and cronies) and overspent for decades, kicking the can down the road and we're now at the end of the road.

The US debt to GDP ratio has been over 120% since 2020 which by IMF definition is an economic death spiral. That means the US is underwater, we don't produce enough money as a nation to pay our bills. By 2028 that death spiral will become irreversible, meaning the payments we make on our loans for all that free money --the bailout money, stimulus checks, the entitlements, that omnibus, the inflation reduction act-- will only go to the interest and no longer the principal. That sets us on track to be insolvent by 2042.

Yeah I know, crazy right? But why? Because when this happens all those companies and private investors that poured money into stocks and venture capital can't rely on them for profits so they instead buy government bonds. They don't give as high of a return but it's guaranteed money in a down economy so they do it. The result is the governmnet receives the money they need to pay their bills and all the those living off free money get a reality check and have to live and operate within their means.

And balance is restored to the universe. Unless people try to cash out their bonds and find the government is bankrupt. This is why government spending is bad folks. They manipulate the economy to prop it up and print money until the Ponzi scheme fails. Rinse and repeat or pass a balanced budget amendment and demand our government stop spending money on pointless wars and entitlements that buy them votes or kickbacks. As long as there is government debt, as long as the government exists, the cycle will repeat. We'll just have to wait and see if we survive this time. Where we are at the end of the road is unprecedented. This has been building since we got off the gold standard which is what allowed them to overspend money we don't have.

Historically this is when there's a world war or a collapse of civilization/Dark Age because most nations are in the same boat. Decadence gets the better of us and lack of restraint (dare I say, conservative behavior) leads to this moment in history once more.

Obviously there's more nuance to it than just that, but that's a concise rough summary of what's going on.

This is the story that will be told to support austerity which will be used by a small cohort to accumulate even more wealth at the expense of everyone else and cause a generation of misery. What this story misses is that the government controls the money. The US Government can't go "bankrupt," it is the bank. The US Government doesn't have to "live within their means" - it is the means. The US Government can't "overspend money [they] don't have," because it has all the money, and the money printer. Sovereign nation 'debt' doesn't work like any other debt, and it's so incredibly useful on it's own that it makes sense to make a lot of it. This idea that the US Government has to pay back its debt is a fiction that has no utility any more.[1]

I will agree with you that most military spending is inefficient at best, and that we should shift our focus and values to something more productive rather than something literally destructive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

There is an interesting exchange in Bourdains "Parts Unknown" [1] that he did in Montana where he's talking to a former labor leader and politician from Butte where he says "the company is a son of a bitch, but they were our son of a bitch" (very much worth watching the entire show, but in particular the Butte segment). I grew up in a union family and that held true of the union as well. Something changed in my lifetime (I'm 40 years old) and I really do think it was NAFTA and free trade in general, but also it was the US reaching a terminal state of resource extraction, or at least the level of resource extraction we were willing to tolerate. The two of these weakened unions and worker solidarity and slowed the profit momentum that we had become accustom to and gave carte blanche to corporations to seek local profits in remote places. I think this fundamentally changed the dynamic of being a worker across all industries and, as you allude to, the focus on organizational optimization (coupled with quarterly earnings focused business culture) only heightened the alienation of workers and now the chicken is coming home to roost for the entire American project. Aside from deindustrialization and optimization, I think much of this can be laid at the foot of the stock market and our collective fixation on it as a barometer for societal success.

[1] https://youtu.be/KU7mda-4KwQ?t=1232

In the 90's the Democratic party abandoned the labor movement because they thought they could get more votes from moderate republicans if they spew the same free market and free trade ideology. And Clinton did that and won, so since then there's been a cohort of political leaders on the left that firmly believe that this is the right and correct path. Literally the same people, they've been in power for 30-40 years. What they miscalculated was that Clinton won the presidency because of his insane charisma and also the Ross Perot spoiler on the right, not the free market stuff. But it was enough cover to dismantle the long-term alliance of the labor movement and the Democratic party.

> but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it? Are they in danger of running out of money?

Stock price crashed. This effects the bonuses/equity of a bunch of employees, some of whom are on the executive levels. Cutting on employment is a very effective method to raise profits and help the stock price. It sucks but that's what the market (investors) like. This is just capitalism ...we've all signed up for this (I guess?).

> We are seeing a bit of a market downturn - but it hasn’t hit Amazon pocketbook now, has it?

Um, yes?

Honestly, I'm not sure how one could sincerely make this statement.

Amazon's net income for Q3 '22 is roughly a third of its net income Q4 '21. If losing 2/3rds of your revenue isn't considered hitting the pocketbook, I don't want is.

Now you could yada yada yada they're still profitable, but that's a different argument.

Amazon was seeing 20-30% growth of its revenue. Their expenses were also growing at a similar base. Now that top line revenue isn't there, they need to address how to address bottom line growth.

Net income is not revenue, so you got your signals crossed somewhere.

From: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273963/quarterly-revenue...

   Revenue Q3 2022: $127 billion
   Revenue Q4 2021: $137 billion

Note the stair-step graph. Q4 is Christmas so it's a lot higher. That's why we normally compare numbers with a year earlier.

   Revenue Q3 2021: $111 billion

When times are good (new technology being invented / adopted / marketed) nobody asks tough questions: the corporate structure somehow orchestrates production, new goods or services are being created, value is added, everybody participating in a meaningful way in the bonanza is "happy".

These periods don't last too long: Technologies are tried but discarded, or are too easy to reproduce and lead to saturation, or competition reaches fierce levels etc.

In "stable" or lean times the corporate structure becomes a ruthless spreadsheet optimisation exercise that focuses on exploiting every possible arbitrage (e.g., tax regimes, employee loyalty, overseas labor cost differences etc) to maintain the monetary profitability projections. This leads to endless corporate restructurings, financial engineering and other zero or negative sum games.

The lifecycle of a human being, the social and emotional needs to belong, contribute, feel appreciated and helpful, to create value when young and able, in order to receive value when old and frail. These things are not part of the corporate structure contracts. Neither is in any sense a sustainable planet (but thats part of another rant).

Because it's leasing an asset, not owning one.

Honestly I think it has a lot to do with a hot market, at least to this point. You get a lot more pliant if you don’t think you can find another job easily (one reason why some tech executives don’t actually mind this downturn too much even though it costs them money).