> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?
Numbers do not support that. Jobs might be shrinking within Amazon, but globally the situation is the opposite.
Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).
That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.
Most jobs are not interchangeable, especially globally.
What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.
Rather, a correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates and excessive money printed which promoted & rewarded hiring just to be compretitive
> correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's planned, merciless strategy. It costs nearly nothing to fire a ton of people, so why not hire a bunch with free money and dump them as soon as the free money disappears
Yeah pretty much. This is just late stage capitalism, and the working class seem to just be shrugging at it instead of what theyr forefathers did in reaction.
While bad, that’s something entirely different. The reported 30,000 seems to be because of economic conditions, whereas that 600,000 number is allegedly from robotic improvements in their warehouses. Not great for the American workforce either way, but they aren’t exactly the same.
It also forecast a certain business growth that we see not happening. Also, no sane PM would document to fire 600,000 people, it’s always “avoid hiring, wink wink”.
Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?
It's been 3 years of this. The frog has already been boiled, especially if you look at the comment activity here compared to 2023. HN is just caring less and less and tuning out the obvious economic headwinds we've been in. Real shame.
We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.
Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.
There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.
It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.
Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.
One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.
In what way? Maybe you have a different definition of human, but as one myself, and someone who produces lots of PDFs for others, it's absolutely readable. Double-click, open, read. Ultimately though the readability depends on the producer of the file...
I think you don't understand what "human-readable format" means. The Wikipedia article has a good overview[1]. Open any PDF in a text editor instead of a PDF viewer and you'll see why it's not a human-readable format.
there may not be an algorithm at work here as there is on Instagram or TikTok, but there's still a bubble - the name, design and discourse of HN itself works as a filter.
> At the time, I went "WTF?" and just commented it out to get it running again. I had bigger fish to fry... and just kind of forgot about it. Everything seemed fine.
You're running a database system and you just casually comment out the configuration setting the timezone?
In what way did everything "seem fine"? SELECT 1 returned something? No further investigation required??
The world might have people like Erdogan hold less powerful positions if large social platforms like Twitter didn't enable populism and suppression so easily.
How is purchasing advertisement any more safe from free speech suppression than posting on X/Twitter, Instagram or similar? You're still subject to algorithms, and because advertisment goes through a private entity, they can instil arbitrary restrictions with some amount of effort.
- Purchasing advertising can be done from a variety of actors not just a couple social media platforms.
- As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice.
Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.
Have you considered that LLMs are also biased against new languages and libraries, so the code quality will be worse compared to something more established regardless of what you personally think/feel?
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.