As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done
we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce
Are we done for?
yes, create a legion of angry, unemployed/unemployable people, that will go well for the capitalist system
Don’t worry, they’ve got the army + police at their feet to keep people in line!
unless the public are well organizedunemployed = more free time to organize!
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Quick recap for future historians:
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for a really brief part of its history, humanity tried to give kindness a go. A half-hearted attempt at best, but there were things like DEI programs, for instance, attempting to create a gentler, more accepting world for everyone. At the very least, trying to appear human to the people they managed was seen as a good attribute for Leaders.
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some people felt that their God-given right to be assholes to everyone was being taken away (it’s right there in the Bible: be a jerk to your neighbor, take away his job and f##k his wife)
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Assholes came back in full force, with a vengeance. Not that they had ever disappeared, but now they relished the opportunity to be openly mean for no reason again. Once again, True Leaders were judged by their ability to drain every drop of blood from their employees and take their still-beating hearts as an offering to the Almighty Shareholders.
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I get the feeling that simply working at Amazon means your job is at risk.
That’s pretty much how it goes yeah lol
Amazon is currently hemorrhaging executive level and above engineers. Amazon will have to be replacing these jobs with AI cause every one of value has already left/is leaving and filling those jobs with qualified people at that level is actually a lot more difficult than more junior level positions.
if you don’t boycott Amazon by now it’s time to start. Don’t buy from them don’t work for them. Let them rot in the dark.
Out of all the jobs, the bosses job is the most replaceable
Yet they will never be replaced, sadly.
They get all of the credit and none of the blame.
Time to head for greener pastures.
I just want my shit delivered in under an hour by drones for now please
No. Amazon has been trying to cut head count for years now. They were hoping RTO5 would do the trick but because every company is trying to do the same thing people didn’t have a ship to jump to.
“Our AI is so great!” Is a way to mask that their finances aren’t good and they dramatically made the wrong bet in 2021 hiring so much.
Honestly most of the time at Amazon you’re doing more meetings and red tape than you are coding so I don’t expect AI to magically fix shit for them.
They’re actually significantly below their current hiring target at the executive level and people are leaving left and right.
When I was last there a while ago people were leaving but they were hoping for a lot more of an exodus. Particularly in the L6/7 level.
Has that changed?
but they were hoping for a lot more of an exodus. Particularly in the L6/7 level.
Higher is more senior right? Counting up from L1?
If so, that’s an insane amount of ego, to want less of that talent. Wow.
But I bet the drugs they do are amazing, though.
It’s a bit misleading for engineering.
Every Engineer starts at L4. That’s the junior position.
L5 is the mid-senior level. Most SDEs in Amazon are L5 and that’s considered a terminal position. For management this is the “junior” (for lack of a better term) tier
L6 is Senior but it’s closer to staff engineers at other companies. You tend to do more cross team work. This is also where a glut of managers are at
L7 is Principal engineer and senior manager. Only about 2% of engineers get here. Managers at this lever oversee multiple teams.
L8+ is fancy external hires and directors.
The problem is that Amazon expects a lot of people to churn out before you hit the L6/7 levels. They dangle a carrot of super high pay for those tiers but don’t actually expect to pay it long term. There’s quite a few that have stayed longer than expected. And it’s hard to get out because they know how to game the system to demonstrate “impact”. Now that isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of good managers and engineers at this tier either. There are really good people at this tier. It’s just Amazon doesn’t want that many at this tier for long.
Also if the idea of having an expected churn and dangling pay that no one can hit sounds dystopian and awful it is. Amazon sucks.
Their shopping experience is so much worse than only 3 years ago. Whatever they are doing, they are doing it wrong.
Amazon is a technology company now. For a long time the storefront and logistics have been a tech demo for Amazon Web Services.
For instance: FreeRTOS
Even Bezos has acknowledged that companies really only last 30 years. They inevitably decline. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos from his garage in Bellevue, Washington,[3] on July 5, 1994
The people who are predicting that AI will replace X% of jobs are usually not qualified to make that determination. They don’t do those jobs, and they don’t have any idea what is involved in those peoples jobs. They are way too high up the corporate ladder to have actually been doing any real work in the last 10 years. They were sold some AI product which promises to lay off thousands of workers, and they seem to have believed it implicitly.
What’s sickening to me is how enthusiastic they seem to be about ruining their employees lives
Ironically, save for specific positions that require facetime and political shrewdness, it is these same prognosticators whose roles can most readily be fulfilled by Ai
It takes a special type of shithead to threaten peoples’ jobs to their face without even knowing what the fuck they are talking about.
This is going to be the threat that EVERY employee will hear over the next several years, whenever they ask for any sort of a raise, promotion, etc. “Just be glad we don’t replace you with AI.”
Nice of him to give them the heads up, so they can all go find new jobs now. Sure would be poetic if they all just moved elsewhere and left Amazon understaffed.
Can we quit posting this baseless fear mongering? It is simply powerful people trying to demoralize workers and acting like it is legitimate news is playing into their hands.
Time for the AI teams to suddenly have tech issues.
“Sorry, the whole codebase is just gone! We have no idea what happened!”
“Must have been the S3 storage”
Stupid question but what is stopping the software engineers to poison the well?
Insert malicious code, self destructing functions, have entire batches of code lost or corrupted, hardware damaged, etc?
A company with fuck off amount of legal power?
Small acts of sabotage are easy to write off to causality, if well planned.
Stupid question but what is stopping the software engineers to poison the well?
Great question. I agree with other responses - it happens, and there’s motive to hush it up, so we tend not to hear about it.
It’s also just really hard to tell the difference after the fact between “Dave sabotaged us” and “no one knows how to do what Dave did”.
But I’ll add - there’s currently little need motive sabotage AI implementations. Current generation AI is largely unable to deliver on what is promised, in a business sense. It does cool but useless things, like quickly generating low maturity code, and writing a summary any seven year old could have wtitten.
Current generation AI adds very little business value, while creating substantial risks. Nevermind that no one knows how Dave worked, now no one knows how our AI works, and it’s so eager to please everyone that it lies at critical moments.
Companies playing around with current generation AI to boost next quarter’s stocks will hit plenty of “find out” soon enough, with nothing beyond the natural consequences of ignoring their own engineers advice.
All that to say - if we see what looks like sabotage, it may well just be the natural consequences of stupidity.
It’s not a stupid question. From what I hear, people try stuff like this all the time, stuff like putting a bit of code on your employer’s system that’ll erase important files if you get shit canned and no longer appear on the payroll. It’s why a lot of companies no longer give notice when ppl are fired, just have security walk them out. And unfortunately this stuff is often traceable, which means they’re risking quite serious prosecution.
I don’t like much of what I see, I think it’s becoming clear that some new tech is going to have wide ranging and harmful effects. I’m not sure that doing luddite stuff will help but I can understand why people would think that way.
We could just regulate tech companies and outright ban some practices but since we apparently don’t have time for rational solutions…
Well thought out sabotage can be written off to causality or involuntary human error.
Not giving notice of lay off is an abusive work practice and only shows how far we’ve allowed work conditions to degrade.
And that practice itself can be highly dangerous, if we consider a person can be midway into a complex task that can turn extremely difficult to follow by another: waste of time, resources, energy and money.
10 years in jail is what’s stopping them.
It’s REALLY hard to create a dead man’s switch that works, but also leaves no trace. Even if you delete the script after it executes, there’s probably backups or logs that show what happened.
Nah, not stupid. But yeah it’s hard to do without leaving a very clear trail. I assume most engineers want to keep their job and their income.
But programmers tend to use some form of a “versioning” system like git. This will record everyone’s changes to the codebase, when a change was made, what was changed, who changed it. And it allows you to go back and revert changes if something important broke. Very convenient for programmers, less convenient for sabotage.
Something I think should be on the same level as “if buying isn’t owning piracy isn’t theft” is something like “if an ai/robot can take my job why should I have to work”
why should I have to work
Because landlords would like to keep their wealth extraction going.
In theory we could get solar panels and batteries for power, some cheap robots for growing food, but all land is owned.
On how about “the robot can take my job I only want the money”
