(but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)
This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.
The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.
Aside from that, you need to contribute with money for something that will not get you anything in the short term. Also the lack of transparency incentives corruption
A software engineer’s union would just kick whatever offshoring is happening into overdrive.
Where I live now in Austria, there's some union of IT workers, but it's small and toothless because they know their work can be offshored and have no leverage especially that the country is already not attractive to investors as-is due to high costs, high taxes and regulations. IT workers giving themselves even more benefits and protections through unions, like the rail workers do for example, would just mean non critical IT work leaves the country ASAP.
In a globalized free market without trade and regulatory barriers, where the products and the "labor" travels freely over a wire with no borders or tariffs, the best value players win all and everyone else is stuck in a race to the bottom trying to match that even if their operating costs are higher due to regulations, taxes, etc
Unions only worked in jobs where the workers could collectively use the leverage they had all along against their employer but were too afraid to use due to retaliation, but unions can't fix real world economic and trade facts that make your leverage zero to begin with. See the VFX industry for best example.
However, the experienced reality repeatedly doesn't live up to the promise.
Nobody wanted to risk disrupting smooth running operations by offshoring when free money was raining from the sky, but now that money is getting tighter and covid opened the doors to accepting more work done remotely and less face to face collaboration, offshoring is a lot less risky and offputting than in the past.
Plus, unlike the Indian offshoring scare of ~20 years ago, besides the remote work thing, offshore labor is a lot more skilled at IT task now. There isn't that massive gap anymore, where only Americans or Germans new how to write SW, and the eastern world only knew to make sneakers and do call support.
However, the second an IT union gets established they’re just going to say the hell with it, India ain’t so bad.
In such an environment, H1B workers will actively fight union formation.
I don't know about how a union would affect the standard salary being offered. I'd say that it could be higher for those essential enough to be "core staff", those that the company hires permanently knowing they'll be hard to get rid of and who drive the company forward because they're motivated with additional means.
So a union might drive the salaries and employment conditions up for the "core" team, while driving them down for the "temps". I've been through this as a unionized tech worker in both categories, and this is how it played out.
This is a boom and bust industry by nature. Projects finish or cancel, and work winds down. You can always be laid off. Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine.
It’s having all of humanity or all the country subsidize you/your industry.
I suppose there was a time when American manufacturing had a big power/equality/productivity and social stability imbalance over Chinese manufacturing and the US unions did play a role in correcting that and promoting Chinese wealth and power. So in principle I agree. I'm just less sure that AWS employees are going to benefit from doing the same thing in software.
Humans organize together in many different ways for many different reasons. Your own assertion belies that — if my negotiating my terms of working for someone is crime against humanity, why should the guy controlling the capital have that right?
The dude for whom I work is worth $10-15B. What should he make for the benefit of humanity and efficiency? He negotiated a deal with the board for his comp.
That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Elon's layoffs at Twitter were basically the signal for the rest of the industry that it's time to reverse the trend.
I don’t see a conspiracy here other than sheep herd mentality of hire hire hire then too many
Is it mentioned anywhere that the roles eliminated are all going to be software engineers, because that’s what all the threads so far are interpreting this as. This feels more like preparing for a recession without saying it out loud. People aren’t buying as much anymore and with focus on cost savings across tech, can easily understand AWS not covering for lower retail revenue anymore.
Amazon has demonstrated a preference for “unregretted attrition” (URA). URA is the name for what happens when engineers exit the company and Amazon is happy that they do. The exit can either be due to a PIP failure (performance improvement plan) or just unhappiness with the company. If you believe URA works well, then URA is how Amazon gets rid of low-performing employees. If you are like me, then you believe that URA is mostly explained by the following factors:
- Failure of Amazon to successfully develop engineers. A good company will turn engineers into better engineers, and Amazon gets rid of them instead, which is inefficient. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon was not competent enough to develop these engineers into better engineers.
- Consequences of poor culture, causing good engineers to mentally check out and eventually leave. The attrition is only unregretted because the good engineers will care less and therefore look like bad performers, when they’re good performers in a bad environment.
- A way for Amazon to avoid paying out stock grants at the 2-year mark (which is when you get most of your stock grants at Amazon). The attrition is only unregretted because somebody at Amazon cares more about the short-term bottom line.
- A way for managers to exercise control over employees they don’t like. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon’s decisions about employee performance are based on bad data provided by managers.
I won’t share stories here but the targets are around 5% per year, maybe a little higher.
When you're in between jobs, work on:
1. improving your job skills
2. network
3. build your resume by contributing to open source
4. start your own business
Q: You know what investors and shareholders love more than having 1 billion dollars?
A: Having 2 billion dollars. And with all the money being burned on AI, having 2 billion is better than 1.
If mass layoffs causes the stock to go from 1 to 2, then guess what's gonna happen?
In the ZIRP era companies would hire needlessly to get the stock up because that signaled growth to investors. Now it's the opposite, you trim because that gets the stock up, not because they conspire together to lay off people.
For the last few months I still randomly get errors opening audible. You know, to buy more books.
Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well. Which is awesome when you're dealing with databases and the logistics of delivering packages. But it's effectively the opposite of games, movies and other creative media where you have to trust a single person or small group of people with a vision. Otherwise you get what Amazon gives, which is unappetizing slop.
If I were Jassy I'd cut off these product lines entirely. It's just not a good fit for how Amazon operates.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/king-of-meat-studio-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_ori...
On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.
Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.
Quite.
I remember when they started off flogging books in the '90s. I completely agree with you that trying to do "creative" is a bloody daft idea for a bunch of very efficient box shifters.
These people were told they were being laid off in October but remain on payroll. What Amazon is "bracing" for is another one of these announcements, much larger, announcing people who will actually separate from the company 90 days later. They will find out on or around the same day the WARN notice is posted.
The Meta layoff is 100% Reality Labs (they published team names, in addition to locations and roles).
Edit: parent comment removed the link, but it was https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe... .
> Employee separations resulting from this action are expected to be permanent. The affected employees are not represented by a union or any other collective bargaining representative.
1. dont understand ai
2. have had the same skill set for 10 years
3. are working on autopilot, not trying to get promoted, just collecting paychecks
4. taking zero risk, follow protocol, play politics
for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge. 15k is childs play. too many employees that make too much money to just maintain status quo
I’m not here to defend the people in Amazon corporate, I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim. It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.
Amazon doesn't owe anybody a job. Likewise, if you buy groceries from Safeway, you can switch to buying from Walmart anytime.
> It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.
I'm sure there are a lot of things people don't buy even though they can afford it.
isn't this the American dream?
become Bezos, then exploit every last cent out of your suppliers, employees and customers
Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Deciding one day to simply fire them all, I guess for doing what they were hired to do, is not okay.
Business conditions change constantly.
That pretty much sums it up for 90% of the world's employment...
Relevant speech by SF author Charlie Stross, from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
2. yes, if you're talking about basic reading skills at best.
3. correct. except "autopilot" doesn't even mean solving the basic problems they're supposed to solve as part of the role.
4. which is exactly what Amazon asked them to do.
> for the company to move forwards, they need a massive purge.
Absolutely. Starting at the C-suite, VP, and director levels (L8 and above).
Source: I was there.
But they don't really think about things from a "consumer who wants to watch something tonight" vs "shopper who we want to get money from" perspective. So the Prime Video app has been painful to navigate and use. Things like concepts of how people want to interact with TV shows - one top level entry with seasons in it, vs top-level entries per season, which took them forever to change - reflect quick and dirty shoveling of concepts over from how they'd sell box sets or such vs thinking about it from a user-first POV. Or how search will return a match for just about anything because they will happily sell it to you vs having as a default "show any free results first because I'm not looking to spend more right now."
That's a product/vision failure (or just mismatch with what you and I want) not an engineering/engineering culture thing.
- Amazon has 3 main business lines ("orgs"): Ecommerce, AWS and devices.
- Ecommerce and AWS are (now) cash cows. Devices bleeds money. TV falls into the devices organization.
- Devices was a Bezos bet. Current Amazon couldn't care less honestly.
- The devices organization is (today, after layoffs and people leaving in droves) essentially full of incompetent people, where all the leftovers of the other two orgs end up.
- It's people that was hired to build structure with the sole purpose of some higher-up promotion. They never served any other purpose, neither they have any particularly sophisticated skill.
- That's the people that makes the TV app.
1. scaling retail
2. keeping the servers running at AWS
all the low hanging fruit has been picked, they need a fundamentally different employee base
As anyone in software development can tell you, this does not compute. You cannot do things this way, and any experienced software engineer can tell you it doesn't work.
Besides, it's not how Amazon worked at all. Amazon is famous for having systematically verified ("mathematically proved") how it's core systems operated. Whereas, for example Google only did that in redesigns when the systems had already collapsed once or twice due to scale, not from early on. And even that is superior to how Microsoft or Oracle did it: they bought Google employees and had them design an iteration of what Google is running (yes, is running, not was running. Google redesigned it's core systems ... and then mostly didn't migrate. Borg was never replaced with Omega and the main large system that they migrated to is Spanner. Kubernetes isn't Borg. Kubernetes grew out of Borg's successor. Except Google never migrated away from Borg)
https://cacm.acm.org/practice/systems-correctness-practices-...
I'm sure Amazon had entire departments, much larger than core engineering, just like every other company, where it looked like everything was operationally focused. That doesn't mean core engineering doesn't exist, or does nothing.
The Amazon way is to quickly grind something out, and build on as many layers of AWS abstractions as possible. They’re famous for the hustle and grind not the stellar engineering acumen of formal verification.
[0] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/apo...
[1] - https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/prime-video-india-growth-pa...
[2] - https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/prime-video-india-content-c...
(I know the literal answer is on Wikipedia, but I’m flabbergasted.)
They are aiming to layoff 30k employees this year. They are one bad earnings away from a surprise mass layoff unfortunately.
The other big tech companies are at lesser risk.
Turns out announcing a $100k fee to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement during the same press conference [3] leads to a reverse brain drain [0] and a $35B commitment to invest in India [1].
For example, much of AWS SageMaker's team is out of AWS India, and unofficially Amazonians on work visas are being offered transfers to India [2] while paying L6/7 [4] roughly the same as they would in Germany [5].
I warned people on HN for years to not be greedy with remote work (1-2 day hybrid is not the end of the world) and not be pissy to Americans of non-European heritage and derogatorily calling us H1Bs.
Either way those of us who know how to take advantage of brutal raw capitalism win.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/us-loses-...
[1] - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill...
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1qfesvs/6_...
[3] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-signs-proclamati...
[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
FedRAMP requires US persons on US soil, and so as far as Americans are concerned, only senior management and people working on the federal business are safe.
It's not the end of the world, but it's also not really remote work if you have to live within commuting distance of an office.
Seems a lot of the Trump policies go exactly the opposite of what was planned. The supply people at my company are telling me that there is a huge push to move manufacturing away from the US due to tariffs.
But anyway, the decrease in hiring in the US will be mostly driven by foreigners that will still be hired, but now not relocate to the US. Why hire someone on a H1-B at an extra cost of 100k when you can hire the same person in some other office and not pay that cost? It's a self-own by the US.
Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off.
If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k jobs in GOP-leaning upstate NY, the CEO of that company (who also invented the entire field of flash memory) may as well hedge and shift abroad [1] helping other countries move up the value chain [2].
If you can't respect our community, why shouldn't we geopolitically hedge as well?
[0] - https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2026/01/trump-cabinet-member...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260123VL207/micron-commerc...