Amazon boss tells staff AI means their jobs are at risk in coming years
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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?
How kind of him to tell his staff to look elsewhere for jobs so far in advance. Polish that resume team!
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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?
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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 organized -
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?
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.
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How kind of him to tell his staff to look elsewhere for jobs so far in advance. Polish that resume team!
Yes, a few times before I have thought, “what possible good can come from this?” In response to utterances by petty, nervous tyrannical managers.
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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?
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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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?
Developer guilty of using kill switch to sabotage employer's systems
A software developer has been found guilty of sabotaging his ex-employer's systems by running custom malware and installing a
BleepingComputer (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
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.
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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?
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.
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Ah yes those famous "Agents". They will of course write themselves, adapt themselves to changing environment and run on their own without any supervision.
Yes. Exactly. They'll also deploy upgrades to themselves painlessly. Thankfully that's never been a huge ongoing pain felt by everyone paying attention.
(I couldn't resisit adding a "yes, and" to your point.
Edit: And the AI agents will back themselves up correctly, too! We trained them on the activities of all currently living IT engineers, and the average of our work always results in a successful backup...
If that wasn't true, we would be having a new ransomware crisis every month...
I'm sure glad we live in one of the good timelines, and have plenty of clean correct code and configuration data to train our AI on!
(This is, of course, sarcasm. Companies that shift to AI IT agents today can expect to very quickly reach today's median IT outcome. There's not enough popcorn in the world for what is coming.)
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Between AI and Robotics, we will likely have a permanently unemployed segment of close to 50%, or even more, within the next decade.
Not everyone will be able to be retrained to be a robotics engineer or AI programmer, and many, many jobs that are considered entry-level will disappear. Imagine a world where most fast food and retail workers are unemployed.
When 40% of America is unemployed, the government will be faced with 2 options - Universal Basic Income, or reducing the population by 40%. Which solution will each party embrace, and how will they accomplish their objectives?
Which solution will each party embrace, and how will they accomplish their objectives?
Both American partiesEach party will solve it the way they have solved climate change. -
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.
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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?
Out of all the jobs, the bosses job is the most replaceable
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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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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?
I get the feeling that simply working at Amazon means your job is at risk.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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?
Time to head for greener pastures.
