The article didn’t even mention that, at 29 years old, he abandoned his 5 year-old son to go on his middle-aged crisis journey. Some person to celebrate.
Apparently it was his ex that took the child and moved out of his reach, to Northern Ireland, to the place he couldn't go because of his military background.
Perhaps this explains his motivation to just go on a ridiculous healing journey.
I understand your argument but it just seems like you’re purposely being contrarian.
Here’s why what you wrote seems needlessly contrarian: Amazon just posted an $18B quarter, so there is no pressing financial pressure. Okay, so you suggest this may be a last resort in lieu of retraining, but we’re talking about 14k jobs across many teams (I know of at least 40 affected), levels, and job families. The idea of needing to cross train is obviously not the culprit at that scale; An SDE laid off from one team can easily perform the same tasks on many others internally. This also completely ignores how Amazon works internally, with managers required to rank employees for pip, and, for events just like this one, URA, regardless of whether or not they deem them to be competent or not.
Of course, Amazon has also been documented to use automated processes for pip/layoffs, and the idea that layoffs involved any ounce of consideration as a last resort is so unbelievable it feels almost inflammatory.
The notion that criticizing one of history’s most profitable companies laying off thousands (at the height of their profits) is the same thing as stating, “every company beyond profit X should never do layoffs” is a blatant misrepresentation and ignores any context.
If you know people affected, then you have more information than me and I'm not going to pretend like I have a better grasp on the situation than you.
However, the "last resort" comment I made was a guess to their reasoning - it wasn't an authoritative explanation. My core point is that Amazon seems to think they can do the same, or about the same, or an acceptable amount less with fewer people. If that's the case, then from their perspective, they're overpaying on labor. That's it.
From the outside looking in, if your "last resort" comment truly was a guess to their reasoning, then I'm rather shocked. We're both on HN, so I have to assume we both work in tech and have access to the same information regarding why Amazon has earned its awful reputation.
Beyond that, I agree with your larger point, with an asterisk on "overpaying", as I do think an American company should have an incentive to prevent laying off workers just to refill them with offshoring and hiring H1Bs, especially at Amazon's scale of profitability.
I think you're missing a more human point: people dislike the effect of hiring and firing thousands of people with zero consideration. They hire thousands because it makes management look like they're ramping up to solve problems, and then they fire this many people because it makes management look like they're cutting costs to be more efficient. It's all about management keeping up the illusion that they're "on top of things", when in reality they're just playing number games.
There's empathy involved in the revulsion toward this kind of process. Please take time to consider that not everyone fired is a $300k/year rockstar programmer who can just as easily walk over to Meta or Google for a job. I know of people who have uprooted their lives and work under the idea that if they do a good job they'll stay on, when in fact the reality is more like gambling and they could be fired at any point.
Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen time). One of them was passionate about coding and kept working on side projects/leetcoding, eventually landing a role at a tech company after a year of working at a boba shop. The other, who struggled with coding and was verbally not passionate about it (complained about it a lot, didn’t interview prep much) ended up throwing in the towel a few months on the job hunt.
An anecdote, but probably generalizable across those in today’s job market. But the market is the core problem, second to the individual’s willingness to grind. Neither are related to screen time.
> Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.
The difference today is two-fold IMO:
* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.
* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
I took the ancestor comment to be more about the "3-4 hours a day on social media" than time on a screen doing something like learning/improving programming skills.
Now, if you're spending three hours a day writing your blog and promoting your reputation as a skilled developer that's possibly going to help you. If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you. Though back in my 20s I could waste hours just watching stupid shit on TV.
It's possibly harder now to get a great job offer right out of school, but getting a lot of rejections as a new graduate isn't new either. It used to be a thing for seniors near graduation to paper their living room or hallway with all their rejection letters.
Most people are average. They will end up with average jobs and earning average money. One negative thing about social media is that it makes the top overachievers seem normal, and when you compare their lives (at least as they portray them) to your own it can make you feel hopeless.
The hard job market drives more screen time. Less jobs, less money to spend at bars or any other third place that has become paid, less money to network. You aren't spending time honing your craft now, you spend times on hustles trying to launch your social media account or by doing gig work on deliveries and rides hating.
You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
>"Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate."
Although I'm roughly half the age of the median HN user, and don't have a lot of life experience, one thing I've learned over the last few years - particularly during covid - is that people will accomplish success after a difficult circumstance, and will come out one of two ways (which often decides their core values, political leaning, empathy towards people in other difficult situations, etc.):
1. "I got through it, so anyone else can, too"; or
2. "I got through it, and believe no one else should need to".
One can also progress from 1. to 2. after living long enough, and realising how much luck has played into their fate.
It took me 10 years of career to realise how lucky I had been, even though I had put work and effort, in no way that alone accounts for my whole professional trajectory. A lot of it was due to sheer luck, by knowing the right people, at the right time, being in the right economical environment of a specific geographical place. Yes, you can work on things under your control to improve your chances with luck but it's still not something in anyone's entire control.
Believing purely in 1. is being blind to this aspect of life in general, a lot of achievements only happened due to luck, there are other thousands of people who were not as lucky and over time it completely changed their paths in life.
It could be having to accept working at a boba shop for a year during labor market fluctuations. It could even be having to choose a different career altogether if the demand in that market simply no longer exists.
It could also be losing one's home because their kid got sick and they had a job that didn't offer PTO. Or a mom not being able to breastfeed because their government doesn't offer paid parental leave.
The use of "it" meant a "difficult circumstance", which are also pretty broad - because calling a circumstance difficult is highly subjective and oftentimes held up on nothing, unless it can hold up to scrutiny.
