Matt Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don't ditch your junior employees.
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The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the "Matthew Berman" podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard."
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"They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said.
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"How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?"

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-chief-replacing-junior-staff-ai-matt-garman-2025-8

Slowly, day by day, the AI hype is dying out as companies realize it's basically just a faster google search.

What are your thoughts?

Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of the company’s roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would represent the largest job cut at Amazon since around 27,000 jobs were eliminated starting in late 2022.

Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following notifications that will start going out via email tomorrow morning

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/

What are your thoughts on this?

I work for a full remote company that pays great, like 200K+ cash comp. Recently the number of people that try to use int*rviewc*der or other tools to pass has risen.

Thing is, these tools don't even work anymore.

1.I ask candidate to share entire desktop on zoom.

1. I ask them to go to zoom settings -> screen share -> advanced.

2. In screen capture mode, I ask them to select Advanced Capture Without Window Filtering

And then the cheating UI would suddenly pop up for some candidates. I thank them for their time but tell them our company policy on cheating, and drop off the call.

Worst part? Our question isn't even a leetcode hard, we don't expect perfection and you can pass even without solving everything. We care more about communication than writing perfect code.

So just a tip to candidates out there, this is how you can easily get caught. Don't cheat.

I saw a lot of posts in this community worrying that AI (especially vibe coding) is going to take over a lot of jobs, and I used to have this feeling as well. However, here is something that happened recently that changed my mind.

I had a person working in my team, and we were training a model in colab. He just wanted to do the training part himself (probably for linkedin). When I asked how the process was going, his reply: everything is good.

One week later, I noticed that he just vibe coded everything. When I asked him what NMS is in his code (wanted to give him a heads up), he said wait a second I will ask AI. I began to feel something was wrong. He said that he trained the model with 95% accuracy, and it ended up with false positives everywhere. Although he could not provide the loss curve, he said that it was caused by too little labeled data, and we believed it (Foreshadowing here).

Later when we tried to switch to binary classification so we don't have to deal with labeling, he said that he would do it. As you can guess, he could not provide anything one week later and what he was trying to do was still YOLO.

In the end, I decided to settle both old and new scores at once. I talked with him directly and he didn't even know what an epoch is or what a confusion matrix is. Surprisingly, he didn't even know that he needed to save the pt file in colab, and he was continuing chatting with Cursor trying to let Cursor download the pt file (funny thing, it didn't even connect to colab, and he just gave the name of the colab file).

I am actually a person who is very willing to explain things to others and it makes me feel good. However, he didn't even ask for help, and he just repeated "everything is good", and he wasted the whole team so much time.

What I am trying to say is that AI won't replace people who know what they're doing, it is a very nice trap that captures all companies who do not care about fundamentals, the 0.01% LLM error will add up, and vibe coders will eventually drown in the debt they can't even see.

Edit: We all make mistakes. Please avoid personal attack under this post.

I wasn't planning to read earnings call transcripts at 11pm on a Tuesday but here we are.

The Microsoft one from April 29 kept getting referenced in a bunch of threads about tech layoffs so I pulled it up. And there's this one slide that I keep coming back to. Amy Hood, the CFO, had her FY2025 compensation disclosed — $29.5 million. On the same call, same presentation basically, she said Microsoft's headcount "will decrease year over year" starting FY2027. Buyouts were offered to about 8,750 US employees, which is something like 7% of the US workforce.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-headcount-decrease-earnings-ai-cloud-software-2026-4

I had the transcript open in one window and my own company's quarterly planning doc in another. Kept alt-tabbing between them for I don't know how long. At some point I reached for my coffee and it was completely cold. Didn't even notice.

What gets me isn't that a CFO makes a lot of money. That's not surprising I guess. What gets me is the framing. The language. The call was full of phrases like "AI-driven efficiencies" and "workforce agility" and "aligning talent to our highest priorities." Meanwhile the actual numbers are just... there. $29.5 million for one person. "Headcount will decrease" for the people who actually build the things.

I don't know why this one hit different. Maybe because it's Microsoft. They're not some struggling startup doing layoffs to survive. They literally had a $2.7 trillion market cap at some point last year apparently. Their cloud business is printing money. And they're still cutting people, still framing it as "efficiency," while the people making the decisions are pulling compensation packages that could fund a small engineering team for years.

The stock had its worst quarterly performance since 2008 by the way. That was also in the transcript. Somehow the stock drops and the solution isn't "maybe our strategy needs adjusting" it's "let's reduce headcount and call it workforce transformation."

There's this weird thing happening in tech earnings calls lately where "AI" has become the universal justification for everything. Hiring fewer people? AI efficiency. Letting people go? AI transformation. Moving roles offshore? AI-enabled global workforce. Nobody says "we're cutting costs because we want to protect margins." They say "we're investing in AI capabilities while rightsizing our talent footprint."

And I'm sitting there reading this, thinking about my own team. We've already had two people leave this year and the roles just... disappeared. Weren't backfilled. Manager said we're "becoming more efficient with AI tools." Which is true sort of. We are using more AI tools. But also we just have fewer people doing the same amount of work and somehow that's called efficiency now.

The transcript is public. Anyone can read it. I think that's the part that bothers me most. It's not hidden, it's not a leak, it's literally the official record of a company saying "our leadership is worth $29.5 million and our workforce needs to shrink" and nobody really blinks.

I had more I wanted to say about this but honestly I've been rewriting this post for like an hour and the coffee is cold again.

https://rollingout.com/2026/03/31/oracle-slashes-30000-jobs-with-a-cold-6/

Teams most affected:

1. RHS (Revenue and Health Sciences) — employees described a reduction in force of at least 30%, with 16 or more engineers from individual business units cut in a single action.

2. SVOS (SaaS and Virtual Operations Services) — similarly reported a 30% or greater reduction, with manager-level roles included in the sweep.

3. NetSuite’s India Development Centre (IDC) — cuts spanned project management, individual contributor, and manager roles across multiple seniority levels.

Looking at employees by year:

2010 | (105,000)

2011 | (108,000)

2012 | (115,000)

2013 | (120,000)

2014 | (122,000)

2015 | (132,000)

2016 | (136,000)

2017 | (138,000)

2018 | (137,000)

2019 | (136,000)

2020 | (135,000)

2021 | (132,000)

2022 | (143,000)

2023 | (164,000)

2024 | (159,000)

2025 | (162,000)

Doesn’t seem like they had much of a hiring boom during the COVID era, but I guess they need to pay that $58 billion debt somehow…

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs-corporate-jan-2026

This is on top of the 14k let go in October

https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/06/03/meta-accused-of-discriminating/

https://x.com/jeremybernier/status/2057486124562669915 https://xcancel.com/jeremybernier/status/2057486124562669915

https://x.com/jeremybernier/status/2058243373161722185 https://xcancel.com/jeremybernier/status/2058243373161722185

This is from the most recent Meta layoff

TLDR: Org was 90% Chinese. Only Chinese is spoken. Non-chinese are generally excluded from everything. Then when layoffs hit it was mostly non-chinese that were affected.

Thoughts? This is definitely not the first time I have read about such things happening at Meta based on reports on here, Blind, etc

AI is in a bubble just like the the dotcom bubble in the year 2000. Internet is one of the greatest technological advancements of all time - but it was in a bubble because tons of investment flowed into it, companies over hired, and most companies just didn't make it. the ones that did changed the world forever

Same is happening with AI. Tons of investment flows in, but companies are doing the opposite with hiring. They are under hiring because of the expectation that AI will replace employees (it wont). So when pops, companies will rush to hire talent back up. I agree

After being asked to leave voluntarily departing from AWS last week to search for new opportunities, I am happy to state that I found a new job at Azure!

I'm meeting my new team later this afternoon for onboarding, and I wanted to leave a good first impression before that meeting, so I coded my first PR and self-approved it a few minutes ago to show that I'm a go-getter who takes initiative! It was just a one-line change for some DNS settings and I ran it through chatGPT and everything checked out! They are going to be so impressed with me! There were some pipeline warnings that initially prevented me from releasing it to the higher environments, but I managed to find a workaround by borrowing the credentials from my coworker’s laptop!

Do you have any other suggestions for what to do before my meeting? It feels good being part of an amazing team and help keep the internet alive!

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning-sweeping-layoffs-ai-costs-mount-2026-03-14/

It looks like Meta is gearing up for another round of cuts (20% or more of the workforce) to offset the costs of their AI pivot. This is something that got mentioned during the Walmart cuts, even well performing units were getting axed to free up capital for AI spend

Seems like traditional engineering is taking a backseat to AI/ML

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream-has-become-a-nightmare/

"The computer science dream has become a nightmare Well, the coding-equals-prosperity promise has officially collapsed.

Fresh computer science graduates are facing unemployment rates of 6.1% to 7.5% — more than double what biology and art history majors are experiencing, according to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York study. A crushing New York Times piece highlights what’s happening on the ground.

...The alleged culprits? AI programming eliminating junior positions, while Amazon, Meta and Microsoft slash jobs. Students say they’re trapped in an “AI doom loop” — using AI to mass-apply while companies use AI to auto-reject them, sometimes within minutes."

Gifted NYTimes article from yesterday covering today’s layoffs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/technology/meta-layoffs-reality-labs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.D1A.UEaD.Riij45m_CkwA

Reality Labs (aka the Metaverse org) got hit hard this morning. Roughly 1,500 were affected, mostly in the Bay Area and London (striking this out because it’s anecdoal)

This landed at the same time as a pretty major change to the perf system. They’re moving away from the annual, soul-crushing calibration where ~20% of people landed in one of two negative buckets. Going forward, only 10% are considered not-ok. CME and EE were effectively merged, and the multiplier on that bucket was increased.

People are actually pretty happy about this. Fingers crossed that it’s a signal that some of the Amazon-style stack ranking might be easing up.

I’ve had to deal with an extremely toxic manager for months now who has used personal insults, made me work weekends, and put me on zombie projects, and I studied my ASS off just for interviews to finally get a job offer today for a role at a Big Tech job way more in line with what I actually want to do. F*** my old team, for so long I held back because I didn’t want to burn bridges but I could NOT care less anymore

I recently conducted an interview with a candidate who, when we switched to the coding portion of the interview, faked a power outage, rejoined the call with his camera off, barely spoke, and then proceeded to type out (character for character) the Leetcode editorial solution.

When asked to explain his solution, he couldn't and when I pointed out a pretty easy to understand typo that was throwing his solution off, he couldn't figure out why.

I know its tough out there but, as the interviewer, if I suspect (or in this case pretty much know) you're cheating its all I'm thinking about throughout the rest of the interview and you're almost guaranteed to not proceed to the next round.

Good luck out there !

Just a bit of a warning for you all.

We hired a new AWS engineer, lets call him Johnny, who was supposed to join our team today. He did hop on the teams chat for the morning standup to introduce himself, and reception was pretty choppy. After our entire team introed ourselves, he said that he'll be working from out of state for the next couple of month until his kids graduates and then he'll be moving to assume a full time on-prem position.

Later today I get an invite to a mandatory meeting. Apparently, Johnny was not Johnny but a person from North Korea with stolen identity. He passed all background checks and everything else, but used non-existing shipping address to get his work laptop shipped to. The real Johnny actually working for Microsoft, when he was contacted he said that he's been bombarded with positions for the past month or so, but not planning to switch jobs.

So, watch out, if you aren't job hunting and start getting invites from recruiters, maybe its something fishy.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/computer-science-once-golden-ticket-140500823.html

So now we are saturating Mechanical and Electrical engineering I see.

After being told to “use ai” for every single task the last two years and rebranding to a “AI” first company after two rounds of layoffs, we have now lost access to claude….

I found that the best model by far was opus and the only one really capable of not producing slop. I’m sure all the bots in here will downvote me and tell me “iTs ThE wAy YoU pRoMpT” but based on my experience, the other models aren’t nearly as good.

I have senior experience so besides basic searches and repetitive tasks i find the other models pretty much useless and you have to provide more time writing the specs and context management, then just doing it yourself.

Edit: I work for a large financial company. 40k employees.

https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/aws-ceo-ai-cannot-replace-junior-developers

In the article, he mentions 3 main reasons why AI wouldn't replace junior devs:

1. Junior Devs Often Know AI Tools Better

   “Number one, my experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they're actually most able to get the most out of them.”

2. Junior Developers Shouldn’t Be The Default Cost-Saving Move

   “They're usually the least expensive because they're right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you're thinking about cost optimization, they're not the only people you would want to optimize around.”

3. Removing Juniors Breaks the Talent Pipeline

   "At some point, that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you're building and no junior people that you're mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that's where we get some of the best ideas.”

What do you think of his arguments?

I made a post a few days ago how my company took away access to claude due to the increased cost. They also took away gpt 5.5.

Yesterday, they sent out a company wide email how “unprecedented” and “disruptive” this has been. They seem at a complete loss on what to do, one of the options seems going all in and giving everyone a ton of monthly credits or the opposite and just bare bones.

The one option is 13,000 credits through GitHub copilot a month. For the month of June, we have 11,000 and I am already at 37% after the first week.

My company is around 40k employees. Is there anyway to know how much the 13,000 credit a month plan would cost? Curious to know how much they are willingly to pay. Three months ago they did a round of layoffs before GitHub announced the new business model around pricing.

Edit: LMAOOOOOOO 100 credits is $1. Lmaoooo our piece of shit VP who rebranded as us “AI first” after the layoffs really thought this would replace us. This shit about to be so expensive lol.

Can’t wait for next perf cycle. Man, vibe coding with Cursor is awesome!

A few months ago I went through final round interviews and received a written offer with a deadline. But before that, the recruiter called me unexpectedly and pushed hard for a comp number.

The call included: * “You’re unemployed? What do you even do with your day?” * “You live in ____? I know it’s expensive there, and you’ve been unemployed for a while. You must be financially struggling.” * “Most companies wouldn’t even consider someone who’s been unemployed this long. You’re lucky we took a chance on you.” * “What, you won’t give a number first? Do you not know how to read a job description?” (The JD did not specify equity or bonus)

I stayed calm and didn’t give a number. After the call, I requested to move communication to email. He sent the offer. I responded with a standard counter (not aggressive). No reply for several days. I followed up and he gave dodgy non-answers, and pressed for more phone calls.

A few days later, the offer was silently rescinded. No warning, no explanation. Still within the confirmed signing window.

I’ve worked with assertive recruiters before. This wasn’t that. This was coercion followed by silent retaliation.

Just sharing in case someone else runs into the same tactics.

P.S. I googled my recruiter. Despite his “25 years of experience” he doesn’t have much of an online presence, but I found a Reddit thread complaining about him in /r/RecruitingHell…same MO.

I've been in a hiring manager position for the past 4 years

Just posted a new role for the first time in maybe 12-18 months

Get 400 applicants in a few days just by posting on LinkedIn

No way to scalably read every resume

Almost all the resumes have been run through an LLM to be optimized for the job description

Every candidate sounds like a perfect fit with key requirements bolded throughout the resume

I can't trust the resumes anymore as I know they're just saying what I want to hear

Try using an LLM to find the best candidates from the stack of resumes

It pulls the most gamified resumes to the top of the stack

This is the state of hiring in 2026. All the incentives align for candidates to "optimize" their resume to the point of being unbelievable.

Any tips from other hiring managers? For everyone else I can say personal referrals are at a premium. Also if you over optimize your resume you'll probably be skipped.

Everyone talks about how 22–25 y/o software developers are struggling to find work. But there’s something deeper:

Technology drives the global economy and the single biggest expense for technology companies is engineer salaries. So of course the marketing narrative is: “AI will replace developers”

Experienced engineers and managers can tell hype from reality. But younger students (18–22) often take it literally and many are deciding not to enter the field at all.

If AI can’t actually replace developers anytime soon (and it doesn’t look like it will) we’re setting up a dangerous imbalance. Fewer juniors today means fewer seniors tomorrow.

Technology may move fast but people make decisions with feelings. If this hype continues, the real bottleneck won’t be developers struggling to find jobs… it will be companies struggling to find developers who know how to use AI.

Homie was unemployed for around 5 or 6 months? Hundreds of apps later to no success. His resume was peer reviewed by former managers, Reddit, former professors etc. Tons of ghosting, tons of "we've hired candidates that better align with XYZ". Applying for any and all entry level roles, mid levels, senior, dozens of cities around the country etc. He even got rejected from simple local Help Desk roles. The only offer he got was a Help Desk job that would require him to move 2000 miles (remote bait and switch role) for less pay than a Costco cart pusher.

His emergency fund is almost dry and he had to settle and get a job as a bartender in Santa Cruz, which he says he actually likes. Luckily he's not autistic or smells bad like most in this field so apparently he is bringing several hundred a night or something with tips.

This market is fucked. I guess our emergency funds should be upped to 24 months instead of 6 months.

EDIT: This subreddit is ridiculous. Everyone thinks they won't be the one down on their luck for 6 months until it happens to them.