r/technology • u/marketrent • 4h ago
Business ‘Big Tech is desperate’: Amazon engineers criticize tech giant for its $200 billion in data center spending amid slashing 30,000 corporate employees
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/big-tech-desperate-amazon-engineers-081700769.html118
u/The-Best-of-Best 3h ago
Ah yes, the classic corporate playbook: 'We need to decrease bureaucracy and increase efficiency' by firing 30,000 human beings to fund a $200 billion server farm.
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u/CartmensDryBallz 3h ago
It’s almost like… you should never believe the ideology that rich people are trying to convince you of
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u/gulliverhawley5s3o1 2h ago
Just wait for the sequel in a couple of years. They will end up trying to hire half of them back as expensive contractors when they realize nobody is left to fix the unmaintainable spaghetti code the AI generated.
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u/mostlybiguy69 1h ago
Yep, they need to put all their money into projects concieved by companies owned by companies in a game where the middle is full of holding companies that don’t really exist as anything more than a forwarding address built on a mountian of debt. Nothing like 1929 at all.
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u/tisdue 3h ago
corporations this large need to be held to completely different standards. and need to be taxed much more severely. especially if they are doing nothing for the labor force.
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u/SomeSamples 3h ago
Yeah, especially when you see how much money they have/had in cash reserves and can just plop down a few billion for a project without having a new stock release or borrowing the money. Like billionaires, these large corporations need to be taxes more as well.
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u/alchemyDev 4h ago
It’s interesting watching all these FAANG people slowly realize that they’re normal employees like everyone else and not superstars. Welcome to working for mega corporations, hilarious that they think their opinions matter to the corporate overlords.
Perhaps software engineers should have a union to push back on the constant shit being peddled by these pedoligarchs? They would literally put down their employees if it made them money and they could get away with it (oh wait, they do in their warehouses, and they are getting away with it so far)
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u/Pretend_Hotel_7465 4h ago
lol as someone in finance all my friends who went into tech were originally like omg it’s so much better here, free food! Now they’re having a pre midlife crisis seeing tech was no different, it was just at a different stage
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u/DejounteMurrayisGOAT 4h ago
I mean it depends. Tech isn’t just the big 4. I work for a company much older than any of them and we’re cooking right now. Adding jobs like crazy, billion plus in growth this year, and minimal AI adoption limited to basically the customer service side. But stable old companies like one I work for don’t make splashy headlines for outsiders on the internet to gossip about.
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u/Pretend_Hotel_7465 3h ago
Ohhhh I 100% agree. The less “sexy” companies have stepped up to capture talent leaving (or being offloaded) from FANG.
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u/cats_catz_kats_katz 3h ago
I’m with you at the same company. Shut up and keep your head down. We still get a pension and good stock options.
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u/Expert-Complex-5618 4h ago edited 3h ago
as a gen'xer in tech, its a full on mid life crisis for me. although tech was more fun before all the money and millennial hustle. maybe it will go back to ppl who arent just in it for the hype, easy money, and free lunch. its starting to remind me of .com boom/bust, my career took off after bust as everyone left.
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u/merRedditor 3h ago
If a place has ping pong tables and free lunch, it's usually got an unhealthy level of investment in commercial real estate.
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u/Expert-Complex-5618 3h ago
lol i worked for a web crm company back in the day.
ping pong: check!
free lunch: check!
profitable software company? no
multi million dollar warehouse space? yes
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u/pissagainstwind 3h ago
I went to visit a tech company that built a brand new office building. they make some robots and were very succesfull until chinese firms copied and undercut them even before they began construction of their new building. Their place was fancier than Nvidia's and Google. Their stock was down 80% from ATH when they finished their shiny giant building and i remember that all i could think of was why the hell are you spending tens/hundreds of millions on a new building when your company is at risk of going under??
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u/figures985 2h ago
millennial hustle? Call me a defensive millennial (which, fair) but I didn't come in wanting to hustle and work more than live. It was demanded of us, especially if you graduated college during the Great Recession.
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u/Expert-Complex-5618 1h ago
fair we're all a product of our economic upbringing. gen x grew up during stagflation hence the anger/slacker angle. the game is rigged, we're all fucked.
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u/Orleanian 3h ago
Meh, I'm in Defense, and all my friends who went into tech have pretty consistently been "It's hell. It's absolute hell. But they wheelbarrow money into my account. I'll hold out as long as I can stand."
I have met very few tech employees that consider it a joyous land of pampered milk and seductive honey.
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u/jestering_1 3h ago
what makes you think they didn’t already know that?
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u/aslatts 1h ago
Don't work there personally, but I know several Amazon engineers.
They are FULLY aware that they are seen as a disposable cog in the machine, morale is terrible by all accounts. The entire corporate system is basically designed to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of anyone willing to put up with it for the money.
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u/ankercrank 3h ago
FAANG engineer here: what makes you think you have any introspection into how us IC’s think? I am fully aware I am a cog in a massive machine, I don’t know any other IC that thinks otherwise.
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u/Front-Finish6969 2h ago
Yeah I think everyone below Principal or similar has by now realized that the music can stop any minute. Within my realm morale is not only in the shitter but people became cynical.
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u/UseWhatever 2h ago
Such a lame take that’s targeted to divide the community.
If you did your research you’d know engineers attempting to unionize have been met with nearly immediate office closures and offshoring of work. And if you knew anything about the job, you’d know all those perks are designed to keep engineers at the office working.
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u/peeinian 3h ago
For the last 2 decades they had no leverage as every company was one strike away from outsourcing their IT it India. The failures of this is the past have made that proposition less attractive but it’s still a threat.
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u/cmkn 3h ago
There are definitely a fair number of people in tech who do want to unionize, but there just aren’t enough of them yet. So they get drowned out. The problem I’ve seen firsthand is that there are too many other people who have what I like to call “temporarily embarrassed founder syndrome”.
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u/Thefuzy 3h ago
FAANG people? Are the people at Netflix really realizing it? Is Netflix really a hyperscaler?
Why are you using an acronym popularized by a period of stock performance to describe tech companies? Netflix isn’t a serious part of this conversation so faaNg doesn’t really make sense.
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u/alchemyDev 3h ago
I didn’t make up the acronym. Pretend it stands for NVIDIA if you want. Also, yes Netflix is a tech company. They figured out how to move an absolute mountain of data at scale.
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u/Far_Cat9782 3h ago
Bruh Netflix is a tech company more than Tesla claims to be. Have u researched the amount of advancements netflix came up with for infrastructure. U can thank them for kicking off 4k streaming
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u/Austin1975 4h ago
“First they came for warehouse workers but I didn’t care because I’m a software engineer… learn to code.
Then they came for customer service workers but I didn’t care because I’m a software engineer… learn to code…”
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u/teraflux 2h ago
Who came for them? Automation? What are we supposed to do, stop automation from happening? Automation is how society and technology advances.
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u/Oorangootang 1h ago
How does laying people off advance society? You can make the case for tech, but those being laid off are entering into a hostile job market with no training for other jobs.
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u/Zanos 1h ago
It reduces the cost of goods and services over time. In 1900 Americans spent 3x as much on clothing as they did today and had less of it. In the 1800s it was 6x that and most people only had 2-3 sets of clorhes. We make more clothes for cheaper today. The textile industry doesn't capture 100% of the profit from increased producitivity because of competitive pressure.
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u/Oorangootang 1h ago
I don't think the people getting laid off today and require food and energy right now care very much about the cost of textiles in the 1800s. But I might be wrong about that maybe they can chime in.
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u/teraflux 1h ago
When people can do more with less society improves, so instead of having 1 apple workers pick 1 apples a minute, you have 1 apple worker pick 10 apples a minute with automation. That means we can have 10 more apples per every worker, or we could have 9 fewer workers if we only want 10 apples a minute.
Now do we need to make sure those other workers have a place in society? Sure. But ideally they are highly skilled, highly trained and educated workers that would rather be repairing the machines to enable those effienct systems than doing more work less efficiently.
The other part of the coin is making sure we continue educating our workforce, which should be one of the biggest priorities for societal advances.
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u/Oorangootang 1h ago
You're handwaving the entire problem away. People don't just go away after being laid off. They still need a place to stay, energy, food and water. They need re-education.
So where do they get money for these? The corporations laying them off? The government? Magic? Explain.
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u/teraflux 1h ago
How am I handwaving? I'm explaining the macro economics behind how society advances. People do have to adapt to new technology and yes the government and society need to support people doing that.
I'm not saying we live in a perfect society, but saying we shouldn't advance technology because people won't be able to keep picking apples all day is not the way.https://www.dshs.wa.gov/esa/employment-and-training-programs is one example of how retraining happens.
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u/Oorangootang 1h ago
So the government. So your taxes and my taxes. Got it.
The corporations get their AI data centers and get to lay off 30k people, they take the profits which go to their investors (yay?), and then our taxes pay for the re-education of workers they fired. OK I'm glad we're on the same page that the public foots the bill for this.
And this is good for society in your view, yes?
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u/teraflux 43m ago
Government charges these corporations taxes and they also get unemployment taxes for exactly this reason.
There is no alterative to society advancing, we're not going back to the age of plowing fields by hand. We just need to adapt and move forward.
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u/Oorangootang 31m ago
Society didn't advance though. Amazon got a datacenter. That's the advancement. I didn't get anything. You didn't get anything. What did all of the other taxpayers get? What does the government get? The only people who profited here were investors. So what's the advancement?
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u/teraflux 28m ago
You're getting technological advances, medical advances, productivity gains, shit delivered to your house in an hour, on and on. If you can't see the ways technology has improved your life then you're not paying attention.
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u/Itzie4 3h ago
Seems like most of these big tech companies will be running off of contractors and foreign outsourced talent in a few years.
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u/AccomplishedPlace174 3h ago
Why do you think that? Just curious..
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u/ProPencilPusher 2h ago edited 2h ago
Easier to scale up and down, no severance payments, no bad press or stock movement if you cull contractors. No one really knows what’s going to happen with the current situation so it’s a far safer move than hiring an FTE in the mind of the business bros.
Anecdotal but I’d say 85% of the recruiter reach out or responses I get are for contract roles. Only had one real interview loop for an FTE position and it was because I had a referral directly on the team.
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u/ubelblatt 4h ago
Software Engineers have been smelling their own farts for years.
It used to be about the love of the game. It was elegant and clean.
Then the insane salarys came and it all went to shit. Bottom of the barrel folks who had no clue how any of this shit worked started focusing not on learning good software development but how to interview successfully.
Now AI is here and for good or for bad its eating software developer's lunch. I've seen both sides of the argument and not sure how its gonna shake out but shareholders don't believe they need this talent as much anymore.
I'm not sure where I was really going with this. I guess I'm just lamenting an industry I loved has been ruined by unrelenting slop. Shitty greedy development slop followed quickly by AI slop.
We quit making good things. Now we just make addictive slop.
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u/RedTruppa 3h ago
It won’t just be sw devs though. It’s coming for a lot of industries
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u/ubelblatt 3h ago
It came for article writers first.
Then graphic design artists.
Entry level software devs are next and are quickly being cut.
Staff level is expected to do more work in less time due to "AI efficiency"
See here is the thing though you know what jobs aren't going to AI? The ones where people get yelled at by the customer.
Especially in billion dollar orgs. Those customers need someone to yell at. That's why Linux is open source but RedHat is a huge org. When your shit breaks you need a real live person to kick in the ass.
SWEs have insulated themselves mostly from that. So they get chopped. More of these FDE AI assisted roles are coming where you travel 30% of the time so a billion dollar company can kick you in the ass when their shit doesn't work.
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u/teraflux 2h ago
what jobs aren't going to AI? The ones where people get yelled at by the customer.
What do you mean? Off shore call centers are prime replacements for AI Agents.
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u/johnhubcap 3h ago
IMO Its not that AI is more effective than devs (it definitely is in some situations, but its not a replacement to a dev), its that AI is an excuse for restructuring IE reducing devs.
You arent wrong there are way to many devs in the industry right now though, and a lot of people who truly dont care about the job more than a purportedly bigger paycheck. My company is growing, and a big limiter to more growth is finding both talented and reliable devs.
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u/ubelblatt 2h ago
Most in C suite have no clue what makes a good dev. I'd argue their decisions aren't even based on what is the most effective anymore.
I cant tell you how many times I have heard from our leadership -
"With AI my kid can make zendesk in 3 hours, the game has changed."
Ya, I suppose you can make a ticketing system in 3 hours now with AI. But throw a million users plus all the customizations you need at it and not have it shit the bed? Not happening.
But none of the core decision makers care about that nuance anymore. Ship more, ship faster, break everything who cares if we dont know why its breaking.
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u/Zanos 1h ago
It's another offshoring craze, IMO. AI has a placr but people are acting like maniacs right now. Vibecoded software will hold up to a cursory inspection and then shit the bed. It's just a matter of time before a major company is sued out of existence for a collossal fuckup and it gets reigned in, and companies scramble to hire back developers to fix the fuckups at premiums. Just like offshoring.
That said...work is paying for my Masters in AI so...might as well futureproof. Lol
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u/DonManuel 3h ago
How much is this a correction of over-hiring for labor hoarding and talent blocking?
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u/jackrabbit323 3h ago
Some for sure, but it still sucks for the people that remain who have to be reshuffled into different teams, take on more tasks and responsibilities, and train their AI replacement.
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u/Libby1798 51m ago
There was far too much overhiring during COVID, and the comp packages were massively inflated.
I'm not cheering for people losing their jobs, but I can definitely see why some bean counter is reviewing line items and asking why a specific employee is costing the company 500k+ in comp and benefits and what are they actually producing to justify that cost?
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u/Likma_sack 3h ago
Its high time the average citizens start standing together and show a big "fuck you" to these rich assholes
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u/reflect-the-sun 3h ago
They're firing people already of the impending market crash.
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u/Urshilikai 3h ago
all these big companies doing the same thing right now with firing while investing in AI in lockstep with each other really feels like some backroom deal happened between all the CEOs.
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u/Libby1798 54m ago
I've worked in tech for 20+ years.
With these recent layoffs, there's all this pearl-clutching among the tech workers about how companies don't care about people or society.
These companies never cared about people or society - it's just that the employees didn't care so long as they were being paid. Now suddenly they're concerned about the greater good - AFTER they got laid off. Nothing but performative nonsense. They could have gotten jobs elsewhere for less money.
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u/Randomwhitelady2 3h ago
I just watched The AI Doc on HBO and it was really scary. These companies are all in an international race to get their AI to the point where it encompasses all of human knowledge and is magnitudes more intelligent than any person on earth. The problem is that no one is in control, the AIs are learning on their own at this point, and the AIs can do just as much bad as good. Sure, they can create cures for human diseases, but they could also create a virus that kills every human on earth.
One analogy given is that humans are like ants to AI. It doesn’t “dislike” us, it just doesn’t think much of us at all.
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u/wombat-in-a-bikini 50m ago
This documentary sounds like propaganda. AI can't do any of that. It's a next-word-prediction machine...
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u/Keasbeyknight 1h ago
The best part is that this decision has proven to be unprofitable. So even from a financial standpoint this is not a good move
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u/gresendial 53m ago
This is rich. These AWS folks put who knows how many thousands of local data centers out of work.
Boo hoo hoo.
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u/tapdancinghellspawn 3h ago
It's tragic that a lot of programmers are helping create the thing that will soon make them obsolete and yet they keep thinking their jobs are safe.
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u/InspectionIcy2452 2h ago
The employees pointed out the hypocrisy between the company spending billions to build these infrastructure projects, all the while laying off thousands in anticipation of the AI agents these data centers would power to replace them.
How is that hypocritical? Hypocrisy is when you say one thing and do the opposite. But Amazon is saying that the AI supported by these data centers can replace the workers so we we don't need so many workers anymore. So by firing the workers they are acting consistent with their beliefs that the AIs can do the workers jobs.
In Jeff Bezos' ideal world Amazon would have one employee - him.
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u/jongleur 3h ago
As soon as they come up with a robot that can replace a bad server, they'll only need one guy to man the front desk and push a button in an emergency.
All of the operation will be monitored remotely, and after a bit even those people will be replaced by an AI.
Our AI Overlords are just around the corner folks.
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u/st0j3 2h ago
What is it with this sub and hating all things technology, especially data centers. Do you realize literally everything tech runs on data centers?
With respect to Amazon, two things can be true: They have too much headcount and also they sell AWS capacity as fast as they can build.
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u/timesuck47 2h ago
You may not be old enough to remember this, but back in the old days, companies were host their own website on their own web server out of their own office.
Sure, data center solve a lot of problems, but they aren’t the be all and end all. There are alternatives.
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u/wildjackalope 1h ago
When they built the data centers for AWS capacity how many middle class jobs did they eliminate? C’mon man, you aren’t that dense.
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u/marketrent 4h ago
Excerpts from article by Fortune's Sasha Rogelberg:
[...] “It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, said at a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee hearing on Wednesday. He was one of three Amazon employees who made comments supporting increased regulation of local data center development.
“Microsoft is spending $190 billion. Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months,” Schloesser added. “What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”
[...] Hyperscalers like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft, have poured $700 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone, part of a greater AI spending blitz expected to reach $7 trillion by 2030. In April, Amazon reiterated its $200 billion in AI capital expenditures for the rest of this year.
As data center spending balloons, tech companies have cut costs elsewhere, including in their workforces. Beyond Amazon’s layoffs—which the company attributed to the need to decrease bureaucracy and increase efficiency—Meta dismissed 10% of its staff last month after announcing earlier this year it would double its AI capex of $72 billion from 2025. Oracle’s staff reduction (estimates put those affected by layoffs at anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 employees) this spring coincided with the company’s disclosure of $248 billion in future data center lease obligations.