Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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FedPostalService said:
GTA 6 could be about a tranny who is going to free America from Trump by enslaving white people and it will still make billions.
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It will break sales records; launch day, launch weekend, first week and first month sales. That's a given. What happens afterwards is where the game goes to shit.
RDR2 sold 65 million copies and it's all the niggercattle talked about how it was the best, most realistic, most amazing game ever, day in, day out, for about a week. Then it was never talked about or mentioned again. I brought up the game a few weeks after and received "meh/I haven't played it in weeks/I haven't turned my PS5 on in weeks".

If that happens to GTA6, then rockstar are cooked.
 
Whoopsie Daisy said:
It will break sales records; launch day, launch weekend, first week and first month sales. That's a given. What happens afterwards is where the game goes to shit.
RDR2 sold 65 million copies and it's all the niggercattle talked about how it was the best, most realistic, most amazing game ever, day in, day out, for about a week. Then it was never talked about or mentioned again. I brought up the game a few weeks after and received "meh/I haven't played it in weeks/I haven't turned my PS5 on in weeks".

If that happens to GTA6, then rockstar are cooked.
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Is it? It still sold a ton of copies. As long as the goyslop eaters buy it, Rockstar is good. The pain would be not getting recurring revenue from shark cards assuming online mode is complete trash.

I played RDR2 when it hit game pass and wondered why anyone would like the game about twenty minutes in. It was like someone watched Gabe's "games should be fun" video and said "naaahhhh."


Somehow this story didn't get picked up by the thread:

Amazon layoffs: Tech giant to slash 10% of staff, 25% of Principal-Level roles at risk; claims US influencer​

The layoffs have come in not only in the cloud services, but across the devices and services division, the books business, and the Wondery podcast group.​

Tech layoffs: Amazon Web Services (AWS) division gave hundreds of employees the pink slip from its cloud unit earlier this week. The major wave of job cuts comes just weeks after CEO Andy Jassy stated that AI will likely reduce the need for certain roles across Amazon. Analyst Amanda Goodall, who uses the handle “@thejobchick” on X(formerly Twitter) predicted that further job cuts are expected towards the end of this year.

Several teams within AWS were affected across all levels, including the training and certification unit.

Predicted layoffs analysis​

Goodall’s predictions suggest a 10% cut in roles overall across AWS, with nearly 25% layoffs in the L7 (principal-level) roles under close scrutiny. Factors like a high attrition rate managed by performance improvement plans (PIP) and reduction in force (RIF) have been identified as the root cause for these some-to-come layoffs.

The drivers behind these anticipated layoffs appear to be multi-layered. These moves may reflect broader shifts in the cloud and infrastructure market, where intense competition, margin pressures, and the push towards AI-driven efficiency are forcing companies to reassess headcounts and skill alignments.

Rumor of more layoffs at AWS:


– 10% cut expected by year-end
– 25% of L7s (Principal-level) on the chopping block
– Managed via RIFs, PIPs, attrition, not headlines

Modeling already baked into OP1 planning.

Working to confirm more on this as this may include the Bedrock GTM…

— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) July 19, 2025

In AWS’s case, targeting senior principal-level roles suggests a deliberate effort to flatten hierarchies and optimise costs, especially as these positions tend to command some of the highest compensation packages.

AI layoffs at Amazon​

Internal reports from Amazon suggest that AI tools and agents are being periodically increased, which are rapidly replacing jobs done by former employees. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” wrote CEO Jassy. This round of layoffs also streamlines a company’s change in structure and cuts back on “excess bureaucracy”, as per Jassy.

ALSO READ
‘Amazon is definitely a Day 2 company now:’ Longtime employee retires after 12 years, slams work culture and firing spree
“We’ve made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS. These decisions are necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimise resources to deliver innovation for our customers,” a company spokesperson said.

The layoffs have come in not only in the cloud services, but across the devices and services division, the books business, and the Wondery podcast group. At the same time, Amazon has, however, refuted a complete takeover by AI and related investments but cited a broader organisational review.

A memo, as per a Reuters report, suggested that the employees received the termination email on Thursday, July 17. After receiving the emails, the systems of the employees were deactivated. On the other hand, Amazon’s cloud services had a reported revenue of $29.3 billion, attributed to a 17% rise in sales.
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Principal level employees are the most expensive and there are a lot of rest-and-vest types since it's a terminal level (no more "get promoted or get out" pressure.) They can also be the most knowledgeable people who keep the whole company from imploding.

Amazon is also closing their China AI research lab; since their employees were giving everything to the CCP anyway this just means that they will work directly for the government instead of pretending not to.
 
Peaches the Wonder Cat said:
Is it? It still sold a ton of copies. As long as the goyslop eaters buy it, Rockstar is good. The pain would be not getting recurring revenue from shark cards assuming online mode is complete trash.
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Rockstar makes the vast majority of their profit from GTA5 online. Every member leaving GTA 5 online must spend at least the same amount in GTA6 online, otherwise that person is lost revenue - £50 spent in gta5 but only £40 spent in GTA6 online, is a loss of £10 revenue.

If GTA6 is boring and people walk away from the game, there is a large chance that most of those players won't go back to GTA5, they will just leave the GTA ecosystem completely. That equates to a double loss in corporate accounting (Loss of actual revenue + loss of potential revenue). That's big.

GTA6 needs to be as popular are GTA5 to break even, which is a loss considering how much is being banked on GTA6. For GTA6 to be successful it needs to do better than expected, and that expectation is yuge.

Here's the funny thing; niggercattle are dumb and will buy any slop, but they're also addicted to the dopamine. They need constant key-jangling to keep them entertained and GTA6 must provide as much dopamine as GTA5 online, from day one. Rockstar are banking a lot of money on people walking away from an accomplished online presence, where they own cars, guns, gangster clothes, missions, houses etc and are 'better than the average player' because they've spent loads of money in having that prestige, and swapping it with a blank slate where they're the same level as every other player.
Psychologically, that's a huge ask of the kind of clientele that run on respek and being better than the rest. No doubt FOMO will help out but still...

Bonus is that Sony banks 30% of money made from MTX and their Playstation business is carried and propped up by MTX revenue. When GTA6 flops, Sony will feel it. If Nintendo are clever and drop a new online game around that time...

And then, if GTA6 flops and misses projections
 
Peaches the Wonder Cat said:
Is it? It still sold a ton of copies. As long as the goyslop eaters buy it, Rockstar is good. The pain would be not getting recurring revenue from shark cards assuming online mode is complete trash.
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That's what happened to RDR Online. They tried to get lighting to strike twice, and it didn't work. The mode simply didn't hook people, Rockstar 'Online' fans just went back to GTA Online, because they found the monetization too aggressive. You couldn't really make meaningful progress without opening your wallet, the content that rewarded gold bars was a grindfest that rapidly got boring, and people fell off it. GTA6 is very much at risk of this, with the monetization expectations the publisher is going in with. And then combine that with the fact that it won't have any modding community or unofficial gamemodes, just by virtue of being new. There's a lot that's going to be working against it at launch, which'll be hard to overcome.

Its not a guarantee GTA6 Online will be a winner, there's just too many variables to predict. And since we've been told so little about it, its hard to make heads or tails about what will or will not be there when it goes live, which is a huge factor as to whether it'll succeed or not. Rockstar will sell an absolute fuckton of copies, but half of GTA5's lifetime revenue is game sales, the other half is GTA Online, who's money printer only started ramping up later in life. They're financially reliant on it hitting the ground running, or its gonna be a huge problem for the entire industry.
 
Kier Starmer said:
I don't know man, a shit ton of prompt engineers are Indian, and we know how they protect their own. The more I see it, I think AI is a Jew/Indian Ponzi scheme.
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Its putting lipstick on a pig. Prompt engineering is on the same level as Google-Fu, poking a search engine to get a useful result rather than just bloat articles. Its an actual, legitimate skill, but its a skill entirely focused around attempting to make up for your own lack of effective primary skills. Useful, sure, but its not at all employable in of itself. The pajeets are just putting in an exceptional effort to make it sound like they're in possession of an expert skillset, and the irregular outputs of AI makes it possible to trick the average executive into believing them. An engineered prompt looks a lot more complex than a human phrase prompt, even though its just directly specifying parameters and weights rather than allowing the model to infer them - if you know the models training data, its super easy.

The funniest part is that most of prompt engineering is really just Google-Fu at the end of the day, as the first step is looking up the model and its recommended default prompts and often-provided list of training data keywords. 80% of the average engineered prompt is the same shared universal boilerplate, 10% targeted keywords, and the remainder is just "This is not relevent at all but trial and error found that it provides the result I want for some ungodly reason".

Still just pajeet asskissing at the end of the day, trying to make themselves look like they're actually useful, rather than doing real work.
 
Kier Starmer said:
There is some interesting news regarding SoftBank and their support for OpenAI. They had to approach 21 different banks to collect $18 billion in loans to avoid affecting their credit. The issue is that OpenAI is expecting $ 40 billion from SoftBank next year, which they cannot actually do because it exceeds all credit lines and their material funding. To this day, OpenAI has not seen a penny of profit. Sam Altman needs to be exalted as the biggest con Jew, Sam, and dethrone Fried. He has conned so much VC and Corpo money it would make SBF weep.

M$ is starting to pull back on their data centres too and redistribute it into funding for AI. Switching the ledger where it is going. On top of that, the TX data centre expected in the next few years is expected to cost 500 billion, and 5% of the money has been itemised.

They cannot declare AI a failure because the big 7 have about 97% of their investments in NVidia, which would fuck them over into oblivion. NVidia would survive as they have a tangible product, as does Apple but the rest would lose so much of their wealth.

https://fortune.com/2024/02/12/sam-altman-7-trillion-ai-chips-grind-for-future-substack/

It's OK, he only needs 7 trillion dollars! The collective wealth of Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. It's worth it, guys.

Meanwhile, VC be like
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UyvFiG1K0W0
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AI does seem like such a grift. Chatgpt is great in that its completely replaced Google and websearching 99% of the time for me when it comes to technical issues, but its way too much of a yes man and confident in its responses which kills its usefulness beyond strictly technical matters.

Maybe what theyre working with non lobotomized AIs behind the scenes.
 
I posted this over in the India Menance thread but it's relevant to this discussion as well.

One of the most infuriating parts of working in the tech space with a fuck ton of poojeets is when you start working on poojects that touch the regulatory might of the US government. As I'm sure many of you know, most projects that are part of a government contract need to comply with ITAR regulations, which state that accessing environments where resources are deployed that are a part of these contracts can only be done by US citizens on American soil.

What inevitably happens is that the majority-poojeet developer staff need to get a US citizen to access these resources on their behalf near fucking constantly. There are a team of 20-odd poojeets on a major infrastructure team without ONE fucking US citizen (at an American company mind you). This team constantly requires access to these governmental environments to deploy code. They engage the few American citizens distributed through the rest of the organization to put in extra work to help them do routine tasks and maintenance on the system. At my work, this has become such a problem that there is a formal rotation, with US citizens forced to be available in shifts to help facilitate brown hands shitting up these systems for several days at a time.

The most insulting part isn't even the extra work just for the privilege of being American. No, it's the fact that we must participate in an infrastructure that only exists to allow the company to continue to replace American Whites with cow fuckers. This experience of working in this environment has poo-pilled me beyond belief and has made The Great Flush my number one political objective.
 
Whoopsie Daisy said:
Rockstar makes the vast majority of their profit from GTA5 online. Every member leaving GTA 5 online must spend at least the same amount in GTA6 online, otherwise that person is lost revenue - £50 spent in gta5 but only £40 spent in GTA6 online, is a loss of £10 revenue.

If GTA6 is boring and people walk away from the game, there is a large chance that most of those players won't go back to GTA5, they will just leave the GTA ecosystem completely. That equates to a double loss in corporate accounting (Loss of actual revenue + loss of potential revenue). That's big.

GTA6 needs to be as popular are GTA5 to break even, which is a loss considering how much is being banked on GTA6. For GTA6 to be successful it needs to do better than expected, and that expectation is yuge.

Here's the funny thing; niggercattle are dumb and will buy any slop, but they're also addicted to the dopamine. They need constant key-jangling to keep them entertained and GTA6 must provide as much dopamine as GTA5 online, from day one. Rockstar are banking a lot of money on people walking away from an accomplished online presence, where they own cars, guns, gangster clothes, missions, houses etc and are 'better than the average player' because they've spent loads of money in having that prestige, and swapping it with a blank slate where they're the same level as every other player.
Psychologically, that's a huge ask of the kind of clientele that run on respek and being better than the rest. No doubt FOMO will help out but still...

Bonus is that Sony banks 30% of money made from MTX and their Playstation business is carried and propped up by MTX revenue. When GTA6 flops, Sony will feel it. If Nintendo are clever and drop a new online game around that time...

And then, if GTA6 flops and misses projections
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Nintendo is currently trying to get Rockstar to revive plans for an update of GTA4 for a Switch release, since GTA Trilogy sold well enough in spite of it's flaws to want more ports of Rockstar games.

Also Nintendo has repeatedly stated that they have no plans for a new Animal Crossing game, the only game Nintendo could put out that is online centric that could rival GTA6.
 
Silver Sasquatch said:
What inevitably happens is that the majority-poojeet developer staff need to get a US citizen to access these resources on their behalf near fucking constantly. There are a team of 20-odd poojeets on a major infrastructure team without ONE fucking US citizen (at an American company mind you). This team constantly requires access to these governmental environments to deploy code. They engage the few American citizens distributed through the rest of the organization to put in extra work to help them do routine tasks and maintenance on the system. At my work, this has become such a problem that there is a formal rotation, with US citizens forced to be available in shifts to help facilitate brown hands shitting up these systems for several days at a time.
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Nevermind that you have only one chance per day to contact them despite living in an entirely different time zone, and that's assuming that they respond to your emails at 2:30 am in the night.
 
SIMIΔN said:
Saars vs overtime... It's a tough choice.
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My understanding was that they don't hold foreigners to the same insane standards, your not expected to get it as an outsider - much of the worst of the 'stay until after the boss leaves' performative presentation isn't really expected of you, as long as you're delivering on the expected work. Double edged sword as that outsider position also makes you fairly undesirable for career advancement until you do start to adapt and participate though.

At any rate, it'll be interesting to see how their work culture evolves over the next ten years, considering they're becoming more racist and hostile to foreigners that don't want to assimilate and behave, but are also going to be facing down an increasingly difficult labor market for employers. Will the japanese worker continue to be the peak wageslave, or will they leverage that position to ask for more?
 
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