Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon
He is right, but what I don't see in the post is a solution.
How do you stop multinational companies like Amazon from using the global talent pool as they see fit and pay whatever wages the local market will bear?
Without that it comes off as the standard "elect me because foreigners are bad".
I would wager being remote made him a target. It seems like a stretch to say it's just the global job market when the layoffs are global.
> I saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress.
Well, that's one way to go for that next job.
I don't see a clean solution here. The price/craft distinction matters - companies competing on price (Amazon retail) have different incentives than those competing on quality and craft (Notion, Linear). If you're in the price business, replacing expensive US labor with cheaper global labor is rational. If you're in the craft business, it usually isn't.
But that framing is incomplete. Amazon isn't just retail - AWS, logistics tech, and AI enablement are craft-heavy. Cutting experienced people in those areas might be short-term thinking dressed up as strategy, not actual optimization. The policy question is where I get stuck. Regulate this, and US companies risk losing ground to foreign competitors who don't follow those rules. Do we want Alibaba as the default American retailer? But do nothing, and experienced workers keep getting squeezed while "efficiency" narratives provide cover.
What's the intervention that doesn't just shift the problem somewhere else?
Inconsistent jingoistic nationalism.
On one hand, he claims that he "fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them." And on the other hand he claims his layoff on "a global labor market with almost no guardrails."
So which is it: did he really work on problems no one else could solve, or was he replaced by cheap foreign labor?
Probably neither. The most likely scenario here is one of two things:
a) Amazon made a mistake by firing him. They laid off someone truly valuable.
b) He wasn't as valuable as he thinks he was. Those problems were not worth paying him a meaningful fraction of a million dollars a year (what an L7 makes at amazon).
What I can guarantee is that he wasn't replaced by a cheap, foreign, plug-and-play replacement.
It all makes sense when you realize the point of his tweet is that he's plugging his run for congress: so yeah, of course he's tapping in to the absolute worst nationalistic sentiment. Shame on him.
If this is AI slop as the knee jerk comments next to me suggest, it’s goin to be a hell of a surprise if he gets elected this year! https://www.nleeplumb.com/about
"moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them."
A screenshot later on shows he was a manager who spent his entire career in Houston. So... he didn't move and I associate "untangling difficult problems" as something an engineer should brag about not a manager.
Reads like AI generated slop that doesn't correlate with the actual situation.
We must do something about labor offshoring to india. It's too much. I want my children to have opportunities here in the country they were born in.
It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.
I'm not reading all that. I thought tweets were supposed to be short. What the hell happened?