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dsigntoday at 7:20 AM1 replyview on HN

> Amazon has a really odd viewpoint when it comes to the people who work there. They view almost all employees as “fungible”.

Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die. With that said, due to its late-stage capitalistic ethos, Amazon is just too overly gleeful about this tasteless reality of life. It's the equivalent of a nephew coming to an aunt's funeral and shouting "A week ago, I told her everybody dies! And now she did! Wasn't I right??? Everybody dies!"

> Also, last year the focus at AWS turned fully and almost desperately toward GenAI.

I wonder if I'm being too cynical, but late-stage capitalism companies also love profiteering, and the mere prospect of firing all those pesky workers and not having to pay their salaries is like cocaine to those organizations. Which is why I think Amazon fulfillment centers will at some point rent robots at a price point between 2x and 3x their current human labor costs, in the hope that it will eventually make economic sense.


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surgical_firetoday at 11:01 AM

> Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die.

Enterprises typically have this mindset. Most corporations I worked for in fact treated employees exactly like this.

As for needing this mindset, I am not so sure. There is a spectrum in between going under because a storied employee retired and treating employees as meaningless numbers in a spreadsheet.

But ultimately I fully agree with the whole of your post. I just had to nitpick about this.