Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon

https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198

I'm not reading all that. I thought tweets were supposed to be short. What the hell happened?

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.

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 saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress.

Well, that's one way to go for that next job.

At least in the US, we've spent the better part of 80 years building a huge amount of wealth and growth on the backs of debt and externalized costs.

Its interesting, in a morbid humor kind of way, to see people realize that these costs always come due.

Globalization allows a huge amount of growth and many benefits you simply can't get with smaller or stronger borders. It also comes with risks, chief among them the risk that any one country loses self sufficiency and competitive advantage.

I do hope that the heaviest cost we (in the US) pay anytime soon is the cost of outsourcing jobs. We don't know how to manufacture anymore, our populace is extremely unhealthy in historical standards, and both political parties are toying with different forms of socialism. There are a lot of bad outcomes that can come where we're heading, we'd get off easy if it stops at outsourcing some of our high paid jobs to cheaper foreign labor.

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

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.

"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.

It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.

is it me or is this ai slop