In terms of warehouses there's a fair bit of automation which replaces quite a few jobs - at my former employer's warehouses the pickers had robots drive all the stuff to them, and they were trying out robot pickers (they were able to handle ~30% of orders due to limitations in agility, SKUs had to be specifically whitelisted). You still need people to handle e.g. dangerous goods and handle the various fuckups in the system (e.g. due to poor master data), but when I was leaving they were not planning on any new "classic" warehouses.

I don't want to disclose where I worked, but you can take a look at Ocado, they are in a similar space (although focused on a different target market) and expanding from being online grocer to making those FCs for other companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

I think online shopping has also taken a bite of that traffic.

If you look at similar videos, there's a number of people who try to mimic what he does. Often kids, and with much less preparation than he does.

They are laying off more than 50% of the company, they are still going to lose their best employees even if they are not laid off. I do agree though that distribution between the roles needs to be taken into account.

And I believe microsoft counts their SaaS offerings in their Azure usage, which significantly skews the numbers.

Software engineering jobs are extremely cushy. You are not working in an Amazon warehouse to make the ends meet.

They are when you're 30 years old in a boom market. The fact that people act like unemployment is impossible suggests no one was an adult during 2001-3. That means you know neither age discrimination nor recession.

Ah, the idealism of youth.

Because the goal of shrinkflation is to mislead. You have the same packaging, but weight suddenly changes from 750g to 700g. Or instead of 24 eaches, you have 22. It's not prominently displayed on packaging that anything has changed. For many products you will notice a change in price more easily (and it's difficult to show changes in prices on packaging as it's the retailers who set those, and they change much more frequently)

There are GS1 GTIN "rules" about that (e.g. https://www.gs1.org/1/gtinrules/en/decision-support/decision...), but they are guidelines, and relatively lax ones at that (e.g. gross weight changes of up to 20% are allowed). Anybody in retail more or less knows that manufacturers, and even worse - intermediate sellers - don't bother informing about material changes (e.g. languages on packaging being removed to put some marketing bullshit, opening you to legal consequences). Never mention people reusing GTINs for totally unrelated articles.

A referral won't make you skip all technical interviews.

Have you attended virtual ones which "work" in that regard? I've been to a few and to be honest discussion dies out nearly completely.

Sort of depends on what you're looking for. To me, the best value of a meetup or conference is meeting individuals and having one-on-one or small group conversations, as well as being able to hang out with people after an event. When I've hosted meetups, I usually get together a group of people to hang out at a pub down the street after the event. It's both fun and good for networking. Fake "meetups" will never ever fulfill that. Can a fake "meetup" work for honest discussion? Yeah, I've even hosted ones like that. It doesn't mean I think they're optimal that way. A fake "meetup" still necessitates that everyone participates in a single conversation and that not everyone gets enough of a word in.

I really don't have anything against virtual meetups. I'm really more against the idea that they are equivalent or superior.