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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but my opinions are my own.

I don't think you have much to worry about if you're a WF employee. Amazon actually treats their employees very well. In my experience here, I've never seen any of the things the NY times article talked about, either on my team or any other team I've interacted with. People have a healthy work/life balance (40-50 hours a week), get paid very well (definitely above average, and probably in the top 25% of industry), and in general they are concerned with long-term employee sustainability, rather than letting employees burn out and quit.

I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor. That's a completely different environment than full time employees work in.

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I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor.

The tone of your writing suggests that you are OK with treating these people badly. If a company treats some set of its workers badly, what stops them from treating other employees the same way? In this case, they may treat SW engineers well because there is a lot of demand for engineers, and they have to be treated well to retain good folks. That is not comparable to the good culture that OP claims WF has.

Have you ever worked a minimum wage food service or warehouse job before? I have, and believe me, it's hell. I spent my high school years working as a cook at KFC. Hot summer days spent making $3.35 an hour standing over pressure cookers full of 400 degree hot oil and lifting 50 pound baskets of deep fried chicken out of them. You get a 15 minute paid break every 4 hours, and a mandatory 30 minute unpaid break for lunch.

I'm not saying its ok to be inhumane or break laws and treat your workers like cattle. I'm just saying that if you've never worked at a minimum wage unskilled job before, you probably don't realize how much it can be hell, just due to the nature of the work. The same thing can be said for lots of labor like farming, construction work, mining, etc.

> I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor. That's a completely different environment than full time employees work in.

But probably more similar to most jobs in a grocery store than a software engineering position.

I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.

> I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.

Just a tad, but the financial analysis told us inhumanity was the right direction to move in. /s

I believe HQ staff was very unhappy about that situation and that (some of?) the warehouses in hotter places have A/C now. (Source: live in Seattle, know a number of Amzn employees.)

I haven't seen any articles about the working conditions at warehouses in years, have you? In the mean time, they've opened dozens more warehouses.

(The latest was the NYT article which was about office jobs and which is a whole discussion in its own right.

source?

It took literally two seconds to find:

https://www.google.com/#q=amazon+ambulance+warehouse

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...

> In a lengthy and heavily reported article, The Call said a warehouse employee contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on June 2 to report that the heat index in the warehouse had reached 102 degrees, and that 15 workers had collapsed. The employee also said workers who were sent home because of the heat received disciplinary points.

> Eight days later, the paper said, an emergency room doctor at a local hospital saw enough Amazon employees suffering from heat-related injuries to call OSHA and report “an unsafe environment.”

> So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the ambulance chief told The Call.

I suspect keeping ambulance at standby was more of a hotfix for a bug, than a feature. Yes Amazon is frugal, but I think it is a bit of a stretch to assume there was malicious intent in not cooling their FCs.

In a giant warehouse managed by a company with > 100k employees, things are not changed that quickly...

They're not malicious, so much as indifferent.

Maliciousness probably costs money, and Amazon's looking to spend as little as possible on these warehouse resources.

Regardless of indifference or malicious, its still breathtakingly inhumane.

I did a contract at Amazon here in the Dallas/Ft Worth area, and in my experience between the warehouses (I think that there are now 8 in the DFW area alone) these stories were the exception, not the norm.

I wasn't a contract product picker either, I'm a Paramedic that helped staff the on-site medical clinic, which exists mostly for workers comp paperwork and the occasional emergency. (in 6 months, I responded to 2 actual medical emergencies.)

The warehouses were not overheating even in the Texas sun, we didn't have an ambulance sitting outside, and people weren't passing out. I'm not sure what was up with the one in the story but it definitely sounds like more of an exception than the rule. But that story of that warehouse just keeps coming up.

Keep in mind this is from 2011...A lot has changed at Amazon since then.

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/workers-complain-about-...

>but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor. That's a completely different environment than full time employees work in.

Some positions are temporary seasonal labor, but Amazon employs people full time in their fulfillment centers as well, and they work hard trying to convert the former into the latter.

Where I am (near Austin, TX), Amazon is running a campaign to recruit UT students with the promise of "tuition assistance." The way they treat their FC employees has nothing at all to do with their relative skill level, educational background or expected tenure. They've also been pushing 60 hour mandatory overtime for over a month for some shifts and they pay well under the cost of living for the area in which they operate, and I expect that represents the general treatment of the majority of Amazon employees, because there are far more of them at the bottom of the pyramid than the top.

I don't doubt the engineers are doing well, though. They probably get chairs to sit in and everything.

> I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor.

This might be one of the more tone deaf things I've read on HN in recent memory.

Please see my other comment. I've worked a $3.35/hr. minimum wage food service job before and it's hell. If you took 1,000 average citizens and threw them into minimum wage food service, factory, or warehouse work, I would completely expect a good percentage of them to burn out and quit within a couple days. Unskilled jobs are just too hard and require too much effort for too little salary to make them acceptable to a lot of people. This doesn't mean they are inhumane; it means we've grown accustomed to easy, white-collar jobs and are fairly divorced from the reality of hard, physical labor these days.

Any job that would cause a good percentage of people to 'burn out and quit within a couple days', would fall into the category of inhumane for me.

Fair enough, but keep in mind that in the 1800s, parents often made their young children work 16 hour days in the sun farming for them. Child labor, under harsh conditions. We've grown accustomed to a much easier life now, but it was not always like this.

Is there a point you are trying to make that's relevant to this discussion? I have read a few of your comments on this thread and I just can't for the life in me figure out what point you're trying to make.

Honestly, forget it. The point I'm trying to make is that nobody owes you a handout or an easy job. The fact that I've worked brutal fast food jobs for $3.35 an hour, yet you don't see KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, being trashed here for terrible working conditions, while AMZN is, speaks volumes.

Today has taught me that HN has a pretty fierce anti AMZN bias, and it shows. I have 4K+ karma, and am sharing my honest opinion and experiences working for AMZN for the last year. Next time, I just won't participate. This community has gone downhill pretty seriously in the last few years... No big loss.

Please don't let me comments prevent you from participating in good discourse. I just don't understand why you are so hell bent on defending Amazon at the expense of all the "seasonal unskilled laborers". They are humans like you and me and they are not secondary citizens. It seems to me like we should be trying to make other people's lives better. I will trash whatever place that mistreats its employees. But this is Hacker news and the topic is about whole food and amazon. Why you keep bringing the fact that you worked for $3.50 an hour at McDonald's is beyond me. Damn man, just because you suffered from having to do fast food doesn't mean everyone else should too?

> The fact that I've worked brutal fast food jobs for $3.35 an hour, yet you don't see KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, being trashed here for terrible working conditions, while AMZN is, speaks volumes.

If it speaks volumes, those volumes are more about this being a tech-industry biased forum than anything else. We don't really talk about the fast food industry and it's working ccondition nearly as much (though, even so, the whole industry is often used as a shorthand for terrible working conditions even when discussing other things.)

Your idea that the fact that HN talks about Amazon more than the fast food industry is anti-Amazon bias and not tech-industry focus is interesting, but not particularly plausible. (Especially given that plenty of that talk is positive.)

I appreciate your honest opinion and I am only providing my own honest response. This thread is about AMZN, you talked about how some workers are treated at AMZN so that's what we are talking about. I actually happen to love AMZN as a whole and own stock in the company which has done extremely well for me. My company buys almost all of our equipment off AMZN. That doesn't mean I can't criticize them when I disagree with one of their practices.

It's interesting to hear these stories, because when I was looking for a job, naturally I talked to all my friends that had worked at Amazon at one point. Out of maybe 6 people, 4 had some pretty negative things to say. These are all career SDEs/SW/SDETs, but on very different teams and divisions.

I once had a coworker that walked into the building, and said that morale was so low people would start crying when they were paged. Gave back his signing bonus and resigned immediately.

Completely anecdotal stories obviously. Not saying you're wrong, but you may be the outlier?

> Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but my opinions are my own.

> I don't think you have much to worry about if you're a WF employee. Amazon actually treats their employees very well.

Normally when people say Amazon abuses their employees, they aren't talking about AWS.

> Amazon actually treats their employees very well.

Do you mean the software developers who work on Lake Union or the many lower skilled people who work in Amazon's fulfillment centers...like people who would work in a grocery store...

People who work at Wholefoods aren't software developers making top bucks.

I don't think this is completely true. I was with AWS for 3 years as SW engineer and was working around 12 hours until I decided to switch. AWS has pretty messed up softwar services with lot of technical debt. Rather than fixing these, AWS relies on oncall (pager duty) to mitigate production issues. My team use to get 200 pages a week.

I've heard similar stories from several AWS engineers who were looking to leave or recently left. I can believe that pieces of AWS have good culture, because AWS is a large set of services and it's inevitable that it's not 100% consistent across the entire organization. But I also fully believe that parts of AWS are "duct taped together and on fire" because I've heard it from multiple sources.

I've never had anyone in person tell me that Amazon was a good place to work unless they were trying to recruit me.

I've worked here for a year and have never seen that. I'm sure there are a few bad managers, as there would be in any company with 350K+ employees, but Amazon really tries to take a data driven approach to employee retention. If you think they don't know this causes burnout and aren't trying to optimize for long-term employee sustainability, you're underestimating their management talent.

I think working in a grocery store is more similar to working in a distribution centre than at AWS. Highly paid engineers are usually treated well, unskilled/low-skill labour often not (not implying that this is the job OP does, but many in WF will be low-skilled).

> People have a healthy work/life balance (40-50 hours a week)

40-50 hours of work a week isn't healthy.

Why not? The important part is commute. 50hr work week in a job you like with a reasonable commute is no problem for your health. 30hr/week in a job you don't like with 2.5hr in traffic each day is much less healthy.

Unless all 50 hours are compensated, 10 of them at 1.5-2x base pay, the person working them is getting ripped off.

Every one of my friends in engineering (actual engineering, e.g. civil, aerospace, etc.) positions get at least 1.5x for any hour over 40 they work in a week. In fact "unpaid overtime" is something I hadn't heard of for an engineering position prior to working in software. It's almost like workers in this industry are competing to see how much they can let themselves be exploited.

I'm guessing you don't live in the US, or your friends are underpaid, or they work for a firm that chooses, but does not have to, provide overtime. Actual engineering should generally be considered exempt from overtime.

1. If nothing else, engineers are considered a learned professional.

2. They probably make over $100,000 per year.

3. They may hit the executive exemption.

https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17a_overview.pdf

Their firms choose to provide overtime. I live in the US, and so do they. They are underpaid, but so are software engineers (even adjusting for overtime or lack thereof).

In the US, software developers are exempted from the law requiring 1.5x pay for overtime. Not sure it matters if they're salaried instead of hourly to begin with though.

This is in the US and they're all salaried. Their overtime is computed as a function of the equivalent hourly rate, biweekly pay, etc.

That is a set of regulations that vary state by state. I work in mass and I have never received a dime for overtime

It has nothing to do with regulations, actually. These companies they work at aren't normally obliged to pay overtime by any regulation or contractual obligation. The engineers there are "exempt" employees, classified identically to what a software engineer would be.

In some cases these employers' contracts require them to pay overtime to employees that work on the contract project, but generally that isn't the case. They pay overtime because of the historical evolution of the industry and the expectations and dynamics of the employer/employee relationships.

I guess you are speaking about juniors/graduates? Senior engineers in my experience in two different European countries have always contracts with unpaid overtime exactly as management contracts.

No. Three of them have very senior positions (e.g. principal or chief engineer). They've always had paid overtime at every stage of their career.

Interesting, my undergrad is actual engineer, Electrical, worked in VLSI design (GPUs) for 4 years after college, and nobody I ever heard doing EE every got paid overtime.

You have to negotiate your salary based on these assumptions. Or get paid hourly (as a consultant or contractor). I'm not currently hourly, but I am also not getting exploited, either. Most places I have worked didn't give a damn about their employees. They would just use them up and get new ones when people eventually got fed up and quit (or got sick and quit, in a few cases). When you bill hourly, projects are far more honest in terms of not shifting costs onto the staff.

Says what research?

Agreed, although I imagine it's probably the norm unfortunately.

I mean to be fair, most of the jobs at WF stores ARE unskilled labor though.

Our proclivity to treat all “unskilled labor” as if the people doing them are trained monkeys is one of the reasons customer service in large retail stores is so often horrible.

If you treat your people like valuable members of society/your organization they will develop and improve on the actual skills that an unskilled job needs, like anticipating problems, knowing when an how to escalate issues, being warm to customers, being knowledgeable about the business and your products, and hustling when needed.

If your treat your people like disposable chattel then they’ll show up to punch a clock, check the boxes, and get out as soon as possible.

When comparing price to customer service, price wins every time.

We can say all we please that we want great customer service, but we vote with our wallets, and our wallets say "Save $5 per trip to interact with the trained monkeys."

Thus, we have Walmart.

>When comparing price to customer service, price wins every time.

This is very much a cultural problem that stems from treating service workers as subhuman and undeserving of a decent wage.

And the price difference is hardly as high as $5 per trip. Even places with really high minimum wages don't get that bad. It's more like a few extra cents, barely noticeable. Where the savings on payroll at the bottom are going is usually payroll further up the chain.

Some stores have much better customer service than others, like Whole Foods and Costco (just to cover both sides of the pricing models), and they seem to be doing all right.

Not true. I know several people that have good careers at WF and would be offended by the fact that you think they are unskilled.

Seasonal workers in the FCs literally get only 4 hours of training and are then filling orders. That's the pure definition of unskilled, and a far cry from a pastry chef at WF.

That's not what unskilled means in this context. It just means that they are easily replaceable and not specialized. You can have respect for people as individuals while recognizing that the job they do could be done by just about anybody (the definition of unskilled)

A pastry chef is unskilled?

How many employees at WF are pastry chefs and how many are in stocking, orders, cleaning, and manning the register?

I feel like at least half of the average grocery store staff I see are skilled: butchers, fishmongers, cheese and wine managers, and pasty or bakers. Proportion varies with class of grocery: BiLo obviously having fewer than WF.

There's the checkout counter and stock in the back, but I feel like the employed-during-the-day crew definitely has career opportunities.

Thank you for saying this. WF needs a half dozen unskilled workers to stock shelves, and about 6 dozen skilled laborers in the trades you mentioned. Do you think a 21-day dry-aged steak can be made by someone that just showed up during a high school job fair with zero training? Would you eat it?

It's not that pastry chef's are unskilled, but they are very easily replaceable. It's really difficult for culinary school grads to find work because of the influx.

Not true. It's very hard for restaurants to find skilled cooks nowadays because the salaries they are willing to pay are not high enough. When an artisanal pastry chef can open their own business, setup a Stripe account, and make six figure income, you know a restaurant only willing to pay $45K for a skilled chef is going to have a problem...

A pastry chef is to WF what an AWS engineer is to Amazon.

IIRC the definition of unskilled labor is one requiring less than a year of training.

What I mean is you don't necessarily need a college education to work in any of their departments. Not trying to be offensive

Oh well, you know a dozen people working at Whole Foods that have good careers, guess the literal thousands of people working in the stores, filling the shelves, being cashiers, etc., usually being the first ones to be thrown away, overworked and overpressured don't exist then. Only white collar jobs matter after all.

Enjoying your ivory tower I hope?

So the people stocking the shelves and operating the registers are all highly skilled labor?

>I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor

But keep in mind poor non-tech people are trash and you can treat them like it!

I surely hope you are correct for the sake of the workers of WF, but...

If you work for AWS, you are either software engineer or linux/network admin. And that means you bring high value to Amazon. So yes, Amazon would treat you well.

But as you go further down the value chain, your treatment will get exponentially worse. And I can't imagine cashiers and stockers being viewed as high value makers by Amazon.

> keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor

What do you think most Whole Foods employees are?

Yes, but fulfillment center employees are likely much more comparable to whole foods employees than software developers, in terms of education, job responsibilities, ease of replacement, etc. So that's probably who we should be looking at anyway

There's one key difference that the retail employees are interacting with customers whereas the distribution center employees are hidden away in the factory. Not sure how important this difference will be, but it could definitely influence the company's behavior.

okay, so its fine to treat unskilled labor and temp workers poorly?

Gotcha.

I'm sure this is true but you sound exactly like Uber employees who come on here and say they've never seen any of the issues.

40-50 hours a week is NOT a healthy work/life balance. Nice try buddy.

50 hours per week really isn't that bad if you're getting paid well for it

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