Amazon: Staff told to work overtime as virus spikes demand
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Every single one of them gave me a non-answer; most simply answered a different question I didnt ask.
If there isn't an expectation of a consistent 40 hour work week, then it is highly unlikely that there will be any bonus for working extra during this time period.
At that time, SDEs were paid on a salary basis with additional compensation in restricted stock units (RSUs) that vested in the future based on how long you stayed with the company a.k.a "golden handcuffs".
SDEs worked about 50 to 60 hours during most of the year, 70 to 90 hours during an oncall / pager duty week, and 70 to 100 hours during Q4, the holiday season leading up to Christmas.
The pay was really good, the people I worked with were brilliant and amazing, and it was exciting to build awesome systems and see them make a difference in the company's operations and capabilities. At the same time, it starts to wear on you and your family after a few years. I am glad I did it, but it's not the type of job most people can do for more than a few years due to how much it requires and impacts your life.
I don't know anyone that works 60 hours regularly. 50, maybe - you know including lunch.
Oncall for the vast majority of teams isn't extra hours, just strange hours. But if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week? If you went through that I'm sorry, I suspected our Ops org is psychotic, but that is too much. Still, i really have to wonder if you are exaggerating since the other 2 numbers were dramatically. Or you got an Outlier team.
My org crunches for reinvent, sure, but what company wouldn't with a massive yearly conference where/when most of the products are launched.
It was common on the team I was on to work about 10 hours a day in office and then go home and have meetings with our sister team in India and some follow-up work with them. The sister team was working on standing up an automation service to reduce some of our "manual" work and help reduce the oncall burden, but it took nearly a year and a half for that to happen.
>> if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
That would have been nice. We initially had to provide 24-7 coverage for a week during our oncall rotation. After the sister team in India stood up, it turned into 12 hours a day and a hand off to an oncall engineer in India who would cover the next 12 hours. Both "tag team" engineers would cover a week together for the oncall rotation.
>> I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week?
Our service directly supported order fulfillment. Therefore it HAD to stay up at all costs, especially during Q4.
Granted 100 hours did not happen often, it was usually closer to 70 and mainly consisted of getting everything ready for Q4 and load testing it all to make sure that it was solid for the tremendous holiday volume. Remember, this was BEFORE the retail website had fully transitioned to elastic scaling. All the supporting layers and configuration were pre-scaled manually based on the previous year's peaks plus the expected increase.
My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
Kind of unrelated, but:
> As the owner of a small company that has a hard time finding good help > My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
I hope that you're not saying you shed the good help when you don't need them.
> Amazon is looking to hire 100,000 new warehouse and delivery workers to meet increased demands for shipments as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the company announced on Monday. It will also increase the hourly pay of workers employed in these positions by an additional $2 in the United States through April.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21182411/amazon-hires-emp...
Overtime should be optional, so that people can decide if they're capable or willing to push themselves during this period.
>This is, I think, good for humanity.
I think it's valuable to note it's good for the bits of humanity that live in the first-world parts of America, et al. Not so much the people who will get ground into dust getting Prime delivery times down while exposing themselves to disease all so I can get some book about teaching my kid in 2 days or less and then put it on a shelf.
Eh, this is the same as poor people eating fast food and rich people eating healthy organic foods. It is also the same as how rich people can afford to live close to work and poor people cannot so they spend more time commuting.
This theme isn't unique to Amazon or one facet of the world, its everywhere if you open your eyes. Financially affluent people have benefits that lower class people don't and that is how our world currently works.
What essentials? Toilet paper? Water? These can be bought from Amazon, no?
I agree, I will and am gladly working overtime for which I will not get compensation in the hope of preventing layoffs at the company I work for. We all have to do our part to keep what economic activity we can going in the face of this crisis.
So yeah it would make sense that OT is going to be a thing.
The article is sort of wishy washy on exactly what is going on though, it talks about voluntary and "condition of employment" OT.
I've worked in industries where OT was celebrated by employees and a lack of it was actually seen as a huge problem. I'm not 100% sure everyone's response to OT will be identical.
The only way this makes sense to me is if employees are directly or indirectly compensated for working overtime.
If they're not, then that kind of attitude is pathological.
Most people who celebrate how much of a "hard worker" and wear 50-60 regular work weeks like badges of honor that aren't being compensated extra drank the corporate culture koolaid their HR/HR management offered them, from my experience.
It's an entirely different story if you're working more and being compensated more for that work. In that case you're not being taken advantage of (hopefully) and I say, let that person decide what amount of work is appropriate for them.
Businesses aren't paying you any more than they can get away with so don't do them any favors either.
That completely contradicts my experience. I work in biotech and we proudly put in long hours when required because we believe in the products we're working on and their benefit to society.
Amazon likewise is it's own mechanism, and it seems to vary heavily depending on the warehouse. From the workers I've talked with in our local warehouses, they typically like it - but our warehouses are also open for tours so they probably get treated a bit better than others.
We need logistics infrastructure to stay up, and we need the general populace to trust it.
Last I checked, employment and OT was voluntary.
This is all good stuff.
I don't have a comprehensive list at the moment, but I do know Washington state, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, and California have expanded benefits. If you or someone you know is impacted, check with your local state's governor's office and the Dept of Unemployment and file as soon as you're eligible, including food stamps and Medicaid if also eligible for those programs.
Unemployment requires that you're actively seeking work. You're no longer eligible for unemployment if you turn down an offer.
Did I miss a news article about this? Or are you just speculating?
Moreover, airline roles are going to be the last to open up. It's going to take a long time for airlines to return to their former capacity, and their employees who were furloughed or laid off are going to be recalled first.
Ditto, frankly, for gig economy saviors running around delivering for GrubHub et. al. There's no reason these need to be subsistence level trash jobs. If we really care, now is the time to fix that at the regulatory level.
I mean, okay? You know groceries and other goods at other shops also require workers to work, right?
You could replace "Amazon" with any other grocery delivery company, works the same.
Is this a 0.1% chance or a 90% chance? One matters, the other doesn't :)
Because Amazon is using desperate people to sign abusive contracts and then make them work risking their lives and loved ones to increase an already huge profit.
> who actually deliver things that we're going to need?
This post is full of this propaganda from Amazon. Who said that they are delivering first necessity items? Who said that it is better to have one person touching thousands of packages and sending to people's homes is a good idea?
Amazon is nos just being a bad player in the job market but also it is damaging the much needed rational on-line debate.
Please, keep yourself safe and help society by staying home when asked by the authorities. It is not just about you, but also others.
A small number of interacting people + most people hiding at home, is WAY better than having everyone still going out there.
I've noticed that the stories on the dark satanic mills of Amazon's warehouses never bother to show us how wonderful the conditions are in Barnes & Noble warehouses by comparison.
Why is that?
It's so, so trendy to hate Amazon these days.
And I do keep myself and society safe. I am staying home, before the authorities even asked.
But if I was part of an essential supply chain, I'd be going to work. Because supply chains are important, especially when there's a virus going round, putting pressure on supply. I've even volunteered to deliver groceries at unsociable hours for an online grocery store, just to make sure that people get things like food in these difficult times.
Apparently telling people to stay home is the new social bandwagon of (dis)approval.
If they were cutting hours, the spin would be "Amazon throws helpless workers on the street".
People worry about the loss of jobs due to automation but humanity has to evolve to create new professional lines with new types of employment that don't involve things like someone packing boxes or transporting goods.
Amazon should be held responsible for all the damage that they do to their employees.
> She pointed out that under Working Time Regulations in the UK, overtime is limited to a maximum of 48 hours per week, averaged over a 17-week period. Workers can "opt out" of the maximum weekly limit, however, and some are required to do so as a condition of employment.
Any right that you can opt-out it is not a right at all.
This is why the survival rate for the poor and the right is going to be different. In our modern society we have the resources for taking care of everybody, it is just greed and malice that allow for this situations.
I'm confused, Amazon ships all kinds of things, and people still need to be able to buy stuff. How is this different from logistical workers in any other industry? To enable people to still buy groceries, there's all kinds of workers in that chain.