Ask HN: Amazon employees how do you feel about Bezos' handling of Covid-19? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Amazon employees how do you feel about Bezos' handling of Covid-19?

29 pointsmav3rick8 comments

Firing employees who held a strike (legitimate reasons). Whole Foods employees complaining about no PPE. What do current employees think of this ?

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Having worked at amazon for 3 years. I don't find it surprising. Amazon, in general, is known for not taking good care of its employees. My experience has been as SWE and its a well know fact of there that if you and your manager don't get along then you have limited time to move to a different team or company before you get PIPed.

Taking good care vs inhumane. This is just inhumane.

That’s just a severity.

People tend to be consistent in their behavior.

I think Bezos gets a lot of flack for anything he does. That being said, I'm not defending the man. I think his response to things as the CEO can be much better.

Transparency is very important from employees at the bottom - and given a lot of the recent stuff that happened recently (like the strikes and all), I don't think upper management is particularly good at showing visibility. I understand that company is huge - but that's why you hire smart people. They should have ways to address issue like this. Asides from one email that was sent company wide, I haven't heard zip from him. However, Amazon is known to not take great care of its employees. So I'm not too surprised here either.

I'm a software engineer, btw. My thoughts are my own and do not of my employer.

If we took PPE we're receiving and gave it to Whole Foods employees and warehouse workers, that means taking it from the hospitals that are running out. Do you think that Amazon is making the wrong choice, and should prioritize its warehouse workers over hospitals? It's not a fun choice to make.

Is this what Amazon is telling you inside ? How about the Whole Foods email about asking employees to donate their time off to other sick employees. In these times they should go above and beyond to help their employees. Instead, it's one insensitive thing after the other.

Well Bezos said this publicly as well. I’m not interested in giving a whole sale defense of everything amazon does. It’s a huge company. But there is a world shortage of PPE as you’ve probably noticed, so if we diverted supply to ourselves over delivering it to hospitals, that seems like the wrong call. Don’t you think?

It’s kind of an interesting quest though where is PPE most effective. Somewhat counterintuitively it might make more sense to deploy it where the contact quantity is Is the highest like grocery stores as opposed to where individual risk is highest at the hospital

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