Amazon’s HR Failures | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s HR Failures

amazonchronicles.substack.com

160 pointsramimac141 comments

One thing stuck out to me:

> Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point.

So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don't think for a second you're immune to this "up or out" force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It's just not as blatant.

Here's how: all these companies have a performance review system. It might be 1, 2 or 4 times a year. The exact process varies. Typically you'll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly.

How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone's performance was given their review and their level. To avoid "ratings inflation" each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can't be "strongly exceeds expectations" by design.

But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument's sake, say that number is 8%. That means the employees get ranked and those buckets will be applied so the bottom 8% will end with a subpar rating.

Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door.

In corporate America the "up or out" culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you're out) but the effect is basically the same.

This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.

"up or out" seems like such a strange concept - I understand the idea of trimming fat, but I've seen a firing of 5-10% annually, and it's demoralizing and terrifying as a worker.

You're basically put in a position where you don't want to do too poorly, as you're guaranteed to get fired, but you also don't want to do too well, because then you may hit your ceiling too early, end up being "overpaid", then underperform and be set up for the cull.

I've seen both, and the yearly ritual of managers coming in and tapping people on the shoulder, them walking out to never be seen again ... I hated that.

Isn't that what the "stack ranked" system is about?

Wasn't that a Microsoft invention?

It's been around a long time.

It was actually a GE invention and adopted by companies across a wide swath of industry. These were the days when Jack Welch was the prophet of business leaders and if he did something, it must be good.

Several companies in Silicon Valley also used stack ranking, for example.

edit:typo

That makes sense. I worked there, back when "Neutron Jack" was in charge. I don't remember that, but they probably didn't come out and say it (also, I rated fairly high -they even gave me an award, after I left the company. I still have the plaque, upstairs).

I was taught in business school (early 2000s) that it was good that GE fired the lowest 10% performing employees b/c the employees were not actually happy or content at GE or they would perform better. Therefore firing them is good b/c they'll find a better career fit elsewhere.

But I actually think it is terrible. It pits co-workers against each other and makes taking credit for an accomplishment more important than doing what's best for the organization.

It's probably good if it's done once every four years. But companies do it every year if not multiple times a year. So at that point, without new blood coming in, you end up cutting into the meat of a high performance org.

IIRC employed during a period where GE was burning the furniture to heat the house. And it was only supposed to be employed temporarily.

The up or out is not a strange concept in the realm of professional sport.

Though the culling should only apply to those at the bottom, not the top.

The culling is necessary to maintain top performance.

In sports you have multiple divisions. It is rather "up, down or stay".

Sadly it is still mandatory system in Accenture and other big "consulting" companies.

The "overpaid" bucket is a risk at Amazon that some don't think about. Some manage to hack the performance process and then get tossed out because they're then ranked against senior people and how long you've been senior doesn't factor in.

But as far as not doing too poorly, how sure will you be that you're not in or close to that 10%? For a lot of people who aren't completely assured of themselves, this is a constant source of anxiety. Couple that with the leverage your manager has to casually place you in that bucket twice a year if you haven't done enough groveling, and this is where a lot of the toxicity at Amazon corporate comes from. People don't want to help each other because they have to look out for themselves.

Over time I saw three kinds of people thrive in that environment:

1) highly competent, productive people who managed the culture and workload with ease.

2) people who have Amazon as part of their identity and will sacrifice their well-being or personal life to meet the bar

3) typical corporate sociopaths that are non value-add

In my opinion they are growing bucket (3) the fastest.

I thought the military also used a variant of this - interesting that is "such a strange concept".

How so? The military doesn't fire people that I know of.

The 1980 Defense Officer Personnel Management Act mandates that officers passed over twice for promotion are required to be discharged from the military.

So yes, if you are not promoted, you don't get to stay - you are actually fired.

They have modified this for some positions like flight instructors who they want to keep. But in general it's up or out in military - that means fired before you get your pension.

Yes, see [0].

They also seem to be about to change this [1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out#Military

[1]https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/24/up-or-ou...

I've only run into this issue in 'corporate America' once in my career.

I worked for a company who acquired another company. Acquired company was bonkers dysfunctional. First day I met them one of the managers bragged about how hard he worked his people and how many would leave.

I just didn't get it. What good does that do?

He didn't get more out of his people, quite the opposite, his team didn't perform well.

He was unpleasant to just be around, almost anytime, his employees clearly hated him. I'm not super social but I at least like to work with people that ... I want to be around to some extent.

Let alone my question of "Why would you want to be like that to other people?"

It was weird because it was one of the only times I encountered this issue.

> Let alone my question of "Why would you want to be like that to other people?"

Did you actually ask that? Did you get a response?

Yes, he kinda paused and then talked around it about how it is his job.

But what was weird was it absolutely wasn't any kind of company policy, nobody else was quite like that.

It was possible I might end up working for him at some point so I didn't push the issue. Not that it helped... he didn't like me much at all as time went on, mostly I showed some level of independence. Fortunately I was pretty well insulated from him and his efforts to complain about me were pretty childish / ineffective.

Yes. I've worked at a place where the CEO up and said "we're OK with losing <X>% of employees per quarter" which was just insane to me to release that publicly to everyone, at a time when all our friends were leaving or given the boot. Really killed morale.

Tech has (and other industries have) a characteristic turnover rate and people have all sorts of reasons to change jobs, so being OK with losing an appropriately chosen X% per quarter seems perfectly rational and appropriate.

I like the teams we have here, but I'm OK with losing about 2% of employees per quarter in the same way that I'm OK with it being snowier in the wintertime.

You need to be okay with losing X% of employees because they're going to quit for their own reasons, or they're going to be hit by a bus, or want to change jobs internally.

This doesn't mean that you push them out, but rather that you make sure more than one person knows how everything works.

Imagine working every day to ensure the world is miserable up to a required quota.

I don't know if I could do that, I might be happier homeless.

What do you do for a livelihood?

It's funny, this was the pull quote for me too. Or at least this part:

> the cruelty is the point.

However, my reaction is quite different. It became hard to take this article seriously at all after they drew that conclusion. It is flagrantly false. To wit, they don't produce any documentation (whereas elsewhere the article is awash) to support this claim. No email threads where a sinister VP says, "Back to drawing board gang, this proposal isn't cruel enough."

Very clearly, the point is performance.

The author's fantastical conclusion ("cruelty is the point") reeks to high heaven of the sort of leaps in logic and interpretation that seems to be undermining the credibility of some of the West's most hallowed institutions.

>Very clearly, the point is performance.

Yeah from my understanding from former Amazon folks it is hyper performance oriented. The outcome (as far as treating people) might suck, but the motivation seems to genuinely be performance.

It's a distinction without a difference.

I think motivation and the intent of the policy is relevant.

The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does[1]. It doesn't really matter what the motivation or intent was. If the outcome is cruelty, then it is a cruel policy. If the people who make the policy don't intend for the outcome to be cruel, it is within their power to change it.

EDIT: If the outcome is also a high performing workforce, then the policy can be both cruel and performance enhancing. I'm just arguing that a policy that ends up being $X is an $X policy, regardless of whether the policy makers intended it to be $X, for whatever value of X you choose.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

If the outcome is performance?

What absolute nonsense. You could just as easily say "since Amazon performs well, the purpose of Amazon is performance".

Anyway, intent and motivation are clearly relevant when we think about moral issues (such as cruelty). To suggest otherwise is absurd.

Intent and motivation are describing human thought process. We can apply this metaphorically to corporations to illustrate a point, but corporations can't literally have motivations. Systems theory (and thus the above heuristic) describes entities like Amazon.

So corporations can't literally have intent or motivation but they can be cruel. Or maybe we're talking about metaphorical cruelty?

Cruelty is an outcome. It can be the result of an intent or motivation, but doesn't have to.

Cruelty is a moral justment.

Made by an observer, or the victim(s).

So if a person walks under a cliff and a rock falls on them, would an observer be right to deduce that the rock/cliff is cruel, or perhaps that the entire Earth is cruel to its inhabitants?

You should think about the phrase "the way to hell is paved with good intentions" a little sometime.

Intents and motivations are irrelevant when you look at their effect (which cruelty is). Heck even the worst dictator in known history had wanted to make the world a "better place" in his own, twisted way. Some things just aren't worth their price.

Wow I didn't expect a reductio ad hitlerum in this thread.

What is the "effect of Amazon" anyway? Surely Amazon has done a lot of good. It has created jobs, it has changed how people buy things. It has also done a lot of bad. It has made it harder for small indepdendent businesses, it has engaged in anticompetitive practices. How am I supposed to "sum up" Amazon's "overall effect"?

Truthfully, I have no idea if Amazon is "good" or "bad" or "cruel" and neither does anyone else. The people making these claims confidently are posers.

So you believe that performance and cruelty are not different?

If performance is subjective (# of tickets, "impact", cut of your jib, etc) and at times applied arbitrarily by a manager, would applying such a flawed assessment to the detriment of someone's career, livelihood, and personal happiness, not also be cruel?

If you honestly believe these rating systems are objective, consistent, and applied fairly, sure performance measurements are not cruel. But I argue most of the time they are at the discretion of management - and will reflect the worst qualities of that manager.

>If performance is subjective (# of tickets, "impact", cut of your jib, etc) and at times applied arbitrarily by a manager, would applying such a flawed assessment to the detriment of someone's career, livelihood, and personal happiness, not also be cruel?

Through this lens, everything in life is cruel.

My statement was not that abstract. Those who have the power to inflict punitive damage on others should be really careful about when they apply that power. The premise of my argument is that tech org management is sometimes so careless with the way that they hire and fire that sometimes it is cruel.

I think this slightly misses the point of the original phrase (which I agree is unnecessarily unclear) and by extension how it applies to Amazon.

The point of cruelty at the border was clearly to discourage migrants from coming to the United States. The cruelty was the method chosen to accomplish that goal. But the phrase, "the cruelty is the point" functions really to point out that the cruelty isn't incidental to the thing being accomplished. If it were, then when someone pointed out to you -- as progressives did during the Trump admin -- that you were being unnecessarily cruel, then maybe you'd want to try to stop. But "the cruelty is the point" suggests that the cruelty is core to the strategy.

"The cruelty is the point" would more accurately be formulated as, "the cruelty is intentional."

I disagree with both elements of this premise: 1) that Amazon is cruel, and 2) that the objectives are achievable by other means.

Performance, as I say above, is the point. Amazon pushes very hard for performance. Achieving high performance is difficult and uncomfortable. But to classify the activities which yield high performance as "cruel" is an interpretation. This article and the NYT articles it cites bend over backwards to paint Amazon in a negative light in this respect. But here's' the thing, Amazon is very transparent about both their aims and means. Amazon encourages and incentives workers to quit bc Bezos (quite correctly, in my opinion) recognizes the "march to mediocrity" as a basic reality of large orgs. Amazon offers training which will help employees find different jobs and pays quit bonuses. Flat out: that's not cruelty. It is actually a fairly humane and "progressive" approach to a difficult and uncomfortable challenge.

Implicit in these claims is of course (the fairly absurd, in my opinion) belief that there are some more effective means of achieving sustained and very high performance that are more comfortable for employees. This, to me, is the root flaw in the "cruelty" interpretation. It basically requires us to be believe that Amazon is run by sadistic people that are aware of better means by which to achieve sustained high performance, but that they choose more uncomfortable, "less humane" options instead. If I'm wrong, I simply ask that the people on the other side of the argument point to proven methods (that they interpret as not cruel) which yield the kind of sustained high performance that Amazon has achieved.

It’s fairly well known that Amazon can only hire “mediocre” tech talent precisely due to their hostile work environment and relatively low pay. Top people go elsewhere.

That's interesting - at least from what I've seen they've been able to lowball folks (relatively) and still get hires in.

Given that they can only hire mediocre tech talent, this speaks to perhaps the success of the HR management that they were able to build what looks like a market leading offering in AWS (the scale of which is absolutely huge - all built by these mediocre engineer!)

Structural barriers to entry will mask all manner of incompetence (c.f. Microsoft in the 90s). It’s important for our industry to recognize what actually leads to success instead of cargo culting horrible managerial practices that only succeed because the practitioners have first mover advantage, regulatory capture, network effects…

Seems like a pretty dubious claim. I'd love to seem some sources to support it.

Since inception, Amazon has achieved nearly unprecedented growth of revenue, profits, employee head count, customer base, product offerings, and just about any other business metric.

You believe all of this was achieved with mediocre talent? I doubt it, but maybe you're right. Either way, so what? If Jeff Bezos has figured out how to create an innovative, world leading, ultra high performance business with mediocre talent, his accomplishments (vis-à-vis Amazon) are even more admirable.

By this definition, there are no cruel companies in a capitalist society. It's a nice world to live in, but it doesn't really conform to experience.

I agree, the author's application of "the cruelty is the point" misuses the phrase.

The article coining that term [1] (accurately) describes the collective joy Trump fans experience at his rallies when he promises to have American troops commit war crimes [2] or have police physically abuse people convicted of no crime [3]. Trumpists believe in using the state to hurt, even physically, anyone they don't like. To them, Trump's cruelty is literally the point.

I don't think that applies to Amazon. It sounds like Amazon just wants labor, as cheaply as possible, and does not care to invest back in its hourly workforce. To simplify, the labor is the point.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10828770/trump-terrorist-famil...

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/07/2...

Yeah turnover may be cruel but it has a point. It's the business equivalent of mass movements' continuous revolution.

I've worked for up or out companies most of my career. I get it can be uncomfortable but there is a good reason there is forced ranking. Most managers hate giving bad reviews to people that aren't doing well. If someone on the team is doing some work but not doing much its easier to say they meet standards and be nice to them. My current job is like this, there are a bunch in the team that do very little but manager is too nice and I think the firm suffers.

I think this ignores the value of long-haulers who are reliable contributors but don't necessarily want to be in management roles. I could see an up-or-out environment without significant allowances essentially ending in an organization full of Peter-principled managers who would've been more solid contributors at their old positions.

That also gives the incentive to hire dunces to fire at the end of the year so you can keep your team intact.

Which has been confirmed to happen at Amazon.

>the cruelty is the point.

I just don't get this part. On an intellectual level the point they just got done making is that cruelty is not the point. It's a byproduct of the system. The "point" of the whole thing is having a motivated and efficient workforce, at almost any cost. This is arguably evil and immoral, but it's not the case that the ultimate aim of the policies is to be cruel. I guess the author just included it because they're very emotional about it and want me to be emotional about it too?

If HR says "You can't have all high performers on a team", they are telling a manager that you aren't allowed to excel in your own job as a coach.

They are literally telling you not to spend your time helping employees because some HR chart wizard is going to make you rank them anyways and you will have wasted your time.

The way this should be done is to recognize who are motivated high performers and make sure they get help on their path "upward". This isn't saying to ignore others but recognize that people are at different stages of careers and will have different needs.

Although Dave Clark comes across as an unrequited villain in most Amazon reporting, he’s just a loyal shadow of Bezos’ dictum that Amazon employees at all levels are to unquestioningly serve his machine without thought of compensation. The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me.

"The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me."

That seems to be widely spread modern management thinking. Executives always have a reason why they should be paid a lot no matter if the stock goes up or down, the company does illegal things, profits go up or down. They always need to be incentivized financially.

And the same pople will tell you that giving more money to the lower ranks will make them lazy.

I remember a discussion with my director where he explained to me that he doesn't want to hire people who work for the money while at the same time in a lot of meetings he talks about cost and profit.

That's why you hire execs from the right social classes; their expenses, or their non-monetary needs like staying away from their wife, need to be so high that they won't retire just because you gave them $4 million.

That’s actually true. I would retire after half a year if I got my CEOs salary. And I would feel super rich. Even a month would propably be sufficient.

People as commodity.

Of course, I am NOT people.

> The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me.

Well, this is true. Google tried the opposite strategy with self-driving cars; they paid everyone so much that none of them had any reason to work for the rest of their lives. This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving.

I am not sure I would trust Google on that. At least one guy got an even better offer from Uber and Googles involvement in fixing salaries with several competitors has been out of the bag for years now.

It seems to me — not that this is my space — that Waymo’s gotten further than anyone else, running a taxi service and recently testing long-haul trucking. Zoox might also get there quickly, but note that Amazon is already losing key personnel to Waymo and is having to buttress their purchase with additional stock options to employees in order to keep them around — Bezos’ dictum breaks down rapidly as your labor pool becomes constrained.

Paying people yearly salaries so huge that they don't have to work for the rest of their lives is much different from simply paying them more.

> This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving.

There's so many more factors here than just pay, and as others have said, Google's team has done pretty damn well overall.

I think it's still an open question whether any amount of money would be enough to build a true SDC. The engineers made the rational decision to take the money and work on some cool problems for a while.

People very high up the corporate ladder often aren't motivated by money. They just get paid a lot. It's not the reason why they work. They work to get power, fame, respect etc. They believe that good workers are like them even if those people don't earn very much in comparison. They also believe that if someone is a bad worker, eg not like them, and you pay them a lot then they'll slack off and spend their money on things like holidays rather than working as hard as possible.

There is one reason why Amazon gets away with paying smart white collar engineers lower than market and in general treating them bad. That reason is India and its unlimited supply of engineers to Amazon.

For last 10 years India has been producing more smart engineers than local market is willing to pay for. Note that the demand is more than supply but Indian companies still will not pay engineers top salaries.

So for years it became easy for companies like Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft to pay top of market and get their pick. And these engineers, historically, were willing to grind to any levels for a ticket to US. And Amazon offered that. 1.5 years in almost 70% of their Indian employees move to US on L1 visas. Even lower tech market salaries in US are life changing for most of these folks. Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians.

It hasn't mattered to Amazon if people leave after 2 years. Because they always have a next batch coming from India. But then local companies started to pay and Amazon struggled to hire top talent. At this point they were smart enough to realise they need workers more than engineers. And now Amazon hires more engineers than any product company in India. It goes to more colleges than any other company. It pays them in top 80 percentile of market, they get to go to US where get paid top 70 percentile of market. So what if they get treated like shit for couple years. That's the cost of buying a 3 bedroom house for many of them.

The day Indian market is big enough to absorb these engineers at their price, Amazon recruiters will be on their knees for their next batch. Unfortunately due to pure currency difference it's always going to better financial decision for most Indian engineers to go to US, at least for next 10 years and Amazon will not have to treat it's employees like humans.

We are rapidly entering a true global market for things like software engineers.

We've always had "off-shore" and "near-shore" companies, but now with this major push to remote work there is no reason outside timezone differences to hire locally if you can get someone elsewhere who has better skills and will take a 5x+ lower rate.

I know this because I am a Team Lead / Senior Architect on a large project that has a component in one of these countries. They are highly skilled and are literally 5x lower than US rates.

This should rightfully make highly paid software engineers in wealthy countries nervous. I'm one of them.

Basically this. Without the never ending visa supply, amazon would never get away with this. They can just burn through foreign workers, most of whom are just happy to be in the USA. The loser is the American worker, who now has to work way harder due to the expanded labor supply.

That is a justification I hear for working in defense or on US gov contracts.

>Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians.

I don't understand this.

India is part of Asia

Paradoxically, I think Amazon has been able to get away with this because their stock is doing well. When your stock is going up 10%-30% per year, people will put up with a lot (my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now). I really do think that if they have a few down years, they'll have an incredibly hard time with retention and hiring.

The question I have is this, is amazon doing well because of this? Or in spite of this?

a positive feedback loop. High pay attracts talents, which if utilized properly, will produce higher profits, which in turn, can afford higher pay.

I think both. But what I do think is that they've leaned heavily on this flywheel, and if it stops it'll be very hard to get it going again. I could see most people sticking around Google or even Facebook for a few years of downward stock, but there not so much.

Same for most of tech. My friends in finance are working for banks where the stock is lower than 10 even 20 years ago. Completely different attitude.

> my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now

Are you saying in 2021 new graduates out of college with bachelor degrees in computer science are being offered $160k/salary + $340k in stock grants at Amazon?

No, he's not. He's saying the stock award, had he vested it all and not sold it, would have been worth 500k per year because of how much the stock has gone up.

New grads at amazon make 100 - 120k + 30-60k of stock or bonuses per year.

No, I'm saying 10ish years ago, my offer was about $85k/year + $50k of stock over 4 years - at around $90/share. Now at over $3400/share, that stock would be worth $1.75 million today.

The point being that anyone who joined Amazon saw massive growth in income, which I think means they didn't have to figure out morale or career growth or even compensation strategies, since everyone (software engineers at least) was getting rich.

Hot take here. Amazon is the harbinger of a permanent, systemic and pervasive bifurcation between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else as enabled by technology.

> between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else

Private Military Contractor?

Professional-managerial class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...

Sometimes, also yes. Mayor Pete would be one well known example of both.

I saw someone put phrase it as being "above or below the algorithm"

Chilling and true.

Just wait until Amazon replaces all their warehouse workers with robots. Then the true bifurcation begins.

And yet it’s market success, supports the notion it’s had remarkable HR success by hiring the right people to develop new products and services.

From a shareholder standpoint, it's an incredible business.

From a sustainability, humanity or... really any standpoint that isn't "how much money can I make off of trading this stock/receiving dividends", it's disturbing.

Is Amazon actually paying dividends though?

That should not matter at all to a shareholder.

No, if a biz can’t profitably reinvest excess cash, it should get returned to investors as buybacks or dividends. No investment opportunity can take unlimited capital input

Note that Amazon.com has not proven it can profitably reinvest - just that it can reinvest and keep growing revenue. The question is why so many people believe Bezos when he said there was a plan to eventually become profitable.

(AWS is quite profitable, but retail isn't, and it doesn't have a moat.)

No, you are wrong about this. Or several years out of date at least. The idea that Amazon isn't profitable save for AWS is almost a meme for some reason in parts of the tech community, but it isn't true and never really has been when you account for re-investment.

Retail on its own has been profitable for several years now, and its margins are improving. Some of those numbers are public and some are not, but even with just the public numbers it is easy enough to infer the above. What's more, Amazon retail would be pretty wildly profitable, relative to the typical margins of retail, if Amazon stopped dumping billions of dollars every quarter into continuous expansion of its logistics capabilities. They're able to dump those billions while still pulling a slight profit. In general though, they optimize for free cash flow, not profit.

Source: worked there until recently

This was more about when Amazon was starting up (eg before Prime or slightly after it) than the last few years. Nobody expects it to die at this point. Also I said "quite profitable" not "profitable" ;)

> What's more, Amazon retail would be pretty wildly profitable, relative to the typical margins of retail, if Amazon stopped dumping billions of dollars every quarter into continuous expansion of its logistics capabilities.

Well, this is falsifiable, but it hasn't been tested, so I dunno.

I strongly disagree with this statement.

Stock pump is great when you plan to sell later, realize dizzying share price gains, enjoy stock splits, and take loans against your portfolio; that's how it works now and I get it.

But something glaring about this situation makes me feel rather uneasy. Since the market has transitioned from dividends to price hikes, the price performance is fully baked into the economic equations that investors count on for profits.

I can't help but feel something is untoward about the ponzi-esque mechanics and tax sheltering implications of buy-hold-sell-buy the dip-hold. Regular (not rich) people are much less insulated to market downturns and the big players as well as corporate officers are bound to value short term performance, stock buybacks in lieu of dividends, pr-driven policies, and doesn't this even further incentivize insider trading activities and concealment of environmental issues, HR abuses, and other externalities?

What is the real point of the stock now? It is so much farther divorced from the fundamentals of a business and tilted towards this emotional stock market yearly performance corporate raider stuff. Doesn't the stock market have to keep recording historic record highs, or else this all comes crashing down? Does it really matter at all what a company is doing so long as the share price climbs at a rate above inflation? Shouldn't the smartest move now be to buy mass market ad campaigns for "Buy AMZN!"? I mean, if you squint at it just right it looks like if that works, corporations would be obligated to do just that.

If its all truly this fake (so to speak) and its gonna be fine, aren't I an enormous idiot for not quitting my job, liquidating everything, and just buying and selling shares all day long? (I suspect the answer is yes.)

As a sibling comment posted, if no one cares about dividends there’s no endgame with owning a stock making it effectively a “always a greater fool” con.

Amazon's product is so good that its shareholders don't actually want it to make money as long as they get free one-day shipping, which is why they don't ask for dividends.

This is supposedly "investing for future growth", but it's not that believable since US shareholders rarely wait that long and wouldn't let anyone but Bezos try it.

> US shareholders rarely wait that long and wouldn't let anyone but Bezos try it.

Do index funds, pension funds, 401ks, etc count as US shareholders?

https://www.marottaonmoney.com/what-is-the-average-holding-p...

You've put several unrelated things in that list so I can't answer. Trading shares isn't the only way to express your opinion though, it depends if you have voting shares and how you use them.

You don't actually want them to start giving out a dividend, capital gains have a favourable taxation compared to dividends so as long as their profits can be reinvested and turned into growth investors will prefer that.

Qualified dividends* are taxed the same as realized long-term capital gains in the US.

* - which are most dividends paid by US entities that are not REITs or MLPs and paid to holders who care to optimize their taxes.

We can all agree that slavery was a profitable business as well - for those who profited from it. Nowadays we look at it with different eyes though, so why shouldn't we look with those same eyes at Amazon (et al) practices as well? Only because they are contemporary? Of course I'm not saying that Amazon does slavery, my point is that if we can apply ethics talking about old practices, we should do the same with current practices.

> We can all agree that slavery was a profitable business as well - for those who profited from it.

It actually wasn't the most profitable business because slaves are both unproductive and not capable of being your customers. Economics being called "the dismal science" was started by a slaveowner who was mad that economists were opposed to slavery.

Of course, to this day middle managers do a lot of things that aren't economically rational because it makes them feel more powerful.

Slavery was profitable. Many mansions in England attest to this. It just wasn't optimal.

Serfdom is not exactly the same as slavery though. It has enough differences to make them incomparable from an economic point of view.

The mansions from feudal times are mostly gone. Many enormous mansions built with the profits of slavery in the West Indies still exist.

The perspective of customers is also positive.

> From a shareholder standpoint, it's an incredible business.

If you're trading the stock, sure. But if it's unsustainable it's not a buy and hold stock to fund your retirement

> From a sustainability, humanity or... really any standpoint that isn't "how much money can I make off of trading this stock/receiving dividends", it's disturbing.

It should be disturbing for shareholders (not "sharetraders") too. "Sustainability" is often thought (in America at least) as an externality (e.g. environmentalism).

But they are strip mining their workforce: when turnover happens in weeks or even days they run the risk of running out of hourly workers -- something it's been reported they worry about (though don't seem to be able to do anything about).

They are also exploiting their own customer base (by trying to permit just enough cheapo and crap/counterfeit products to get their margins up without pissing off the punters).

And while social diversity is also considered by many Americans to be an externality, the reality is that an increasing number of people are graduating who did not grow up with a "just put up with that crap" mentality, which restricts the pool of qualified people available to Amazon for the equally crucial non-hourly roles. If you're a black woman with a CS degree from a good school why would you even interview there?

> supports the notion it’s had remarkable HR success by hiring the right people

Amazon is well known for having a reasonably high hiring bar but also a strikingly high turnover.

I would not call it an "HR success" if people join the company mostly only for the FAANG name and the money and then leave.

If it achieves their goals, then it is a success.

I think Amazon, as any IT giant, is a two-tier or a three-tier company. Meaning different HR principles are applied to 'line workers' compared to mid-management compared to VP level hires.

In my experience the farther left DEI policy goes the more chaos, distraction, and resentment it creates. There also seems to be some correlation between how far left DEI policy goes and how acceptable vocal political activism is. The final anecdotal observation is that the farther left the DEI policy is the more likely you are to destroy your career by being voicing any dissenting critique of the DEI policy.

Amazon tends to embrace/reward constructive critical thinking but not disruptive/revolutionary critical thinking and so it may not be possible for Amazon to keep it's culture and adopt a left leaning DEI policy. I think the Amazon culture and staying focused on people who will thrive in that culture are the things that have made it so successful in so many areas.

How is a DEI policy "left" or "right"?

I think one way to measure how far left or right by looking at how far they take "Equity". If equity is an anti-racist version of "racial equity" then it demands "anti-racist" discrimination. To quote Kendi

"The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

The more extreme ideologies of DEI like critical race theory are closely associated with (in American terms) "the liberal left".

> The more extreme ideologies of DEI like critical race theory are closely associated with (in American terms) "the liberal left".

“Critical race theory” isn’t either extreme or an ideology, its a fairly mainstream historiographic approach (it was a novel, but not particularly extreme, idea in its field nearly half a century ago, but now its not even that) that the American Right has recently adopted public opposition to (especially, oddly enough, in places it isn’t being promoted) as a tribal identity symbol (alongside election conspiracy theories and defiance of COVID precautions.)

EDIT: It’s particularly odd to call “critical race theory” as an “extreme ideology of DEI” since DEI existing at all as a thing is based on a mainstream understanding of reality developed through critical race theory.

They've adopted public opposition to the words "critical race theory" and have essentially just made up a definition of what that is, or rather not defined it at all[1].

The level of discourse they're at doesn't admit discussing actual grad school critical theories, it's just a chance to bring back older school curriculums like that we didn't do anything bad to the Indians, the Civil War wasn't about slavery, MLK had a point but we've done all he asked for, etc.

[1] https://www.rawstory.com/pete-ricketts/

"DEI existing at all as a thing is based on a mainstream understanding of reality developed through critical race theory."

This strikes me as a very postmodern and intersectionalist view. My reply pointing out the ideological progression as:

marxism -> neo marxism -> postmodernism -> critical theory -> critical race theory -> anti-racism

was downvoted. Your post seems to validate it though.

> This strikes me as a very postmodern and intersectionalist view.

There's nothing “postmodern or intersectionalist” about noting the historical factual sequence:

critical race theory (1970s+) -> detailed analysis of post-civil-rights structural/institutional barriers to racial progress -> modern DEI

The idea that you can understand reality through CRT was what struck me postmodern/intersectionalist not the historical sequence. "lived experience" as truth and all that.

CRT, like critical theory more generally, has both modernist and postmodernist branches (contrary to the Right’s typical propaganda, which tends, confusingly, to associate it vert tightly with postmodernism despite also associating it very tightly with Marxism, which is extremely modernist.)

I suppose your comment would make some distant sense if only the postmodernist branch of CRT existed.

It doesn’t have to be, but it has been made “left” in many companies. Start with seminars and zoom calls with progressive politicians as guests, donate company $$ to organizations that support civil rights while espousing Marxist beliefs, enable volunteer time to support certain types of politicians, etc.

And that’s all aside from the instances of forcing CRT training on the workforce - plenty of controversy there as well.

This stuff happens more than you’d think.

I have seen all your examples in a top tech firm. In that same firm any public questioning was quickly shouted down in a way that made it clear that your were putting your career at risk by asking why the company was promoting left leaning politics through DEI.

"Critical race theory" and "Marxism" are literally two different theories that oppose each other.

I believe the ideology went something like this

marxism -> neo marxism -> postmodernism -> critical theory -> critical race theory -> anti-racism

You can see the connections by swapping out class for oppressions/oppressed power dynamics plus intersectionality

The connections between most of these are just that different French people wrote about some of them at the same time. e.g. Marxism and postmodernism are also opposed to each other.

Corporate trainings of course also don't contain hardcore theories, because the point is to be inoffensive and prevent lawsuits. Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo might show up and do a talk (these people also don't exactly agree) but the actual result is that people are going to start saying "allowlist" instead of "whitelist".

What CRT actually says is that since many US laws were written under racism, those laws still do racist things, and it's obviously true: https://twitter.com/AdamHSays/status/1394986418993340425

What CRT/anti-racism actually says is:

capitalism is racist

the US is systemically racist

all white people are racist

color-blindness is racist

all disparate outcomes can be explained by racism

None of the analysis is falsifiable so it is closer to religion than anything else. Based on the above lens these ideologies deconstruct things like laws and structures, or science and this is how you end up with racist math, racist knitting, racist birds... racist everything.

This is wrong. CRT is basically repackaged class war, and Marxism.

I was born and lived under communism, and a lot of the means CRT is peddled, feels eerily similar to communist/socialist propaganda and perpetual class warfare. Because you have to have some kind of eternal enemy in order to prop up the ideology, even if it is a failed/bankrupt one to the core.

> This is wrong. CRT is basically repackaged class war

You didn't disagree with me. By repackaging something it opposes it. That's called the narcissism of small differences - CRT is a liberal thing and nobody hates liberals more than leftists.

Anyway, you don't seem to be talking about critical race theory (something taught in graduate schools) but instead critical race theory (a collection of unrelated or made up things Fox News has decided to complain about this year.)

HR exists to protect the company from liability and to enforce policy. Since the high attrition rate and generally miserable nature of the job are apparently intentional, that means it's a feature, not a bug. There's no HR failure here, because this is the kind of relationship management wants with (at least part of) the humans it employs.

Amazon's the poster child at the moment, but I think this is just how Americans have decided to do capitalism. At some level, we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Maybe there'll be congressional hearings if the story catches on, but then nothing will change.

> we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job.

Don't think the managers and politicians aren't also trying to remove that one power as well. Between work-tied healthcare and NDAs/NCAs your options as a low to mid tier employee are very limited.

I've often thought this is the reason Republicans are so staunchly against the ACA.

Insurance that's portable and moves with you from job to job is a liability for companies that want to tether workers to the job because of health insurance.

You also get to buy health insurance with pre tax money if your employer offers subsidizes it. But if your employer does not, then you have to buy it with post tax money.

You can defeat any non-compete by moving to California. Well, as long as there's housing.

This article has an inaccurate title. It appears that HR is not failing at all, they are implementing the desired process successfully. Many people seem to think that HR is there to help the employees, but it is not, it is there only to help the company, very often when the company is in direct opposition to those employees. While the Amazon process is cruel, one would be hard pressed to label it a failure, the warehouses appear to work flawlessly, I cant recall a single time Amazon has missed a delivery date of mine.

If one wants to say that people should not be treated like this, I agree, reducing people to nothing but statistics is inhumane but for Amazon the company it has been a complete success.

Performance is the point. It is just seemingly cruel if you cannot perform relative to your peers. It may not be the best tool to get that in some cases, but I am pretty sure that nobody is setting "make 6% of the staff miserable" as a goal.

Agreed. It's more like 90%.

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