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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

They're losing engineers left and right, especially in H2 2021. It's probably all related. Their recruiters' emails are increasingly desperate. If I was considering a job at Amazon now, I would be very interested in a good answer for how they plan to address their attrition problem (and paying new hires well isn't a viable answer alone).

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All they need to do to hire me is lay off the draconian IP assignment clauses or give me an explicit exception for side projects. That's what I tell the desperate recruiters, and then they go away until the next one comes along.

I'm not familiar with their draconian IP assignment, do you have any references I can read on this? Genuinely curious.

There was an article on The Register[0] about something especially nutty Amazon Games Services required of employees, then later backed off on. (Cheers to them for caving to pressure.) Apart from that I've got no good references. I believe AWS typically put the "usual" overbearing clause in their contracts, where any IP you create before or during your employment becomes theirs. Sadly, so do many other employers. My previous employer did, and it was a sticking point for me and one reason for leaving.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/amazon_game_contracts...

They have been getting desperate, much more so than my quarterly Facebook/Google email. I've also had multiple Amazon recruiters reaching out, whereas I usually have a single Facebook/Google one. But apparently they aren't desperate enough to allow remote work after Covid, so I keep reminding them I'm not interested in non-remote work.

Seems like every company in tech is losing engineers left and right at this point

I keep getting AWS recruiters contacting me and I'm pretty sure I am nowhere near qualified

I know a few companies that treat their engineers very well (remote, good pay, equity, no overtime, ~6 weeks vacation) and they’ve barely lost anyone.

Companies like Amazon should learn from this, but they likely won’t unless their employees unionize.

Can you share names? Asking for a friend ... Although if they are small companies, I would be wary of anecdata... The narrative sounds good but small companies are more likely than large companies to exhibit extreme behavior in any metric, and it's likely that there's some confirmation bias in reporting what works / doesn't work

that’s true, and unless you trust someone in the inside you can’t rely on a company reporting accurately about themselves… plus the tide at a small company can turn in an instant, just look at basecamp

I think it’s worse at Amazon, but I don’t have any hard data to support that belief.

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