Burnt Out Amazon Employees Are Embracing the Great Resignation
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's impossible to do better, but nowadays I'd be more surprised to see Google beat an Amazon offer anywhere above entry-level rather than the reverse.
There are a fair number of people out there who are either not careful or who think that somehow "things will be different for them" (e.g. assume they're some better-than-average person who can make it work, and that most of the horror stories are from people who just weren't as good as they are).
> I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
There a lot of things that work well until they suddenly don't. Maybe they're falsely reassured that since it hadn't caught up to them yet, so it won't catch up with them ever. Sort of like people who believe in technological progress, know about a lot of cases where technology pulled a rabbit out of a hat and saved the day (e.g. the Green Revolution [1]), so downplay alarm over threats as insufficiently optimistic because they assume a rabbit will be found in a new hat before the threat manifests itself.
Also, a company culture can be extremely difficult to change once it's established itself.
So the top end companies with VC money or huge bank accounts get a wealth of talent while everyone else is thankful they have a web developer who knows the difference between margin and padding or what responsive design means.
> it just seems like a disincentive to have children
people who get paid in stock aren't warehouse employees they are highly paid software engineer types, surely they can tolerate getting by on 200k/yr salary for a few months.
this is a huge over reaction.
Why would anyone be OK with not getting paid their fair, and agreed, share?
I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker, regardless of how much he or she makes.
Agreed? Surely their employment contract included this clause, wouldn't that be plainly illegal to do that otherwise?
> I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker,
Because not everyone chooses which side they are on first and comes up with the justification later.
The linked article explicitly states that: "A few days after she sent the note, according to a report in Business Insider, Amazon changed the policy and reestablished vesting during parental leave and for up to 26 weeks of medical leave."
Why do they offer parental or medical leave, then?
This is akin to cutting someone's wages when they are on PTO. It's not "paid" time off anymore.
Could it be that employees that take maternal or paternal (parental) leave are significantly and disproportionately more likely to exit a short time after returning from leave? Or else see some other significant pattern of attrition after parental leave - controlling for the absence and costs of the leave over its duration?
Not commenting on the ethics or legality of this sort of HR accounting...
huh? i don't know anyone who gets paid purely in stock.
Their yearly bonuses are not predicated on how many days off they have taken, why would it be any different with stocks?
A few RSU related quality of life improvements:
- Before, the vesting policy only allowed for 2 weeks of gracetime if you took any form of leave of absence (and leaves being a wholly legally separate category from vacation or sick days); since parental leave was 6 weeks, that means that your vest schedule would delay by 4 weeks (which I can confirm, my vest dates went from May to June because of this)... From 2022 onwards, the gracetime has been extended to match the parental leave time, so there is no longer this weird 6-2=4 mismatch
- In the rare case an employee dies, their next 2 years worth of unvested RSUs, will automatically accelerate and vest immediately. These accelerated RSUs will vest to the deceased's estate, and the heirs of the estate will get them via the probate process (having a will massively simplifies this). The accelerated vesting cannot be transferred directly to a beneficiary, it has to go to the estate first.
- RSU vesting allows for a sell-to-cover option for tax withholding, but previously only whole numbers of shares could be sold (and the leftover after taxes, is paid to your paycheck direct deposit). Now going forward, you can sell fractional shares to cover tax withholding.
- (couple other minor QoL improvements, but those were the ones I could recall off the top of my head)
I doubt these policy changes were in any way tied to the reporting of these stories or the experiences of these employees, but the timing is somewhat ironic.
In a market with sky high tech valuations, a big tech position that’s all cash for the first two years was very appealing since a correction across the board seems likely(note: Amazon offers extra cash for the first two years to keep your comp roughly the same every year).
Source - former AWS engineer
The "golden handcuffs" stock vesting is what it is, but I think that when people burn out, they're probably more concerned with their personal situation than a 5-6 figure sum over 2-3 years.
It's also high-pressure work in high-CoL areas. IIRC, they're used to high turnover.