Amazon warehouse fires a worker 1 day before his $3000 hiring bonus | Hacker News Reader

Amazon warehouse fires a worker 1 day before his $3000 hiring bonus

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104 pointshighwind44 comments

To make a sensationalist story a little more educational and useful for our HN discussions:

Aside from the not-feel-good story, my god if there's a case for wanting to get all the stats when you attribute a cause to a problem, this illustrates it. (before you jump to the conclusion that Amazon does this out of spite or purposefully, which of course it might -- and unless you happen to get your kicks from overreacting to stories on the internet/Reddit)

With tens of thousands of workers recently hired, and probably a good number fired, I'm sure you will find a distribution of people who were fired 2, 3, 4, etc. any number of days before some noteworthy date in their pay schedule. This of course happens to be a case where it was dramatically close. Get enough people in a set and you will find all sorts of pleasant and unpleasant coincidences.

I'm guessing there could be 10x the number of people outraged if you made the criterion: fired 1 week before bonus. How about people who died a day before their birthday, or even minutes before? Cut a sample a certain way and you're sure to find the oddest case. How about the person who lucked out and got the bonus and quit the next day?

Now, as I said, maybe Amazon did it deliberately out of spite, to save $3000. Who knows. But I'm just saying it's not inconsistent with random HR behavior, and if you want to make a claim of deliberate malice with any responsibility you'd better study the matter more carefully than citing one example. I'm not jumping on the Reddit antiwork bandwagon just because of this stat.

Aside from that, what does this story incentivize Amazon to do? Pretty much fire someone earlier so that they won't be accused of stuff like this.

As someone who may to may not have worked uh, somewhere like this, and observed decisions like this, they absolutely, positively don’t give a rat’s behind about losing $3,000, especially considering the money they burn in the bonfire of bad ideas.

The real problem is a manager or leader doing this behavior out of spite, or a leader who really doesn’t understand the business doing it to naively prove his thriftiness to some other boneheaded leader in an act that ultimately has zero value to the company. So IMHO, blame the mid-level leadership, not the corporation.

Yeah, maybe if that isn't a whole heaping load of conjecture injected into a story you made in your head. Otherwise, you're getting mad at imaginary situations.

If the corporation gave more money to manager fo action reducing budget it could be

>what does this story incentivize Amazon to do

As someone else said, $3000 isn't even a rounding error on the level of amazon. However, I wouldn't put it past middle management to do this. But that's hearsay given the info.

Either way I think HR dropped the ball here. Getting fired/laid off this close to a significant bonus is such an easy case with the Department of Labor. It honestly wastes more of Amazon's infinite funds than just accepting an invoice and giving the employee the bonus.

Yes - also, if there is a break-in period for a sign on bonus or whatever it is called then what exactly are the problems here? The reason the bonus is delayed from the start date would be to enable situations like this and everyone signing up knows it.

If this dude was an unsatisfactory employee and Amazon didn't tell them then that would be troubling. But they probably did, internet stories tend to filter out that sort of detail. There isn't enough here to get worked up about.

The title isn’t sensationalized - it’s literally factual.

Sounds like a power trippy middle manager more than a corp “evil plan”.

They did not say that the title is sensationalized.

The difficulty with these stories second hand is that people often lie about why they have been fired, especially to family. I doubt anybody involved in the firing had anything to gain here so I'd be interested in hearing their side of the story.

A few people I grew up with are frequently the "best workers in the company" and are similarly fired suddenly after a few months. If you haven't seen the pattern you can be forgiven when you believe them the first time.

> I doubt anybody involved in the firing had anything to gain here so I'd be interested in hearing their side of the story.

Not having to pay the $3000?

If the unemployment makes up for it, maybe they're banking on him being dumb or intimidated, or maybe they're just dumb themselves.

They aren't paying the $3000, Amazon is. If that incentive isn't paid I doubt anyone involved here would receive it, even in part instead.

If such an incentive did exist I suspect we will hear a great deal more of these stories and won't have to rely on a second hand account retold anonymously.

Unless they have an incentive to "save the company money".

I feel like these comments are really giving a lot more benefit of doubt than Amazon deserves based on their previous actions.

Never underestimate the incentive of sucking up to management.

By firing a highly productive worker that they designed incentive programs around hiring and retaining?

I don't work for Amazon, but as an employee of another large conglomerate, it's really no skin off my back if they pay one of my colleagues $3,000 more. I make no more or less money as a result.

Seems unlikely assuming the brother isn't lying about being promoted. To be honest, this just looks like a coincidence to me, Amazon is a large employer and assuming every warehouse worker gets this offer 1/365 firings of new employees will have this happen to them.

That said, I'm surprised Amazon doesn't have a policy about avoiding firing around bonuses like this because it seems like such bad PR if a newspaper picks a story like this up and runs with it.

At one former employer, I literally was the best worker in the group -- I got the highest ratings possible from the interim manager who had been working there for years, and the highest ratings from our division chief above him. Then we hired a new manager, and I quickly got the lowest ratings. And lots of other top people in the group suddenly left around that time, too.

So, this kind of shit really does happen, at least to some of us. Some are smart enough to leave the sinking ship before it tanks their career.

Just like every other post in r/maliciouscompliance is from the person at the bottom of the totem pole who is somehow the only person in the company who knows how to do the thing keeping the company afloat. One, the company will be fine without you, and Two, assuredly part of your job was communicating what you're doing so no you are not the best worker in the company. Sheesh.

You would be surprised how many companies fall apart after losing key employees.

Could you name some? I’m genuinely curious.

Prosper comes to mind: https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/perspectives-events/publicatio...

They didn't fall apart but got fined.

I always have the same impression.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon or the manager might in the wrong here.

But when you only hear from one side, it reminds me of my coworker who complained of how poorly she was treated when she barely did any work and was eventually fired after a year.

I've been fired after receiving more money/promotion, I've been fired after 3 months and benefits have been activated, I've been fired within 3 months for various reasons by sketchy and non-sketchy companies, one of which was stupid enough to actually keep me on longer than 3 months amd think they could just sever ties and not pay me out. There's no detail in the post, but the story is totally plausible. Companies suck and shouldn't be trusted.

Maybe this is a true story, but it doesn't make a lot of sense - Amazon is desperate for workers, that's the entire point of the bonus.

Firing each worker you get after a few months to back out of the bonus seems very unlikely to me, they would run out of people to hire very quickly. And imagining some middle manager doing this (i.e. not official policy) also doesn't make sense - it's not like they personally pay the bonus, what's their motivation?

It's more likely they gave the new hire the full length of time to prove themselves, and they decided they were inadequate for some reason that the story teller will of course never tell us.

> what's their motivation?

Managing their budget is often how management is incented

It doesn't necessarily have to make sense, humans are involved. Could just be a crappy manager abusing their position to feel powerful.

Can anyone explain to me how Amazon gets away with calling these a “signing bonus”? It seems very near to an outright lie to use that name to describe a payment that is only given after you’ve proven yourself at your job for some period of time.

Literally every signing bonus I've ever had as a white collar worker was contingent on a period of time at the employer.

Literally every signing bonus I've ever heard of is the same.

As I understand it, signing bonuses started out as upfront payments that would be negotiated to compensate top executives for taking the risk of leaving their current job.

Using this for warehouse workers sounds like little more than a tool for recruiters to mislead people before they’ve read the terms of the contract.

Why not call it a “one year retention bonus”?

Except after taking that risk, if the exec leaves within a period, they have to return that bonus. So for the exec as well, it’s both inducement and retention.

Where I work a signing bonus is paid with the first paycheck and no contingency.

We also have another kind of bonus that's paid after a year and we don't call it a signing bonus.

In my industry signing bonuses are paid with the first paycheck but there is a clawback if you voluntarily leave before a year. There's no clawback if they fire you, though.

Clawbacks are effectively bad debt when you’re talking about this type of worker/income bracket. While the language is always put in writing, no employer I’ve worked for would actually attempt a clawback as it’s not worth the bad press/word of mouth when you pull $3000 out of their checking account 2 days before their rent is due.

You get a signing bonus when you sign, hence the name. I'd consider it a massive red flag if a company bucked the trend and made it contingent.

but you get the signing bonus in advance, and if the company fires you (rather than you quitting), they need to do the work to collect it back, no?

* talking of white collar jobs I have seen

And not just that, usually they can only get it back if you're fired with cause.

This is fake. Amazon gives $1,000 after 30 days, then the next $1,000 after 90 days, and the next $1,000 after 180 days.

Frugality is a leadership principal there. But on a serious note Amazon is a large employer meaning that this could just be a coincidence.

So large that being one of the hardest working employees might not mean much. If stats forecast that they need to trim employees it could either be random or using criteria that is different than what was traditionally valued.

We're supposed to believe that a company of the size of Amazon did this just to save $3000? This doesn't pass the sniff test. The most likely scenario is that the person did something egregious, got rightfully fired for it, and it happened to be a day before their bonus.

Some red flags:

- A one-off save of $3000 makes absolutely no sense for a company of the size of Amazon. Where are all the other workers who got fired for the same reason?

- We only have one side of the story.

- The post does not go into any detail about the firing. It's the classic "he was a good boy" story which falls apart instantly once you see hard evidence.

- The subreddit is incredibly biased against work in general.

- The poster has not made any further comments after posting the thread, no clarifications, nothing - a likely karma-farming attempt.

This is almost certainly fake.

Tell me about human psychology --

You sign onto a job with no promise of getting a bonus until you work, say, 90 days. What does it matter if you got fired 1 month before that date, versus 1 day? You feel it was almost yours, and it feels so much worse?

Aside from that, until workers refuse to sign up for a job that has a 1 month vesting period for the bonus, and instead they have to make it 1 week to find employees, or 1 day, what is there to object to? You agreed.

Of course, I am not known for my PR skills.

This is how things work in financial services. People work like dogs with the anticipation of a bonus that is at least half their annual salary (often more). Bonuses get paid January 31st. Firings happen in November thru December - they don't want to pay for people it sit around on the holidays, so right before or just after Thanksgiving, that is when you get the boot.

The fair thing would be to prorate bonuses like this in cases of involuntary termination.

Please be skeptical of things you read on Reddit, doubly so from that subreddit.

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