Comment by basedgod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basedgod | Hacker News Reader

I never understand Amazon's uncompromising stance on efficiency. They'll immediately fire a worker who is a few percentage points below target efficiency. Surely the grind in turnover has to cost them something.

What if they moved towards a more incentive based system. Workers who do 60% efficiency targets get minimum wage. 70% gets minimum wage + $X.YY and hour. 100% gets typical wage rate.

Adjust hourly wages up and down for the next day, based on the previous days productivity. Then nobody has to get fired for only being at 96% productivity that day.

Perhaps the increased job security would offset the somewhat dystopian productivity tracking this would result in. Workers might prefer to work a day at 85% wages to get back up to 100%, than to be fired?

Though, I suspect treating their workers better and giving them more benefits, security, and humanity would be about cost neutral compared to their intense current system of treating workers like cogs. You can only squeeze someone for so long.

I have some small insight into this.

Often at Amazon you have the "Frugality" principal taking the wheel for short term savings, even with long term massive costs. They're notoriously cheap, think like no free coffee cheap.

One of Jeff's guiding principals that he infused the company with, is that workers are lazy and will take advantage of any moment to not be productive if you let them. If you're nice to your workforce they'll take advantage of your kindness to do nothing. This happens on the corporate side too with all the PIP stuff.

In the long term I don't think this is going to work at all, either they need to change their policy and attitude or literally no-one will work there given the choice lol. (This is more on the SWE/Corporate side and less on the warehouse side, often Amazon is the only/best game in town on the warehouse side which makes things more tricky.)

E.g. At their current attrition rate they will run out of workers in the whole country in a couple of years assuming they keep it up.

Actually, at the Amazon office in NYC, the one thing we did get was free coffee :) But it wasn't one of those fancy machines at other FANGs where you press cappuccino and you get a cappuccino. It was more like one salvaged from an old diner, where you would load a couple cups of grinds into a filter and it would percolate down into a gallon jug.

Haha same for us in the West Coast offices.

I was working with a senior engineer who was shocked we had one of those big machines when we came in to the office.

>In the long term I don't think this is going to work at all, either they need to change their policy and attitude or literally no-one will work there given the choice lol.

I wanna see what happens when they cross this threshold. I don't think any company in modern US history has had to deal with this scenario?

I suspect they know this and are running out the clock before they are forced to raise wages to compensate. Essentially squeeze as much margin as they can now until they are force to dispense a few more crumbs.

Its insane how crazy they are getting with the recruiters. I am a loser who spends too much time on HN. A terrible mediocre dev with no really outstanding roles, yet these people are now finding my internal company email and reaching out. They somehow found my private phone number and are texting me. Who knows what will happen next? Maybe they will knock on my window in the dead of night lol.

That’s just the recruiters trying not to get fired. As a fellow mediocre dev who also gets contacted by Amazon recruiters I won’t believe they are interested in changing their ways until they either let up on the mandatory firings or they lower their standards. At the moment they are acting like the corporate equivalent of when you keep opening your fridge even though you decided you don’t want to eat anything in there

The recruiters still won't be getting those conversions so yeah they can get more desperate but in reality its an extension of the company getting more desperate. Thats why I think they will exhaust every possible lead and only then raise wages to attract people who will tolerate their conditions.

I had to get pretty stern with their recruiters to get it to stop. I was getting contacted at least once a month for a while, and it was getting close to once a week. I had to ask several different recruiters to get put on their "no contact" list, but what finally worked was mentioning the email alias of the previous recruiter who I had asked. My email ended with this:

> The recruiter who contacted me last week (John Doe, jdoe [not the actual name, obviously]) said he would do that, and that is clearly not the case. I'm finding these persistent emails rather obnoxious.

It's now been almost 3 months, and I'm very glad for the reduced spam.

Me too, I've heard rumors of like 80% of an engineering team disappearing.

How many times can that happen before we end up in a situation where there's no work capable of being done lol.

"One of Jeff's guiding principals that he infused the company with, is that workers are lazy and will take advantage of any moment to not be productive if you let them. If you're nice to your workforce they'll take advantage of your kindness to do nothing."

The guy sounds like a total jerk.

Zuckerberg seems like a complete jerk too.

Bill Gates was reportedly a real jerk while at Microsoft too.

Steve Jobs was supposedly a huge asshole.

What is it about assholes running the world? Do nice guys really finish last? How many truly nice people ever make it very far in business (not to mention politics)? Do you really have to walk over a mountain of other people's backs to make it to the top?

Mark Zuckerburg addressed this question very well on the Lex Friedman podcast. He pointed out that facebook did some science around this and discovered that many top level decisions are lose-lose from a public perception standpoint. On key policy questions the losing interest group almost always manages to create a stink that outweighs the happiness of the winning group.

Couple this with the well documented negative bias of the news, and it's not surprising that most corporate public figures have bleak reputations.

Note that I'm not actually defending these men. I'm simply pointing out that there are some structural reasons for the strong negative perceptions of these executives.

or it could be that the only reasons to go for a billion when you already have a hundred million are pathological?

I know this is extremely simplistic and insufficient as a complete explanation, but I truly think it's a major component.

I don't think it necessitates pathological, though I am sure there are higher rates of it among the wealthy. I don't think someone worth $100 million keeps working because they're incentivized by the money as much as they're incentivized by "success". They enjoy the power and prestige and reputation and having people work for them. They enjoy getting to make big, powerful decisions. They like having their big ego.

Of course many do genuinely just want that $400 million yacht and won't get there unless they make a few billion first.

Let me get this strait. A billionaire funds a study to find out why they are considered an asshole and the answer is conveniently "the plebs and the big bad media". Riiiiiiiight

I mean there absolutely is truth to it. When you get to the size of Facebook, you are going to be pissing people off with almost any decision you make.

Reminds me of when I worked at a grocery store, during training it was drilled that one angry customer would outweigh ten happy customers.

> What is it about assholes running the world?

They understand how to exploit the existing system for profit and power (which in some cases are synonymous).

> Do nice guys really finish last? How many truly nice people ever make it very far in business (not to mention politics)? Do you really have to walk over a mountain of other people's backs to make it to the top?

Consider your perspective if you’re unhappy coming in last in the same competition where these folks succeed. If these people are “winning”, do you really want to win?

Top of a mountain that rewards exploitation? Yeah, you have to do some exploitation along the way :)

There are plenty of other mountains to climb.

It's just not very sexy to write articles about people who run a 10 person plumbing company and treat everyone fairly. There are millions of those types of mountains people have been climbing for a long time.

Who achieves more power, the guy who dedicates his life and soul to it, or the guy who wants it, but only if it’s ok with everybody, and only when his family doesn’t need him?

Just because you are conscientious and don't take advantage of your employer doesn't mean that others (many others) don't, especially in a large organization where it's easier to feel anonymous and disconnected.

> Do nice guys really finish last?

Generally, yes.

if it reassures you, think about scientists, and adjacently, inventors. those two groups can also be entrepreneurs, but they are not necessarily the same.

civilization is advanced largely through the discoveries of scientists and inventors, not by businessmen, who are like the pack animals that provide motive force to implement these advances.

it can be depressing to see the competitive Bronze Age genes at work ruining everything, but given the way humans are wired, we won't escape this cycle of aggression very easily.

if all of society were peaceful cooperative scientists they would be easily murdered by the first vikings to happen along. how can we pacify the global human population (and I dont mean subjugate)?

its a riddle. greed is not good, but without greed how can we fill the vacuum created by everyone having enough? how intelligent does everyone have to be, on average, for people to get up in the morning and create things instead of playing video games?

I am not pretending to rigorously outline these issues, but I feel strongly that humanity needs to take charge of its evolution soon, and also find a away to reach detente between competing AI systems - I fear that AI favors scale so much that anyone who falls behind in marshaling the most complex AI will be at a permanent disadvantage and this will create an incentive to preemptive war.

I think it really depends on how you define the word "nice".

On a personal level everyone here (outside of Steve Jobs lol) might be great. I remember when Jeff left senior people who knew him from Amazon seemed genuinely upset, and also left. Tons of photos of people having a good time, drinking and hanging out etc. For all of Zuck's problems he seems more awkward than actively malicious, and lots of his worst quotes come from when he was much younger and immature. So on a personal basis I don't think it's required to be an asshole in order to be successful at this level.

From a leadership perspective someone who is "nice" to the point of being a doormat isn't going to last long in any leadership position. Needing to reach a consensus on every decision or defaulting to the decision that causes the least amount of short term pain just means you're not going to be a leader for very long.

Businesses are dictatorships at the end of the day, and they're constantly in a state of conflict. I think at a CEO level you're going to end up with people who are at the very least willing to be disagreeable, because you need to put your foot down and tell everyone no at some point. "nice" CEOs probably get filtered out b/c they're unwilling to do things like layoff people.

I don't think nice guys finish last per se, because this level of wealth comes with it's own problems. (e.g. How many of these dudes have been divorced...)

Politics are a whole different animal, I'd argue it's much more zero sum than business. Only so many seats after all.

on the warehouse side, Amazon is only the best game in town when it is the only game in town.

Other warehouses have higher wages, better hours, many are unionized, etc.

Huh things may have changed since I worked in warehouses. (I used to live/work in a blue collar area before going to school for software dev years ago, I did construction over the summer and other people did warehouses and deliveries, and still do.)

From my past exanecdotal experience Amazon has had the best pay but the worst working conditions, that's usually the bargin you get. Maybe their conditions got worse with additional surveillance and other warehouses catching up in wages has changed the calculus for people.

>is that workers are lazy and will take advantage of any moment to not be productive if you let them

Some times I think the biggest villain of the Twentieth Century (ok, 19th-20th) was actually Fredrick Winslow Taylor.

We get free coffee in the offices but it sucks and you have to pay for everything else (including good coffee).

I think the mindset that explains amazon's decisions here is that their warehouse workers are only there because they haven't figured out how to automate them yet. Amazon's long term goal is to figure out how to make a robot that can grab items and put them into boxes quickly, but until then they're going to have people who they treat like robots do the work instead. One of the consequences of this mindset is they've made extremely easy to plug new hires in with minimal orientation. Everything is standardized and the computer is organizing everything, no thinking required means no training required.

I feel like the whole company may one day go this route. Imagine a company run by an AI thats plugged into the market. No CEO needed, any jobs that haven't been automated will have tasks directly dispensed and monitored by this AI. Its primary goal will be to maximize shareholder value and it will do it with an efficiency and ruthlessness that even Elon Musk can't match. The coming end state of Amazon makes me appreciate my current boring CEO very much.

We're gonna build a paperclip maximizer on purpose?

Why wouldn't we? Ironically the CEO may lose their job before the coders lol

We already did, it's called the public corporation.

AKA Phillip K. Dick's Autofac.. eventually manufacturing more consumers for itself to sell to.

It'd make a great movie to watch (but a weird thing to experience in real life). The AI should also figure out how to influence people to consume even more, maybe by buying/creating social media companies so it can deliver more ads.

It would be a miserable existence but I can't see any other direction for our current unchecked capitalism to move towards. The capital class also write the laws in this country so this sort of company is inevitable whether or not it ends up being Amazon.

That's not that different from doing piecework.

> Though, I suspect treating their workers better and giving them more benefits, security, and humanity would be about cost neutral compared to their intense current system of treating workers like cogs. You can only squeeze someone for so long.

I only see stories of bad treatment from activists, interviews I've seen with actual employees say they are happy with the work, and "people who complain have never done warehouse work".

150% annual attrition is not a sign of a healthy workplace. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...

It's a warehouse job that demands real physical labour each day of course people leave if they get a better offer or even a worse offer that requires less work.

It's 3 times the rates reported by BLS though they group "Transportation, warehousing, and utilities" into a single category.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t16.htm

It's also a job that will be there until it can be automated or until Amazon closes, and I think it's the latter that's the closest to happening. Until that happens, it'd be better for everyone involved if the tasks that need doing can be arranged so that long-term employment is viable. A job shouldn't be as exploitative as it can be just because there will be someone who's in a rough enough spot in their life that they will take it.

Is that attrition rate inclusive of seasonal employees?

The NYT article I linked to accounts for seasonal workforce differences and has a lengthy methodology section at the bottom.

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