Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire | Hacker News Reader

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

vox.com

626 pointsUmofomia730 comments

> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times.

Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.

So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.

Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.

This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.

> employees will naturally want to leave within four years

That also explains why the breadth of AWS services keep growing, but the depth of the existing ones remains the same. Seems they would, every 4 years, lose a bunch of people with deep knowledge in the existing ones, the ones who'd be able to add new and deep features.

Yes and it has always been like this.

Why would companies truly "value" Engineering? The majority of execs thinks we are just interchangeable drones and the only reason the salaries are so high in SV is because they literally can't get away with less. If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.

They will fire you in an instant to save cost, never increase your salary and come up with elaborate schemes to basically screw you.

I have seen executives try it all: Replace senior engineering with students or interns (I'm not kidding), hire from third world companies and pay the peanuts, bring in cheap labor on visa restrictions and abuse them, low ball you in salary negotiations, attempt to pay with "stocks" (I'm talking about penny stock companies here..)

To management, Engineering is nothing but an annoying expense that gets in their way of profit.

All the free foods, foosball tables, "family" mantra and cool hats are designed to distract you from the fact that you are being paid in pittance. This is why there is so much discrimination against older engineers, because they are more likely to catch up to this and demand a fair wage and good working conditions. When you are young, naive and hungry, you don't think about it much because burning the midnight oil with pizza is exciting.

As a result, AWS engineers are very much promotion oriented. This leads to two results: title inflation and disgruntled employees. L6 used to be a big deal but not any more. L7 is now the new L6. The challenge with this arrangement is that whoever got promoted early on but stayed in the same level get less in return. And apparently it's human's nature to compare. When engineers see that their peers get promoted to L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach) in three years for no particularly obvious reasons, they can barely hide their cold anger.

Combine that with aggressive pruning/PIPing and you have people fighting to stay long enough to get their shares vested, once you stop getting promoted there is little stability because you will either get torn down for someone else’s ladder climb or have to keep getting promoted by any means necessary.

In what world is a $150k out of college starting salary low?

Was that Amazon or AWS?

I've heard that the cultures are different between the two. I would expect AWS to value holding onto their most experienced engineers.

ironically in this down turn Amazon offers are extremely appealing since your first two years are all cash. So you shore up on your cash while your future vesting have an upside if the recession is short lived.

> This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well.

That still doesn’t make it acceptable. People are not Bezos’ minions slaving away so he can get even richer. Even Amazon employees deserve to be treated like humans, whether the abusive culture at amazon is a secret or not.

> stock

You left out a big part here; RSU vesting schedule is back loaded. It's something like 5-20-25-50

Yep it’s a churn n burn shop.

There has been rumours of engineers "bouncing back" recently (they had a better term for it, but I forgot)

Bezos was invited to dinner with the Obamas at the White House, along with Jon Stewart. He was flapping his mouth off about his vision for us all being happy little worker drones.

Stewart told him that people want fulfilling, rewarding work they can be proud of, and that being errand boys for billionaires isn't fulfilling. Stewart capped it by saying that turning people into service drones for billionaires is how you end up with a revolution (ballsy words to say at a White House dinner to the richest guy on the planet.) And after a bit of silence, Obama said "I agree with Jon."

https://youtu.be/Vewz1v4rQYg?t=116

You'd think Bezos would take the words of the president of the united states a little more to heart, but it seems not.

And then years later, what happens? Staten Island union leaders thank Bezos for being too busy flying on his dick-rocket to stop them from unionizing his warehouse.

Bezos basically considers every other human to be a happy little servant, just dying to work for the 0.001%. He's exactly like the stereotypical 1800's British lord who looks down upon his servants and says "oh they enjoy a good hard day's work for someone else."

(print version: https://www.businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-jeff-bezos-econo...)

Jon Stewart is the best, honestly he should run for president.

His crossfire episode (celebrity death match) with Tucker Carlson is epic.

> many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.

South Park had a realistic vision on how it is to work at Amazon Fulfillment Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc

Wow, that was really poignant.

> So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.

My wife is a Physiotherapist; when we lived closer to a fulfillment center it was deeply concerning just how many of her patients were seeing her for WCB (Worker's Compensation Board) claims resulting from injuries at the Amazon warehouse.

You'd think they'd scrap the commercials and put the budget into improving working conditions if they really cared. I doubt the cost of the ads, plus the cost of the bad publicity, plus the cost of employee churn is really worth it. Why not just do the right thing? Even if it made them sightly less profitable, so what?

Having warehouse workers is not Amazon's long term plan. They will replace as many workers with robots as quickly as they can. Their strategy revolves around burning out the entire workforce and then perfecting their robots before they need to pay truly absurd packages. Since the workers are a short term solution treating them poorly and using ads to reel more suckers in is a viable strategy. The question is will they run out of people before they can fully automate?

Amazon has never struck me as a company that would prioritize doing the right thing.

"The leaked internal findings also serve as a cautionary tale for other employers who seek to emulate the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."

"Amazon's attrition rates were 123 percent in 2019 before jumping to 159 percent in 2020, according to internal data in the report Recode obtained, while turnover rates across the US transportation and warehouse sectors were much lower: 46 percent and 59 percent respectively in 2019 and 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates."

When unpacking the quote I read:

1) Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable

2) He feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled

The two statements seem relatively disconnected (which makes the "and" a little confusing). Anyway, while I understand a) (not saying I agree) and am a little confused by b), how both or either would logically lead to your conclusion is not obvious to me. Can you elaborate?

"Complacent and disgruntled" is the problem Bezos was trying to solve. "Replaceable" is the circumstance that he leveraged to produce his solution: hire a continual stream of fresh non-complacent non-disgruntled people and fire them before they have a change to become complacent and disgruntled.

Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive rather than complacent and disgruntled, i.e. the kind of work environment that their current PR campaign portrays, apparently never entered into his thinking. Which makes it hard for me to sympathize that Amazon is now running out of fresh non-complacent non-disgruntled people to feed their process and has to resort to PR campaigns in order to attract fresh victims.

>figure out that they are getting a bad deal.

That's not what it's "really saying". That's you adding analysis.

I think hourly workers are perfectly capable of figuring out if a job is a good or bad deal for them.

They have bills and payments that must be made or they will suffer real consequences. They aren't making employment decisions based on free soda, foosball tables, and the political affiliation of the CEO.

I don't know, Amazon's absurdly high churn rate is pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in one of them. It's not about people being dumb and making bad decisions, it's just really hard to evaluate a work environment from the outside.

Even for tech jobs, where it's common to interview with many future coworkers, assessing the work environment is tough. Warehouse type jobs are probably even harder to evaluate.

If you can pass Amazon algorithms interview you can get hired in any other fang.

Literally all the others are on average better options than Amazon for your mental health (even if not by as much as you think)

Compare with an "up or out" system [1], which many companies have, as does the US Army.

When I was at Google, it was generally understood that you were expected to be promoted to senior engineer eventually, but I never knew how much it was enforced.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

This is not unusual at all.

My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm. Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would stick around long enough to be considered for partnership.

The work hours were long (50 hour weeks normal, more was not unusual) but the pay was good and it was good experience to cite when applying for other jobs.

Amazon warehouse work is not a career. It's a job, that has minimal if any prerequisite skills other than being strong enough to move boxes around. It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.

I think you have little understanding of how warehouses work if you think it’s just people moving boxes.

Big consulting firms are exactly the place you should avoid, especially if you're a developer with plenty of better options.

If you like working in the office / overworking just get into a fang and get more money. If you want a quiet environment go for smaller companies and get the same money as your big consultancy.

Nobody cares where you worked unless it's a fang, anyway

> It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.

Quite literally, not with that attitude. So many of capitalism's pitfalls amount to no more than self-fulfilling prophecies.

> Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.

Surely they stay on exactly long enough to figure that out. It is, after all, presumably why they leave.

Yeah, my first thought when I read the headline was “Oh shit, have Amazon figured out they can’t treat people like shit and not run out of people willing to work for them?”

Hopefully it will lead to better treatment of those they can employ.

Beyond the "up or out" mentality, the disgust you got from considering people as replaceable cogs in a machine and how it's done overall, and maybe not applicable to warehouse forces ; I think having some turnover in your organization is a good thing. You don't get the same diversity of idea and experience when people around you have all been there for 15 years than you get when they're coming and going. In my experience people who have been around for a long time tend to drink the coolade much more, and are more complacent with stuff that shouldn't be.

Yes, of course some turnover is necessary. You do sometimes have to get rid of the deadwood. But deciding that everyone is going to be treated as deadwood sooner or later (and apparently more likely sooner than later) as a matter of policy seems ill-advised to me.

Yes, Amazon actually pays employees $5000 if they quit and agree to never return. Available to any employee who has worked there for long enough (I believe a year?)

But why...?

One of the big rules of hiring is to get people that require the fewest hours of training. That's why most companies welcome "alumni" back.

I can't wrap my brain around this.

People need to read some history.

The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard. There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become complacent or disgruntled.

Early 20th centruy industrialists also had to deal with the looming threat of anti-trust regulations. These days it's almost a joke. There is no trust-busting anymore. The monopolies control foreign and domestic policy through massive lobbying efforts.

> People need to read some history.

But they'll get distracted before getting around to it. Gore Vidal wasn't kidding when he used the words "United States of Amnesia" in his essays.

(Also, "our owners". Good stuff, tangy with aristocratic vinegar - acerbic, I believe the tasters call it.)

> The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff.

Yeah, this is just capitalism at work.

> People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard.

Well I guess that’s an alternative lesson to take away from this.

This is a retrospective. Priorities have changed, according to TFA

> But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won’t work much longer, especially if leaders truly want to transform it into “Earth’s best employer,” as Bezos proclaimed in 2021.

> Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.

Is there a law like betteridge's law of headlines for commercials?

I.e. Anything a commercial tries to assert is probably untrue.

You'd think it was obvious, but then it seems most people actually believe commercials, and buy more of the products they see advertised.

Let's call it cwkoss' law of commericals.

I think this article might bury the lede a bit:

>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.

People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location.

After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need.

It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.

This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist.

1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr

2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr

Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.

I upvoted this for contributing a valuable and insightful clarification about how those two statements relate, but the part where you attribute "tactics" and "bias" to the journalist has no direct evidence and reads like a political meme.

You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners because they needed to pick up their kid from school.

Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah...

The journalist did their job by offering these statements with all the qualifiers that you used to make your comparison.

Journalists have to work with the information they get; they can’t force two employers to give them perfectly comparable figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do get.

The point still stands: other employers are offering competitive wages for similar roles and are forcing Amazon to react. Otherwise Amazon wouldn’t be struggling to hire warehouse workers.

I read it the same way and completely agree with you. Grammar and the context in which statements are presented can be biased too.

I don't know whether they teach that in journalism school. My guess is that they do, and that this type of bias only leaks out now due to the overwhelming amount of citizen journalism that social media allows.

I think the other replies to you who won't consider this possibility are influenced by trying to take down Amazon, which in my opinion they will do to themselves if it is warranted. No media push is necessary.

We still haven't found our way back to trusted sources. Some day, we will.

Well yeah, but that's a very very direct explanation of why people might LEAVE Amazon to go work at Wal Mart, since they fit into that category of some workers with past experience.

Turnover is the subject of the story, those two statements seem directly relevant.

I don't think that formulation is misleading, it is GP who put an interpretation on it that was critical of Amazon.

> Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.

Shared understanding is not and never has been the goal of journalism, possibly excluding the business press. Stories are more interesting with heroes and villains so journalists create them if necessary.

> it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison

Isn’t that a good thing? What’s your complaint?

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries:

1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?

2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses.

This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).

It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side.

Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...

Seems to be what Larry and Sergey called penny wise and pound foolish. A few points in favor of the "lazy cafe."

1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than it does for individual employees to acquire on the open market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it weren't provided.

2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its money than the sweat shop.

3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1 person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your competitors.

4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for rubes.

> If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?

You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had.

Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible.

The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.

Solution to #1 is bringing in workers that care more about $ than lifestyle. Same situation in the tech industry.

> I think this article might bury the lede a bit:

When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.

Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.

> this article might bury the lede

That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.

There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k).

If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.

I guess Walmart decided to become a better employer.

> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.

Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.

It's not needed right _now_, perhaps, but wait a few months or a few years. Next time the job market shifts back to the employers, the incentives will align the other way.

Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.

The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.

Minimum wage is important when you have more people wanting to work, than jobs. Right now 1 in 300 people just died, a bunch retired, and 3-5% of the remaining workforce is out with covid and/or post-covid syndrome. So right now there are more jobs than workers.

Given people's natural inclination towards reproduction, at some point in the future, there will once again be more people than jobs, and minimum wage will once again become a flashpoint as quality of life begins to shrink. That's not even accounting for inflationary effects on the bottom 75% of wage earners.

The natural minimum wage that the market determines (absent all regulations) is $0 per hour and is called slavery. Enlightened people have moved passed the idea that the “market” alone should determine the minimum wage.

That's a pretty awful take - labour exploitation in America is rampant with theft by employer being our largest crime by value. It's probably fair to say that 25/hr isn't what the minimum wage should be set to - but it exists to prevent extreme abuse of employees.

> There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines.

The market "determined" this "natural minimum wage" because a patchwork of laws dictated (somewhere around) a $15 minimum wage in a lot of locations and as a policy for many state/city/county contracts.

Isn’t it? My sister lives in a state where the true minimum wage is federal minimum wage. My teenager and her teenager both work at the same fast food place. My son makes $16/hour, her son makes $7.25/hour.

This is nonsense unless you're ready to go deeper on what "true" and "natural" mean here. Beware: it'll be easy to run into tautology.

> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.

If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help

When are they going to start firing people to make up for the actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact! There is so much demand for workers that those places can't convince them to work for double the minimum wage given the crappy conditions they require. The idea that a rising minimum wage will result in lower employment, given that the current wage is lower in real terms than it was 30 years ago, makes absolutely no sense - the real world evidence is literally all around us right now.

> If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost […]

Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies

So they're going to fire people to make up the cost of not being able to hire people? Maybe I'm not understanding you're comment.

The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end.

https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...

The Fed has shown they cannot plan 3 years in the future.

The odds they won't find an excuse to reverse course within 3 years seems low.

They talked about reducing the balance sheet for almost a decade and barely made a dent before more than doubling it during the Pandemic.

I will be shocked if in 5 years the Fed's balance sheet isn't substantially higher than it is now.

I've also found it quite hard to predict things, especially about the future. So I have a hard time being mad at the fed on that account.

If anyone that worked at the fed could predict the future, they wouldn’t work at the fed.

Those idiots!

Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008 was going to blow up one day. Technology and unsubstantiated sectors allowed them to print without repercussions for a while and the administration and them also tried to fool people into believing the inflation was transitory... Reckless idiots. And now wage labor is the one to suffer most.

4TT in spending for BBB? Uhhuh! Even Yellen said it was crazy.

> Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008 was going to blow up one day.

You can't "predict" that something will cyclical will happen on some indeterminate timeline then claim success when it eventually does. Impactful actions have pretty immediate results. So if you "predicted" that the actions of 09-10 to have an effect, if effect didn't happen by like 2012, your prediction was wrong. The economy is way too complicated to predict out more than a few years because it's constantly undergoing major shifts and changes.

Inflation is being experienced globally, even in regions with little/no economic ties to the USA. And the USA is experiencing less inflation than in many other countries. This suggests that the underlying cause is external to the USA and whatever actions Americans are taking in response is more effective than what other countries are doing.

Everyone is Ludwig von Mises these days.

Time to start buying stock in Keynes.

It's not the money supply. It's a supply side problem due to Corona shutdowns. All the Fed is about to do is induce a bunch of unemployment.

> 4TT in spending for BBB

Over ten years.

4T is a big number but when I look at the details it all seems very reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan#Origina...

Honest question: How are we supposed to maintain our civilization without some government spending?

Is climate change going to fix itself? Is our infrastructure going to modernize itself? We need to migrate to EVs and build out energy infrastructure.

What is going to happen to aging and disabled people? The current answer appears to be to have them live in the streets.

The country's 1% currently own 70% of the wealth. I think they can handle some taxation, especially when those taxes are going to be used to modernize our infrastructure.

2009. Thats how "growth" came from last decade & half. People never realized that & majority will never. Stocks/Home prices will keep going up to infinity crowd thinks its a hoax.

BBB wasn’t enacted, though? Are you thinking of the infrastructure package?

ah but it will control inflation. So when the bank repossesses your home you can rest easy knowing a gallon of milk is 7 cents cheaper.

Actually controlling inflation means slowing it down. So the gallon of milk will be only 7 cents more expensive than last month, not 70 cents.

> when the bank repossesses your home

Most homeowners have been in their homes for a while, refinanced, and have benefited from a fixed payment for their home while wages have risen with inflation.

This is the sad reality. The associated wage stabilization is going to be necessary for us to control inflation.

SWEs probably don't need worry about remaining employed, but the days of salary wars will be over.

> The associated wage stabilization is going to be necessary for us to control inflation.

It won't. Everyone involved in business dealing with physical goods knows it's a supply side problem.

Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this time. The Fed of course knows this.

How come Switzerland has only 2.5% year-over-year inflation, less than a third of the U.S. rate?

Last I checked there seemed to be some correlation between a country's money printing and current inflation rates. That's not to say that a protion of the current inflation rate is not due to supply consitrictions, but I certainly not assume that is the only factor.

We're seeing manufacturers tell their suppliers of JIT to hang on to components because they don't need them right now. So I don't think that's accurate everywhere.

Supply is only a problem when it can't meet demand.

If demand drops then supply stops being a problem.

> Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this time

The Fed has no control over fiscal policy. You mean monetary?

Rising wages are a very small part of cost increases, except for a few things like on-demand quick-response delivery services (food delivery and the like) and even there, fuel costs are a lot of it.

We’re also living in a volatile time. It might end up meaning a potential civil war is a lot more likely.

Desperation creates extremism. I don’t think the US is prepared for the monster it may unleash.

Have you seen how obese we are? Only civil war happening will be for the last packet of Schezuan Sauce at Mcdonalds.

You don't have to be that fit to pull a trigger. Conversely, look at all the wars that continue to happen in places with severe food insecurity. In theory starving people shouldn't be able to fight, in practice those most willing to fight get enough of the limited food supply to keep fighting.

Civil war? That’s ridiculous. Please turn off Fox/CNN.

You’ve not been paying attention to the world if you think we’re not in that unhealthy society territory.

The only people who cry "civil war" are the people wishing for it.

Are you on the right side?

This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too

It turns out when you treat your employees as disposable resources to be exploited, instead of human beings, people don't want to work there. I have several friends that worked for Amazon as engineers and from their stories, I don't think I'll ever consider working for Amazon. They probably have some good teams in there somewhere. And let's not forget their "hire to fire" practices to meet their turnover quotas.

From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out. Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.

+1 They are horrible to work for as an SDE.

I regret my 3 years at Amazon, and wish I had left sooner. When I left for G, ~15 people called/emailed to tell me how I was going to a much better company, including my own manager.

People love to say that its manager dependent, but IMO the default at amazon is the horrible, employee-exploiting culture. So a good team/manager is the exception, and thing will eventually turn to shit.

I worked at Amazon 8 years and it is very manager and team dependent on what your experience is. I got to work on S3 and Alexa, and have no regrets. I learned so much, had a bunch of fun and worked with really smart people. Got paid well too.

Downside, there was no free snacks. shrug

I'm sure there are great teams to work for at Amazon. After all it is a large company with many different offices all over that does a lot of different things. However, my naïve estimation is that I am not very likely to land on one of these teams and much more likely to end up in a meat grinder. However, like I said, that is just my perception and I could be wrong. I just don't intend to find out.

implying bananas aren't snacks

Yeah, I don't know if I'd make the cut and I'm sure it'd be a SUBSTANTIAL pay increase, but I haven't followed up with any Amazon recruiters simply because of their reputation as the sort of company who's comfortable with employees having visible breakdowns.

I had an internal AWS recruiter message me about a position there once; I just flat-out told him that I had heard so many negative things about their work environment that I had no interest in working there.

(Also, that position would've required relocating to the Washington, DC metro area, which would've been a dealbreaker even if AWS had a great work environment)

I've heard mediocre feedback about their research groups as well, although they do pay pretty well.

From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job compared to other big tech companies.

I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time.

They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the interviews puts me off from engaging.

I’m regularly asked to talk to AWS recruiters, but always decline unless they assure me up front they will never ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. They’re still not hurting enough for that common sense step to have been taken, so I will not be talking to them.

I recommend asking them to take you off of their recruiting lists. They'll still contact you but way less frequently.

Same. I’m not on Facebook’s radar, but I get Amazon recruiter spam to my inbox every 2-3 months. This is a far higher rate than any other company.

I can’t be the only one who had this experience. I recently had the choice between pursuing a cool startup position and an AWS position. Once I was emailed all of the AWS interview material and the 4 hour itinerary… I just had to ask myself if it was even worth putting my time into it. The total comp would probably be better than the startup position, but everything else (work life balance, risk of being fired, opportunity for growth, etc) seemed (probably) worse from what I’ve heard. Suffice to say, I dropped out of the interview process and took the cool startup job instead.

"4 hour itinerary" is hardly excessive for a big tech role, what are you on about?

The point is that the role wasn’t tantalizing enough to justify taking off a day from my existing job and going through Amazon’s interview gauntlet. The other job I was interviewing for had a much more reasonable interview structure, no whiteboard bullshit, no live coding, no 4 hour sessions. I think it says a lot about the company and how they value prospective employees’ time.

Yep. They keep messaging me. Could double my salary and not a chance I would work there.

I know some recent grads that are starting there however.

I miss the days when I was young totally clueless about corporate or political values and I just wanted to program stuff.

Was so much easier.

> corporate or political values

If you think any company has any real values beyond "make as much money as possible" you're doing yourself a disservice.

I would never work for amazon because I refuse to grind leetcode, but in an odd way they're almost the most honest about their mission being to make money.

I’m totally happy to work for a place that wants to make as much money as possible. That is a great thing.

Making as much money as possible by milking the government or using the government to regulate your competitors things is another matter

Only allowing one voice in politics is super dangerous.

A company's true loyalty is naturally to its shareholders but it's a bit of a cop out on your part to deny the fact that there are different levels of ethicality within different companies (palentir vs yacht games).

Probably depends on region/country/situation. Applied for an engineer position in Europe a few weeks ago, got to the last round of interviews, was rejected (probably because I'm horrible trying to explain things with that STAR method, I think the rest was ok).

I don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.

I'm a fairly inexperienced software engineer (<2 yrs experience) and I've been contacted by 3 separate Amazon recruiters on Linkedin in the past month alone if that means anything

I don't even do any coding and have gotten contacted by their recruiter for a SWE position in the past month. Seems like their recruiters are resorting to spray and pray when it comes to finding new hires.

Eventually their reputation will precede themselves with all job types. I think this also mimics their other business practices of short term-ish decisions for revenue instead of longer term practices to build a place where people are attracted naturally.

What will happen with their tech products when they can't staff engineers, can't get ahead of the bad PR for recruiting and don't want to pay over market to attract those that will put up with their way of working? They might have some systemic outage level things happen where companies may take their business elsewhere. Or maybe not, I don't have a crystal ball.

Cloud abstraction/migration technologies might be a good investment/startup.

Considering I get an email at least once a week (sometimes more) to join them, I'm not surprised at this. Usually I go out of my way to tell them I'm not interested in working for Amazon in particular.

I feel like this post by Matthew Prince sums it up => https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1537541459137548290

This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.

I have a friend who was an engineer at Amazon, and it sounds like tech jobs at Amazon are a nightmare, too.

I've been an engineer at Amazon for almost 10 years. Been promoted twice. Ask me anything.

Yes, we're having a lot of trouble recruiting engineers, because of discussion threads like this where a lot of misinformation is shared about what it's like to work here.

Is it tough? Yes. Is it competitive? Yes. Is there stack ranking? Yes.

Is it the most fulfilling and challenging and interesting job I've had in 22 years of Software Development? (The latter half of my career has been here). Yes, yes, and yes.

This is the best job I've ever had and I think it can be for a lot of others who want to have disproportionately large impact day-to-day and on-the-world.

Can you expand on this a bit? What makes the work so fulfilling? Is it just knowing the impact? The team is good? Are you learning and improving as an engineer?

I'm glad you asked because it's a subtle thing, and may be related to me personally. But I would venture I'm not the only engineer like this.

For me, I spent my whole career bouncing against the walls constraining of what an engineer role was supposed to be. I'd push back against requirements from Product Managers and be told I'm ruffling feathers. (Not directly, but indirectly). I'd see QA or Documentation struggling, and I'd jump in to help, and be told later that my contributions there are not appreciated.

I'd see another part of the company do something wrong, bring it up, and be told there's nothing I can do.

I'd have a great idea and be told "that makes sense, but we can't do it for <unsatisfying reasons>"

Amazon, on the other hand, always nurtured this within me. Good ideas reign supreme. Most people I work with have very little ego - they just want to do the Right Thing for customers, and ship great solutions that solve real problems. NOTE: I'm not claiming this is universal. There are plenty of egomaniacal assholes that ruin whole teams. Those horror stories are out there too. But in my experience, working on 4 different teams, in 3 different geographies, they are by far the exception.

My last 3 years in my career before Amazon, I was the tech lead for 3 different year-long projects in 2 different companies. Each we built exactly what we set out to do. Each went into production. Each was a collossal failure. Why? Customers didn't want it. We didn't solve the right problem.

This has NEVER happened to me in a decade at Amazon. The "Working backwards" process is LEGIT. There are notable exceptions (Firephone!), but every single project I've personally worked on has been a monumental success. That's super important to me. I want my work to have meaning. I don't want to write code, exchange it for cash, and move on to the next thing. I want the things I build (mostly AWS services) to be useful to someone.

So, this is what fulfillment means to me:

* I can define my own job description via a lot of Ownership, and work on big problems within my job role (SDE), and outside of it. Despite Amazon's huge size, I never feel like a cog in a machine. I have a lot of power to fix problems I see in my team, org, and in the rest of the company.

* Everything I've built I know has made an impact on people's lives (Developers, and their productivity) and that impact only grows. It feels really good knowing hundreds of thousands of developers are each a little (or a lot) more efficient and can spend more time on interesting problems rather than boring cruft, by using stuff I built.

The "learning and improving" part is interesting. I would unequivocally say yes, and was a huge part of what I loved about the company a decade ago when I first joined. But that part is also as much a curse as is a blessing. Sometimes I actually wish I could just pause and keep doing what I'm doing and be GOOD at it without tackling the next tier of challenges. But it seems that as soon as I get good at anything, I find myself seeking the next level of complexity, and the company is equally happy to throw me into an even deeper part of the pool. So to some degree I always feel like I'm on the edge - always not sure if the problem I'm working on is solvable. At this point I just know that I'll get through it and figure it out in time. And if I don't, I'll learn a lot about why it doesn't work. So maybe I just take this for granted now. It doesn't spark joy day to day, unlike the other 2 bullet points.

“We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said.

lol this is just monstrous.

Let's quote more of this for context:

Pagan began working at the Amazon delivery hub in October and, within two months, had been promoted to a role on the safety committee for the facility. The new role didn’t come with a pay raise, and is on top of a worker’s core tasks, but Pagan saw it as a stepping stone to an official promotion. But in April, Pagan told Recode, he took two days off to have an infected tooth looked at and ultimately removed.

The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated.

An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy.

“We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said.

“I find the whole situation crazy,” said the 35-year-old Pagan, who was supporting his wife and daughter on his Amazon income. “They’re gonna lose a good worker for nothing.”

It's not the issue of Grubhub or re-applying 90 days later, it's the completely inflexible termination policy and the lack of any sort of humanness or flexibility around decision-making that caused them to dig their own hole, in this specific example.

I never understood limited sick days... i mean.. you're sick, how can you limit your sickness to X days?

But yeah, seems to be an US-only anomaly, atleast compared to the rest of the developed world.

This is an open secret in the US. It's used to fire people constantly for employee churn. This ensures by the time they are unhappy at the job, they are close to being fired.

It also ensures only the super dedicated or those without families are the ones to stay.

High turnover jobs known for this are telephone agent jobs, sales employees, or reallly anyone they can sucker into accepting crazy quotas.

Some places, especially those with several lines of business, will do this because they get laid $X/agent to graduate a class.

I don't know where the idea came from or why but I've seen it over and over, especially as a LOB (line of business) is being closed. They will rush to push through as many classes as possible, knowing full well they will be graduating into a non-existent job with little to no chance of moving to another LOB.

The US has really gone insane.

This wouldn’t be out of place as the first chapter in an 80s dystopian sci fi novel.

When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees I mentioned on here how it felt wrong in comparison to what they pay their warehouse workers and drivers and got some backlash on here. A lot of talk about how an engineer provides XXX% more value and supply and demand.

Warehouse jobs are back breaking. I don't think they need to be paid as much as a software engineer, but they should be paid a decent wage and have decent work conditions.

> When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees

I'm pretty sure they just doubled the salary cap. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone's salary was doubled.

Amazon didn’t even do that. Before, no matter who you were, your cash component was maxed out between $160K - $175K. The rest of your compensation was in stock.

Now, more of your compensation can be stock based.

I passed the edit window. I meant more of your compensation can be cash based.

Yeah. I wish healthcare was universal because it's not okay to curry health issues past capability.

Imagine busting your lumbar and then not being to find a construction job or something.

I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere.

The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.

Same here (daily emails).

I've been getting enough of them to start seeing that most of the emails from amazon are generated in some form. A generated recruiting email is pretty much an immediate turn off for me.

Also, they have been very aggressive... going as far as the same recruiter reaching out on a monthly basis despite me telling them I am not interested.

In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled by recruiter contractors.

These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide net" strategy.

It’s the same for Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

I’ve gotten emails from Google about Engineering Manager positions for software developers even though my LinkedIn profile shows no management experience (I have none) and it has that I’m not even currently officially a software developer (cloud app dev consulting).

The same with Facebook.

If they're using questionable means to get contact info, they probably have enough build in layers of buffer for plausible deniability. The recruiter may not know, and by design they probably don't keep a record of that.

Not hard to guess in many cases -- especially if you can find other people's email addresses from the same company, since they are often created formulaically. E.g. first.last@company.com or <firstinitial><lastname>@company.com

“Running out of people to hire” is a strange way of saying “Not offering employees enough to want to work there”. To be catty, there are plenty of people to hire, but maybe they’re running out of people to exploit.

It's not sustainable for them to offer, say, $30 an hour starting salary for fulfillment centre employees. As it is, they have to subsidize retail with other revenue lines like AWS and advertising.

That implies their business is not viable.

That is the design: business units that are not viable on their own are subsidized by a few cash cows but might gain market share and be profitable in the future

"The conclusion is that Amazon is not a viable business"

-- best of HN

Bozos simp.

He doesn't know who you are, doesn't care about you, and likely actively despises your existence.

Why would you ever think of defending a business?

I've always wondered about this, at Amazon and also at Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc... They seem to burn through people quite fast. Won't they all just run out of people at some point, or will just increasing pay bring enough people back?

If it's anything like retail, a lot of these places work on the assumption that there are enough people who too desperate for a job that they'll come regardless of the working conditions.

Yep, and when the free market sets up conditions to allow those people to be slightly less desperate the Fed will chime in about how unemployment is too low and we need more desparate people, while the wall st pundits go on and on lamenting how rising worker prices might mean that the companies make profits that gasp don't set records. Because apparently the only measure of a good economy is record profits - regular profitable businesses just don't cut it anymore.

If you find this worrying, don't - someone will be along shortly to spend a lot of words proving that this situation (the one where we require desperate people to exist so Elon and Jeff can make a few extra $billion) is somehow the best.

Having worked in conditions like this, god it's horrible.

The people that were there when I started were rough guys, but they could do their job.

After I started the company apparently could only hire angry alcoholics, lazy stoners, and fresh out of jail domestic abusers who were proud of it. How many of these people could the job effectively, no.

Then the company had a merge and corporate came down with a brilliant plan to force all the fulltime employees (read legacy employees with some level of leadership responsibilities and the only ones good at their job) into part time positions or offer them severance to leave. You can imagine what happens.

So then it was me, a couple other guys, and a slew of incompetent bums. I managed to take advantage of the situation to demand a pathetic raise and near total autonomy of my hours. These concessions ended up being not enough and one night I decided not to show up anymore, as management was constantly moving responsibilities of their "friends" to use.

Luckily I had been using my time to make my break into the software industry. A couple years later, I read that triple merged company had to file for bankruptcy.

This is one reason why these types of megacorps support mass immigration, it provides a steady stream of desperate people they can exploit. Those from other countries also might lack the collective cultural knowledge to stay away.

I hadn't really thought before about how left-wing folks typically want higher wages as well as more mass immigration which inherently suppresses wages. In their defense, they want raises waged by law rather than by market (an elevated minimum wage would raise wages irrespective of immigration), but considering how unlikely a minimum federal wage hike is, it seems like they're pursuing two contradictory goals.

EDIT: I was really (naively) hoping this would be discussed maturely. Some clarifying points:

1. "mass immigration" is just intended in opposition to highly selective immigration policies (e.g., policies which allow highly educated or wealthy people to immigrate). This isn't a criticism or a value judgment, and indeed there's something noble and egalitarian about this.

2. observing that these two goals are contradictory doesn't imply ignobility or foolishness, but rather difficulty of task.

3. I'm not a "right-winger" nor do I have a political tribe. I'm not slinging anything at left-wing people.

You'll be surprised how many people are looking for a job and these companies know the numbers. That's the reason why they dictate the process. In some countries there's just not enough population to fill all the vacancies so the workers dictate the terms. eg South Korea.

They'll start to lobby the government to bring in temporary foreign workers before they'll raise wages and improve working conditions.

They can only increase pay so much before they have to increase their fees beyond the point people are willing to pay them. As an anecdote, I have completely stopped using DoorDash because they recently increased their fees to a level that I consider to be absurd.

DoorDash costs have always been absurd, they just hide a lot of it by pricing the food higher than it normally is.

I've noticed our grocery delivery services doing that, too, giving us prices on items that are higher than they are if you go to the store yourself. We'll stop using them soon. It's bullshit. Delivery costs ought to be transparent.

[EDIT] Oh, and places like pizza joints that already had delivery service are starting to get a lot more aggressive about differentiating delivery vs. pick-up pricing. They've long had a deal or two at a time that's carry-out only, but now it's all the decent deals, and even some deals specify that they'll be less-good if you order delivery. Delivery can easily be 40% more expensive than carry-out, as a result, because they also still charge the delivery fees they all started tacking on a decade or so ago (which are also higher, now) and you still, despite already potentially paying $10+ more than you would have for carry-out, have to tip, because most of that money's not making it to the delivery driver.

It is not a given that all service economy business models will survive. Historically as goods got cheaper relative to labor, service prices rose. In poor countries service jobs such as doorman or shaver are much more common than in rich countries. The classic example is that below a certain income level, the majority of men start to have their faces professionally shaved rather than doing it themselves.

Having another person spend 15-30 minutes in a high stress situation to deliver you food should be a high cost activity that gets more expensive relative to your income over time. Traditional delivery services only made this cost effective by making food for low cost. The alternative is an economy where wages cannot rise relative to goods.

I'm not sure how much food delivery should cost. Though most local restaurants around me seen to do it for free (and tipping isn't expected, in fact it would be a struggle, most drivers drop the food and run now).

I'm not naive enough though not to notice that it's all done under the table. Few are paying tax or commercial insurance on their vehicles to do restaurant delivery.

I'm pretty sure doing it legitimately costs a reasonable amount. Doubly so when you aren't just trying to get your food to your customers but also paying a bunch of developers Silicon Valley wages to try to capture the entire market before someone else does.

Same. My last doordash order was for 20 dollars of food and after tip (the suggested) it came to over double the original food cost. That's just not sustainable for anyone.

I mean they could also not set record profits, and just have regular profits for a while.

I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effort to buy direct from a vendor, but more often than not the experience is so horrible that I go right back to Amazon.

You should try walmart.com for ordering... they stepped up their game... it's not uncommon for them to do 3 deliveries for a $35 order with free shipping to get you the stuff as fast as possible... Most of the time I wish they would combine items to avoid the waste but that's what they do.

Yeah, I've considered Walmart, but it kind of defeats the purpose for me. It doesn't do a lot of good to replace one monopolistic behemoth with a different monopolistic behemoth.

For the record, being on the other side, and working hard to CREATE these experiences that customers love is absolutely addictive and intoxicating.

You have to actually give a shit about it though. Which most of us do. It requires effort and grit to have this level of "customer obsession", and to be fair, I would say we are mostly well compensated for it.

But it's not for everyone. Plenty of SDEs, including in this market just want to punch in and punch out, and not meaningfully move the bar forward. That's probably OK.

It's not good enough for me. My work is 1/3 of my life, 1/2 of my waking life. That better be fucking meaningful and significant.

You'd be surprised, you might enjoy working here too.

Kudos to you. If you think it's a fair deal, more power to you. I'll sleep better at night knowing that you feel like you're not being exploited, and that you're being fairly compensated for the work you do.

But I've heard too many horror stories to ever take that risk myself.

This comment isn't directed to you specifically, but the many many others who feel the same.

"What have you got to lose?"

By that I mean, we're in a hot tech market. If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease.

OK, but we're about to hit a recession. I'd venture Amazon is a lot safer than many other tech companies to ride out a recession in - the core business (cloud and retail) is fundamentally sound. The company is only ever not profitable when it chooses not to be because it invests all gains into new R&D and lines of business. When things tighten in the market, Amazon refocuses on core optimizations, and realizes massive profits again. Certainly I can't predict layoffs or no layoffs, but noone can, at any company.

I am probably not alone, but I use Amazon.com about twice a year. Pretty much only when I don't have time to wait for something, or if there is a ludicrous deal. It's obviously harder to get what I want, but I just think about the counterfeit items and the slave labor in the warehouse.

Of course I use AWS everyday at my job. I think of it like Amish people using power tools at their job.

I'm curious if Amazon retail was equally efficient in the past, say the early 2000s. Was warehouse management the same?

Amazon wasn't a logistics expert from day one, they've learned a lot over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckmbVpG390

No they aren't.

They are running out of people to over exploit.

Big difference.

Amazon will find better compensation and a modest change to work culture and environment will bring them as many people as they need.

Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have plenty of strong opinions about how they treat their workers and have no desire to work for such a company, but I was surprised to find that I did sympathize with them to an extent - it's not just about offering better pay and bathroom breaks, they're also on the verge of exhausting the viable labor market. I wish whoever took the job the best of luck - I hope that they're taking the research effort seriously and it's not just performance art.

The article suggests they are on the verge of exhausting the labor supply because they can't get anyone to stay for more than a couple years though, because so many people have already been there and left -- and that this has in the past been intentional on the employer's part, to only keep workers for a couple years.

If true, that puts a different light on things -- how the combination of having such a large labor force and a strategy to intentionally have high turnover combine to exhaust the labor supply, sure.

Oh don't get me wrong, much of it is definitely the result of their policies and could have been avoided if they hadn't treated their labor force like a discardable, consumable resource for years. I just thought it was interesting to see something pop up in the news that echoes what I got a glimpse of a few months ago - that Amazon is starting to recognize that they have a problem on their hands (finally). Just thinking about it in dispassionate scientific terms, it's a fascinating and unique problem - it might be too late for them to pivot and shift back towards "sustainable" practices, and if they fail I'm certainly going to enjoy the schadenfreude, but I'm really curious to see how they attempt to deal with all this.

>I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers.

Some companies take pride in promoting from within. McDonald's is well known for turning entry-level workers into store mangers, then regional managers, and so on. Walmart does this, too.

Does Amazon not have such a culture?

They definitely have some fluff pieces talking about cases where it happens, no idea how common it is relative to those others though

Lol, not yet it seems

> also on the verge of exhausting the viable labor market [at this level of pay]

I mean, that's definitely a huge factor, but there IS a limit to how much Amazon can pay their hundreds of thousands of workers and still remain competitive - and I have NO idea where that threshold is, which is why I'm fascinated to see how this shakes out. Either Amazon workers start getting treated better which is great, or the company collapses and turns into an unprecedented case study of what not to do. Either way, I'm grabbing some popcorn!

As many others have said, there's no shortage of labor in the US; there's a shortage of pay.

Like many others, Bezos built his business by exploiting a temporary condition: A virtually infinite supply of people willing to accept a horrible job for low pay. That condition no longer exists, but Bezos didn't realize it was unsustainable (it's unsustainable because if all workers are paid shit wages they can't afford to be customers). Or maybe he did realize it which is why he retired. In any case, now Amazon is panicking.

Good. When I think about this along with their other dick moves like pushing cheap Chinese counterfeit products, encouraging fake reviews, and stealing third-party product designs just because they can, I now check Amazon's competitors first when I buy something online.

Amazon has 1.6 MILLION employees based on its last financial report, with 1.1 million in the US. Basically 1% of the US labor force currently works for Amazon.

That's getting into too-big-to-fail territory. I'd expect some big fat checks for free money from us taxpayers to Amazon in the future.

I work for a company which Amazon uses and pays us per seat. Scaling with them while they exploded in hiring has been a struggle.

What % of the population of the US labor force currently shops on Amazon?

Amazon has become the substrate for more than tech- ordering stuff on Amazon is practically a utility like electricity, water and internet now.

This is the sign of a extremely unhealthy place to work

> But attrition at Amazon’s facilities in the area grew from 128 percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020

I can see business papers talking about Amazon's failure in this space in the next 5 years.

They're really pushing the limits of their work force. I think slowing the pace down a smidge in the warehouse and not burning everyone out would really help them keep it sustainable.

- wants to become “Earth’s Best Employer”

- tells drivers to pee in a bottle

Doesn’t compute

Destroy all the other companies in the world and then you'll be earths best employer, why be better when you have the power to make things universally worse.

> An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy. “We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him.

This is _madness_.

Who wants to work under inhuman conditions and be treated like garbage?

Tells you how bad their alternative choice is.

>>“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024”

At what price point?

Offering what working conditions?

>> "...the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."

Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and pay better wages, and benefits?

Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and make better rules that are not attempting to run employees like running machines at 105% of redline for every shift, e.g., so they don't have to make a choice between making their performance numbers and urinating in a bottle in the delivery truck?

These are likely seen as crazy ideas, but perhaps they should get ahead of the curve and make an attractive place to work instead of trying to treat Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times as a "How To Manage" work...

The combination of arrogance and utter out-of-touch cluelessness of management/MBAs, thinking everything runs just on their numbers, never ceases to amaze. Just because you can optimize one or two numeric parameters does not mean you are getting closer to your goal.

This is simply laying down groundwork for hiring temporary foreign workers.

and how do they plan on bringing all of them? There are 85,000 new H1B visas in a given year, and they cannot be used for warehouse workers. The work visas are mainly for white collar jobs, and the only way then can bring a ton of foreign workers is from Amazon offices overseas, via the L-1 work visa, and that is not that easy since they need to maintain headcount to support the use of Amazon services in those countries.

H1B visas are for workers in the tech sector, but they have other visas for other purposes. H2A visas are for temporary/seasonal agricultural workers, H2B visas for temporary workers in non agricultural fields.

So they could be shipped in via H2B visas, or they could lobby for some new kind of temporary worker visa.

In Canada we've already seen similar - McDonalds (and other similar businesses) offers non-living wages for work, and when they can't find workers for low wages, the canadian government lets them ship in temporary foreign workers to run their fast food restaurants because 'there's no workers at the market (non livable) wage'.

With programs like these the free market for labour dies. Why are wages low? because companies can offer extremely low wages and when no one bites, ship in temporary workers.

This is from mid-2021. I suspect they are now more concerned about having expanded too quickly during the pandemic period.

They are just running out of clique members to hire. I've had interviews at Amazon where the setup was hostile from get go, and it was evident the hiring team was looking to recruit their friends which they eventually probably did. All the other interviews are just padding/process tick marks for that one profile.

Every time I shop at Amazon I have a bad conscience about supporting such a worker-hostile company. Well the turnover they get from me has been well under 100 € / yr. for many years. And I have monthly AWS bill over $5 for some Lightsail stuff. Should move to some smaller player, but it's more work.

I guess this implied people are burned out by working in these warehouses and they will have churned through EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES who might have considered it. Quite a feat. Maybe finally allow people bathroom breaks rather than peeing in bottles? Or just develop more robots.

So it turns out that people are fungible after all. At least at the scale that Amazon operates at.

Amazon designed its warehouses from the very beginning to have it workers be completely replaceable. By not letting them make any decisions, instead just mindlessly doing what the computer says, they can easily plug and play new hires with minimal training. The end goal is pretty obviously to not have any warehouse workers, and making their jobs as simple and repetitive as possible probably makes them easier to automate.

Arguably the largest company in the world is depleting its own potential labor pool around all of its facilities, due to the sheer cruelty of how it treats its workers.

The assumption has been that there's always more workers, so who cares if you burn them all out before the year is over? Just get some more. But Amazon has unprecedented scale and an unprecedented (sustained) attrition rate, which means they are heading into uncharted territory. Maybe there aren't always more bodies to burn through.

When things like these happen, it's time to consider regularly using terms like "megacorporation" in earnest.

Peter Zeihan on the labor shortage going into the next decade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXp8Z7_Y4Bw

I quit after orientation, spent the whole time arguing that their ten principles were contradictory, whilst the broken remnants of Microsoft's silicon valley campus sat there, happy to have whatever crumbs Amazon were throwing them. When I told my manager I wouldn't be staying, he congratulated me!! Your can see it in their products, mediocrity by design.

This isn't just their warehouse workers, their delivery drivers (many through partner companies) have been struggling with this for a while. They grind through employees fast. Drivers will sometimes just leave their keys in the ignition and walk off the job.

There was a lot of speculation that this is why they dropped the drug testing requirement last year.

I heard a rumor that Amazon is flying people in from out of the country to work for $15hr. However, I did a search and cannot find any documentation on this. 22mins into this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg

That person is not reputable, a fact that was easy to confirm in minutes just by googling their name and finding them peddling 'Obama's birth certificate is fake' nonsense as recently as 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTmIDuCMFk&t=2s

Maybe potential candidates finally understand how much worse their life gets in the US if they don’t speak English, and they won’t have money to go back to latin america.

* at their wage levels

More like running out of people willing to work at existing conditions, salary and employment terms.

They've got a high volume of employees at physical locations and high churn.

That seems like a recipe for this.

"It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024"

yes, by 2024 the number of people willing to piss in bottles for peasant wages in unconditioned warehouses with no healthcare or time off will certainly become problematic.

I’d suggest rather than paying by the hour, Amazon should switch to paying workers by the task. They have the data to work out a profitable rate.

This gives workers the ability to self regulate how lazy or efficient they’d like to be.

Don't know about the US, but it would be illegal in many countries if workers don't reach the minimum wage despite working full-time. Of course they could fire slow workers (at least in the US, in Europe it's often not that easy), but then they are back at the problem of the submission: running out of workers

With the imminent crypto implosion there will be a lot of people with any kind of exposure to crypto (as workers, investors or something) looking for a job. A short stint in the warehouse would do them good.

Funnily enough, I got paid 100$ to do a 20 minutes survey that was asking hiring questions (which fang would you apply for and why) and it was just a pretest to have someone from Aws trying to recruit you.

Who are the emerging competitors to Amazon that the article refers to?

A lot of businesses are like that, particularly telemarketing and low skill. Churn and burn. It almost feels like the pornography industry at times, every day someone turns 18.

Good! They can raise wages and give better benefits and treat workers better. It's really not that hard when you have billions of dollars laying around.

Would it be so bad to just develop better robots for this type of work?

Keynes had a prediction that we would be working 15 hour work weeks by now.

In your opinion, why haven’t we obtained this?

Amazon has flipped the script, replacing inefficient and overly sympathetic human management with software-based micro-managers. This leaves the rank and file as meat-based robots to follow narrowly scripted programming.

They've also automated a lot of the physical work; you should watch a video of how their warehouses operate. But as of yet many physical tasks cannot be easily automated -- but they can be cheaply acquired if you are willing and able to treat human labor as machines. Until recently at least.

As to the second question though, I have a completely different thought. I think it's just that given a choice, most people will choose more money rather than more free time, up to a point. I think most people in urban office jobs could find a way to work less, earn less, and spend less; I certainly could. But it just runs counter to human nature.

I think the downfall of Amazon will begin from the inside…

What the memo doesn’t account for is what will happen when the Fed Reserve is adamant about bringing demand destruction with their interest rate hikes.

s/people to hire/people to hire cheaply/

> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024

robots are the answer. or less consumption. or both.

Is that why I get recruiter emails almost daily?

If you really are, my recommendation is to get stern with your responses. I got them to stop for a little while by just asking them to stop, and then to stop entirely by asking again while mentioning who I sent my previous request to. Like "Hi John, please stop contacting me", and then a few months later like "Hi Steve, a few months ago I asked John Doe (johndoe@) to stop contacting me". The second step seems to have been the trick.

Same. Amazon has been relentless in recruiter spam, more so than any other company I've ever seen.

I don't know why anyone wants to work for a company that acknowledges for attrition. No wonder they can't keep talent.

There's something like 200k homeless people in California - all those failed policies have put a dent in the labor pool.

Just remember; in big companies you’re nothing more than a cost, to be replaced by automation. They don’t want you.

I wonder if this or similar stories is leaked by purpose to encourage more people to apply.

Why is this news? Amazon employs ~1M people. Of course they cannot churn people for long.

> the company is running out of people to hire

Pay more. That’s how capitalism works.

I try to avoid purchasing from Amazon to help them as much as I can...

Well, an Amazon recruiter contacted me, so they must be desperate.

You know conditions are bad when desperate people say no

Surely at some point the market will just regulate itself and amazon will have to improve working conditions to keep operations running... Right? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?

That’s what’s happening. Walmart is paying warehouse workers $25/hr and Amazon is losing workers to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOFdr03-CVM

Increase wage. Problem solved.

You mean Uber Capitalists want to pretend 'cost of labor' isn't an input to the economic equation? Shocker.

Who'da thought unsustainable labour practices are unsustainable.

Maybe you should treat your employees better then?

tl;dr: you want to be a customer of Amazon, not an employee.

There's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of workers wanting to work for Amazon.

It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just delivery or warehouse).

You have the notorious NYT article from 2015 (the article mentions this):

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

The online perception is that it has only gotten worse. It doesn't take much to find stories on teamblind, twitter, reddit, or even hackernews about hire to fire, stack ranking/pip, and even just general mental abuse.

I mean just read this excerpt from the article about a working needing to go see a dentist about an infected tooth:

> The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated.

At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency? [1]

[1] https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigation...

>> It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just delivery or warehouse).

Even if Amazon changed their policies, I'd be cautious about any AMZN managers or directors. The fact that they survived there, or thrived, means they are probably ruthless and I wouldnt want to work with such an individual (or hire them, for that matter.)

> At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency?

We don't need to ask, we already know. Actions speak louder than words anyway, and we've all seen how they treat all their workers: from warehouse to corporate. One would be a bit naive to think only their warehouse workers get treated badly, corporate workers are slapped around just as much in their own way.

Even in death, Amazon doesn't care and will lie through its teeth: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...

> Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment from Amazon’s internal safety responders.

> Bill was laying there for 20 minutes and nobody nearby saw until an Amnesty worker with a radio came by.

> A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it

> “After the incident, everyone was forced to go back to work. No time to decompress. Basically watch a man pass away and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like it’s fine,”

> Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”.

Amazon will just keep doing what it's doing because it can. Like you mentioned, online perception has gotten worse ever since that 2015 article, so clearly they just don't care about anything other than profit. Warehouse workers have had enough, they're pushing back by organizing their rights collectively. But so should corporate workers, we shouldn't have to keep watch over our shoulders every time we go to work in fear of PIP, or even at the interview stage where we have to suspect if we're getting "hired to be fired".

It's ridiculous. We should organize too.

I have a friend that works in an Amazon data center and he describes the work environment as “Have you seen any of the hunger games movies?”

Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he says it’s the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He’s in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn’t understand the hate aside from lazy people that have no work ethic complaining they are being asked to actually work, and work hard, consistently. If it was as terrible as some articles make it sound, I’d doubt they’d have so many employees.

Skip sense of decency this is just downright stupid: a worker with an urgent medical issue needed time off for it. They had accrued leave, but you don't let them take it. They resolve the issue, come back to work and then you fire then anyway...and what, now have to train a new person up? What the hell was gained by any of that?

Not really what the article says - Amazon's enforced-churn policy leads to workers that want to continue working there being fired for no good reason.

You could argue the reason is that they weren’t good enough.

Just have to reply to recruiters saying you don't want to work for a company with forced attrition and they shut up.

They don't try to correct me and say they aren't doing it anymore, they just cease communication.

Makes you wonder why they still do such barbaric practices as forced attrition

There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.

> There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.

Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers."

As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.

Its a shortage at a given salary. Up the salary and the shortage is not present. So really it is self imposed.

Working at an Amazon warehouse sounds terrible in every way, but… did you see those spiral package slides in the background? Might give up my sweet tech job just to ride on those.

There are only 9 employers on planet earth with more employees than Amazon.

They're known to have such crazy warehouse shifts that people unofficially carry piss bottles with them.

They're also known to be a crap place to work at the high end for the educated workforce and the best I have heard is "Get in, get out, pump your resume and leave as fast as you can"

Surprise!

offer remote work - I'm in

I'm not sure how you can remotely work a warehouse job, which is what this article is about.

Control the amazon warehouse robots from your bed.

You jest, but they are absolutely on it

It is an obvious sarcasm

In SWE jobs, a lot of AWS teams are allowing remote, still not worth the ultra-crap culture.

You can still be hired-to-fire as a remote, probably more so.

Amazon's scale encounters limits that most companies don't ever have to consider. There's a parallel from 20ish years ago: Amazon eschewed software performance engineering with the mantra "if it can be solved with a credit card [i.e. you can buy more hardware] don't worry about it now". That worked up to the day they called the company that made their database server and asked to upgrade and were told "you already have the most powerful machine we've ever built".

In single master architecture this is inevitable. At some point you wont be able to throw more hardware.

Thats why multi-master architecture was created in the first place.

A lot of big companies went through that, I've seen presentations about eBay running out of scaling room on their Oracle servers in their boom.

Otoh, maximum database server today is a ton bigger. Looking at just Supermicro, you can get 8 TB ram in a dual Epyc server, and 24 TB in exotic, but still off the shelf systems. You can get a lot of qps with 24 TB of ram and a whole bunch of cores.

If you go with Oracle, they'll sell you a Sparc server with 48 TB of ram, and 384 CPU cores.

Single "manager" or "distributor" you mean

Reply on news.ycombinator.com