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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Ex-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will.

The back-ended equity structure (i.e., you only vest 5% of your equity grant in the first 12mo) isn’t great when you’re comparing it with a standard vesting schedule as an employee. As an employee if you’re given two identical grants for two identical companies with the same future prospects then you take the one that gives you that equity sooner. But the rhetoric is usually that equity is meant to be an employee retention tool. So from that perspective the AMZN vesting structure makes much more sense to me than what is common elsewhere.

As for the service dynamic: the whole “2 pizza team” thing is both a blessing and a curse IMO. Once you launch a service at AWS’s scale you’ve immediately got tens of thousands of users. And AWS takes stability/availability/scalability incredibly seriously. I think it’s more likely that team is now in a permanent operations mode fixing weird edge cases you find at scale and keeping the lights on.

If it was a staff retention issue like you suggest then you’d see the platform plagued with reliability issues and services being shut down. But that doesn’t happen. Even SimpleDB is still available for use (though well hidden).

That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase/usage decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over optimization, because the apparent return from optimization exceeds the apparent cost.

I mean, just look at the Amazon retail operation - everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites. Amazon's bottom line seems to indicate that breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving human populations.

> Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition?

This was Microsoft’s strategy way-back-when. You can go surprisingly far, especially in enterprise, by covering all the basics without excelling at anything in particular, and fixing your mistakes.

Avoiding fatal flaws is really really important and is extremely difficult to do, so just managing to be mediocre at everything necessary is actually quite uncommon in my experience.

I have seen this particularly in my limited experience of founders and startups: you may need to be great at one thing, but you also need to be OK at many many things, and you must avoid the infinite sea of fatal flaws.

> everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites

Slow compared to what? Amazon's website feels more responsive and more usable than 90% of online stores I've seen that carry orders of magnitude less variety of inventory. It loads fast, searches fast, provides for easy navigation between related products, and displays all needed information on one page without jank. Sure, it doesn't look modern, but it feels far more functional than the competition.

Though the filtering features are pretty much useless for almost every product. Too many products to maintain any decent classification. That makes it pretty much useless for looking for computer hardware (that and counterfeit products).

So true, but I don't think it's impossible to maintain classification, that's just Amazon. I think they just gave up trying to, probably after they opened up up other sellers.

I suspect their search, classification, filters etc are all so broken because it's all based on a Google-style textual search, with no backend database driving those site features.

Pricespy had excellent filters for the produxts they listed, though I guess it was more focused than amazon. I would say maintaining is possible, especially if they let retailers define the fields and responsible for filling them for the products they list.

Yet they could do much worse. By just not having multiple options merged into one item makes them better than the disaster that's eBay. In comparison they're not useless, because someone is doing it even worse.

Their local competitors in my country are so much better, and amazon shipping is so slow, I don't know anybody that actually uses amazon except for AWS.

Except it's full of terrible fakr products and shady overseas businesses and shady company policies which often screw the customer over and fake reviews everywhere. Tons of crap products that will break or not work instantly and shady companies who refuse to give a refund unless you provide a 5 star review. Their delivery service and prime is also a rip off, it's literally no longer worth it.

This actually seems like a structural weakness in cloud, where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few customers who are very deep in their usage. On the other hand, you can usually rely on close relationships with those customers to identify their significant needs. However, it might be harden to implement them without the bench of deeply knowledgeable engineers.

It seems unlikely to me that this analysis applies to amzn's retail division.

If you spend any time reading their retail forums [1], you'll see almost everyone lambasting Amazon constantly. Either disgruntled sellers who broke the rules and got terminated, or normal, hardworking mom-and-pop stores that were all but forced to sell on Amazon and consistently lose money due to amazon's ever-changing policies, poor support, and catering to large retailers. Large retailers get a direct line and quality support, while most sellers on Amazon get treated like crap.

[1]: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/

The GP claim was

> where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few customers who are very deep in their usage.

I'm disputing that for retail.

If you view the sellers rather than the buyers as customers, then you’ll see that it is the case.

Or maybe it’s just a tiny fraction of those millions of sellers on their platform?

Who would bother writing on these forums unless they have an axe to grind?

The number of services is just crazy - I've worked with AWS solutions architects in trying to find the perfect solution to our particular problems, and even they don't seem to know what half the stuff does.

Let alone which ones are the good ones. That only comes from experience.

AWS never cancels anything... but they never complete anything either and they abandon 80% of their products in minimum viable state, where "viable" is defined by the PM's bonus packet, not by anyone who has to use the damn thing.

And the level of actual integration of various services varies a lot (I mean, you expect things like IAM to be included if it's AWS service, right? Lol nope) plus then there's stuff that will be documented with something like one paragraph in docs and highly paid support engineers will never find anything internal about it, so you end up building a complete SSO solution for AWS from scratch...

AWS sometimes feels like Debian's APT but everything is rewritten in java.

AWS SimpleDB is in Erlang :p

What services aren't currently integrated with IAM / didn't launch with IAM integration?

AWS Quicksight was one, late 2020-early 2021 (which is about 5+ years after acquisition, iirc).

IAM support was essentially useless, you had to create second set of accounts inside Quicksight, with various limitations, and generally it was one hell of a mess.

Also when IAM integration is there it has patchy support for resource condition wildcards and condition keys which are usually not documented

Totally agreed there. Also condition keys have such a high cognitive load; I can never ever remember the exact spelling of them or whether I need StringEqual or StringIsEqualIfExists or whatever other operator. The documentation has tons of prose about what service-specific keys to expect, but nearly 100% of the time when I'm trying to do something non-trivial with IAM, I end up finding the answer on somebody's blog rather than the documentation.

All of this because the policy language and featureset started off simple enough that it was reasonable to describe policies in json. I sort of wish that they would keep the existing policy stuff as-is but have an escape hatch that let us write lua (or JS or eBPF or something) as "policies", and charge us for the compute time.

I recall that there was at least one case where two similar condition keys that by name should work both, only one was appropriate.

But then I actually blew the stack in IAM processing to the point we couldn't start an AWS sagemaker notebook because IAM died while attaching a network interface to EC2...

S3 had poor integration with IAM until a few months ago.

I'm glad we have bucket-owner-enforced now, but the correct time to add it was 10 years ago.

Not true - they are finally turning off "EC2 classic" in August.

Kind of goes both ways, they might not have been very good architects.

I know a few certified "architects", and let's just say they are people whose career was built on talking, not building.

It's a cottage industry.

Maybe they stick around for only 4 years too.

EC2, Lambda, S3, EKS, and their prepackaged DBs and queues. That's about it.

That's more promotion oriented architecture and design.

New services/businesses are how you get promoted. Maintenance or incrementally improve existing functionality and you'll never get promoted.

Amazon isn't really alone in that short sightedness though, it's just extra noticeable when combined with high churn

Yes- this is real. There used to be “subclasses” to the Principal Engineer role and you could pick if you wanted to be a Depth Principal or a Breadth Principal, and that no longer exists now.

Too many features: code bloat from noob engineers Too few features: too many new apps from noob engineers

Can't win.

I know you didn't say #1, but both of these contradictory points are floated quite often.

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.

> If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.

I think that misses a cultural difference, which is that Canada and EU jobs don't require as much work because our work ethic is different. I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated. I don't have to flat-share on 100k.

US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle. If you value your time more than your money then it's the US that provides an embarrassingly low return.

> less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more

This sounds like 90% of the people I knew at Google.

> US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle.

This isn’t even remotely true.

Canadian here. I have my doubts on that; I had some devs that's consistently pulled 280 hours a month and once hit I think 320 hours. His salary was $59,000 CAD a year, and I believe the junior devs working with him were earning $11/hr circa 2010 ish and were working fairly close to those hours.

The longest work day I've had is 40 or 50 hours without sleep to meet a deadline that and then had to be in bright and early the next morning. But there's been more then a few times a year that I ended up sleeping in the office because I missed the last 1:00am train out.

Not all Canadian companies are like that anymore then all American companies are like Amazon or Google. Nor do I claim to understand why this is the case, but at least from what I've seen, Canadian tech salaries do lag quite a lot compared to US salaries compared to the skill demanded.

40 hours in a day? Teach me your secrets.

That’s in Canadian hours

Metric to imperial hours.

Having immigrated from Canada to the US, and worked as a software engineer in both countries, I don't believe this is accurate.

> I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more

This describes LOTS of engineers at big tech, just change 100k to 400k and 40 hours to 20

2008: everyone brags about working 90 hours a week

2022: everyone brags about working 20 hours a week

Not true really...having worked in both countries...Americans do not work harder than the Brits yet many Americans earn way more for same qualifications and abilities...reflective of the market position many US companies have and the grip they have on the largest end-market in the world.

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

IT professionals in Ontario, at least, are probably exempt from most of your list of things you'd think are required.

Engineers and engineering students get an even shorter stick, in the form of more labour law exemptions.

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

-20% more work for 200% more pay seems like a pretty good ROI to me. Especially when I can check out and go back to a low stress gig after a few years.

>be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated

This is pretty normal in the US too. Sure, its not "mandated" but everything besides 6 weeks of vacation is pretty common for SDE.

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

https://www.engadget.com/amazon-more-than-doubles-base-pay-f...

Much cheaper to hire a US citizen versus bringing someone in on a visa. Have you actually ever gone through the process of hiring a foreign national?

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.

> L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach)

I can attest to this; worked there from mid 2000s to early 2010s. Principle Engineers, L7 ICs, were looked up as Gods back then. To an extent that a couple of projects by an L5 where it went through principal-review process was almost guaranteed to get them a promotion to L6. Back when I was there I thought pulling off L5-L6 required crazy work schedule (I couldn't so didn't) and L7 was well and truly beyond mortals.

But now I hear they are doling out L7s like candy as they are getting increasingly desperate to fill their open head counts. How times change!

Man, I worked at Amazon in the early 2010s, and I remember I was an L something and proud of it, but thought I'd never make it to L whatever. It was such a huge deal and a huge part of my life, and now I can't even remember which number it was.. I wish I'd spent less time working and more time doing stuff I cared about

At least you picked up some life wisdom along the way.

They should teach this lesson at school, but instead they reinforce the opposite.

The US military is the same way. Officers get promoted, or they retire. I.e. "up or out".

In the AF, your performance reviews need to be "firewalled" or it's time to leave.

> In the AF, your performance reviews need to be "firewalled" or it's time to leave.

What does firewalling a performance review mean?

All the scores are at the max. "Firewalling" the throttle means full power (pushing it towards the firewall).

Firewall fives, I forgot about that, or maybe blocked it from my memory. It’s the same for enlisted.

No kidding, my first EPR out of tech school had a bunch of 4s and when it came time to test for SSgt my combined points were so far off I just gave up and coasted until I got out. For the best though.

That almost sounds like a cult.

You need to buy 10,000 hours of self improvement tapes to get to L7. Only the most enlightened have achieved it

A cult takes money from you and doesn't pay you a million a year or whatever these people are making.

Their work output is worth more than the compensation or Bezos wouldn't be authorizing it.

How much are they making for Amazon, though?

They give money but take your life time.

Promotion-orientation is bad, but so are promotion levels that are considered "almost impossible to reach".

Levels.fyi doesn't seem to agree with your title inflation evaluation: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon,Microsoft&trac...

It's only 3 data points, but it seems that Amazon Senior is comparable to Google senior, and it's Microsoft that inflates the Senior title.

Sort of. The main issue is that AMZ/AWS doesn't differentiate (by title) between someone recently promoted to L6 (generally ~8-10 YOE) and someone deep in to L6 (~12-15 YOE). Other companies solve this with the Staff Engineer title, but AMZ doesn't have that. If you're an L6 who reports to an L7 Sr. Manager then you're functionally a Staff Engineer and supposed to be on the Principal track. Mileage varies across orgs/teams.

Gist: "junior" L6 SDE is more like Google L5, "senior" L6 SDE tracks mostly with Google L6 (or even L7 in rare cases).

Are you sure about this?

I think it's more like Google junior L6 SDE is equivalent Uber L4.5, which itself is about the same as senior AA at Oracle (= like a L11 at Twitter).

You’re right. Amazon’s L6 do not have larger packages than Google. On the other hand, Amazon has a flatter structure. Amazon’s L6 used to influence more than 100 engineers, advising general managers, owning an entire product line, if not more. Go figure.

You're right, but when they adjusted the L6 role guideline (circa 2016), it was specifically to clarify that the L6 role was never intended to have that span of influence. Rather, every 2-pizza team (8-13 people) should have a sr. engineer. What at Google would be a Tech Lead.

Yeah, L6 is the new L5, and L7 L6. That's bad for those who joined Amazon as L7 and thought that they didn't have to work for title any more.

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 my experience there, PIPing wasn't any more aggressive than anywhere else I've worked. The fighting was certainly real, though.

Leaked memos show Amazon’s senior leadership asks managers to “manage out” (PIP or let go) the bottom 6% of their workforce each year:

https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-pleb...

I remember when that memo leaked. I was an EM at Amazon, and that wasn't my experience. I didn't feel any more pressure to PIP there than anywhere else. Maybe I wasn't there long enough to feel it.

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

In a world where you can get 250

No one is paying $250k salary out of college. Every one of those jobs has similar salary to amazon with the rest in stock. Maybe high frequency traders will give you that cash, but no one else.

It's not unheard of, but usually you need a PhD is a hot field with several conference papers. But it does not seem the norm yet.

However, anecdotes make up hopes.

That's just a bachelors with 6 YOE (masters + phd). I have a bachelors with 6 years of actual experience and my target comp is 250k and actual is like 350k but in the meantime I've made a million dollars pre-tax in those 6 years. Totally different.

are you sure about that?

I think their new grad salary is around 120k in HCOL areas like SF.

That sounds low to me

When you make an argument for companies paying that much, you are essentially saying "FAANG companies with lots of cash reserves should overpay new hires in the goal to attract as many of them as possible in hopes that a few of them make something profitable and offset the cost"

While a viable business strategy, from a personal value perspective, if you are an average CS college grad, you are by far not going contribute even close to $150k/year worth of value - you are going to do some menial basic code modifications.

So by all means, while you can go and take advantage of the inflated salaries to maximize your own profit as much as you can, but you cannot claim that $150k starting salary is too low.

Considering the origins of these tech giants, I read your first paragraph and couldn't help but think, "meta-VC"

salary not total comp

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.

There are differences of course, but culturally there is One Amazon. Both take a meat grinding approach, even for software engineers. Source: worked at AWS.

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.

Yes, their comp plans have changed in the last couple years because the stock isn't as exciting as it used to be. A couple years ago, it wasn't like this.

> 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

It's 5-15-40-40

To me that is a real tell. New employees are a risk, but you can tell if they are going to work out after a year. If you are still discounting the RSUs at the second year, it is in hopes that some won't survive to the payout of the third.

This is not me defending Amazon's comp structure (they need to improve it in many ways), just correcting the facts:

At the time of calculating an offer, all 4 years are considered the same "Total Compensation Target" i.e. no built in reduction or raise. Amazon just pays cash equivalents for years 1 and 2 - through a signing bonus to make up for the lack of stocks, and through stocks in years 3 and 4.

The stocks in for each year are calculated assuming an average of 15% growth. This can be problematic, or can be great depending on the year you join.

Disclaimer: Worked at Amazon for 9 years.

To say that it is backloaded is misleading.

Yes, technically speaking, the stock only compensation is backloaded. But that is balanced out by a 2 year "signing bonus" that is front loaded an equivalent amount of money, such that you are almost getting a hybrid stock/signing bonus package, so that it is technically the same amount of compensation each year.

How'd the combination to my safe get on the internet? Drat, now I have to change it.

It's 5-15-40-40

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)

“Boomerang” most likely

Yes, that's the term, thanks

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.

I dunno, it seemed fairly rosy.

They could have twisted the knife quite a bit more: there were a couple 3-second interactions where people are buying things [0][1], if they had been denominated in "hours of service" rather than USD, with the Company knowing what their hours balance was, and having the balance tick down and go negative... that would have been dark.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=1m26s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=2m5s

Yes, it was understated. Given SP's general trend of exaggerating things to extremes I thought that made it all the more emotionally impactful. It was like: if we exaggerated this reality, it would not be funny, it would be unwatchable.

> 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?

This sounds so close to Uber's strategy from the mid-20teens of having huge incentives / gamification for drivers (up to and including offering to finance car loans to get more drivers) but it'll all be okay because in Just A Few More Years they'll have perfected the robotaxi and they can dump all the humans.

It's disgusting to treat people this way. You can replace people with robots and still treat them with respect.

I don't see it being very long until people get out their pitchforks.

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

Most companies irrationally value growth.

Most of them are cancerous because of it.

"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.

> Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive

Is there a large (or even mid-sized) tech company that managed to achieve it? I've never heard of one and I don't think it's possible. At scale these companies operate, senior level jobs are about navigating the organization and its bureucracy and there aren't many people who find that kind of work fun. Especially people who have an engineering mindset.

The tech jobs in bigger companies are mostly meh at best an their biggest saving grace is the pay. Bezos realizes that and tries to work with this reality. Most big cos work because they've found way to extract enough value of out their people who'd rather not be there (but the pay and stability is too good), and tech is no exception.

> I don't think it's possible.

It is manifestly possible. The Germans do it.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236165/german-workers-satis...

The reason it doesn't happen in the U.S. is that workers have been systematically stripped of all of their power, so corporate management now answers exclusively to shareholders. Trying to make life better for your workers puts you at a competitive disadvantage.

But it does not have to be that way. All we have to do to change it is to decide that it needs to change.

German economy is famous for being based on small and mid-sized companies (which are often the best in the world at the ultra-specialized thing that they do). My post was on impossiblity of high job satisfaction levels in big organizations, I don't think it's as bad for the mid-sized and small shops.

There are 29 German companies in the Fortune Global 500, each with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_German_compani...

Most of those companies are well over 100 years old. I can’t be certain that Adidas in Germany is a terrible place to work but I can say that China HQ is bad enough to get workaholics to bail on it, worse than Amazon China.

Germany’s underperformance in founding new companies in the last 50 years is puzzling but I doubt shorter work hours really explain it. They’re actually working every single one of those hours.

> German economy is famous for being based on small and mid-sized companies

Companies under 500 people are responsible for half of the jobs in the US.

Companies under 20 workers are ~15% of the employment market.

https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/0414...

These aren't just tech jobs, though. Amazon employs far more warehouse and other non-tech staff.

>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.

>pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in one of them

Pretty strong evidence that the job is worse than people would expect would be an anonymous survey of workers by a third party.

Churn can result from any number of factors. It simply isn't enough to support your conclusion, and a lack of imagination in seeing alternative explanations isn't proof. Warehouse jobs have high churn. Yes, Amazon's churn is higher.

A pandemic is just ending. Amazon hired a lot of temporary staff. Temporary staff are temporary.

As things open people have more employment options. People will always go to the best option available. That doesn't mean the job they left is inhumane. It means they found something better.

Finally, Amazon has a signing bonus. Some workers may be there just for the bonus. Once they get it they may want something that pays less but is easier.

The fact that people are leaving with their foot is a strong evidence in itself that the job is not good. Does Ford lose all their workers right now? No. But they are unionized and make more money. Of course different industry but since Amazon chose to be in the industry of razor-thin margin, they have to find a solution to their own problem. If their business model relies on super cheap labor, then they must adapt.

> The fact that people are leaving with their foot is a strong evidence in itself that the job is not good.

Do we know which positions are leaving? Is it the back breaking jobs, or the higher level stuff? I don't imagine any the back breaking portion would ever be "good". It's seems like fast food, something that should be transitory, where you move on to better things (even if that's fast food management). Physical labor is a young persons job, because bodies break. It's not something you could stay with if you wanted to.

If it's the skilled positions, like mechanics, engineers, forklift operators, operations, etc, that are leaving, then I think that would be better evidence. If it's the guys moving boxes, maybe not.

It's a warehouse job. Warehouse jobs are "not good". Most people do it for a while and move on to better things.

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)

The labor analysis in TFA did not appear to consider technical staff.

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.

Amazon has very specifically designed its warehouses so that employees not only don't need to think, they effectively can't. Everything is decided by the computer, the employees just look at their handset and do what it says. This strategy is paramount due to their > 100% yearly turnover. They do not have any experienced workers to train others, so the job needs to be pretty self explanatory. By turning employees into robots you can plug and play everyone in the warehouse.

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

At the time, FNG didn't exist, and Apple was gasping for life. It was one of the top paying options for a new graduate with no experience.

> 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.

Your argument has no relevance to the comment you are responding to as the point being made was it is human nature for (some) people to get complacent regardless of the circumstances.

contextualizing a point is just as legitimate as responding to it directly and this particular comment is relevant

perhaps some people will always grow complacent but you could just as easily make an essentialist argument about the corporation: maybe some employers will always abuse their employees, certainly some deliberately make it difficult to distinguish worker complacency from legitimate complaint, which bears directly on the original claim about human nature

It's also human nature to grumble about one's job. Heck, I do it too, even though I work for free.

On the other hand, they could just beat up or kill their disgruntled employees... I think things have improved and not regressed since then.

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottl...

> 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.)

or acetic ;)

These two words (like acid, acrid, and vinegar) come from the same root.

> 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.

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