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Comment by ozzythecat | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s game is squeezing out every ounce of value they can.

I worked in one of the Seattle buildings. It was still a culture of people crying at their desks, incompetent managers being checked out or just stressing out everyone around them.

Then you had the more seasoned people who figured out how to play the game. Something is broken or had some outage?

Find a way to blame another team. Think of the most sleezy used car sales manager you’ve met in the finance office of a car dealership. Now give them a “Sr. software development manager” role. That’s Amazon for ya.

Managers going on vacations to Hawaii while their teams are slaving away over the weekend to meet unrealistic deadlines. Utter lack of leadership. A house of cards held together by H1Bs and other visa situations where people put up with it out of fear of losing their jobs and having to leave the country.

I pray the government breaks up that scam. It’s a stain on humanity.

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Just to give a minor counter point, I've been at Amazon for 5 years. In that time, I've been in two different orgs and 4 different teams. All in Seattle. I'm yet to see people crying at their desks.

The trick to happiness at Amazon is staying the hell away from anything tier 1 -- or, hell, just anything with direct lines to external customers. Those "9s" we give are delivered on the backs of engineers. I'd for sure break down and cry too if I was getting paged 50 times per week because the response time of some subsystem went outside SLA by 5ms.

Chill org, chill life.

And yet, Amazon continues to be a highly ranked employer [1] consistently.

Last I checked, these employees don't _have_ to work for Amazon.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/amazon-is-the-no-1-company-t...

I'm sure there's no way to game or no bias in Linkedin's "top companies" list...

Wells Fargo at number 2? Come on.

Seriously. I once worked for a company where Marketing and HR had a cross-functional team of three people working full-time to game such surveys, counter/contest bad reviews from former employees, writing fake positive reviews, etc.

On Wednesday, the networking platform released its annual Top Companies list identifying the 50 best places in the U.S. for professionals to grow their careers. Amazon ranked No. 1 on the list, followed by Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Wells Fargo.

From the LinkedIn article:

LinkedIn Top Companies is a ranking of the 50 companies that are investing in their talent and helping people build careers that will set them up for long-term success.

Our 2022 LinkedIn Top Companies list is the 6th annual ranking of the 50 best workplaces to grow your career, all based on unique LinkedIn data. These are the companies that are offering stability in our ever-changing world of work — the ones that are not only attracting workers, but retaining them.

And this survey has nothing to do with quality of environment. This list, and the accompanying article, are completely meaningless.

Every employer tries to game those surveys, I have little faith in them.

But there is also a huge difference between "best employer to grow your career" and "best employer to work for".

Simply having the Amazon name on your resume is great for your career, but your career will probably be outside of Amazon.

I always assumed those lists (& others) were like Christmas cards from media organizations to the advertisers who keep the lights on.

You don't have to work there no. But employees should always feel free to unionise if they want to. No matter how well reviewed the workplace is.

Amazon has H1B visa workers who pretty much do have to work for them.

Amazon likes to open warehouses where they are the only bigger emplyer in the area, so that it's not so easy for people to switch jobs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

I'm confused by what you wrote, because when I worked there during the pandemic, or even a year into it, almost no one was in the office. The first plan was to bring people back by Jan 2022, but then it was decided that individual directors could decide for their teams what was best. From what I saw while I was there (approx 6 months ago), most desks were still empty.

I don't mean to necessarily disagree with the general tone of what you're saying, though. I felt some of that while I was there.

I wonder how someone who founded a company like this could lead a rocketry company.. For all of Elon's flaws he does seem to reward hard work and taking responsibility. Bad leadership, blaming others, doesn't sound like a culture you'd want in something where more can go wrong than a few deliveries.

Granted, their rocketry company isn’t as successful as Elon’s.

Interesting perspective on the white collar part of Amazon. But given that Amazon is the second largest employer in the world and the vast majority of those jobs are blue collar, I don't think this is exactly what the article is mainly referring to?

Interesting. So not knowing a lot about the situation, is this actually a hiring strategy?

Hiring people into the country on Visas, because then they have to perform to very high levels and crazy demands else they have to go back home?

That's evil genius stuff right there.

It’s not so much that it’s explicit strategy. It’s more that tech companies look for high performers, and the H1B situation creates high performers through extortion. The companies are happy to take advantage of it.

It absolutely is a hiring strategy.

Come visit Amazons campus around Denny Triangle and SLU in Seattle.

The majority of the foot traffic (Amazon employees) are #1 Indian nationals.

If you sponsor someone from Bangalore or Chennai, you pay some up front costs. But that person is going to work double/triple time and deal with a huge amount of shit. Otherwise, they have to pay themselves to move back to India within a limited amount of time.

If you see organizations like Prime Video, Alexa, Kindle - pretty much the entire org is Indian. You want to tell me white, black, Hispanic people can’t code?

The HR pipelines are set up where most new recruits come through specific colleges that have an abundance of Indians studying abroad.

If someone from Chennai has to be on a miserable on call, they’d rather do that and send their kid to a school in Seattle or Redmond, instead of moving back to India.

> Amazon’s game is squeezing out every ounce of value they can.

Of course. And the union's and worker's job is to squeeze every ounce of value they can out of Amazon.

It's how marketplaces work.

And amazon has enough power to undermine the union’s power through legal, dubiously legal, and illegal means. Thus tilting the market in their favor. Does that seems ok with you?

Not to mention most of amazon’s workplaces are not unionized, so it’s amazon vs a single worker in the marketplace. Who’s gonna win in that pairing?

Anybody who doesn't like working for Amazon can walk out the door and never look back. Amazon can't make you work, cannot make you stand on your head, cannot put you in jail, cannot send your family to a labor camp, etc.

> Who’s gonna win in that pairing?

If Amazon is so powerful, why aren't all its employees working at minimum wage?

The US is full of people who don't work for Amazon. Plenty of choices.

Amazon does have a habit of putting its distribution centers in economically depressed places with no jobs where all the people who could leave already did.

In the 1930s the US government provided an "employer of last resort" to prevent giving people like bezos from wielding this kind of power and growing the economy but apparently these days weak moral platitudes suffice.

How could Amazon force them to work there if they survived before Amazon built those centers?

Nobody forces anyone to live in depressed areas. Move. Even penniless immigrants cross the southern border and manage to move to every part of the US.

Sorry but you sounds like you are completely out of touch with the poor.

In economically depressed area, Amazon can offer a penny better than a few handful employers and people will try and see if they can earn a better living, even if they heard enough story about how stressful it is working at Amazon.

Move? You might be wealthy enough to do so, but do you think those living in those area have enough money to afford that? The so called penniless immigrants, they paid their way to get to the border and try to cross the border illegally. You are talking about those who are living in the country legally, and not in a situation to move.

As I wrote, penniless immigrants crossing the southern border migrate to every part of the US. How do you think they manage that? Have you seen the news footage of caravans of them walking thousands of miles to get to the border?

Every corner of the US was settled by penniless people, including the colonists who arrived here penniless.

Why do you think that because some people from latin america do that that all of them can?

Yes, that is how a healthy marketplace works and why it should be illegal for Amazon to use its trillion dollars to crush unions.

If 51% vote for unionization, what about the other 49%?

How is that relevant? Whether or not employees unionize and how they do so is up to them to decide. It still should be illegal for Amazon to interfere in that process in any way.

If employees don't agree on stuff to the point there's a 50-50 divide, then they aren't actually united. There is no union. That's fine, as long as Amazon accepts whatever result. It's also totally possible that 99% want to unionize so they can apply maximum leverage on Amazon and extract better pay and benefits out of them.

> How is that relevant?

The minority doesn't get a choice. There's a big difference between a choice and a vote.

Okay. Amazon still has no say in that.

A fair chunk of southern and western US consists of "right-to-work" states, in which one cannot be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment.

They're still stuck with the union contract. Even if they join the union, a vote on the contract is not the same as a choice.

If union contracts only applied to people who voluntarily joined the union, then it might be fair.

Make it an open shop, and they can negotiate individually.

If it works for the president of the United States...

If 51% vote against unionization, what about the other 49%?

That's why I'm jaded that IVONA TTS, a world-class product from my hometown founded by graduates of my alma mater, was acquired by a company with culture like this.

I guess someone else would acquire them regardless, but Amazon seems the worst outcome.

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