Amazon Is Running Out of Warehouse Workers. Cue the Robots | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Is Running Out of Warehouse Workers. Cue the Robots

bloomberg.com

40 pointsmfiguiere66 comments

As I posted in another thread on this topic, the problem of robotics is not just about labor costs as much as space and shipping costs.

Robots have always been able to do picking. But they needed items to be carefully laid out, easy to identify as distinct items, easy to grab without disturbing others. Amazon warehouses have incredible item storage density because they don't do that- they look like that one drawer in your kitchen that has every tool imaginable all thrown in there together. A very hard vision problem (which humans are good at) and a very hard manipulation problem (which humans are good at).

The goal is to build a robot that can pick as well as a human given that storage system or something approaching the density of it.

Storage density matters because Amazon wants any item you order to be as close to you as possible. They need this because shipping costs are the dominant factor, especially with one and two day shipping options.

(But it's also about labor costs because they simply can't hire at the price point they want anymore.)

Couldn't they simply require all goods to come to FBA pre-packaged, so it's all in a box, and boxes could be easier to grab since they're all square, etc? then put all the boxes by size in the warehouse, so robots could specialize?

That increases the volume of each item- sometimes significantly. That impacts storage density, but it isn't the only issue.

I know everyone loves to complain when Amazon sends a too-large box for one item, but sometimes you order seven items and get a perfectly packed box. If everything is inside yet another box, that gets really hard to do. Plus, that's a lot of extra cardboard to pay shipping rates for.

Plus, lots of vendors (FBA or normal) just wouldn't do it. The labour costs of adding those boxes adds up. Imagine if every pack of 3 pens needed to be individually boxed.

Amazon is running out of engineers too. The way that company treats workers is finally catching up to them (hopefully).

No, there are millions of engineers in India that will be happy to work for AMZN, same in LATAM

People always say this and I have to ask: have you seen the job market in India lately? It's competitive. Salaries used to be 1/10th that of a US engineer. US-based companies pay a premium, with Google offering L5 engineers over 100K total comp.

Steve Yegge said that India had basically run out of software engineers.

Yep, and in the United States, there's no longer a large generation flooding into the workforce (Millennials); CS degrees have flatlined since 2016.

Is there a source for this? I'd love to also find out if there's some inverse with bootcamp grads, albeit that would be harder to track.

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20223/trends-in-undergraduate-...

Bootcamps are more challenging to evaluate, as they have a history controversy around their graduation rates / job placement rates. Anecdotally, I just don't see a ton of bootcamp graduates on the market relative to CS degree holders. However, stats seem to indicate there were ~25K graduates in 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/626932/north-america-cod...

But this can be somewhat misleading, as it includes all trainings - including existing software developers reskilling.

There are millions of engineers in the USA that would, too. But few of the good ones from any of those places are going to want to.

This is an outdated viewpoint. 10 years ago, outsourcing to India involved a lot of tradeoffs that usually ended poorly. But Bangalore has become a first-world city in some ways, with a middle class that was educated in Western universities or viably-equivalent Indian universities.

Before the pandemic, I worked with a guy (in person) who was educated at an Indian university, who was as good a developer as any of the American intermediate developers I've worked with, including fluency in English. The rise of remote work has further enabled this sub-economy to flourish: since I've gone full-remote myself, I've worked with a few Indian developers and learned a lot from them: they're not worse developers than me (I'm a senior full-stack developer with enough experience to predate the existence of "full-stack developers"--much of my experience with Fortune 500 companies). There's even enough of an economy in Bangalore that one of my coworkers left for a pay raise to work at a company based in Bangalore.

There are still downsides, primarily time zones. And if you are looking to save money, it's not going to really work out that way: you can still hire chop-shop Indian devs for 20% of what you'd pay a Western dev, but Indian devs who are equivalent to Western devs will require Western pay (minus at most 20-30% to account for the time zone issue, but you'll pay that out in management costs due to the time zone issue).

I'll also add that, coming from nonprofits, some people viewed hiring from India as a way to provide "aid" to the poor in India, but it doesn't really play out that way: most of the folks who are educated enough to work Western jobs, obtained that education because they are from the upper castes with generational wealth.

Engineers that can communicate effectively in English, work collaboratively, break cultural barriers and stick to company values are just a handful.

Running out isn’t going to happen, they just lower the hiring bar. Not saying this is a good thing but it’s what’s happening.

My understanding is that they literally just shut down some of their larger warehouse robotics teams. That doesn't seem to make sense in the context of this article.

This isn't true. A lot of media sources (and people) define Alexa as a "robot" and since 99% of reporters aren't experts in technology you end up with headlines like, "Layoffs Reportedly Hit Amazon's Robotics Team" when in reality it's mostly just people working on Alexa and related hardware.

Comrade, the propaganda mill will say the same thing regardless of what is actually happening.

It was the devices robotics teams, not the warehouse robotics. Like Scout and Astro.

Seems like it would be much easier to just hire a few extra people for each shift so everyone isn’t pushed to a burnout limit all of the time.

Or maybe just do both.

I do most of my groceries through Ocado, and their warehouse operations are almost fully automated[0], but then on the delivery front I can only assume they staff much more generously than amazon, because their delivery drivers are always much more relaxed than Amazon drivers, they're quite happy to have a chat while unpacking, and often call saying they're running early and ask whether it's ok to arrive before the delivery window.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

This is also my experience. I would say that most Ocado warehouses are far less automated than that, that one is kind of a tech demo (but presumably it is an indication of where they are going).

The bots are in production and live.

The warehouse still needs lots of staff but less than a supermarket

despite knowing about what Kiva robots do at Amazon, apparently I've been living under a rock for how things got along since. Fun trivia from that video: Ocado is using off the shelf xbox 3d cameras to check the packing grocery box.

I'm unsure if I personally am in need of prepackaging an order living in a city. Having 5 minutes on foot to the next market I like to see it as a break. But different lives, different needs.

I have a friend who's been doing computer vision for ages, for security applications (think: automated passport control booths), and they always had to hide the Xbox cameras when customers came to visit. Apparently, they are (were?) absolutely amazing for the price, and great to develop with, but it's always hard to explain why you're using gaming accessories for developing super critical stuff.

As for deliveries, London isn't super car-friendly, so I only do shopping in person when I'm comfortable carrying the shopping home. As you say, different lives... :)

Everyone is having a hard time finding workers, and Amazon has a bad reputation - deserved or not.

From the little I’ve seen I’d rather work there than a meat processing plant I’ve been inside of, and I’m guessing the pay is comparable. Those types of jobs suck, and there’s no way to make them not.

https://archive.ph/sRZTC

This is potentially a huge step up -- Amazon's purchase of Kiva was a big strategic acquisition, and they made some incremental improvements to that system but as the article stated it was "pennies" vs the "dollars" of savings from the acquisition itself.

Running out of people it can abuse, more likely.

Running out of?

Or burned through all of?

Interviewed at a local company software. I was well qualified. But interview was brutal. Basically arrogant managers. Didn’t get hired. Turned out they had turned down everyone local, hundreds of developers. They had to replace managers and were trying re interview all the locals. Everyone I knew refused.

> Amazon, which churns through hourly workers at a brisk pace, has long expected to one day run out of warm bodies for its US fulfillment centers

Looks like it's the latter.

Does Walmart have the issue of not being able to find workers?

FYI: Walmart doesn't treat their workers nearly as harshly as Amazon does. They don't pay as well but no one who works for Walmart is incessantly being told they need to work harder than their peers or they'll be fired. Not like Amazon anyway.

Furthermore, if you work for one Walmart and get fired you can always go work for a different Walmart at a later date as long as the reason why you were fired wasn't for something like theft. They're not too picky about such things.

Anecdote: I knew a guy (neighbor) who worked at a Walmart in a different town that got fired for missing too many work days (don't know why). He had no trouble at all going to work for a new Walmart that had recently opened up nearby. From what I've heard, this is the type of thing that would get you blacklisted from Amazon (because they're just that ridiculous about punishing people who don't put in extra hours or "just do their job").

I also notice most Walmart stores have employees doing nothing and the stores are a giant mess

I've noticed this too at multiple locations, I guess keeping aisles clean isn't a requirement for a store's success.

People will go there anyway.

I didn't find any recent headlines specifically referencing Walmart, but in the following article* they mention it's a "general trend" for retailers.

March 2022: *https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/16/business/walmart-new-employee...

The real problem for Amazon is that people who used to work there never want to go back. Either you're OK with the stack ranking system that favors psychopaths or you're glad to be rid of it after you're gone.

The company I work for exists because Amazon bought the robotics company that the founders were using. The only solution to make sure it didnt happen again was to make your own and never sell.

Amazon built a brand new warehouse near me in summer of '22. As far as I can tell, it's still sitting there empty. I haven't seen a truck enter or leave in months.

As I understand this, Amazon primarily has private landlords build facilities to the specifications of Amazon; the company then leases the facility from the landlord.

One could imagine that Amazon re-negotiated that particular lease when they decided to start downsizing instead of spending additional money on completing the warehouse build-out.

So much easier to fix this problem if the execs are replaced by saner people who realize that the PIP program is exacerbating their own problems.

sed 's/running out of/unwilling to pay for/'

Funny how shallow big company's support for free markets turns out to be when it comes to workers raising the asking price of their labor.

And yet the media just lap up their rhetoric proclaiming a "shortage".

There are billboards at up around here that advertise working for Amazon and boast “No interview required!” Or something like that. Not even interviewing a candidate implies how much they care about the long term prospects of said candidate.

A few times a year I get a flyer in the mail advertising open positions at my nearest Amazon warehouse, which is 120 miles away. I assume that it's because they've already burned through most of their local workforce and have to keep casting a wider and wider net to find anyone willing to work for them

Not every job position is intended to be a long term prospect. Especially something like an Amazon warehouse where the demand for workers is highly seasonal. Advertising that there's no interview required is actually very attractive to a lot of people who struggle to hold down a steady job.

They don't usually employ people for a long time. They hire everyone quickly and let them go quickly. High turnover rate. In other words, they "burn through" workers and just replace them.

This was probably always the gamble. Treat your human employees terribly with the assumption that robots will be available once you burnt all those bridges.

We all know Amazon doesn't actually hire these warehouse workers, they use shell firms, aka 'staffing agencies.' Bloomberg is obviously perpetuating false positive talking points for Amazon here.

Personally, I don't think robotic picking arms are going to solve any problems, only introduce new ones.

> Upon learning the starting pay was $18.25 an hour, the man said he couldn’t afford to pay rent on that wage.

Yeah, that was a fair wage back in 2005. It's a starvation wage in most metros today. But, we need to learn as a society to not just walk off when we hear this. Always, always accept the job. This will keep them from actually fulfilling the job since they're planning on you working there.

> But, we need to learn as a society to not just walk off when we hear this. Always, always accept the job. This will keep them from actually fulfilling the job since they're planning on you working there.

What does this mean?

Accept the job, never show up. It's petty, but when the system is rigged sometimes petty is the only viable "fuck you" left

I should've guessed from the "as a society" that it was something like that. Thanks.

it means accept the offer but no call no show on your first day. this could be a serious inconvenience for a small business, but it's not going to impact the operations of an FC unless a lot of people do it.

It sounds like they are saying take the job and then don't show up? Cause this will cause them an inconvenience? I don't know if that is a good approach OR maybe I also don't understand what they meant.

Churn is too high at AMZN. Just work for a few years until your stock options are fully vested and exit.

That stopped being a valid strategy after the stock split. Now the only reason to keep working there (in the warehouses at least) is benefits and peak season income.

Does anyone have statistics or thoughts if unionization is also fueling robots ?

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