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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as a developer at Amazon.com, what contractors? I've never met any, and I only have heard of one who left a while ago.

Edit later: Developer contractors at least. I mean, sure, cleaning staff are contractors/temps.

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I mean, sure, cleaning staff are contractors/temps.

Obviously people like that don't deserve any kind of job security and should be fired annually.

/sarcasm

Those uppity cleaning staff better not get the balls and gall to make a blog on-line about it either!

I find at Amazon that the close you are to the core business, the better you get treated. The engineers seem to be very well compensated and get benefits and shit because they make the company what it is. I hate to break it to you, but the people who empty the bins are not essential. They should still be treated with the same respect as any human being, but you are absolutely smoking rocks if you think that Amazon has any incentive to give a shit about them.

I have no notion that they're essential to the business in any way. But firing people after 11 months just to avoid a deeper employment relationship is a terrible way to treat people.

I agree that I would hate to be in a temporary employment-type position, but ultimately it's what the market will bear. Amazon doesn't spend money it doesn't feel like it has too, which unfortunately makes its priorities crystal clear in terms of employment. If Amazon has no incentives to hire these people full time, they won't. It's pretty simple.

I think having people willing to clean up after others and keep the environment tidy and hygienic offers a lot of value.

They do, but there are a lot more people asking for that job than for the engineering jobs.

I agree, having been one of those people. I just meant that those jobs are not so specialized that it's hard to find other people if you fire your existing cleaners regularly; unfortunately there are more people who need the money than can afford to give such unethical employers a wide berth.

It's likely government regulation that forces them to choose between letting them go or paying them more.

Well, we can't possibly go giving people raises after almost a year of productive work. Next thing they'll be wanting holidays and sick leave. Seriously, what does a low-level employee have to do to get treated as something more than an expendable labor unit?

> The engineers seem to be very well compensated...

As an ex-engineer at Amazon, unless they drastically changed things, their compensation did not seem to be anything special, compared to what one can get at other companies. Their "benefits" were laughable.

Around how much does an SDEII make at this time there?

Yea, I'm sure that's what he meant. /sarcasm

I remember a receptionist in a UK office complaining about the cleaning contractors the company was using. When I asked why they hadn't changed she mentioned there is apparently some union set up so that when you 'fire' the contractor, the new cleaners that you get are actually the same people, hired under a new contract.

They aren't temps, they're staff of an outside janitorial company. How they staff up I have no idea.

Valid criticism. I'd prefer to see them as full time, but I think most large companies today use contacted companies for cleaning staff, etc. It's what it is, and that whole problem is bigger than just one company.

I've been a dev at Amazon. They don't hire devs as contractors. They hire the people that support the devs. Testers, validators, vetters, etc. If you need someone to manually poke, prod, click on a button all day long, they hire temps for that. The testers for our app were temps, same thing with the people that would click the "approve" button on user submitted images or uploads.

This is not correct. I left Amazon last year after 3 years. I had a temp sit besides me for about 1 year. He did the same job as a SDE-2 would do. He worked for a team writing software for inventory management, my team worked in the same space. A month after he left, my manager asked me if I knew anyone who would be a good fit. I immediately mentioned his name based on what I had seen for over an year. I never heard back again.

Amazon has less then stellar hiring practices even for full time employees. From personal experience in no particular order (a) low balling new hires in salary and position (b) bar raiser ego trips and (c) if it isn't my answer it isn't the right answer.

I have also seen an engineer promoted to Principal for having accomplished nothing during the entire year (imo), and another principal say to me, why would anyone who has an offer from Google ever pick Amazon.

Presumably this person was annotating movies with which actors were on screen when, and possibly where in the frame.

My org hires contract for various understaffed projects. Often for SDET. Sometimes they make a transition to full time.

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