Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers • Hacker News Board

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#21

Post by HarryHirsch » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

retrocryptid wrote: post #17

xibalba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

By what measure of productivity?

The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#22

Post by matz1 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

I don't think it matter much, for many people few years in Amazon is worth it, in term of financial benefit/future job.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#23

Post by void_mint » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

xibalba wrote: post #20

retrocryptid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure of productivity?

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees.

Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#24

Post by retrocryptid » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

Also... Amazon likes to say they hire "the best." And I think they do hire reasonably good people. But I saw a lot of situations where people were just plain in the wrong job. Like people who were DevOps experts getting shuffled into DB programming jobs. Or one guy from Romania who was an excellent coder -- would crank out reams of well documented, clearly laid out, well architected C++ code. But most of what they had him doing was writing shell scripts to set environment variables for containers as they launched. I don't think he minded -- he was happy to have a job. But I kept seeing a lot of things like this and thinking "damn, what a waste of talent."

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#25

Post by dimitrios1 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

xibalba wrote: post #20

retrocryptid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure of productivity?

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what point do we qualify productivity with some measure of quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces quality. For all the laurels and new features and gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings or new Amazon products are considered best in class.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#26

Post by retrocryptid » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

xibalba wrote: post #20

retrocryptid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure of productivity?

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

and then you divide it by # of employees and get something kind of low.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#27

Post by julianeon » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years?

1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#28

Post by retrocryptid » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #21

retrocryptid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure of productivity?

The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.

How does AWS advance the state of the art with undocumented services that frequently fail? I'm not a big fan of Azure, but at least they document their services.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#29

Post by xibalba » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #21

retrocryptid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure of productivity?

The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.

The size and growth of AWS' customer base and financial success is a very strong counterargument to your claims. Is it possible you are confusing your personal preferences for the goals of the AWS business? AWS may seek to advance the state of the art, but this is not the end goal, per se, but rather one factor that may or may not achieve the end goal. The end goal is more customers and greater revenue and profit.

> someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team

Customers don't care all that much why AWS "works". They care that it "works". And, again, it "working" is not their end goal. Rather, AWS "working" is yet another means to an end.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#30

Post by retrocryptid » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

julianeon wrote: post #27

This rate seems high. They're pushing 1 out of 3 people (30%) out of their workforce every 5 years. Is that sustainable over the course of, say, 20 years? 1-2 percent, I could understand. But I would think the labor force simply isn't large enough for this to work, long term, at this high rate.

There's the "old fart" tool internally that tells you how many people were hired after you. I think after 9 months or so, I was senior to 30% of the corporate jobs. After 12, I was senior to 50%.