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

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

#91

Post by ipaddr »

sokoloff wrote: post #72
plank_time wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. This is well documented behavior, even in Jack Welch’s book. He was the one famous for cutting 5% every year at GE.

At Amazon*, the "bar raiser" has to approve the hire though, so there's a pretty mechanistic control against the worst form of this. * - as I understand it; never worked there.

At Amazon you still hire good people you just mark them poorly because you don't want to break up your team.

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

#92

Post by TheHypnotist »

weimerica wrote: post #66
jandrese wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there ever been a company that doesn't say they hire "only the best"?

Work for a public utility... lack of talented employees was stated explicit in the interview.

Having worked for a public utility, there is a fair share of mediocre people but worse yet there are people in management positions who are entirely incompetent and can't recognize/don't know what to do with good talent. Funny enough, some of those people ended up working for Amazon.

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

#93

Post by ipaddr »

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.

Customer lifetime value for non-prime members is under $1,000, $2300 for prime. Not exactly the leader.

Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.

End price reduction? Amazon is rarely the cheapest.

Employee headcount, is more or less better?

Things always seem rosier.

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

#94

Post by ipaddr »

influx wrote: post #32
dimitrios1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What cloud provider is better than AWS?

By price? All of them

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

#95

Post by w0mbat »

So what is the percentage of people that must be purged every year at Amazon? Does that goal vary by country?

I've seen people quote 5%, 6%, 15% and even 30%. The 30% number was in the Amazon India post that was high-ranking here yesterday.

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

#96

Post by HWR_14 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #79
Frost1x wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects. I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just…

Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies. So, I would say that an engineer working at a high…

> Generally, compensation is pretty closely tied to revenue per employee. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb.

I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true nor see any evidence of that in practice.

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

#97

Post by yawaworht1978 »

While this is not the most popular imaginable method of selection, at least every hire gets a reasonably good chance to survive and will have the prestigious entry on the cv. As for the 6 percent, most companies have more than that in every department. Usually people who only survive by brown nosing the right people or being friends with a manager.

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

#98

Post by spoonjim »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #25
xibalba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IKEA produces excellent quality for the price. People who think it's low quality usually don't glue it together or attach it to the wall when appropriate.

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

#99

Post by mxvzr »

danuker wrote: post #83
arkitaip wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not can, actively is. If you as as manager know that you have to fire x% of your employees no matter how good they are as a whole, you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the company is literally wasting millions each year because Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea that…

> you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Wouldn't the most valued people get retained at the end, whether the new hires were "hired to fire"? If so, a manager has no incentive to do bad hires.

My understanding is that even once the manager has filled their team with top performers they'll keep hiring every year for the sole purpose of firing them later in order to meet the quota

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

#100

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

danuker wrote: post #83
arkitaip wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not can, actively is. If you as as manager know that you have to fire x% of your employees no matter how good they are as a whole, you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Also, because each hire costs thousands of dollars, the company is literally wasting millions each year because Bezos had this dangerously ignorant and dehumanizing idea that…

> you are always going to hire certain people just so you can fire them in order to protect your most valued people. Wouldn't the most valued people get retained at the end, whether the new hires were "hired to fire"? If so, a manager has no incentive to do bad hires.

Uhh.. no. I don't know if you ever hired or fired anyone, but, in US at least, if you don't want your unemployment insurance to go up, you want to be able to prove that it was a firing for cause. Perversely, in Amazon case what this means that manager has to hire an employee just bad enough that the 'for cause' firing will be ready for him and he/she just needs to document it.

I fail to understand how people do not see how this simple metric can be gamed. Am I the only person thinking in those weird terms imposed by the system?

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