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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

#301

Post by wildfire »

throw8881 wrote: post #254
int_19h wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I know quite a few people from FAANG and associated companies, and those coming from Amazon are consistently the most unhappy about work there. So, while this may not be universal inside the company, Amazon definitely does have a problem compared to the industry at large.

I will offer my perspective, and this is not to disparage or dispute anyone else's experience at Amazon or any other company. Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon. I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce. Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic prob…

No, your experience does not represent a systemic problem.

It represents your lived experience.

(I'd also say that with only three different company cultures that you have personally expirenced, your perspective is skewed).

What you are missing is that you do not see similar news reports about (say) Google, Netflix, etc. Sure there will always be individual stories in any organisation but the fact that there are *continual* stories about Amazon in all areas (blue collar, white collar) indicates that this is a systemic, widespread problem that they are either unaware of (unlikely) or do not care about.

Whether it is not caring (probably) or unawareness you have to be worried if an organisation like Amazon is this complacent.

[ note: I work at AWS, and I've experienced all this bullshit from the inside. When people I know ask me for a referral in, I tell them to run away. I'm looking to leave shortly ]

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

#303

Post by acituan »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #158
plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's li…

> a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear

Fantastic analogy. The same fundamentalist narrow-mindedness only about "growth at all costs"; no regard to content of that growth. Just make the stock go up.

Kind of like King Midas wanting to make everything gold. No regard to the interiority of the objects, nor their real use. Just make them gold on the outside.

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

#304

Post by wildfire »

throw8881 wrote: post #217
ferdowsi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where management or executives literally count people's commits. Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people…

There are lies, damned lies and CRUX statistics.

EVERY manager I've interacted with at Amazon looks at CRUX statistics -- it is the actual reason that they exist.

My current manage (5 year badge employee btw) is counting my code. We are both L6s and he has shared with me the various target CR each level is expect to do (per week).

For L6 it is 4 (in the AWS org) per week.

The leadership principals also say "hire and develop the best", which ought to mean that they would be doing the damnedest to keep people.

But they don't. I've seen three people Pivoted in the last 6 months -- two of them had been with Amazon (AWS) for over 4 years.

These people did not "suddenly" become bad, or shit at their job, or etc. What happened is that they were stacked ranked, and they were at the bottom. The job was, and remains, exactly the same.

Which is why stack ranking is stupid. Same job. Same person. One year you are meeting the bar. The next you are the worst at it.

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

#305

Post by retrocryptid »

Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type of rank-and-yank. Employees were ranked in their group and across the board. And then those rankings were used to compare engineers across teams.

The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses.

Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses.

We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention.

Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.

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

#306

Post by wildfire »

joshe wrote: post #43

The problem with stack ranking at places like microsoft was twofold. First small team managers were forced to rank their reports, and each manager had to get rid of the bottom 10% each year. If you had 20 employees you had to fire 2 employees each year. But statistics doesn't work like that, there were many microsoft teams with all productive employees. And there were probably teams where 30% of the group should have…

Amazon managers have a "hire to fire" philosphy.

That makes it way easier to meet an URA target.

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

#307

Post by acituan »

plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.

I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.

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

#308

Post by astrange »

TFortunato wrote: post #146
civilian wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?

On top of what other folks said, the warehouse folks not getting stock is a fairly recent development (2018, when minimum wage was raised). They do have a shockingly high turnover rate, but not sure if there is much that can be said about that relating to stock price currently, given how soon it's been since their stock comp went away, combined with the general strangeness of the Covid-19 pandemic https://www.cnbc.co…

Getting your salary raised is probably a better deal. I don't think you can fund a stock purchase program at those wages (obviously you can take RSUs though) and the main effect might be they have to pay for Turbotax.

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

#309

Post by retrocryptid »

plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

You'll find plenty of people who will leave a profitable company or a lucrative position if they value intangibles over cash.

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

#310

Post by strikhedonia »

koheripbal wrote: post #236
outside1234 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, they are already leaving in droves.

No, they are not. Amazon logistics employees get paid significantly higher than any other blue collar job in the region.

.. and significantly less than other logistics workers.
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