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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

#321

Post by astrange »

jandrese wrote: post #51
retrocryptid wrote: post #24

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 ha…

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

I hope so, since hiring "the best" is not a good strategy, it means you never hire any juniors. ("meritocracy" is also a bad idea and the word was invented for a book about how it doesn't work.)

As for hiring "the worst", I guess there's those companies founded to give ex-convicts honest work.

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

#322

Post by samcal »

a3n wrote: post #189
dragonwriter wrote: post #169

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? Wait, does “logistics” include warehouse, where the article mentions they had reached 150% annual turnover prepandemic? Sounds a lot like “leaving in droves”.

Yeah, they're leaving in droves. They're also arriving in droves, which is why Amazon has been able to withstand 150% turnover. But Amazon is now worried that they've worn out much of the US workforce available for "industrial athlete"positions. (Their term.) The droves of arrivals may slow down to dribbles.

"Arriving in droves" is much more telling about the external conditions of the job market. I think it's safe to say that it sounds like a good gig before you have a good understanding of what the work is. Then, after working for less than a year you see it for what it is and get out of there.

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

#323

Post by astrange »

kevstev wrote: post #156
jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #69

With the stack-ranking/hire-to-fire stuff, on-call load, and hilariously backloaded vesting schedule, why do people want to work there? It seems like such a minefield.

I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic? I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile…

> I headed on the flight back with zero interest in working with that team, though I did love the dog friendly culture.

I remember reading a blog about working at Amazon that was mostly about how they hated the dog friendly culture and couldn't get any accommodation for being allergic to dogs.

The reputation of Amazon as somewhere you go out of college and then quit after 2 years has been around a while, maybe about as long as the one about Google having impossible interviews.

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

#324

Post by state_less »

testing_1_2_3_4 wrote: post #300
55555 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their retail business is still in a tiny portion of the world.

not to mention continued cloud growth, not just as a market, but the AWS share of that growing market.

I’m not seeing estimates of Amazon at 5x larger business (revenue). Estimates have Amazon at ~2x revenue ($850ish B) in five years and earnings growth slower than current levels. Folks think they’ll grow, just not quite as fast.

We’ll see. I think it’s going to be hard to maintain today’s growth rate at this size.

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

#325

Post by astrange »

intricatedetail wrote: post #44

It's modern slavery. You can't explain the fact that most workers can't even afford to save for a deposit for a small flat and at the same time company is boasting about making billions and avoiding taxes. They tell workers this lie that the salary they get is adequate to the value they produce. This is despicable. These companies should be forced to pay fairly and pay all the taxes.

When the number of houses is fixed, the price of a house is infinite, so of course you can't save for it. The solution is to build more houses, not give everyone a raise.

Also Amazon is not dodging state income taxes because Washington doesn't have a state income tax.

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

kapp_in_life wrote: post #193
VRay wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work. I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a…

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by codezero »

chris11 wrote: post #232
codezero wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different reason, the promise that you’re on a rocket ship that is pre-initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the lottery. Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not th…

> Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.

I don’t understand. In fast moving small companies (Can you maybe give me an example, or something concrete to root your statement in?

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

#328

Post by planet-and-halo »

acituan wrote: post #303
maybelsyrup wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As they say in The Wire, "The whole world shines shit and calls it gold."

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

#329

Post by Causality1 »

acituan wrote: post #307
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…

Yes. Once I passed a certain threshold of comfortable income, and it was certainly less than anything to be found in Silicon Valley, money stopped being any motivation to me at all. What's the point of going from "comfortable plus ten percent" to "comfortable plus five hundred percent"? That's not worth one single headache, let alone a mental breakdown.

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

#330

Post by acituan »

unethical_ban wrote: post #316
acituan wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Oh, come on. The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment. Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

> Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer.

> The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others

Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.

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