An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
11–20 of 178 posts
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#12Did this person actually go ahead and apply for any other full time jobs that were on offer on the amazon job site? I have seen this before where people expected to be presented full time jobs, when all they needed was a little prodding to go through the hoop jumping and formally apply.
A few of the temps, who had been on the project since X-Ray’s inception, applied for the now vacant position of project manager. I was convinced the position would be filled by one of two individuals who had trained me and acted as point people for questions and concerns when the manager was in a meeting. None of the temps who applied for the position got it, which most of us on the team found confusing because they were basically already doing the job.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#13This is rather strange if it is accurate. Everywhere I've worked where they hired contractors as developers, the company always preferred contract-to-hire, assuming the person worked out well. I've had two jobs that way, 6-12 month contract to full-time regular employee. The only time people didn't transition to full-time is if they sucked, basically a 6-month interview. And sometimes they would go full-time even if…
In one organization where I was a manager, our HR policies limited the contractors we hired to 'two terms,' 36 months. If I wanted to keep that person on staff, I would have to wait 12 months before I could bring them back. The result: The really good people I WANTED on my staff could not keep any longer than three years.
Did the HR people ever provide any rationale for this? I mean, I know that hiring people full-time creates a bunch of additional costs and liabilities. But did they ever quantify what those costs would be, so that you could weigh them against the projected benefit of a hire, not to mention the opportunity cost of cutting someone loose and hiring a new person, with the resultant drop in productivity?
I mean, it's not going to get better until HR people and CFOs are called on the carpet for poor decision-making in a situation like that.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#14I used to work at Amazon, and this is disturbing, but not really surprising.
A focus on cost instead of value is a core element at Amazon. I ultimately left because what could be described as a failure to recognize value over the actual cost. 5 years of controlling high-value but high-cost things left my department with a shredded staff. By the time the economy was improving in the 2006-8 timeframe, nearly all my colleagues left.
And these were people at the TOP of the foodchain - senior full time software engineers.
Unfortunately Bezos is more lucky than a skilled manager. He has some useful values, mostly around being frugal, that has served the company well. But in a competitive hiring market, one would be making a mistake joining up with Amazon if you had an alternative.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#15Sounds to me like the work his team was doing, annotating films with meta-data, is a stop gap situation. I presume Amazon is working on an automated system based on Mechanical Turk or crowd sourcing to do the annotating.
If this is indeed the case, it would not make sense to hire a full-time team.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#16Speaking 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.
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
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#17A lot of people are jumping to the comments and assuming that the worker is either a developer or a warehouse worker, which makes me assume they didn't finish the article. The OP worked on quality assurance, which is staffed by a lot of contractors because (ideally) the ramp-up time for the position is much smaller than that of an SDE, and a lot of these positions don't last long enough to warrant full-time employment. (That being said, a lot of the full-time QA people start out as contractors.)
The clarion call about the dangers of bad management (and not even "bad" in the Dilbert sense, but "bad" in the "these people are not qualified to do what they need to do" sense) is extremely well-taken. This is why documentation at MegaCorps is so incredibly important, especially with high turnover: if your institutional knowledge is confined to a person, not a wiki or a sharepoint doc, then you're unnecessarily exposing yourself to risk and ruin.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#18An outsider was brought in who knew nothing about X-Ray. I was later told the new manger was hired based on management experience. She spent her first week being trained by one of the temps who had been deemed unqualified for the product manager position. After spending a week training the manager, and being her go-to person for the next three weeks whenever there was a problem, he was let go because he reached the m…
I really wonder how long CEOs and management people in general think this party can go on.
The trouble is, many tech-based industries today have little effective competition in the short term. No-one is going to disrupt Amazon and take over "We own on-line sales for the entire universe" because someone made a dumb hiring decision. No-one is going to beat Google out of the online advertising space because they have terrible customer service.
Sure, they might succeed despite these obvious failings rather than because of them, and they might have succeeded more if they'd been smarter, but in a very real economic sense, success is relative. Until these kinds of screw-ups make a dent in the bottom line that is both significant and clearly visible, there's nothing to drive a change unless something catches the eye of a few people who are very powerful but even more busy.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
In one organization where I was a manager, our HR policies limited the contractors we hired to 'two terms,' 36 months. If I wanted to keep that person on staff, I would have to wait 12 months before I could bring them back. The result: The really good people I WANTED on my staff could not keep any longer than three years.
Did the HR people ever provide any rationale for this? I mean, I know that hiring people full-time creates a bunch of additional costs and liabilities. But did they ever quantify what those costs would be, so that you could weigh them against the projected benefit of a hire, not to mention the opportunity cost of cutting someone loose and hiring a new person, with the resultant drop in productivity? I mean, it's not…
Microsoft got sued in the 90's for not extending retirement plans to its temps. Since then the two track system developed.
Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com
#20Did this person actually go ahead and apply for any other full time jobs that were on offer on the amazon job site? I have seen this before where people expected to be presented full time jobs, when all they needed was a little prodding to go through the hoop jumping and formally apply.
A few of the temps, who had been on the project since X-Ray’s inception, applied for the now vacant position of project manager. I was convinced the position would be filled by one of two individuals who had trained me and acted as point people for questions and concerns when the manager was in a meeting. None of the temps who applied for the position got it, which most of us on the team found confusing because they…
It's been some considerable time, but I spent some time some decades ago working as a temp. In many cases -- institutional and/or individual perspectives -- it's essentially a class system. Regardless of ability, temps are "second class citizens".
Or perhaps we should start to think of it as a "caste" system. Once you are "labelled" at an institution, depending on for whom you're working, your only way out may be to move to a different institution. These days in the U.S., that's not necessarily an easy proposition.
It used to be that many business would hire temporary workers as essentially a "trial" period. If they liked you, you might well be offered a permanent position.
These days, temporary employment has indeed turned for many into a shell game limiting liability and obligation to the employee.
Truly fungible employment.
It can be hard to be rid of that "fungible" label.
"There are people who count, and people who don't."