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Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

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Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#151
post #6

I've always wondered about this, at Amazon and also at Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc... They seem to burn through people quite fast. Won't they all just run out of people at some point, or will just increasing pay bring enough people back?

They can only increase pay so much before they have to increase their fees beyond the point people are willing to pay them. As an anecdote, I have completely stopped using DoorDash because they recently increased their fees to a level that I consider to be absurd.

DoorDash costs have always been absurd, they just hide a lot of it by pricing the food higher than it normally is.

I've noticed our grocery delivery services doing that, too, giving us prices on items that are higher than they are if you go to the store yourself. We'll stop using them soon. It's bullshit. Delivery costs ought to be transparent.

[EDIT] Oh, and places like pizza joints that already had delivery service are starting to get a lot more aggressive about differentiating delivery vs. pick-up pricing. They've long had a deal or two at a time that's carry-out only, but now it's all the decent deals, and even some deals specify that they'll be less-good if you order delivery. Delivery can easily be 40% more expensive than carry-out, as a result, because they also still charge the delivery fees they all started tacking on a decade or so ago (which are also higher, now) and you still, despite already potentially paying $10+ more than you would have for carry-out, have to tip, because most of that money's not making it to the delivery driver.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#154
I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere.

The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#155
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really what the article says - Amazon's enforced-churn policy leads to workers that want to continue working there being fired for no good reason.

You could argue the reason is that they weren’t good enough.

>" You could argue the reason is that they weren’t good enough. "

This is a valid possibility. However, companies that enforce churn through up-or-out and stack ranking tend to end up treating employees ruthlessly in order to satisfy the system. There are no shortage of stories where managers and individuals backstab and sabotage each other so that they aren't automatically fired as part of the culling process. There are plenty of 'just fine' employees out there, yet companies like Amazon act like everyone needs to be above average.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#156

There's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of workers wanting to work for Amazon.

Just have to reply to recruiters saying you don't want to work for a company with forced attrition and they shut up.

They don't try to correct me and say they aren't doing it anymore, they just cease communication.

Makes you wonder why they still do such barbaric practices as forced attrition

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#158
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason why these types of megacorps support mass immigration, it provides a steady stream of desperate people they can exploit. Those from other countries also might lack the collective cultural knowledge to stay away.

I hadn't really thought before about how left-wing folks typically want higher wages as well as more mass immigration which inherently suppresses wages. In their defense, they want raises waged by law rather than by market (an elevated minimum wage would raise wages irrespective of immigration), but considering how unlikely a minimum federal wage hike is, it seems like they're pursuing two contradictory goals. EDIT:…

I'm just a supporter of equity. If your country have a FTA with another country, people from either country should be able to emigrate/immigrate between the two at will. If your country has a quota trade agreement with another country, you can do quotas as long as those respect a relationship with production quota.

I find France, UK and US comportements towards their colonies ('trade partners') unjust.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#159
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just delivery or warehouse). You have the notorious NYT article from 2015 (the article mentions this): https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... The online perception is that it has only gotten worse. It doesn't take much to find stories on teamblind, twitter, reddit, or even hacker…

I have a friend that works in an Amazon data center and he describes the work environment as “Have you seen any of the hunger games movies?”

When I interviewed for Amazon, they had an online screen that was basically asking which employee should be fired based on the metrics in a table. I'm all for firing bad employees, productivity matters, but it does seem like the culture promotes looking for people to fire.

Re: Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

#160
This is the sign of a extremely unhealthy place to work

> But attrition at Amazon’s facilities in the area grew from 128 percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020

I can see business papers talking about Amazon's failure in this space in the next 5 years.

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