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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

#201

Post by hotpotamus »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #184
alangibson wrote: post #22

The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end. https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...

The Fed has shown they cannot plan 3 years in the future. The odds they won't find an excuse to reverse course within 3 years seems low. They talked about reducing the balance sheet for almost a decade and barely made a dent before more than doubling it during the Pandemic. I will be shocked if in 5 years the Fed's balance sheet isn't substantially higher than it is now.

I've also found it quite hard to predict things, especially about the future. So I have a hard time being mad at the fed on that account.

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

#203

Post by kvathupo »

lisper wrote: post #119

I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effo…

I'm curious if Amazon retail was equally efficient in the past, say the early 2000s. Was warehouse management the same?

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

#204

Post by Dave_Rosenthal »

surement wrote: post #192
throw0101a wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost […] Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies

While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these empirical studies are ridiculous. Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. The studies about the price elasticity of labor also don't b…

I tend to agree with this conventional Econ 101 wisdom, but your comment got me wondering if raising the minimum wage would have an effect of driving people to build skills and push harder. I.e. think of a minimum wage as the government saying to workers, ‘Hey, if you want to be part of this economy, you better be at least X productive.’

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

#205

Post by vlunkr »

ipaddr wrote: post #185
SecondTimeAgain wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're going to fire people to make up the cost of not being able to hire people? Maybe I'm not understanding you're comment.

The comment was insightful. One part of the company raises wages the other fires to increase profitability and reduce headcount. Both groups get a bonus and the group in charge of productivity get culled. Welcome to 2022

But then the warehouses are understaffed... Not sure that's a win

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

#206

Post by dgfitz »

treeman79 wrote: post #68
no_wizard wrote: post #9

This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too

Yep. They keep messaging me. Could double my salary and not a chance I would work there. I know some recent grads that are starting there however. I miss the days when I was young totally clueless about corporate or political values and I just wanted to program stuff. Was so much easier.

> corporate or political values

If you think any company has any real values beyond "make as much money as possible" you're doing yourself a disservice.

I would never work for amazon because I refuse to grind leetcode, but in an odd way they're almost the most honest about their mission being to make money.

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

#207

Post by corrral »

SoftTalker wrote: post #163
youessayyyaway wrote: post #81

I think this article might bury the lede a bit: >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/…

Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.

This is nonsense unless you're ready to go deeper on what "true" and "natural" mean here. Beware: it'll be easy to run into tautology.

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

#208

Post by kennywinker »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #188
kennywinker wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a 29.28% increase from 2020. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/gross-...

There is no reason to ignore fixed costs (aka using “gross profit”) for the purpose of calculating how much extra cash a company could be paying its employees. Net income (aka profit) is the extra cash flow that could have been spent.

> Net income (aka profit) is the extra cash flow that could have been spent.

It's possible gross profit is the wrong metric, but the premise that net income is the right metric isn't something I accept. Net income is the money left over after it's been allocated out as the company has chosen. i.e. all the salaries have been paid, stock grants have been made, buildings and utilities are all paid, stock buybacks have been allocated, etc

If they allocated a little less to exec pay, and a little more to warehouse worker pay, I don't even think they'd need to cut into the 33B they have leftover.

But EVEN if we accept the compensation amazon has and only allow ourselves to play with net income - 33B is STILL $20k per employee. Do you know how life-changing $5k/year is when you're making 29k/year? That still leaves 15K of profit per employee (or 25B) that can go to people who didn't work for it.

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

#209

Post by abfan1127 »

esaym wrote: post #187
kzrdude wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.

>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line. I am…

would you prefer they not tell those people about the available benefits?

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

#210

Post by cbsmith »

esaym wrote: post #187
kzrdude wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.

>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line. I am…

If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA, which the HR team will discuss during almost any company's new-hire orientation...

There are lots of government benefits that are restricted to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so that they can take advantage of it.

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