Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by jodrellblank » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

PKop wrote: post #137

_dqna wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's zero sum. You're hurting your fellow citizens by diluting their labor. You may think this is a righteous position, but from the perspective of a nationalist, you are strictly harming not helping your fellow countrymen, and therefore you set yourself up as their enemy. >only cares about And the prosperity of their own country. It is "selfish" yes. But a selfishness that extends out to their kin and their neighbor…

> "You're hurting your fellow citizens by diluting their labor"

No more so than having children and growing the population that way, which is a concept the right generally supports ("family values", "pro life").

> "you are strictly harming not helping your fellow countrymen"

It's not like the right do things to help fellow countrymen; taking away rights ("pro choice"), scorning single mothers instead of helping them and their children, demonizing social welfare users as 'welfare queens', opposing 'free' healthcare, oppising livable wages, remove unions and removing the bargaining power workers would need to have good wages otherwise, worsening education and making it less accessible and more expensive. The society their actions move towards is one where wealthy people live off the back of a working class who grind for money and die when they aren't productive anymore, along with a militarised police force acting to keeps the poors in line, and a 'justice' system which lets the rich away without punishment. And you can see it in action when Texas power fails and Ted Cruz takes his family on holiday, or the needlessly cruel treatment the UK Conservative Party's Department for Work and Pensions does to disabled people.

Nationalism isn't "help fellow citizens", it's "given a region drawn on a map, inside good, outside bad".

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

#222

Post by kube-system » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

kvathupo wrote: post #203

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?

Amazon wasn't a logistics expert from day one, they've learned a lot over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckmbVpG390

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

#223

Post by treeman79 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

dgfitz wrote: post #206

treeman79 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m totally happy to work for a place that wants to make as much money as possible. That is a great thing.

Making as much money as possible by milking the government or using the government to regulate your competitors things is another matter

Only allowing one voice in politics is super dangerous.

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

#224

Post by iinnPP » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

azemetre wrote: post #83

mtnGoat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he says it’s the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He’s in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn’t understand…

I don't need many sides of a story when there is one damning example of a human needing to see a medical professional then getting fired shortly after because no leader at Amazon took 5 seconds to think if this was compassionate or not. Why should I give Amazon the benefit of the doubt when they have proven time and time again to be actively hostile and dehumanizing? Maybe we should expect Amazon to not treat their f…

I've worked ~5 low skill jobs that meet this description. It is the norm, not the exception. At least in Canada.

Jobs advertised as permanent full-time where they can you on the last day they are allowed to are also very common.

Also, my co-workers at these jobs were 90% lazy slobs who did maybe 25% of the load I would while getting paid the same amount. No amount of write ups would alter their behaviour.

I'm blessed, truly, to have escaped poverty.

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

#225

Post by bcassedy » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

azemetre wrote: post #83

mtnGoat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he says it’s the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He’s in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn’t understand…

I don't need many sides of a story when there is one damning example of a human needing to see a medical professional then getting fired shortly after because no leader at Amazon took 5 seconds to think if this was compassionate or not. Why should I give Amazon the benefit of the doubt when they have proven time and time again to be actively hostile and dehumanizing? Maybe we should expect Amazon to not treat their f…

It's also short sighted right?

This was a successful worker that missed a few days of work with a medical issue, boom fired. And then we see memos like this lamenting that they can't get enough workers? By not accepting some productivity dips due to human nature, they're shrinking their labor pool both by removing people from it directly and with the sentiment generated by the bad press of their inhumane treatment of workers.

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

#226

Post by formercoder » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #201

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anyone that worked at the fed could predict the future, they wouldn’t work at the fed.

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

#227

Post by mirker » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

abfan1127 wrote: post #209

esaym wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I think the point is Walmart is able to pay at a low enough rate that it must be effectively subsidized by the government. Walmart then plays into it as a further benefit “they” provide.

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

#228

Post by cbsmith » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

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…

> Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.

You're presuming it's a binary choice; consider the systemic effect might not make it a binary choice.

Let's accept that it is a binary choice, then no, it's not necessarily better to be making a low wage, because that presumes a value for your time that is effectively zero. In truth, with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself, provide yourself with shelter, etc., and when you are working you can't do that stuff. Let's assume though that one wouldn't take a wage that was a net direct loss like this, there's still the possibility that a low wage might be tactically beneficial, but strategically & systemically quite harmful.

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

#229

Post by bsedlm » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

blagie wrote: post #182

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/…

Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries: 1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go? 2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competi…

It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side.

Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...

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

#230

Post by maherbeg » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

sefrost wrote: post #66

7ewis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job compared to other big tech companies.

I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time. They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the interviews puts me off from engaging.

I recommend asking them to take you off of their recruiting lists. They'll still contact you but way less frequently.