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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

#271

Post by SMAAART »

OK, give me some latitude when reading this comment, while I have been thinking about it for a while, it's still a bit raw.

For starters Amazon's policy is similar to GE's in the 90's, where every year they would let go the bottom 10% of the workforce.

Either way, we need to decide whether the part of the workforce that is let go are bad workers or a mismatch with the company.

I want to believe that there are very few bad workers, and that the majority of cases are a question of mismatch.

If that's the case, parting way is the best outcome for both the company and the workers; so that they can both move on and seek metter match.

Maybe we need to embrace more this practice, and - AT THE SAME TIME - fix the hiring process that is broken beyond belief.

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

#272

Post by brutus1213 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #140
dcolkitt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In microeconomics, it’s a pretty foundational tenet that wages normalize to marginal worker productivity.

I don't remember that from any of my microeconomic courses. I mean, maybe you mean society wide (aka macro), but that's only as average worker productivity rises, and has nothing to do with particularly efficient single firms.

Simple thought experiment. Firms will continue to hire until wage = marginal productivity .. otherwise, you leave money on the table. Usual BS assumptions on perfect information/competition, cetrus paribus, and all that stuff.

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

#273

Post by DesiLurker »

habibur wrote: post #2

So what's the problem? Is that unethical or illegal?

no problems unless you are willing to be upfront about it and pay a premium for this 'feature'. Its highly unethical otherwise, especially for immigrants who may be putting their legal status in jeopardy. Cynical part of me suspects they want to use this kind of engineers to create work-slave like culture for everybody.

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

#274

Post by brutus1213 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #60
decafninja wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having Amazon on your resume probably opens many doors. True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though. If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on…

If you can pass Amazon's interview you can pass any other fang's interview which will give you the same CV prestige with probably less hassle. The only people I know who went to Amazon picked it just because it was the only fang they passed at and they didn't want to bother doing another round of interviews or wait for the cooldown period. Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems…

I am not sure why but I always assumed Amazon was easier to get into than Google, Facebook and Netflix. Microsoft/LinkedIn is probably same difficulty as Amazon. Just anecdotes and people I know I guess.

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

#275

Post by alpha_squared »

A friend with a background in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology was hired at Amazon a few years back and was shocked to discover the 10% turnover rate. As they shared, they took it upon themselves to find a better way to manage turnover and have a better performance assessment system. They implemented it and brielfy reduced turnover to 3%; until Bezos intervened and explicitly asked for at least 6% turnover. For someone with a background in I/O psych and interest in improving worker well-being, it was soul-crushing and they soon left.

It appears HR is also helpless in improving conditions, the turnover goals actually came down from the top. It's possible this changes with Bezos gone, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

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

#276

Post by bostonsre »

koheripbal wrote: post #236
outside1234 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, they are already leaving in droves.

No, they are not. Amazon logistics employees get paid significantly higher than any other blue collar job in the region.

Someone else posted this in response to a similar comment further down:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...

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

#277

Post by maybelsyrup »

pedrosorio wrote: post #253
rejectedandsad wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.

> for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class Wait, what?

I was curious about the first bit - the lower social class stuff is mostly right, I think, because of the huge gap between national narrative and reality on US socioeconomic mobility [0].

[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20162015

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

#278

Post by shados »

ferdowsi wrote: post #130
lakevieew wrote: post #111

I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

Its unfortunately pretty common. Measuring perf that way is bullshit.

It is, however, still a useful signal. It should never be how the final decision is made, but in orgs where managers have way too many reports (which is a separate problems), it can accelerate things a bit.

Eg: look at the team's or orgs LoC/Commits over a long period of time in similar roles (long enough to smooth out outliers). Then if someone is DRASTICALLY underperforming (like, 1/10th of the output), you don't jump to conclusion. You starts looking at the code itself and ask questions about the projects, get opinions from the rest of the team, etc. Stuff you should be doing ANYWAY, but with a little more focus.

Based on -those- data points, then you can start making a judgement call. But yeah, any manager who stops at the SLOC or number of commits to make perf decisions is awful.

I actually worked with a manager who used number of commits exclusively. He also did not know about squash + merge workflows. So people who squashed would get in trouble and those who didn't would get raises until someone in the team finally figured out which metrics he was actually using. That was so sad...

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

#279

Post by shados »

seahawks78 wrote: post #215
slumpt_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morons at Google do it, too. I knew a manager who wore a suit to every fucking meeting, and would make a point to bring up IC’s CL counts and lines of code changed during calibration / promo review. He still works there and likely has sway over the careers of countless more competent individuals than himself. Quitting Google was the best decision I ever made. Good teams are outnumbered by shitty teams with shitty man…

Really!!! I am surprised to hear this. I always thought that Google is akin to "Chocolate factory" for programmers where programmer is the king and each and every decision is made by programmers. In my circle, Google is considered to be the final nirvana and a Software Engineer badge the ultimate status of "you made it in life". Even I found their coding interviews so damn hard. In my opinion, they are at least 5-10x…

It used to be, long ago. Lots of other places caught up and they went down.

Of course, like any very large companies, it's going to be fragmented. Some groups at Google are really that awesome. Some are awful.

It's no longer "the place to be" for the top engineers though who will frequently pick other places, though it does look good on your resume.

For the interview being harder, they give you a flier that tells you almost exactly what they're going to ask, and they expect you to prep specifically for those things, so it's a lot more of a test of will than a test of skill. If you "really want to get a job there", you just cram your head with whatever the PDF says you should know and repeat it during the interview and you should be in. It's of course not that simple for people with personal situations that prevent them from just cramming reading material, and they're somewhat famous in some circles for discrimination (especially gender based, from anecdotal evidence).

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

#280

Post by gergi »

subsubzero wrote: post #249
bob33212 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you, and just for context, I have spent 600k on AWS over the past 3 years, when I could have spent it on Azure. I don't think AWS should be shut down.

I absolutely don't believe AWS should be shut down. I do think AWS and Amazon(retailer) should be split up, and thats what a majority of sensible people believe.

Source? I consider myself “sensible”, do not agree with this statement, and haven’t seen any data that would suggest the “majority” would agree.
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