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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

#271

Post by fugalfervor »

alangibson wrote: post #110
mc32 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those idiots! Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008 was going to blow up one day. Technology and unsubstantiated sectors allowed them to print without repercussions for a while and the administration and them also tried to fool people into believing the inflation was transitory... Reckless idiots. And now wage labor is the one to suffer most. 4TT in spending for BBB? Uhhuh! Even Yellen said it…

It's not the money supply. It's a supply side problem due to Corona shutdowns. All the Fed is about to do is induce a bunch of unemployment.

It's both. There's evidence supporting the idea that COVID relief contributed to inflation, if you'd like I can link the fivethirtyeight article exploring this.

However, I should note that if it were up to me, I would accept inflation to save lives every single time. Without that relief, people would have died, starved, or gone into life-ruining debt. Inflation is unfortunate, but better than the alternative.

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

#272

Post by abakker »

bsedlm wrote: post #229
blagie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures?

look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions.

All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.

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

#273

Post by surement »

dwallin wrote: post #252
surement wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your analysis overly simplifies the matter. For one, this assumes that there is a replacement solution available for the role the employee fills with a cost less than the cost of an employee. This is trivially falsifiable in the large majority of employment situations, if so you would see these solutions already being implemented in places with higher minimum wages. Businesses prefer making some amount $x over $0. So…

An employee that earns an employer $8 in revenue but gets paid $9 is a net loss of $1 to the employer. If x is -1 then $x is not better than $0.

If the employer could raise prices and still be in business, then they would already be doing it. Same thing with lowering costs. As for employee efficiency, yes, if you're forced to pay someone $9 then you will want to get at least $9 out of them. That means you won't hire anyone that's not experienced enough.

> Really what ends up happening in reality is increased costs just get passed along

Not if the employer wants to remain competitive. There are plenty of bigger companies with greater economies of scale that will happily run them out of business.

This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is for things or labor is irrelevant.

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

#274

Post by colinmhayes »

corrral wrote: post #151
jaywalk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have to believe that a large portion of delivery markup is price discrimination. Restaurants have long looked for ways to charge more to people who are willing to pay more, but have been largely unable to because everyone gets the same menu. Delivery provides a convenient way to weed out those that will pay more by letting those who aren't pick up the food themselves.

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

#276

Post by albatross13 »

native_samples wrote: post #143
alangibson wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the money supply. It's a supply side problem due to Corona shutdowns. All the Fed is about to do is induce a bunch of unemployment.

It's both. The money supply grew enormously to fund the Corona shutdowns. You can see it clearly on a graph of M2. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS Such a fast increase in such a short amount of time is extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented. There's nothing even remotely close to that instant increase since the dataset begins at the start of the 1980s. And then the COVID jump didn't only make a huge increa…

Since you seem to know your stuff, can you give me a slight tl;dr on the consequences of M1 and M2?

M1 also shot way up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

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

#277

Post by packetlost »

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

Considering I get an email at least once a week (sometimes more) to join them, I'm not surprised at this. Usually I go out of my way to tell them I'm not interested in working for Amazon in particular.

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

#278

Post by gruez »

kps wrote: post #218
gruez wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? Factoring in margins you need each dollar paid to your workers to generate $6.66 dollars worth of sales for you for it to break even.

> In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? A world where you're raising the floor so that everyone else's workers can also spend on the products your company makes.

...except that won't happen because supply/demand drives prices, not the inflated wages that you're paying. Your competitors will continue to pay their workers the usual wages, and laugh all the way to the bank with the extra money that they're not spending on wages, or undercut your prices.

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

#279

Post by influx »

dktoao wrote: post #193
influx wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Amazon 8 years and it is very manager and team dependent on what your experience is. I got to work on S3 and Alexa, and have no regrets. I learned so much, had a bunch of fun and worked with really smart people. Got paid well too. Downside, there was no free snacks. shrug

I'm sure there are great teams to work for at Amazon. After all it is a large company with many different offices all over that does a lot of different things. However, my naïve estimation is that I am not very likely to land on one of these teams and much more likely to end up in a meat grinder. However, like I said, that is just my perception and I could be wrong. I just don't intend to find out.

For sure, it's not for everyone, and I would encourage everyone at any job they interview for to also vet the people and team you are going to be working with.

Ask them hard questions about performance, expectations and on call burden.

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

#280

Post by FFRefresh »

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/…

>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.

This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist.

1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr

2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr

Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.

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