Live data from Hacker News

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

seattletimes.com

281–290 of 385 posts

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

#281
post #93
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any mainstream business metric. Here is a brief and incomplete sample: Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

Customer lifetime value for non-prime members is under $1,000, $2300 for prime. Not exactly the leader. Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million. End price reduction? Amazon is rarely the cheapest. Employee headcount, is more or less better? Things always seem rosier.

>> Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.

??

Sorry but Amazon has far, far more than 12M SKUs.

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

#282

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…

You need an attitude readjustment. Your problem isn't the bad review; it's that you care what some big co apparatchik thinks about your work. What qualifications did your boss have to evaluate your work, other than his position assigned to him by fiat?

Being a successful middle manager in a large corp entails smiling when you're expected to smile, feigning frustration when you're expected to feign frustration, showing up to the meetings you're expected to show up to, and writing the documents you're expected to write. Your problem is that you think of them as people. They may be people outside of work, but at work they're a neural net that simulates the averaged behavior of other middle managers in the corp, and then tweaks it to locally optimize their own comp. That has fuck all to do with your programming ability.

It's of course possible that you suck. In fact, it's likely, because most people suck-- excellence is the exception, not the norm. But judging your own programming ability by a column in some HR database that your NPC manager filled in? That's bonkers, man. That feedback is at best a very weak signal for it. More likely you can disregard it altogether, but that's somewhat dependent on the situation. (It is, however, a very strong signal that you're low on the corporate totem pole and can be dispensed with with little risk to the manager in question)

The proper response to a new manager assessing your performance (regardless of whether the assessment is positive or negative) is "umm, and who are you?" Don't say that out loud, but that's roughly what you ought to be thinking.

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

#283
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according to a new report Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...

I know I will never work for them, they constantly reach out to me and its all nope on my side. As a side note there's always new college grads(a sucker born every minute according to PT Barnum) willing to suffer for their chance to work at a FANG.

I haven't seen too many threads on HN complaining about the work conditions at any FAANG other than Amazon though?

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

#284
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest

That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.

Except that their competitors are giving you 25/25/25/25 vest with 100/0/0/0 signing bonus.

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

#286
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a glowing performance review at Amazon one year, and then with the exact same job/productivity level/attitude I got a bad review the year after. I did some digging, and it turned out that from the VP level down everyone in the org got a big "F U" from management as part of an effort to reduce the size of the org. I was wondering why all my teammates with more experience were jumping ship before that, and I lear…

From your other post that I read here: >I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled. I've never met anyone who was happy with their previous employer after getting let go. I don't know the s…

Offtopic: I'm curious to know why you chose to go with a throw-away account. All of your comments in this thread offer a glowing opinion of Amazon; so why the need to go incognito?

It's stood out for me because it subverts my expectations - that those with the most vituperative comments would use throw-away accounts to avoid burning bridges.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's PE has always been this high

But their market cap hasn’t. Odds are they won’t 5x their size in the next five years as they did in their last five.

Their retail business is still in a tiny portion of the world.

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

#288
post #11

No worries - in academia, the number is a lot higher.

True - 7 years at my university as a grad student and I've been here longer than at least three or four of their new junior faculty hires (including replacements for some I used to work for)

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

#289
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your simple thought experiment, why are wages going up for that one firm? You're hiring more people, not raising the wages of the existing people. And I'm not sure why you think unit economics apply to software with it's almost 100% fixed costs.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore. Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.

Which ones for example?

No one publication is exhaustively tracking exec exits, but this businessinsider article gives you an idea of what's perhaps going on and why: https://archive.is/RwUZ9
Post reply on HN