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

#281

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:43 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…

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by madrox » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #269

> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times. Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting…

This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.

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

#283

Post by xiphias2 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

donclark wrote: post #202

I heard a rumor that Amazon is flying people in from out of the country to work for $15hr. However, I did a search and cannot find any documentation on this. 22mins into this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg

Maybe potential candidates finally understand how much worse their life gets in the US if they don’t speak English, and they won’t have money to go back to latin america.

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

#284

Post by colinmhayes » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #5

So it turns out that people are fungible after all. At least at the scale that Amazon operates at.

Amazon designed its warehouses from the very beginning to have it workers be completely replaceable. By not letting them make any decisions, instead just mindlessly doing what the computer says, they can easily plug and play new hires with minimal training. The end goal is pretty obviously to not have any warehouse workers, and making their jobs as simple and repetitive as possible probably makes them easier to automate.

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

#285

Post by jerglingu » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

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

This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.

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

#286

Post by swatcoder » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

FFRefresh wrote: post #280

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 S…

I upvoted this for contributing a valuable and insightful clarification about how those two statements relate, but the part where you attribute "tactics" and "bias" to the journalist has no direct evidence and reads like a political meme.

You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners because they needed to pick up their kid from school.

Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah...

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

#287

Post by sky-kedge0749 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

happytoexplain wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not attacking left-wing people You said "left-wing folks typically want ... more mass immigration", which I disagree with, though not with any real authority or conviction (I wrote a separate comment about it). The rub is - coming from most people on the internet at large, I would assume that statement was purposefully uncharitable, but I think on HN, the chances that a person (you, in this case) is being honest…

Yes, my honest impression is that left-wing people generally (i.e., it's a very popular position on the left) wanted to lower the barrier for "asylum seekers" which implies admitting lots of people without respect to their educational background or skill (hence "mass immigration"). I didn't realize this was controversial (I thought everyone agreed that this is a popular position on the left). This also isn't a value…

"Asylum seeker" is a specific term, for example see this UN glossary: https://www.unhcr.org/449267670.pdf. In particular it's not about huddled masses, it's about people escaping violent situations and active persecution. Putting "asylum seeker" in scare quotes and conflating it with general immigration is a right-wing thing to do. If you don't want people to mistake you for a right-wing partisan then consider just saying "immigration" of whatever type you mean.

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

#288

Post by ruined » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #272

bsedlm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material.

how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it.

it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation.

maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.

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

#289

Post by femto113 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

Amazon's scale encounters limits that most companies don't ever have to consider. There's a parallel from 20ish years ago: Amazon eschewed software performance engineering with the mantra "if it can be solved with a credit card [i.e. you can buy more hardware] don't worry about it now". That worked up to the day they called the company that made their database server and asked to upgrade and were told "you already have the most powerful machine we've ever built".

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

#290

Post by politician » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #272

bsedlm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

The employer is able continuously improve and iterate on their productivity systems, but the employee, broadly speaking, only has one opportunity to negotiate their compensation at the outset of the engagement.

This is problematic for employers like Amazon that ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push back.