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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

#291

Post by svachalek »

tmaly wrote: post #101

Would it be so bad to just develop better robots for this type of work? Keynes had a prediction that we would be working 15 hour work weeks by now. In your opinion, why haven’t we obtained this?

Amazon has flipped the script, replacing inefficient and overly sympathetic human management with software-based micro-managers. This leaves the rank and file as meat-based robots to follow narrowly scripted programming.

They've also automated a lot of the physical work; you should watch a video of how their warehouses operate. But as of yet many physical tasks cannot be easily automated -- but they can be cheaply acquired if you are willing and able to treat human labor as machines. Until recently at least.

As to the second question though, I have a completely different thought. I think it's just that given a choice, most people will choose more money rather than more free time, up to a point. I think most people in urban office jobs could find a way to work less, earn less, and spend less; I certainly could. But it just runs counter to human nature.

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

#292

Post by tylerhou »

influx wrote: post #171
dktoao wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out. Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.

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

implying bananas aren't snacks

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

#293

Post by mbostleman »

kzrdude wrote: post #169
SoftTalker wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.

The purpose of minimum wage is a floor, not that someone has to make that level. If everyone makes more, good.

>>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor>> There's the purpose and then there's the outcome. I have always found it useful to also keep in mind the perspective on minimum wage that recognizes that from a practical perspective, it makes it illegal for workers that create a certain level of economic value to work. Of course that's not the perspective that a proponent of minimum wage would use to pitch it because that certainly is not the purpose. But it's hard to argue that this other perspective is not to some extent, the outcome in terms of economic mechanics.

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

#294

Post by jimmaswell »

fugalfervor wrote: post #250
idiotsecant wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When are they going to start firing people to make up for the actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact! There is so much demand for workers that those places can't convince them to work for double the minimum wage given th…

Assuming an even distribution of COVID deaths throughout the 50 states, 20,000 workers per state have died in the last two years. I wonder if that has anything to do with the hiring difficulties fast-food restaurants are facing. The number of deaths is probably also higher among those who would be fast-food workers, since the likelihood of death from COVID was correlated with poverty.

How many 80 year olds were working in fast food in 2019?

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

#295

Post by dnissley »

gigel82 wrote: post #154

I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere. The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.

Not hard to guess in many cases -- especially if you can find other people's email addresses from the same company, since they are often created formulaically. E.g. first.last@company.com or @company.com

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

#296

Post by elldoubleyew »

Joe_Boogz wrote: post #268
gigel82 wrote: post #154

I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere. The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.

Same here (daily emails). I've been getting enough of them to start seeing that most of the emails from amazon are generated in some form. A generated recruiting email is pretty much an immediate turn off for me. Also, they have been very aggressive... going as far as the same recruiter reaching out on a monthly basis despite me telling them I am not interested.

In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled by recruiter contractors.

These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide net" strategy.

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

#297

Post by brightball »

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/…

I guess Walmart decided to become a better employer.

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

#298

Post by ComputerGuru »

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…

> If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?

You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had.

Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible.

The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.

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

#299

Post by capableweb »

madrox wrote: post #282
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.

> employees will naturally want to leave within four years

That also explains why the breadth of AWS services keep growing, but the depth of the existing ones remains the same. Seems they would, every 4 years, lose a bunch of people with deep knowledge in the existing ones, the ones who'd be able to add new and deep features.

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

#300

Post by pojzon »

femto113 wrote: post #289

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 ha…

In single master architecture this is inevitable. At some point you wont be able to throw more hardware.

Thats why multi-master architecture was created in the first place.

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