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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

#31

Post by ptudan »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #25
xibalba wrote: 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.

By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what point do we qualify productivity with some measure of quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces quality . For all the laurels and new features and gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings or new Amazon products are considered best in class.

Top of market quality is obviously not IKEAs goal. There is no one in IKEA corporate who would argue differently.

IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are striving for it.

Disclaimer: I work for AMZN

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

#32

Post by influx »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #25
xibalba wrote: 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.

By those metrics, IKEA fits the bill as well. But at what point do we qualify productivity with some measure of quality? You'd be hard pressed to argue IKEA produces quality . For all the laurels and new features and gadgets and gizmos have produced, very few AWS offerings or new Amazon products are considered best in class.

What cloud provider is better than AWS?

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

#33

Post by NathanKP »

void_mint wrote: post #23
xibalba wrote: 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.

The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees. Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

As a current Amazon employee I have to say that is pretty ludicrous. If you actually think Amazon could scale back to 10% of it's current employees without losing massive forward momentum and capacity to deliver results then I don't know what to say. All those metrics would suffer greatly in both the short and long term.

In order to scale back that far without suffering negative results you'd have to assume that those 90% of people aren't doing much day to day, so their loss would not be felt, and that is frankly not true and kind of insulting to the hard work that Amazon employees do.

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

#34

Post by maurys »

xibalba wrote: post #12
ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

I've always wondered about this. I'd expect this to catch up with Amazon and not work out in the long term.

But their stock price keeps going up and they keep eating up new markets.

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

#35

Post by NathanKP »

retrocryptid wrote: post #28
HarryHirsch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock price, of course. Yesterday, in another thread about Amazon, someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team. It's the exact opposite of progress, why advance the state of the art when you have access to a large pool of cheap labour.

How does AWS advance the state of the art with undocumented services that frequently fail? I'm not a big fan of Azure, but at least they document their services.

Which services in specific are undocumented services that frequently fail?

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

#36

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.

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

#37

Post by tines »

xibalba wrote: post #12
ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

> Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed.

Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a situation wherein the facts are different than they really are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the example, "If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over."

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

#38

Post by xibalba »

void_mint wrote: post #23
xibalba wrote: 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.

The "productivity" of a company by these definitions is almost totally unrelated to the productivity of its employees. Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

Just to be clear, I am using the word "productivity" in a very general sense: output over input.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. How would any of these metrics not rapidly collapse under a 90% workforce cut? Are you assuming that the majority of Amazon is somehow automated? It definitely isn't.

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

#39

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

retrocryptid wrote: post #16

This isn't news, but what they don't mention is managers will set up their own "private" PIPs to frighten workers into doing what they want. It's not news that the big-A wants its software engineers working 60 hours per week. I interviewed for a principle engineer role and everything seemed to be going well. But when the offer came it said "Software Engineer II." I asked about that and they said... "Oh, don't worry.…

> you'll get automatically promoted at the end of the next quarter

Unless it's in writing, you should never, ever, ever take a statement like this at face value.

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

#40

Post by xibalba »

tines wrote: post #37
xibalba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact that counters your hypothesis: Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. *Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

> Amazon is obviously one of the most productive companies to have ever existed. Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a situation wherein the facts are different than they really are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the exam…

Indeed, you are correct! *blushing face emoji*. Edit made. Thank you!
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