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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

#331

Post by FFRefresh »

snowwrestler wrote: post #306
FFRefresh wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The journalist did their job by offering these statements with all the qualifiers that you used to make your comparison. Journalists have to work with the information they get; they can’t force two employers to give them perfectly comparable figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do get.

There are plenty of websites where employees share their wages/salaries, which enable direct comparisons between companies. A simple google search reveals such data. Also, for a lot of these jobs, the companies post the pay ranges on the actual job description.

These wages aren't some super secret data point. Referencing a 2021 Reuters article as the source for Amazon wage data is an interesting choice, when you can find better comparable data by spending 5 minutes on Google.

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

#332

Post by irrational »

jimmaswell wrote: post #294
fugalfervor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most of the people who I knew that died from Covid were not old people. I literally did not know of any old people that died from it. Even my 99 year old grandmother got it and beat it (this was pre-vaccine). She said that she beat the Spanish flu in the 1920s so she would beat Covid in the 2020s, and she did.

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

#334

Post by jjoonathan »

SoftTalker wrote: post #329
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 is not unusual at all. My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm. Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would stick around long enough to be considered for partnership. The work hours were long (50 h…

No post body was provided.

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

#335

Post by ameister14 »

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…

I mean...50% of the increase since April 2020 is the addition of OCD's to M1, isn't it?

Why wouldn't it be better to look at the total monetary base?

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

#336

Post by dixie_land »

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.

ironically in this down turn Amazon offers are extremely appealing since your first two years are all cash. So you shore up on your cash while your future vesting have an upside if the recession is short lived.

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

#337

Post by cupofpython »

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…

If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the problem.

People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.

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

#338

Post by madrox »

uncomputation wrote: post #310
madrox wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Combine that with aggressive pruning/PIPing and you have people fighting to stay long enough to get their shares vested, once you stop getting promoted there is little stability because you will either get torn down for someone else’s ladder climb or have to keep getting promoted by any means necessary.

In my experience there, PIPing wasn't any more aggressive than anywhere else I've worked. The fighting was certainly real, though.

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

#339

Post by jrockway »

lisper wrote: post #266
Vladimof wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try walmart.com for ordering... they stepped up their game... it's not uncommon for them to do 3 deliveries for a $35 order with free shipping to get you the stuff as fast as possible... Most of the time I wish they would combine items to avoid the waste but that's what they do.

Yeah, I've considered Walmart, but it kind of defeats the purpose for me. It doesn't do a lot of good to replace one monopolistic behemoth with a different monopolistic behemoth.

I don't think there is a small mom & pop one stop shop, but if you are willing to buy different things from different stores, you have options. I buy most of my electronics from B&H, and things like fasteners from McMaster-Carr.

Amazon does feel pretty unavoidable for the long tail, though.

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

#340

Post by ruined »

adrianN wrote: post #325
ruined wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true. why does that make it a bad definition? it is a material relationship, it is okay to call it accurately.

I'm not a native speaker, but to me exploitation has a negative moral connotation. I think it's possible for companies to make use of their employees to make a profit without exploiting them.

the negative moral connotation of "exploitation" is an effect of anticapitalist propaganda :)
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