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

#411

Post by FFRefresh » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:35 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #368

FFRefresh wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you're working as a professional journalist, a "simple google search" isn't enough: how can you be sure that the information you are seeing on those kinds of wage comparison websites is accurate, and comes from people who genuinely worked at those companies?

Yours is a broad epistemic question. How can you be sure of anything? How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?

We're dealing with uncertainty in all regards. My position is that it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty.

If the article had said "We didn't have good wage data to directly compare Walmart & Amazon warehouse compensation against each other", I would have loved it, because it'd show transparency/honesty/authenticity. Or if they did an analysis using data from job postings or wage sites and were very transparent on their methodology and admitted what you stated "These figures were taken from job postings on X.com, which can often have ranges. Consider there to be some degree of imprecision."

I totally get that it's not a norm in the media today to do that, and there are a lot of structural incentives that create that situation. I can empathize with each actor/individual within the broader system, and that they're doing their best within the world they live in.

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

#412

Post by hintymad » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

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.

As a result, AWS engineers are very much promotion oriented. This leads to two results: title inflation and disgruntled employees. L6 used to be a big deal but not any more. L7 is now the new L6. The challenge with this arrangement is that whoever got promoted early on but stayed in the same level get less in return. And apparently it's human's nature to compare. When engineers see that their peers get promoted to L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach) in three years for no particularly obvious reasons, they can barely hide their cold anger.

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

#413

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

_dqna wrote: post #41

throwaway894345 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't really thought before about how left-wing folks typically want higher wages as well as more mass immigration which inherently suppresses wages. In their defense, they want raises waged by law rather than by market (an elevated minimum wage would raise wages irrespective of immigration), but considering how unlikely a minimum federal wage hike is, it seems like they're pursuing two contradictory goals. EDIT:…

[flagged]

“I want to both increase the supply of labor and increase the price of labor”.

You don’t see anything wrong with that statement?

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

#414

Post by 99_00 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #392

99_00 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>figure out that they are getting a bad deal. That's not what it's "really saying". That's you adding analysis. I think hourly workers are perfectly capable of figuring out if a job is a good or bad deal for them. They have bills and payments that must be made or they will suffer real consequences. They aren't making employment decisions based on free soda, foosball tables, and the political affiliation of the CEO.

I don't know, Amazon's absurdly high churn rate is pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in one of them. It's not about people being dumb and making bad decisions, it's just really hard to evaluate a work environment from the outside. Even for tech jobs, where it's common to interview with many future coworkers, assessing the work environment is tough. Warehouse type jobs are probably even…

>pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in one of them

Pretty strong evidence that the job is worse than people would expect would be an anonymous survey of workers by a third party.

Churn can result from any number of factors. It simply isn't enough to support your conclusion, and a lack of imagination in seeing alternative explanations isn't proof. Warehouse jobs have high churn. Yes, Amazon's churn is higher.

A pandemic is just ending. Amazon hired a lot of temporary staff. Temporary staff are temporary.

As things open people have more employment options. People will always go to the best option available. That doesn't mean the job they left is inhumane. It means they found something better.

Finally, Amazon has a signing bonus. Some workers may be there just for the bonus. Once they get it they may want something that pays less but is easier.

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

#415

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:39 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

Eventually their reputation will precede themselves with all job types. I think this also mimics their other business practices of short term-ish decisions for revenue instead of longer term practices to build a place where people are attracted naturally.

What will happen with their tech products when they can't staff engineers, can't get ahead of the bad PR for recruiting and don't want to pay over market to attract those that will put up with their way of working? They might have some systemic outage level things happen where companies may take their business elsewhere. Or maybe not, I don't have a crystal ball.

Cloud abstraction/migration technologies might be a good investment/startup.

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

#416

Post by p_l » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #386

torginus wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of services is just crazy - I've worked with AWS solutions architects in trying to find the perfect solution to our particular problems, and even they don't seem to know what half the stuff does.

Let alone which ones are the good ones. That only comes from experience. AWS never cancels anything... but they never complete anything either and they abandon 80% of their products in minimum viable state, where "viable" is defined by the PM's bonus packet, not by anyone who has to use the damn thing.

And the level of actual integration of various services varies a lot (I mean, you expect things like IAM to be included if it's AWS service, right? Lol nope) plus then there's stuff that will be documented with something like one paragraph in docs and highly paid support engineers will never find anything internal about it, so you end up building a complete SSO solution for AWS from scratch...

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

#417

Post by mywittyname » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

chickenpotpie wrote: post #379

mikem170 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come Switzerland has only 2.5% year-over-year inflation, less than a third of the U.S. rate? Last I checked there seemed to be some correlation between a country's money printing and current inflation rates. That's not to say that a protion of the current inflation rate is not due to supply consitrictions, but I certainly not assume that is the only factor.

1) prices were already universally high in Switzerland 2) swiss government regulates the price of healthcare 3) Switzerland uses significantly less fossil fuels and aren't as effected by the war in Ukraine 4) Switzerland passed multiple laws over the past few years to reduce the cost of goods, including banning foreign companies from charging Swiss citizens more

The Swiss Franc has traditionally been a strong currency. Probably the world's strongest.

The CHF has gained steadily on the EUR since the pandemic and is up about 10% since a year ago. That alone is going to offset a lot of the inflation.

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

#418

Post by scarface74 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #97

Spooky23 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, I’ve always found it amusing that right wing business guys pay lip service to being against illegal immigration, yet they move their meat packing plants to nowhere-ville.

"use illegal immigration for meat packing" isn't a broadly-held right-wing position, it's something certain unprincipled business owners do (and I'm not even sure that they're universally right-wing). In contrast, "increasing wages" and "increasing mass immigration" are broadly-held left-wing positions. Again, this doesn't suggest incoherence on the left.

“Unprincipled” business owners, farmers, and basically every other company that wants cheap labor in “rural America”.

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

#419

Post by simonw » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

FFRefresh wrote: post #411

simonw wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're working as a professional journalist, a "simple google search" isn't enough: how can you be sure that the information you are seeing on those kinds of wage comparison websites is accurate, and comes from people who genuinely worked at those companies?

Yours is a broad epistemic question. How can you be sure of anything? How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate? We're dealing with uncertainty in all regards. My position is that it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty. If the article had said "We didn't have good wage data to directly compare Walmart & Amazon warehouse compensation against each other", I wou…

"How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?"

You can't. That's why the article says "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" - rather than stating as fact that "in 2021 the company bumped the average starting wage...".

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

#420

Post by Xeronate » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #380

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to read some history. The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard. There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become complacent or disgruntled.

Early 20th centruy industrialists also had to deal with the looming threat of anti-trust regulations. These days it's almost a joke. There is no trust-busting anymore. The monopolies control foreign and domestic policy through massive lobbying efforts.

Your argument has no relevance to the comment you are responding to as the point being made was it is human nature for (some) people to get complacent regardless of the circumstances.