Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 764 posts

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

#481

Post by swat535 »

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.

Yes and it has always been like this.

Why would companies truly "value" Engineering? The majority of execs thinks we are just interchangeable drones and the only reason the salaries are so high in SV is because they literally can't get away with less. If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.

They will fire you in an instant to save cost, never increase your salary and come up with elaborate schemes to basically screw you.

I have seen executives try it all: Replace senior engineering with students or interns (I'm not kidding), hire from third world companies and pay the peanuts, bring in cheap labor on visa restrictions and abuse them, low ball you in salary negotiations, attempt to pay with "stocks" (I'm talking about penny stock companies here..)

To management, Engineering is nothing but an annoying expense that gets in their way of profit.

All the free foods, foosball tables, "family" mantra and cool hats are designed to distract you from the fact that you are being paid in pittance. This is why there is so much discrimination against older engineers, because they are more likely to catch up to this and demand a fair wage and good working conditions. When you are young, naive and hungry, you don't think about it much because burning the midnight oil with pizza is exciting.

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

#483

Post by lisper »

burntoutfire wrote: post #464
lisper wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Complacent and disgruntled" is the problem Bezos was trying to solve. "Replaceable" is the circumstance that he leveraged to produce his solution: hire a continual stream of fresh non-complacent non-disgruntled people and fire them before they have a change to become complacent and disgruntled. Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive rather than complacent and disgruntled, i.e…

> Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive Is there a large (or even mid-sized) tech company that managed to achieve it? I've never heard of one and I don't think it's possible. At scale these companies operate, senior level jobs are about navigating the organization and its bureucracy and there aren't many people who find that kind of work fun. Especially people who have an eng…

> I don't think it's possible.

It is manifestly possible. The Germans do it.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236165/german-workers-satis...

The reason it doesn't happen in the U.S. is that workers have been systematically stripped of all of their power, so corporate management now answers exclusively to shareholders. Trying to make life better for your workers puts you at a competitive disadvantage.

But it does not have to be that way. All we have to do to change it is to decide that it needs to change.

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

#485

Post by raverbashing »

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.

There has been rumours of engineers "bouncing back" recently (they had a better term for it, but I forgot)

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

#486

Post by jrockway »

lisper wrote: post #425
jrockway wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm surprised that these specialty retailers have not banded together to form some kind of syndicate with a common web front end to take orders. That sort of thing could be an Amazon-killer. Combined with a doordash-like delivery service it could offer same-day delivery and reliable product vetting. Hm, anyone here want to start a company?

Isn't that kind of what Shopify, Fast, and some other company that I only heard off because they laid off half their staff doing?

I haven't researched the industry extensively, but I'm guessing that companies like to keep customer data to themselves and curate what they think is the ideal checkout experience. (Everyone should copy McMaster, though.) That's why you see companies happy to delegate the financing involved in buying their products to credit card companies, but still make their own website/checkout/fulfillment rather than letting, say, Amazon do that for them. (Shopify does seem to have quite a lot of traction, however.)

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

#487

Post by mr_beans »

capableweb wrote: post #299
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.

> 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.

Yes- this is real. There used to be “subclasses” to the Principal Engineer role and you could pick if you wanted to be a Depth Principal or a Breadth Principal, and that no longer exists now.

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

#489

Post by burntoutfire »

lisper wrote: post #483
burntoutfire wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive Is there a large (or even mid-sized) tech company that managed to achieve it? I've never heard of one and I don't think it's possible. At scale these companies operate, senior level jobs are about navigating the organization and its bureucracy and there aren't many people who find that kind of work fun. Especially people who have an eng…

> I don't think it's possible. It is manifestly possible. The Germans do it. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236165/german-workers-satis... The reason it doesn't happen in the U.S. is that workers have been systematically stripped of all of their power, so corporate management now answers exclusively to shareholders. Trying to make life better for your workers puts you at a competitive disadvantage. But it does not…

German economy is famous for being based on small and mid-sized companies (which are often the best in the world at the ultra-specialized thing that they do). My post was on impossiblity of high job satisfaction levels in big organizations, I don't think it's as bad for the mid-sized and small shops.

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

#490

Post by lisper »

amzn-throw wrote: post #478
lisper wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos to you. If you think it's a fair deal, more power to you. I'll sleep better at night knowing that you feel like you're not being exploited, and that you're being fairly compensated for the work you do. But I've heard too many horror stories to ever take that risk myself.

This comment isn't directed to you specifically, but the many many others who feel the same. "What have you got to lose?" By that I mean, we're in a hot tech market. If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease. OK, but we're about to hit a recession. I'd venture Amazon is a lot safer than many other tech companies to ride out a recession in - the core business (cloud and retail) is fundament…

> If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease.

If that's true then I could just skip the Amazon pain and go straight to the "job elsewhere".

Post reply on HN