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

#521

Post by int_19h » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

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…

> Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures?

No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance between employers and employees - and market competition means that companies that don't exploit as much as they can lose to those that do.

Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why don't we try the second?

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

#522

Post by lotsofpulp » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #511

dh2022 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net income is all the money left after all the expenses are paid. Stock buybacks have no impact on net income (they are part of the cash flow statement, not the income statement). Excluding all the things you said to get to the metric you like means Amazon can function without executives, software developers (no stock grant expenses), warehouses (no buildings and utilities expenses).... Which is plainly not true.

Yes, I agree, your straw-man is plainly false. Amazon does need executives, software developers, and warehouses. Amazon is a functioning + profitable business. If it can't continue to be a functioning + profitable business if it pays every employee a good wage, it doesn't deserve to exist anymore - it needs to die to make room for a business that CAN do that. But I don't actually think that amazon has to exploit its…

You are welcome to start your own Amazon competitor with however much profit you would like.

If you are willing to accept less profit than Amazon, then you should be able to steal customers and employees by offering lower prices and better quality of life at work.

Same goes for Walmart/Target/any other retail business.

Maybe all the execs at these established retail businesses working for decades know what they are doing. Or maybe people posting on the internet know how they could be running the business better and delivering goods and services at lower prices and paying workers more.

If I were a betting man, I would bet that you would soon find profit margins are about as low as they can get for retail businesses and the competition very stiff.

> I think the numbers (at very least the 33B in net profits) back me up.

That profit is coming from AWS, Amazon video, and from the commission they collect from 3rd party sellers, not their retail operations.

By the way, I am all for better labor laws and higher quality of life at work laws. I just do not see the point of criticizing individual businesses, especially those running at low profit margins with no moat. They are obviously in cutthroat competition already, otherwise the profit margins would be higher.

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

#523

Post by throwaway894345 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #515

throwaway894345 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but that doesn't support the generalization that this is a broadly-held right-wing position, which is what we were debating. Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies want cheap labor as well.

> Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies want cheap labor as well. There are (outside of small local cooperative enterprises) approximately zero left-wing companies in the US. The things painted as “left-wing” companies by the far right are center-right neoliberal corporate capitalist enterprises that do some mix of opposing far-right culture war efforts as a drag on corporate capitalist exploitation…

I think you and I have debated this before, and I think your definition for "left-wing" is pretty different from the general population (and you may think the same about my definition, all good, agree to disagree, etc). Anyway, I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately because I don't think any company actually adheres to an ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing departments say or do, but rather they all comport themselves according to their individual profit motives.

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

#524

Post by another_story » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

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…

These aren't just tech jobs, though. Amazon employs far more warehouse and other non-tech staff.

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

#525

Post by Dracophoenix » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

suture wrote: post #495

Dracophoenix wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean open source work should count as slavery? You're right that the natural minimum wage is zero, but there's more to slavery than simply being paid nothing. I would think the enlightened you speak of would also know the difference between volition and compulsion.

I do not at all understand the reason for your response. Do you really think that I was saying that doing something for free is always a form of slavery? I think it’s obvious the meaning and intent of what I wrote and only a disingenuous interpretation could have led you to respond as you did.

Please stop with the motte and bailey. I interpreted what you wrote and what you wrote was itself disingenuous. You stated that a zero-dollar income in a laissez faire market is sufficient to render anyone earning that amount a slave. You made no exceptions. As to the claim that the "more enlightened" are those who would reject the laissez-faire system, you've presented no credible evidence to that either.

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

#526

Post by Hasu » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

surement wrote: post #498

Hasu wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the exact amount of revenue a single emp…

So what, an employer is gonna go on losing money and will never look into why? If they go out of business then the employee will also lose their job.

If the aggregate across all employees is negative, the company is losing money. If the aggregate over all employees is positive, you have profit.

It's like that old joke about marketing budgets: half is wasted, but it's impossible to tell which half. The same can be true for employees, maybe half your employees lose money, but the other half make enough that you're profitable, but you can't attribute every dollar that comes into your company to the specific employee that generated that dollar.

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

#527

Post by int_19h » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

suture wrote: post #231

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 natural minimum wage that the market determines (absent all regulations) is $0 per hour and is called slavery. Enlightened people have moved passed the idea that the “market” alone should determine the minimum wage.

There are countries in Europe which do not have a minimum wage mandated by the law - rather, it's the unions that negotiate them - and they still end up with more than people get in US. I guess you could term such negotiations "regulation", but it'd be really stretching it.

Regulating a broken system is an exercise in futility. We need a system in which the feedback loops produce the desired outcomes in the first place.

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

#528

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #523

dragonwriter wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies want cheap labor as well. There are (outside of small local cooperative enterprises) approximately zero left-wing companies in the US. The things painted as “left-wing” companies by the far right are center-right neoliberal corporate capitalist enterprises that do some mix of opposing far-right culture war efforts as a drag on corporate capitalist exploitation…

I think you and I have debated this before, and I think your definition for "left-wing" is pretty different from the general population (and you may think the same about my definition, all good, agree to disagree, etc). Anyway, I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately because I don't think any company actually adheres to an ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing departments say or do, but rather…

> I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately because I don't think any company actually adheres to an ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing departments say or do, but rather they all comport themselves according to their individual profit motives.

Where do you think ideologies come from? One of the most common places is some identifiable group's economic self-interest; neoliberalism is that for the owner class in capitalist society, which is why institutions controlled by that class (especially when they are controlled broadly by that class rather than by an individual member who may have personal quirks) tend to pursue it.

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

#529

Post by throwaway894345 » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #510

throwaway894345 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but that doesn't support the generalization that this is a broadly-held right-wing position, which is what we were debating. Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies want cheap labor as well.

How is it not broadly held? What business is saying “we really wish we could spend more on labor, that would be great!” Politicians on the right have been playing lip service to “illegal immigration” for years. But they all knew just what would happen if they actually did it. Business interest and farmers would crucify them. Even Trump supporting farmers were complaining about not being able to find anyone. Just like…

> Politicians on the right have been playing lip service to “illegal immigration” for years. But they all knew just what would happen if they actually did it. Business interest and farmers would crucify them.

It's the same thing with climate change on the left (Democrat politicians never manage to pass any kind of carbon pricing because they know they'd get crucified by business interests), but I wouldn't say that the left-wing broadly opposes carbon pricing.

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

#530

Post by ljm » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

p_l wrote: post #416

jjoonathan wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

AWS sometimes feels like Debian's APT but everything is rewritten in java.