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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

#531

Post by cyanydeez »

ironmagma wrote: post #431
eloff wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think they'd scrap the commercials and put the budget into improving working conditions if they really cared. I doubt the cost of the ads, plus the cost of the bad publicity, plus the cost of employee churn is really worth it. Why not just do the right thing? Even if it made them sightly less profitable, so what?

Amazon has never struck me as a company that would prioritize doing the right thing.

Most companies irrationally value growth.

Most of them are cancerous because of it.

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

#532

Post by georgeecollins »

peanuty1 wrote: post #474
vishnugupta wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stock You left out a big part here; RSU vesting schedule is back loaded. It's something like 5-20-25-50

It's 5-15-40-40

To me that is a real tell. New employees are a risk, but you can tell if they are going to work out after a year. If you are still discounting the RSUs at the second year, it is in hopes that some won't survive to the payout of the third.

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

#533

Post by throwaway894345 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #528
throwaway894345 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't think they come from corporations, although no doubt organizations may promote popular ideologies.

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

#534

Post by dragonwriter »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #529
scarface74 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> I wouldn't say that the left-wing broadly opposes carbon pricing.

The left wing does not, and much of it actively supports it.

The Democratic Party-in-government, dominated by its center-right faction, does oppose it, or at least does not actively support it.

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

#535

Post by ljm »

swat535 wrote: post #481
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.

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 sav…

> If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.

I think that misses a cultural difference, which is that Canada and EU jobs don't require as much work because our work ethic is different. I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated. I don't have to flat-share on 100k.

US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle. If you value your time more than your money then it's the US that provides an embarrassingly low return.

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

#536

Post by colinmhayes »

kache_ wrote: post #456
ActorNightly wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world is a $150k out of college starting salary low?

In a world where you can get 250

No one is paying $250k salary out of college. Every one of those jobs has similar salary to amazon with the rest in stock. Maybe high frequency traders will give you that cash, but no one else.

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

#537

Post by scarface74 »

scarface74 wrote: post #397
ASinclair wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees I'm pretty sure they just doubled the salary cap. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone's salary was doubled.

Amazon didn’t even do that. Before, no matter who you were, your cash component was maxed out between $160K - $175K. The rest of your compensation was in stock. Now, more of your compensation can be stock based.

I passed the edit window. I meant more of your compensation can be cash based.

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

#538

Post by tetromino_ »

anigbrowl wrote: post #317
capableweb wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't actively cause problem…

> everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites

Slow compared to what? Amazon's website feels more responsive and more usable than 90% of online stores I've seen that carry orders of magnitude less variety of inventory. It loads fast, searches fast, provides for easy navigation between related products, and displays all needed information on one page without jank. Sure, it doesn't look modern, but it feels far more functional than the competition.

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

#539

Post by [deleted] »

burlesona wrote: post #462
youessayyyaway wrote: post #81

I think this article might bury the lede a bit: >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. People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/…

There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k). If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area yo…

[deleted]

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

#540

Post by heavyset_go »

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?

Before the pandemic, there were a lot of retirement-aged people working in food service, like an uncomfortable amount. I certainly haven't been out to eat as much as I have before COVID, but what I noticed was a suspicious lack of those older workers I've come to expect working in food service. A lot of restaurants and fast food places are running on skeleton crews, now, some of them with one or two 16 year olds running the whole businesses alone even during dinner rushes.
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