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

541–550 of 764 posts

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

#541

Post by toolz »

lamontcg wrote: post #198
mc32 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those idiots! Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008 was going to blow up one day. Technology and unsubstantiated sectors allowed them to print without repercussions for a while and the administration and them also tried to fool people into believing the inflation was transitory... Reckless idiots. And now wage labor is the one to suffer most. 4TT in spending for BBB? Uhhuh! Even Yellen said it…

Everyone is Ludwig von Mises these days. Time to start buying stock in Keynes.

Everything about our federal monetary policy is Keynesian and has been for a long time now, what do you mean?

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

#542

Post by colinmhayes »

eloff wrote: post #398
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…

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?

Having warehouse workers is not Amazon's long term plan. They will replace as many workers with robots as quickly as they can. Their strategy revolves around burning out the entire workforce and then perfecting their robots before they need to pay truly absurd packages. Since the workers are a short term solution treating them poorly and using ads to reel more suckers in is a viable strategy. The question is will they run out of people before they can fully automate?

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

#543

Post by vageli »

WalterBright wrote: post #508
hintymad wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US military is the same way. Officers get promoted, or they retire. I.e. "up or out". In the AF, your performance reviews need to be "firewalled" or it's time to leave.

> In the AF, your performance reviews need to be "firewalled" or it's time to leave.

What does firewalling a performance review mean?

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

#544

Post by pvankessel »

Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have plenty of strong opinions about how they treat their workers and have no desire to work for such a company, but I was surprised to find that I did sympathize with them to an extent - it's not just about offering better pay and bathroom breaks, they're also on the verge of exhausting the viable labor market. I wish whoever took the job the best of luck - I hope that they're taking the research effort seriously and it's not just performance art.

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

#545

Post by cm2187 »

tetromino_ wrote: post #538
anigbrowl wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

Though the filtering features are pretty much useless for almost every product. Too many products to maintain any decent classification. That makes it pretty much useless for looking for computer hardware (that and counterfeit products).

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

#546

Post by jrochkind1 »

pvankessel wrote: post #544

Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have…

The article suggests they are on the verge of exhausting the labor supply because they can't get anyone to stay for more than a couple years though, because so many people have already been there and left -- and that this has in the past been intentional on the employer's part, to only keep workers for a couple years.

If true, that puts a different light on things -- how the combination of having such a large labor force and a strategy to intentionally have high turnover combine to exhaust the labor supply, sure.

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

#547

Post by philsnow »

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...

What services aren't currently integrated with IAM / didn't launch with IAM integration?

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

#548

Post by jedberg »

Hasu wrote: post #307
surement wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these empirical studies are ridiculous. 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. The studies about the price elasticity of labor also don't b…

> 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…

In most cases, and almost certainly in any minimum wage case, sure.

But sales people have a pretty directly attributable profit contribution.

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

#549

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

scarface74 wrote: post #447
sudosysgen wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not quite. They exist because they are profitable on average.

You think that most companies that are YC funded and seeking additional rounds of funding are profitable?

"on average" does not mean "most companies".

It could mean that, but in all likelihood it means that some YC funded companies make huge amounts of money for YC that sufficiently balances the losses that they keep doing it.

Ya know, like most investment (that works).

Post reply on HN