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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

#551

Post by barry-cotter »

lisper wrote: post #497
burntoutfire wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are 29 German companies in the Fortune Global 500, each with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_German_compani...

Most of those companies are well over 100 years old. I can’t be certain that Adidas in Germany is a terrible place to work but I can say that China HQ is bad enough to get workaholics to bail on it, worse than Amazon China.

Germany’s underperformance in founding new companies in the last 50 years is puzzling but I doubt shorter work hours really explain it. They’re actually working every single one of those hours.

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

#552

Post by [deleted] »

stevenwoo wrote: post #512
blagie wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's fair. I just went to a random pizza joint. There were two teenagers hanging around behind shooting the breeze. They were polite, fast, and professional when a customer would draft in, but for the most part, it looked like a pretty chill job. I can almost guarantee they were making minimum wage. There are plenty of jobs like that everywhere. There aren't many jobs like that much above minimum wage…

Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment? 30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent, though childcare would take a big bite out of their budget even at 60K per year. Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have jo…

[deleted]

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

#553

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

scarface74 wrote: post #391
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer that nobody who works 40 hours a week (tops! I'd be happy if the number was less) earns less than the US poverty level for a family with 1 or 2 children (undecided over which). As a matter of law.

I’m sure my 16 year old son would have loved that. And everyone arguing that a company doesn’t deserve to exist if it can’t profitably pay more, is posting on a site funding money losing companies that couldn’t exist if they actually had to make a profit.

If you want to advocate the position that there's some age where the correlation between work and income can or should be looser, be my guest.

For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week doing something that requires no skill should still entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life. Further, that it should require only one person in a family to do that work in order for the family do live a basic life. If the person wishes to earn more then they will need to acquire more skills one way or another.

I do not believe there can be any moral justification for somebody receiving 40 hours of someone's effort (even an unskilled effort) and not giving that person enough for a basic life. I don't care what the age of the person doing the work is, and yep, if the company cannot do that, it doesn't deserve to exist - it doesn't do anything valuable enough to pay its employees adequately, so it can disappear and nobody except the owners will care.

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

#554

Post by WalterBright »

vageli wrote: post #543
WalterBright wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All the scores are at the max. "Firewalling" the throttle means full power (pushing it towards the firewall).

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

#555

Post by barry-cotter »

FFRefresh wrote: post #280
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/…

>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. This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist. 1. Walmart pays S…

> Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.

Shared understanding is not and never has been the goal of journalism, possibly excluding the business press. Stories are more interesting with heroes and villains so journalists create them if necessary.

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

#556

Post by philsnow »

colinmhayes wrote: post #542
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?

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 the…

This sounds so close to Uber's strategy from the mid-20teens of having huge incentives / gamification for drivers (up to and including offering to finance car loans to get more drivers) but it'll all be okay because in Just A Few More Years they'll have perfected the robotaxi and they can dump all the humans.

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

#557

Post by suture »

int_19h wrote: post #527
suture wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pla…

I’m pretty sure slavery is outlawed in all European countries so that alone prevents a 0 minimum wage. That itself is a regulation. There are lots of “regulations” (government interventions) that prevent a zero minimum wage. Indeed the legal protections and regulations regarding unions, social programs for the unemployed, universal healthcare, etc. all contribute to an environment where the lowest wage isn’t zero. It is not a stretch at all to say that the legal infrastructure surrounding unions and requirements surrounding dealing with them count as “regulation”.

There are lots of instances where regulations fixed a broken system. Government regulations fixed the broke system of using child labor and fixed the broken system of slavery.

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

#558

Post by doubled112 »

ljm wrote: post #535
swat535 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 force…

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

IT professionals in Ontario, at least, are probably exempt from most of your list of things you'd think are required.

Engineers and engineering students get an even shorter stick, in the form of more labour law exemptions.

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

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

#559

Post by SonOfKyuss »

ljm wrote: post #535
swat535 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 force…

-20% more work for 200% more pay seems like a pretty good ROI to me. Especially when I can check out and go back to a low stress gig after a few years.

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

#560

Post by philsnow »

lisper wrote: post #470
type0 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon. South Park had a realistic vision on how it is to work at Amazon Fulfillment Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc

Wow, that was really poignant.

I dunno, it seemed fairly rosy.

They could have twisted the knife quite a bit more: there were a couple 3-second interactions where people are buying things [0][1], if they had been denominated in "hours of service" rather than USD, with the Company knowing what their hours balance was, and having the balance tick down and go negative... that would have been dark.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=1m26s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc#t=2m5s

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