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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

#571

Post by kareemsabri »

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…

Having immigrated from Canada to the US, and worked as a software engineer in both countries, I don't believe this is accurate.

> 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

This describes LOTS of engineers at big tech, just change 100k to 400k and 40 hours to 20

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

#572

Post by TMWNN »

mywittyname wrote: post #417
chickenpotpie wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) prices were already universally high in Switzerland 2) swiss government regulates the price of healthcare 3) Switzerland uses significantly less fossil fuels and aren't as effected by the war in Ukraine 4) Switzerland passed multiple laws over the past few years to reduce the cost of goods, including banning foreign companies from charging Swiss citizens more

The Swiss Franc has traditionally been a strong currency. Probably the world's strongest. The CHF has gained steadily on the EUR since the pandemic and is up about 10% since a year ago. That alone is going to offset a lot of the inflation.

USD is up 8% versus EUR YTD ($1 = €0.88 then, €0.95 now). US, unlike Europe, does not actually need Russian oil/gas. And yet, US inflation is above the world average (https://www.barrons.com/articles/inflation-has-become-a-glob...>).

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

#573

Post by blagie »

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…

> Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment?

In most cases, the scenario described involves families who have been in the US for several generations, who are poorly-educated, but own homes and land. One parent takes care of kids. One works.

It's not uncommon.

Wealth and income aren't as strongly correlated as people assume. A lot of immigrants are low-wealth, high-income, while a lot of American families have generational wealth, but little income. There are plenty of families with >$1M homes with $30k incomes where I live. And there are plenty of families with >$100k incomes, who can't afford to buy homes here too.

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

#574

Post by avgcorrection »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #363
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…

People need to read some history. The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard. There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become complacent or disgruntled.

> The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff.

Yeah, this is just capitalism at work.

> People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard.

Well I guess that’s an alternative lesson to take away from this.

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

#575

Post by TMWNN »

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…

>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.

Some companies take pride in promoting from within. McDonald's is well known for turning entry-level workers into store mangers, then regional managers, and so on. Walmart does this, too.

Does Amazon not have such a culture?

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

#576

Post by p_l »

philsnow wrote: post #547
p_l wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AWS Quicksight was one, late 2020-early 2021 (which is about 5+ years after acquisition, iirc).

IAM support was essentially useless, you had to create second set of accounts inside Quicksight, with various limitations, and generally it was one hell of a mess.

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

#577

Post by yazaddaruvala »

georgeecollins wrote: post #532
peanuty1 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not me defending Amazon's comp structure (they need to improve it in many ways), just correcting the facts:

At the time of calculating an offer, all 4 years are considered the same "Total Compensation Target" i.e. no built in reduction or raise. Amazon just pays cash equivalents for years 1 and 2 - through a signing bonus to make up for the lack of stocks, and through stocks in years 3 and 4.

The stocks in for each year are calculated assuming an average of 15% growth. This can be problematic, or can be great depending on the year you join.

Disclaimer: Worked at Amazon for 9 years.

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

#578

Post by glenngillen »

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.

Ex-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will.

The back-ended equity structure (i.e., you only vest 5% of your equity grant in the first 12mo) isn’t great when you’re comparing it with a standard vesting schedule as an employee. As an employee if you’re given two identical grants for two identical companies with the same future prospects then you take the one that gives you that equity sooner. But the rhetoric is usually that equity is meant to be an employee retention tool. So from that perspective the AMZN vesting structure makes much more sense to me than what is common elsewhere.

As for the service dynamic: the whole “2 pizza team” thing is both a blessing and a curse IMO. Once you launch a service at AWS’s scale you’ve immediately got tens of thousands of users. And AWS takes stability/availability/scalability incredibly seriously. I think it’s more likely that team is now in a permanent operations mode fixing weird edge cases you find at scale and keeping the lights on.

If it was a staff retention issue like you suggest then you’d see the platform plagued with reliability issues and services being shut down. But that doesn’t happen. Even SimpleDB is still available for use (though well hidden).

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

#579

Post by pbourke »

mc32 wrote: post #102
alangibson wrote: post #22

The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end. https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...

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…

BBB wasn’t enacted, though? Are you thinking of the infrastructure package?

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

#580

Post by cwkoss »

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…

> Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.

Is there a law like betteridge's law of headlines for commercials?

I.e. Anything a commercial tries to assert is probably untrue.

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