Amazon’s attrition costs $8B annually according to leaked documents

That is an eye–watering figure.

> The same Times investigation reported the company “intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers,” according to David Niekerk, a former Amazon HR Vice President.

It’s not just for hourly workers. I was actively coached on holding promotions as a carrot. My leadership team would commit to unrealistic dates, taking input and estimates from dev teams but hand wave it.

Amazon applies pressure on L7 and L6 software development managers to deliver. They in turn apply pressure to their engineering teams.

We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers. They all left within a 1-2 month window of each other.

I can’t tell you how many SDEs were promised that getting some project delivered is key to their promotion. These people would kill themselves working every night, every weekend, coding, writing documents, and so on. They’d get very little in return if anything.

I saw several successful launches, where specific promotions were held back because of nit picks on some engineering decision, which the whole group agreed on, including Principals and Sr. Principal engineers.

It’s just a sweat shop. And the Indian devs work their ass off out of fear of getting PIP’d and with their work authorization, they lose their job means they have to leave the country.

This sounds so sad.

It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius. If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation, you’ve won the lottery.

You make big promises to employees, maybe give a carrot to a very select few. Everyone else will either accept the long hours and grueling culture or they’ll leave, and if they leave, they’ll go before their RSU compensation vests. So the other thing you do is weigh compensation heavily on RSUs instead of salary. If you leave before the 4 year vest, you get massively screwed and walk away with a small fraction, since vests don’t really kick in until years 3 and 4.

Now here’s the kicker. If the company does well and the value of your RSUs to up, you get nothing extra. You can get promoted and if your existing RSUs are putting you near or at the bottom of the next compensation band, you take more responsibility but without any meaningful compensation increase.

Now if the company does poorly, you’ll get extra RSUs, in 1.5 to 2 years out. You can hang around for that carrot, but they’ll work you like a machine. And it’s not just the labor. It’s the gaslighting and sociopathic behavior - “you’re so great at X, but you really didn’t do a, b, and c. You’re really just being your own bottleneck. Oh you’re working extra hours? Your fault for not scaling yourself better.”