4 ms·

What do you mean? Are you saying that Amazon warehouse employees were treated better back then? What makes you say that?

• chriselles 8y ago
  It was pretty hard(physically) back then, even before simple tilt tray sortation equipment. Everything was manual. And zero air conditioning in the first early generation distribution(now fulfilment) centres. Hiring, even in distribution(fulfilment) operations, had quite a high hiring bar. This was done to help develop the near future Human Resources capacity of the company. So we had an inordinately high % of Amazon Associate stock pickers with undergraduate and graduate degrees. Quite an eclectic and quirky bunch of quite over educated folks doing a lot of manual labor trying to get the orders out the door and not drown in them. It was a much much smaller company back then. We were just trying to survive the never ending need to get customer orders out te door and “average up” with each new hire. Intellectual capacity per person was quite high, but our operational execution would be far lower than what is achieved today. We were failing/learning as we were going. More exploration, less exploitation(in the process sense). Exploitation as an employee wasn’t a problem in the early days from my perspective. We all knew what we were getting into. 100% commitment and acting like an owner. As headcount exploded, individual understanding of Amazon’s mission, ethos, etc declined as it become more job-like, and less purposeful. Growth rate compelled hiring more specialists and less multi-purpose generalists....who could write non Borg Collective like Tweets. I guess what I’m saying is the culture in the early days was more like a pirate ship full of idiosyncratic individualist buccaneers than Borg.