13 ms·

Amazon’s HR Failures

160 points by ramimac 5y ago

HillRat 5y ago
Although Dave Clark comes across as an unrequited villain in most Amazon reporting, he’s just a loyal shadow of Bezos’ dictum that Amazon employees at all levels are to unquestioningly serve his machine without thought of compensation. The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  "The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me." That seems to be widely spread modern management thinking. Executives always have a reason why they should be paid a lot no matter if the stock goes up or down, the company does illegal things, profits go up or down. They always need to be incentivized financially. And the same pople will tell you that giving more money to the lower ranks will make them lazy. I remember a discussion with my director where he explained to me that he doesn't want to hire people who work for the money while at the same time in a lot of meetings he talks about cost and profit.
  - astrange 5y ago
    That's why you hire execs from the right social classes; their expenses, or their non-monetary needs like staying away from their wife, need to be so high that they won't retire just because you gave them $4 million.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      That’s actually true. I would retire after half a year if I got my CEOs salary. And I would feel super rich. Even a month would propably be sufficient.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  People as commodity. Of course, I am NOT people.
- astrange 5y ago
  > The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me. Well, this is true. Google tried the opposite strategy with self-driving cars; they paid everyone so much that none of them had any reason to work for the rest of their lives. This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving.
  - josefx 5y ago
    I am not sure I would trust Google on that. At least one guy got an even better offer from Uber and Googles involvement in fixing salaries with several competitors has been out of the bag for years now.
  - HillRat 5y ago
    It seems to me — not that this is my space — that Waymo’s gotten further than anyone else, running a taxi service and recently testing long-haul trucking. Zoox might also get there quickly, but note that Amazon is already losing key personnel to Waymo and is having to buttress their purchase with additional stock options to employees in order to keep them around — Bezos’ dictum breaks down rapidly as your labor pool becomes constrained.
  - RankingMember 5y ago
    Paying people yearly salaries so huge that they don't have to work for the rest of their lives is much different from simply paying them more.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    > This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving. There's so many more factors here than just pay, and as others have said, Google's team has done pretty damn well overall.
  - deegles 5y ago
    I think it's still an open question whether any amount of money would be enough to build a true SDC. The engineers made the rational decision to take the money and work on some cool problems for a while.
- onion2k 5y ago
  People very high up the corporate ladder often aren't motivated by money. They just get paid a lot. It's not the reason why they work. They work to get power, fame, respect etc. They believe that good workers are like them even if those people don't earn very much in comparison. They also believe that if someone is a bad worker, eg not like them, and you pay them a lot then they'll slack off and spend their money on things like holidays rather than working as hard as possible.
alangibson 5y ago
Hot take here. Amazon is the harbinger of a permanent, systemic and pervasive bifurcation between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else as enabled by technology.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else Private Military Contractor?
  - Thorondor 5y ago
    Professional-managerial class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
  - alangibson 5y ago
    Sometimes, also yes. Mayor Pete would be one well known example of both.
- seem_2211 5y ago
  I saw someone put phrase it as being "above or below the algorithm" Chilling and true.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Just wait until Amazon replaces all their warehouse workers with robots. Then the true bifurcation begins.
newsclues 5y ago
And yet it’s market success, supports the notion it’s had remarkable HR success by hiring the right people to develop new products and services.
- devmor 5y ago
  From a shareholder standpoint, it's an incredible business. From a sustainability, humanity or... really any standpoint that isn't "how much money can I make off of trading this stock/receiving dividends", it's disturbing.
  - brtkdotse 5y ago
    Is Amazon actually paying dividends though?
    - pfortuny 5y ago
      That should not matter at all to a shareholder.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        No, if a biz can’t profitably reinvest excess cash, it should get returned to investors as buybacks or dividends. No investment opportunity can take unlimited capital input
        astrange 5y ago
        Note that Amazon.com has not proven it can profitably reinvest - just that it can reinvest and keep growing revenue. The question is why so many people believe Bezos when he said there was a plan to eventually become profitable. (AWS is quite profitable, but retail isn't, and it doesn't have a moat.)
        ikRwS3Nb6Y 5y ago
        No, you are wrong about this. Or several years out of date at least. The idea that Amazon isn't profitable save for AWS is almost a meme for some reason in parts of the tech community, but it isn't true and never really has been when you account for re-investment. Retail on its own has been profitable for several years now, and its margins are improving. Some of those numbers are public and some are not, but even with just the public numbers it is easy enough to infer the above. What's more, Amazon retail would be pretty wildly profitable, relative to the typical margins of retail, if Amazon stopped dumping billions of dollars every quarter into continuous expansion of its logistics capabilities. They're able to dump those billions while still pulling a slight profit. In general though, they optimize for free cash flow, not profit. Source: worked there until recently
meepmorp 5y ago
HR exists to protect the company from liability and to enforce policy. Since the high attrition rate and generally miserable nature of the job are apparently intentional, that means it's a feature, not a bug. There's no HR failure here, because this is the kind of relationship management wants with (at least part of) the humans it employs. Amazon's the poster child at the moment, but I think this is just how Americans have decided to do capitalism. At some level, we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Maybe there'll be congressional hearings if the story catches on, but then nothing will change.
- yardie 5y ago
  > we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Don't think the managers and politicians aren't also trying to remove that one power as well. Between work-tied healthcare and NDAs/NCAs your options as a low to mid tier employee are very limited.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    I've often thought this is the reason Republicans are so staunchly against the ACA. Insurance that's portable and moves with you from job to job is a liability for companies that want to tether workers to the job because of health insurance.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      You also get to buy health insurance with pre tax money if your employer offers subsidizes it. But if your employer does not, then you have to buy it with post tax money.
  - astrange 5y ago
    You can defeat any non-compete by moving to California. Well, as long as there's housing.
cletus 5y ago
One thing stuck out to me: > Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point. So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don't think for a second you're immune to this "up or out" force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It's just not as blatant. Here's how: all these companies have a performance review system. It might be 1, 2 or 4 times a year. The exact process varies. Typically you'll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly. How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone's performance was given their review and their level. To avoid "ratings inflation" each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can't be "strongly exceeds expectations" by design. But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument's sake, say that number is 8%. That means the employees get ranked and those buckets will be applied so the bottom 8% will end with a subpar rating. Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door. In corporate America the "up or out" culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you're out) but the effect is basically the same. This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.
- necrotic_comp 5y ago
  "up or out" seems like such a strange concept - I understand the idea of trimming fat, but I've seen a firing of 5-10% annually, and it's demoralizing and terrifying as a worker. You're basically put in a position where you don't want to do too poorly, as you're guaranteed to get fired, but you also don't want to do too well, because then you may hit your ceiling too early, end up being "overpaid", then underperform and be set up for the cull. I've seen both, and the yearly ritual of managers coming in and tapping people on the shoulder, them walking out to never be seen again ... I hated that.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
GoodJokes 5y ago
This is why the warehouse Union was a big threat. People for like to leave union jobs for the most part.
mindvirus 5y ago
Paradoxically, I think Amazon has been able to get away with this because their stock is doing well. When your stock is going up 10%-30% per year, people will put up with a lot (my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now). I really do think that if they have a few down years, they'll have an incredibly hard time with retention and hiring.
- aynyc 5y ago
  The question I have is this, is amazon doing well because of this? Or in spite of this?
  - chii 5y ago
    a positive feedback loop. High pay attracts talents, which if utilized properly, will produce higher profits, which in turn, can afford higher pay.
  - mindvirus 5y ago
    I think both. But what I do think is that they've leaned heavily on this flywheel, and if it stops it'll be very hard to get it going again. I could see most people sticking around Google or even Facebook for a few years of downward stock, but there not so much.
- u678u 5y ago
  Same for most of tech. My friends in finance are working for banks where the stock is lower than 10 even 20 years ago. Completely different attitude.
- MuffinFlavored 5y ago
  > my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now Are you saying in 2021 new graduates out of college with bachelor degrees in computer science are being offered $160k/salary + $340k in stock grants at Amazon?
  - mindvirus 5y ago
JackPoach 5y ago
I think Amazon, as any IT giant, is a two-tier or a three-tier company. Meaning different HR principles are applied to 'line workers' compared to mid-management compared to VP level hires.
greenail 5y ago
In my experience the farther left DEI policy goes the more chaos, distraction, and resentment it creates. There also seems to be some correlation between how far left DEI policy goes and how acceptable vocal political activism is. The final anecdotal observation is that the farther left the DEI policy is the more likely you are to destroy your career by being voicing any dissenting critique of the DEI policy. Amazon tends to embrace/reward constructive critical thinking but not disruptive/revolutionary critical thinking and so it may not be possible for Amazon to keep it's culture and adopt a left leaning DEI policy. I think the Amazon culture and staying focused on people who will thrive in that culture are the things that have made it so successful in so many areas.
- halbritt 5y ago
  How is a DEI policy "left" or "right"?
  - greenail 5y ago
    I think one way to measure how far left or right by looking at how far they take "Equity". If equity is an anti-racist version of "racial equity" then it demands "anti-racist" discrimination. To quote Kendi "The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    The more extreme ideologies of DEI like critical race theory are closely associated with (in American terms) "the liberal left".
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The more extreme ideologies of DEI like critical race theory are closely associated with (in American terms) "the liberal left". “Critical race theory” isn’t either extreme or an ideology, its a fairly mainstream historiographic approach (it was a novel, but not particularly extreme, idea in its field nearly half a century ago, but now its not even that) that the American Right has recently adopted public opposition to (especially, oddly enough, in places it isn’t being promoted) as a tribal identity symbol (alongside election conspiracy theories and defiance of COVID precautions.) EDIT: It’s particularly odd to call “critical race theory” as an “extreme ideology of DEI” since DEI existing at all as a thing is based on a mainstream understanding of reality developed through critical race theory.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point. Performance is the point. It is just seemingly cruel if you cannot perform relative to your peers. It may not be the best tool to get that in some cases, but I am pretty sure that nobody is setting "make 6% of the staff miserable" as a goal.
- inkywatcher 5y ago
  Agreed. It's more like 90%.
wonderwonder 5y ago
This article has an inaccurate title. It appears that HR is not failing at all, they are implementing the desired process successfully. Many people seem to think that HR is there to help the employees, but it is not, it is there only to help the company, very often when the company is in direct opposition to those employees. While the Amazon process is cruel, one would be hard pressed to label it a failure, the warehouses appear to work flawlessly, I cant recall a single time Amazon has missed a delivery date of mine. If one wants to say that people should not be treated like this, I agree, reducing people to nothing but statistics is inhumane but for Amazon the company it has been a complete success.
throawayhn243 5y ago
There is one reason why Amazon gets away with paying smart white collar engineers lower than market and in general treating them bad. That reason is India and its unlimited supply of engineers to Amazon. For last 10 years India has been producing more smart engineers than local market is willing to pay for. Note that the demand is more than supply but Indian companies still will not pay engineers top salaries. So for years it became easy for companies like Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft to pay top of market and get their pick. And these engineers, historically, were willing to grind to any levels for a ticket to US. And Amazon offered that. 1.5 years in almost 70% of their Indian employees move to US on L1 visas. Even lower tech market salaries in US are life changing for most of these folks. Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians. It hasn't mattered to Amazon if people leave after 2 years. Because they always have a next batch coming from India. But then local companies started to pay and Amazon struggled to hire top talent. At this point they were smart enough to realise they need workers more than engineers. And now Amazon hires more engineers than any product company in India. It goes to more colleges than any other company. It pays them in top 80 percentile of market, they get to go to US where get paid top 70 percentile of market. So what if they get treated like shit for couple years. That's the cost of buying a 3 bedroom house for many of them. The day Indian market is big enough to absorb these engineers at their price, Amazon recruiters will be on their knees for their next batch. Unfortunately due to pure currency difference it's always going to better financial decision for most Indian engineers to go to US, at least for next 10 years and Amazon will not have to treat it's employees like humans.
- cdstyh 5y ago
  >Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians. I don't understand this.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    India is part of Asia
- EMM_386 5y ago
  We are rapidly entering a true global market for things like software engineers. We've always had "off-shore" and "near-shore" companies, but now with this major push to remote work there is no reason outside timezone differences to hire locally if you can get someone elsewhere who has better skills and will take a 5x+ lower rate. I know this because I am a Team Lead / Senior Architect on a large project that has a component in one of these countries. They are highly skilled and are literally 5x lower than US rates. This should rightfully make highly paid software engineers in wealthy countries nervous. I'm one of them.

160 points by ramimac 5y ago

Although Dave Clark comes across as an unrequited villain in most Amazon reporting, he’s just a loyal shadow of Bezos’ dictum that Amazon employees at all levels are to unquestioningly serve his machine without thought of compensation. The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
"The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me." That seems to be widely spread modern management thinking. Executives always have a reason why they should be paid a lot no matter if the stock goes up or down, the company does illegal things, profits go up or down. They always need to be incentivized financially. And the same pople will tell you that giving more money to the lower ranks will make them lazy. I remember a discussion with my director where he explained to me that he doesn't want to hire people who work for the money while at the same time in a lot of meetings he talks about cost and profit.
- astrange 5y ago
  That's why you hire execs from the right social classes; their expenses, or their non-monetary needs like staying away from their wife, need to be so high that they won't retire just because you gave them $4 million.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    That’s actually true. I would retire after half a year if I got my CEOs salary. And I would feel super rich. Even a month would propably be sufficient.
pfortuny 5y ago
People as commodity. Of course, I am NOT people.
astrange 5y ago
> The image of a man who owns mansions in Seattle, DC, New York, and LA (amongst others) pontificating to his S-Team that paying employees more makes them /less/ motivated is one that sticks with me. Well, this is true. Google tried the opposite strategy with self-driving cars; they paid everyone so much that none of them had any reason to work for the rest of their lives. This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving.
- josefx 5y ago
  I am not sure I would trust Google on that. At least one guy got an even better offer from Uber and Googles involvement in fixing salaries with several competitors has been out of the bag for years now.
- HillRat 5y ago
  It seems to me — not that this is my space — that Waymo’s gotten further than anyone else, running a taxi service and recently testing long-haul trucking. Zoox might also get there quickly, but note that Amazon is already losing key personnel to Waymo and is having to buttress their purchase with additional stock options to employees in order to keep them around — Bezos’ dictum breaks down rapidly as your labor pool becomes constrained.
- RankingMember 5y ago
  Paying people yearly salaries so huge that they don't have to work for the rest of their lives is much different from simply paying them more.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  > This has not accomplished cars becoming self-driving. There's so many more factors here than just pay, and as others have said, Google's team has done pretty damn well overall.
- deegles 5y ago
  I think it's still an open question whether any amount of money would be enough to build a true SDC. The engineers made the rational decision to take the money and work on some cool problems for a while.
onion2k 5y ago
People very high up the corporate ladder often aren't motivated by money. They just get paid a lot. It's not the reason why they work. They work to get power, fame, respect etc. They believe that good workers are like them even if those people don't earn very much in comparison. They also believe that if someone is a bad worker, eg not like them, and you pay them a lot then they'll slack off and spend their money on things like holidays rather than working as hard as possible.

alangibson 5y ago

Hot take here. Amazon is the harbinger of a permanent, systemic and pervasive bifurcation between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else as enabled by technology.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> between what we now call the PMC and basically everyone else Private Military Contractor?
- Thorondor 5y ago
  Professional-managerial class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
- alangibson 5y ago
  Sometimes, also yes. Mayor Pete would be one well known example of both.
seem_2211 5y ago
I saw someone put phrase it as being "above or below the algorithm" Chilling and true.
colinmhayes 5y ago
Just wait until Amazon replaces all their warehouse workers with robots. Then the true bifurcation begins.

newsclues 5y ago

And yet it’s market success, supports the notion it’s had remarkable HR success by hiring the right people to develop new products and services.

devmor 5y ago
From a shareholder standpoint, it's an incredible business. From a sustainability, humanity or... really any standpoint that isn't "how much money can I make off of trading this stock/receiving dividends", it's disturbing.
- brtkdotse 5y ago
  Is Amazon actually paying dividends though?
  - pfortuny 5y ago
    That should not matter at all to a shareholder.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      No, if a biz can’t profitably reinvest excess cash, it should get returned to investors as buybacks or dividends. No investment opportunity can take unlimited capital input
      - astrange 5y ago
        Note that Amazon.com has not proven it can profitably reinvest - just that it can reinvest and keep growing revenue. The question is why so many people believe Bezos when he said there was a plan to eventually become profitable. (AWS is quite profitable, but retail isn't, and it doesn't have a moat.)
        ikRwS3Nb6Y 5y ago
        No, you are wrong about this. Or several years out of date at least. The idea that Amazon isn't profitable save for AWS is almost a meme for some reason in parts of the tech community, but it isn't true and never really has been when you account for re-investment. Retail on its own has been profitable for several years now, and its margins are improving. Some of those numbers are public and some are not, but even with just the public numbers it is easy enough to infer the above. What's more, Amazon retail would be pretty wildly profitable, relative to the typical margins of retail, if Amazon stopped dumping billions of dollars every quarter into continuous expansion of its logistics capabilities. They're able to dump those billions while still pulling a slight profit. In general though, they optimize for free cash flow, not profit. Source: worked there until recently

meepmorp 5y ago

HR exists to protect the company from liability and to enforce policy. Since the high attrition rate and generally miserable nature of the job are apparently intentional, that means it's a feature, not a bug. There's no HR failure here, because this is the kind of relationship management wants with (at least part of) the humans it employs. Amazon's the poster child at the moment, but I think this is just how Americans have decided to do capitalism. At some level, we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Maybe there'll be congressional hearings if the story catches on, but then nothing will change.

yardie 5y ago
> we're collectively ok with employees only power in the working relationship being to find another job. Don't think the managers and politicians aren't also trying to remove that one power as well. Between work-tied healthcare and NDAs/NCAs your options as a low to mid tier employee are very limited.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  I've often thought this is the reason Republicans are so staunchly against the ACA. Insurance that's portable and moves with you from job to job is a liability for companies that want to tether workers to the job because of health insurance.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    You also get to buy health insurance with pre tax money if your employer offers subsidizes it. But if your employer does not, then you have to buy it with post tax money.
- astrange 5y ago
  You can defeat any non-compete by moving to California. Well, as long as there's housing.

cletus 5y ago

One thing stuck out to me: > Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point. So, for anyone who is in even salaried positions in tech including engineering, sales, product management and whatever... don't think for a second you're immune to this "up or out" force. I hate to break it to you but Big Tech companies do this too. It's just not as blatant. Here's how: all these companies have a performance review system. It might be 1, 2 or 4 times a year. The exact process varies. Typically you'll review yourself and others will review you. Some will stack rank directly, others will stack rank indirectly. How this works is that groups of managers will come together and decide what everyone's performance was given their review and their level. To avoid "ratings inflation" each ratings bucket will have a range it needs to stay in. So the entire org can't be "strongly exceeds expectations" by design. But the dark side of this is that subpar ratings have targets too. For argument's sake, say that number is 8%. That means the employees get ranked and those buckets will be applied so the bottom 8% will end with a subpar rating. Depending on your company this can be the kiss of death essentially forcing you out the door. In corporate America the "up or out" culture is more explicit (eg get promoted within 3 years or you're out) but the effect is basically the same. This is not limited to hourly employees and it is absolutely present in tech.

necrotic_comp 5y ago
"up or out" seems like such a strange concept - I understand the idea of trimming fat, but I've seen a firing of 5-10% annually, and it's demoralizing and terrifying as a worker. You're basically put in a position where you don't want to do too poorly, as you're guaranteed to get fired, but you also don't want to do too well, because then you may hit your ceiling too early, end up being "overpaid", then underperform and be set up for the cull. I've seen both, and the yearly ritual of managers coming in and tapping people on the shoulder, them walking out to never be seen again ... I hated that.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

GoodJokes 5y ago

This is why the warehouse Union was a big threat. People for like to leave union jobs for the most part.

mindvirus 5y ago

Paradoxically, I think Amazon has been able to get away with this because their stock is doing well. When your stock is going up 10%-30% per year, people will put up with a lot (my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now). I really do think that if they have a few down years, they'll have an incredibly hard time with retention and hiring.

aynyc 5y ago
The question I have is this, is amazon doing well because of this? Or in spite of this?
- chii 5y ago
  a positive feedback loop. High pay attracts talents, which if utilized properly, will produce higher profits, which in turn, can afford higher pay.
- mindvirus 5y ago
  I think both. But what I do think is that they've leaned heavily on this flywheel, and if it stops it'll be very hard to get it going again. I could see most people sticking around Google or even Facebook for a few years of downward stock, but there not so much.
u678u 5y ago
Same for most of tech. My friends in finance are working for banks where the stock is lower than 10 even 20 years ago. Completely different attitude.
MuffinFlavored 5y ago
> my new grad offer there 10+ years ago is worth $500k/year now Are you saying in 2021 new graduates out of college with bachelor degrees in computer science are being offered $160k/salary + $340k in stock grants at Amazon?
- mindvirus 5y ago

JackPoach 5y ago

I think Amazon, as any IT giant, is a two-tier or a three-tier company. Meaning different HR principles are applied to 'line workers' compared to mid-management compared to VP level hires.

greenail 5y ago

In my experience the farther left DEI policy goes the more chaos, distraction, and resentment it creates. There also seems to be some correlation between how far left DEI policy goes and how acceptable vocal political activism is. The final anecdotal observation is that the farther left the DEI policy is the more likely you are to destroy your career by being voicing any dissenting critique of the DEI policy. Amazon tends to embrace/reward constructive critical thinking but not disruptive/revolutionary critical thinking and so it may not be possible for Amazon to keep it's culture and adopt a left leaning DEI policy. I think the Amazon culture and staying focused on people who will thrive in that culture are the things that have made it so successful in so many areas.

halbritt 5y ago
How is a DEI policy "left" or "right"?
- greenail 5y ago
  I think one way to measure how far left or right by looking at how far they take "Equity". If equity is an anti-racist version of "racial equity" then it demands "anti-racist" discrimination. To quote Kendi "The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
- Clewza313 5y ago
  The more extreme ideologies of DEI like critical race theory are closely associated with (in American terms) "the liberal left".
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The more extreme ideologies of DEI like critical race theory are closely associated with (in American terms) "the liberal left". “Critical race theory” isn’t either extreme or an ideology, its a fairly mainstream historiographic approach (it was a novel, but not particularly extreme, idea in its field nearly half a century ago, but now its not even that) that the American Right has recently adopted public opposition to (especially, oddly enough, in places it isn’t being promoted) as a tribal identity symbol (alongside election conspiracy theories and defiance of COVID precautions.) EDIT: It’s particularly odd to call “critical race theory” as an “extreme ideology of DEI” since DEI existing at all as a thing is based on a mainstream understanding of reality developed through critical race theory.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point. Performance is the point. It is just seemingly cruel if you cannot perform relative to your peers. It may not be the best tool to get that in some cases, but I am pretty sure that nobody is setting "make 6% of the staff miserable" as a goal.

inkywatcher 5y ago
Agreed. It's more like 90%.

wonderwonder 5y ago

This article has an inaccurate title. It appears that HR is not failing at all, they are implementing the desired process successfully. Many people seem to think that HR is there to help the employees, but it is not, it is there only to help the company, very often when the company is in direct opposition to those employees. While the Amazon process is cruel, one would be hard pressed to label it a failure, the warehouses appear to work flawlessly, I cant recall a single time Amazon has missed a delivery date of mine. If one wants to say that people should not be treated like this, I agree, reducing people to nothing but statistics is inhumane but for Amazon the company it has been a complete success.

throawayhn243 5y ago

There is one reason why Amazon gets away with paying smart white collar engineers lower than market and in general treating them bad. That reason is India and its unlimited supply of engineers to Amazon. For last 10 years India has been producing more smart engineers than local market is willing to pay for. Note that the demand is more than supply but Indian companies still will not pay engineers top salaries. So for years it became easy for companies like Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft to pay top of market and get their pick. And these engineers, historically, were willing to grind to any levels for a ticket to US. And Amazon offered that. 1.5 years in almost 70% of their Indian employees move to US on L1 visas. Even lower tech market salaries in US are life changing for most of these folks. Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians. It hasn't mattered to Amazon if people leave after 2 years. Because they always have a next batch coming from India. But then local companies started to pay and Amazon struggled to hire top talent. At this point they were smart enough to realise they need workers more than engineers. And now Amazon hires more engineers than any product company in India. It goes to more colleges than any other company. It pays them in top 80 percentile of market, they get to go to US where get paid top 70 percentile of market. So what if they get treated like shit for couple years. That's the cost of buying a 3 bedroom house for many of them. The day Indian market is big enough to absorb these engineers at their price, Amazon recruiters will be on their knees for their next batch. Unfortunately due to pure currency difference it's always going to better financial decision for most Indian engineers to go to US, at least for next 10 years and Amazon will not have to treat it's employees like humans.

cdstyh 5y ago
>Which is why 50% of lower level engineers in Amazon are Indians and around 70% are asians. I don't understand this.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  India is part of Asia
EMM_386 5y ago
We are rapidly entering a true global market for things like software engineers. We've always had "off-shore" and "near-shore" companies, but now with this major push to remote work there is no reason outside timezone differences to hire locally if you can get someone elsewhere who has better skills and will take a 5x+ lower rate. I know this because I am a Team Lead / Senior Architect on a large project that has a component in one of these countries. They are highly skilled and are literally 5x lower than US rates. This should rightfully make highly paid software engineers in wealthy countries nervous. I'm one of them.