7 ms·

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how ba

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price. If the stock price starts to drop for whatever reason. All the best employees will leave in droves. That’s what I saw at Uber post IPO.

renewiltord 5y ago
That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rkalla 5y ago
  Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.
  - _rs 5y ago
    Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.
  - ndesaulniers 5y ago
    Grants vest over a period of 4 years, with overlapping grants generally granted each year. So you don't need to wait a full 4 years to begin selling.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      Right I know, my point is that if AMZN doubles two years in and GOOG doesn't, the AMZN worker is better off because their entire grant has doubled. The GOOG worker buying AMZN has only doubled half their grant, the unvested portion is in GOOG which hasn't moved.
- ndesaulniers 5y ago
  Compare the performance of GOOG vs AMZN over the past 6mo, 1 yr, 2 yr. Amazon's pandemic growth is leveling out.
- thanhhaimai 5y ago
  I'm not a lawyer. Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph. Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws based on the training I recalled.
- startup_excuse 5y ago
  The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no guarantee it will double effectively taking a pay cut.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - htrp 5y ago
    You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        But you’re vesting 40% of your initial grant this year was the point, not that you didn’t get the initial “fill in” cash bonus.
        rejectedandsad 5y ago
        Fair but if you decide to invest in Amazon with the proceeds you’re in the same boat. And other companies do frequently at least attempt to match scenarios like this (if you’re smart enough to get better offers).
      - dlp211 5y ago
        Except that their competitors are giving you 25/25/25/25 vest with 100/0/0/0 signing bonus.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  > The employees value the money more than they value well-being yeah, if it's that then Amazon is not to blame.
nxmnxm99 5y ago
I have several friends at Amazon. They all love it. Mostly because they're workaholics. Most Amazon people you talk to will say the same things. However, you won't see that story featured on Hacker News because it doesn't fit the "bring down the bourgeoisie" overwork-porn yay-Sweden narrative that is HN/Reddit. My theory is it's because most high performers who work hard don't have much time for Reddit/HN and it self-selects for the opposite profile
- slaymaker1907 5y ago
  Ah yes, the imfamous antiwork news site controlled by a venture capital firm.
EarlKing 5y ago
> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.
- civilian 5y ago
  So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?
  - htrp 5y ago
    > Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according to a new report Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-worker-shortage-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...
    - subsubzero 5y ago
      I know I will never work for them, they constantly reach out to me and its all nope on my side. As a side note there's always new college grads(a sucker born every minute according to PT Barnum) willing to suffer for their chance to work at a FANG.
      - Clewza313 5y ago
        I haven't seen too many threads on HN complaining about the work conditions at any FAANG other than Amazon though?
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    because they may not have other job opportunities ? Because being screwed is better than having no job at all ?
hintymad 5y ago
It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one promising company to another every week from weeks.
- codezero 5y ago
  This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different reason, the promise that you’re on a rocket ship that is pre-initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the lottery. Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not the companies’ failed promises. Obviously not keeping people is painful for growth too, but it’s still a very one sided power dynamic.
  - chris11 5y ago
    > Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.
    - codezero 5y ago
      I don’t understand. In fast moving small companies (<150) employees this sounds absurd. Are you talking about different companies? Can you maybe give me an example, or something concrete to root your statement in?
      - chris11 5y ago
        I misspoke and used cliff as the length of the grant instead of when it started vesting. Short cliffs are good, some companies are starting to vest equity grants immediately. I haven't heard of a two year cliff. Some companies are also doing one year grants instead of four year grants, like Stripe. That's costing employees a lot of money.
maybelsyrup 5y ago
> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  The poor fellow at Amazon can always go to Zillow or Microsoft not really the same as deaths of despair here.
  - maybelsyrup 5y ago
    Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.
      - pedrosorio 5y ago
        > for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class Wait, what?
        maybelsyrup 5y ago
bob33212 5y ago
I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"
- throw8881 5y ago
  I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here. Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic. Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles where they're unhappy. Amazon can't certainly do better in how it scales its business, but alot of the posts here that give the appearance that everyone at Amazon is unhappy are exaggerated. Alot of people don't like Amazon, period, and think the company should be broken up. While I think we can do alot of things better, I also believe there's a particular agenda pushed because Amazon is perceived as a threat across many industries, not just retail sales or cloud services.
  - bob33212 5y ago
    I believe you, and just for context, I have spent 600k on AWS over the past 3 years, when I could have spent it on Azure. I don't think AWS should be shut down.
    - subsubzero 5y ago
      I absolutely don't believe AWS should be shut down. I do think AWS and Amazon(retailer) should be split up, and thats what a majority of sensible people believe.
      - gergi 5y ago
        Source? I consider myself “sensible”, do not agree with this statement, and haven’t seen any data that would suggest the “majority” would agree.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Golden handcuffs? More like golden shackles.
casefields 5y ago
It's not just about work conditions. Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on. 2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time. 3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on. 4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own. 5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking. 6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on. Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed master can do this also. 7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers. 8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.) 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave? -------------- An excerpt from 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' by Robert Nozick
brown9-2 5y ago
Over the past 9 months though the stock has been flat, so this willingness to suffer for rewards will hit a brick wall soon
hollerith 5y ago
Your friend could switch jobs, then use his salary to buy Amazon's stock :)
- mrbonner 5y ago
  Would you?
spamizbad 5y ago
I always worry that companies that run like this will rapidly implode as soon as the crazy growth and market dominance begins to be threatened. As soon as you're no longer king of the hill - what happens? Seems like you would rapidly shed talent.
darksaints 5y ago
You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries. Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price. And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures. Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I think the market will solve this soon on its own and it won’t be pretty. Amazon may be a great stock but everything falls in a market crash. I wonder what will happen internally when that happens. I never knew so much of Amazon structure was tied to the stock price until reading this thread.
Lammy 5y ago
> because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price What is the point of hiring the "best" employees except as an optimization of the stock price?
acituan 5y ago
> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  Oh, come on. The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment. Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.
  - decker 5y ago
    You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."
  - acituan 5y ago
    > Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate. Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer. > The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.
  - hiyer 5y ago
    The damage they're doing to themselves will eventually trickle down to those they live with - spouse, kids, parents, friends, etc.
retrocryptid 5y ago
You'll find plenty of people who will leave a profitable company or a lucrative position if they value intangibles over cash.
js8 5y ago
> So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price. I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out. If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.) I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.

renewiltord 5y ago

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment. Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rkalla 5y ago
Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.
- _rs 5y ago
  Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.
thebean11 5y ago
Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.
- ndesaulniers 5y ago
  Grants vest over a period of 4 years, with overlapping grants generally granted each year. So you don't need to wait a full 4 years to begin selling.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    Right I know, my point is that if AMZN doubles two years in and GOOG doesn't, the AMZN worker is better off because their entire grant has doubled. The GOOG worker buying AMZN has only doubled half their grant, the unvested portion is in GOOG which hasn't moved.
ndesaulniers 5y ago
Compare the performance of GOOG vs AMZN over the past 6mo, 1 yr, 2 yr. Amazon's pandemic growth is leveling out.
thanhhaimai 5y ago
I'm not a lawyer. Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph. Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws based on the training I recalled.
startup_excuse 5y ago
The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no guarantee it will double effectively taking a pay cut.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- htrp 5y ago
  You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      But you’re vesting 40% of your initial grant this year was the point, not that you didn’t get the initial “fill in” cash bonus.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        Fair but if you decide to invest in Amazon with the proceeds you’re in the same boat. And other companies do frequently at least attempt to match scenarios like this (if you’re smart enough to get better offers).
    - dlp211 5y ago
      Except that their competitors are giving you 25/25/25/25 vest with 100/0/0/0 signing bonus.
wiz21c 5y ago
> The employees value the money more than they value well-being yeah, if it's that then Amazon is not to blame.

nxmnxm99 5y ago

I have several friends at Amazon. They all love it. Mostly because they're workaholics. Most Amazon people you talk to will say the same things. However, you won't see that story featured on Hacker News because it doesn't fit the "bring down the bourgeoisie" overwork-porn yay-Sweden narrative that is HN/Reddit. My theory is it's because most high performers who work hard don't have much time for Reddit/HN and it self-selects for the opposite profile

slaymaker1907 5y ago
Ah yes, the imfamous antiwork news site controlled by a venture capital firm.

EarlKing 5y ago

> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.

civilian 5y ago
So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?
- htrp 5y ago
  > Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according to a new report Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-worker-shortage-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...
  - subsubzero 5y ago
    I know I will never work for them, they constantly reach out to me and its all nope on my side. As a side note there's always new college grads(a sucker born every minute according to PT Barnum) willing to suffer for their chance to work at a FANG.
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      I haven't seen too many threads on HN complaining about the work conditions at any FAANG other than Amazon though?
- wiz21c 5y ago
  because they may not have other job opportunities ? Because being screwed is better than having no job at all ?

hintymad 5y ago

It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one promising company to another every week from weeks.

codezero 5y ago
This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different reason, the promise that you’re on a rocket ship that is pre-initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the lottery. Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not the companies’ failed promises. Obviously not keeping people is painful for growth too, but it’s still a very one sided power dynamic.
- chris11 5y ago
  > Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.
  - codezero 5y ago
    I don’t understand. In fast moving small companies (<150) employees this sounds absurd. Are you talking about different companies? Can you maybe give me an example, or something concrete to root your statement in?
    - chris11 5y ago
      I misspoke and used cliff as the length of the grant instead of when it started vesting. Short cliffs are good, some companies are starting to vest equity grants immediately. I haven't heard of a two year cliff. Some companies are also doing one year grants instead of four year grants, like Stripe. That's costing employees a lot of money.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
The poor fellow at Amazon can always go to Zillow or Microsoft not really the same as deaths of despair here.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago
  Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      > for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class Wait, what?
      - maybelsyrup 5y ago

bob33212 5y ago

I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"

throw8881 5y ago
I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here. Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic. Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles where they're unhappy. Amazon can't certainly do better in how it scales its business, but alot of the posts here that give the appearance that everyone at Amazon is unhappy are exaggerated. Alot of people don't like Amazon, period, and think the company should be broken up. While I think we can do alot of things better, I also believe there's a particular agenda pushed because Amazon is perceived as a threat across many industries, not just retail sales or cloud services.
- bob33212 5y ago
  I believe you, and just for context, I have spent 600k on AWS over the past 3 years, when I could have spent it on Azure. I don't think AWS should be shut down.
  - subsubzero 5y ago
    I absolutely don't believe AWS should be shut down. I do think AWS and Amazon(retailer) should be split up, and thats what a majority of sensible people believe.
    - gergi 5y ago
      Source? I consider myself “sensible”, do not agree with this statement, and haven’t seen any data that would suggest the “majority” would agree.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Golden handcuffs? More like golden shackles.

casefields 5y ago

It's not just about work conditions. Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on. 2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time. 3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on. 4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own. 5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking. 6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on. Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed master can do this also. 7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers. 8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.) 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave? -------------- An excerpt from 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' by Robert Nozick

brown9-2 5y ago

Over the past 9 months though the stock has been flat, so this willingness to suffer for rewards will hit a brick wall soon

hollerith 5y ago

Your friend could switch jobs, then use his salary to buy Amazon's stock :)

mrbonner 5y ago
Would you?

spamizbad 5y ago

I always worry that companies that run like this will rapidly implode as soon as the crazy growth and market dominance begins to be threatened. As soon as you're no longer king of the hill - what happens? Seems like you would rapidly shed talent.

darksaints 5y ago

You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries. Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price. And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures. Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I think the market will solve this soon on its own and it won’t be pretty. Amazon may be a great stock but everything falls in a market crash. I wonder what will happen internally when that happens. I never knew so much of Amazon structure was tied to the stock price until reading this thread.

Lammy 5y ago

> because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price What is the point of hiring the "best" employees except as an optimization of the stock price?

acituan 5y ago

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.

unethical_ban 5y ago
Oh, come on. The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment. Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.
- decker 5y ago
  You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."
- acituan 5y ago
  > Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate. Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer. > The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.
- hiyer 5y ago
  The damage they're doing to themselves will eventually trickle down to those they live with - spouse, kids, parents, friends, etc.

retrocryptid 5y ago

You'll find plenty of people who will leave a profitable company or a lucrative position if they value intangibles over cash.

js8 5y ago

> So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price. I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out. If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.) I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.