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> This is not a case of “not enough resources'', this is a case of the project not getting the internal priority to invest in improvement. This is only partly

> This is not a case of “not enough resources'', this is a case of the project not getting the internal priority to invest in improvement. This is only partly true. Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. So yes, parts of Amazon have prioritised new/more features over improving existing ones, and some are drowning in a sea of legacy. But also parts simply don't have the number of experienced engineers they need to deliver all their goals. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon.

rk06 5y ago
> churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. It was a matter of time for that to happen. Amazon is infamous for having a firing quota, and infamous for Hiring managers to hire people, to fulfill said quota. As long as these practices remain, the situation will only worsen for Amazon
- harshaw 5y ago
  There is no firing quota.
  - rk06 5y ago
    According to multiple sources, Amazon has a policy to have 6% UnRegrettedAtiration. which in normal speak is 6% of employees to be fired per year. and managers are expected to fullfil this quota, and backfil it if they failed to meet it previously. Here is a recent news mentioning it: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unregretted-attrition-told/ https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...
    - zeckalpha 5y ago
      Nuance, but you can have someone leave you don’t regret without firing someone.
      - PhoenixReborn 5y ago
        Sure, but let's say that the quota is not met organically and only 3% leave voluntarily. Then to achieve the target 6% unregretted attrition for an org, you'd necessarily need to pick a different 3% to fire/push out.
  - franczesko 5y ago
    > There is no firing quota. It's called planned attrition.
  - harshaw 5y ago
    to make this clear: as a SDM at Amazon who is probably not really authorized to speak about this - there are goals but there is no quota that says "you must fire your bottom 6%". At least, no one has said to me you must fire someone. That's just nuts. At any organization there tends to be some under performers so if you are doing your job the problem sorts it self out.
- angarg12 5y ago
  Top performers leave the company voluntarily, most often to get a promotion and pay rise elsewhere. This is commonplace in tech. The problem is (particularly during the last few months) the intake of talent has struggled to keep up.
peakaboo 5y ago
I guess some people work for shitty companies because it makes their cv look "good"? And the pay is probably decent too. But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul.
- nix23 5y ago
  >But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul. Bell Laboratory's was a thing....
  - fmajid 5y ago
    That's because T.N. Vail was a visionary leader. They are in short supply nowadays.
    - Veelox 5y ago
      Hot take If that's what your interested in go work at Tesla or SpaceX.
    - nix23 5y ago
      True words!
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  If Amazon engineers said they never work more than 40 hours a week and shut off their work phones at 5, I’d consider their pay decent. And maybe it’s true. But I’m not sure.
Alex3917 5y ago
> Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. This is only true because Amazon refuses to pay market rates for talent. E.g. for the folks who write their technical documentation, they require that they have the technical skills of senior engineers, but pay them closer to what you would pay a recent college grad to churn out SEO blogspam. If they actually payed their technical writers the same amount (or more) as their engineers, their documentation would be great. They have the money to do so, they just refuse to actually do it, because they're big enough that they can externalize the costs of bad documentation onto their customers.
- angarg12 5y ago
  I can only talk for Software Engineers. Amazon pay for engineers is by no means low, definitely above the median. But it doesn't pay top dollar either. We are constantly losing good candidates to other companies for a higher pay. That's not counting those that don't even bother applying, for which we don't have visibility.
  - flashgordon 5y ago
    Come on mate. If you compare every other employer on earth yes Amazon comp looks great but limit it to say FAANGs and it gets interesting. Even more when you look at vesting structures (even worse that even your 401k match vests after three years. Or that your refreshers are tied to what the current value of your past grants are etc!
jen20 5y ago
If that’s true, perhaps they should reconsider a) their non-compete agreement b) their equity vesting schedule.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Why would anyone work at Amazon except for desperation? The hilarious thing about your "raising the bar" hiring is that the abusive hiring process, abusive work culture, abusive HR policies, and the rapidly declining reputation cap the bar. Why would good people work at fucking Amazon? They won't. So you'll end up with a bunch of backstabbing Machiavelli wannabes. And those people that shake out of Amazon? They don't have tech talent to rise above the machiavellis, so that means they are the FAILED machiavellian backstabbers. What could be worse? That means they will be ULTRA machiavellian out of paranoia in the next workplace. Sure, tell yourself "this happens everywhere". "It depends on the team". I have never met an amazon employee that didn't admit the place was a terrible workplace and they only worked there for the resume checkmark. Usually this pathetic machiavellian game theory plays out in middle management. Amazon however has trickled this down to the tech workers, which is not good. All that for "ok" pay? Your vesting is a three year carrot that the HR policies try to ensure that you won't be able to cash? What a crap company.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I was recently hired into AWS. I’m not seeing the kind of organization that you’re describing. There may be parts of Amazon that work that way, but I don’t see it. Maybe that’s an Amazon versus AWS thing, or maybe not. I would say that any company with 1.6m employees is going to have radically different policies and procedures in different parts of the company. Maybe you’ve only heard about the bad parts so far. I see this as the same issue as the future being distributed irregularly. We do have a hiring issue in our team, where we are short by dozens of SDEs that we wanted to have by now. And we are definitely still hiring. I can’t speak for anyone else, but my incentive comp is not backloaded, and I feel like I’m definitely getting market rate pay. I don’t consider myself to be desperate. I was already on my way out the door at Whole Foods when I virtually ran into a guy on one of the internal channels, and he thought I’d be a good fit for what they were looking for. I interviewed, and I got the job. But I think I could have gotten a job at a lot of other places, too. @AtlasBarfed — There is no part of what you’re describing that fits what I’m seeing in our team or what I can see of other teams. But I can only speak for myself and my own personal experience.

rk06 5y ago

> churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. It was a matter of time for that to happen. Amazon is infamous for having a firing quota, and infamous for Hiring managers to hire people, to fulfill said quota. As long as these practices remain, the situation will only worsen for Amazon

harshaw 5y ago
There is no firing quota.
- rk06 5y ago
  According to multiple sources, Amazon has a policy to have 6% UnRegrettedAtiration. which in normal speak is 6% of employees to be fired per year. and managers are expected to fullfil this quota, and backfil it if they failed to meet it previously. Here is a recent news mentioning it: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unregretted-attrition-told/ https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...
  - zeckalpha 5y ago
    Nuance, but you can have someone leave you don’t regret without firing someone.
    - PhoenixReborn 5y ago
      Sure, but let's say that the quota is not met organically and only 3% leave voluntarily. Then to achieve the target 6% unregretted attrition for an org, you'd necessarily need to pick a different 3% to fire/push out.
- franczesko 5y ago
  > There is no firing quota. It's called planned attrition.
- harshaw 5y ago
  to make this clear: as a SDM at Amazon who is probably not really authorized to speak about this - there are goals but there is no quota that says "you must fire your bottom 6%". At least, no one has said to me you must fire someone. That's just nuts. At any organization there tends to be some under performers so if you are doing your job the problem sorts it self out.
angarg12 5y ago
Top performers leave the company voluntarily, most often to get a promotion and pay rise elsewhere. This is commonplace in tech. The problem is (particularly during the last few months) the intake of talent has struggled to keep up.

peakaboo 5y ago

I guess some people work for shitty companies because it makes their cv look "good"? And the pay is probably decent too. But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul.

nix23 5y ago
>But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul. Bell Laboratory's was a thing....
- fmajid 5y ago
  That's because T.N. Vail was a visionary leader. They are in short supply nowadays.
  - Veelox 5y ago
    Hot take If that's what your interested in go work at Tesla or SpaceX.
  - nix23 5y ago
    True words!
Waterluvian 5y ago
If Amazon engineers said they never work more than 40 hours a week and shut off their work phones at 5, I’d consider their pay decent. And maybe it’s true. But I’m not sure.

Alex3917 5y ago

> Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. This is only true because Amazon refuses to pay market rates for talent. E.g. for the folks who write their technical documentation, they require that they have the technical skills of senior engineers, but pay them closer to what you would pay a recent college grad to churn out SEO blogspam. If they actually payed their technical writers the same amount (or more) as their engineers, their documentation would be great. They have the money to do so, they just refuse to actually do it, because they're big enough that they can externalize the costs of bad documentation onto their customers.

angarg12 5y ago
I can only talk for Software Engineers. Amazon pay for engineers is by no means low, definitely above the median. But it doesn't pay top dollar either. We are constantly losing good candidates to other companies for a higher pay. That's not counting those that don't even bother applying, for which we don't have visibility.
- flashgordon 5y ago
  Come on mate. If you compare every other employer on earth yes Amazon comp looks great but limit it to say FAANGs and it gets interesting. Even more when you look at vesting structures (even worse that even your 401k match vests after three years. Or that your refreshers are tied to what the current value of your past grants are etc!

jen20 5y ago

If that’s true, perhaps they should reconsider a) their non-compete agreement b) their equity vesting schedule.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Why would anyone work at Amazon except for desperation? The hilarious thing about your "raising the bar" hiring is that the abusive hiring process, abusive work culture, abusive HR policies, and the rapidly declining reputation cap the bar. Why would good people work at fucking Amazon? They won't. So you'll end up with a bunch of backstabbing Machiavelli wannabes. And those people that shake out of Amazon? They don't have tech talent to rise above the machiavellis, so that means they are the FAILED machiavellian backstabbers. What could be worse? That means they will be ULTRA machiavellian out of paranoia in the next workplace. Sure, tell yourself "this happens everywhere". "It depends on the team". I have never met an amazon employee that didn't admit the place was a terrible workplace and they only worked there for the resume checkmark. Usually this pathetic machiavellian game theory plays out in middle management. Amazon however has trickled this down to the tech workers, which is not good. All that for "ok" pay? Your vesting is a three year carrot that the HR policies try to ensure that you won't be able to cash? What a crap company.

bradknowles 5y ago
Disclaimer: I was recently hired into AWS. I’m not seeing the kind of organization that you’re describing. There may be parts of Amazon that work that way, but I don’t see it. Maybe that’s an Amazon versus AWS thing, or maybe not. I would say that any company with 1.6m employees is going to have radically different policies and procedures in different parts of the company. Maybe you’ve only heard about the bad parts so far. I see this as the same issue as the future being distributed irregularly. We do have a hiring issue in our team, where we are short by dozens of SDEs that we wanted to have by now. And we are definitely still hiring. I can’t speak for anyone else, but my incentive comp is not backloaded, and I feel like I’m definitely getting market rate pay. I don’t consider myself to be desperate. I was already on my way out the door at Whole Foods when I virtually ran into a guy on one of the internal channels, and he thought I’d be a good fit for what they were looking for. I interviewed, and I got the job. But I think I could have gotten a job at a lot of other places, too. @AtlasBarfed — There is no part of what you’re describing that fits what I’m seeing in our team or what I can see of other teams. But I can only speak for myself and my own personal experience.