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Complete speculation; but I wonder if how Amazon works their employee's so hard is the root cause of this. Layer on COVID as an additional stressor and give it

Complete speculation; but I wonder if how Amazon works their employee's so hard is the root cause of this. Layer on COVID as an additional stressor and give it a few years and this could be the result. Curious to hear from those at Amazon, what's it been like during COVID?

valleyjo 5y ago
Attrition has been super high during Covid and they raised the pay a lot for new offers to try and attract talent. (source: I got an offer for S3 mid-Nov. this is what the hiring manager told me).
dv_dt 5y ago
The rule of thumb of efficiency is that it can make things worse when it breaks. How that applies to organizations is if you have an incredible org with a higher plates to plate spinner ratio than ever, then if you have a catastrophe, the org may not have enough people to actually get the plates spinning again as fast as a less efficient, larger crew with more reserve.
loeg 5y ago
They're losing engineers left and right, especially in H2 2021. It's probably all related. Their recruiters' emails are increasingly desperate. If I was considering a job at Amazon now, I would be very interested in a good answer for how they plan to address their attrition problem (and paying new hires well isn't a viable answer alone).
- ridaj 5y ago
  Seems like every company in tech is losing engineers left and right at this point
  - nefitty 5y ago
    I keep getting AWS recruiters contacting me and I'm pretty sure I am nowhere near qualified
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    I know a few companies that treat their engineers very well (remote, good pay, equity, no overtime, ~6 weeks vacation) and they’ve barely lost anyone. Companies like Amazon should learn from this, but they likely won’t unless their employees unionize.
    - ridaj 5y ago
      Can you share names? Asking for a friend ... Although if they are small companies, I would be wary of anecdata... The narrative sounds good but small companies are more likely than large companies to exhibit extreme behavior in any metric, and it's likely that there's some confirmation bias in reporting what works / doesn't work
      - micromacrofoot 5y ago
        that’s true, and unless you trust someone in the inside you can’t rely on a company reporting accurately about themselves… plus the tide at a small company can turn in an instant, just look at basecamp
  - loeg 5y ago
    I think it’s worse at Amazon, but I don’t have any hard data to support that belief.
- smolder 5y ago
  All they need to do to hire me is lay off the draconian IP assignment clauses or give me an explicit exception for side projects. That's what I tell the desperate recruiters, and then they go away until the next one comes along.
  - Alcha 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with their draconian IP assignment, do you have any references I can read on this? Genuinely curious.
    - smolder 5y ago
      There was an article on The Register[0] about something especially nutty Amazon Games Services required of employees, then later backed off on. (Cheers to them for caving to pressure.) Apart from that I've got no good references. I believe AWS typically put the "usual" overbearing clause in their contracts, where any IP you create before or during your employment becomes theirs. Sadly, so do many other employers. My previous employer did, and it was a sticking point for me and one reason for leaving. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/amazon_game_contracts/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/amazon_game_contracts...
- joshgachnang 5y ago
  They have been getting desperate, much more so than my quarterly Facebook/Google email. I've also had multiple Amazon recruiters reaching out, whereas I usually have a single Facebook/Google one. But apparently they aren't desperate enough to allow remote work after Covid, so I keep reminding them I'm not interested in non-remote work.
efitz 5y ago
AWS was always stressful. Great people for the most part. Culture had strong pros and strong cons. Same for treatment of employees; mixed bag. During COVID everyone who didn’t need to be in the office worked from home. That was sometimes more stressful as you had lots more time in video meetings and no hallway interactions to make quick decisions on easy stuff. For the problem reports today I am in wait and see mode. It’s not clear to me yet that AWS is the problem; could be a six-pack-and-a-backhoe kind of problem with a network provider.
nickjj 5y ago
> Complete speculation; but I wonder if... If we're going into pure speculation mode I think we might also want to include that maybe their outages are staged and have factored in that the temporary bad press and paying out SLA credits is more profitable because it guides existing customers to start scaling to multiple AWS regions to offset these infrequent downtime events in 1 specific region at a time. For example if you have hosting on US West but now to help reduce time down you duplicate your infrastructure in the EU region then I'm pretty sure the outcome here is if you were paying $6,000 a month before now you would be paying $12,000 a month (+/- any regional cost differences). Realistically I don't believe this is the case but it's not impossible.
- jen20 5y ago
  Likely more because of internet-region data transit costs.

valleyjo 5y ago

Attrition has been super high during Covid and they raised the pay a lot for new offers to try and attract talent. (source: I got an offer for S3 mid-Nov. this is what the hiring manager told me).

dv_dt 5y ago

The rule of thumb of efficiency is that it can make things worse when it breaks. How that applies to organizations is if you have an incredible org with a higher plates to plate spinner ratio than ever, then if you have a catastrophe, the org may not have enough people to actually get the plates spinning again as fast as a less efficient, larger crew with more reserve.

loeg 5y ago

They're losing engineers left and right, especially in H2 2021. It's probably all related. Their recruiters' emails are increasingly desperate. If I was considering a job at Amazon now, I would be very interested in a good answer for how they plan to address their attrition problem (and paying new hires well isn't a viable answer alone).

ridaj 5y ago
Seems like every company in tech is losing engineers left and right at this point
- nefitty 5y ago
  I keep getting AWS recruiters contacting me and I'm pretty sure I am nowhere near qualified
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  I know a few companies that treat their engineers very well (remote, good pay, equity, no overtime, ~6 weeks vacation) and they’ve barely lost anyone. Companies like Amazon should learn from this, but they likely won’t unless their employees unionize.
  - ridaj 5y ago
    Can you share names? Asking for a friend ... Although if they are small companies, I would be wary of anecdata... The narrative sounds good but small companies are more likely than large companies to exhibit extreme behavior in any metric, and it's likely that there's some confirmation bias in reporting what works / doesn't work
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      that’s true, and unless you trust someone in the inside you can’t rely on a company reporting accurately about themselves… plus the tide at a small company can turn in an instant, just look at basecamp
- loeg 5y ago
  I think it’s worse at Amazon, but I don’t have any hard data to support that belief.
smolder 5y ago
All they need to do to hire me is lay off the draconian IP assignment clauses or give me an explicit exception for side projects. That's what I tell the desperate recruiters, and then they go away until the next one comes along.
- Alcha 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with their draconian IP assignment, do you have any references I can read on this? Genuinely curious.
  - smolder 5y ago
    There was an article on The Register[0] about something especially nutty Amazon Games Services required of employees, then later backed off on. (Cheers to them for caving to pressure.) Apart from that I've got no good references. I believe AWS typically put the "usual" overbearing clause in their contracts, where any IP you create before or during your employment becomes theirs. Sadly, so do many other employers. My previous employer did, and it was a sticking point for me and one reason for leaving. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/amazon_game_contracts/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/amazon_game_contracts...
joshgachnang 5y ago
They have been getting desperate, much more so than my quarterly Facebook/Google email. I've also had multiple Amazon recruiters reaching out, whereas I usually have a single Facebook/Google one. But apparently they aren't desperate enough to allow remote work after Covid, so I keep reminding them I'm not interested in non-remote work.

efitz 5y ago

AWS was always stressful. Great people for the most part. Culture had strong pros and strong cons. Same for treatment of employees; mixed bag. During COVID everyone who didn’t need to be in the office worked from home. That was sometimes more stressful as you had lots more time in video meetings and no hallway interactions to make quick decisions on easy stuff. For the problem reports today I am in wait and see mode. It’s not clear to me yet that AWS is the problem; could be a six-pack-and-a-backhoe kind of problem with a network provider.

nickjj 5y ago

> Complete speculation; but I wonder if... If we're going into pure speculation mode I think we might also want to include that maybe their outages are staged and have factored in that the temporary bad press and paying out SLA credits is more profitable because it guides existing customers to start scaling to multiple AWS regions to offset these infrequent downtime events in 1 specific region at a time. For example if you have hosting on US West but now to help reduce time down you duplicate your infrastructure in the EU region then I'm pretty sure the outcome here is if you were paying $6,000 a month before now you would be paying $12,000 a month (+/- any regional cost differences). Realistically I don't believe this is the case but it's not impossible.

jen20 5y ago
Likely more because of internet-region data transit costs.