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> That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team. I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies l
by qqtt 5y ago
> That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.
I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad.
It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists.
It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly.
Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.
- unnouinceput 5y agoAnd all these sounds to me that devs at Amazon needs unionization rather faster than the poor workers in their warehouses.
- Edman274 5y agoAs bad as it is for any developer at Amazon, I have to say that I'm going to feel more sympathy for the people in the warehouse who are told to get back to work when a line worker dies of a heart attack in the middle of their shift due to stress than any developer who can always leave and get a fine job somewhere else. The precariat in those warehouses need collective bargaining more than any developer, anywhere (except for maybe game developers).
- unnouinceput 5y agoA dev's work is mental, a warehouse work is physical. I agree that the worker on warehouse have it tough, no denying there. However mental recovery takes longer that physical one. I have a joke for you, goes something like this: "Big rich guy goes to Mexico for vacation. There he meets Julio, a simple worker who after work is drinking in the bar with his friends and enjoys a simple life. Rich guy asks why Julio doesn't work longer & harder to make more money. Why? So when you grow older to have time, like me, to enjoy life and party with friends. I can party with my friends right now and enjoy life just as well"
- BoorishBears 5y agoYou've never seen Amazon warehouse work if you think it's not mental and physical. A story I don't really tell people is about my 3 days working at an Amazon warehouse. The short version is, I'm a self-taught dev who didn't realize he was good enough to be a full time dev (spoiler as an L6 making >500k TC, I was!) So I applied to a few labor jobs: Amazon Warehouse, pushing carts at WalMart, etc. And a few dev jobs: Nothing fancy, a few local dev shops looking for a mobile dev. - I get a job with a local dev shop, but I'm still not sure I can actually make it there. So I still take my Amazon Warehouse job thinking I can work both somehow... I fell asleep at my computer on my first day at the office, which is why I only worked at that warehouse for 3 days. But those 3 days are permanently etched in my mind. BDL5, I still recognize it looking at random Amazon deliveries when I visit my parents. I'm not sure what it is about that place that makes me slightly sick to even recall, I think it's a mixture of: - The awful lighting. That place was lit in this sickly blue light that made you feel sleepy and wide awake at the same time, and stuck with you after you went outside - The noise: BDL5 is a sort center. It's tiny compared to a normal fulfillment center. And it was still constantly noisy. Something like 3 acres of open warehouse, miles of conveyer belts, constant truck loading and unloading. - The nature of the work: I think part of what makes me sick thinking about it is how depressingly menial the work was. Again, I was only there 3 days, but it's a nightmare to imagine standing on your feet for hours wrestling with comically large shrink wrap rolls for a living. Or packing useless crap into a truck for hours on end. I don't believe humans were meant for that kind of repetition. This was when BDL5 first opened and you could see how uneasy people seemed to get as the weight of the work landed on them. - Amazon is such a depressing company. I mean I know all of this and of course, and I still use Amazon, it's just that ubiquitous and all-encompassing (although not as much lately) It's just reached this point where something needs to give. I'm ok with not being able to place orders at 4 AM and getting them before 8PM. We'll live if 2 day shipping becomes 3 and that allows some shorter shifts for the same pay. But yeah, devs have it easy compared to all that.
- pb7 5y agoBlows my mind that there are so many people that voluntarily choose to join a company like this. Sounds completely dystopian.