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Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

• torginus 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOFdr03-CVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOFdr03-CVM
• thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  “Running out of people to hire” is a strange way of saying “Not offering employees enough to want to work there”. To be catty, there are plenty of people to hire, but maybe they’re running out of people to exploit.
  • peanuty1 4y ago
    It's not sustainable for them to offer, say, $30 an hour starting salary for fulfillment centre employees. As it is, they have to subsidize retail with other revenue lines like AWS and advertising.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      That implies their business is not viable.
      • bpodgursky 4y ago
        "The conclusion is that Amazon is not a viable business" -- best of HN
        • quickthrower2 4y ago
          Didn’t say that. I just wanted to tease more out of the comment I was replying to. I said that comment if true, without further clarification implies they are not viable.
      • mwt 4y ago
        That is the design: business units that are not viable on their own are subsidized by a few cash cows but might gain market share and be profitable in the future
        • quickthrower2 4y ago
          My guess is what you say here, and where the plan is AI/Robotics will take over. That in itself will be unprofitable for a while until it is very profitable and like Google with search, hard to displace.
          • mwt 4y ago
            You might be right but that isn't even what I'm saying here. Your description could apply to many sectors of the economy, most of which they have a some amount of presence in
            • quickthrower2 4y ago
              Amazon is unique in that they are so big they saturate the job market. Most companies don’t. This sounds like a unique challenge.
    • scollet 4y ago
      Bozos simp. He doesn't know who you are, doesn't care about you, and likely actively despises your existence. Why would you ever think of defending a business?
• rsynnott 4y ago
  > An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy. “We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. This is _madness_.
• ReptileMan 4y ago
  With the imminent crypto implosion there will be a lot of people with any kind of exposure to crypto (as workers, investors or something) looking for a job. A short stint in the warehouse would do them good.
• Ava433 4y ago
• blakesterz 4y ago
  I've always wondered about this, at Amazon and also at Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc... They seem to burn through people quite fast. Won't they all just run out of people at some point, or will just increasing pay bring enough people back?
  • kayodelycaon 4y ago
    If it's anything like retail, a lot of these places work on the assumption that there are enough people who too desperate for a job that they'll come regardless of the working conditions.
    • sophacles 4y ago
      Yep, and when the free market sets up conditions to allow those people to be slightly less desperate the Fed will chime in about how unemployment is too low and we need more desparate people, while the wall st pundits go on and on lamenting how rising worker prices might mean that the companies make profits that gasp don't set records. Because apparently the only measure of a good economy is record profits - regular profitable businesses just don't cut it anymore. If you find this worrying, don't - someone will be along shortly to spend a lot of words proving that this situation (the one where we require desperate people to exist so Elon and Jeff can make a few extra $billion) is somehow the best.
      • diordiderot 4y ago
        [flagged]
    • the_only_law 4y ago
      Having worked in conditions like this, god it's horrible. The people that were there when I started were rough guys, but they could do their job. After I started the company apparently could only hire angry alcoholics, lazy stoners, and fresh out of jail domestic abusers who were proud of it. How many of these people could the job effectively, no. Then the company had a merge and corporate came down with a brilliant plan to force all the fulltime employees (read legacy employees with some level of leadership responsibilities and the only ones good at their job) into part time positions or offer them severance to leave. You can imagine what happens. So then it was me, a couple other guys, and a slew of incompetent bums. I managed to take advantage of the situation to demand a pathetic raise and near total autonomy of my hours. These concessions ended up being not enough and one night I decided not to show up anymore, as management was constantly moving responsibilities of their "friends" to use. Luckily I had been using my time to make my break into the software industry. A couple years later, I read that triple merged company had to file for bankruptcy.
• mmastrac 4y ago
  So it turns out that people are fungible after all. At least at the scale that Amazon operates at.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Amazon designed its warehouses from the very beginning to have it workers be completely replaceable. By not letting them make any decisions, instead just mindlessly doing what the computer says, they can easily plug and play new hires with minimal training. The end goal is pretty obviously to not have any warehouse workers, and making their jobs as simple and repetitive as possible probably makes them easier to automate.
• amotinga 4y ago
  offer remote work - I'm in
  • jaywalk 4y ago
    I'm not sure how you can remotely work a warehouse job, which is what this article is about.
    • booboofixer 4y ago
      Control the amazon warehouse robots from your bed.
      • scollet 4y ago
        Should be easier to break scab pigs holding the blue line. Presumably the bots are resistant to tasers and gunfire.
    • gman2093 4y ago
      You jest, but they are absolutely on it
    • FpUser 4y ago
      It is an obvious sarcasm
      • scollet 4y ago
        Cool comment. Was very helpful.
  • 22SAS 4y ago
    In SWE jobs, a lot of AWS teams are allowing remote, still not worth the ultra-crap culture.
    • cardiffspaceman 4y ago
      You can still be hired-to-fire as a remote, probably more so.
• crikeyjoe 4y ago
  There's no shortage of workers, there's a shortage of workers wanting to work for Amazon.
  • lc9er 4y ago
    There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers.
    • IMTDb 4y ago
      > There's a surplus of management eager to exploit workers. Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers." As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.
      • nopenopenopeno 4y ago
        Have you considered that those customers and workers are mostly the same people? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. See: https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/ https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/
        • corrral 4y ago
          Exactly—it's entirely infeasible to live in the modern world and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use, even if the information were readily available, which it very much is not. It's not even close to being possible. That's what laws setting floors on how shitty product-safety/work-conditions/worker-pay/et c. can get, are for. Doesn't work so hot in a world where we grant MFN (or whatever it's called now) trade status to authoritarian states with weak worker, consumer, and environmental protections, though.
          • scollet 4y ago
            > and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use So okay. The onus is never on the individual. It's on the collective. Businesses owe us. Business owners owe us. They can pay or they can burn. That is the deal.
• no_wizard 4y ago
  This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too
  • 7ewis 4y ago
    From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job compared to other big tech companies.
    • yojo 4y ago
      Same. I’m not on Facebook’s radar, but I get Amazon recruiter spam to my inbox every 2-3 months. This is a far higher rate than any other company.
    • sefrost 4y ago
      I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time. They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the interviews puts me off from engaging.
      • jen20 4y ago
        I’m regularly asked to talk to AWS recruiters, but always decline unless they assure me up front they will never ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. They’re still not hurting enough for that common sense step to have been taken, so I will not be talking to them.
      • maherbeg 4y ago
        I recommend asking them to take you off of their recruiting lists. They'll still contact you but way less frequently.
  • TrianguloY 4y ago
    Probably depends on region/country/situation. Applied for an engineer position in Europe a few weeks ago, got to the last round of interviews, was rejected (probably because I'm horrible trying to explain things with that STAR method, I think the rest was ok). I don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.
• N_A_T_E 4y ago
  More like running out of people willing to work at existing conditions, salary and employment terms.
• deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• akagusu 4y ago
  Who wants to work under inhuman conditions and be treated like garbage?
  • fullshark 4y ago
    Tells you how bad their alternative choice is.
• pram 4y ago
  “We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said. lol this is just monstrous.
  • rexreed 4y ago
    Let's quote more of this for context: Pagan began working at the Amazon delivery hub in October and, within two months, had been promoted to a role on the safety committee for the facility. The new role didn’t come with a pay raise, and is on top of a worker’s core tasks, but Pagan saw it as a stepping stone to an official promotion. But in April, Pagan told Recode, he took two days off to have an infected tooth looked at and ultimately removed. The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated. An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy. “We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said. “I find the whole situation crazy,” said the 35-year-old Pagan, who was supporting his wife and daughter on his Amazon income. “They’re gonna lose a good worker for nothing.” It's not the issue of Grubhub or re-applying 90 days later, it's the completely inflexible termination policy and the lack of any sort of humanness or flexibility around decision-making that caused them to dig their own hole, in this specific example.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      This wouldn’t be out of place as the first chapter in an 80s dystopian sci fi novel.
    • 4y ago
• fullshark 4y ago
  Amazon has 1.6 MILLION employees based on its last financial report, with 1.1 million in the US. Basically 1% of the US labor force currently works for Amazon.
  • unsupp0rted 4y ago
    What % of the population of the US labor force currently shops on Amazon? Amazon has become the substrate for more than tech- ordering stuff on Amazon is practically a utility like electricity, water and internet now.
  • throwaway787544 4y ago
    That's getting into too-big-to-fail territory. I'd expect some big fat checks for free money from us taxpayers to Amazon in the future.
  • daheza 4y ago
    I work for a company which Amazon uses and pays us per seat. Scaling with them while they exploded in hiring has been a struggle.
• duxup 4y ago
  They've got a high volume of employees at physical locations and high churn. That seems like a recipe for this.
• alangibson 4y ago
  The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end. https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-unemployment-as-it-hikes-rates/ https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    This is the sad reality. The associated wage stabilization is going to be necessary for us to control inflation. SWEs probably don't need worry about remaining employed, but the days of salary wars will be over.
    • alangibson 4y ago
      > The associated wage stabilization is going to be necessary for us to control inflation. It won't. Everyone involved in business dealing with physical goods knows it's a supply side problem. Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this time. The Fed of course knows this.
      • mc32 4y ago
        We're seeing manufacturers tell their suppliers of JIT to hang on to components because they don't need them right now. So I don't think that's accurate everywhere.
      • colinmhayes 4y ago
        > Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this time The Fed has no control over fiscal policy. You mean monetary?
        • alangibson 4y ago
          Buh, yea. Vacation brain...
      • mikem170 4y ago
• LegitShady 4y ago
  This is simply laying down groundwork for hiring temporary foreign workers.
  • 22SAS 4y ago
    and how do they plan on bringing all of them? There are 85,000 new H1B visas in a given year, and they cannot be used for warehouse workers. The work visas are mainly for white collar jobs, and the only way then can bring a ton of foreign workers is from Amazon offices overseas, via the L-1 work visa, and that is not that easy since they need to maintain headcount to support the use of Amazon services in those countries.
    • LegitShady 4y ago
      H1B visas are for workers in the tech sector, but they have other visas for other purposes. H2A visas are for temporary/seasonal agricultural workers, H2B visas for temporary workers in non agricultural fields. So they could be shipped in via H2B visas, or they could lobby for some new kind of temporary worker visa. In Canada we've already seen similar - McDonalds (and other similar businesses) offers non-living wages for work, and when they can't find workers for low wages, the canadian government lets them ship in temporary foreign workers to run their fast food restaurants because 'there's no workers at the market (non livable) wage'. With programs like these the free market for labour dies. Why are wages low? because companies can offer extremely low wages and when no one bites, ship in temporary workers.
• encrux 4y ago
  Surely at some point the market will just regulate itself and amazon will have to improve working conditions to keep operations running... Right? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
  • dymk 4y ago
    That’s what’s happening. Walmart is paying warehouse workers $25/hr and Amazon is losing workers to them.
• binbag 4y ago
  Who are the emerging competitors to Amazon that the article refers to?
• arbuge 4y ago
  This is from mid-2021. I suspect they are now more concerned about having expanded too quickly during the pandemic period.
• a_shovel 4y ago
  Arguably the largest company in the world is depleting its own potential labor pool around all of its facilities, due to the sheer cruelty of how it treats its workers. The assumption has been that there's always more workers, so who cares if you burn them all out before the year is over? Just get some more. But Amazon has unprecedented scale and an unprecedented (sustained) attrition rate, which means they are heading into uncharted territory. Maybe there aren't always more bodies to burn through. When things like these happen, it's time to consider regularly using terms like "megacorporation" in earnest.
• ddingus 4y ago
  No they aren't. They are running out of people to over exploit. Big difference. Amazon will find better compensation and a modest change to work culture and environment will bring them as many people as they need.
• youessayyyaway 4y ago
  I think this article might bury the lede a bit: >Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location. After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need. It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
  • drewcoo 4y ago
    > this article might bury the lede That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.
  • dionian 4y ago
    > It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr. If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help
    • SecondTimeAgain 4y ago
      So they're going to fire people to make up the cost of not being able to hire people? Maybe I'm not understanding you're comment.
      • macinjosh 4y ago
        My understanding is that yes if their growth cannot be maintained because of labor shortages they will have to begin shrinking down to the size the labormarket can bear.
      • 4y ago
• throwawayLabor5 4y ago
• tmaly 4y ago
  Would it be so bad to just develop better robots for this type of work? Keynes had a prediction that we would be working 15 hour work weeks by now. In your opinion, why haven’t we obtained this?
  • svachalek 4y ago
    Amazon has flipped the script, replacing inefficient and overly sympathetic human management with software-based micro-managers. This leaves the rank and file as meat-based robots to follow narrowly scripted programming. They've also automated a lot of the physical work; you should watch a video of how their warehouses operate. But as of yet many physical tasks cannot be easily automated -- but they can be cheaply acquired if you are willing and able to treat human labor as machines. Until recently at least. As to the second question though, I have a completely different thought. I think it's just that given a choice, most people will choose more money rather than more free time, up to a point. I think most people in urban office jobs could find a way to work less, earn less, and spend less; I certainly could. But it just runs counter to human nature.
• windex 4y ago
  They are just running out of clique members to hire. I've had interviews at Amazon where the setup was hostile from get go, and it was evident the hiring team was looking to recruit their friends which they eventually probably did. All the other interviews are just padding/process tick marks for that one profile.
• lisper 4y ago
  I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effort to buy direct from a vendor, but more often than not the experience is so horrible that I go right back to Amazon.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kvathupo 4y ago
    I'm curious if Amazon retail was equally efficient in the past, say the early 2000s. Was warehouse management the same?
    • kube-system 4y ago
      Amazon wasn't a logistics expert from day one, they've learned a lot over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckmbVpG390 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckmbVpG390
  • Vladimof 4y ago
    You should try walmart.com for ordering... they stepped up their game... it's not uncommon for them to do 3 deliveries for a $35 order with free shipping to get you the stuff as fast as possible... Most of the time I wish they would combine items to avoid the waste but that's what they do.
    • lisper 4y ago
      Yeah, I've considered Walmart, but it kind of defeats the purpose for me. It doesn't do a lot of good to replace one monopolistic behemoth with a different monopolistic behemoth.
      • 4y ago
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Is that why I get recruiter emails almost daily?
  • synaesthesisx 4y ago
    Same. Amazon has been relentless in recruiter spam, more so than any other company I've ever seen.
  • delecti 4y ago
    If you really are, my recommendation is to get stern with your responses. I got them to stop for a little while by just asking them to stop, and then to stop entirely by asking again while mentioning who I sent my previous request to. Like "Hi John, please stop contacting me", and then a few months later like "Hi Steve, a few months ago I asked John Doe (johndoe@) to stop contacting me". The second step seems to have been the trick.
• thrill 4y ago
  s/people to hire/people to hire cheaply/
• chaostheory 4y ago
  What the memo doesn’t account for is what will happen when the Fed Reserve is adamant about bringing demand destruction with their interest rate hikes.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• etempleton 4y ago
  When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees I mentioned on here how it felt wrong in comparison to what they pay their warehouse workers and drivers and got some backlash on here. A lot of talk about how an engineer provides XXX% more value and supply and demand. Warehouse jobs are back breaking. I don't think they need to be paid as much as a software engineer, but they should be paid a decent wage and have decent work conditions.
  • ASinclair 4y ago
    > When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees I'm pretty sure they just doubled the salary cap. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone's salary was doubled.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      Amazon didn’t even do that. Before, no matter who you were, your cash component was maxed out between $160K - $175K. The rest of your compensation was in stock. Now, more of your compensation can be stock based.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        I passed the edit window. I meant more of your compensation can be cash based.
  • scollet 4y ago
    Yeah. I wish healthcare was universal because it's not okay to curry health issues past capability. Imagine busting your lumbar and then not being to find a construction job or something.
• Havoc 4y ago
  You know conditions are bad when desperate people say no
• gigel82 4y ago
  I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere. The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.
  • wollsmoth 4y ago
    If they're using questionable means to get contact info, they probably have enough build in layers of buffer for plausible deniability. The recruiter may not know, and by design they probably don't keep a record of that.
  • Joe_Boogz 4y ago
    Same here (daily emails). I've been getting enough of them to start seeing that most of the emails from amazon are generated in some form. A generated recruiting email is pretty much an immediate turn off for me. Also, they have been very aggressive... going as far as the same recruiter reaching out on a monthly basis despite me telling them I am not interested.
    • elldoubleyew 4y ago
      In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled by recruiter contractors. These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide net" strategy.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      It’s the same for Google, Microsoft and Facebook. I’ve gotten emails from Google about Engineering Manager positions for software developers even though my LinkedIn profile shows no management experience (I have none) and it has that I’m not even currently officially a software developer (cloud app dev consulting). The same with Facebook.
• slenk 4y ago
  I don't know why anyone wants to work for a company that acknowledges for attrition. No wonder they can't keep talent.
• subsubzero 4y ago
  This is the sign of a extremely unhealthy place to work > But attrition at Amazon’s facilities in the area grew from 128 percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020 I can see business papers talking about Amazon's failure in this space in the next 5 years.
  • wollsmoth 4y ago
    They're really pushing the limits of their work force. I think slowing the pace down a smidge in the warehouse and not burning everyone out would really help them keep it sustainable.
• xwdv 4y ago
  I’d suggest rather than paying by the hour, Amazon should switch to paying workers by the task. They have the data to work out a profitable rate. This gives workers the ability to self regulate how lazy or efficient they’d like to be.
  • usr1106 4y ago
    Don't know about the US, but it would be illegal in many countries if workers don't reach the minimum wage despite working full-time. Of course they could fire slow workers (at least in the US, in Europe it's often not that easy), but then they are back at the problem of the submission: running out of workers
• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  * at their wage levels
• donclark 4y ago
  I heard a rumor that Amazon is flying people in from out of the country to work for $15hr. However, I did a search and cannot find any documentation on this. 22mins into this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg
  • xiphias2 4y ago
    Maybe potential candidates finally understand how much worse their life gets in the US if they don’t speak English, and they won’t have money to go back to latin america.
  • Sebguer 4y ago
    That person is not reputable, a fact that was easy to confirm in minutes just by googling their name and finding them peddling 'Obama's birth certificate is fake' nonsense as recently as 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTmIDuCMFk&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTmIDuCMFk&t=2s
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  This isn't just their warehouse workers, their delivery drivers (many through partner companies) have been struggling with this for a while. They grind through employees fast. Drivers will sometimes just leave their keys in the ignition and walk off the job. There was a lot of speculation that this is why they dropped the drug testing requirement last year.
• Vladimof 4y ago
  I try to avoid purchasing from Amazon to help them as much as I can...
• theonlybutlet 4y ago
  Who'da thought unsustainable labour practices are unsustainable.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  They're known to have such crazy warehouse shifts that people unofficially carry piss bottles with them. They're also known to be a crap place to work at the high end for the educated workforce and the best I have heard is "Get in, get out, pump your resume and leave as fast as you can" Surprise!
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• lisper 4y ago
  > Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times. Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal. So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal. Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.
  • madrox 4y ago
    This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      > employees will naturally want to leave within four years That also explains why the breadth of AWS services keep growing, but the depth of the existing ones remains the same. Seems they would, every 4 years, lose a bunch of people with deep knowledge in the existing ones, the ones who'd be able to add new and deep features.
      • anigbrowl 4y ago
        That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase/usage decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over optimization, because the apparent return from optimization exceeds the apparent cost. I mean, just look at the Amazon retail operation - everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites. Amazon's bottom line seems to indicate that breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving human populations.
• dqpb 4y ago
  > the company is running out of people to hire Pay more. That’s how capitalism works.
• femto113 4y ago
  Amazon's scale encounters limits that most companies don't ever have to consider. There's a parallel from 20ish years ago: Amazon eschewed software performance engineering with the mantra "if it can be solved with a credit card [i.e. you can buy more hardware] don't worry about it now". That worked up to the day they called the company that made their database server and asked to upgrade and were told "you already have the most powerful machine we've ever built".
  • pojzon 4y ago
    In single master architecture this is inevitable. At some point you wont be able to throw more hardware. Thats why multi-master architecture was created in the first place.
    • toast0 4y ago
      A lot of big companies went through that, I've seen presentations about eBay running out of scaling room on their Oracle servers in their boom. Otoh, maximum database server today is a ton bigger. Looking at just Supermicro, you can get 8 TB ram in a dual Epyc server, and 24 TB in exotic, but still off the shelf systems. You can get a lot of qps with 24 TB of ram and a whole bunch of cores. If you go with Oracle, they'll sell you a Sparc server with 48 TB of ram, and 384 CPU cores.
    • scollet 4y ago
      Single "manager" or "distributor" you mean
• usr1106 4y ago
  Every time I shop at Amazon I have a bad conscience about supporting such a worker-hostile company. Well the turnover they get from me has been well under 100 € / yr. for many years. And I have monthly AWS bill over $5 for some Lightsail stuff. Should move to some smaller player, but it's more work.
• whatever1 4y ago
  Why is this news? Amazon employs ~1M people. Of course they cannot churn people for long.
• toss1 4y ago
  >>“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024” At what price point? Offering what working conditions? >> "...the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year." Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and pay better wages, and benefits? Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and make better rules that are not attempting to run employees like running machines at 105% of redline for every shift, e.g., so they don't have to make a choice between making their performance numbers and urinating in a bottle in the delivery truck? These are likely seen as crazy ideas, but perhaps they should get ahead of the curve and make an attractive place to work instead of trying to treat Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times as a "How To Manage" work... The combination of arrogance and utter out-of-touch cluelessness of management/MBAs, thinking everything runs just on their numbers, never ceases to amaze. Just because you can optimize one or two numeric parameters does not mean you are getting closer to your goal.
• asah 4y ago
  tl;dr: you want to be a customer of Amazon, not an employee.
• danamit 4y ago
  I wonder if this or similar stories is leaked by purpose to encourage more people to apply.
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Funnily enough, I got paid 100$ to do a 20 minutes survey that was asking hiring questions (which fang would you apply for and why) and it was just a pretest to have someone from Aws trying to recruit you.
• tomohawk 4y ago
  There's something like 200k homeless people in California - all those failed policies have put a dent in the labor pool.
• mrleinad 4y ago
  Peter Zeihan on the labor shortage going into the next decade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXp8Z7_Y4Bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXp8Z7_Y4Bw
• otikik 4y ago
  - wants to become “Earth’s Best Employer” - tells drivers to pee in a bottle Doesn’t compute
  • fellowniusmonk 4y ago
    Destroy all the other companies in the world and then you'll be earths best employer, why be better when you have the power to make things universally worse.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  A lot of businesses are like that, particularly telemarketing and low skill. Churn and burn. It almost feels like the pornography industry at times, every day someone turns 18.
• EGreg 4y ago
  I guess this implied people are burned out by working in these warehouses and they will have churned through EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES who might have considered it. Quite a feat. Maybe finally allow people bathroom breaks rather than peeing in bottles? Or just develop more robots.
• nimbius 4y ago
  "It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024" yes, by 2024 the number of people willing to piss in bottles for peasant wages in unconditioned warehouses with no healthcare or time off will certainly become problematic.
• Madmallard 4y ago
  Maybe you should treat your employees better then?
• monkey88 4y ago
  Well, an Amazon recruiter contacted me, so they must be desperate.
• tacker2000 4y ago
  I think the downfall of Amazon will begin from the inside…
• nothrowaways 4y ago
  Increase wage. Problem solved.
• dreamcompiler 4y ago
  As many others have said, there's no shortage of labor in the US; there's a shortage of pay. Like many others, Bezos built his business by exploiting a temporary condition: A virtually infinite supply of people willing to accept a horrible job for low pay. That condition no longer exists, but Bezos didn't realize it was unsustainable (it's unsustainable because if all workers are paid shit wages they can't afford to be customers). Or maybe he did realize it which is why he retired. In any case, now Amazon is panicking. Good. When I think about this along with their other dick moves like pushing cheap Chinese counterfeit products, encouraging fake reviews, and stealing third-party product designs just because they can, I now check Amazon's competitors first when I buy something online.
• HacklesRaised 4y ago
  I quit after orientation, spent the whole time arguing that their ten principles were contradictory, whilst the broken remnants of Microsoft's silicon valley campus sat there, happy to have whatever crumbs Amazon were throwing them. When I told my manager I wouldn't be staying, he congratulated me!! Your can see it in their products, mediocrity by design.
• pvankessel 4y ago
  Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have plenty of strong opinions about how they treat their workers and have no desire to work for such a company, but I was surprised to find that I did sympathize with them to an extent - it's not just about offering better pay and bathroom breaks, they're also on the verge of exhausting the viable labor market. I wish whoever took the job the best of luck - I hope that they're taking the research effort seriously and it's not just performance art.
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    The article suggests they are on the verge of exhausting the labor supply because they can't get anyone to stay for more than a couple years though, because so many people have already been there and left -- and that this has in the past been intentional on the employer's part, to only keep workers for a couple years. If true, that puts a different light on things -- how the combination of having such a large labor force and a strategy to intentionally have high turnover combine to exhaust the labor supply, sure.
    • pvankessel 4y ago
      Oh don't get me wrong, much of it is definitely the result of their policies and could have been avoided if they hadn't treated their labor force like a discardable, consumable resource for years. I just thought it was interesting to see something pop up in the news that echoes what I got a glimpse of a few months ago - that Amazon is starting to recognize that they have a problem on their hands (finally). Just thinking about it in dispassionate scientific terms, it's a fascinating and unique problem - it might be too late for them to pivot and shift back towards "sustainable" practices, and if they fail I'm certainly going to enjoy the schadenfreude, but I'm really curious to see how they attempt to deal with all this.
  • kfarr 4y ago
• andsoitis 4y ago
  > Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024 robots are the answer. or less consumption. or both.
• kjs3 4y ago
  You mean Uber Capitalists want to pretend 'cost of labor' isn't an input to the economic equation? Shocker.
• neycoda 4y ago
  Good! They can raise wages and give better benefits and treat workers better. It's really not that hard when you have billions of dollars laying around.
• rejor121 4y ago
  Just remember; in big companies you’re nothing more than a cost, to be replaced by automation. They don’t want you.