13 ms·

Amazon’s attrition costs $8B annually according to leaked documents

173 points by baskethead 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tech-historian 4y ago
> "only one out of three new hires in 2021" stay with the company for 90 or more days. This is truly amazing. I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
- db48x 4y ago
  That is an eye–watering figure.
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  >This is truly amazing. Amazing in a bad way... but I believe it. The person who told me "autistic people can't work for RAND" was hired by Amazon. I'd blacklisted them by that point -- I don't like when folks treat a good faith interview like a free consulting session. The company culture reminds me of some kind of suicide cult - treating a job interview like a free consulting session might work if you're looking for warehouse workers with teachable and replaceable skills, but when you apply that goldfish galaxy brain mentality to interacting with folks who have a buck twenty five plus IQ and more esoteric knowledge, it is unsurprising that mistakes will happen, those mistakes will be costly... and that those mistakes may increase in frequency. >I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow. I don't know off the top of my head, they sell a lot of servers. (I was thinking the other day about how in my attempts to avoid Google I often involuntarily use their stuff -- it's why my old VPN was hosted on Digital Ocean, because I have no warm feelings for either.)
  - hinkley 4y ago
    > Amazing in a bad way... The word you folks are looking for is “appalling”.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  I recently did a contract with a company in the logistics (warehouse/delivery) business for a product you've heard of. Their turnover rate is over 100% every year. The industry is crazy.
  - whatever1 4y ago
    Warehouse work is rough with tight deadlines and rough hours (night shifts are the norm, since deliveries happen in businesses hours)
- hinkley 4y ago
  I knew two people who quit after two weeks. One after being called to find out why he wasn’t at work. On a Sunday. I ended up on a short contract and think I understand why. I also understand why Amazon employees are notorious for taking up the entire sidewalk like nobody else is there. Trauma.
- deadbolt 4y ago
  In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000 [1] It sounds amazing, but it's not original. It says something about where we're at, as a country, [1] https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/curb-employee-turnover-henry-ford/ https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/curb-employee-t...
  - Fnoord 4y ago
    Its the R in 'HR'.
ozzythecat 4y ago
> The same Times investigation reported the company “intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers,” according to David Niekerk, a former Amazon HR Vice President. It’s not just for hourly workers. I was actively coached on holding promotions as a carrot. My leadership team would commit to unrealistic dates, taking input and estimates from dev teams but hand wave it. Amazon applies pressure on L7 and L6 software development managers to deliver. They in turn apply pressure to their engineering teams. We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers. They all left within a 1-2 month window of each other. I can’t tell you how many SDEs were promised that getting some project delivered is key to their promotion. These people would kill themselves working every night, every weekend, coding, writing documents, and so on. They’d get very little in return if anything. I saw several successful launches, where specific promotions were held back because of nit picks on some engineering decision, which the whole group agreed on, including Principals and Sr. Principal engineers. It’s just a sweat shop. And the Indian devs work their ass off out of fear of getting PIP’d and with their work authorization, they lose their job means they have to leave the country.
- golly_ned 4y ago
  Further, about a quarter of workers are annotated in Ivy as "Do Not Promote." They don't know who they are. I don't know why they get put on that list.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  What an incredibly stupid way to run a company.
  - ozzythecat 4y ago
    It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius. If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation, you’ve won the lottery. You make big promises to employees, maybe give a carrot to a very select few. Everyone else will either accept the long hours and grueling culture or they’ll leave, and if they leave, they’ll go before their RSU compensation vests. So the other thing you do is weigh compensation heavily on RSUs instead of salary. If you leave before the 4 year vest, you get massively screwed and walk away with a small fraction, since vests don’t really kick in until years 3 and 4. Now here’s the kicker. If the company does well and the value of your RSUs to up, you get nothing extra. You can get promoted and if your existing RSUs are putting you near or at the bottom of the next compensation band, you take more responsibility but without any meaningful compensation increase. Now if the company does poorly, you’ll get extra RSUs, in 1.5 to 2 years out. You can hang around for that carrot, but they’ll work you like a machine. And it’s not just the labor. It’s the gaslighting and sociopathic behavior - “you’re so great at X, but you really didn’t do a, b, and c. You’re really just being your own bottleneck. Oh you’re working extra hours? Your fault for not scaling yourself better.”
throwaway787544 4y ago
throwaway81523 4y ago
If you can fire people faster than they can quit, it doesn't count as attrition. Retention metrics are UP! Promotion is on deck!
LatteLazy 4y ago
I'm always amazed how little people know about how companies operate. Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news. People are shocked that they are profit seeking, that they do barely legal but legal things, that they don't actively knowingly pay their workers more than they have to etc.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news. Yes, and that's because of its scale and size.
- SrslyJosh 4y ago
  > The rate of serious injuries at Amazon warehouses in the United States is more than twice as high as those at other, non-Amazon warehouses, according to a new study that examines injury data supplied to the federal agency that oversees workplace safety. > Amazon employed 33% of all US warehouse workers in 2021, but was responsible for 49% of all injuries in the industry, according to a report published Tuesday by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of four labor unions. (Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study...) No, they are not "the same", they are worse. They are at the absolute fucking forefront of treating their workers badly. You don't hear about postal workers having to piss in bottles and shit in plastic bags to make their deliveries. You don't hear about warehouse workers at other companies having their bathroom breaks timed, probably because damn near no other company's leadership is sociopathic enough to build an automated system to time fucking bathroom breaks.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Yeah. My brother worked at a Husqvarna warehouse for a few months. It was the most depressed I’ve ever seen him. I’ve chatted with my dad about Amazon working conditions, and he retorted with tales of his own days in un-conditioned factories and warehouses in Oklahoma in the 1980s. There are a lot of crappy jobs out there. Those of us who have found enjoyment and balance are fortunate.
Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
I stopped using Amazon for shopping about two years ago, because of how they treat warehouse staff. I never thought to work at Amazon, because I heard from multiple colleagues, former employees, that Amazon is profoundly metric based; then the stories such as this, about burning out staff, and about the fake PIP process, began surfacing.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Likewise, and the extra reason of amazon being filled with low quality products. Now if only i could get people to move away from aws…
- throwaway12388 4y ago
  Me too and now i have better & cheaper alternatives where i live.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    Can you list some?
- pembrook 4y ago
  Not shopping at Amazon because the company is big enough to get media attention is a bit silly. Do you know what the working conditions are like at any of the million non-Amazon warehouses? Of course not, there’s no media attention for Bob’s fulfillment in Wichita, Kansas. Here’s the truth: your friendly neighborhood warehouse down the street likely pays its employees far less, with far worse benefits, less safe facilities, and similar turnover. It shouldn’t be the job of consumers to police labor practices—we’re really bad at it and only care if the company is big enough to get NYT coverage. This is the role of government and law. If we really care about conditions for workers, we need to focus our attention there.
  - dendriti 4y ago
    Right. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and "voting with your wallet" is capitalist bullshit. They love to trot that one out, to make real change impossible.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
Anyone has a link to the actual leaked documents?
Ligma123 4y ago
It's not just Amazon that does this. And there are only two ways to hurt them back for it. One is people refusing to work there, which is obviously easier to do for engineers than for warehouse workers. The second is refusing to make business with them. Just don't order your stuff from there, don't subscribe to Prime and so on, but I guess this is just too much to ask for the average guy whose whole personality revolves around the shows they are currently watching.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  There are a few more than two... The third is organizing a union and striking until demands are met. The fourth is regulating them with laws. The fifth is borrowing enough money to gain enough stock to force some allies onto board seats and implementing change from the top down. I'm sure there are more.
esarbe 4y ago
How is the US - as a society - okay with companies like Amazon abusing their employees, deny them union representation while paying them a starvation wage? These companies abuse the total breakdown of the US's social security network; the US made it so bad that people are actually forced to work in such conditions. Together with the almost total dismantling of the unions in the US, this leaves low skilled workers no way to fight back. It's not as bad in jobs were you need to have even a little training and need to invest in your workers. But in Amazon's case the brutality of this system is laid bare.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  It’s the work culture. In the uk it’s more or less known that when a us company acquires a local company it will go downhill in terms of working conditions.
yrgulation 4y ago
I absolutely wouldnt mind waiting an extra day or two for my package if it means better working conditions for warehouse and software workers at amazon. I wouldnt mind if bezos earned a little less either. For now tho i stopped using it all together.
- sneak 4y ago
  I think you hold the minority opinion amongst Amazon customers. TBH I think perhaps the (opt-in) suffering endured by the Amazon staff (both blue and white collar) is outweighed by the massive benefits to an entire society enabled by same-day shipping of approximately everything. It's an extremely powerful and valuable service, that serves as a force multiplier for every personal and business project that has it available. Facebook can and should be destroyed. I think if you were to destroy Amazon, the world would be a worse place.
- GoldenMonkey 4y ago
  Already happening without better conditions. Amazon prime delivery is so unreliable now. I live 1/2 mile from the distribution center. And 1 out of 3 packages are always late. Sometimes a week late. Quality and reliability are declining rapidly.
speed_spread 4y ago
I'm so glad I screwed a ski trip out of Amazon. Took me 3 hours of my life to pass the coding test, then the remote live coding interview. Then they paid the flight and hotel to meet and grill me in person. I asked for an extra hotel night "to look for houses". That day, I actually took a bus to $BIG_MOUNTAIN nearby and had the some of the best snowboard of my life. The interviews were shit, clearly designed not to know if I knew software but rather if was compliant and thick skinned enough to survive and perform in their shit culture. Fuck you Amazon. Thank you Amazon.
MichaelMoser123 4y ago
Oh, doesn't that go against the Amazon leadership principle of... frugality?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
not_enoch_wise 4y ago
The PIPs will continue until profitability improves

173 points by baskethead 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

> "only one out of three new hires in 2021" stay with the company for 90 or more days. This is truly amazing. I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.

db48x 4y ago
That is an eye–watering figure.
dontbenebby 4y ago
>This is truly amazing. Amazing in a bad way... but I believe it. The person who told me "autistic people can't work for RAND" was hired by Amazon. I'd blacklisted them by that point -- I don't like when folks treat a good faith interview like a free consulting session. The company culture reminds me of some kind of suicide cult - treating a job interview like a free consulting session might work if you're looking for warehouse workers with teachable and replaceable skills, but when you apply that goldfish galaxy brain mentality to interacting with folks who have a buck twenty five plus IQ and more esoteric knowledge, it is unsurprising that mistakes will happen, those mistakes will be costly... and that those mistakes may increase in frequency. >I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow. I don't know off the top of my head, they sell a lot of servers. (I was thinking the other day about how in my attempts to avoid Google I often involuntarily use their stuff -- it's why my old VPN was hosted on Digital Ocean, because I have no warm feelings for either.)
- hinkley 4y ago
  > Amazing in a bad way... The word you folks are looking for is “appalling”.
Consultant32452 4y ago
I recently did a contract with a company in the logistics (warehouse/delivery) business for a product you've heard of. Their turnover rate is over 100% every year. The industry is crazy.
- whatever1 4y ago
  Warehouse work is rough with tight deadlines and rough hours (night shifts are the norm, since deliveries happen in businesses hours)
hinkley 4y ago
I knew two people who quit after two weeks. One after being called to find out why he wasn’t at work. On a Sunday. I ended up on a short contract and think I understand why. I also understand why Amazon employees are notorious for taking up the entire sidewalk like nobody else is there. Trauma.
deadbolt 4y ago
In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000 [1] It sounds amazing, but it's not original. It says something about where we're at, as a country, [1] https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/curb-employee-turnover-henry-ford/ https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/curb-employee-t...
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Its the R in 'HR'.

ozzythecat 4y ago

> The same Times investigation reported the company “intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers,” according to David Niekerk, a former Amazon HR Vice President. It’s not just for hourly workers. I was actively coached on holding promotions as a carrot. My leadership team would commit to unrealistic dates, taking input and estimates from dev teams but hand wave it. Amazon applies pressure on L7 and L6 software development managers to deliver. They in turn apply pressure to their engineering teams. We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers. They all left within a 1-2 month window of each other. I can’t tell you how many SDEs were promised that getting some project delivered is key to their promotion. These people would kill themselves working every night, every weekend, coding, writing documents, and so on. They’d get very little in return if anything. I saw several successful launches, where specific promotions were held back because of nit picks on some engineering decision, which the whole group agreed on, including Principals and Sr. Principal engineers. It’s just a sweat shop. And the Indian devs work their ass off out of fear of getting PIP’d and with their work authorization, they lose their job means they have to leave the country.

golly_ned 4y ago
Further, about a quarter of workers are annotated in Ivy as "Do Not Promote." They don't know who they are. I don't know why they get put on that list.
HyperSane 4y ago
What an incredibly stupid way to run a company.
- ozzythecat 4y ago
  It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius. If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation, you’ve won the lottery. You make big promises to employees, maybe give a carrot to a very select few. Everyone else will either accept the long hours and grueling culture or they’ll leave, and if they leave, they’ll go before their RSU compensation vests. So the other thing you do is weigh compensation heavily on RSUs instead of salary. If you leave before the 4 year vest, you get massively screwed and walk away with a small fraction, since vests don’t really kick in until years 3 and 4. Now here’s the kicker. If the company does well and the value of your RSUs to up, you get nothing extra. You can get promoted and if your existing RSUs are putting you near or at the bottom of the next compensation band, you take more responsibility but without any meaningful compensation increase. Now if the company does poorly, you’ll get extra RSUs, in 1.5 to 2 years out. You can hang around for that carrot, but they’ll work you like a machine. And it’s not just the labor. It’s the gaslighting and sociopathic behavior - “you’re so great at X, but you really didn’t do a, b, and c. You’re really just being your own bottleneck. Oh you’re working extra hours? Your fault for not scaling yourself better.”

throwaway787544 4y ago

throwaway81523 4y ago

If you can fire people faster than they can quit, it doesn't count as attrition. Retention metrics are UP! Promotion is on deck!

LatteLazy 4y ago

I'm always amazed how little people know about how companies operate. Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news. People are shocked that they are profit seeking, that they do barely legal but legal things, that they don't actively knowingly pay their workers more than they have to etc.

ignoramous 4y ago
> Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news. Yes, and that's because of its scale and size.
SrslyJosh 4y ago
> The rate of serious injuries at Amazon warehouses in the United States is more than twice as high as those at other, non-Amazon warehouses, according to a new study that examines injury data supplied to the federal agency that oversees workplace safety. > Amazon employed 33% of all US warehouse workers in 2021, but was responsible for 49% of all injuries in the industry, according to a report published Tuesday by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of four labor unions. (Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study...) No, they are not "the same", they are worse. They are at the absolute fucking forefront of treating their workers badly. You don't hear about postal workers having to piss in bottles and shit in plastic bags to make their deliveries. You don't hear about warehouse workers at other companies having their bathroom breaks timed, probably because damn near no other company's leadership is sociopathic enough to build an automated system to time fucking bathroom breaks.
christophilus 4y ago
Yeah. My brother worked at a Husqvarna warehouse for a few months. It was the most depressed I’ve ever seen him. I’ve chatted with my dad about Amazon working conditions, and he retorted with tales of his own days in un-conditioned factories and warehouses in Oklahoma in the 1980s. There are a lot of crappy jobs out there. Those of us who have found enjoyment and balance are fortunate.

Max-Ganz-II 4y ago

I stopped using Amazon for shopping about two years ago, because of how they treat warehouse staff. I never thought to work at Amazon, because I heard from multiple colleagues, former employees, that Amazon is profoundly metric based; then the stories such as this, about burning out staff, and about the fake PIP process, began surfacing.

yrgulation 4y ago
Likewise, and the extra reason of amazon being filled with low quality products. Now if only i could get people to move away from aws…
throwaway12388 4y ago
Me too and now i have better & cheaper alternatives where i live.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Can you list some?
pembrook 4y ago
Not shopping at Amazon because the company is big enough to get media attention is a bit silly. Do you know what the working conditions are like at any of the million non-Amazon warehouses? Of course not, there’s no media attention for Bob’s fulfillment in Wichita, Kansas. Here’s the truth: your friendly neighborhood warehouse down the street likely pays its employees far less, with far worse benefits, less safe facilities, and similar turnover. It shouldn’t be the job of consumers to police labor practices—we’re really bad at it and only care if the company is big enough to get NYT coverage. This is the role of government and law. If we really care about conditions for workers, we need to focus our attention there.
- dendriti 4y ago
  Right. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and "voting with your wallet" is capitalist bullshit. They love to trot that one out, to make real change impossible.

firstSpeaker 4y ago

Anyone has a link to the actual leaked documents?

Ligma123 4y ago

It's not just Amazon that does this. And there are only two ways to hurt them back for it. One is people refusing to work there, which is obviously easier to do for engineers than for warehouse workers. The second is refusing to make business with them. Just don't order your stuff from there, don't subscribe to Prime and so on, but I guess this is just too much to ask for the average guy whose whole personality revolves around the shows they are currently watching.

Eisenstein 4y ago
There are a few more than two... The third is organizing a union and striking until demands are met. The fourth is regulating them with laws. The fifth is borrowing enough money to gain enough stock to force some allies onto board seats and implementing change from the top down. I'm sure there are more.

esarbe 4y ago

How is the US - as a society - okay with companies like Amazon abusing their employees, deny them union representation while paying them a starvation wage? These companies abuse the total breakdown of the US's social security network; the US made it so bad that people are actually forced to work in such conditions. Together with the almost total dismantling of the unions in the US, this leaves low skilled workers no way to fight back. It's not as bad in jobs were you need to have even a little training and need to invest in your workers. But in Amazon's case the brutality of this system is laid bare.

yrgulation 4y ago
It’s the work culture. In the uk it’s more or less known that when a us company acquires a local company it will go downhill in terms of working conditions.

yrgulation 4y ago

I absolutely wouldnt mind waiting an extra day or two for my package if it means better working conditions for warehouse and software workers at amazon. I wouldnt mind if bezos earned a little less either. For now tho i stopped using it all together.

sneak 4y ago
I think you hold the minority opinion amongst Amazon customers. TBH I think perhaps the (opt-in) suffering endured by the Amazon staff (both blue and white collar) is outweighed by the massive benefits to an entire society enabled by same-day shipping of approximately everything. It's an extremely powerful and valuable service, that serves as a force multiplier for every personal and business project that has it available. Facebook can and should be destroyed. I think if you were to destroy Amazon, the world would be a worse place.
GoldenMonkey 4y ago
Already happening without better conditions. Amazon prime delivery is so unreliable now. I live 1/2 mile from the distribution center. And 1 out of 3 packages are always late. Sometimes a week late. Quality and reliability are declining rapidly.

speed_spread 4y ago

I'm so glad I screwed a ski trip out of Amazon. Took me 3 hours of my life to pass the coding test, then the remote live coding interview. Then they paid the flight and hotel to meet and grill me in person. I asked for an extra hotel night "to look for houses". That day, I actually took a bus to $BIG_MOUNTAIN nearby and had the some of the best snowboard of my life. The interviews were shit, clearly designed not to know if I knew software but rather if was compliant and thick skinned enough to survive and perform in their shit culture. Fuck you Amazon. Thank you Amazon.

MichaelMoser123 4y ago

Oh, doesn't that go against the Amazon leadership principle of... frugality?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

not_enoch_wise 4y ago

The PIPs will continue until profitability improves