5 ms·

I saved Amazon $10MM as an intern back in 2012. If only I could have seen 1% of that.

by cybernoodles 3y ago

shepherdjerred 3y ago
I also saved Amazon a ton of money and saw nothing from it!
- gottorf 3y ago
  On the other hand, employees aren't liable for the company's losses and debts, so it works out in the end.
  - TuringNYC 3y ago
    In trading/PM roles in finance, before clawbacks became more popular, employees would regularly get the upside and avoid the downside.
    - searchableguy 3y ago
      Are clawbacks common at trading companies?
  - foxyv 3y ago
    > employees aren't liable for the company's losses and debts Never been laid off during a recession or had your pay frozen and bonuses cancelled during a hard time? Employees risk a lot more than most stock holders by working for a company. On average, stock holders are way more diversified.
    - throwaway98797 3y ago
      losing your job is not the same as losing capital
      - mao_tse_tung 3y ago
        Correct, is way worse. Proletarians don't have any capital to lose. Capitalists do. So if they lose their capital, they can just be like the rest of us. If we (proletarians) lose our job, we risk poverty and death.
        anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        > So if they lose their capital, they can just be like the rest of us. Nah, if they had enough capital to live off of before then, they are far more likely than us to fail upward into a management job.
      - foxyv 3y ago
        No, it is wayyyy worse. Although there is a lot of capital investment in a job. You are also investing the most valuable thing you own.
        bigstrat2003 3y ago
        > Although there is a lot of capital investment in a job. No there isn't. You haven't put up any capital when you join a job, and you aren't (generally) required to invest any as you go along. Your time is not capital.
        foxyv 3y ago
        Auto Loans, Student Loans, training, certification, internships, moving costs, and other small costs like special clothing are all investments made by employees to be paid for before or during hiring. In addition, many businesses require employees to buy tools and special equipment like boots and safety vests.
    - geodel 3y ago
      > Employees risk a lot more than most stock holders by working for a company. hmm, they can perhaps reduce the risk by not working for a company. They can just be stock holders or launch their own company, that way whatever may happen they will never get fired.
      - birdyrooster 3y ago
        > They can just be stock holders or launch their own company
      - foxyv 3y ago
        In order to become a stock holder or launch a company, you need to have capital. Capital is hard to acquire when wages are being actively suppressed by a cabal of employers. It is also hard to hold on to capital when your health care system is intentionally designed to strip away generational wealth from workers. Then to add a cherry on top, you lock the higher wage jobs behind an additional investment that can only be funded by non-dischargeable loans. Then you have the rent seekers, both literal and figurative. Landlords, insurance companies, toll roads, etc...
        johnny99k 3y ago
        so you mean riskier?
        foxyv 3y ago
        No, more like a fairy tale.
    - martin8412 3y ago
      Pay frozen? Absolutely not. The company would be undergoing bankruptcy by the end of day if not all employees agreed to it.
      - vdqtp3 3y ago
        Pay frozen != no pay Pay frozen == no pay raises
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
        LOL back in the late 90s and early aughts I had many friends in games. There were many times when payments didn't come in in time and employees were working for repayment promises.
    - 93po 3y ago
      This isn't a risk the employee takes on as a result of doing business. It's a result of the company choosing to do this while also still making profits. So it's not really a risk, it's just mistreatment.
    - deepsun 3y ago
      > Employees risk a lot more than most stock holders by working for a company. Uhm no? You apparently never been a business owner. Employees get their wages, and even can legally enforce them. If a business go down, owners eat the losses and envy their employees. I've been on both sides. Being a business owner is much riskier.
      - fennecfoxy 3y ago
        But wages are often also only a fraction of what they should be, especially for those working outside of the tech industry. But I suppose that's a separate issue. Is the risk high enough to justify the ever-growing disparity between owners/C levels/investors/etc and the employees that get the work done? What with all of the bail-outs through history, running an especially large company seems pretty much riskless. And hell, if you look at the history of technology, say games and game consoles (because I like retro games) the number of times a hugely successful product/project that netted 100s of millions of dollars was "not allowed" by the CEO etc but was hidden until it was too late (see Xbox etc) is super high. In addition to the number of decisions made by higher ups where the business swallowed a loss (particularly easy in larger businesses) is also high. Imagine if Bill Gates and Steve Balmer hadn't been convinced/swayed to make the Xbox. How much profit has MS made from that? A fucking shitload, and have the guys that pushed it, or for that matter anybody in a similar situation (of which there are many) ever seen any of that success? No. And we can't say "well the CEXs have the final say because they take on all the risk" they do, technically, but in reality when C levels screw up oftentimes it's just taken as a loss and things move on.
      - foxyv 3y ago
        If you only take into account small businesses with single owners you are entirely correct. Mostly because large corporations are squeezing them to death with various forms of rent seeking. However, if your corporation is in a position to casually misplace half a million dollars, I don't think you are in that category.
  - dvt 3y ago
    > On the other hand, employees aren't liable for the company's losses and debts, so it works out in the end. How can anyone seriously type this? If you fuck up bigly enough, you will 100%—without fault—get sacked. Again, not even talking about long tails (bad economic conditions, layoffs, etc.). This is under totally normal situations: if you lose the company money, you will be fired. As a bonus, you also lose unvested options or equity. These kinds of posts are exactly why engineers have garbage bonuses compared to finance even though they probably generate an order of magnitude more value.
    - chii 3y ago
      > If you fuck up bigly enough, you will 100%—without fault—get sacked which is to be expected - making a big mistake might not be something that can be forgiven and overlooked (depending on the magnitude of the mistake). But you will not lose capital as an employee, since you did not put in capital to lose. Your time would still have been paid, up to the day you are fired. Therefore, you obviously have no incentive to take on a risk that can result in a mistake (but which the reward you take no part in). You just do your assigned job, and whether it saves the company money or not, as long as you can cover your ass, you're golden. Unless the company incentivize you to save money - for example, via a bonus through hitting a target or achieving some goal that was set.
      - dvt 3y ago
        > But you will not lose capital as an employee, since you did not put in capital to lose. The conversation is a lot more complicated because there's an opportunity cost, you lose time (your time is finite, company time is infinite), you lose reputation, and so on. Besides, your argument is a bit weak as it's not like hedge fund managers put up the cash themselves, either. My point is only that value-generators should be rewarded as such, and it's a bit weird that engineers are totally cool with not getting a piece of the pie.
        gottorf 3y ago
        > My point is only that value-generators should be rewarded as such, and it's a bit weird that engineers are totally cool with not getting a piece of the pie. Software engineers are some of the best-paid labor in the world with great benefits and workplace conditions. They often receive equity as a compensation, even when the salary is still vastly above many other lines of work. They are absolutely getting a piece of the pie, and in much greater proportions than almost any other economic activity. You may be discounting the value of capital, management, sales, and other roles in a successful software-related business. The remuneration that labor and employees receive is never going to be in line with the value that they generate, precisely because the former group doesn't take any risk. They don't invest any personal capital and they aren't liable for anything. They can walk away any time, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. In return, they work fixed hours and get paid on a routine basis. The owners receive only what remains above and beyond all that, which could be great profits, just breaking even, or even losses. > there's an opportunity cost, you lose time (your time is finite, company time is infinite) Everyone everywhere loses time, because time passes whether or not you choose to do anything with it. Employees aren't unique among economic entities that they face opportunity costs. > it's not like hedge fund managers put up the cash themselves, either This is actually a good example to dive into. Hedge funds are typically paid "2/20", meaning 2% of assets under management every year whether or not there are any gains, and 20% of any gains above some benchmark. It's similar to, say, a commission-based sales role that gets paid a certain fixed salary and a percentage of sales they make. Whether or not 2/20 is "fair" is solely up to those who buy their services, since there is a competitive market of providers of fund management (the "employee") and providers of capital (the "employer"). And in some situations, the "employers" do in fact lose a lot of money, while the "employees" walk away; the limited partners of Melvin Capital, for example, lost many billions of dollars, all while Melvin Capital itself continued to charge the 2% management fee. And within hedge funds itself, there are again employees who receive a stable salary and maybe some performance-related bonuses on top of that, versus the principals and owners who have personal capital invested. When LTCM blew up, for example, it's estimated that its owners lost $1.9B[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    Who is liable for the company's losses and debts, I wonder?
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  Sounds like you should move into sales if you want a % paid on value you help a company.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    It just feels strange to save a company a huge sum of money (by my own initiative) and not see a penny.
    - tiffanyh 3y ago
      Flip side, are you ok if your company docked your pay if they found you wasteful? E.g. why didn't you turn off that temp m3.xlarge instance. $X gets docked from your pay.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    We're all in sales
- rvnx 3y ago
  In some way, I made Amazon get a lot of profit by choosing to purchase on their platform, and saw nothing from it, though I directly contributed to their profit and could deserve a %.
microtoodle 3y ago
I once saved a company $20k in infra costs and saw nothing of it. In fact the team was pretty upset that they'd budgeted that money for infra already and it'd have been better spent instead of waiting till next year to re-budget it.
- busterarm 3y ago
  I once talked AWS into a 5-digit refund for something that was our team's mistake. It wasn't necessary though because we had a committed spend target to reach and we just had to figure out how to legitimately spend the money somewhere else. :(
WediBlino 3y ago
My company paid a consultant £25K to increase efficiency. He recovered about 5 minutes a job. I wrote a tool that saved about two hours a case, in total this saved about £500k. I got a free case off beer.
- kakwa_ 3y ago
  You are lucky, I got nothing for heavily suggesting a ~1M/year saving. The only "personal" reward I get from that is: whenever I feel guilty for not having done much in a given day, I remind myself that by this action alone, I've saved my company several times what I would ever cost them. Helps with self-esteem, but I don't think my company see it that way.
- switch007 3y ago
  Are you a consultant now?
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  That's the difference between perm/consultant I guess. Perm is more "we pay you so fix this", consultant is more the reverse "we need this fixed so we'll pay you". I always find that dynamic hilarious because in a general sense permanent employees have more value than contractors/consultants as perms usually have a much longer tenure at a company (years and years, vs 6 months to 1 year). However one thing I noticed after moving to the UK is that the culture is completely different here - everywhere I've worked here there are contractors who stay for years and years like a perm would. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me reconsider why anybody would ever be a permanent employee beyond a bit more job security (ie long term contractors definitely have to trust that they'll be renewed, even if they usually are it's always possible for the business to decide otherwise).
oh_sigh 3y ago
I saved/earned Amazon $25M/yr also back in 2012. Because the project that was supposed to compute price matching/most-favored-nation status for vendors was never actually implemented. Despite it being in the standard contract for vendors for years, no one ever noticed that we never adjusted prices based on it. My own initiative noticing the problem, my own design and implementation, as a L3(or whatever the fresh grad role level is), and I got zip for it. Big part of my reason for leaving the company. I didn't expect people to fall to their knees and worship me, but it seemed like a project that should be a big part of a promotion, but I was passed over multiple times.

I saved Amazon $10MM as an intern back in 2012. If only I could have seen 1% of that.

shepherdjerred 3y ago

I also saved Amazon a ton of money and saw nothing from it!

gottorf 3y ago
On the other hand, employees aren't liable for the company's losses and debts, so it works out in the end.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  In trading/PM roles in finance, before clawbacks became more popular, employees would regularly get the upside and avoid the downside.
  - searchableguy 3y ago
    Are clawbacks common at trading companies?
- foxyv 3y ago
  > employees aren't liable for the company's losses and debts Never been laid off during a recession or had your pay frozen and bonuses cancelled during a hard time? Employees risk a lot more than most stock holders by working for a company. On average, stock holders are way more diversified.
  - throwaway98797 3y ago
    losing your job is not the same as losing capital
    - mao_tse_tung 3y ago
      Correct, is way worse. Proletarians don't have any capital to lose. Capitalists do. So if they lose their capital, they can just be like the rest of us. If we (proletarians) lose our job, we risk poverty and death.
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        > So if they lose their capital, they can just be like the rest of us. Nah, if they had enough capital to live off of before then, they are far more likely than us to fail upward into a management job.
    - foxyv 3y ago
      No, it is wayyyy worse. Although there is a lot of capital investment in a job. You are also investing the most valuable thing you own.
      - bigstrat2003 3y ago
        > Although there is a lot of capital investment in a job. No there isn't. You haven't put up any capital when you join a job, and you aren't (generally) required to invest any as you go along. Your time is not capital.
        foxyv 3y ago
        Auto Loans, Student Loans, training, certification, internships, moving costs, and other small costs like special clothing are all investments made by employees to be paid for before or during hiring. In addition, many businesses require employees to buy tools and special equipment like boots and safety vests.
  - geodel 3y ago
    > Employees risk a lot more than most stock holders by working for a company. hmm, they can perhaps reduce the risk by not working for a company. They can just be stock holders or launch their own company, that way whatever may happen they will never get fired.
    - birdyrooster 3y ago
      > They can just be stock holders or launch their own company
    - foxyv 3y ago
      In order to become a stock holder or launch a company, you need to have capital. Capital is hard to acquire when wages are being actively suppressed by a cabal of employers. It is also hard to hold on to capital when your health care system is intentionally designed to strip away generational wealth from workers. Then to add a cherry on top, you lock the higher wage jobs behind an additional investment that can only be funded by non-dischargeable loans. Then you have the rent seekers, both literal and figurative. Landlords, insurance companies, toll roads, etc...
      - johnny99k 3y ago
        so you mean riskier?
        foxyv 3y ago
        No, more like a fairy tale.
  - martin8412 3y ago
    Pay frozen? Absolutely not. The company would be undergoing bankruptcy by the end of day if not all employees agreed to it.
    - vdqtp3 3y ago
      Pay frozen != no pay Pay frozen == no pay raises
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      LOL back in the late 90s and early aughts I had many friends in games. There were many times when payments didn't come in in time and employees were working for repayment promises.
  - 93po 3y ago
    This isn't a risk the employee takes on as a result of doing business. It's a result of the company choosing to do this while also still making profits. So it's not really a risk, it's just mistreatment.
  - deepsun 3y ago
    > Employees risk a lot more than most stock holders by working for a company. Uhm no? You apparently never been a business owner. Employees get their wages, and even can legally enforce them. If a business go down, owners eat the losses and envy their employees. I've been on both sides. Being a business owner is much riskier.
    - fennecfoxy 3y ago
      But wages are often also only a fraction of what they should be, especially for those working outside of the tech industry. But I suppose that's a separate issue. Is the risk high enough to justify the ever-growing disparity between owners/C levels/investors/etc and the employees that get the work done? What with all of the bail-outs through history, running an especially large company seems pretty much riskless. And hell, if you look at the history of technology, say games and game consoles (because I like retro games) the number of times a hugely successful product/project that netted 100s of millions of dollars was "not allowed" by the CEO etc but was hidden until it was too late (see Xbox etc) is super high. In addition to the number of decisions made by higher ups where the business swallowed a loss (particularly easy in larger businesses) is also high. Imagine if Bill Gates and Steve Balmer hadn't been convinced/swayed to make the Xbox. How much profit has MS made from that? A fucking shitload, and have the guys that pushed it, or for that matter anybody in a similar situation (of which there are many) ever seen any of that success? No. And we can't say "well the CEXs have the final say because they take on all the risk" they do, technically, but in reality when C levels screw up oftentimes it's just taken as a loss and things move on.
    - foxyv 3y ago
      If you only take into account small businesses with single owners you are entirely correct. Mostly because large corporations are squeezing them to death with various forms of rent seeking. However, if your corporation is in a position to casually misplace half a million dollars, I don't think you are in that category.
- dvt 3y ago
  > On the other hand, employees aren't liable for the company's losses and debts, so it works out in the end. How can anyone seriously type this? If you fuck up bigly enough, you will 100%—without fault—get sacked. Again, not even talking about long tails (bad economic conditions, layoffs, etc.). This is under totally normal situations: if you lose the company money, you will be fired. As a bonus, you also lose unvested options or equity. These kinds of posts are exactly why engineers have garbage bonuses compared to finance even though they probably generate an order of magnitude more value.
  - chii 3y ago
    > If you fuck up bigly enough, you will 100%—without fault—get sacked which is to be expected - making a big mistake might not be something that can be forgiven and overlooked (depending on the magnitude of the mistake). But you will not lose capital as an employee, since you did not put in capital to lose. Your time would still have been paid, up to the day you are fired. Therefore, you obviously have no incentive to take on a risk that can result in a mistake (but which the reward you take no part in). You just do your assigned job, and whether it saves the company money or not, as long as you can cover your ass, you're golden. Unless the company incentivize you to save money - for example, via a bonus through hitting a target or achieving some goal that was set.
    - dvt 3y ago
      > But you will not lose capital as an employee, since you did not put in capital to lose. The conversation is a lot more complicated because there's an opportunity cost, you lose time (your time is finite, company time is infinite), you lose reputation, and so on. Besides, your argument is a bit weak as it's not like hedge fund managers put up the cash themselves, either. My point is only that value-generators should be rewarded as such, and it's a bit weird that engineers are totally cool with not getting a piece of the pie.
      - gottorf 3y ago
        > My point is only that value-generators should be rewarded as such, and it's a bit weird that engineers are totally cool with not getting a piece of the pie. Software engineers are some of the best-paid labor in the world with great benefits and workplace conditions. They often receive equity as a compensation, even when the salary is still vastly above many other lines of work. They are absolutely getting a piece of the pie, and in much greater proportions than almost any other economic activity. You may be discounting the value of capital, management, sales, and other roles in a successful software-related business. The remuneration that labor and employees receive is never going to be in line with the value that they generate, precisely because the former group doesn't take any risk. They don't invest any personal capital and they aren't liable for anything. They can walk away any time, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. In return, they work fixed hours and get paid on a routine basis. The owners receive only what remains above and beyond all that, which could be great profits, just breaking even, or even losses. > there's an opportunity cost, you lose time (your time is finite, company time is infinite) Everyone everywhere loses time, because time passes whether or not you choose to do anything with it. Employees aren't unique among economic entities that they face opportunity costs. > it's not like hedge fund managers put up the cash themselves, either This is actually a good example to dive into. Hedge funds are typically paid "2/20", meaning 2% of assets under management every year whether or not there are any gains, and 20% of any gains above some benchmark. It's similar to, say, a commission-based sales role that gets paid a certain fixed salary and a percentage of sales they make. Whether or not 2/20 is "fair" is solely up to those who buy their services, since there is a competitive market of providers of fund management (the "employee") and providers of capital (the "employer"). And in some situations, the "employers" do in fact lose a lot of money, while the "employees" walk away; the limited partners of Melvin Capital, for example, lost many billions of dollars, all while Melvin Capital itself continued to charge the 2% management fee. And within hedge funds itself, there are again employees who receive a stable salary and maybe some performance-related bonuses on top of that, versus the principals and owners who have personal capital invested. When LTCM blew up, for example, it's estimated that its owners lost $1.9B[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
- tshaddox 3y ago
  Who is liable for the company's losses and debts, I wonder?
tiffanyh 3y ago
Sounds like you should move into sales if you want a % paid on value you help a company.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  It just feels strange to save a company a huge sum of money (by my own initiative) and not see a penny.
  - tiffanyh 3y ago
    Flip side, are you ok if your company docked your pay if they found you wasteful? E.g. why didn't you turn off that temp m3.xlarge instance. $X gets docked from your pay.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  We're all in sales
rvnx 3y ago
In some way, I made Amazon get a lot of profit by choosing to purchase on their platform, and saw nothing from it, though I directly contributed to their profit and could deserve a %.

microtoodle 3y ago

I once saved a company $20k in infra costs and saw nothing of it. In fact the team was pretty upset that they'd budgeted that money for infra already and it'd have been better spent instead of waiting till next year to re-budget it.

busterarm 3y ago
I once talked AWS into a 5-digit refund for something that was our team's mistake. It wasn't necessary though because we had a committed spend target to reach and we just had to figure out how to legitimately spend the money somewhere else. :(

WediBlino 3y ago

My company paid a consultant £25K to increase efficiency. He recovered about 5 minutes a job. I wrote a tool that saved about two hours a case, in total this saved about £500k. I got a free case off beer.

kakwa_ 3y ago
You are lucky, I got nothing for heavily suggesting a ~1M/year saving. The only "personal" reward I get from that is: whenever I feel guilty for not having done much in a given day, I remind myself that by this action alone, I've saved my company several times what I would ever cost them. Helps with self-esteem, but I don't think my company see it that way.
switch007 3y ago
Are you a consultant now?
fennecfoxy 3y ago
That's the difference between perm/consultant I guess. Perm is more "we pay you so fix this", consultant is more the reverse "we need this fixed so we'll pay you". I always find that dynamic hilarious because in a general sense permanent employees have more value than contractors/consultants as perms usually have a much longer tenure at a company (years and years, vs 6 months to 1 year). However one thing I noticed after moving to the UK is that the culture is completely different here - everywhere I've worked here there are contractors who stay for years and years like a perm would. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me reconsider why anybody would ever be a permanent employee beyond a bit more job security (ie long term contractors definitely have to trust that they'll be renewed, even if they usually are it's always possible for the business to decide otherwise).

oh_sigh 3y ago

I saved/earned Amazon $25M/yr also back in 2012. Because the project that was supposed to compute price matching/most-favored-nation status for vendors was never actually implemented. Despite it being in the standard contract for vendors for years, no one ever noticed that we never adjusted prices based on it. My own initiative noticing the problem, my own design and implementation, as a L3(or whatever the fresh grad role level is), and I got zip for it. Big part of my reason for leaving the company. I didn't expect people to fall to their knees and worship me, but it seemed like a project that should be a big part of a promotion, but I was passed over multiple times.