6 ms·

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Am

• throwanem 2y ago
  Only by virtue of throughput.
• toomuchtodo 2y ago
  There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
  • jackyinger 2y ago
    Actually I heard from a friend that worked there that eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US who haven’t previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes warehouse workers.
    • toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Look at their H1B visa data and hiring in India (at least with regards to corp jobs, not US warehouse workers). They absolutely could find these folks in the US who don't need sponsorship. https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon > Amazon H1B Salary 2024 > 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less than $100k Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a known quantity at this point. https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-fraud/combating-fraud-and-abuse-in-the-h-1b-visa-program https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
      • Hypocritelefty 2y ago
        [dead]
      • apwell23 2y ago
        If they hire from india on h1b they are almost guaranteed that person wouldn't be able to leave for amazon for a very long time if they apply for a perm process. They are getting that retention premium that won't be possible if they hire locally.
        • TeaBrain 2y ago
          Which is the reason for the h1b fraud, but this also begs the question of why amazon has been able to get away with this strategy for so long.
    • WalterSear 2y ago
      Apparently Amazon agrees with your friend, at least as far as warehouse workers go. > Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021... > In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. 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... https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        They will automate their way out of the warehouse worker problem. The only reason they still employ human workers is that they are still cheaper than robots for some tasks.
      • aurizon 2y ago
        Amazon steadily promotes packaging standards that create standard boxes/packs amenable to fast robo read/sort/grip/handle, so they are looking to this.
    • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      There was a leaked memo showing that Amazon itself is aware of this risk to their business: https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
  • tivert 2y ago
    > There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option. Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
    • toastedwedge 2y ago
      Apologies for the side question here, but what is an "on-trend" resume? This is the first time (in general, on/off HN) I've seen that particular phrase.
      • jaggederest 2y ago
        These days that means AI, a few years ago it was crypto, python data science, or React, before that it might have been a server framework or angular. Just whatever is considered hot.
• alephnerd 2y ago
  > How is that a sustainable corporate culture Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options. It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level. Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much. + A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
  • eli_gottlieb 2y ago
    Amazon has been Like This since long before the pandemic and the tech downturn. I was told they were Like This when I was finishing undergrad.
    • red-iron-pine 2y ago
      there were news articles about it in the Seattle Times a decade ago. headlines like "I Used To Cry At My Desk".
  • yourapostasy 2y ago
    > ...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached... I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
• alex_lav 2y ago
  Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"
  • benterix 2y ago
    I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top. I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844
    • alex_lav 2y ago
      > I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top. The employee can do something about it by leaving.
      • elevatedastalt 2y ago
        And go where?
        • alex_lav 2y ago
          A place where you don't complain every day about hating your job?
    • ahahahahah 2y ago
      warehouse is very different than corporate. also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
      • benterix 2y ago
• nyrikki 2y ago
  People want it on their resume and money. While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward. Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward. Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens. Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many. But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
  • sbrother 2y ago
    Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
  • Spartan-S63 2y ago
    What do you mean by delegating upward?
    • soniclettuce 2y ago
      I'm not them but I suspect they mean a kind of "above my paygrade/not my problem" tendency. You can defer almost indefinitely (or make other people do it for you) a lot complicated work with phrases like "we need senior/staff buy-in on the design", "I think we need XYZ team on board/cross-team management approval", "maybe the cloud platform team should be building this, not us?", "I told the architect our requirements and they'll get back to us once they makes a design". i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
• supergeek133 2y ago
  The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics. Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more. This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
  • burningChrome 2y ago
    >> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics. This is a very important distinction. At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it. I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers. I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
    • sushisource 2y ago
      It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less). People prioritize weird shit.
      • beaglesss 2y ago
• dividefuel 2y ago
  I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    Alternatively, it can be seen as a test of where things really have landed.
  • couscouspie 2y ago
    I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent from remote work.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]