16 ms·

Between the engineering staff and the warehouse workers, I wonder how long it will be until they have already fired everyone who ever would have been willing to

• steve-atx-7600 1y ago
  Seriously. I don’t know any half way decent engineer that would ever work there twice.
  • president_zippy 1y ago
    I like to think I'm halfway decent at my job, and I wouldn't work there once. During undergrad, my landlord working for AMZN on the opposite end of the country offered me an interview, but it was during final exam week. I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams, and his arrogance really showed when not only did he refuse, but then insisted my exams are not don't even register on the same scale of importance as the opportunity to work for Amazon. Somewhat related: a recruiter at Google cold-called me a couple months into my first job out of undergrad back in 2016 and was similarly condescending about "the chance" to work for Google compared to everything else. I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview. I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs. That job was great until I got put on a team with a guy who was a former middle manager at some IBM-like company and went from being surrounded by people lightyears ahead of me to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. The messed-up part was that it wasn't even punishment. I was rewarded after completing a project with my choice of which team I joined next, and I joined the wrong one. I assumed that joining a new team to utilize this newfangled "cloud computing" thing would be trailblazing, and I didn't do any diligence on who I would work with. To this day, I still regret not rejoining the first team I worked for, otherwise I would still be at that company and happy about it. Then again, the boredom and discontent while being on that sucky team is the reason I started investing, and now I can buy a house in cash and fund myself to do whatever I want for at least a decade. Hard to complain about the way things turned out.
    • le-mark 1y ago
      > to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
      • president_zippy 1y ago
        Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart. I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me. The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore. I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade. It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
        • anal_reactor 1y ago
          I'm currently in a place that pays me €100k just to sit on my ass, and I can do that remotely. I've tried actually doing some work, but that backfired. Not sure what to do, because on one hand my skills are evaporating, but on the other if I wanted a job that pays more I'd have to learn a lot and then work substantially more. I'm wondering if maybe sitting here until retirement is a viable option.
  • stouset 1y ago
    After having heard horror stories from friends who've worked there, you couldn't pay me enough.
  • wppick 1y ago
    The formula is usually more money and ability to work special team isolated from the usual toxic orgs. I think A9 was probably somewhat like that, and AWS probably used to be at some point long ago
  • VirusNewbie 1y ago
    I know some people who are fine working there. No one seems thrilled but if you're an above average engineer who is just getting by at 140k a year and suddenly you're looking at 350k a year as an SDEIII or something, that can be a life changing amount of money. However, I think the question is, what percentage of engineers can pass the amazon interview but not the Apple/Databricks/Uber/Google/Meta ones. Because no one is picking amazon over the aforementioned companies. However, maybe there's an opening at Amazon and not the other companies, or maybe that's your only offer. I certainly think it might be worth it for a a few years.
    • SoftTalker 1y ago
      > just getting by at 140k a year Lol
      • Razengan 1y ago
        Yeah that is such a grim caricature.. First worlders having to "just get by" with 11 thousand dollars every month. What even is this world
        • nothrabannosir 1y ago
          Assuming they’re already living in Seattle: pre tax, and supporting a family? According to a quick google, that’s ~$100k after tax, a 3BR in Seattle is ~$4k/mo so you’re left with $52k for everything else, in a HCOL area. I buy it.
          • BobbyJo 1y ago
            Truth. I honestly don't know how most people are surviving right now.
            • lesuorac 1y ago
              Homelessness + loans (credit cards) are on the rise and births are on the decrease. But to honestly answer the question, by either not living in large cities and commuting in, sharing those 3BRs, or staying home with parents. Shaving that 48k/year (post-tax) rent down to ~12k/year frees up a lot of money. (Also if you're young, staying with your parents and saving ~100-200k in rent for a downpayment over 10 years just seems like a smart idea to me).
  • wkat4242 1y ago
    We do a lot of business with them and we have workshops with them sometimes, and the one thing I notice is how they're all so evangelical. They wouldn't say a bad thing about their company. I couldn't be like that, when I work something I sell my knowledge but not my soul. I'd always speak freely (not always appreciated but usually it's not a problem if it's true). But that company culture leaves me with a very low opinion of them and very little trust. Even Microsoft engineers are less brainwashed. I've had several that just told me the truth about services. Maybe it depends on the country but it feels like this is just their culture.
  • swaits 1y ago
    Hi, I am a half decent engineer. I say that as objectively as one can say something like this about themselves. I worked at Amazon. Twice. In total about a decade as a Principal Engineer. I left voluntarily a few months ago. I have zero regrets about my time at Amazon. I learned lots, worked with some incredible people, and had fun doing it. And the culture? It was life changing for me, especially when I first joined. In all the best ways. And Amazon today? All I’ll say is that at their size, maintaining solid culture is damn hard. The hiring spree peri-Covid definitely added unimaginable stress to maintaining the culture the company was built on. They’re a big company, and thus a big target. It’s easy, cheap, and even lazy to kick them with stuff like this. The truth is that while it’s changed a lot over time, anyone fortunate enough to work there should embrace it.
    • president_zippy 1y ago
      I gotta be candid with you: "anyone fortunate enough to work there" is exactly the kind of arrogance that rubs job candidates the wrong way. A lot of people don't see it the way you do, and you would do well to take a moment of honest self reflection and consider the reason why. Before you reflexively jump to "Amazon is just not for everybody", it's only fair to warn you that a lot of people around here have heard this phrase and don't buy it. My former landlord said the same thing at least 9 times in the 8 times I've interacted with him face to face... right up until he got fired. Management conveniently put him on a PIP 4 months before a vesting cliff on his 2-year RSU vesting schedule. Yeah, Amazon is not for everybody- just the kind of people who either perpetrate or fall victim to pyramid schemes.
      • Arainach 1y ago
        Amazon, on the engineering side, is rough for high-end software engineers, but let's be very real: it pays better than the vast majority of careers available in America, even right out of college, and while it's stressful so is being a teacher or working in the food industry, and those jobs pay peanuts compared to an Amazon SWE. It is fortunate to get a job there. It may be even more fortunate to get a job at another high-end software company but that doesn't change the fact that a job at Amazon is life changing money for most people. To pre-empt hyperbolic responses: I live in Seattle. I personally know plenty of people who have worked at Amazon. I know plenty of local teachers. The teachers work as many hours for a tenth the pay and burn out just as fast.
  • ajkjk 1y ago
    I had a decent time there a decade ago. In retail, though, not AWS.
  • Razengan 1y ago
    Well don't you want to be able to say "I work on the DEATH STAR" when asked what you do? Think of all the Twi'lek headtail that pulls
    • president_zippy 1y ago
      But would I pull the Twi'lek headtails??? "Lord, I apologize." -Dan Whitney
  • awill 1y ago
    I've worked there since 2015, and this simply isn't true. There's a lot wrong with AWS (and it's got a lot worse in the last 3 years), but there's also a lot right, and there are some really, really smart people there, several of which have boomeranged (people who left and came back).
    • JustExAWS 1y ago
      There are smart people but the rot starts at the top and the culture thst was already bad got worse around 2022.
  • jesse_dot_id 1y ago
    I'm an awesome engineer and I'd never even apply to a FAANG company. I value stability over pretty much all else.
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      [dead]
    • fragmede 1y ago
      There are many reasons why someone might not want to work at a FAANG company, but I'm wondering what stories you've heard about stability that would preclude you from working at any of them. Most of the stories I hear are measured in years, but of course, the stories I've heard aren't the stories you've heard, so I'm just curious.
      • jesse_dot_id 1y ago
        The ever-present feeling that, at any time, you can be swept away in a wave of firings with 10,000 other employees, into an abyss of uncertainty, regardless of the quality or quantity of your contributions. FAANG companies do not care about their employees at all and it's clearly just getting worse over time. Also, I will never work in an office again, and I don't trust FAANG companies to allow me to have that luxury, even if it's in place when they hire me. Money turns groups of people — like boards and shareholders — into sociopaths. No thank you. I'd rather work at a University or a small company. Less money, but a lot less stress, a lot more stability, and having experience makes me feel useful instead of feeling like a bullseye with a dollar sign in the middle.
  • BoredPositron 1y ago
    Yep, everyone is excited until they leave after 1 1/2 or 2 years. There are always outliers but my personal experience is that the churn rate is incredible high.
    • EFreethought 1y ago
      There are a lot of companies that think that chewing people up and spitting them out is something to be proud of. MBAs usually wind up eating the seed corn at some point.
  • tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
    I'm barely a halfway-decent engineer, working at a M7 big-tech co, and my next job requirements consist of: anywhere but Amazon. The stories I hear there is just not the style of work I'm interested in
  • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    I'm sure the intersection between sadomasochists and Amazon employees is above average.
• nradov 1y ago
  Are there really many illegal aliens working in the warehouses? I know that Amazon does verify employment eligibility and checks documents. There may be some committing identity theft but I doubt that it's a large proportion.
  • ahi 1y ago
    I assume the parent was being hyperbolic. Illegal immigrants is the barrel scraping bottom of the work force.
    • terminalshort 1y ago
      Not really. For low skilled jobs that don't require much English, illegals are going to be as good as locals. Maybe even better because locals who are any good are mostly going to move on to better opportunities.
      • wkat4242 1y ago
        Yeah this. And warehouse work is all appified and can be configured in any language. Any American working in an Amazon warehouse will be jumping at the chance to get out of there. So turnover would be really high. Same with delivery stuff, I don't think most Americans would enjoy a job where they don't even get a pee break. As for legal stuff, I'm sure they'd use intermediaries to cover their ass.
        • brookst 1y ago
          Using intermediaries to hire illegally makes it worse from a liability perspective. Amazon is too big and hires too many people to get away with “oh, we used agencies in all of our markets and audited nine of them and we’re shocked that they didn’t do diligence”. All it would take is one disgruntled hiring manager. And Amazon doesn’t have many gruntled ones.
          • mschuster91 1y ago
• terminalshort 1y ago
  Not just firings. I sure got a deluge of Amazon recruiter emails right after they went full RTO.
  • saghm 1y ago
    I still occasionally get them even though I literally was one of the people who left after they tried to make us go in office (I don't like to use "RTO" because no one on my team had actually worked out of an office for Amazon before since the project we were on was fairly new). My wife (at the time fiancee) has an autoimmune issue that makes it much safer for me not to commute, and although my manager suggested I could get an exemption, he didn't actually know what the process was because it all happened so quickly that no one seemed to have actually defined what that process was up front. I had a little less than a month to figure what to do and get that exemption before they expected me to either have that exemption, be in an office in another city three days a week, or transfer to a local team and be in the office in my current city three days a week. I ended to deciding that it wasn't worth the effort to try to figure out how to convince them to let me stay.
• sumanthvepa 1y ago
  There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer. I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came back home to India. I run my own business now. And yes. I'm ex-Anazon. It was a tough place to work, but circa mid-nineties, the stock options made it worth working for them. I'm willing to bet I'll outcode a significant fraction of the audience on this site. And I'm not even close to the best developer around. Some of the smartest people I've met have been on an H-1b visa. Please consider not letting prejudice affect your view. You'll do yourself a disservice by underestimating your competition.
  • Eric_WVGG 1y ago
    I believe his point is that, even if you expand the available pool of developers outside of the US, that pool is still exhaustible.
  • president_zippy 1y ago
    I never implied that, let alone said it. The only thing I implied is that workers with fewer rights that a U.S. citizen are easier to exploit and abuse. If I refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, the worst that can happen is that I get fired, and spend months looking for a new job. If you refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, you get fired and lose your ability to stay in a place you have lived for 5+ years and made your home. That's BS, and I hate it almost as much as you do. You can be blackmailed with deportation, and I can be replaced with someone who can be blackmailed with deportation. We're both getting screwed in this current arrangement.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • FrustratedMonky 1y ago
      Nice exchange. Both points are valid.
    • 1718627440 1y ago
      Requesting work-related calls at 3am should be illegal and is in a lot of places.
• rester324 1y ago
  It seems amazon itself is aware of this issue. The linked engadget article even mentions this: > "The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years."
  • Yokolos 1y ago
    That's wild. Does any other company have this problem?
    • fragmede 1y ago
      Walmart
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      Agriculture, food processing and handling and everything associated, particularly meatpacking, and that's valid across countries. There's a reason that even if you pay (relatively) obscene wages, there will be no domestic employees willing to pick up these jobs - the work conditions are usually horrible because there are few industries as cut-throat and cost-sensitive as anything related to food. The root cause is global competition, especially from countries with very low wages - Ukraine, a country in Europe, for example, was a top food supplier for Africa -, and widespread income disparity in many Western countries - 67% of Americans self-report to live from paycheck to paycheck [1], for example. First it's "luxuries" that get the cut - travel, eating out, entertainment - and once everything has been cut, people go for savings in food because that's the last large expenses block that they can meaningfully control. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-youre-not-alone-67-percent-of-people-are-in-2025-11812027 https://www.investopedia.com/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-you... [2] https://www.boeckler.de/de/boeckler-impuls-vermoegen-nur-jeder-dritte-hat-reserven-6400.htm https://www.boeckler.de/de/boeckler-impuls-vermoegen-nur-jed...
      • regularfry 1y ago
• beAbU 1y ago
  > tens of millions of illegal immigrant warehouse workers You have a source for that claim?
  • typpilol 1y ago
    I think you misunderstood. He's not saying they have 10m illegal workers. He's saying even if they had 10m illegal workers they would burn though them all too
  • pavlov 1y ago
    The claim is not that Amazon would be using illegal warehouse workers today, but that there is theoretically a pool of tens of millions of people available. Which is still kind of dubious.
• casenmgreen 1y ago
  Yes. I would never work for AWS, given what I've heard, and consistently, of their internal culture. Also, everything I've seen while working with internal staff makes me feel there's a culture of obfuscating all weaknesses from customers, practically to the point of deceit.
• grafmax 1y ago
  Given their self-imposed labor supply issues, notably the awful working conditions, I hope the workforce there figures out how to effectively organize against this cesspool of a corporation.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  They pay very well, for some roles. I have a friend who recently started there. He just brought a Mercedes, and a second house, and he’s still in his early thirties. They keep him busy, though.
  • JCM9 1y ago
    Amazon’s not the only company on the planet that pays well. While they’re above average they’re far from top of the market. If you’re talented enough one can make a lot of money and skip the toxic culture. Double win.
  • coredog64 1y ago
    Come back after your friend hits the 4 year cliff. OY2 is a killer.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      That’s too bad. He seems happy, right now. I don’t think I’d like it, but he does. Last couple of days have been a challenge, though…
• JCM9 1y ago
  From what folks at AWS tell me that’s basically already happened. The best and brightest won’t even apply to work there anymore. For many key functions they’ve legit run out of people to recruit and thus have to go down market compared to competitors. Thats very much true in hot sectors like AI where AWS has “C” and at best “B” team players and leadership.
  • derangedHorse 1y ago
    I’ve also heard key pieces of their infrastructure has sloppily written code and that communication between teams is horrible. Even with their insane salary offers, most people don’t think it’s worth it. Especially given their 6% “unregretted attrition”[1] [1] https://fortune.com/2024/03/20/amazon-layoffs-performance-review-tech-human-resources-andy-jassy/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/20/amazon-layoffs-performance-re...
    • rhetocj23 1y ago
      The thing is, the brand is toxic. They can offer all the money they want, but no employee has any pride in working for them. So they produce the bare minimum to get their salary - and I applaud them.
• iamleppert 1y ago
  It's only a matter of time before ICE starts cracking down on Amazon Fulfillment Centers...
  • agoodusername63 1y ago
    There was another comment that pointed out how unlikely this is to happen because Amazon is just too big to bring the law down on now. When you're the, what. Second? Third? Largest employer in the US, enforcing the law now becomes a meaningful hit to economic velocity. And as much as Trump hates brown people, his administration has begrudgingly revealed that there are moves that his billionaire buddies Will Not Allow. I'm no fan of ice or this administrations deportation strategy, but it's a serious problem that even enforcing the law on Amazon is now an economic liability so much that nobody dares to try
• typeofhuman 1y ago
  Not totally on topic, but I recently passed the tipping point with Amazon shopping. I now go to Temu. They have US warehouses shipping in a couple days which was the only thing keeping me on Amazon. Plus everything on Amazon is basically the same stuff on Temu but with a markup!
• NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  I seem to remember an internal memo being leaked in which middle management was complaining that they would eventually/soon burn through all the laborers in that region, after which they'd suffer immense difficulty in staffing that warehouse.
• alexpotato 1y ago
  There was a tweet the other day about Walmart. They raised worker pay which, unsurprisingly, did not make Wall Street happy in the short term. However, over the next couple years there were multiple benefits: - lower turnover - less employee theft - cleaner stores - more same store sales etc
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • SilverElfin 1y ago
    That doesn’t seem convincing as far as evidence. Is there something by more formal showing raising pay led to those specific outcomes?
    • sp4cec0wb0y 1y ago
      It is about the same level of evidence as a CEO getting hired and their profits ticking up, which becomes attributed to them.
      • thayne 1y ago
        I'd say it's higher, because it makes a lot of sense that if you pay your employees more they are more likely to stay around, put in more effort, not steal merchandise, etc. Not to mention it probably increases the pool of prospective employees you can choose from.
    • danudey 1y ago
      There's an article about it: https://archive.is/fPAlB https://archive.is/fPAlB Walmart executives seem to claim that the pay raise led to those outcomes; specifically, they talked to employees and realized that in order to get those outcomes they had to stop paying people the least they possibly could because why would anyone stay? From the article: > Rissa Pittman, then a store manager in Ponca City, Okla., said it was easier to staff her store after 2015 as wages improved and it became easier to train workers for promotions.
• foobiekr 1y ago
  Every single engineer I know who went to Amazon except one lasted under 3 years and to this day, often ten+ years later, they all will mention how much they hated it. The one exception is an engineer who stopped engineering, switched into product, and transferred to China to hit on the women there. Some Amazon practices actually sound great to me (short documents, read before the meeting) but so many things just sound needlessly, relentlessly cheap.
  • michaelcampbell 1y ago
    I know of 1 tech person at Amazon that claims to have liked it there; the husband of a co-worker (albeit 6 years ago). He was some in-house consultant type role though and few all over the world to help the internal teams straighten out whatever AWS mess they'd gotten into, so that's not quite the role that people think about when talking in a FAANG context.
  • y-c-o-m-b 1y ago
    I was on one of the core AWS teams. I lasted 3 years and 1 month, to your point hah. I left about a year ago. My stress levels were through the roof during the time I was there. It truly was one of the most toxic stressful places I've ever worked, second only to Intel. The largest contributor of stress being on-call rotations where getting paged between 12am-6am each night was basically a guarantee. God help you if it was a holiday and you got a high sev page, where the people that you really need are all out of pocket. The many many many instances of their security "regime" relentlessly paging us in the middle of the night for things like having an S3 bucket for static website assets; despite numerous exceptions given by L7+ leadership. I disagree with the notion around "short documents", not only were they quite lengthy at times, but they actually made the process of "busywork" worse by adding more overhead to trivial matters. Add on the layoffs and "return to office" horse-shit excuses and it's no wonder nobody wants to go back.
  • dls2016 1y ago
    I got a job at AWS/EFS from a post here on hacker news. Stayed there almost 2 years until RTO took its toll (left early 2024). If not for that, I'd still be there... and I went in with full knowledge of all the horror stories. Perhaps the EFS org was just a diamond in the rough, but it was honestly one of the best jobs I've had. Even the on call wasn't so bad, with management taking an extremely hands-on and proactive approach to reducing operational burden. Extremely high technical bar which taught me a ton about building and operating large distributed systems. I do wonder if EFS is still run so well. I've since been at Oracle/OCI (absolute dog shit with the worst on call I've ever seen, and I've been in the military lol), and now at Microsoft/Azure, which so far seems like a decent workplace.
• gtirloni 1y ago
  > tens of millions of illegal immigrant warehouse workers Sorry, what?
• HardCodedBias 1y ago
  Amazon culture is entirely powered by recruiting. Even L6 managers feel this, but it becomes more clear as one goes up in levels. Recruiting is job one. If Amazon runs out of recruitable engineers (unlikely, they are one of the most prestigious firms in the world) then they will simply lower the bar. HC must be filled. The company is well structured, it will survive.