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.
This matches what I saw at Nike. Though it was a bit less extreme, it was the same dynamic. Indian-born workers got paid half what the American-born workers did for the same SWE jobs. And Indian workers couldn’t complain or push back against unrealistic expectations because getting fired meant getting deported. It’s a captive, exploitable labor force. It’s really messed up.
Joining meetings at Seattle time (like 7-8pm CET), meanwhile you're being paid less than half of what the American engineers earn at the same level.
But they know there's so few options in Europe so they set the salaries according to "local market conditions".
Guess they are more than happy being a part of captive, exploitable force.
It stopped working (mostly overtime) on promises that were impossible to keep. In return I got more sleep, social life and very recently a different job.
Amazon engineer salaries are in the 90th+ percentile in the tech industry -- let's not bother comparing them to the typical American's income. They have almost unlimited mobility in their industry: They can find a job elsewhere anytime they want.
I remember you mentioning elsewhere that in 10 years of working at Amazon you're now financially independent. This isn't the outcome you usually see in a sweat shop.
I don't disagree that they have a culture of treating employees as expendable and are a harder place to work for than some other big tech companies but at some point a little perspective on your own privilege is healthy.
All amazonians would jump to Google if they could. The reverse is quite rare.
FANG engineers are typically in the 99th percentile of tech excellence. Amazon engineers are not well paid when compared to professionals of the same league. Amazon SDE1s in Austin, Texas have a salary of around $120k/year and new hires have a total compensation package of around $160k/year. In Europe salary ranges for the same role go from €80k/year in northern countries and €40k/year in southern European countries. Check Glassdoor.
We're discussing positions and professionals which compete in a global stage.
Amazon is far from well paid for this sort of position. It's one of the key factors why Amazon SDEs tend to bail out after 2 or 3 years. They are smart enough to not bother with high stress, low-paying jobs .
"Amazon" is named after the rainforest, and like the rainforest, developers are an infinite resource that you can burn down forever and there will never be any consequences .. until somehow you run out.
Really the only solution to this is for people to withdraw their labour - not just unionization but refusing to work for them in the first place.
No FAANG offer yet, but by my calculations, Amazon has wasted 5 digit sums on assesing me.
Bezos made it personal with how he treated my partner while they worked for him, so I'll have my petty revenge one way or another...
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.”
That isn't a nobody. He was a major HR guy for Amazon for over 15 years. I knew his name in passing when I was working there, and met his daughter who was a rising star at the warehouse in Phoenix.
Wild to hear him speaking out against Amazon when he honestly built a lot of the system.
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.
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.
One could (without data) come up with some explanation about reporting rates, and while that should be investigated it would be weird to assume something like that without actual proof.
>According to their findings, Amazon workers are twice as likely to be injured on the job as e-commerce workers for Walmart, Amazon's closest retail competitor. The injury rate for Amazon's delivery drivers — who are classified as contractors rather than full company employees — also have an injury rate that is 50% higher than drivers for UPS, the groups found.
>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-injury-rate-highest-amon...
This is truly amazing. I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
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-t...
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.
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.)
The word you folks are looking for is “appalling”.
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.
> 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...)
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.
Yes, and that's because of its scale and size.
Quality and reliability are declining rapidly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
