> 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, according to reporting by the New York Times.
Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.
So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.
This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.
> employees will naturally want to leave within four years
That also explains why the breadth of AWS services keep growing, but the depth of the existing ones remains the same. Seems they would, every 4 years, lose a bunch of people with deep knowledge in the existing ones, the ones who'd be able to add new and deep features.
Ex-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will.
The back-ended equity structure (i.e., you only vest 5% of your equity grant in the first 12mo) isn’t great when you’re comparing it with a standard vesting schedule as an employee. As an employee if you’re given two identical grants for two identical companies with the same future prospects then you take the one that gives you that equity sooner. But the rhetoric is usually that equity is meant to be an employee retention tool. So from that perspective the AMZN vesting structure makes much more sense to me than what is common elsewhere.
As for the service dynamic: the whole “2 pizza team” thing is both a blessing and a curse IMO. Once you launch a service at AWS’s scale you’ve immediately got tens of thousands of users. And AWS takes stability/availability/scalability incredibly seriously. I think it’s more likely that team is now in a permanent operations mode fixing weird edge cases you find at scale and keeping the lights on.
If it was a staff retention issue like you suggest then you’d see the platform plagued with reliability issues and services being shut down. But that doesn’t happen. Even SimpleDB is still available for use (though well hidden).
That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase/usage decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over optimization, because the apparent return from optimization exceeds the apparent cost.
I mean, just look at the Amazon retail operation - everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites. Amazon's bottom line seems to indicate that breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving human populations.
> Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition?
This was Microsoft’s strategy way-back-when. You can go surprisingly far, especially in enterprise, by covering all the basics without excelling at anything in particular, and fixing your mistakes.
Avoiding fatal flaws is really really important and is extremely difficult to do, so just managing to be mediocre at everything necessary is actually quite uncommon in my experience.
I have seen this particularly in my limited experience of founders and startups: you may need to be great at one thing, but you also need to be OK at many many things, and you must avoid the infinite sea of fatal flaws.
> everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites
Slow compared to what? Amazon's website feels more responsive and more usable than 90% of online stores I've seen that carry orders of magnitude less variety of inventory. It loads fast, searches fast, provides for easy navigation between related products, and displays all needed information on one page without jank. Sure, it doesn't look modern, but it feels far more functional than the competition.
Though the filtering features are pretty much useless for almost every product. Too many products to maintain any decent classification. That makes it pretty much useless for looking for computer hardware (that and counterfeit products).
So true, but I don't think it's impossible to maintain classification, that's just Amazon. I think they just gave up trying to, probably after they opened up up other sellers.
I suspect their search, classification, filters etc are all so broken because it's all based on a Google-style textual search, with no backend database driving those site features.
Pricespy had excellent filters for the produxts they listed, though I guess it was more focused than amazon. I would say maintaining is possible, especially if they let retailers define the fields and responsible for filling them for the products they list.
Yet they could do much worse. By just not having multiple options merged into one item makes them better than the disaster that's eBay. In comparison they're not useless, because someone is doing it even worse.
Their local competitors in my country are so much better, and amazon shipping is so slow, I don't know anybody that actually uses amazon except for AWS.
Except it's full of terrible fakr products and shady overseas businesses and shady company policies which often screw the customer over and fake reviews everywhere. Tons of crap products that will break or not work instantly and shady companies who refuse to give a refund unless you provide a 5 star review. Their delivery service and prime is also a rip off, it's literally no longer worth it.
This actually seems like a structural weakness in cloud, where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few customers who are very deep in their usage. On the other hand, you can usually rely on close relationships with those customers to identify their significant needs. However, it might be harden to implement them without the bench of deeply knowledgeable engineers.
If you spend any time reading their retail forums [1], you'll see almost everyone lambasting Amazon constantly. Either disgruntled sellers who broke the rules and got terminated, or normal, hardworking mom-and-pop stores that were all but forced to sell on Amazon and consistently lose money due to amazon's ever-changing policies, poor support, and catering to large retailers. Large retailers get a direct line and quality support, while most sellers on Amazon get treated like crap.
The number of services is just crazy - I've worked with AWS solutions architects in trying to find the perfect solution to our particular problems, and even they don't seem to know what half the stuff does.
Let alone which ones are the good ones. That only comes from experience.
AWS never cancels anything... but they never complete anything either and they abandon 80% of their products in minimum viable state, where "viable" is defined by the PM's bonus packet, not by anyone who has to use the damn thing.
And the level of actual integration of various services varies a lot (I mean, you expect things like IAM to be included if it's AWS service, right? Lol nope) plus then there's stuff that will be documented with something like one paragraph in docs and highly paid support engineers will never find anything internal about it, so you end up building a complete SSO solution for AWS from scratch...
AWS Quicksight was one, late 2020-early 2021 (which is about 5+ years after acquisition, iirc).
IAM support was essentially useless, you had to create second set of accounts inside Quicksight, with various limitations, and generally it was one hell of a mess.
Totally agreed there. Also condition keys have such a high cognitive load; I can never ever remember the exact spelling of them or whether I need StringEqual or StringIsEqualIfExists or whatever other operator. The documentation has tons of prose about what service-specific keys to expect, but nearly 100% of the time when I'm trying to do something non-trivial with IAM, I end up finding the answer on somebody's blog rather than the documentation.
All of this because the policy language and featureset started off simple enough that it was reasonable to describe policies in json. I sort of wish that they would keep the existing policy stuff as-is but have an escape hatch that let us write lua (or JS or eBPF or something) as "policies", and charge us for the compute time.
I recall that there was at least one case where two similar condition keys that by name should work both, only one was appropriate.
But then I actually blew the stack in IAM processing to the point we couldn't start an AWS sagemaker notebook because IAM died while attaching a network interface to EC2...
Yes- this is real. There used to be “subclasses” to the Principal Engineer role and you could pick if you wanted to be a Depth Principal or a Breadth Principal, and that no longer exists now.
Why would companies truly "value" Engineering? The majority of execs thinks we are just interchangeable drones and the only reason the salaries are so high in SV is because they literally can't get away with less. If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.
They will fire you in an instant to save cost, never increase your salary and come up with elaborate schemes to basically screw you.
I have seen executives try it all: Replace senior engineering with students or interns (I'm not kidding), hire from third world companies and pay the peanuts, bring in cheap labor on visa restrictions and abuse them, low ball you in salary negotiations, attempt to pay with "stocks" (I'm talking about penny stock companies here..)
To management, Engineering is nothing but an annoying expense that gets in their way of profit.
All the free foods, foosball tables, "family" mantra and cool hats are designed to distract you from the fact that you are being paid in pittance. This is why there is so much discrimination against older engineers, because they are more likely to catch up to this and demand a fair wage and good working conditions. When you are young, naive and hungry, you don't think about it much because burning the midnight oil with pizza is exciting.
> If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require.
I think that misses a cultural difference, which is that Canada and EU jobs don't require as much work because our work ethic is different. I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated. I don't have to flat-share on 100k.
US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle. If you value your time more than your money then it's the US that provides an embarrassingly low return.
> less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more
This sounds like 90% of the people I knew at Google.
> US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle.
Canadian here. I have my doubts on that; I had some devs that's consistently pulled 280 hours a month and once hit I think 320 hours. His salary was $59,000 CAD a year, and I believe the junior devs working with him were earning $11/hr circa 2010 ish and were working fairly close to those hours.
The longest work day I've had is 40 or 50 hours without sleep to meet a deadline that and then had to be in bright and early the next morning. But there's been more then a few times a year that I ended up sleeping in the office because I missed the last 1:00am train out.
Not all Canadian companies are like that anymore then all American companies are like Amazon or Google. Nor do I claim to understand why this is the case, but at least from what I've seen, Canadian tech salaries do lag quite a lot compared to US salaries compared to the skill demanded.
Having immigrated from Canada to the US, and worked as a software engineer in both countries, I don't believe this is accurate.
> I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more
This describes LOTS of engineers at big tech, just change 100k to 400k and 40 hours to 20
Not true really...having worked in both countries...Americans do not work harder than the Brits yet many Americans earn way more for same qualifications and abilities...reflective of the market position many US companies have and the grip they have on the largest end-market in the world.
-20% more work for 200% more pay seems like a pretty good ROI to me. Especially when I can check out and go back to a low stress gig after a few years.
>be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated
This is pretty normal in the US too. Sure, its not "mandated" but everything besides 6 weeks of vacation is pretty common for SDE.
As a result, AWS engineers are very much promotion oriented. This leads to two results: title inflation and disgruntled employees. L6 used to be a big deal but not any more. L7 is now the new L6. The challenge with this arrangement is that whoever got promoted early on but stayed in the same level get less in return. And apparently it's human's nature to compare. When engineers see that their peers get promoted to L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach) in three years for no particularly obvious reasons, they can barely hide their cold anger.
> L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach)
I can attest to this; worked there from mid 2000s to early 2010s. Principle Engineers, L7 ICs, were looked up as Gods back then. To an extent that a couple of projects by an L5 where it went through principal-review process was almost guaranteed to get them a promotion to L6. Back when I was there I thought pulling off L5-L6 required crazy work schedule (I couldn't so didn't) and L7 was well and truly beyond mortals.
But now I hear they are doling out L7s like candy as they are getting increasingly desperate to fill their open head counts. How times change!
Man, I worked at Amazon in the early 2010s, and I remember I was an L something and proud of it, but thought I'd never make it to L whatever. It was such a huge deal and a huge part of my life, and now I can't even remember which number it was.. I wish I'd spent less time working and more time doing stuff I cared about
No kidding, my first EPR out of tech school had a bunch of 4s and when it came time to test for SSgt my combined points were so far off I just gave up and coasted until I got out. For the best though.
Sort of. The main issue is that AMZ/AWS doesn't differentiate (by title) between someone recently promoted to L6 (generally ~8-10 YOE) and someone deep in to L6 (~12-15 YOE). Other companies solve this with the Staff Engineer title, but AMZ doesn't have that. If you're an L6 who reports to an L7 Sr. Manager then you're functionally a Staff Engineer and supposed to be on the Principal track. Mileage varies across orgs/teams.
Gist: "junior" L6 SDE is more like Google L5, "senior" L6 SDE tracks mostly with Google L6 (or even L7 in rare cases).
You’re right. Amazon’s L6 do not have larger packages than Google. On the other hand, Amazon has a flatter structure.
Amazon’s L6 used to influence more than 100 engineers, advising general managers, owning an entire product line, if not more. Go figure.
You're right, but when they adjusted the L6 role guideline (circa 2016), it was specifically to clarify that the L6 role was never intended to have that span of influence. Rather, every 2-pizza team (8-13 people) should have a sr. engineer. What at Google would be a Tech Lead.
Combine that with aggressive pruning/PIPing and you have people fighting to stay long enough to get their shares vested, once you stop getting promoted there is little stability because you will either get torn down for someone else’s ladder climb or have to keep getting promoted by any means necessary.
I remember when that memo leaked. I was an EM at Amazon, and that wasn't my experience. I didn't feel any more pressure to PIP there than anywhere else. Maybe I wasn't there long enough to feel it.
No one is paying $250k salary out of college. Every one of those jobs has similar salary to amazon with the rest in stock. Maybe high frequency traders will give you that cash, but no one else.
That's just a bachelors with 6 YOE (masters + phd). I have a bachelors with 6 years of actual experience and my target comp is 250k and actual is like 350k but in the meantime I've made a million dollars pre-tax in those 6 years. Totally different.
When you make an argument for companies paying that much, you are essentially saying "FAANG companies with lots of cash reserves should overpay new hires in the goal to attract as many of them as possible in hopes that a few of them make something profitable and offset the cost"
While a viable business strategy, from a personal value perspective, if you are an average CS college grad, you are by far not going contribute even close to $150k/year worth of value - you are going to do some menial basic code modifications.
So by all means, while you can go and take advantage of the inflated salaries to maximize your own profit as much as you can, but you cannot claim that $150k starting salary is too low.
There are differences of course, but culturally there is One Amazon. Both take a meat grinding approach, even for software engineers. Source: worked at AWS.
ironically in this down turn Amazon offers are extremely appealing since your first two years are all cash. So you shore up on your cash while your future vesting have an upside if the recession is short lived.
Yes, their comp plans have changed in the last couple years because the stock isn't as exciting as it used to be. A couple years ago, it wasn't like this.
> This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well.
That still doesn’t make it acceptable. People are not Bezos’ minions slaving away so he can get even richer. Even Amazon employees deserve to be treated like humans, whether the abusive culture at amazon is a secret or not.
To me that is a real tell. New employees are a risk, but you can tell if they are going to work out after a year. If you are still discounting the RSUs at the second year, it is in hopes that some won't survive to the payout of the third.
This is not me defending Amazon's comp structure (they need to improve it in many ways), just correcting the facts:
At the time of calculating an offer, all 4 years are considered the same "Total Compensation Target" i.e. no built in reduction or raise. Amazon just pays cash equivalents for years 1 and 2 - through a signing bonus to make up for the lack of stocks, and through stocks in years 3 and 4.
The stocks in for each year are calculated assuming an average of 15% growth. This can be problematic, or can be great depending on the year you join.
Yes, technically speaking, the stock only compensation is backloaded. But that is balanced out by a 2 year "signing bonus" that is front loaded an equivalent amount of money, such that you are almost getting a hybrid stock/signing bonus package, so that it is technically the same amount of compensation each year.
Bezos was invited to dinner with the Obamas at the White House, along with Jon Stewart. He was flapping his mouth off about his vision for us all being happy little worker drones.
Stewart told him that people want fulfilling, rewarding work they can be proud of, and that being errand boys for billionaires isn't fulfilling. Stewart capped it by saying that turning people into service drones for billionaires is how you end up with a revolution (ballsy words to say at a White House dinner to the richest guy on the planet.) And after a bit of silence, Obama said "I agree with Jon."
You'd think Bezos would take the words of the president of the united states a little more to heart, but it seems not.
And then years later, what happens? Staten Island union leaders thank Bezos for being too busy flying on his dick-rocket to stop them from unionizing his warehouse.
Bezos basically considers every other human to be a happy little servant, just dying to work for the 0.001%. He's exactly like the stereotypical 1800's British lord who looks down upon his servants and says "oh they enjoy a good hard day's work for someone else."
They could have twisted the knife quite a bit more: there were a couple 3-second interactions where people are buying things [0][1], if they had been denominated in "hours of service" rather than USD, with the Company knowing what their hours balance was, and having the balance tick down and go negative... that would have been dark.
Yes, it was understated. Given SP's general trend of exaggerating things to extremes I thought that made it all the more emotionally impactful. It was like: if we exaggerated this reality, it would not be funny, it would be unwatchable.
> So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
My wife is a Physiotherapist; when we lived closer to a fulfillment center it was deeply concerning just how many of her patients were seeing her for WCB (Worker's Compensation Board) claims resulting from injuries at the Amazon warehouse.
You'd think they'd scrap the commercials and put the budget into improving working conditions if they really cared. I doubt the cost of the ads, plus the cost of the bad publicity, plus the cost of employee churn is really worth it. Why not just do the right thing? Even if it made them sightly less profitable, so what?
Having warehouse workers is not Amazon's long term plan. They will replace as many workers with robots as quickly as they can. Their strategy revolves around burning out the entire workforce and then perfecting their robots before they need to pay truly absurd packages. Since the workers are a short term solution treating them poorly and using ads to reel more suckers in is a viable strategy. The question is will they run out of people before they can fully automate?
This sounds so close to Uber's strategy from the mid-20teens of having huge incentives / gamification for drivers (up to and including offering to finance car loans to get more drivers) but it'll all be okay because in Just A Few More Years they'll have perfected the robotaxi and they can dump all the humans.
"The leaked internal findings also serve as a cautionary tale for other employers who seek to emulate the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."
"Amazon's attrition rates were 123 percent in 2019 before jumping to 159 percent in 2020, according to internal data in the report Recode obtained, while turnover rates across the US transportation and warehouse sectors were much lower: 46 percent and 59 percent respectively in 2019 and 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates."
1) Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable
2) He feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled
The two statements seem relatively disconnected (which makes the "and" a little confusing). Anyway, while I understand a) (not saying I agree) and am a little confused by b), how both or either would logically lead to your conclusion is not obvious to me. Can you elaborate?
"Complacent and disgruntled" is the problem Bezos was trying to solve. "Replaceable" is the circumstance that he leveraged to produce his solution: hire a continual stream of fresh non-complacent non-disgruntled people and fire them before they have a change to become complacent and disgruntled.
Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive rather than complacent and disgruntled, i.e. the kind of work environment that their current PR campaign portrays, apparently never entered into his thinking. Which makes it hard for me to sympathize that Amazon is now running out of fresh non-complacent non-disgruntled people to feed their process and has to resort to PR campaigns in order to attract fresh victims.
> Creating a work environment where long-term workers become happy and productive
Is there a large (or even mid-sized) tech company that managed to achieve it? I've never heard of one and I don't think it's possible. At scale these companies operate, senior level jobs are about navigating the organization and its bureucracy and there aren't many people who find that kind of work fun. Especially people who have an engineering mindset.
The tech jobs in bigger companies are mostly meh at best an their biggest saving grace is the pay. Bezos realizes that and tries to work with this reality. Most big cos work because they've found way to extract enough value of out their people who'd rather not be there (but the pay and stability is too good), and tech is no exception.
The reason it doesn't happen in the U.S. is that workers have been systematically stripped of all of their power, so corporate management now answers exclusively to shareholders. Trying to make life better for your workers puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
But it does not have to be that way. All we have to do to change it is to decide that it needs to change.
German economy is famous for being based on small and mid-sized companies (which are often the best in the world at the ultra-specialized thing that they do). My post was on impossiblity of high job satisfaction levels in big organizations, I don't think it's as bad for the mid-sized and small shops.
Most of those companies are well over 100 years old. I can’t be certain that Adidas in Germany is a terrible place to work but I can say that China HQ is bad enough to get workaholics to bail on it, worse than Amazon China.
Germany’s underperformance in founding new companies in the last 50 years is puzzling but I doubt shorter work hours really explain it. They’re actually working every single one of those hours.
That's not what it's "really saying". That's you adding analysis.
I think hourly workers are perfectly capable of figuring out if a job is a good or bad deal for them.
They have bills and payments that must be made or they will suffer real consequences. They aren't making employment decisions based on free soda, foosball tables, and the political affiliation of the CEO.
I don't know, Amazon's absurdly high churn rate is pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in one of them. It's not about people being dumb and making bad decisions, it's just really hard to evaluate a work environment from the outside.
Even for tech jobs, where it's common to interview with many future coworkers, assessing the work environment is tough. Warehouse type jobs are probably even harder to evaluate.
>pretty strong evidence that the jobs look a lot worse once you're in one of them
Pretty strong evidence that the job is worse than people would expect would be an anonymous survey of workers by a third party.
Churn can result from any number of factors. It simply isn't enough to support your conclusion, and a lack of imagination in seeing alternative explanations isn't proof. Warehouse jobs have high churn. Yes, Amazon's churn is higher.
A pandemic is just ending. Amazon hired a lot of temporary staff. Temporary staff are temporary.
As things open people have more employment options. People will always go to the best option available. That doesn't mean the job they left is inhumane. It means they found something better.
Finally, Amazon has a signing bonus. Some workers may be there just for the bonus. Once they get it they may want something that pays less but is easier.
The fact that people are leaving with their foot is a strong evidence in itself that the job is not good. Does Ford lose all their workers right now? No. But they are unionized and make more money. Of course different industry but since Amazon chose to be in the industry of razor-thin margin, they have to find a solution to their own problem. If their business model relies on super cheap labor, then they must adapt.
> The fact that people are leaving with their foot is a strong evidence in itself that the job is not good.
Do we know which positions are leaving? Is it the back breaking jobs, or the higher level stuff? I don't imagine any the back breaking portion would ever be "good". It's seems like fast food, something that should be transitory, where you move on to better things (even if that's fast food management). Physical labor is a young persons job, because bodies break. It's not something you could stay with if you wanted to.
If it's the skilled positions, like mechanics, engineers, forklift operators, operations, etc, that are leaving, then I think that would be better evidence. If it's the guys moving boxes, maybe not.
Compare with an "up or out" system [1], which many companies have, as does the US Army.
When I was at Google, it was generally understood that you were expected to be promoted to senior engineer eventually, but I never knew how much it was enforced.
My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm. Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would stick around long enough to be considered for partnership.
The work hours were long (50 hour weeks normal, more was not unusual) but the pay was good and it was good experience to cite when applying for other jobs.
Amazon warehouse work is not a career. It's a job, that has minimal if any prerequisite skills other than being strong enough to move boxes around. It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.
Amazon has very specifically designed its warehouses so that employees not only don't need to think, they effectively can't. Everything is decided by the computer, the employees just look at their handset and do what it says. This strategy is paramount due to their > 100% yearly turnover. They do not have any experienced workers to train others, so the job needs to be pretty self explanatory. By turning employees into robots you can plug and play everyone in the warehouse.
Big consulting firms are exactly the place you should avoid, especially if you're a developer with plenty of better options.
If you like working in the office / overworking just get into a fang and get more money.
If you want a quiet environment go for smaller companies and get the same money as your big consultancy.
Nobody cares where you worked unless it's a fang, anyway
> Abuse is OK because some people eventually figure out how to get away from it?
I take issue with calling it abuse, but yes -- it's a learning experience and a life lesson. I did it, I was disillusioned with school, quit and worked in manual labor, delivery, and restaurant jobs when I was young. Decided I didn't want to do that for life, so I went back to school and learned to program computers. Then I worked as a consultant, decided that was too many hours and too much time away from home, so I found another job that was better on those metrics. Decided I didn't like living in a huge metro area, so found another job in a small town.
Life isn't handed to you, and if it is, you don't appreciate what you have.
We do it in the medical and legal field under the guise of “experience” and “career development”. Is it different because it’s blue collar hourly work and not used as a foundation for a lucrative career.
I think it should stop in all places but we seem to disregard shitty work arrangements for the few prestigious and financially lucrative careers and cry wolf for those hourly souls.
Yeah, my first thought when I read the headline was “Oh shit, have Amazon figured out they can’t treat people like shit and not run out of people willing to work for them?”
Hopefully it will lead to better treatment of those they can employ.
Beyond the "up or out" mentality, the disgust you got from considering people as replaceable cogs in a machine and how it's done overall, and maybe not applicable to warehouse forces ; I think having some turnover in your organization is a good thing. You don't get the same diversity of idea and experience when people around you have all been there for 15 years than you get when they're coming and going. In my experience people who have been around for a long time tend to drink the coolade much more, and are more complacent with stuff that shouldn't be.
Yes, of course some turnover is necessary. You do sometimes have to get rid of the deadwood. But deciding that everyone is going to be treated as deadwood sooner or later (and apparently more likely sooner than later) as a matter of policy seems ill-advised to me.
Yes, Amazon actually pays employees $5000 if they quit and agree to never return. Available to any employee who has worked there for long enough (I believe a year?)
The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard. There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become complacent or disgruntled.
Early 20th centruy industrialists also had to deal with the looming threat of anti-trust regulations. These days it's almost a joke. There is no trust-busting anymore. The monopolies control foreign and domestic policy through massive lobbying efforts.
Your argument has no relevance to the comment you are responding to as the point being made was it is human nature for (some) people to get complacent regardless of the circumstances.
contextualizing a point is just as legitimate as responding to it directly and this particular comment is relevant
perhaps some people will always grow complacent but you could just as easily make an essentialist argument about the corporation: maybe some employers will always abuse their employees, certainly some deliberately make it difficult to distinguish worker complacency from legitimate complaint, which bears directly on the original claim about human nature
This is a retrospective. Priorities have changed, according to TFA
> But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won’t work much longer, especially if leaders truly want to transform it into “Earth’s best employer,” as Bezos proclaimed in 2021.
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.
People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location.
After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need.
It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.
This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist.
1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr
2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr
Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.
I upvoted this for contributing a valuable and insightful clarification about how those two statements relate, but the part where you attribute "tactics" and "bias" to the journalist has no direct evidence and reads like a political meme.
You may be convinced of your interpretation, but it's also likely that the journalist isn't rigorous enough to notice the distinction themselves, didn't have access to perfectly comparable figures, or had a deadline to meet and cut corners because they needed to pick up their kid from school.
Never attribute to malice that which blah blah blah...
Totally fair on the implying bias strictly on the journalist (which may or may not be there).
Regardless of the awareness/intent of the given journalist, I do hope that we can find leaders (whether people/orgs/software) that can help improve our information environment to improve shared sensemaking.
In an ideal world, non-rigorous journalists, arbitrary deadlines, and corner cutting because of school pickups shouldn't impact the clarity of information being shared. That's the world of today, and it leads to a very muddied/confused information environment, but I don't believe it's the only possibility for us.
> Totally fair on the implying bias strictly on the journalist (which may or may not be there).
But it's not.
You were correct to call out their bias and tactics, as journalists have written hit pieces on various companies in the past and have earned scrutiny over how they present data.
I don't feel like you should need to backpedal on your astute observation just because someone points out a bs excuse scenario like they might have kids to pick up from school.
It is literally a journalist's job to gather and present accurate data, hopefully without bias. I don't think it is too much to ask of them, no matter the circumstances.
You went from a providing an astute observation in the first comment to providing vague platitutes about leaders (waves hands) in the next one. Way to go.
The deadlines of those poor journalists—and their kids!—is hardly the main problem with the Media. But you probably already know that.
The content of my comments is highly context-dependent. The poster who replied that it may not be the journalist's bias which led to the formulation, was right. It may or may not be due to bias. I'm willing to cede that I do not know this journalist personally, to be able to confidently say it was due to bias. I would personally bet that there's some degree of anti-Amazon/anti-big tech bias somewhere in the chain that led to the production of this article, but it's something that's hard to know for sure. I can only observe broad trends that usually show these types of formulations always leaning in one direction. This broad 'bias' is a major reason the media has lost so much trust.
Formulation: MAX(Group A) > MIN(Group B) . I often notice that some types of groups/entities always find themselves having the MIN function applied to their case, and others always have the MAX function applied to theirs.
You are also right that deadlines/school pickups aren't the main problem with media. I don't believe that to be true, I was just using that as an example because the poster I was replying to did. When we think about what a better version of the media could look like, those shouldn't be excuses.
You're right in pointing this out. If it's not obvious that there is bias involved in the article, then criticism of it should include the other option of the journalist simply being incompetenct.
I think you're correct that the statement isnt necessarily indicative of the writer having a specific bias. However misleading yet provocative comparisons like that are actively incentivized by the structure of journalism at the moment. Writing like that takes less effort and research yet it gets more views and shares. So perhaps its not malice or agenda pushing, but the writer also understands that being misleading is directly profitable. Why would they bother doing the work to make a more accurate or nuanced comparison if will hinder their own interests.
That little “rule” sounds so smart, huh? That people are just dumb and there is no pattern to anything. It’s all random and people are just fumbling about, doing “stupid” or “random” shit. Their mind is distracted because they need to pick up their child froms school.
But it’s not even about malice or intent. It’s about patterns and analysis of how the media operates. You observe if things are slanted in a certain way. If they give one side the benefit of the doubt while the other not so much.
It’s not about finding evidence of the inner workings/mind of some run of the mill journalist. It’s about seeing what kind of output certain outlets put out. On aggregate.
This has been done before. It can be done.
And how do you disregard such good work? By half-quoting—it’s so cliche that you won’t lower yourself to finish the pseudo-quote—some smarter-than-thou, above the fray nonsense which fundamentally confuses individual intent (i.e. “conspiracy”) with aggregate analysis, all because you got hung up on the particular-sounding “bias of the journalist”, which could originally have been meant to be illustrative[1] and could have been taken as such in a charitable reading, especially since it’s not like any of us even remember the byline of this article.
[1] Although note that the original poster totally folded in a sibling comment, so whatever…
You may be right that the journalist didn't notice the distinction. But at this point 10-15 years into the age of data, I'd think that's one of the most basic requirements for their job.
Maybe the blame should fall more on Vox and their work environment rather than the journalist, but we do have to draw a line somewhere on the basic standards for journalism. We don't excuse a bridge falling down or a web service failing because the engineers had to pick up their kids from school..
I believe in the opposite; systematic incompetence is no different from malice, and this is usually well understood by the people who have influence over the system.
The journalist did their job by offering these statements with all the qualifiers that you used to make your comparison.
Journalists have to work with the information they get; they can’t force two employers to give them perfectly comparable figures. Their job is to accurately report the info they do get.
There are plenty of websites where employees share their wages/salaries, which enable direct comparisons between companies. A simple google search reveals such data. Also, for a lot of these jobs, the companies post the pay ranges on the actual job description.
These wages aren't some super secret data point. Referencing a 2021 Reuters article as the source for Amazon wage data is an interesting choice, when you can find better comparable data by spending 5 minutes on Google.
When you're working as a professional journalist, a "simple google search" isn't enough: how can you be sure that the information you are seeing on those kinds of wage comparison websites is accurate, and comes from people who genuinely worked at those companies?
Yours is a broad epistemic question. How can you be sure of anything? How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?
We're dealing with uncertainty in all regards. My position is that it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty.
If the article had said "We didn't have good wage data to directly compare Walmart & Amazon warehouse compensation against each other", I would have loved it, because it'd show transparency/honesty/authenticity. Or if they did an analysis using data from job postings or wage sites and were very transparent on their methodology and admitted what you stated "These figures were taken from job postings on X.com, which can often have ranges. Consider there to be some degree of imprecision."
I totally get that it's not a norm in the media today to do that, and there are a lot of structural incentives that create that situation. I can empathize with each actor/individual within the broader system, and that they're doing their best within the world they live in.
"How can you be sure what the Amazon exec stated in a Reuters article last year is accurate?"
You can't. That's why the article says "An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour" - rather than stating as fact that "in 2021 the company bumped the average starting wage...".
My comment was rhetorical in response to your prior comment on saying you can't use certain data points because of uncertainty. It was about that principle. The citation of the source of data here is okay, I'm not suggesting they were wrong to indicate where the quote/data point came from.
The greater point is about source/data selection. MAX(Walmart) > MIN(Amazon) is a weird comparison to make. And choosing to quote two completely different sources for both the MAX(Walmart) data point [resolves to $25] and the MIN(Amazon) data point [resolves to $18] is strange, and I feel should have been explained if they're going to use quotes to communicate what might be happening in objective reality.
How was Sheheryar Kaoosji, of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, able to communicate what the max wage for a Walmart worker was, but unable to provide any comparable data point for Amazon (or it was provided, and an editor/journalist excluded it)?
> it's best to be transparent with our uncertainty
Why is it best? I'm not interested in reading a bunch of gibberish disclaimer that I already know, and that all readers should know when consuming media. People can be wrong, facts are not black and white, and truth is a spectrum. It's not the job of a journalist on a deadline to spoon feed you critical thinking.
The point still stands: other employers are offering competitive wages for similar roles and are forcing Amazon to react. Otherwise Amazon wouldn’t be struggling to hire warehouse workers.
Totally, but why do a MAX(Walmart) > MIN(Amazon) comparison to bolster that point at all? Why not exclude the comparison, since it doesn't really communicate what the actual wage options are for prospective new warehouse workers or experienced workers.
I read it the same way and completely agree with you. Grammar and the context in which statements are presented can be biased too.
I don't know whether they teach that in journalism school. My guess is that they do, and that this type of bias only leaks out now due to the overwhelming amount of citizen journalism that social media allows.
I think the other replies to you who won't consider this possibility are influenced by trying to take down Amazon, which in my opinion they will do to themselves if it is warranted. No media push is necessary.
We still haven't found our way back to trusted sources. Some day, we will.
Well yeah, but that's a very very direct explanation of why people might LEAVE Amazon to go work at Wal Mart, since they fit into that category of some workers with past experience.
Turnover is the subject of the story, those two statements seem directly relevant.
> Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.
Shared understanding is not and never has been the goal of journalism, possibly excluding the business press. Stories are more interesting with heroes and villains so journalists create them if necessary.
Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries:
1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?
2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses.
This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).
It also has the consequence that from the perspective of the employee getting optimized, what Amazon is doing is exploiting them more, faster, better, and for less effort on Amazon's side.
Let's not forget that each of us the people are more similar to the employee than we're to Amazon. Though I suppose a lot of people who never have had to be an employee anywhere (e.g. due to being born into enough wealth) wouldn't see this as clearly as a more typical person; compound this into the fact that most law makers (specially senators) are from very wealthy backgrounds already...
Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures?
look, I don't want to work for Amazon, but, I don't think it is exploitation to expect productivity concomitant with wage. I think Amazon has offered poor working conditions.
All that said, the market will solve this. I've been told recently by a company providing outsourced help desk services that they were struggling to compete for talent because target was paying more than they were. I told them that they were not paying enough. they responded that their clients wouldn't agree to price increases in the service...The answer is that either you will get underqualified people, declining service quality, or you will pay more.
If a universal basic income existed, I would agree with you. Since it doesn't, this employment model is exploitative. There is a limited amount of paid work to go around. Being able to avoid being one of the people who draws the short stick is inconsequential to the problem.
People like to say, "if you do X like me, youll get ahead or be your own boss or ___". It may be true for some people, but it comes almost directly at the cost of putting someone else in the bad place you were trying to get out of. So with respect to trying to improve the overall system, shuffling people around isnt going to help.
Secondly, that very strongly suggests survivor bias. You almost never hear about all the people who did X and didn't make it. And the one time you do, those were unlucky, or didn't really do X (true scottsman fallacy).
I generally agree with this and if the leaked memo is true, then the market is basically solving this now.
In essence, let's say the pool of applicants for warehouse jobs is 1,000,000 million people. Amazon needs 250k of them to operate their biz and the average retention is 1 year. In 4 years, the people who left previously are now looking for jobs and the only option is Amazon. If a warehouse job conditions are that poor, then they will collectively argue for higher pay.
Said another way - Amazon's presumably poor work conditions eventually catches up with them and the market will respond.
If all of this is true, then the underlying issue is the more controversial one (and moral one), which is that the mental/physical damage to workers mind/bodies can't be repossessed.
i mean, if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around, that's by definition exploitation. it's silly to avoid the word, it's purely material.
how you feel about it is up to you, but the more it sucks for the worker the less they'll like it.
it's important that for most people, "voluntary" in this situation involves the threat of fairly immediate homelessness, hunger, and family separation.
maybe the market will solve this, but i think the market might have a larger appetite for hellish consequences than many of us would like, and we all have to live with them.
It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before.
It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.
"Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is homelessness and hunger is hilariously wrong.
sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands this. of course there is an element of choice.
but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs.
>It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws.
these are both literally happening.
if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.
as for labor laws, that's still under litigation, but the NLRB agrees.
> but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs.
A shockingly large chunk of people making six figures live paycheck-to-paycheck. The perceived threat of homelessness is useless compared to actual homelessness statistics, which tell a different story.
> if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.
It's not exploitation, and it's not OK to call it exploitation. All trades must create value for both parties, or else they wouldn't happen. It's the reason why civilization is able to exist at all.
Yes, Amazon gets more out of their workers than they pay them. Workers get paid more for their labor than they would get out of it themselves.
> if Amazon is getting more out of the worker than it costs to keep them around
That's a pretty simplistic argument. For one thing, it assumes a zero-sum game. But in economic theory both sides need to gain something in order for a transaction to occur. Walmart is not exploiting its customers just because it gets more from the customer than it cost (i.e. profit). Both sides are benefiting: the customer gets thousands of products in one location at pretty much the lowest possible price. Likewise, Target is not exploiting its customers just because it has higher prices than Walmart; customers get thousands of products in one location with somewhat higher quality than Walmart and a good deal better style. Target has a fairly loyal following, in fact, indicating that customers derive value from Target, even though Target is turning a profit; they could always go to Walmart if they were unhappy.
My employer is (hopefully) getting more value from me than they are paying for. I do not see it as exploitative at all: I could be in business for myself, but I already tried it and I discovered I did not want to bother with a lot of the business stuff, and people were not interested in paying for my product. So I switched the (internally perceived) product I am selling: now I am selling my software engineering services. In return I get some money. I'm a lot happier now than when I felt like I was an employee.
The problem is not that Amazon is getting more perceived value from the worker than the perceived value that they are paying the worker. The problem is that Amazon is abusive; people work for them either because they pay enough to make up for the abuse (at least the initial perception), or the worker does not feel like they have other options. The latter is not a problem of companies making a "profit" on workers, though; that is required for any employment to take place. It is a problem, but it is a different problem.
I think you're just factually wrong about this particular part. If I understand you correctly, you're claiming that the definition of "exploit" is "derive net profit from", but I've never seen any definition like that. Generally, I think there are two definitions:
1) use / utilize
2) use unfairly
The first is typical when describing resource exploitation. The second is typical when describing relationships between humans. In neither case does net profit come into it.
That's both my personal understanding of the word (but who cares what I think), and also what I see in three different online dictionaries that I just checked. So I ask you: where are you getting your definition from?
I'm not a native speaker, but to me exploitation has a negative moral connotation. I think it's possible for companies to make use of their employees to make a profit without exploiting them.
Or you could band together and collectively withhold your labour. These are solved problems, its how the impoverished and exploited ended the gilded age.
Individualization is heavily pushed because capitalism requires fungible labour. But if you band together then capitalism breaks down, because pure ideology runs into the brick wall of reality.
The employer is able continuously improve and iterate on their productivity systems, but the employee, broadly speaking, only has one opportunity to negotiate their compensation at the outset of the engagement.
This is problematic for employers like Amazon that ruthlessly optimize their workforce, and, is why structures like unions emerge to allow employees to push back.
> Is paid labor, (historically) above market rate, entered into voluntarily, necessarily exploitative because it includes productivity measures?
No. It's exploitative because of the power imbalance between employers and employees - and market competition means that companies that don't exploit as much as they can lose to those that do.
Thus, the two obvious solutions are to get rid of the market, or to get rid of the power imbalance. The first one has a lot of undesirable side effects, though, so why don't we try the second?
I intentionally did not provide a moral argument, primarily because I did not think I could do it justice. I've never worked in an Amazon warehouse, and while I have strong opinions, those are better unvoiced to leave air space for people who have worked there, and therefore have better-informed opinions.
I can make academic statements like this one: From the perspective of capitalist ideology, income in an efficient, frictionless market would be proportional to contribution. If Amazon can drive a worker to move twice as many boxes, they ought to be paid double. However, I've never seen a perfectly frictionless, efficient market.
I don't believe there is a "typical" employee whose perspective I could take either -- a lot of this is incredibly context-dependent. Most of us see the world around us, and tend to underestimate the difference to which situations differ, both in other regions, and on the individual. More money=better is obvious, but whether:
- Minimum wage labor sitting in a Domino's idle most of the time; or
- Double minimum wage labor doing back-breaking hard labor
depends on financial needs, age, health, and a whole slew of other things.
Seems to be what Larry and Sergey called penny wise and pound foolish. A few points in favor of the "lazy cafe."
1. Free food costs the company less to provide in bulk than it does for individual employees to acquire on the open market. The benefit to the employee is higher than the cost to the employer. The employee values this perk in their comp package against what it would cost him to acquire it if it weren't provided.
2. The marginal value of an employee's time is nonlinear and asymmetric. My weekly hours 0-40 are less valuable to me than hours 120-160, and the inverse is true for the company - my weekly hours 0-40 are more valuable to them than hours 120-160. The lazy cafe is again getting more value for its money than the sweat shop.
3. Hiring two people to work 40 hours/week instead of 1 person to work 80 reduces the labor supply for your competitors.
4. Hiring people so you can extract as much value as possible for them gets your a bad reputation and a company full for rubes.
> If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?
You can really close to really identifying the issue but there’s more to build off of this point. Amazon does offer a (somewhat) comparable wage to “a lazy cafe job at the beach” but the catch is that Amazon has a warehouse or two in every major metro area, and each of those requires thousands of full-time employees while there are only handful of beach-side jobs to be had.
Previously, that meant that Amazon didn’t have to raise wages (much) beyond that (poor) benchmark because people need jobs and after all the easy, low-paying ones are taken then the hard, low-paying ones get filled. But with everyone hiring nonstop, everyone paying comparable-enough salaries, that’s not going to cut it, especially when you purposely don’t make employee retention a goal and treat all two-armed human beings as being fungible.
The only bad news is that the layoffs are coming and this historically-low unemployment we’re seeing is coming to an end, meaning Amazon may still get get their way.
I don't think that's fair. I just went to a random pizza joint. There were two teenagers hanging around behind shooting the breeze. They were polite, fast, and professional when a customer would draft in, but for the most part, it looked like a pretty chill job. I can almost guarantee they were making minimum wage. There are plenty of jobs like that everywhere. There aren't many jobs like that much above minimum wage, or anywhere close to Amazon's wage.
If I were a teenager, I'd take that job over Amazon's nightmarish warehouses.
That calculus changes with rent and family. 30k per year is probably the minimum needed to raise a family for a homeowner in a lower cost-of-living part of the country, which translates to around $15/hour. Someone with rent / mortgage needs a bit more.
> Homeowner seems optimistic - how or when are they saving for the downpayment?
In most cases, the scenario described involves families who have been in the US for several generations, who are poorly-educated, but own homes and land. One parent takes care of kids. One works.
It's not uncommon.
Wealth and income aren't as strongly correlated as people assume. A lot of immigrants are low-wealth, high-income, while a lot of American families have generational wealth, but little income. There are plenty of families with >$1M homes with $30k incomes where I live. And there are plenty of families with >$100k incomes, who can't afford to buy homes here too.
When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.
There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k).
If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.
> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.
It's not needed right _now_, perhaps, but wait a few months or a few years. Next time the job market shifts back to the employers, the incentives will align the other way.
Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.
It goes deeper than that. There was a documentary that leaked a new Walmart employee going through their initial first day orientation. If you were a new hire and were married and/or had children, you got extra "orientation" on all the government benefits you now qualified for (welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc) since you were now considered below the USA poverty line.
I am fine with letting the market regulate itself, but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half. That is not "self regulation".
If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA, which the HR team will discuss during almost any company's new-hire orientation...
There are lots of government benefits that are restricted to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so that they can take advantage of it.
>If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA
Assuming you mean a flexible spending account (for healthcare out of pocket), you're certainly not capped at $130K/year in the US. Your broader point is of course true.
It makes sense, kinda. When your public and private social programs are numerous and disconnected, getting a job can mean losing a lot of benefits while qualifying for others.
e.g. my employer had a session about their benefits package: If I was on welfare, this would be a change in how everything works. It would have been nice if they had a session on our national pension scheme since I was now obligated to start paying into that.
>>but it is not ok that a company can pay employees low because the government will pick up the other half>>
I don't think this is a situation that applies to the idea of self-regulation. In this case, a distortion of the market is first created by the government subsidy. So the natural behavior of a business would be to leverage it. Just as the natural behavior of the IRS is to go after things like your company's paying for your cell phone and calling it taxable income.
I would suggest that the idea of self-regulation is best applied where there are no market distortions from the government that have already warped the context.
That's not how economics works. Walmart is paying their employees low despite welfare, not because of it. Without welfare, people would be more desperate for work and would be willing to work for lower wages.
I think the point is Walmart is able to pay at a low enough rate that it must be effectively subsidized by the government. Walmart then plays into it as a further benefit “they” provide.
The government is setting the price floor for wages. If that price floor falls below the point at which the government will offer benefits to people, then it isn't Walmart that is being subsidized.
I would prefer that nobody who works 40 hours a week (tops! I'd be happy if the number was less) earns less than the US poverty level for a family with 1 or 2 children (undecided over which). As a matter of law.
I’m sure my 16 year old son would have loved that.
And everyone arguing that a company doesn’t deserve to exist if it can’t profitably pay more, is posting on a site funding money losing companies that couldn’t exist if they actually had to make a profit.
If you want to advocate the position that there's some age where the correlation between work and income can or should be looser, be my guest.
For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week doing something that requires no skill should still entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life. Further, that it should require only one person in a family to do that work in order for the family do live a basic life. If the person wishes to earn more then they will need to acquire more skills one way or another.
I do not believe there can be any moral justification for somebody receiving 40 hours of someone's effort (even an unskilled effort) and not giving that person enough for a basic life. I don't care what the age of the person doing the work is, and yep, if the company cannot do that, it doesn't deserve to exist - it doesn't do anything valuable enough to pay its employees adequately, so it can disappear and nobody except the owners will care.
Portland Oregon is #25 on the list of the 50 largest metro areas in the US. A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?
For the purposes of my answers, I am taking your cost-of-living values as they are. I am not convinced they are correct, but willing to assume that they are.
> Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?
Yes.
> A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?
Yes.
What's your alternative? "Oh sorry, your job is requires so little skill that even though you could just spend 40 hours a week doing it, you will need to find at least another 20 hours a week doing something else to be able to afford a basic life"
So you want to raise the minimum wage of everyone in San Francisco to $131K a year? How is that going go work out for inflation?
You want to raise the minimum wage of everyone in Portland to $91K year?
Let’s say the average grocery store has 6 people working every hour for 16 hours a day and 355 days a year. Their labor cost would be $1.465 million. Grocery stores already operate on thin margins (https://www.biz2credit.com/blog/2020/05/22/grocery-store-pro...) are you prepared to pay enough for the labor cost of the entire food chain to quadruple? From the people in the field, delivery truck drivers, etc?
Let's just say that I don't subscribe to the conservative traditional view of economics and politics that you're using to point out how absurd this sounds.
Yes, I believe we should be paying much, much more for most of the things in our lives. Right now, those of us who make about 80% of median income and above are essentially riding on the backs who make less. I think this is immoral, although I recognize that changing it is a millenia long project that faces staunch opposition.
I want to see GDP distributed more evenly. In reality, the likely end game is not that everyone in Portland makes $91k a year or more, but that there is massively more redistribution within the economy, high end incomes fall, overall highest:lowest income ratios drop, housing prices drop (because more housing is built, and housing ceases to be an investment), and lots more good stuff that
I wonder, how do you personally justify millions of people working for less than a living wage? Do you feel that there just has be a bunch of people who lose out in life, and that's just the way it is? What makes it all seem OK to you?
I am not justifying anything. I am putting numbers behind your belief that “everyone who works for 40 hours a week should be able to support a family of four”. It’s easy to talk about ideals until the cold reality of numbers, inflation, etc are brought up.
How do you propose we restructure our economy so that everyone get a wage that supports a family of four?
How many people do you think will “lose out” if inflation sky rockets where food isn’t affordable? You can look at places like Venezuela to see what happens.
Do you personally give away enough of your income to bring your compensation down to the median household wage of $65K a year?
I assure you that I’m not a conservative by any means. I’m card carrying member of the F*## the police (and have been since the 90s), BLM, keep religion out of policy, pro-choice brigade.
But I’m also a student of economics and an MBA drop out with one course remaining (CS undergrad)
> How do you propose we restructure our economy so that everyone get a wage that supports a family of four?
At its crudest, the US GDP is $23T. Divided among 350M people that's about $66k, for every living American. The working age population is about 215M, so that would be about $107k per working age American (not per household, per working age individual).
There's no need for money creation, we just need to spread the wealth around more evenly.
And note, I'm not actually advocating precisely equal income for everyone, or even every working age person. I suspect that some range of incomes is probably a good thing for society overall, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't need to be anything like it is today. The point is that redistribution is how we get there, not injecting money into the economy.
You might care to listen to someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than me. Thomas Piketty was on the Ezra Klein Show a couple of weeks ago, and talked about several "radical" schemes to alter the levels of inequality in western societies.
(there's a transcript there too, so you can read rather than listen if that's your preference).
I give away 5% of my income. That's not enough to bring it down to median levels. My work is relatively charitable in some sense though: I develop libre audio software, and convince people to pay me for it anyway.
So you’re not even willing to give up more than 5% of your income and redistribute if yet you think everyone else should and you justify it by the fact that you work on open source audio software? I’m sure people struggling really appreciate that
So let’s say we redistribute the entire economy to each working age person (even though you are personally not willing to), how do we fund health care, infrastructure, education, people who need more than that from the government, etc? Who is going to invest in business? Do you suggest we tax everyone so that they have equal income? Should the fry cook make as much as the brain surgeon? Who is going to pay for the education needed for the more skilled jobs and what motivation does the doctor have to put in 8 additional years of school if they could make just as much money as the fry cook?
My children are grown, should my wife and I get the same income that someone with two special needs children get?
My parents are retired and doing pretty well for themselves with two pensions and two social security checks. Should we also tax them enough to make things more equal and tell them that they don’t deserve to keep their income after working 30 years?
That $66K might be enough for someone living in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. But it won’t be enough for someone living in Seattle. Do we also redistribute people across the United States to make the cost of living equal?
What’s to stop me from just moving overseas where I can take my talents and make more money and then you have a brain drain?
It could mean that, but in all likelihood it means that some YC funded companies make huge amounts of money for YC that sufficiently balances the losses that they keep doing it.
That’s not how VCs make money. They make money based on “exits” either via acquisition or IPO. Over the last few years, most companies had exits without ever showing profitability.
Joe Bob’s Burgers don’t have the luxury of losing money hoping they can survive long enough to find the “greater fool” either via acquisition or IPO.
> That’s not how VCs make money. They make money based on “exits” either via acquisition or IPO.
It doesn't matter. The only question for YC is whether they make money or not. They make money on some of their investments, and lose it on others. It's fairly clear that on average, that is, summed across all winners and losers, they make money overall.
I’m not questioning YCs business model. I’m calling out the hypocrisy of people who say that “companies who can’t afford to pay their employees a livable wage and stay in business don’t deserve to exist” while many people here work for companies who are only able to pay their wages even though they work at non profitable companies because they are being propped up by VC funding.
Well, in this you're seeing the result of living in a society that is responsive to the needs and desires of people with money and power. In this case, YC is an example of such people, and they've made the decision that what Overinflated Sense of Self's Startup is up to is potentially valuable enough that they'll fund it. OSSS has been judged "worthwhile" by enough money that for now at least, it can keep going.
On the other hand, Andy's Average Appetizers is of no particular interest to VC money, or any other money really, and so yep, they're going to go under because they don't anything that attracts enough money to make them viable (possibly at a higher living wage standard, possibly at current minimum wage standards).
>>The purpose of minimum wage is a floor>>
There's the purpose and then there's the outcome. I have always found it useful to also keep in mind the perspective on minimum wage that recognizes that from a practical perspective, it makes it illegal for workers that create a certain level of economic value to work. Of course that's not the perspective that a proponent of minimum wage would use to pitch it because that certainly is not the purpose. But it's hard to argue that this other perspective is not to some extent, the outcome in terms of economic mechanics.
Minimum wage is important when you have more people wanting to work, than jobs. Right now 1 in 300 people just died, a bunch retired, and 3-5% of the remaining workforce is out with covid and/or post-covid syndrome. So right now there are more jobs than workers.
Given people's natural inclination towards reproduction, at some point in the future, there will once again be more people than jobs, and minimum wage will once again become a flashpoint as quality of life begins to shrink. That's not even accounting for inflationary effects on the bottom 75% of wage earners.
As long as people are even mildly productive, economic growth will handily outpace population growth.
This has been going on for a very long time now, which is why we’re all so wildly rich compared to 100 years ago.
My grandparents remembered a time when completely emptying a jar of peanut butter was essential and lavatory paper was counted by the individual sheet. Today I have homeless people refusing my gifts of food.
The natural minimum wage that the market determines (absent all regulations) is $0 per hour and is called slavery. Enlightened people have moved passed the idea that the “market” alone should determine the minimum wage.
Exactly. Ever heard of scrip[0]? We have historical proof that companies won't even pay their employees with real money unless the government mandates that they do so.
> We have historical proof that companies won't even pay their employees with real money unless the government mandates that they do so.
Well, we have historical proof that nearly all companies do pay with real money in the total absence of such government mandates. We definitely don't have proof of the proposition you claim, which is immediately falsified by the most cursory examination of history.
Note also that scrip is denominated in currency and accepted at par. The problem was generally not that you had a lot of scrip and couldn't spend it; the problem was that the company store charged high prices. But the store charged the same prices whether you were spending company scrip or currency.
Someone will want to enslave people. This has been so for almost all of history for sufficiently large civilizations. In general humans exploit one another when they can get away with it. In the absence of government/societal regulations slavery will occur and thus the “market” minimum wage is 0.
Government regulations can be good and they can be bad. In enlightened countries enough good ones are in place to prevent a minimum wage of 0.
> In the absence of government/societal regulations slavery will occur
Slavery cannot occur in the absence of governmental and societal regulations, because in that case there's nothing stopping the slaves from leaving. Any such obstacle would be a governmental or societal regulation.
> and thus the “market” minimum wage is 0.
Slaves are paid much more than zero wages. In every culture, a slave in a good position is much better off economically than a freeman in a bad position.
… because in that case there's nothing stopping the slaves from leaving
Obviously this is false and you can find examples of people being enslaved in countries where it is outlawed. There are plenty of examples of an enslaved person being prevented from escaping even in the presence of laws prohibiting slavery. It’s as if you don’t understand human behavior.
You have a fanciful notion of slavery and what it entails. In another thread you bring up cases where the enslaved had it “good” and act as if this is normative in such circumstances. I am thankful views such are yours are no longer acceptable to most people. Within in your views on this topic one will not find common sense or decency.
That you find it worth your time to try to convince people of the benefits of slavery says much about you and nothing about slavery.
> There are plenty of examples of an enslaved person being prevented from escaping even in the presence of laws prohibiting slavery. It’s as if you don’t understand human behavior.
Or perhaps it's as if I'm labeling that prevention a "societal regulation". Go look at my comment again.
You are being deliberately obtuse. There are people who are enslaved in societies where slavery is illegal and, as a whole, considered evil by a very large majority of the population. People are sometimes kept in bondage by force and that force does not come from the government or by the society at large or by that societies views or consent. Of course, all of this is obvious and thus you are clearly trolling. If not, then you are a sad example.
There are countries in Europe which do not have a minimum wage mandated by the law - rather, it's the unions that negotiate them - and they still end up with more than people get in US. I guess you could term such negotiations "regulation", but it'd be really stretching it.
Regulating a broken system is an exercise in futility. We need a system in which the feedback loops produce the desired outcomes in the first place.
I’m pretty sure slavery is outlawed in all European countries so that alone prevents a 0 minimum wage. That itself is a regulation. There are lots of “regulations” (government interventions) that prevent a zero minimum wage. Indeed the legal protections and regulations regarding unions, social programs for the unemployed, universal healthcare, etc. all contribute to an environment where the lowest wage isn’t zero. It is not a stretch at all to say that the legal infrastructure surrounding unions and requirements surrounding dealing with them count as “regulation”.
There are lots of instances where regulations fixed a broken system. Government regulations fixed the broke system of using child labor and fixed the broken system of slavery.
Does that mean open source work should count as slavery? You're right that the natural minimum wage is zero, but there's more to slavery than simply being paid nothing. I would think the enlightened you speak of would also know the difference between volition and compulsion.
I do not at all understand the reason for your response. Do you really think that I was saying that doing something for free is always a form of slavery? I think it’s obvious the meaning and intent of what I wrote and only a disingenuous interpretation could have led you to respond as you did.
Please stop with the motte and bailey. I interpreted what you wrote and what you wrote was itself disingenuous. You stated that a zero-dollar income in a laissez faire market is sufficient to render anyone earning that amount a slave. You made no exceptions. As to the claim that the "more enlightened" are those who would reject the laissez-faire system, you've presented no credible evidence to that either.
Obviously it was a whimsical way of saying “slavery is the natural minimum wage” in the absence of all regulations (which is a proxy for government/societal interventions). Some person/company will be willing to enslave people if they can get away with it. Clearly volunteering is not what people mean by “working for $0 per hour”. This is obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous. Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither possible, desirable, or scalable. I won’t convince you of this and you won’t convince me otherwise.
You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.
> Obviously it was a whimsical way of saying “slavery is the natural minimum wage” in the absence of all regulations (which is a proxy for government/societal interventions).
Then you should have said that to begin with. It shouldn't be incumbent on me to account for whimsy botching one's meaning.
> Some person/company will be willing to enslave people if they can get away with it.
Enslavement doesn't require a coherent political or economic philosophy. Hobbes has already proven that. Even governments have and continue to enslave people. I don't see how regulations solve that as governments have no higher power to answer to, except perhaps for atom bombs.
That some company may violate an individual's rights in a laissez-faire system does not itself prove that enslavement is an inevitable outcome of such a system. That is a false induction.
> Clearly volunteering is not what people mean by “working for $0 per hour”. This is obvious to anyone who reads what I wrote without being disingenuous.
What difference is there between volunteering and working for $0 an hour exactly? If one volunteers for an organization, that does not mean that one lacks a de facto or de jure employer. One may still need to sign a contract and still be required to perform tasks to a certain standard. Volunteer work is not required to be accepted indiscriminately.
> Equally obvious is that a laissez-faire system is neither possible, desirable, or scalable. I won’t convince you of this and you won’t convince me otherwise.
You and I benefit from one of the great successes of laissez-faire capitalism: the commercial Internet. It's obviously possible (in fact, it has already succeeded for the past 30 years), desirable, and nearly infinitely scalable.
> You are free to desire to live in a world where a wage of 0 is a reasonable thing for an employer to pay. Fortunately for me people like you have little chance of seeing this desire come to fruition. There is no point in responding further but I will read and contemplate whatever response you decide to make.
A wage of zero is a reasonable wage for the employer and employee to agree upon. What is not reasonable is forcing someone to accept a wage of zero under duress or threat of force.
That's wrong; much of it is wages. Sometimes those wages are paid in cash, but in the more common case where they aren't, the slaves still get paid in food, clothing, and housing. Each of those is a direct transfer of value to the slave.
> the slaves still get paid in food, clothing, and housing.
If those are in the form of earned compensation to which the slave is entitled (which, sure, along with actual wages is common in some historical forms of slavery, but not really the norm in chattel slavery), they are benefits, not wages. If they are (as is typically the case with chattel slavery) discretionary items given at the pleasure of the employer based on the perceived future value to the employer of the worker having them now, they are just maintenance costs of the slave as an industrial machine.
> If those are in the form of earned compensation to which the slave is entitled (which, sure, along with actual wages is common in some historical forms of slavery, but not really the norm in chattel slavery), they are benefits, not wages.
Pure sophistry. There is no reason to call the same thing by two different names. Ask the IRS whether the food and housing your employer gives you count as wages.
> If they are (as is typically the case with chattel slavery) discretionary items given at the pleasure of the employer based on the perceived future value to the employer of the worker having them now, they are just maintenance costs of the slave as an industrial machine.
Not much better. The transfer of valuable goods to a slave is a maintenance cost in exactly the same way that the transfer of valuable goods to an employee is a maintenance cost. Nobody's paying salaries out of the goodness of their hearts; they pay salaries because that's what it costs to have work done.
> Ask the IRS whether the food and housing your employer gives you count as wages.
Ok, but, that works against you, because it is never counted as wages.
If it is provided to attract or retain employees it is treated as a taxable fringe benefit.
If it is provided on the employer’s business premises, for the employer’s convenience, as a condition of employment, it is not taxed for the employee at all.
I don't know where you get that idea. In the historical Deep South of the US, slaves had to work the plantation all day without pay, then go home and grow their own food on the worst strips of land not deemed worth cultivating by their owners.
Traditional African American foods, like hog jowls and chitterlings, were based on the discards that White slave owners would not eat.
> In the historical Deep South of the US, slaves had to work the plantation all day without pay, then go home and grow their own food on the worst strips of land not deemed worth cultivating by their owners.
This is fairly thoughtless modern propaganda, not a description of the historical Deep South.
Some quotes from Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery:
> "Marriage is to be encouraged," wrote James H. Hammond to his overseer, "as it adds to the comfort, happiness, and health of those entering upon it, besides insuring a greater increase." The economic inducements for marriage generally included a house, a private plot of land which the family could work on its own, and, frequently, a bounty either in cash or in household goods.
> about 6 percent of slaves worked in towns, and 20 percent of those living on plantations were employed as artisans and semiskilled workers of various sorts.
> The belief that the typical slave was poorly fed is without foundation in fact.
> More careful reading of plantation documents shows that the slave diet included many foods in addition to corn and pork. Among the other plantation products which slaves consumed were beef, mutton, chickens, milk, turnips, peas, squashes, sweet potatoes, apples, plums, oranges, pumpkins, and peaches. Certain foods not produced on most plantations were frequently purchased for slave consumption, including salt, sugar, and molasses. Less frequent, but not uncommon, purchases for slaves included fish, coffee, and whiskey.
> the average daily diet of slaves was quite substantial. The energy value of their diet exceeded that of free men in 1879 by more than 10 percent. There was no deficiency in the amount of meat allotted to slaves. On average, they consumed six ounces of meat per day, just an ounce lower than the average quantity of meat consumed by the free population.
> The high slave consumption of meat, sweet potatoes, and peas goes a long way toward explaining the astounding results shown in figure 34. The slave diet was not only adequate, it actually exceeded modern (1964) recommended daily levels of the chief nutrients.
> The most systematic housing information comes from the census of 1860, which included a count of slave houses. These census data show that on average there were 5.2 slaves per house on large plantations. The number of persons per free household in 1860 was 5.3. Thus, like free men, most slaves lived in single-family households.
> Descriptions in plantation records and travelers' accounts are fragmentary. They suggest a considerable range in the quality of housing. The best were three- or four-room cottages, of wood frame, brick, or stone construction, with up to eight hundred square feet of space on the inside, and large porches on the outside. Such cottages had brick or stone chimneys and glazed windows. At the other pole were single-room log cabins without windows. Chimneys were constructed of twigs and clay; floors were either earthen or made of planks resting directly on the earth.
> the houses of slaves compared well with the housing of free workers in the antebellum era. It must be remembered that much of rural America still lived in log cabins in the 1850s. And urban workers lived in crowded, filthy tenements.
> When slaves worked at times normally set aside for rest, they received extra pay -- usually in cash and at the rate prevailing in the region for hired labor. Slaves who were performing well were permitted to work on their own account after normal hours at such tasks as making shingles or weaving baskets, articles which they could sell either to their masters or to farmers in the neighborhood.
> Year-end bonuses, given either in goods or cash, were frequently quite substantial. Bennet Barrow, for example, distributed gifts averaging between $15 and $20 per slave family in both 1839 and 1840. The amounts received by particular slaves were proportional to their performance. It should be noted that $20 was about a fifth of national per capita income in 1840.
> Masters also rewarded slaves who performed well with patches of land ranging up to a few acres for each family. Slaves grew marketable crops on these lands, the proceeds of which accrued to them. On the Texas plantation of Julian S. Devereux, slaves operating such land produced as much as two bales of cotton per patch. Devereux marketed their crop along with his own. In a good year some of the slaves earned in excess of $100 per annum for their families. Devereux set up accounts to which he credited the proceeds of the sales. Slaves drew on these accounts when they wanted cash or when they wanted Devereux to purchase clothing, pots, pans, tobacco, or similar goods for them.
I'm sure it varied considerably. I'm certainly no subject matter expert.
I know there was a historical uprising someplace where slaves objected to plans to set them free. I'm unfamiliar with the details.
There is also the fact in some of the Caribbean islands, slavery was so harsh that average life expectancy was 3 years at one point, IIRC. They outlawed the importation of slaves well before they outlawed slavery and during that period the slave population shrank. They were not reproducing fast enough to hit replacement levels.
I read two or three books on the situation in the island or islands in question. Scholars speculate that slaves must have been using some means of herbal birth control as a protest to bringing children into such harsh conditions.
> I'm sure it varied considerably. I'm certainly no subject matter expert.
It did, and I readily admit that I’m not either.
As I understand it, with a few exceptions, the further south an enslaved person lived the worse off they generally were. Further south meant a more agriculture-based economy, with higher labor demands and less “civilization”. More isolation means more opportunity for enslavers to literally work their slaves to death.
I think not recognizing this does a disservice to the people that actually lived through that era.
That's a pretty awful take - labour exploitation in America is rampant with theft by employer being our largest crime by value. It's probably fair to say that 25/hr isn't what the minimum wage should be set to - but it exists to prevent extreme abuse of employees.
> There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines.
The market "determined" this "natural minimum wage" because a patchwork of laws dictated (somewhere around) a $15 minimum wage in a lot of locations and as a policy for many state/city/county contracts.
Isn’t it? My sister lives in a state where the true minimum wage is federal minimum wage. My teenager and her teenager both work at the same fast food place. My son makes $16/hour, her son makes $7.25/hour.
When are they going to start firing people to make up for the actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact! There is so much demand for workers that those places can't convince them to work for double the minimum wage given the crappy conditions they require. The idea that a rising minimum wage will result in lower employment, given that the current wage is lower in real terms than it was 30 years ago, makes absolutely no sense - the real world evidence is literally all around us right now.
Assuming an even distribution of COVID deaths throughout the 50 states, 20,000 workers per state have died in the last two years. I wonder if that has anything to do with the hiring difficulties fast-food restaurants are facing. The number of deaths is probably also higher among those who would be fast-food workers, since the likelihood of death from COVID was correlated with poverty.
Before the pandemic, there were a lot of retirement-aged people working in food service, like an uncomfortable amount. I certainly haven't been out to eat as much as I have before COVID, but what I noticed was a suspicious lack of those older workers I've come to expect working in food service. A lot of restaurants and fast food places are running on skeleton crews, now, some of them with one or two 16 year olds running the whole businesses alone even during dinner rushes.
Most of the people who I knew that died from Covid were not old people. I literally did not know of any old people that died from it. Even my 99 year old grandmother got it and beat it (this was pre-vaccine). She said that she beat the Spanish flu in the 1920s so she would beat Covid in the 2020s, and she did.
While the comment you're replying to is wrong, these empirical studies are ridiculous. Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour. The studies about the price elasticity of labor also don't bother to prove that there are real-world benefits beyond the fact that a higher minimum wage sounds good. Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
Your analysis overly simplifies the matter. For one, this assumes that there is a replacement solution available for the role the employee fills with a cost less than the cost of an employee. This is trivially falsifiable in the large majority of employment situations, if so you would see these solutions already being implemented in places with higher minimum wages. Businesses prefer making some amount $x over $0.
So what actually ends up happening in reality is, in order to not be forced to shutdown, the employer needs to increase the amount of per-employee revenue, which can happen in a number of ways:
- Raising prices (Easiest move, and even easier when labor costs increase for your competitors simultaneously)
- Negotiate lower supply costs (the threat of losing a big customer entirely can motivate a supplier to give up some percent of their profits)
- Increasing employee efficiency (improved processes, additional training, etc). Theoretically the company should have been doing these already but an existential threat is an even larger motivator than marginal profits. This could result in layoffs depending on how the efficiency is realized.
Really what ends up happening in reality is increased costs just get passed along. Yes, consumers probably end up spending more, but less in taxes are spent on benefits programs, making it a wash in overall cost to society. In fact, people who believe that government spending is inherently inefficient should theoretically love the idea of raising minimum wage as it allows us as a society to move resources from government spending into the free market.
An employee that earns an employer $8 in revenue but gets paid $9 is a net loss of $1 to the employer. If x is -1 then $x is not better than $0.
If the employer could raise prices and still be in business, then they would already be doing it. Same thing with lowering costs. As for employee efficiency, yes, if you're forced to pay someone $9 then you will want to get at least $9 out of them. That means you won't hire anyone that's not experienced enough.
> Really what ends up happening in reality is increased costs just get passed along
Not if the employer wants to remain competitive. There are plenty of bigger companies with greater economies of scale that will happily run them out of business.
This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is for things or labor is irrelevant.
> This isn't a nuanced problem. If you raise the price of something, demand drops. Whether the price in question is for things or labor is irrelevant.
There's a little nuance.
Some anecdata: When I tried charging $0 to get my feet wet in consulting I had zero takers. Raising my hourly rate to $100 drastically improved my success rate (nothing else changed, I was still just some kid in high school with a knack for programming at the time).
The real world doesn't have perfect information and is more than happy to use imperfect signals to save time and effort (in any constant-bounded time that's provably required to hit any fixed desired epsilon of error). The price somebody is asking for is often enough a useful signal that demand need not be monotonic.
I tend to agree with this conventional Econ 101 wisdom, but your comment got me wondering if raising the minimum wage would have an effect of driving people to build skills and push harder. I.e. think of a minimum wage as the government saying to workers, ‘Hey, if you want to be part of this economy, you better be at least X productive.’
It can also drive businesses to develop models where people are more productive. Productivity isn't just a function of skills and how much people "push", but also how businesses operate.
In fact, very few people earn minimum wage past early adulthood. I don't remember where I got this figure but it was something like 93% of people over the age of 24 make higher than minimum wage. In any case, income is highly correlated with age until retirement ages.
> Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
You're presuming it's a binary choice; consider the systemic effect might not make it a binary choice.
Let's accept that it is a binary choice, then no, it's not necessarily better to be making a low wage, because that presumes a value for your time that is effectively zero. In truth, with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself, provide yourself with shelter, etc., and when you are working you can't do that stuff. Let's assume though that one wouldn't take a wage that was a net direct loss like this, there's still the possibility that a low wage might be tactically beneficial, but strategically & systemically quite harmful.
> > with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself, provide yourself with shelter, etc.
? You still have the option to quit your job if you're employed and don't find it worth your while.
If that's more than rhetorical, I suggest you do some reading.
If it is rhetorical, I'll just assume you think everything would work great if we had a minimum prevailing wage of one penny for a lifetime's worth of labour. You know, because less than that would be slavery.
> If that's more than rhetorical, I suggest you do some reading.
just some generic advice to read a book? yeah me not so learnded me go read keynes so me agree with you
> If it is rhetorical, I'll just assume you think everything would work great if we had a minimum prevailing wage of one penny for a lifetime's worth of labour. You know, because less than that would be slavery.
Imagine thinking that slavery is about not being paid rather than not having a choice of who to work for. Slaves receive food and housing, technically a salary. The problem is of not being free to leave and work elsewhere. Anyone making a penny for a lifetime can just go work elsewhere if they don't like it.
> Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour, and if the minimum wage was greater than $8 an hour, then that worker would be out of a job, thus making $0 an hour.
One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the exact amount of revenue a single employee is responsible for in any real world employment situation.
> One of the many fallacies here that hasn't already been pointed out is that it's impossible to determine the exact amount of revenue a single employee is responsible for in any real world employment situation.
Sure. But if it costs $100/hr in labor to run a McDonalds (split between cashier, burger flipper, fry guy), $100/hr in ingredients, and the store only produces $150/hr in revenue, it's not hard to figure out that those wages are unsustainable.
Blah blah, businesses don't deserve to exist if they can't pay whatever wage. Sure, but I'm not saying McDonalds deserves to exist--I'm saying those people won't have jobs when it becomes very obvious that the store is losing money.
Just because you can't pinpoint the exact contribution of every worker does not mean that you can't have a pretty good estimate of the contribution from retail workers in practice.
That's true, and there's going to be a spectrum of measurement, from very measurable roles to roles that are almost impossible to measure. I'd say even in the sales case, something that isn't getting measured is how much a good salesperson can rely on other parts of the organization to answer questions for customers that can make the difference in landing the sale or not. That attribution usually goes entirely to the salesperson, when someone else's knowledge was key to the transaction. It's a team effort.
This is most obvious when you take the extreme case of looking at the department level - sales and marketing are "responsible" for 100% of the revenue, but if you delete legal, support, R&D, HR, and finance, your revenue goes to zero pretty quickly.
If the aggregate across all employees is negative, the company is losing money. If the aggregate over all employees is positive, you have profit.
It's like that old joke about marketing budgets: half is wasted, but it's impossible to tell which half. The same can be true for employees, maybe half your employees lose money, but the other half make enough that you're profitable, but you can't attribute every dollar that comes into your company to the specific employee that generated that dollar.
However, a if the minimum wage is increased to $9, the collective spending power of the minimum wage cohort may increase enough to increase the per worker revenue to $9 or more. Likewise, if the employer cohort doesn’t believe this to be the case and fires workers, then X% of the workforce will no longer have the discretionary spending to support $8 in revenue.
If a position cannot pay well enough for the employed to sustain themselves then it should not exist in the first place.
If there literally are not enough jobs that can pay sustainable wages to everyone in need, then we need to rethink how our economy works on a fundamental level.
A system that requires some portion of the population to go hungry or even homeless is ethically indefensible.
I'm not saying that being unemployed is better than making an unlivable wage. I am saying both outcomes are unacceptable.
And I am not advocating for any specific solution, just saying that the current system does not work. I don't believe in false dichotomies. Being unhappy with capitalism does not automatically make one a communist.
What is the alternative? You can't pay someone more than they earn in revenue and minimum wage laws create an artificial price floor that causes everyone who would otherwise earn between above zero and the minimum to instead make zero.
The idea of a "living wage" is an worthless notion that assumes that the distribution of income by age and experience is not the one from the real world. In the real world, the more experience you have, the more money you make. The majority of low earners are simply young or at an early point in their careers. To rob them of entry level jobs by setting artificial price floors is what's unethical. Let them get low wage jobs while they still live at home or have roommates or don't live downtown SF instead of dictating that the world should be one of magical bounty and abundance where everyone can somehow work for "high" wages without price inflation for everything else making them effectively poor.
Being unhappy with capitalism is being in denial about the world having scarce resources.
> Being unhappy with capitalism is being in denial about the world having scarce resources.
Food and shelter are not scarce resources. In the United States, we have more empty homes than homeless people. Every day we throw away an obscene amount of food.
So again, I say any system that requires the existence of a class of people who cannot afford these things in order to function is morally untenable. Similar shitty arguments were made in defense of slavery 200 years ago.
Communism isn't the only possible answer. Welfare programs are a common solution. The way I see it though, welfare is just the taxpayer subsidizing unlivable wages. So why not cut out the tax middleman and make the employers pay livable wages to begin with? Either way, that money has to get moved from the top to the bottom.
> I say any system that requires the existence of a class of people who cannot afford these things in order to function is morally untenable
As they say in game of thrones: "what kind of god would do that?
- the one we've got"
If we're talking historically, it's not poverty that's out of place, it's wealth.
Paying "livable" wages, as subjective a definition as it is, means some people will be unemployed. Unless those wages are subsidized, that is, but then how is the wealth created and acquired for that? And how do you know that it wouldn't be put to better use elsewhere?
I worked for much less than the US minimum wage as a young adult and I managed to make it work until I was able to gain the skills to earn more. Had the minimum wage been what it is in many American cities today, I wouldn't have been able to work until I was 23, assuming I could've somehow gained useful experience without burdening myself with student debt. It's not like that option wasn't there, but I preferred to work for low wages and I do not regret it. I really don't see any good argument for preventing me from making that choice for myself. But that's what minimum wage laws do.
> Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage.
In the US, it depends on the programs that are available to you.
For some people, a small part time job sabotages some existing subsidies.
This is a critical component of the institutional poverty, that is now generational, in the US.
> Every price has some elasticity, but the fact is that if a worker earns an employer $8 an hour in revenue, they're not going to pay that worker $9 an hour,
One part of the company raises wages the other fires to increase profitability and reduce headcount. Both groups get a bonus and the group in charge of productivity get culled. Welcome to 2022
That only matter for the productivity team and that group gets fired because they are below their metrics. The hiring group just raised wages and they are doing all they can. The profitability group needs to get the numbers back on track and does the firing.
My understanding is that yes if their growth cannot be maintained because of labor shortages they will have to begin shrinking down to the size the labormarket can bear.
The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end.
We should focus on easier tasks and build up to it. First we should try to predict the past accurately. Once we're comfortable with that maybe we can move on to predicting the present.
Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008 was going to blow up one day. Technology and unsubstantiated sectors allowed them to print without repercussions for a while and the administration and them also tried to fool people into believing the inflation was transitory... Reckless idiots. And now wage labor is the one to suffer most.
4TT in spending for BBB? Uhhuh! Even Yellen said it was crazy.
> Everyone and their mother knew that printing money since 2008 was going to blow up one day.
You can't "predict" that something will cyclical will happen on some indeterminate timeline then claim success when it eventually does. Impactful actions have pretty immediate results. So if you "predicted" that the actions of 09-10 to have an effect, if effect didn't happen by like 2012, your prediction was wrong. The economy is way too complicated to predict out more than a few years because it's constantly undergoing major shifts and changes.
Inflation is being experienced globally, even in regions with little/no economic ties to the USA. And the USA is experiencing less inflation than in many other countries. This suggests that the underlying cause is external to the USA and whatever actions Americans are taking in response is more effective than what other countries are doing.
> You can't "predict" that something will cyclical will happen on some indeterminate timeline
It was in plain sight as early as one year ago. The fed itself had signalled exactly one year ago (coincidentally) that they are preparing to tighten money supply in 2023 [1]. Of course they didn't anticipate Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing supply shortage. But as far as cycles go it was clearly expected. Also, it was obvious if one had paid attention the fed rate history [2]. Interest rates were on the rise until COVID struck forcing both fed and treasury to increase money supply to prevent hardship to the people. Also, back in Nov 2021 fed had slowed down money infusion by reducing MBS purchase speed.
People don't realise the extent to which 2008 GFC continues to reverberate. 2010s were truly exceptional years where interest rates were kept artificially low and fed kept printing money through QE (e.g., MBS purchase [3]). It would be really absurd to expect fed to have kept creating money and as the last decade drew to an end something had to give just that COVID postponed the day of the reckoning. Make no mistake 2020s are going to be really harsh money supply wise; a generation of people are going to experience what tight money supply feels like.
Von Mises is generally a laughing stock in academia. Only the internet thinks he's worth dusting off.
Von Mises has been missing from proper economic discussions in academia for half a century. He predates when economics was a science, and was expected to produce things that matched the data.
Absolutely nobody with any actual training would take his name seriously in practice. Naming him in a non-critical is like mentioning Ivermectin - a red flag that everything you know about the topic comes from social media. You might as well bring up Dr Sebi.
That's largely because academia favors central planning and doesn't trust those without a graduate degree to make socially optimal choices. They want to be the planners the masses depend on and Mises tried to show that desire was problematic from a first-principles, liberty-oriented perspective.
What's really laughable is that academia thinks its policy prescriptions play no role in the ongoing economic mismanagement despite all evidence to the contrary and the predictions of the Austrian school. Your need to smear the name of Mises with unrelated controversies is also very telling. Why not let the theories speak for themselves?
They did. That's what the "doesn't match the data" part was.
It's just that you haven't ever actually studied this, and are trying to wing your way through fake criticism, the way the kid who never read the book does their book report.
It's both. There's evidence supporting the idea that COVID relief contributed to inflation, if you'd like I can link the fivethirtyeight article exploring this.
However, I should note that if it were up to me, I would accept inflation to save lives every single time. Without that relief, people would have died, starved, or gone into life-ruining debt. Inflation is unfortunate, but better than the alternative.
> There's evidence supporting the idea that COVID relief contributed to inflation
The way inflation is being used here is not what it has traditionally meant. Inflation, ie, too much total liquid cash, accompanied by super high prices for labor (and therefore goods) started secretly and dramatically a very long time ago. It's debated if it's the 60s, or some people say as far back as pre or post great depression. That runaway inflation is an old story and has become the norm.
The current definition of inflation is "whether the working class has enough money to feel secure." Which is something the market hates with a passion. The market wants all the money in the hands of the rich, so it can be in the market. The market wants cheap labor and an immobile workforce.
The market ALREADY thought that the workforce had too much money BEFORE COVID. So they were absolutely appalled at the idea of a stimulus. So what you are seeing described as inflation is really that. Cost of goods are up because of price gauging barrels of oil, which is intentional.
The measures taken to "reduce inflation" are actually to get money out of the workforce and back into the market.
If you want to look at inflation, look at how much money is being held by the 1%.
> It's a supply side problem due to Corona shutdowns
This is a lie being spread around. It's actually extracting stimulus back from the poor, making up for lost profit during COVID, and decreasing total employment.
The market holds more power in the price of oil than the fed does with interest rates. The fed and the market are teaming up to make up for any ground (in profits and operating cost) that was lost during COVID.
Such a fast increase in such a short amount of time is extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented. There's nothing even remotely close to that instant increase since the dataset begins at the start of the 1980s.
And then the COVID jump didn't only make a huge increase by itself, but the slope of the graph permanently increased.
It's basic economics that if you do that to the money supply you will get a massive jump in inflation.
Well, these are measures of the money supply. If the Fed "prints" money, then M1/M2 go up to reflect that. And they went up a lot. M2 went up by 40%, M1 it's harder to say because they adjusted the definition exactly at the time they started printing tons of stimulus money (what a coincidence). But it's definitely grown by a vast amount.
The consequences of money printing are extremely basic and well known since antiquity. You get both inflation and, less well discussed but more important, consequent distortion of production in the currency zone as resources are reallocated to wherever the newly printed money enters the economy. The Edict of Diocletian was an example of this from Roman times [1].
Unfortunately, in the last few years we've seen something very disturbing. Central bankers, who are theoretically chosen for their command of economics, have become delusional about this and started arguing that actually money printing doesn't create inflation at all [2]:
"But the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has dismissed claims that the Fed’s money-printing is fueling today’s price spiral, emphasizing instead the disruptions associated with reopening the economy. Like his most recent predecessors, dating to Alan Greenspan, Powell says that financial innovations mean there no longer is a link between the amount of money circulating in the economy and rising prices."
This is economic illiteracy and sets us on the path to absolute ruin. If it were true then after the economy had "re-opened" (whatever that means) we'd experience deflation as prices re-adjusted back to their pre-pandemic norms, but no such deflation will ever happen, because inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon".[3]
In my view it's all a part of the same package of social phenomena you might call "government expertise failure". Anywhere you have the perception of expertise (whether justified or not), you create people who are incentivized to abuse that perception. Governments are filled with technocrats who claim to fully understand and control large systems, but their statements and beliefs seem to have been departing from what's actually correct at an ever higher rate. We are now all paying the price for their delusions at the checkout.
From a recent Bloomberg article: Wealth of bottom 50% doubled between 2020-2022. Top 1% rose significantly. While the remaining 49% didnt budge much. Interpret it for your supply chain concerns.
The bottom 50% own very little. Home ownership rates in the USA are like 65% and poorer people are less likely to own their homes.
So the answer is likely, a negligible amount. The increase in wealth among poorer people was most likely driven by stimulus money and a bit due to wage increases (which also favored the poor).
They primed the pump, stimulated the economy, people had a bunch of money to spend, no where to put it. But aside from that, we're seeing MFGs tell their suppliers to slow their parts deliveries as demand is cooling.
Their hands are in this. Corona has a role too, but so does the Fed and the admin. If instead of Biden and it were the Repubs, or, god forbid, Trump, imagine the headlines and finger pointing. we'd be getting --they'd probably be overshooting with their blaming, but we'd definitely see more blame at the foot of that administration and the Fed.
Honest question: How are we supposed to maintain our civilization without some government spending?
Is climate change going to fix itself? Is our infrastructure going to modernize itself? We need to migrate to EVs and build out energy infrastructure.
What is going to happen to aging and disabled people? The current answer appears to be to have them live in the streets.
The country's 1% currently own 70% of the wealth. I think they can handle some taxation, especially when those taxes are going to be used to modernize our infrastructure.
> Honest question: How are we supposed to maintain our civilization without some government spending?
You speak as if there is currently no government spending, which is bizarre.
> The country's 1% currently own 70% of the wealth
This wealth does not exist as specie unproductively hoarded in vaults or banknotes hidden by misers so as to deprive the rest of us of food and shelter. It is lent and invested in the hope of generating value. The wealthy could spend their wealth on caviar, yachts, hookers, and blow, but instead, they make it available to those who promise to do something useful with it. Even the government itself can raise money borrowing from the wealthy. You may have heard of government bonds, or perhaps even the federal deficit.
Who will build the EVs? Who will build the houses for the homeless? Who will care for the aging and disabled? It's not just a matter of money, or printing it and giving to the poor, the gasoline-burning, the aging, the disabled would not drive up prices.
Someone has to be paid to provide these things, and housing, vehicles, medical care already account for most of our economy. Everyone with the skill and desire to care for the aging and the disabled are already doing it. Everyone with the skill and desire to build houses and cars are already doing it. We have full employment. Inflation is rampant because too many dollars chase too few resources, both people and material. If the new round of COVID stimulus had passed or BBB had passed, there would be more dollars and less investment, but not more resources.
In order to build more EVs, which EV factories should be disassembled and auctioned off for tax revenue? In order to care for more elderly, what elderly care facilities should be closed and sold to land developers? To fund more solar panels, how much do we need to tax solar panels?
2009. Thats how "growth" came from last decade & half. People never realized that & majority will never. Stocks/Home prices will keep going up to infinity crowd thinks its a hoax.
Most homeowners have been in their homes for a while, refinanced, and have benefited from a fixed payment for their home while wages have risen with inflation.
How come Switzerland has only 2.5% year-over-year inflation, less than a third of the U.S. rate?
Last I checked there seemed to be some correlation between a country's money printing and current inflation rates. That's not to say that a protion of the current inflation rate is not due to supply consitrictions, but I certainly not assume that is the only factor.
1) prices were already universally high in Switzerland
2) swiss government regulates the price of healthcare
3) Switzerland uses significantly less fossil fuels and aren't as effected by the war in Ukraine
4) Switzerland passed multiple laws over the past few years to reduce the cost of goods, including banning foreign companies from charging Swiss citizens more
Social systems only work, when you have a vast majority of people who produce (and pay taxes on that) and a small minority of people who don't (because they either can't work or the abuse the system).
I'm not sure how the swiss handled the lockdowns, if it was more "open" (like the swedes did) or if they shut everything down, but here (in slovenia), we shut a bunch of businesses down (most of the service industry, most of the shops, etc.) and the government basically paid freshly printed EU money to all those people to stay at home on a "paid vacation" (80% of the paycheck they'd otherwise get), which was great for them (and made them not-protest), but on the other hand, a great middle finger to the rest of the people, and the consequences of all that printed money, that we see now.
Hardly. The parent reminded me of other issues affecting inflation in the U.S. - things I would chalk up to a sub-omptimal reglatory/legislative environment, which has made a mess over the decades of health care, housing, energy, social spending, and taxes. Congress is somewhat disfunctional, and can't agree on fiscal policies that might help in our current situation. That leaves only the fed to intervene, as best they can. That's not a supply problem.
Also, how could injecting 7 trillion dollars directly into the economy not have an effect on prices? Supply and demand were both affected by the U.S. pandemic response, not just supply as you asserted earlier.
Are you saying that the 7 trillion dollars of money given to small business owners and as stimulas checks had no affect on prices?
IIRC, Switzerland was doing funny things with bank deposits and exchange rates to control deflation until recently. So +2.5% inflation may represent a significant jump from where they were last year.
We're seeing manufacturers tell their suppliers of JIT to hang on to components because they don't need them right now. So I don't think that's accurate everywhere.
Rising wages are a very small part of cost increases, except for a few things like on-demand quick-response delivery services (food delivery and the like) and even there, fuel costs are a lot of it.
You don't have to be that fit to pull a trigger. Conversely, look at all the wars that continue to happen in places with severe food insecurity. In theory starving people shouldn't be able to fight, in practice those most willing to fight get enough of the limited food supply to keep fighting.
This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too
It turns out when you treat your employees as disposable resources to be exploited, instead of human beings, people don't want to work there. I have several friends that worked for Amazon as engineers and from their stories, I don't think I'll ever consider working for Amazon. They probably have some good teams in there somewhere. And let's not forget their "hire to fire" practices to meet their turnover quotas.
From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out. Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.
I regret my 3 years at Amazon, and wish I had left sooner. When I left for G, ~15 people called/emailed to tell me how I was going to a much better company, including my own manager.
People love to say that its manager dependent, but IMO the default at amazon is the horrible, employee-exploiting culture. So a good team/manager is the exception, and thing will eventually turn to shit.
I worked at Amazon 8 years and it is very manager and team dependent on what your experience is. I got to work on S3 and Alexa, and have no regrets. I learned so much, had a bunch of fun and worked with really smart people. Got paid well too.
I'm sure there are great teams to work for at Amazon. After all it is a large company with many different offices all over that does a lot of different things. However, my naïve estimation is that I am not very likely to land on one of these teams and much more likely to end up in a meat grinder. However, like I said, that is just my perception and I could be wrong. I just don't intend to find out.
For sure, it's not for everyone, and I would encourage everyone at any job they interview for to also vet the people and team you are going to be working with.
Ask them hard questions about performance, expectations and on call burden.
Yeah, I don't know if I'd make the cut and I'm sure it'd be a SUBSTANTIAL pay increase, but I haven't followed up with any Amazon recruiters simply because of their reputation as the sort of company who's comfortable with employees having visible breakdowns.
I had an internal AWS recruiter message me about a position there once; I just flat-out told him that I had heard so many negative things about their work environment that I had no interest in working there.
(Also, that position would've required relocating to the Washington, DC metro area, which would've been a dealbreaker even if AWS had a great work environment)
From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job compared to other big tech companies.
I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time.
They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the interviews puts me off from engaging.
I’m regularly asked to talk to AWS recruiters, but always decline unless they assure me up front they will never ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. They’re still not hurting enough for that common sense step to have been taken, so I will not be talking to them.
I can’t be the only one who had this experience. I recently had the choice between pursuing a cool startup position and an AWS position. Once I was emailed all of the AWS interview material and the 4 hour itinerary… I just had to ask myself if it was even worth putting my time into it. The total comp would probably be better than the startup position, but everything else (work life balance, risk of being fired, opportunity for growth, etc) seemed (probably) worse from what I’ve heard. Suffice to say, I dropped out of the interview process and took the cool startup job instead.
The point is that the role wasn’t tantalizing enough to justify taking off a day from my existing job and going through Amazon’s interview gauntlet. The other job I was interviewing for had a much more reasonable interview structure, no whiteboard bullshit, no live coding, no 4 hour sessions. I think it says a lot about the company and how they value prospective employees’ time.
If you think any company has any real values beyond "make as much money as possible" you're doing yourself a disservice.
I would never work for amazon because I refuse to grind leetcode, but in an odd way they're almost the most honest about their mission being to make money.
A company's true loyalty is naturally to its shareholders but it's a bit of a cop out on your part to deny the fact that there are different levels of ethicality within different companies (palentir vs yacht games).
Probably depends on region/country/situation. Applied for an engineer position in Europe a few weeks ago, got to the last round of interviews, was rejected (probably because I'm horrible trying to explain things with that STAR method, I think the rest was ok).
I don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.
I'm a fairly inexperienced software engineer (<2 yrs experience) and I've been contacted by 3 separate Amazon recruiters on Linkedin in the past month alone if that means anything
I don't even do any coding and have gotten contacted by their recruiter for a SWE position in the past month. Seems like their recruiters are resorting to spray and pray when it comes to finding new hires.
That’s nothing. I’ve never programmed a computer, just recently learned how to use an abacus, and been in a coma for three years—yet 43 Amazon recruiters email and call me seven times a day for a software senior management job.
Eventually their reputation will precede themselves with all job types. I think this also mimics their other business practices of short term-ish decisions for revenue instead of longer term practices to build a place where people are attracted naturally.
What will happen with their tech products when they can't staff engineers, can't get ahead of the bad PR for recruiting and don't want to pay over market to attract those that will put up with their way of working? They might have some systemic outage level things happen where companies may take their business elsewhere. Or maybe not, I don't have a crystal ball.
Cloud abstraction/migration technologies might be a good investment/startup.
Considering I get an email at least once a week (sometimes more) to join them, I'm not surprised at this. Usually I go out of my way to tell them I'm not interested in working for Amazon in particular.
This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.
I've been an engineer at Amazon for almost 10 years. Been promoted twice. Ask me anything.
Yes, we're having a lot of trouble recruiting engineers, because of discussion threads like this where a lot of misinformation is shared about what it's like to work here.
Is it tough? Yes. Is it competitive? Yes. Is there stack ranking? Yes.
Is it the most fulfilling and challenging and interesting job I've had in 22 years of Software Development? (The latter half of my career has been here). Yes, yes, and yes.
This is the best job I've ever had and I think it can be for a lot of others who want to have disproportionately large impact day-to-day and on-the-world.
Can you expand on this a bit? What makes the work so fulfilling? Is it just knowing the impact? The team is good? Are you learning and improving as an engineer?
I'm glad you asked because it's a subtle thing, and may be related to me personally. But I would venture I'm not the only engineer like this.
For me, I spent my whole career bouncing against the walls constraining of what an engineer role was supposed to be. I'd push back against requirements from Product Managers and be told I'm ruffling feathers. (Not directly, but indirectly). I'd see QA or Documentation struggling, and I'd jump in to help, and be told later that my contributions there are not appreciated.
I'd see another part of the company do something wrong, bring it up, and be told there's nothing I can do.
I'd have a great idea and be told "that makes sense, but we can't do it for <unsatisfying reasons>"
Amazon, on the other hand, always nurtured this within me. Good ideas reign supreme. Most people I work with have very little ego - they just want to do the Right Thing for customers, and ship great solutions that solve real problems. NOTE: I'm not claiming this is universal. There are plenty of egomaniacal assholes that ruin whole teams. Those horror stories are out there too. But in my experience, working on 4 different teams, in 3 different geographies, they are by far the exception.
My last 3 years in my career before Amazon, I was the tech lead for 3 different year-long projects in 2 different companies. Each we built exactly what we set out to do. Each went into production. Each was a collossal failure. Why? Customers didn't want it. We didn't solve the right problem.
This has NEVER happened to me in a decade at Amazon. The "Working backwards" process is LEGIT. There are notable exceptions (Firephone!), but every single project I've personally worked on has been a monumental success. That's super important to me. I want my work to have meaning. I don't want to write code, exchange it for cash, and move on to the next thing. I want the things I build (mostly AWS services) to be useful to someone.
So, this is what fulfillment means to me:
* I can define my own job description via a lot of Ownership, and work on big problems within my job role (SDE), and outside of it. Despite Amazon's huge size, I never feel like a cog in a machine. I have a lot of power to fix problems I see in my team, org, and in the rest of the company.
* Everything I've built I know has made an impact on people's lives (Developers, and their productivity) and that impact only grows. It feels really good knowing hundreds of thousands of developers are each a little (or a lot) more efficient and can spend more time on interesting problems rather than boring cruft, by using stuff I built.
The "learning and improving" part is interesting. I would unequivocally say yes, and was a huge part of what I loved about the company a decade ago when I first joined. But that part is also as much a curse as is a blessing. Sometimes I actually wish I could just pause and keep doing what I'm doing and be GOOD at it without tackling the next tier of challenges. But it seems that as soon as I get good at anything, I find myself seeking the next level of complexity, and the company is equally happy to throw me into an even deeper part of the pool. So to some degree I always feel like I'm on the edge - always not sure if the problem I'm working on is solvable. At this point I just know that I'll get through it and figure it out in time. And if I don't, I'll learn a lot about why it doesn't work. So maybe I just take this for granted now. It doesn't spark joy day to day, unlike the other 2 bullet points.
Thanks very much for this. I've been fortunate enough to find similar things (though at a much smaller scale than AWS) at my current workplace. If you're still reading this, I would love to know whether you can get the above with some kind of semblance of a worklife balance. Do you have coworkers that maintain a 40 hour workweek, and don't have to work on weekends? How far away from that "ideal" can one get while still having a successful career at AWS?
There are definitely horror stories of teams that are struggling to hire (because of misinformation like in this thread), yet still have to maintain a service operationally, so have an oncall rotation of 4 people. 25% of your life getting paged? No thank you, not for me.
Usually, these get identified, escalated, and some form of help is brought in. But it requires a manager not to be too proud to ask for help.
Most coworkers I know do maintain 40-45 hour weeks, and most oncall rotations are 8-10 people so you're oncall ~once every 2 months.
COVID has been interesting - some folks went off the deep end and ended up working too much and burnt out. Some found a happy work life balance and realized there are more important things in life than work.
That said, if you're a foundational AWS service, and when you go down half the internet goes with you, when there is an issue, it's all hands on deck to try to fix it (up to the CEO level. When there is a public announcement of AWS impairment, the CEO gets updates every 10 mins whatever the time of day. Because of deep deep ownership).
Those don't happen very often (maybe quarterly?)
And if you're not on a team on such critical path, things are a lot more relaxed. But the people that are on this critical path think it's worth it because the fulfillment and pride in being on the critical path for so much technology is itself a worthwhile mission.
Very encouraging to hear, appreciate the detailed answers. I might just apply soon. Would be cool to work on an AWS service for sure. Thanks! If you have any team recommendations or want to refer me in then I’m all ears.
“We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said.
Pagan began working at the Amazon delivery hub in October and, within two months, had been promoted to a role on the safety committee for the facility. The new role didn’t come with a pay raise, and is on top of a worker’s core tasks, but Pagan saw it as a stepping stone to an official promotion. But in April, Pagan told Recode, he took two days off to have an infected tooth looked at and ultimately removed.
The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated.
An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy.
“We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said.
“I find the whole situation crazy,” said the 35-year-old Pagan, who was supporting his wife and daughter on his Amazon income. “They’re gonna lose a good worker for nothing.”
It's not the issue of Grubhub or re-applying 90 days later, it's the completely inflexible termination policy and the lack of any sort of humanness or flexibility around decision-making that caused them to dig their own hole, in this specific example.
This is an open secret in the US. It's used to fire people constantly for employee churn. This ensures by the time they are unhappy at the job, they are close to being fired.
It also ensures only the super dedicated or those without families are the ones to stay.
High turnover jobs known for this are telephone agent jobs, sales employees, or reallly anyone they can sucker into accepting crazy quotas.
Some places, especially those with several lines of business, will do this because they get laid $X/agent to graduate a class.
I don't know where the idea came from or why but I've seen it over and over, especially as a LOB (line of business) is being closed. They will rush to push through as many classes as possible, knowing full well they will be graduating into a non-existent job with little to no chance of moving to another LOB.
When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees I mentioned on here how it felt wrong in comparison to what they pay their warehouse workers and drivers and got some backlash on here. A lot of talk about how an engineer provides XXX% more value and supply and demand.
Warehouse jobs are back breaking. I don't think they need to be paid as much as a software engineer, but they should be paid a decent wage and have decent work conditions.
Amazon didn’t even do that. Before, no matter who you were, your cash component was maxed out between $160K - $175K. The rest of your compensation was in stock.
Now, more of your compensation can be stock based.
I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere.
The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.
I've been getting enough of them to start seeing that most of the emails from amazon are generated in some form. A generated recruiting email is pretty much an immediate turn off for me.
Also, they have been very aggressive... going as far as the same recruiter reaching out on a monthly basis despite me telling them I am not interested.
In the same boat, from talking to higher up recruiting people at AWS it sounds like a lot of their cold leads are handled by recruiter contractors.
These contractors (usually overseas) are paid mostly on commission and there are thousands of them. Its not how most big tech companies handle recruiting. They hand a gigantic list of emails to the mob and implement the "casting a wide net" strategy.
I’ve gotten emails from Google about Engineering Manager positions for software developers even though my LinkedIn profile shows no management experience (I have none) and it has that I’m not even currently officially a software developer (cloud app dev consulting).
If they're using questionable means to get contact info, they probably have enough build in layers of buffer for plausible deniability. The recruiter may not know, and by design they probably don't keep a record of that.
Not hard to guess in many cases -- especially if you can find other people's email addresses from the same company, since they are often created formulaically. E.g. first.last@company.com or <firstinitial><lastname>@company.com
“Running out of people to hire” is a strange way of saying “Not offering employees enough to want to work there”. To be catty, there are plenty of people to hire, but maybe they’re running out of people to exploit.
It's not sustainable for them to offer, say, $30 an hour starting salary for fulfillment centre employees. As it is, they have to subsidize retail with other revenue lines like AWS and advertising.
That is the design: business units that are not viable on their own are subsidized by a few cash cows but might gain market share and be profitable in the future
My guess is what you say here, and where the plan is AI/Robotics will take over. That in itself will be unprofitable for a while until it is very profitable and like Google with search, hard to displace.
You might be right but that isn't even what I'm saying here. Your description could apply to many sectors of the economy, most of which they have a some amount of presence in
Didn’t say that. I just wanted to tease more out of the comment I was replying to. I said that comment if true, without further clarification implies they are not viable.
I've always wondered about this, at Amazon and also at Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc... They seem to burn through people quite fast. Won't they all just run out of people at some point, or will just increasing pay bring enough people back?
If it's anything like retail, a lot of these places work on the assumption that there are enough people who too desperate for a job that they'll come regardless of the working conditions.
Yep, and when the free market sets up conditions to allow those people to be slightly less desperate the Fed will chime in about how unemployment is too low and we need more desparate people, while the wall st pundits go on and on lamenting how rising worker prices might mean that the companies make profits that gasp don't set records. Because apparently the only measure of a good economy is record profits - regular profitable businesses just don't cut it anymore.
If you find this worrying, don't - someone will be along shortly to spend a lot of words proving that this situation (the one where we require desperate people to exist so Elon and Jeff can make a few extra $billion) is somehow the best.
Having worked in conditions like this, god it's horrible.
The people that were there when I started were rough guys, but they could do their job.
After I started the company apparently could only hire angry alcoholics, lazy stoners, and fresh out of jail domestic abusers who were proud of it. How many of these people could the job effectively, no.
Then the company had a merge and corporate came down with a brilliant plan to force all the fulltime employees (read legacy employees with some level of leadership responsibilities and the only ones good at their job) into part time positions or offer them severance to leave. You can imagine what happens.
So then it was me, a couple other guys, and a slew of incompetent bums. I managed to take advantage of the situation to demand a pathetic raise and near total autonomy of my hours. These concessions ended up being not enough and one night I decided not to show up anymore, as management was constantly moving responsibilities of their "friends" to use.
Luckily I had been using my time to make my break into the software industry. A couple years later, I read that triple merged company had to file for bankruptcy.
This is one reason why these types of megacorps support mass immigration, it provides a steady stream of desperate people they can exploit. Those from other countries also might lack the collective cultural knowledge to stay away.
I hadn't really thought before about how left-wing folks typically want higher wages as well as more mass immigration which inherently suppresses wages. In their defense, they want raises waged by law rather than by market (an elevated minimum wage would raise wages irrespective of immigration), but considering how unlikely a minimum federal wage hike is, it seems like they're pursuing two contradictory goals.
EDIT: I was really (naively) hoping this would be discussed maturely. Some clarifying points:
1. "mass immigration" is just intended in opposition to highly selective immigration policies (e.g., policies which allow highly educated or wealthy people to immigrate). This isn't a criticism or a value judgment, and indeed there's something noble and egalitarian about this.
2. observing that these two goals are contradictory doesn't imply ignobility or foolishness, but rather difficulty of task.
3. I'm not a "right-winger" nor do I have a political tribe. I'm not slinging anything at left-wing people.
The left wants to help people, no matter who they are, and that means supporting both immigration and livable wages; the right only cares about the rich and themselves.
It's zero sum. You're hurting your fellow citizens by diluting their labor. You may think this is a righteous position, but from the perspective of a nationalist, you are strictly harming not helping your fellow countrymen, and therefore you set yourself up as their enemy.
>only cares about
And the prosperity of their own country. It is "selfish" yes. But a selfishness that extends out to their kin and their neighbors. They recognize the world is an arena of competition for scarce resources and power, and so they fight for their community and country to be as prosperous and powerful as possible, because they know foreign nations will do the same for their own people.
See: "Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle" [0],
specifically Figure 5: Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology [1] for a nice visualization of the difference between the moral allocation of right vs left.
> "You're hurting your fellow citizens by diluting their labor"
No more so than having children and growing the population that way, which is a concept the right generally supports ("family values", "pro life").
> "you are strictly harming not helping your fellow countrymen"
It's not like the right do things to help fellow countrymen; taking away rights ("pro choice"), scorning single mothers instead of helping them and their children, demonizing social welfare users as 'welfare queens', opposing 'free' healthcare, oppising livable wages, remove unions and removing the bargaining power workers would need to have good wages otherwise, worsening education and making it less accessible and more expensive. The society their actions move towards is one where wealthy people live off the back of a working class who grind for money and die when they aren't productive anymore, along with a militarised police force acting to keeps the poors in line, and a 'justice' system which lets the rich away without punishment. And you can see it in action when Texas power fails and Ted Cruz takes his family on holiday, or the needlessly cruel treatment the UK Conservative Party's Department for Work and Pensions does to disabled people.
Nationalism isn't "help fellow citizens", it's "given a region drawn on a map, inside good, outside bad".
How many pro immigration leftists live their life as if its no more valuable than anyone else's? .001% maybe.If you wanted to help the global poor sending them American dollars would go a lot further in their own country
Being pro immigration doesn't mean you think all the global poor should move 'here' immediately (wherever 'here' is). leftists are more that people who have moved here should be treated as human, not subhuman.
It's normal to think your life is more important than other people's. It's weird to live in Texas and think people born 50 miles away in Mexico are inferior but people born 1,000 miles away in New York are the same, and people born 1,100 miles away in Canada are inferior. In some sense thinking "I just happened to be born here and this doesn't give me any special status over people who weren't" is one way of living life as if it's no more valuable than anyone elses.
> "their own country"
Why nationalism though? Why should someone born in a "shithole country" be obliged to try and make it better instead of moving away? What should compel them to care about the lines on a map? What should compel me in the UK to feel more connected to someone in Norther Ireland (part of the UK) than someone in the Republic of Ireland a few miles away (part of Europe)? Or less connected to people in Spain, but more connected to people in Gibraltar (part of the UK, on the far side of Spain), or people in the Falkland Islands (part of the UK, South Argentina)?
I dont know who you think you are responding to. The person i was responding too does think anyone and everyone should have carte blanche to immigrate to america. Also please post the part of my comment where i said hispanics should be treated as less than. Third wold Immigrants in america get treated much better than their own country. As they should! Thats why they come here!
The person you were responding to was me. And thinking anyone should be able to immigrate (which I kinda do think) is not the same as thinking everyone ought to immigrate (which I don't think).
> "please post the part of my comment where i said hispanics should be treated as less than"
This bit: "If you wanted to help the global poor sending them American dollars would go a lot further in their own country". You think they are treated better in America than in their home country. You don't think they deserve to go to America and should stay in their home country. How is that not treating them as lesser people, less deserving?
Take a 20 year old America and a 20 year old from imaginary Elbonia. Everyone agrees America is greater than Elbonia. OK, but at age 20 the American contributed literally nothing to the greatness of America, and the Elbonian contributed literally nothing to the corruption and mess of Elbonia. The Elbonian might even live closer to the American border than to the capital of Elbonia. But because lines on a map, the American thinks they deserve the greatness of America and the Elbonian doesn't. The American thinks the Elbonian should take responsibility for fixing Elbonia and the American shouldn't. See the world as one blob of land with only ocean boundaries and people as equals with equal rights, and none of this makes sense.
> The left wants to help people, no matter who they are, and that means supporting both immigration and livable wages
I'm not saying otherwise, I'm observing that in this particular case, mass immigration has a wage suppressing effect which contradicts the "livable wages" goal. Noting the challenge doesn't imply ignobility.
> the right only cares about the rich and themselves
I really don't know what this has to do with the subject.
Counterpoint: right wants free market so that wages rises organically through businesses competing for workers, while the left wants open borders and endless government spending that leads of inflation and lower standard of living which we are experiencing now.
I see you get the entirety of your understanding of history and poltics from an actor with alzheimer's. Maybe you could expand your sources a bit to see that this is a lot less true than you imply.
Well Jeff Bezos wants to help people by supporting mass immigration as his father benefited from “grit, determination, and the support and kindness of people here in the U.S.,” but perhaps there is somebody more opportunistic and less altruistic than Jeff Bezos who might try to take advantage of such policies? Such a person may even lie about their motives.
I'm just a supporter of equity. If your country have a FTA with another country, people from either country should be able to emigrate/immigrate between the two at will. If your country has a quota trade agreement with another country, you can do quotas as long as those respect a relationship with production quota.
I find France, UK and US comportements towards their colonies ('trade partners') unjust.
I'm not trying to malign anyone here. I'm pretty sure more mass immigration is a left-wing opinion, and I thought that much was uncontroversial. I don't understand the distinction you're making between "any immigration" and "mass immigration". The US already allows a lot of immigration.
Sure, but what's the argument? "The left wants some immigration, but not a lot"? Because we already have "some" immigration, so presumably they want more immigration, and presumably they oppose constraining that immigration by education level or wealth or etc, hence "mass".
In other words, "mass" doesn't refer to an amount, but a lack of filtration/selection/etc. Note also that this isn't even an inherently bad thing--there's something noble about wanting America's doors open to everyone: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...".
I don't know what you mean by "what's the argument"?
Policies and the impact (something that should hopefully inform a policy) are more nuanced than just "mass migration" "more migration" and so on. Your understanding seems entirely disconnected from actual policy.
I can't possibly explain something that is going to be different from person to person or politician to politician, even more so if for you it only ends up being categorized in weird generalities that read like they're someone else's rhetoric skewed talking points / loaded phrases. I don't think you can expect to understand something if you just generalize in that way.
> I don't know what you mean by "what's the argument"?
I'm asking "what is your argument?" What argument are you making?
> Policies and the impact (something that should hopefully inform a policy) are more nuanced than just "mass migration" "more migration" and so on.
Of course, and still we speak in shorthand all the time because regurgitating the complete nuance in every single Internet comment is untenable. If "left-wing folks generally support mass immigration" is inaccurate or incomplete, let's talk about that--what nuance am I overlooking?
Likewise, I’ve always found it amusing that right wing business guys pay lip service to being against illegal immigration, yet they move their meat packing plants to nowhere-ville.
"use illegal immigration for meat packing" isn't a broadly-held right-wing position, it's something certain unprincipled business owners do (and I'm not even sure that they're universally right-wing). In contrast, "increasing wages" and "increasing mass immigration" are broadly-held left-wing positions. Again, this doesn't suggest incoherence on the left.
I think your use of the word "mass" is causing a lot of confusion, but I'm not sure who's "fault" it is. According to your edit on your original post, you say you're using it to mean "less selective" immigration, which, to me, is a way different sentence - but it's completely possible this is a domain-specific use of the word "mass" that I am just not familiar with.
Fair enough. The idea was that the left wants to lower the barrier for "asylum seeking" or perhaps just admit more asylum seekers irrespective of their educational value or their ability to support themselves (i.e., minimal selection criteria). This isn't a criticism or value judgment.
Please. It’s deeply embedded in GOP power brokering. Principles are for the mass of idiots.
The only difference today is that after years of taking the votes of reactionaries and doing little, the populist blocs of reactionary voters are the tail wagging the dog.
So what's the idea? Republicans secretly favor the cheap labor that immigration provides, but they obstruct themselves at every turn by opposing said immigration? Anyway, we're talking about "right wing" people generally rather than GOP politicians specifically--these two groups often have somewhat different agendas (yes, even in a representative democracy).
Maybe, but that doesn't support the generalization that this is a broadly-held right-wing position, which is what we were debating. Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies want cheap labor as well.
> Note also that plenty of ostensibly left-wing companies want cheap labor as well.
There are (outside of small local cooperative enterprises) approximately zero left-wing companies in the US.
The things painted as “left-wing” companies by the far right are center-right neoliberal corporate capitalist enterprises that do some mix of opposing far-right culture war efforts as a drag on corporate capitalist exploitation and making PR gestures to the left side of culture war fights while remaining locked in the economic center-right.
Yeah, in the GOP’s current view of the world, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is considered radical leftists, but, that's not reflective of reality.
I think you and I have debated this before, and I think your definition for "left-wing" is pretty different from the general population (and you may think the same about my definition, all good, agree to disagree, etc). Anyway, I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately because I don't think any company actually adheres to an ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing departments say or do, but rather they all comport themselves according to their individual profit motives.
> I said "ostensibly left-wing companies" deliberately because I don't think any company actually adheres to an ideology irrespective of what their PR/marketing departments say or do, but rather they all comport themselves according to their individual profit motives.
Where do you think ideologies come from? One of the most common places is some identifiable group's economic self-interest; neoliberalism is that for the owner class in capitalist society, which is why institutions controlled by that class (especially when they are controlled broadly by that class rather than by an individual member who may have personal quirks) tend to pursue it.
How is it not broadly held? What business is saying “we really wish we could spend more on labor, that would be great!” Politicians on the right have been playing lip service to “illegal immigration” for years. But they all knew just what would happen if they actually did it. Business interest and farmers would crucify them.
Even Trump supporting farmers were complaining about not being able to find anyone.
Just like they were all for the wall until the government started using eminent domain to take their land to build it.
> Politicians on the right have been playing lip service to “illegal immigration” for years. But they all knew just what would happen if they actually did it. Business interest and farmers would crucify them.
It's the same thing with climate change on the left (Democrat politicians never manage to pass any kind of carbon pricing because they know they'd get crucified by business interests), but I wouldn't say that the left-wing broadly opposes carbon pricing.
I don't see that as tribalistic/negative language at all. However, I do see it in the unqualified assertion that left-wing people want "more mass immigration", which seems misleading and tangential to their actual desires (which seem to be more about treating immigrants better and allowing more cases of legitimate asylum seeking, rather than actively seeking "more" and "massive" immigration in the general case). Even just the more innocuous version of that statement - "make immigration easier" - is not even a popular opinion of leftwingers, as far as I can tell.
Edit: Where "popular" means a strong majority. However, I'm speaking totally intuitively. I'm not sure what the reality of the numbers are, and there are so many subtly different opinions one can poll for just be tweaking the wording.
Eh, labels are useful. I don't believe that saying "left/right wingers tend to X" means "the world is black and white" or "everybody is left/right wing and that's all you need to know about them". It's how you use labels that matters. And yeah, a label can get misused so bad that it loses its usefulness in honest discussion, but I think "left/right-wing" is far from that death. It carries too much useful meaning when thoughtfully applied.
Even accepting that "left wing is a tribe", summarizing the views of a tribe (especially in relatively objective terms) isn't the same as engaging in tribalism.
I don't have a political tribe, I'm not a partisan, etc. I was hoping HN would be the one place on the Internet where we could discuss things maturely. Notably, I'm not attacking left-wing people or viewpoints here, but observing that there are two goals that are in apparent conflict (which isn't to say they contradict each other or that they're ignoble or anything else).
You said "left-wing folks typically want ... more mass immigration", which I disagree with, though not with any real authority or conviction (I wrote a separate comment about it). The rub is - coming from most people on the internet at large, I would assume that statement was purposefully uncharitable, but I think on HN, the chances that a person (you, in this case) is being honest are higher (i.e. that your opinion that left-wing people want more mass immigration is derived honestly and holistically to the best of your ability, regardless of whether there is a reasonable argument against it out there somewhere).
Yes, my honest impression is that left-wing people generally (i.e., it's a very popular position on the left) wanted to lower the barrier for "asylum seekers" which implies admitting lots of people without respect to their educational background or skill (hence "mass immigration"). I didn't realize this was controversial (I thought everyone agreed that this is a popular position on the left). This also isn't a value judgment--a conservative might look at that and see unintended consequences (a burden on social services, wage suppression, etc) but a progressive might look at that and see nobility ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" etc).
Ah, yeah, I agree. But I don't agree that that position is tantamount to "supporting mass immigration", by the normal colloquial meaning of that phrase. I think that wording, unqualified as in your original usage, implies antagonism toward the position you're describing (though, as I mentioned in another reply, "mass immigration" might have a domain-specific definition I'm not aware of? Sort of like how "obese" technically refers to a much lower weight than the way we use the word colloquially, and how "mass shooting" can technically mean a victim count as low as three, depending on other circumstances, again contrary to what the typical colloquial threshold probably is in most cases).
"Asylum seeker" is a specific term, for example see this UN glossary: https://www.unhcr.org/449267670.pdf. In particular it's not about huddled masses, it's about people escaping violent situations and active persecution. Putting "asylum seeker" in scare quotes and conflating it with general immigration is a right-wing thing to do. If you don't want people to mistake you for a right-wing partisan then consider just saying "immigration" of whatever type you mean.
I'm sure I'm somewhat imprecise with my terms (I didn't realize I was speaking to a group of immigration lawyers). I've been as clear as I can be, and I can't force anyone to understand against their will. Good day.
Some parts of the right have advocated for more skilled immigration, which would tend to equalize wages across the board (mitigating a non-trivial cause of inequality) while raising fewer social concerns compared to the unregulated immigration of lower-skill workers. Unfortunately, many left-wing folks tend to oppose such proposals, with the usual 'they tuk er jerbs!!1' arguments. Just look at the reactions here at HN anytime the subject of H1B visas is brought up.
I'm not sure that H1B visas are a particularly politically polarized position. I could easily see people on the right arguing against H1B visas on the basis that we should keep American jobs for Americans. I don't think there's broad agreement on H1Bs on the right?
Both the left and the ring wing voters despise work visa programs. There are a few in the US, only H1B's get the hate since it is the most used of all work visa programs, and highly publicized as well.
You should be forthright and acknowledge that H1Bs fill white collar jobs at below market rates. This obviously doesn't apply to agriculture (and other) work visas.
They probably do in crappy places. I am an H1B, work in HFT and can say that in big tech and HFT's, H1B's are paid fairly well, probably in the top tier.
BTW, the L1 visa is even worse. The people bought in via that visa are also paid below market rates, and they are not even allowed to change companies on that visa.
My issue is that people love to shit talk about us, and forget there are other visas, like the L1, that are crappier. Worse is, when some lump all of us "H1B? They are probably low paid", and then I and many of my friends chuckle when we look at we are paid.
Left wingers overwhelmingly support immigration of poor people, from poor nations. They think these people would benefit the most out of immigrating to the US. They too, like the right wingers, despise white collar workers immigrating here, since that'd mean more competition for high paying jobs.
They know that recent immigrants from poorer countries, do not have the education and English language skills to break into white collar jobs, and will mostly work in low paying jobs for their whole career. The white collar immigrants can break into all these jobs, and that is something that they see as a danger.
You'll be surprised how many people are looking for a job and these companies know the numbers. That's the reason why they dictate the process. In some countries there's just not enough population to fill all the vacancies so the workers dictate the terms. eg South Korea.
They can only increase pay so much before they have to increase their fees beyond the point people are willing to pay them. As an anecdote, I have completely stopped using DoorDash because they recently increased their fees to a level that I consider to be absurd.
DoorDash costs have always been absurd, they just hide a lot of it by pricing the food higher than it normally is.
I've noticed our grocery delivery services doing that, too, giving us prices on items that are higher than they are if you go to the store yourself. We'll stop using them soon. It's bullshit. Delivery costs ought to be transparent.
[EDIT] Oh, and places like pizza joints that already had delivery service are starting to get a lot more aggressive about differentiating delivery vs. pick-up pricing. They've long had a deal or two at a time that's carry-out only, but now it's all the decent deals, and even some deals specify that they'll be less-good if you order delivery. Delivery can easily be 40% more expensive than carry-out, as a result, because they also still charge the delivery fees they all started tacking on a decade or so ago (which are also higher, now) and you still, despite already potentially paying $10+ more than you would have for carry-out, have to tip, because most of that money's not making it to the delivery driver.
I have to believe that a large portion of delivery markup is price discrimination. Restaurants have long looked for ways to charge more to people who are willing to pay more, but have been largely unable to because everyone gets the same menu. Delivery provides a convenient way to weed out those that will pay more by letting those who aren't pick up the food themselves.
It seems like most of the prices are either equivalent to the restaurant's prices, or only slightly higher. But when I compare DoorDash to UberEats, with the food prices being the same, I have seen $10+ differences in the final total. That's when I dropped DoorDash.
I just know that a couple years back when I had a couple "free delivery!" coupons from DoorDash, I struggled to make use of it in a way that wasn't a rip-off, because the food prices were so much higher than their usual menu price. In the end, to make it any kind of actual bargain, I had to be careful to order only very small amounts (one or two things), and avoid many menu items entirely. That got it down to being about the same as picking up, plus tip, which made it useful. Otherwise I was still paying a large premium for delivery, despite "free delivery".
It is not a given that all service economy business models will survive. Historically as goods got cheaper relative to labor, service prices rose. In poor countries service jobs such as doorman or shaver are much more common than in rich countries. The classic example is that below a certain income level, the majority of men start to have their faces professionally shaved rather than doing it themselves.
Having another person spend 15-30 minutes in a high stress situation to deliver you food should be a high cost activity that gets more expensive relative to your income over time. Traditional delivery services only made this cost effective by making food for low cost. The alternative is an economy where wages cannot rise relative to goods.
I'm not sure how much food delivery should cost. Though most local restaurants around me seen to do it for free (and tipping isn't expected, in fact it would be a struggle, most drivers drop the food and run now).
I'm not naive enough though not to notice that it's all done under the table. Few are paying tax or commercial insurance on their vehicles to do restaurant delivery.
I'm pretty sure doing it legitimately costs a reasonable amount. Doubly so when you aren't just trying to get your food to your customers but also paying a bunch of developers Silicon Valley wages to try to capture the entire market before someone else does.
There is no “how much it should cost”. If there are a lot of people who do not have better opportunities in life, then it will be lower priced. If people have access to better opportunities than spending time delivering food, then it will be higher priced.
When my family goes to their homes in a developing country, they have drivers and cooks and maids, because there is a huge supply of poorer people willing and able to do those things for a sufficiently low price for my family.
When they return to the US, they have to do all of that themselves, because there is not a huge supply of poorer people willing and able to do those things for a sufficiently low price.
Same thing applies to being able to shop on a Sunday evening, or get a burrito at 11PM, or 2 day delivery. I like seeing fast food stores closed due to insufficient labor, because that means the people that used to have to do those jobs for menial wages now have a better option.
Same. My last doordash order was for 20 dollars of food and after tip (the suggested) it came to over double the original food cost. That's just not sustainable for anyone.
I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effort to buy direct from a vendor, but more often than not the experience is so horrible that I go right back to Amazon.
You should try walmart.com for ordering... they stepped up their game... it's not uncommon for them to do 3 deliveries for a $35 order with free shipping to get you the stuff as fast as possible... Most of the time I wish they would combine items to avoid the waste but that's what they do.
Yeah, I've considered Walmart, but it kind of defeats the purpose for me. It doesn't do a lot of good to replace one monopolistic behemoth with a different monopolistic behemoth.
I don't think there is a small mom & pop one stop shop, but if you are willing to buy different things from different stores, you have options. I buy most of my electronics from B&H, and things like fasteners from McMaster-Carr.
Amazon does feel pretty unavoidable for the long tail, though.
I'm surprised that these specialty retailers have not banded together to form some kind of syndicate with a common web front end to take orders. That sort of thing could be an Amazon-killer. Combined with a doordash-like delivery service it could offer same-day delivery and reliable product vetting.
Isn't that kind of what Shopify, Fast, and some other company that I only heard off because they laid off half their staff doing?
I haven't researched the industry extensively, but I'm guessing that companies like to keep customer data to themselves and curate what they think is the ideal checkout experience. (Everyone should copy McMaster, though.) That's why you see companies happy to delegate the financing involved in buying their products to credit card companies, but still make their own website/checkout/fulfillment rather than letting, say, Amazon do that for them. (Shopify does seem to have quite a lot of traction, however.)
None of those companies are syndicates, i.e. none of them are owned by the retailers they represent. They're trying to just be middlemen. That won't work.
For the record, being on the other side, and working hard to CREATE these experiences that customers love is absolutely addictive and intoxicating.
You have to actually give a shit about it though. Which most of us do. It requires effort and grit to have this level of "customer obsession", and to be fair, I would say we are mostly well compensated for it.
But it's not for everyone. Plenty of SDEs, including in this market just want to punch in and punch out, and not meaningfully move the bar forward. That's probably OK.
It's not good enough for me. My work is 1/3 of my life, 1/2 of my waking life. That better be fucking meaningful and significant.
You'd be surprised, you might enjoy working here too.
Kudos to you. If you think it's a fair deal, more power to you. I'll sleep better at night knowing that you feel like you're not being exploited, and that you're being fairly compensated for the work you do.
But I've heard too many horror stories to ever take that risk myself.
This comment isn't directed to you specifically, but the many many others who feel the same.
"What have you got to lose?"
By that I mean, we're in a hot tech market. If it doesn't work out, you can likely find a job elsewhere with ease.
OK, but we're about to hit a recession. I'd venture Amazon is a lot safer than many other tech companies to ride out a recession in - the core business (cloud and retail) is fundamentally sound. The company is only ever not profitable when it chooses not to be because it invests all gains into new R&D and lines of business. When things tighten in the market, Amazon refocuses on core optimizations, and realizes massive profits again. Certainly I can't predict layoffs or no layoffs, but noone can, at any company.
I am probably not alone, but I use Amazon.com about twice a year. Pretty much only when I don't have time to wait for something, or if there is a ludicrous deal. It's obviously harder to get what I want, but I just think about the counterfeit items and the slave labor in the warehouse.
Of course I use AWS everyday at my job. I think of it like Amish people using power tools at their job.
Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have plenty of strong opinions about how they treat their workers and have no desire to work for such a company, but I was surprised to find that I did sympathize with them to an extent - it's not just about offering better pay and bathroom breaks, they're also on the verge of exhausting the viable labor market. I wish whoever took the job the best of luck - I hope that they're taking the research effort seriously and it's not just performance art.
The article suggests they are on the verge of exhausting the labor supply because they can't get anyone to stay for more than a couple years though, because so many people have already been there and left -- and that this has in the past been intentional on the employer's part, to only keep workers for a couple years.
If true, that puts a different light on things -- how the combination of having such a large labor force and a strategy to intentionally have high turnover combine to exhaust the labor supply, sure.
Oh don't get me wrong, much of it is definitely the result of their policies and could have been avoided if they hadn't treated their labor force like a discardable, consumable resource for years. I just thought it was interesting to see something pop up in the news that echoes what I got a glimpse of a few months ago - that Amazon is starting to recognize that they have a problem on their hands (finally). Just thinking about it in dispassionate scientific terms, it's a fascinating and unique problem - it might be too late for them to pivot and shift back towards "sustainable" practices, and if they fail I'm certainly going to enjoy the schadenfreude, but I'm really curious to see how they attempt to deal with all this.
>I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers.
Some companies take pride in promoting from within. McDonald's is well known for turning entry-level workers into store mangers, then regional managers, and so on. Walmart does this, too.
I mean, that's definitely a huge factor, but there IS a limit to how much Amazon can pay their hundreds of thousands of workers and still remain competitive - and I have NO idea where that threshold is, which is why I'm fascinated to see how this shakes out. Either Amazon workers start getting treated better which is great, or the company collapses and turns into an unprecedented case study of what not to do. Either way, I'm grabbing some popcorn!
As many others have said, there's no shortage of labor in the US; there's a shortage of pay.
Like many others, Bezos built his business by exploiting a temporary condition: A virtually infinite supply of people willing to accept a horrible job for low pay. That condition no longer exists, but Bezos didn't realize it was unsustainable (it's unsustainable because if all workers are paid shit wages they can't afford to be customers). Or maybe he did realize it which is why he retired. In any case, now Amazon is panicking.
Good. When I think about this along with their other dick moves like pushing cheap Chinese counterfeit products, encouraging fake reviews, and stealing third-party product designs just because they can, I now check Amazon's competitors first when I buy something online.
Amazon has 1.6 MILLION employees based on its last financial report, with 1.1 million in the US. Basically 1% of the US labor force currently works for Amazon.
They're really pushing the limits of their work force. I think slowing the pace down a smidge in the warehouse and not burning everyone out would really help them keep it sustainable.
Destroy all the other companies in the world and then you'll be earths best employer, why be better when you have the power to make things universally worse.
> An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy. “We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him.
>>“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024”
At what price point?
Offering what working conditions?
>> "...the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."
Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and pay better wages, and benefits?
Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and make better rules that are not attempting to run employees like running machines at 105% of redline for every shift, e.g., so they don't have to make a choice between making their performance numbers and urinating in a bottle in the delivery truck?
These are likely seen as crazy ideas, but perhaps they should get ahead of the curve and make an attractive place to work instead of trying to treat Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times as a "How To Manage" work...
The combination of arrogance and utter out-of-touch cluelessness of management/MBAs, thinking everything runs just on their numbers, never ceases to amaze. Just because you can optimize one or two numeric parameters does not mean you are getting closer to your goal.
and how do they plan on bringing all of them? There are 85,000 new H1B visas in a given year, and they cannot be used for warehouse workers. The work visas are mainly for white collar jobs, and the only way then can bring a ton of foreign workers is from Amazon offices overseas, via the L-1 work visa, and that is not that easy since they need to maintain headcount to support the use of Amazon services in those countries.
H1B visas are for workers in the tech sector, but they have other visas for other purposes. H2A visas are for temporary/seasonal agricultural workers, H2B visas for temporary workers in non agricultural fields.
So they could be shipped in via H2B visas, or they could lobby for some new kind of temporary worker visa.
In Canada we've already seen similar - McDonalds (and other similar businesses) offers non-living wages for work, and when they can't find workers for low wages, the canadian government lets them ship in temporary foreign workers to run their fast food restaurants because 'there's no workers at the market (non livable) wage'.
With programs like these the free market for labour dies. Why are wages low? because companies can offer extremely low wages and when no one bites, ship in temporary workers.
They are just running out of clique members to hire. I've had interviews at Amazon where the setup was hostile from get go, and it was evident the hiring team was looking to recruit their friends which they eventually probably did. All the other interviews are just padding/process tick marks for that one profile.
Every time I shop at Amazon I have a bad conscience about supporting such a worker-hostile company. Well the turnover they get from me has been well under 100 € / yr. for many years. And I have monthly AWS bill over $5 for some Lightsail stuff. Should move to some smaller player, but it's more work.
I guess this implied people are burned out by working in these warehouses and they will have churned through EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES who might have considered it. Quite a feat. Maybe finally allow people bathroom breaks rather than peeing in bottles? Or just develop more robots.
Amazon designed its warehouses from the very beginning to have it workers be completely replaceable. By not letting them make any decisions, instead just mindlessly doing what the computer says, they can easily plug and play new hires with minimal training. The end goal is pretty obviously to not have any warehouse workers, and making their jobs as simple and repetitive as possible probably makes them easier to automate.
Arguably the largest company in the world is depleting its own potential labor pool around all of its facilities, due to the sheer cruelty of how it treats its workers.
The assumption has been that there's always more workers, so who cares if you burn them all out before the year is over? Just get some more. But Amazon has unprecedented scale and an unprecedented (sustained) attrition rate, which means they are heading into uncharted territory. Maybe there aren't always more bodies to burn through.
When things like these happen, it's time to consider regularly using terms like "megacorporation" in earnest.
I quit after orientation, spent the whole time arguing that their ten principles were contradictory, whilst the broken remnants of Microsoft's silicon valley campus sat there, happy to have whatever crumbs Amazon were throwing them. When I told my manager I wouldn't be staying, he congratulated me!! Your can see it in their products, mediocrity by design.
This isn't just their warehouse workers, their delivery drivers (many through partner companies) have been struggling with this for a while. They grind through employees fast. Drivers will sometimes just leave their keys in the ignition and walk off the job.
There was a lot of speculation that this is why they dropped the drug testing requirement last year.
I heard a rumor that Amazon is flying people in from out of the country to work for $15hr. However, I did a search and cannot find any documentation on this. 22mins into this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dBTcY8nvg
That person is not reputable, a fact that was easy to confirm in minutes just by googling their name and finding them peddling 'Obama's birth certificate is fake' nonsense as recently as 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJTmIDuCMFk&t=2s
Maybe potential candidates finally understand how much worse their life gets in the US if they don’t speak English, and they won’t have money to go back to latin america.
"It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024"
yes, by 2024 the number of people willing to piss in bottles for peasant wages in unconditioned warehouses with no healthcare or time off will certainly become problematic.
Don't know about the US, but it would be illegal in many countries if workers don't reach the minimum wage despite working full-time. Of course they could fire slow workers (at least in the US, in Europe it's often not that easy), but then they are back at the problem of the submission: running out of workers
With the imminent crypto implosion there will be a lot of people with any kind of exposure to crypto (as workers, investors or something) looking for a job. A short stint in the warehouse would do them good.
Funnily enough, I got paid 100$ to do a 20 minutes survey that was asking hiring questions (which fang would you apply for and why) and it was just a pretest to have someone from Aws trying to recruit you.
A lot of businesses are like that, particularly telemarketing and low skill. Churn and burn. It almost feels like the pornography industry at times, every day someone turns 18.
Good! They can raise wages and give better benefits and treat workers better. It's really not that hard when you have billions of dollars laying around.
Amazon has flipped the script, replacing inefficient and overly sympathetic human management with software-based micro-managers. This leaves the rank and file as meat-based robots to follow narrowly scripted programming.
They've also automated a lot of the physical work; you should watch a video of how their warehouses operate. But as of yet many physical tasks cannot be easily automated -- but they can be cheaply acquired if you are willing and able to treat human labor as machines. Until recently at least.
As to the second question though, I have a completely different thought. I think it's just that given a choice, most people will choose more money rather than more free time, up to a point. I think most people in urban office jobs could find a way to work less, earn less, and spend less; I certainly could. But it just runs counter to human nature.
What the memo doesn’t account for is what will happen when the Fed Reserve is adamant about bringing demand destruction with their interest rate hikes.
If you really are, my recommendation is to get stern with your responses. I got them to stop for a little while by just asking them to stop, and then to stop entirely by asking again while mentioning who I sent my previous request to. Like "Hi John, please stop contacting me", and then a few months later like "Hi Steve, a few months ago I asked John Doe (johndoe@) to stop contacting me". The second step seems to have been the trick.
Surely at some point the market will just regulate itself and amazon will have to improve working conditions to keep operations running... Right? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
The online perception is that it has only gotten worse. It doesn't take much to find stories on teamblind, twitter, reddit, or even hackernews about hire to fire, stack ranking/pip, and even just general mental abuse.
I mean just read this excerpt from the article about a working needing to go see a dentist about an infected tooth:
> The problem, he said, was that he only had seven hours of unpaid time off but ended up missing 20 hours of work; he had enough paid vacation time to cover the absence, but he said the company did not pull from that separate bank of days because Pagan would have had to apply for vacation time in advance. Pagan said he also had a doctor’s note but was told the company did not need to accept it as an excuse, even though he had been excused from work with a doctor’s note previously. He said he worked for another full week without issue, until he showed up one night for his overnight shift and his badge no longer worked. He was eventually told he had been terminated.
At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency? [1]
>> It's kind of interesting because Amazon has built a reputation for being absolutely ruthless to their workers (not just delivery or warehouse).
Even if Amazon changed their policies, I'd be cautious about any AMZN managers or directors. The fact that they survived there, or thrived, means they are probably ruthless and I wouldnt want to work with such an individual (or hire them, for that matter.)
> At what point do we simply ask if Amazon leaders have no sense of decency?
We don't need to ask, we already know. Actions speak louder than words anyway, and we've all seen how they treat all their workers: from warehouse to corporate. One would be a bit naive to think only their warehouse workers get treated badly, corporate workers are slapped around just as much in their own way.
> Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment from Amazon’s internal safety responders.
> Bill was laying there for 20 minutes and nobody nearby saw until an Amnesty worker with a radio came by.
> A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it
> “After the incident, everyone was forced to go back to work. No time to decompress. Basically watch a man pass away and then get told to go back to work, everyone, and act like it’s fine,”
> Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”.
Amazon will just keep doing what it's doing because it can. Like you mentioned, online perception has gotten worse ever since that 2015 article, so clearly they just don't care about anything other than profit. Warehouse workers have had enough, they're pushing back by organizing their rights collectively. But so should corporate workers, we shouldn't have to keep watch over our shoulders every time we go to work in fear of PIP, or even at the interview stage where we have to suspect if we're getting "hired to be fired".
But yeah even as a software engineer I'm often torn about wanting to work for Amazon. They have quite a few interesting projects and the pay is solid, but there are a lot of horror stories out there that suggest it is a brutal place to work even for engineers.
When I interviewed for Amazon, they had an online screen that was basically asking which employee should be fired based on the metrics in a table. I'm all for firing bad employees, productivity matters, but it does seem like the culture promotes looking for people to fire.
Always remember there are many sides to most stories. I have a cousin who works at an Amazon warehouse and loves it, he says it’s the funnest and most rewarding job he has had. He’s in his late 40s and has worked all kinda of jobs. His schedule allows him a lot of work life balance, he knows exactly what is expected of him and advancement is possible and also easy to understand. In fact he said he doesn’t understand the hate aside from lazy people that have no work ethic complaining they are being asked to actually work, and work hard, consistently. If it was as terrible as some articles make it sound, I’d doubt they’d have so many employees.
Exactly, it means nothing to me when some workers say they're ok with their job when I see evidence dozens upon dozens of their coworkers are abused. It means nothing because I have no reason to assume they won't turn back on their employers once they have a conflict as well. It merely signals a lack of solidarity and nothing else.
I find it disgusting that you think you can take someone's few sentence anecdote about their cousin and think that you know better than both of them about what is good for them.
I don't need many sides of a story when there is one damning example of a human needing to see a medical professional then getting fired shortly after because no leader at Amazon took 5 seconds to think if this was compassionate or not.
Why should I give Amazon the benefit of the doubt when they have proven time and time again to be actively hostile and dehumanizing? Maybe we should expect Amazon to not treat their fellow humans as some flesh automaton and just be decent for a change.
This was a successful worker that missed a few days of work with a medical issue, boom fired. And then we see memos like this lamenting that they can't get enough workers? By not accepting some productivity dips due to human nature, they're shrinking their labor pool both by removing people from it directly and with the sentiment generated by the bad press of their inhumane treatment of workers.
I've worked ~5 low skill jobs that meet this description. It is the norm, not the exception. At least in Canada.
Jobs advertised as permanent full-time where they can you on the last day they are allowed to are also very common.
Also, my co-workers at these jobs were 90% lazy slobs who did maybe 25% of the load I would while getting paid the same amount. No amount of write ups would alter their behaviour.
The guy in the parent comments story loved working at amazon too, until he needed his tooth removed and showed up to work one day to learn that his badge no longer worked.
Skip sense of decency this is just downright stupid: a worker with an urgent medical issue needed time off for it. They had accrued leave, but you don't let them take it. They resolve the issue, come back to work and then you fire then anyway...and what, now have to train a new person up? What the hell was gained by any of that?
>" You could argue the reason is that they weren’t good enough. "
This is a valid possibility. However, companies that enforce churn through up-or-out and stack ranking tend to end up treating employees ruthlessly in order to satisfy the system. There are no shortage of stories where managers and individuals backstab and sabotage each other so that they aren't automatically fired as part of the culling process. There are plenty of 'just fine' employees out there, yet companies like Amazon act like everyone needs to be above average.
That’s quite the conclusion to jump to. I was mere pointing out that maybe some of the churn is justifiable? Most companies have churn, but everyone wants to point fingers at Amazon for what are otherwise normal and accepted business practices.
Can you please justify the "churn" stated in the article about a worker needing to see a medical professional due to an infected tooth, then shortly getting fired one week after the event automatically with zero conversations between him and his superior?
Mind you this is a worker that was meeting all the bullshit metrics Amazon foisted upon him. His only mistake was being human and needing to see a dentist.
I should ask you this yourself, do you have any decency?
YesI have plenty of decency. I take it you don’t own a business nor work in management. And probably think rules don’t apply to you. You might want to reread the thread, otherwise i think your reading comprehension is low. My original comment was in response to a comment mentioning more than a single worker, but thanks for playing.
For a maximal hypercapitalist corporation? Well, yeah.
For as long as they are (seen as) trivially replaceable, an employee that sees a doctor, or has health concerns, or uses benefits of any kind, or really has any slip in their productivity even to the slightest degree is a poorer worker than one that doesn't.
This stops working if you run out of people to hire, or if the cost of hiring increases past a certain threshold.
It is the most rational way for the dominant corporation in the current economic system to act, if they can get away with it.
> "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers."
This is just wrong. First, Amazon’s prices and their wages for warehouse workers aren’t directly connected. If they were, amazon wouldn’t have posted 200B in profit in 2021. Given the 1.6mil employees, that’s $125k per employee of profit. Amazon could pay MUCH more, and still hold the same prices.
Second, the hunger for cheap stuff is driven at least in part BY LOW WAGES. If you’re making minimum wage - you’re going to buy the cheapest things you can find.
edit: i'm getting beat up in the comments because I used gross profits rather than $YOUR_FAV_PROFIT_METRIC
I stand by using that number. If you think I am actually suggesting they distribute 100% of their profits to every employee you're straw-manning my point. I'm suggesting cutting a slice off profits, exec pay, and stock grants, and giving that to the lowest paid employees - since the company would not make that money without their labor.
A significant portion of Amazon profits comes from AWS. If you remove AWS from the equation, AWS does make money, but not the truckloads you are pointing. And AWS profits are in now way linked to amazon warehouse workers salaries.
If Amazon increases wages - and thus prices - what do you think will happen:
1. People will still buy amazon because they have a higher wage so they ca afford it
2. People will buy more stuff from another store that provides cheaper prices while exploiting Chinese workers instead of American ones.
And note that Walmart/Target/Home Depot/ and all the other retail public companies have profit margins of low single digits. It is safe to assume Amazon has the same low single digit profit margins from its retail operations.
There is no reason to ignore fixed costs (aka using “gross profit”) for the purpose of calculating how much extra cash a company could be paying its employees. Net income (aka profit) is the extra cash flow that could have been spent.
> Net income (aka profit) is the extra cash flow that could have been spent.
It's possible gross profit is the wrong metric, but the premise that net income is the right metric isn't something I accept. Net income is the money left over after it's been allocated out as the company has chosen. i.e. all the salaries have been paid, stock grants have been made, buildings and utilities are all paid, stock buybacks have been allocated, etc
If they allocated a little less to exec pay, and a little more to warehouse worker pay, I don't even think they'd need to cut into the 33B they have leftover.
But EVEN if we accept the compensation amazon has and only allow ourselves to play with net income - 33B is STILL $20k per employee. Do you know how life-changing $5k/year is when you're making 29k/year? That still leaves 15K of profit per employee (or 25B) that can go to people who didn't work for it.
Net income is all the money left after all the expenses are paid. Stock buybacks have no impact on net income (they are part of the cash flow statement, not the income statement).
Excluding all the things you said to get to the metric you like means Amazon can function without executives, software developers (no stock grant expenses), warehouses (no buildings and utilities expenses).... Which is plainly not true.
Yes, I agree, your straw-man is plainly false. Amazon does need executives, software developers, and warehouses.
Amazon is a functioning + profitable business. If it can't continue to be a functioning + profitable business if it pays every employee a good wage, it doesn't deserve to exist anymore - it needs to die to make room for a business that CAN do that. But I don't actually think that amazon has to exploit its workers in order to stay profitable, and I think the numbers (at very least the 33B in net profits) back me up.
You are welcome to start your own Amazon competitor with however much profit you would like.
If you are willing to accept less profit than Amazon, then you should be able to steal customers and employees by offering lower prices and better quality of life at work.
Same goes for Walmart/Target/any other retail business.
Maybe all the execs at these established retail businesses working for decades know what they are doing. Or maybe people posting on the internet know how they could be running the business better and delivering goods and services at lower prices and paying workers more.
If I were a betting man, I would bet that you would soon find profit margins are about as low as they can get for retail businesses and the competition very stiff.
> I think the numbers (at very least the 33B in net profits) back me up.
That profit is coming from AWS, Amazon video, and from the commission they collect from 3rd party sellers, not their retail operations.
By the way, I am all for better labor laws and higher quality of life at work laws. I just do not see the point of criticizing individual businesses, especially those running at low profit margins with no moat. They are obviously in cutthroat competition already, otherwise the profit margins would be higher.
The point of my criticism is to show that we can do better without losing same day delivery. These companies are exploitive, and the more people who see that the more likely it is to change in one of three ways:
Through public pressure. I don’t buy from amazon anymore because of this.
Through government action. But given how partisan politics in the usa are, i wouldn’t hold my breath.
Through action from workers. Unionization and work stoppages. I think this is the most likely and the most healthy option for our society.
If you want to be a bystander while people’s lives get chewed up and spat out so a few people can get rich, that’s on your conscience.
No idea where you are getting your numbers, but Amazon did not post $200B in profit in 2021. The list of top five annual profit (adjusted to current USD) by any company ever is:
1. Saudi Aramco (2018) - $120B
2. Saudi Aramco (2021) - $115B
3. Vodafone (2014) - $113B
4. Fannie Mae (2013) - $98B
5. Apple (2021) - $95B
Hello Kenny - some clarification seems to be needed re: some financial metrics.
1. Gross profit = revenue - COGS
2. COGS = price paid to manufacturer + transportation costs from manufacturer to the warehouse and from warehouse to customer
COGS does not include warehouse rent and utilities - these are operating expenses.
Hopefully this makes it clear that my reply to your other comment was in good faith and not a straw man. The metric you proposed is not a good metric. Amazon cannot function if Gross profit is 0 --- because it would not be able to pay for the rest of the stuff it needs to function: executives, software developers, warehouses. Saying all the expenses not included in COGS are discretionary is just not true - some of theses expenses are essential.
I could use one of your numbers, $33B net income, or $60B EBITDA. But using those number accepts the premise that all of that money was allocated correctly, and it's just the 33B left over that is free to be distributed.
It's simple, just apply modern capitalism. In this case the rule is: Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product. Anyone else who makes that realization is a dirty commie.
>Ford was a genius for realizing his workers need to make enough to buy his product
In what world does it make sense to pay your workers $20k (or whatever), so they can spend $20k on products that your company makes? Factoring in margins you need each dollar paid to your workers to generate $6.66 dollars worth of sales for you for it to break even.
...except that won't happen because supply/demand drives prices, not the inflated wages that you're paying. Your competitors will continue to pay their workers the usual wages, and laugh all the way to the bank with the extra money that they're not spending on wages, or undercut your prices.
Supply and demand also applies to the labour market. If you pay more, the best people want to work for you and you can hire the best people. Humans are not fungible, no matter how much businesses try to treat them that way.
Cars are this big advertising moving billboard. Car companies employee thousands who work in cities built around these plants. Having employees driving around earning high paying wages spending it around town has a big influence on the rest of the town/region.
seems tenuous and hard to objectify. You could also use the same argument to say that raining $5 bills from your company offices has net positive value, eg.
1. dump a sack of $5 bills from your office
2. people associate your company with giving them free stuff, thereby giving you positive influence
It can but each situation requires a multiplier. A $10,000 cash drop as a media story picked up nationally or regionally will be worth more.
In Ford's case he doubled the daily pay to 5 dollars but this also provided a steady workforce so it had other benefits because a steady workforce means a trained and more productive workforce.
Exactly—it's entirely infeasible to live in the modern world and keep up with every step of the supply chain for every product and service you use, even if the information were readily available, which it very much is not. It's not even close to being possible.
That's what laws setting floors on how shitty product-safety/work-conditions/worker-pay/et c. can get, are for. Doesn't work so hot in a world where we grant MFN (or whatever it's called now) trade status to authoritarian states with weak worker, consumer, and environmental protections, though.
Unions were supposed to protect workers, at least in theory, but they were more than happy to off-shore manufacturing and allow layoffs in the US --as long as they got to keep their union boss jobs. Cesar Chavez understood this. This is why he did not want just anybody to be able to work in the fields.
It's all related. You wanna pay less by offshoring labor? You got it! But one day that off-shoring is going to come get you and your job will evaporate and you will be happy with service sector jobs. And don't complain, you didn't want to pay $70 for a shirt and instead went to buy a $20 shirt and "saved" money but "sold" your job or the underemployed person's job now driving a clunker.
Working at an Amazon warehouse sounds terrible in every way, but… did you see those spiral package slides in the background? Might give up my sweet tech job just to ride on those.
They're known to have such crazy warehouse shifts that people unofficially carry piss bottles with them.
They're also known to be a crap place to work at the high end for the educated workforce and the best I have heard is "Get in, get out, pump your resume and leave as fast as you can"
Amazon's scale encounters limits that most companies don't ever have to consider. There's a parallel from 20ish years ago: Amazon eschewed software performance engineering with the mantra "if it can be solved with a credit card [i.e. you can buy more hardware] don't worry about it now". That worked up to the day they called the company that made their database server and asked to upgrade and were told "you already have the most powerful machine we've ever built".
A lot of big companies went through that, I've seen presentations about eBay running out of scaling room on their Oracle servers in their boom.
Otoh, maximum database server today is a ton bigger. Looking at just Supermicro, you can get 8 TB ram in a dual Epyc server, and 24 TB in exotic, but still off the shelf systems. You can get a lot of qps with 24 TB of ram and a whole bunch of cores.
If you go with Oracle, they'll sell you a Sparc server with 48 TB of ram, and 384 CPU cores.
Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.
So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.