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Comment by quantumhobbit | Hacker News Reader

Most of that increase is in warehouse and "fulfillment" workers.

I wonder what changes tech employment at Amazon has seen since the NYTimes article a year or so ago.

They just rolled out a new annual review process (starting this month) and changed rules around switching teams and such.

I don't know how much of that is a result of the article though.

Im personally not a fan of the new review & promo process. There seem to be some obvious, and some hidden, risks. In my opinion it reduces depth of the content, breadth of the review, and broader exposure/evaluation inside the org.

The "new" transfer policy is actually from 2015 or 2016. Historically transfers in less than 1 year of employment required senior manager approval. New policy is free to transfer after 30 days. As I recall. For details see inside/wiki/

There are also changes in the SDE1 to SDE2 promo process and SDE leveling/coaching/role normalization across amazon.

From what I saw of timing and content neither change was strictly related to the nyt article.

Source: Principal Engineer in AWS, coming up on 6 years at amazon, a few years doing tech/promo assessments.

Maybe you can tell me why their recruiters for AWS are the worst to deal with? Terrible people, I wish they would stop hitting me up...

Good. Humans are wasted on such mundane tasks. I am sure many of those people, given the opportunity, could do far greater things for humanity than picking books and consumer electronics off shelves and put them in boxes.

However we need to make sure as such jobs are automated away that we give the people who would do those jobs the opportunities to become more with training and education.

Half the population has an IQ at or below 100. That sounds great on it's face, but what would you train and educate the bottom half to do?

I am not saying they can all be doctors or other very high aptitude roles but I have no doubt they can learn new skills that will enable them to do more productive things with their minds than warehouse work for example.

I don't have an answer to be honest though and I am not sure [m]any people do right now. It is a difficult problem but one we need to discuss and work on a solution for. I don't feel a universal basic income is the answer like some have suggested. Not that I am against UBI as part of a bigger solution but it is my personal opinion that a mind wasted is a tragic thing.

> I am not saying they can all be doctors or other very high aptitude roles but I have no doubt they can learn new skills that will enable them to do more productive things with their minds than warehouse work for example.

I have less faith than you that the market will value those new skills at the same level.

The Rust Belt in the US is the example I would point to. No job has appeared in those areas to absorb those people who would have been working in the mills or the mines.

I'm no romanticist. Those jobs sucked.

However, the market valued those jobs rather well at the time. Nothing has come along since that valued those people at the same level.

Grow food, learn an instrument, how to paint, build something.

Not all "work" in life should be based around mercantilism.

Agreed, but the problem is that the economy can't support the citizenry. Learning an instrument is unlikely to change that for someone who doesn't have a job.

Let me guess, you took a test and are in the upper half?

there is no bottom half. there is only a group of people that don't perform well on IQ tests. what should they do? whatever they want. humans are free, inherently. maybe a lot of them would fuck up or become idle. or maybe not. they might find much better ways to use their time and talents (which are substantial, if not well represented by what is tested for on an IQ test) if they didn't have to pick books off of shelves to make rent money.

> I am sure many of those people, given the opportunity, could do far greater things for humanity than picking books and consumer electronics off shelves and put them in boxes.

If they could, they'd be doing them.

So, what's the plan?

1) Robot unemployment

2) Freedom!

3) ???something something training???

4) Utopia

I prefer to not assume that I know what's better for people than they do themselves, so I'd rather they did far greater things for themselves before I worried about humanity's loss.

That said, there are many people who enjoy mindless jobs like that.

Tech has probably increased 20-25% YoY, as it has for a while. Alexa and AWS especially are basically hiring as fast as they can get people to move to Seattle. More remote offices are opening/expanding to make up the difference.

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