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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Hmm this is an interesting anecdote to compare against the view ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29459245 ) that:

> In the Earnings Call in July of this year, they said they now employe 950,000 warehouse workers. They're probably over the 1 MM mark right now due to the holidays. Yes, there are plenty of people working there that are overqualified, but that is the beauty of what Amazon is doing. Their onboarding and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance.

I guess if you hire 500,000 people per year and 99% of people have an excellent onboarding process there will be 5,000 bad stories?

View on HN

I doubt it's as low as 1%. If you hire half a million people in a year, it's pretty much guaranteed a lot of the people involved won't know what they're doing. Many of the HR and recruiting people will be new too.

That's... not an anecdote?

Also, fun math question: if they have 1MM workers, and hire 500k every year, what is their turnover rate?

The number I heard reported recently was 150 percent a year, but I don’t have a source handy for that claim.

If you hire 500,000 people per year, you may be rejecting 500,000 people per year. Where and how you reject them may also be bad stories.

At what workforce size/turnover do you run into the issue that you might churn through your entire countrywide hiring pool?

New ones born every year?

There was a new article a few months ago about Amazon being worried about that very thing. So they're aware of it but corporate America has an ace up their sleeve they can always rely on: work visas. Politicians aren't going to say no when Amazon wants to import guest workers. Amazon done it for the white collar workers for decades, no doubt they'll be quite happy to do it with their blue collar workforce too.

I think there would be enormous political pushback by elements of both parties to expanding the guest worker program to unskilled labor.

There is significant political support for effectively open borders, which has the effect of importing unskilled labor without the permit implied by a guest worker program.

What in the I-485 are you even talking about? American immigration is hard as fuck for an Indian person making like half a million a year.

You think they’re going to try to lobby to get blue collar people in? “Effectively open borders”, my ass.

I didn't claim that there was support for specific special cases. I also didn't say that the general case supporters had gotten their way.

That said, if the general case folk get their way, I assume that your special case will be included.

I do note that folks who want lots of low-skilled immigrants (the "who's going to pick grapes" folks) might not care that much about every instance of high-skilled immigrants.

I'm sorry, did you and I experience the same 2016-2020? The one with a border wall, Muslim country of origin ban, and H1B visa cuts?

I'm not arguing these are good or bad (H1Bs especially are abused) but they definitely happened and have a massive groundswell of support from one party.

In what universe is "there's significant political support for {X}" contradicted by "{not X} happened" or even "there's significant political support for {not X}"?

In the universe of the United States Senate.

It doesn’t scale. Even if they took 100% of the current US work visas, that would cover less than a third of their current hiring.

oh, this question is so good. governments have history of getting millions of people into unpopular jobs. maybe, one day all people not rich enough, will have to serve 2-3 years at amazon logistics, when turning 18 years old.

On the other hand people rarely share stories like this. "I could not make it through the first day of working at amazon" is something most of us would leave out from our resumes/conversations.

What if there are more than "5,000 stories" - There could be 50,000 of these.

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