Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire
vox.com
vox.com
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.
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.
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.
> where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few customers who are very deep in their usage.
I'm disputing that for retail.
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.
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.
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.
New services/businesses are how you get promoted. Maintenance or incrementally improve existing functionality and you'll never get promoted.
Amazon isn't really alone in that short sightedness though, it's just extra noticeable when combined with high churn
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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm glad we have bucket-owner-enforced now, but the correct time to add it was 10 years ago.
It's a cottage industry.
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).
Can't win.
I know you didn't say #1, but both of these contradictory points are floated quite often.
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-pleb...
I've heard that the cultures are different between the two. I would expect AWS to value holding onto their most experienced engineers.
Levels.fyi doesn't seem to agree with your title inflation evaluation: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Amazon,Microsoft&trac...
It's only 3 data points, but it seems that Amazon Senior is comparable to Google senior, and it's Microsoft that inflates the Senior title.
Gist: "junior" L6 SDE is more like Google L5, "senior" L6 SDE tracks mostly with Google L6 (or even L7 in rare cases).
I think it's more like Google junior L6 SDE is equivalent Uber L4.5, which itself is about the same as senior AA at Oracle (= like a L11 at Twitter).
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!
In the AF, your performance reviews need to be "firewalled" or it's time to leave.
What does firewalling a performance review mean?
However, anecdotes make up hopes.
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.
You left out a big part here; RSU vesting schedule is back loaded. It's something like 5-20-25-50
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.
Disclaimer: Worked at Amazon for 9 years.
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.
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.
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.
IT professionals in Ontario, at least, are probably exempt from most of your list of things you'd think are required.
Engineers and engineering students get an even shorter stick, in the form of more labour law exemptions.
https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...
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.
This isn’t even remotely true.
> 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
2022: everyone brags about working 20 hours a week
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.
This is pretty normal in the US too. Sure, its not "mandated" but everything besides 6 weeks of vacation is pretty common for SDE.
https://www.engadget.com/amazon-more-than-doubles-base-pay-f...
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.
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.
Quite literally, not with that attitude. So many of capitalism's pitfalls amount to no more than self-fulfilling prophecies.
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
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.
Literally all the others are on average better options than Amazon for your mental health (even if not by as much as you think)
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 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.
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.
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.
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
But they'll get distracted before getting around to it. Gore Vidal wasn't kidding when he used the words "United States of Amnesia" in his essays.
(Also, "our owners". Good stuff, tangy with aristocratic vinegar - acerbic, I believe the tasters call it.)
Yeah, this is just capitalism at work.
> People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard.
Well I guess that’s an alternative lesson to take away from this.
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?
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.
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.
It is manifestly possible. The Germans do it.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236165/german-workers-satis...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_German_compani...
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.
Companies under 500 people are responsible for half of the jobs in the US.
Companies under 20 workers are ~15% of the employment market.
https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/0414...
Most of them are cancerous because of it.
I don't see it being very long until people get out their pitchforks.
Hopefully it will lead to better treatment of those they can employ.
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.
South Park had a realistic vision on how it is to work at Amazon Fulfillment Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc
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.
> 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.
Is there a law like betteridge's law of headlines for commercials?
I.e. Anything a commercial tries to assert is probably untrue.
Let's call it cwkoss' law of commericals.
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.
One of the big rules of hiring is to get people that require the fewest hours of training. That's why most companies welcome "alumni" back.
"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."
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."
https://youtu.be/Vewz1v4rQYg?t=116
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."
(print version: https://www.businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-jeff-bezos-econo...)
His crossfire episode (celebrity death match) with Tucker Carlson is epic.
Surely they stay on exactly long enough to figure that out. It is, after all, presumably why they leave.
>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.
That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.
If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help
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
Isolated the decisions make sense.
Dropping employment due to higher (minimum) wages has mixed-data in empirical studies:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233184/median-household-...
The motivation to earn skills to make more money is there regardless of minimum wage laws.
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.
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.
You still have the option to quit your job if you're employed and don't find it worth your while.
> strategically & systemically quite harmful
How?
Yes.
> > strategically & systemically quite harmful > How?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But sales people have a pretty directly attributable profit contribution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless they are a tech company funded by VCs…
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".
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.
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.
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.
Ya know, like most investment (that works).
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/San-Francisco
Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?
That’s $60/hour before taxes according to this gross up calculator
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/grossup/california/r...
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?
> 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"
I find that morally unsupportable.
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?
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?
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)
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
(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 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?
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 that income level is the poverty line: Yes, it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or perhaps it's as if I'm labeling that prevention a "societal regulation". Go look at my comment again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slaves are paid much more than that.
No, they aren’t.
Slaves have a higher total cost to employ than that, but none of it is wages.
Traditional African American foods, like hog jowls and chitterlings, were based on the discards that White slave owners would not eat.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
30K per year is about poverty level in most of the United States for a family of four. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
But if both parents work at 15/hour, they could rent, though childcare would take a big bite out of their budget even at 60K per year.
Most places with lower cost of living in the USA have jobs closer to federal minimum wage work rather than 15/hour as well.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/how-much-money-a-family-of-4...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.
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.
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...
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.
The deadlines of those poor journalists—and their kids!—is hardly the main problem with the Media. But you probably already know that.
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.
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.
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…
I think we need to hold journalists to higher standard than "complete idiot".
I've noticed the same pattern, and I can't believe it's not intentional.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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...".
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)?
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.
Isn’t that a good thing? What’s your complaint?
Turnover is the subject of the story, those two statements seem directly relevant.
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.
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.
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.
https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...
SWEs probably don't need worry about remaining employed, but the days of salary wars will be over.
It won't. Everyone involved in business dealing with physical goods knows it's a supply side problem.
Fiscal policy will do little to control inflation at this time. The Fed of course knows this.
The Fed has no control over fiscal policy. You mean monetary?
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.
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
The CHF has gained steadily on the EUR since the pandemic and is up about 10% since a year ago. That alone is going to offset a lot of the inflation.
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?
If demand drops then supply stops being a problem.
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.
Desperation creates extremism. I don’t think the US is prepared for the monster it may unleash.
Are you on the right side?
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.
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
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.
M1 also shot way up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/06/federal-r...
[3] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/heritage-explai...
Why wouldn't it be better to look at the total monetary base?
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).
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.
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%.
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.
Time to start buying stock in Keynes.
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.
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.
Buzzer sound.
Over ten years.
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.
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?
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.
Oil is priced in USD.
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.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/6/16/federal-reserve-...
The odds they won't find an excuse to reverse course within 3 years seems low.
They talked about reducing the balance sheet for almost a decade and barely made a dent before more than doubling it during the Pandemic.
I will be shocked if in 5 years the Fed's balance sheet isn't substantially higher than it is now.
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 don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.
Downside, there was no free snacks. shrug
Ask them hard questions about performance, expectations and on call burden.
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.
(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)
I know some recent grads that are starting there however.
I miss the days when I was young totally clueless about corporate or political values and I just wanted to program stuff.
Was so much easier.
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.
Making as much money as possible by milking the government or using the government to regulate your competitors things is another matter
Only allowing one voice in politics is super dangerous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
lol this is just monstrous.
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.
But yeah, seems to be an US-only anomaly, atleast compared to the rest of the developed world.
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.
The US has really gone insane.
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.
I'm pretty sure they just doubled the salary cap. That doesn't necessarily mean everyone's salary was doubled.
Now, more of your compensation can be stock based.
Imagine busting your lumbar and then not being to find a construction job or something.
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.
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).
The same with Facebook.
-- best of HN
He doesn't know who you are, doesn't care about you, and likely actively despises your existence.
Why would you ever think of defending a business?
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.
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.
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.
Can't HN be the one place on the internet that isn't sullied by tribalism?
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).
So you're either a liar or you are ignorant. Which is it?
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.
Left wing is a tribe. Right wing is a tribe. Just like all the sportsball teams are tribes.
Politics would work better if politicians, and their followers, worked for people, rather than their tribes.
Can't HN be the one place on the internet that isn't sullied by obvious misspellings?
Fixed it. Just for you. -kiss-
I really haven't seen this with "left wing folks". That sounds more like some folks talking points they want you to buy into.
I think you might be mistaken. Any immigration /= "more mass immigration".
Because the amount matters?
If we talk about the impact of migration the amount certainly plays into what if any impact occurs.
It really seems like you're stuck on a sort of rhetorical talking point phrase.
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...".
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
The left wing does not, and much of it actively supports it.
The Democratic Party-in-government, dominated by its center-right faction, does oppose it, or at least does not actively support it.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0?fbclid=Iw...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5
Increasing the amount of people means more resource usage, but also more chances for innovation and economies of scale.
Much power in Trump's trade war came from the size of the consumer base
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".
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)?
> "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.
You don’t see anything wrong with that statement?
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.
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.
I find France, UK and US comportements towards their colonies ('trade partners') unjust.
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 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.
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.
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.
Amazon does feel pretty unavoidable for the long tail, though.
Hm, anyone here want to start a company?
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.)
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.
But I've heard too many horror stories to ever take that risk myself.
"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.
If that's true then I could just skip the Amazon pain and go straight to the "job elsewhere".
Of course I use AWS everyday at my job. I think of it like Amish people using power tools at their job.
They are running out of people to over exploit.
Big difference.
Amazon will find better compensation and a modest change to work culture and environment will bring them as many people as they need.
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.
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.
Does Amazon not have such a culture?
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 become the substrate for more than tech- ordering stuff on Amazon is practically a utility like electricity, water and internet now.
> But attrition at Amazon’s facilities in the area grew from 128 percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020
I can see business papers talking about Amazon's failure in this space in the next 5 years.
- tells drivers to pee in a bottle
Doesn’t compute
This is _madness_.
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.
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.
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.
There was a lot of speculation that this is why they dropped the drug testing requirement last year.
That seems like a recipe for this.
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.
This gives workers the ability to self regulate how lazy or efficient they’d like to be.
Keynes had a prediction that we would be working 15 hour work weeks by now.
In your opinion, why haven’t we obtained this?
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.
robots are the answer. or less consumption. or both.
Pay more. That’s how capitalism works.
Can also be written "There's a surplus of customer eager to pay the lowest possible price even if that means exploiting workers."
As shown by the success of Chinese super low cost brands wether we are talking electronics, fashion etc.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. See: https://www.workers.org/2021/12/60560/
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.
So okay. The onus is never on the individual. It's on the collective. Businesses owe us. Business owners owe us.
They can pay or they can burn.
That is the deal.
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.
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.
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.
A world where you're raising the floor so that everyone else's workers can also spend on the products your company makes.
Right, but for wages (ie. prices) to go up, you need to decrease supply or increase demand. Increasing the prices you pay doesn't do that.
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
3. ???
4. profit
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.
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.
Of course it's 2.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/128660/amazon-amzn-aws-rev...
17.78B in 2021, or $11k per employee.
That’s less than 10% of the per employee profit.
Amazon can increase wages without raising prices.
Redo the math with the correct numbers:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...
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.
They couldn't spend 125k per worker.
> that’s $125k per employee of profit
And it is. Gross profit.
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.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/gross-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes it does:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grossprofit.asp
Sales commissions, direct labor that varies with output, to name a few.
I appreciate that you provided your favorite metric, but gross profit is affected by wages, so it is on point as far as I'm concerned.
1. Saudi Aramco (2018) - $120B 2. Saudi Aramco (2021) - $115B 3. Vodafone (2014) - $113B 4. Fannie Mae (2013) - $98B 5. Apple (2021) - $95B
Perhaps you are thinking about revenue?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/gross-...
Gross profits.
And the comment said "profit" not gross profit.
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.
If you can say that, then you can say that Amazon’s prices and the taxes it pays on its revenues aren't directly connected.
You have the notorious NYT article from 2015 (the article mentions this):
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
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]
[1] https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigation...
This is why I find a lack of solidarity between working people to be somewhere between selfish and disgusting.
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.
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.
I'm blessed, truly, to have escaped poverty.
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.
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.)
Cause I'm pretty sure that is about the emergent workforce and subjugation of academics into kamikaze roles.
So I assume that's what you mean.
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.
Even in death, Amazon doesn't care and will lie through its teeth: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
> 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".
It's ridiculous. We should organize too.
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.
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.
I don't think worker attrition is cost effective. It is just less work and lower skill requirement for the managers to rule by fear and overwork.
Isn't Amazon paying abit higher wages than the competition? They need to pay the bullshit fee to the workers.
I see bottles of sun tea piled up in various places around town where delivery trucks pause for red lights.
Those are good workers, committed to the job.
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.
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?
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.
They don't try to correct me and say they aren't doing it anymore, they just cease communication.
Makes you wonder why they still do such barbaric practices as forced attrition
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"
Surprise!
Presumably the bots are resistant to tasers and gunfire.
Thats why multi-master architecture was created in the first place.
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.