It’s not just for hourly workers. I was actively coached on holding promotions as a carrot. My leadership team would commit to unrealistic dates, taking input and estimates from dev teams but hand wave it.
Amazon applies pressure on L7 and L6 software development managers to deliver. They in turn apply pressure to their engineering teams.
We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers. They all left within a 1-2 month window of each other.
I can’t tell you how many SDEs were promised that getting some project delivered is key to their promotion. These people would kill themselves working every night, every weekend, coding, writing documents, and so on. They’d get very little in return if anything.
I saw several successful launches, where specific promotions were held back because of nit picks on some engineering decision, which the whole group agreed on, including Principals and Sr. Principal engineers.
It’s just a sweat shop. And the Indian devs work their ass off out of fear of getting PIP’d and with their work authorization, they lose their job means they have to leave the country.
This matches what I saw at Nike. Though it was a bit less extreme, it was the same dynamic. Indian-born workers got paid half what the American-born workers did for the same SWE jobs. And Indian workers couldn’t complain or push back against unrealistic expectations because getting fired meant getting deported. It’s a captive, exploitable labor force. It’s really messed up.
Joining meetings at Seattle time (like 7-8pm CET), meanwhile you're being paid less than half of what the American engineers earn at the same level.
But they know there's so few options in Europe so they set the salaries according to "local market conditions".
Guess they are more than happy being a part of captive, exploitable force.
It stopped working (mostly overtime) on promises that were impossible to keep. In return I got more sleep, social life and very recently a different job.
Amazon engineer salaries are in the 90th+ percentile in the tech industry -- let's not bother comparing them to the typical American's income. They have almost unlimited mobility in their industry: They can find a job elsewhere anytime they want.
I remember you mentioning elsewhere that in 10 years of working at Amazon you're now financially independent. This isn't the outcome you usually see in a sweat shop.
I don't disagree that they have a culture of treating employees as expendable and are a harder place to work for than some other big tech companies but at some point a little perspective on your own privilege is healthy.
All amazonians would jump to Google if they could. The reverse is quite rare.
FANG engineers are typically in the 99th percentile of tech excellence. Amazon engineers are not well paid when compared to professionals of the same league. Amazon SDE1s in Austin, Texas have a salary of around $120k/year and new hires have a total compensation package of around $160k/year. In Europe salary ranges for the same role go from €80k/year in northern countries and €40k/year in southern European countries. Check Glassdoor.
We're discussing positions and professionals which compete in a global stage.
Amazon is far from well paid for this sort of position. It's one of the key factors why Amazon SDEs tend to bail out after 2 or 3 years. They are smart enough to not bother with high stress, low-paying jobs .
"Amazon" is named after the rainforest, and like the rainforest, developers are an infinite resource that you can burn down forever and there will never be any consequences .. until somehow you run out.
Really the only solution to this is for people to withdraw their labour - not just unionization but refusing to work for them in the first place.
No FAANG offer yet, but by my calculations, Amazon has wasted 5 digit sums on assesing me.
Bezos made it personal with how he treated my partner while they worked for him, so I'll have my petty revenge one way or another...
You make big promises to employees, maybe give a carrot to a very select few. Everyone else will either accept the long hours and grueling culture or they’ll leave, and if they leave, they’ll go before their RSU compensation vests. So the other thing you do is weigh compensation heavily on RSUs instead of salary. If you leave before the 4 year vest, you get massively screwed and walk away with a small fraction, since vests don’t really kick in until years 3 and 4.
Now here’s the kicker. If the company does well and the value of your RSUs to up, you get nothing extra. You can get promoted and if your existing RSUs are putting you near or at the bottom of the next compensation band, you take more responsibility but without any meaningful compensation increase.
Now if the company does poorly, you’ll get extra RSUs, in 1.5 to 2 years out. You can hang around for that carrot, but they’ll work you like a machine. And it’s not just the labor. It’s the gaslighting and sociopathic behavior - “you’re so great at X, but you really didn’t do a, b, and c. You’re really just being your own bottleneck. Oh you’re working extra hours? Your fault for not scaling yourself better.”
That isn't a nobody. He was a major HR guy for Amazon for over 15 years. I knew his name in passing when I was working there, and met his daughter who was a rising star at the warehouse in Phoenix.
Wild to hear him speaking out against Amazon when he honestly built a lot of the system.
I never thought to work at Amazon, because I heard from multiple colleagues, former employees, that Amazon is profoundly metric based; then the stories such as this, about burning out staff, and about the fake PIP process, began surfacing.
This is truly amazing. I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
It sounds amazing, but it's not original. It says something about where we're at, as a country,
[1] https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/curb-employee-t...
I ended up on a short contract and think I understand why. I also understand why Amazon employees are notorious for taking up the entire sidewalk like nobody else is there. Trauma.
I’ve chatted with my dad about Amazon working conditions, and he retorted with tales of his own days in un-conditioned factories and warehouses in Oklahoma in the 1980s.
There are a lot of crappy jobs out there. Those of us who have found enjoyment and balance are fortunate.
> Amazon employed 33% of all US warehouse workers in 2021, but was responsible for 49% of all injuries in the industry, according to a report published Tuesday by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of four labor unions.
(Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study...)
No, they are not "the same", they are worse. They are at the absolute fucking forefront of treating their workers badly. You don't hear about postal workers having to piss in bottles and shit in plastic bags to make their deliveries. You don't hear about warehouse workers at other companies having their bathroom breaks timed, probably because damn near no other company's leadership is sociopathic enough to build an automated system to time fucking bathroom breaks.
Yes, and that's because of its scale and size.
Quality and reliability are declining rapidly.
TBH I think perhaps the (opt-in) suffering endured by the Amazon staff (both blue and white collar) is outweighed by the massive benefits to an entire society enabled by same-day shipping of approximately everything. It's an extremely powerful and valuable service, that serves as a force multiplier for every personal and business project that has it available.
Facebook can and should be destroyed. I think if you were to destroy Amazon, the world would be a worse place.
These companies abuse the total breakdown of the US's social security network; the US made it so bad that people are actually forced to work in such conditions. Together with the almost total dismantling of the unions in the US, this leaves low skilled workers no way to fight back.
It's not as bad in jobs were you need to have even a little training and need to invest in your workers. But in Amazon's case the brutality of this system is laid bare.
And there are only two ways to hurt them back for it.
One is people refusing to work there, which is obviously easier to do for engineers than for warehouse workers.
The second is refusing to make business with them. Just don't order your stuff from there, don't subscribe to Prime and so on, but I guess this is just too much to ask for the average guy whose whole personality revolves around the shows they are currently watching.
The third is organizing a union and striking until demands are met. The fourth is regulating them with laws. The fifth is borrowing enough money to gain enough stock to force some allies onto board seats and implementing change from the top down.
I'm sure there are more.
Do you know what the working conditions are like at any of the million non-Amazon warehouses?
Of course not, there’s no media attention for Bob’s fulfillment in Wichita, Kansas.
Here’s the truth: your friendly neighborhood warehouse down the street likely pays its employees far less, with far worse benefits, less safe facilities, and similar turnover.
It shouldn’t be the job of consumers to police labor practices—we’re really bad at it and only care if the company is big enough to get NYT coverage.
This is the role of government and law. If we really care about conditions for workers, we need to focus our attention there.
One could (without data) come up with some explanation about reporting rates, and while that should be investigated it would be weird to assume something like that without actual proof.
>According to their findings, Amazon workers are twice as likely to be injured on the job as e-commerce workers for Walmart, Amazon's closest retail competitor. The injury rate for Amazon's delivery drivers — who are classified as contractors rather than full company employees — also have an injury rate that is 50% higher than drivers for UPS, the groups found.
>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-injury-rate-highest-amon...
Amazing in a bad way... but I believe it.
The person who told me "autistic people can't work for RAND" was hired by Amazon. I'd blacklisted them by that point -- I don't like when folks treat a good faith interview like a free consulting session.
The company culture reminds me of some kind of suicide cult - treating a job interview like a free consulting session might work if you're looking for warehouse workers with teachable and replaceable skills, but when you apply that goldfish galaxy brain mentality to interacting with folks who have a buck twenty five plus IQ and more esoteric knowledge, it is unsurprising that mistakes will happen, those mistakes will be costly... and that those mistakes may increase in frequency.
>I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
I don't know off the top of my head, they sell a lot of servers.
(I was thinking the other day about how in my attempts to avoid Google I often involuntarily use their stuff -- it's why my old VPN was hosted on Digital Ocean, because I have no warm feelings for either.)
The word you folks are looking for is “appalling”.
"But for me, it was Tuesday", as the trope is called.
Comparing one of the most sought out, well paid, safe, in demand jobs in THE WORLD to being in a sweatshop is asinine and extremely arrogant.
They still offer pretty much the highest total comp and the best job prospects for 80th to 90th percentile graduates out of anywhere that I know of.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
Amazon is middle of the pack for big tech in total compensation. We don't need to speculate or speak in hyperbole. They certainly are not a "low-paying" job. The OP didn't stay in a low-paying job for 10 years and certainly didn't gain financial independence selling their Amazon stock because it was a low-paying job.
W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India.
If a minimum wage worker happens to enjoy what they do, that doesn’t mean that we should all settle for minimum wage. Your argument is toothless and blatantly anti-worker.
It worked for Walmart, and now Walmart is a trash company with trash products that treats their employees like trash while paying them such a low amount that many of them are on food stamps and government support and then keeping their schedules so screwed up that they can't better themselves out of the horrible situation without herculean efforts.
Amazon is following this pattern and will continue following it until market forces make them stop. And those forces do not exist and probably will not ever exist as long as there is money available for the desperate.
Mate, it isn't quite nearly the same for Europeans.
That said, Russian and Chinese developers had the same happening in companies in the UK.
In my case, the company is extremely accommodating and doesn't schedule reunions at hours that are inconvenient for me, but even if they did, I'd still consider it worth it for the compensation they give out.
I dunno. Maybe I could get an even better deal if I pushed hard or if I unionized or whatever, but right now I just look at the fact that I'm getting 5x what a middle-school teacher gets while doing way less work, and I just... don't feel the anger?
(maybe other american companies pay a lot less, though)
Do you mean as an hourly wage? That would be $200,000+/year and a 6-figure salary.
I think I meant "3 digits before the K".
Joining late meetings and being paid typical local rates is hardly the same as being paid half the local rates and facing deportation.
The former sucks, but the latter is unconscionable.
I'm lucky that we have a "We'll dial into meetings slightly earlier, if you can dial in slightly later" entente and so it's rare for meetings with west coast to go past 18:00 GMT.
For context, I’m a European in a US city. I’m not sure for how long I’ll be able to stay here.
And with the on call shift (when on call, not every week) going till 6:30 pM, sometimes it is 12 hour work days by design.
on the other hand, they don't bug us much during the day with micro management so it is not all bad.
In India it’s routine (in fact standard) for US companies to have the Indian on-call person for 24x7 on-call. Rarely companies have follow the sun policy. Very few! Definitely not Ubers and Amazons.
And Indian managers are the enforcers of this - it’s probably one of the only significant USP these managers have “I’ll get it done by same engineers at the lower Indian rates“.
US HR and leadership wash their hands off the problem - “oh, we give you full ownership, you should decide and own this” :)
In which country are you? We Europoors usually have labor laws to protect us from having to work so late. Where I live we have core working hours in our contract, 10:00 to 16:00, any work requests after that are voluntary for the employees. Is that not something you can use to push back on this?
Like real worker power comes from having good economic conditions and strong trade unions - the American engineers have far more bargaining power, because they can easily get competing $150k-250k offers which are unimaginable in Europe.
Everyone I know who’s worked for Amazon has said the money was great but everything else absolutely sucked. And they all held out doing whatever they had to in order to get by until they vested, and we’re instantly out.
I don’t think Amazon has a good reputation.
It's genius if you don't have a shred of ethics left in your bones.
Not having ethics/empathy is actually _really dumb_ way to run a company.
They end up making a lot of people miserable. Eventually, all of the technology, market advantage yadda yadda catches up. IBM, Yahoo, heck even Meta/Facebook. Amazon won’t last.
But in their wake, they leave behind very different testimonials.
Working people to a grind has its obvious needs in times of crisis — I mean, that is literally what nations do via conscription in times of war. Everybody knows that.
But prop that culture up in a so-called attempt to stave off laziness, rest-and-vest or whatever and you’ll end up in state of perpetual war: a bleak, stupid world not even worth living in, let alone worth dying for.
People opt in to this. They choose it over all of their other options because they believe it to be better than their other choices.
Is that really the world we live in? Have you met rational humans? Are we living in ideal markets?
Truth is, bad situations of all sorts are springing up and remaining in place long-term. A closer look at each individual issue (as done in this thread) reveals complex factors that need to be adressed. Using a simplistic model from economics to ignore any and all ethics (term used loosely for any attempt to do what's right) is not valid imo.
You can see that even though amazon mass hires candidates, they still have to shell out more salaries than say Google and Microsoft. It’s easier to fix bad salary+good wlb reputation (by increasing salary) than fixing good salary + bad wlb reputation (idk how they can even do it).
Not if the secret's out, one would imagine?
They are running out of ppl to hire. Now, to figure out how to short amazon… maybe they last another 5 years… before they just implode.
Irrelevant. Just because you work for a US company that does not mean your kids should go to US colleges.
Or, as St Ignatius quoted to St Francis Xavier, "What does it profit a man of he gains the entire world, but suffers the loss of his own soul?"
I then googled just in case I might have missed something, but it says "ethical" is "relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these", so again…
This is one hundred percent a problem of exploitation and cultural expectations and needs to change.
As an employee I want to be paid the highest that anyone else is paid for the same work. More so if the value generated is the same regardless of location. Yet I can understand employers wanting to help maintain sustainable communities, even where cost of living is high.
Governments too want some control over their currencies and its value.