<story><title>Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire</title><url>https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>&amp;gt; employees will naturally want to leave within four years&lt;p&gt;That also explains why the &lt;i&gt;breadth&lt;/i&gt; of AWS services keep growing, but the &lt;i&gt;depth&lt;/i&gt; 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&amp;#x27;d be able to add new and deep features.</text></item><item><author>madrox</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>&amp;gt; Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times.&lt;p&gt;Wow.  Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the &lt;i&gt;explicit policy&lt;/i&gt; of &lt;i&gt;not wanting&lt;/i&gt; their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s not that they are running out of people to hire, it&amp;#x27;s that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.&lt;p&gt;Now I understand why I&amp;#x27;ve been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glenngillen</author><text>Ex-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x2F;availability&amp;#x2F;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.&lt;p&gt;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).</text></comment>
<story><title>Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire</title><url>https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>&amp;gt; employees will naturally want to leave within four years&lt;p&gt;That also explains why the &lt;i&gt;breadth&lt;/i&gt; of AWS services keep growing, but the &lt;i&gt;depth&lt;/i&gt; 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&amp;#x27;d be able to add new and deep features.</text></item><item><author>madrox</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>&amp;gt; Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times.&lt;p&gt;Wow.  Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the &lt;i&gt;explicit policy&lt;/i&gt; of &lt;i&gt;not wanting&lt;/i&gt; their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s not that they are running out of people to hire, it&amp;#x27;s that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.&lt;p&gt;Now I understand why I&amp;#x27;ve been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it&amp;#x27;s adequate and doesn&amp;#x27;t actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase&amp;#x2F;usage decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over optimization, because the apparent return from optimization exceeds the apparent cost.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;re used to it and it&amp;#x27;s easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites. Amazon&amp;#x27;s bottom line seems to indicate that breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving human populations.</text></comment>