When I left Amazon (as an SWE), with about 11mo of tenure, I was apparently at about median longevity. Yes, some of it is their growth, but a significant reason is also that they churn through people unnecessary. It's ridiculous to me that a big tech company treats people so terribly and continues to get away with it.
I endured 13 months. In my mind, very little skill development happened during those 13 months. But here I am, years later, and that line item in my history still carries some sense of market validation - that, because I successfully navigated the recruitment funnel and was at one time an Amazonian, that I must have useful skills.
This was also my experience at one of the “prestigious” consulting firms I endured working at for a year. It took me three months just to proceed and navigate through all of their ridiculous hurdles during recruitment.
Out of all of the positions/firms on my CV, that one seems to carry the most weight to recruiters and other companies, despite it being the time where I did the least productive work in my life (So much so that when I was asked why I was leaving during my exit interview I straight up said “I’ve gotten dumber since working here.”)
Most of Amazon's employee base are in the warehouses, and there's a significant amount of churn there, especially seasonal. Being median at 11 months is really not that weird considering the sheer nature of warehouse employment there, and considering it's highly likely you were there through at least one Q4.
The tool in Amazon that shows how your tenure ranks is measured against _all_ Amazon employees. Warehouse, delivery, etc.
I was well past the 60% mark by the time I got through my first Q4 working for Amazon as an SE, and in to something like 90% by the time I got through my second. The figures the L7 engineers were bouncing around at that time were that developers averaged around 2 years.
Curious: Where do you feel the SWE people they churn through generally end up?
I'm a bit concerned about this one guy on one of my previous teams who moved from Europe to US to work on AWS. I don't think he was aware of the company culture.
The CEO of Cloudflare has said that he enjoys taking burned out SDEs from Amazon and giving them a happy life at his company. It's how, in his words, Cloudflare can compete at an engineering level with AWS.
Its a common stall tactic for large businesses to fire leadership after a Union is formed. It means you cannot facilitate a good faith negotiation and places the union in a perpetual limbo that can last years.
If you're wondering what the play from unions is after this, its "unexpected" equipment breakdowns and coordinated slowdowns because you now generally lack the leadership necessary to fire people or lead failure/productivity investigations
The funny thing is though that for warehouse employees at Amazon, their job is so simple and all of their work is wrapped up and recorded for KPIs that if they slow down or become unproductive, they could be fired electronically without even assuming that the slowdown was intentional.
They’re hamsters on a wheel and the wheel isn’t going to slow down just because they’re upset about their situation.
I moved to Seattle from my hometown of Phoenix out of college for my "dream job" at Amazon. I started interviewing for other employment after just three months. I ended up quitting after eight months.
Amazon is a horrible place to work. Six years is a lifetime there.
I have seen this sort of sentiment many times, and the narrative here aligns with the main thread. I also know a few in my circle who I respect and think very highly of, but only worked at Amazon for ~1 year, and all of these people have been very quiet about their experience at Amazon. Also, I understand that the leadership principles are taken very seriously. My question: How are the leadership principles used in a way that leads to such a bad experience?
The problem at Amazon as I understand it is extremely darwinian stack-ranking. The leadership principles don’t address this. Even if you have a team of 10 senior high achievers by every metric, some percentage of them have to be managed out every N months. It’s absolutely insane.
If Apple did this, they’d never ship hardware or software updates.
A small part of the problem that's I observed during my interview there is the person who interviewed me mentioned that the teams largely operate independently, and sometimes have competing ideas. First across the finish line wins.
Ultimately, this, I think, sets up a lot of perverse incentives. Engineers are encouraged to burn themselves out to beat their coworkers, and there's less value in maintaining a good product. Anyone who remembers the very early days of their cloud offerings could pretty easily see the results.
Amazon is a retailer, and the mindset of a retailer is squeezing fractions of a penny out of toilet paper vendors. None of the original leadership principles says anything about human beings.
Amazon's workforce has probably doubled twice in the last 6 years? So even without taking attrition into account (which is substantial in the warehouses), after 6 years you're in the 25% longest-tenured warehouse employees. With attrition I'd guess you're in the "top" 10%?
These managers are getting fired because they had been put in charge of stopping the union forming - this is a threat to the managers at other Amazon locations to be more evil - "pour encourager les autres"
Well the line you quoted says company not industry. Ecommerce is a relatively young industry anyway. And Amazon has been around since what, 94? So 6 years is over 20% of the time Amazon has existed.
Fair point. I just found it to be an interesting choice of words. Whenever they use the same term, in other industries, they are talking about double-digit tenures.
The main point is that this is a fairly unambiguous message to other managers, that allowing unionization to happen under their watch would be a careericidal offense.
That means that they can expect the warehouse managers to get pretty desperate, and probably break all kinds of laws and whatnot. It's just that the message is being sent in a way that allows the company to keep their hands clean, from the almost certain results.
The managers will certainly get fired, if unionization happens, and might get fired, if they get caught, spiking the trees.
Amazon's done this with most of their functions. Push expectations: claim no responsibility for outcome.
Walmart laid out the playbook that profits in a thin margin market require you being an asshole to your counterparties, but blackmailing them into still working with you via scale.
It’s not a technical term, so it’s always going to be somewhat of a matter of opinion. If I had to guess, you could only really be described as a veteran at some company if you had been there longer than most other employees. It seems like at least 60 or 70% of the employees should be newer.
> I think it's sad that we have an industry, where someone with six years' experience, is considered a "veteran."
What does it take to be considered a "veteran" in the military?
> The term "veteran" means a person who served in the active military, naval, or air service, and who was discharged or released therefrom under conditions other than dishonorable.
> 1. A person with long experience of a particular activity.
The military version is a bit different:
> 3. A person who has served in the armed forces, especially an old soldier who has seen long service; also called a war veteran to distinguish from veterans who weren't in armed conflict.
> c. 1500, "old experienced soldier," from French vétéran, from Latin veteranus "old, aged, that has been long in use," especially of soldiers; as a plural noun, "old soldiers," from vetus (genitive veteris) "old, aged, advanced in years; of a former time," as a plural noun, vetores, "men of old, forefathers," from PIE wet-es-, from root wet- (2) "year ... General sense of "one who has seen long service in any office or position" is attested from 1590s. The adjective first recorded 1610s.
You can see definition (1) dropped the "soldier" restriction, and (3) dropped the "old" restriction.
I therefore don't think you can apply your understanding of (3) when (1) was meant.
Around these parts, "veteran" is usually used to designate military servicepeople that served during times of active conflict, yet it seems pretty much any soldier that was honorably (or, at least, not dishonorably) discharged, is able to access the VA health system (we have a VA hospital in my town, and I know quite a few veterans). I'm not so sure about other benefits, like schooling, loans, and insurance.
My father[0] was a veteran. He's buried in Arlington. Got a silver star, a bronze star, and a purple heart. His GI Bill benefits got him a Harvard LLB.
I am not even close to a military veteran. I did work for a company for almost 27 years though. In this community, that elicits a lot more scorn, than it does respect.
I was US military for 11 years and can definitely tell you that, beyond the “on paper” definition I posted above, members of the military consider anyone who volunteers for military service and does their time to be a veteran. I’d definitely be interested to know where this concept of “you have to be in a conflict” definition came from. Is it from people who were in the military or just pop culture influenced misconceptions?
> members of the military consider anyone who volunteers for military service and does their time to be a veteran.
If you take the oath, go where you're sent, and do as you're ordered (within the law and morality), that's all that can be asked. Some find themselves having to do it with people shooting at them or trying to blow them up, like my dad and some of my uncles; others are more fortunate, like numerous other family members, including me. All are veterans. (And that goes for draftees too, although it's been 50 years since the U.S. has had a draft.)
I'm a not-so-young chap, so a lot of my compatriots are combat veterans (mostly Vietnam, and Iraq 1). They are the ones that have given me that impression.
In any case, my original post had nothing, whatsoever, to with military service, and I think we've just about exhausted this rabbithole.
You know those help wanted commercials Amazon floods media with, "We pay $15 to start, blah, blah. Start a new career."
I just assumed they were always hiring because of consistent growth.
According to the guy (forget his name. Wears a gold chain.) representing the union; Amazon fires a lot of employees. Many for no reason.
(I once read a restaurant success book. Everything he recommended made sence, except one, and it does make sence, but it's weaselly.
His recommendation to restaurants was to fire all employees every six months. Turn over the semi-skilled completely. His reasoning was a new employee didn't complain, didn't steal (this was before companies had cams everywhere, gps tracking, and wrist movment counters), and worked harder.)
I believe this is Amazon strategy.
It's usually a bit harder to fire union workers for no reason.
Fire them before they can see the inequities in the company.
Another benefit of firing workers early is it increases churn, which makes forming unions in the first place difficult, since it relies on trust between workers.
Having watched the HVAC videos about restaurants and walking freezers with doors left open by new employees causing problems for hardware and their operation in general. Maybe that isn't best solution. Then again maybe returns on other side cover any such issues...
Which I rather doubt that you can train them in all things in that timeframe...
You're completely right. Amazon strategy is to maintain constant turnover, so that employees never feel they have stability and can't complain of anything.
There's an internal tool showing how many total employees (~1m at that time iirc) where hired after/before you for . After somewhere between 6months-12months I was somewhere in the middle, meaning about 500k employees must have left and new 500k joined.
Just to give an estimate. Covid might have contributed to that though, probaly more temp workers than usual.
I see you think this is a win-lose system. Free markets, however, are a win-win system. Both parties must win for the transaction to happen.
The employer-employee relationship is just another transaction, and should be win-win. If a manager sees it as win-lose, he should be fired. The same goes for an employee.
I've been an employer and an employee, and always recognized that it should be a win-win relationship and approached it from that angle.
I think it's sad that we have an industry, where someone with six years' experience, is considered a "veteran."
But it sounds like Amazon is sending a message to managers of other warehouses, to go as low as possible, to fight unionization.
Expect things to get ugly.