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by FmrAMZN_TA 3715 days ago
You did not say roles were increasing at 50% per year as an example - that was your stated fact.

I'm saying unless they had 10 employees in 2000 (wrong) or only started the 50% hiring last year (so we have no longitudinal data to go on), there is no number where that level of exponential growth of employees wouldn't result in either a) a company that was bigger than Walmart in employees in just a few years or b) MASSIVE firings. Maybe that's what you're saying? They hire that many people and remove them from the company that fast? I know the removal from the company is certainly correct.

As far as the increase in costs of RSUs, there is a perfectly alternative solutions to your proposal: their stock has increased by 10x in 10 years. So in that way, they're EXACTLY keeping track (https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=amzn+Interactive#{"range...), and not increasing people collecting RSUs at all. You'll note that you list amount of money required for the RSUs, not number of shares. (This is, by the way, another way that Amazon misleads their employees - your yearly cash bonus actually goes down when the value of the stock increases).

So by that logic, they have, in fact, not kept pace with the rise of their stock. New employees are receiving substantially less new grants than older ones (bordering on zero, which can't be true), or they're being removed before they vest.

Further, the 24k in Washington also include many thousands of non-tech roles (Amazon Fresh warehouse in Redmond, Customer Support in Bellingham, some portion of the more than 2500 sales people for AWS, etc etc), so your math does not add up for adding new 25k tech roles, even if we multiply by 40% as a reduction. Doing some approximations using LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?keywords=amazon&f_CC=1586...) they do appear to have ~24k employees in Washington, but only ~8k in engineering (they appear to add another 4k engineers in India).

Again, these are all public numbers, so they are inaccurate, but they should be good enough to substantially disprove your point. So, without question, your statement about increasing hiring by 50% y/y has no facts to back it up.

As far as active hiring, that is absolutely correct. They are extremely active in hiring - but they have to be because people leave so fast that unless they do, they'd be out of people.