[ozzythecat]

It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius. If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation, you’ve won the lottery.

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.”

[sparker72678]

> If you can do it at scale without damaging the company’s reputation

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.

[tpxl]

Amazon has millions of employees. At this point, if you burn out too many you start running out of people to burn out.

[sneak]

1.4 million, and the vast majority of those are low-skill, low-wage employees who are in no way related to the situations being discussed in this thread.

[ROTMetro]

When I was at the halfway house out of prison, not 1 person went to work at Amazon's warehouse. We went to less pay sorting human waste at the recycling plant in 120 heat before that job, because everyone knows how bad it is. Good luck keeping your labour requirements met Amazon.

[shafyy]

> It’s actually not stupid. It’s genius.

It's genius if you don't have a shred of ethics left in your bones.

[cafed00d]

It’s actually really stupid.

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.

[nivenkos]

To quote Keynes, in the long run we're all dead.

[nvader]

To quote Braveheart, "Every man dies. Not every man truly lives"

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?"

[renewiltord]

That's a bit rich. Everyone on this forum will cry themselves hoarse about how they should only have to confirm to the minimum of their agreements. How is it any surprise that these same people, placed in a position of power, continue to act congruent to the belief that legality is morality.

[sneak]

It's ethical too, because the terms of the deal are given to the employee up front, and if they're the kind of person who can do SWE at Amazon, it's nowhere near their only job option. Nobody forces them to take it, and they're not hurting for jobs.

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.

[UweSchmidt]

Hello Neoclassical Economics: Humans are rational actors in an ideal market, in which supply and demand is rationalizing out anything bad.

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.

[sneak]

You seem to be confusing the definition for "moral" with the definition for "ethical".

[ben_w]

Despite my A-level in philosophy, I have no idea what the difference between those might be. Every example sentence I just thought of, I can substitute "moral" for "ethical" or vice versa without changing the meaning.

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…

[prakhar897]

But it’s not. You can see here now that everyone is aware of these bad practices by amazon. This means less people apply and even lesser accept the position. This leads to more time and resources taken for hiring and giving higher wages eventually to compete.

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).

[ignoramous]

> It's actually not stupid. It’s genius.

Not if the secret's out, one would imagine?

[Danieru]

The secret has been out for over a decade. Yet Amazon still get new hires.

[GoldenMonkey]

It’s pretty well known in tech. I never respond to amazon HR. Been doing that for 5 years now.

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.

[woleium]

Plenty of new grads every year

[HyperSane]

You will eventually run out of people to screw over.