> The same Times investigation reported the company “intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers,” according to David Niekerk, a former Amazon HR Vice President.<p>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.<p>Amazon applies pressure on L7 and L6 software development managers to deliver. They in turn apply pressure to their engineering teams.<p>We had specific projects where we easily burned out dozens of engineers. They all left within a 1-2 month window of each other.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I stopped using Amazon for shopping about two years ago, because of how they treat warehouse staff.<p>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.
> "only one out of three new hires in 2021" stay with the company for 90 or more days.<p>This is truly amazing. I'm guessing the warehouse biz has the most effect on this stat, but still. Wow.
I'm so glad I screwed a ski trip out of Amazon. Took me 3 hours of my life to pass the coding test, then the remote live coding interview. Then they paid the flight and hotel to meet and grill me in person. I asked for an extra hotel night "to look for houses". That day, I actually took a bus to $BIG_MOUNTAIN nearby and had the some of the best snowboard of my life. The interviews were shit, clearly designed not to know if I knew software but rather if was compliant and thick skinned enough to survive and perform in their shit culture. Fuck you Amazon. Thank you Amazon.
I'm always amazed how little people know about how companies operate. Amazon does the same thing as many many companies and is treated as news. People are shocked that they are profit seeking, that they do barely legal but legal things, that they don't actively knowingly pay their workers more than they have to etc.
I absolutely wouldnt mind waiting an extra day or two for my package if it means better working conditions for warehouse and software workers at amazon. I wouldnt mind if bezos earned a little less either. For now tho i stopped using it all together.
How is the US - as a society - okay with companies like Amazon abusing their employees, deny them union representation while paying them a starvation wage?<p>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.<p>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.
It's not just Amazon that does this.<p>And there are only two ways to hurt them back for it.<p>One is people refusing to work there, which is obviously easier to do for engineers than for warehouse workers.<p>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.