Amazon warehouse fires a worker 1 day before his $3000 hiring bonus

To make a sensationalist story a little more educational and useful for our HN discussions:<p>Aside from the not-feel-good story, my god if there&#x27;s a case for wanting to get all the stats when you attribute a cause to a problem, this illustrates it. (before you jump to the conclusion that Amazon does this out of spite or purposefully, which of course it might -- and unless you happen to get your kicks from overreacting to stories on the internet&#x2F;Reddit)<p>With tens of thousands of workers recently hired, and probably a good number fired, I&#x27;m sure you will find a distribution of people who were fired 2, 3, 4, etc. any number of days before some noteworthy date in their pay schedule. This of course happens to be a case where it was dramatically close. Get enough people in a set and you will find all sorts of pleasant and unpleasant coincidences.<p>I&#x27;m guessing there could be 10x the number of people outraged if you made the criterion: fired 1 <i>week</i> before bonus. How about people who died a day before their birthday, or even minutes before? Cut a sample a certain way and you&#x27;re sure to find the oddest case. How about the person who lucked out and got the bonus and quit the <i>next</i> day?<p>Now, as I said, maybe Amazon did it deliberately out of spite, to save $3000. Who knows. But I&#x27;m just saying it&#x27;s not inconsistent with random HR behavior, and if you want to make a claim of deliberate malice with any responsibility you&#x27;d better study the matter more carefully than citing one example. I&#x27;m not jumping on the Reddit antiwork bandwagon just because of this stat.<p>Aside from that, what does this story incentivize Amazon to do? Pretty much fire someone earlier so that they won&#x27;t be accused of stuff like this.

The difficulty with these stories second hand is that people often lie about why they have been fired, especially to family. I doubt anybody involved in the firing had anything to gain here so I&#x27;d be interested in hearing their side of the story.<p>A few people I grew up with are frequently the &quot;best workers in the company&quot; and are similarly fired suddenly after a few months. If you haven&#x27;t seen the pattern you can be forgiven when you believe them the first time.

I&#x27;ve been fired after receiving more money&#x2F;promotion, I&#x27;ve been fired after 3 months and benefits have been activated, I&#x27;ve been fired within 3 months for various reasons by sketchy and non-sketchy companies, one of which was stupid enough to actually keep me on longer than 3 months amd think they could just sever ties and not pay me out. There&#x27;s no detail in the post, but the story is totally plausible. Companies suck and shouldn&#x27;t be trusted.

Maybe this is a true story, but it doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense - Amazon is desperate for workers, that&#x27;s the entire point of the bonus.<p>Firing each worker you get after a few months to back out of the bonus seems very unlikely to me, they would run out of people to hire very quickly. And imagining some middle manager doing this (i.e. not official policy) also doesn&#x27;t make sense - it&#x27;s not like they personally pay the bonus, what&#x27;s their motivation?<p>It&#x27;s more likely they gave the new hire the full length of time to prove themselves, and they decided they were inadequate for some reason that the story teller will of course never tell us.

Can anyone explain to me how Amazon gets away with calling these a “signing bonus”? It seems very near to an outright lie to use that name to describe a payment that is only given after you’ve proven yourself at your job for some period of time.

This is fake. Amazon gives $1,000 after 30 days, then the next $1,000 after 90 days, and the next $1,000 after 180 days.

Frugality is a leadership principal there. But on a serious note Amazon is a large employer meaning that this could just be a coincidence.

We&#x27;re supposed to believe that a company of the size of Amazon did this just to save $3000? This doesn&#x27;t pass the sniff test. The most likely scenario is that the person did something egregious, got rightfully fired for it, and it happened to be a day before their bonus.<p>Some red flags:<p>- A one-off save of $3000 makes absolutely no sense for a company of the size of Amazon. Where are all the other workers who got fired for the same reason?<p>- We only have one side of the story.<p>- The post does not go into any detail about the firing. It&#x27;s the classic &quot;he was a good boy&quot; story which falls apart instantly once you see hard evidence.<p>- The subreddit is incredibly biased against work in general.<p>- The poster has not made any further comments after posting the thread, no clarifications, nothing - a likely karma-farming attempt.<p>This is almost certainly fake.

Tell me about human psychology --<p>You sign onto a job with no promise of getting a bonus until you work, say, 90 days. What does it matter if you got fired 1 month before that date, versus 1 day? You feel it was <i>almost</i> yours, and it feels so much worse?<p>Aside from that, until workers refuse to sign up for a job that has a 1 month vesting period for the bonus, and instead they have to make it 1 week to find employees, or 1 day, what is there to object to? You agreed.<p>Of course, I am not known for my PR skills.

This is how things work in financial services. People work like dogs with the anticipation of a bonus that is at least half their annual salary (often more). Bonuses get paid January 31st. Firings happen in November thru December - they don&#x27;t want to pay for people it sit around on the holidays, so right before or just after Thanksgiving, that is when you get the boot.

The fair thing would be to prorate bonuses like this in cases of involuntary termination.

Please be skeptical of things you read on Reddit, doubly so from that subreddit.