> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.

I'll be blunt, I am not worried about your friend's mental health as much as I am worried about them being a person who will not refuse being part of an operation despite being hospitalized for it. I am scared of the possibility that they could be made to do anything as long as they are paid enough. I am worried that a person that makes such a decision might be a manager, a parent or otherwise influential. There is absolutely nothing to be valorized about this.

It has been known for a while that there is a link between leadership and severe mental health issues [1]. Unfortunately this is how a lot of organisations are being built and how they are fluorishing.

And the higher the position, the worse it is [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniesarkis/2019/10/27/seni...

A recent HN article/discussion that I think is relevant ("Don't kill yourself"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543543

Yes. Once I passed a certain threshold of comfortable income, and it was certainly less than anything to be found in Silicon Valley, money stopped being any motivation to me at all. What's the point of going from "comfortable plus ten percent" to "comfortable plus five hundred percent"? That's not worth one single headache, let alone a mental breakdown.

Oh, come on.

The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others (in their own mind, which neither of us can really enter). This isn't a prison experiment.

Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

The damage they're doing to themselves will eventually trickle down to those they live with - spouse, kids, parents, friends, etc.

> Bonus, I don't think the parent comment was trying to represent his friend's actions as something to replicate.

Fair point. I didn't intend to counter OP, but a general sentiment in tech. Could have made it clearer.

> The person is doing the damage to themselves, not to others

Actually we don't know that. Tech is usually a collaborative field. And the line between auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation is often blurry. The very least through not taking care of oneself in a balanced fashion they've distributed that cost to the insurance payers, their family and even their team through their absence. The word individual means indivisible, not isolated.

You sure there isn't someone there doing A/B experiments for motivating the pickers and having to choose whether or not to try motivating them with the message "how would you feel if you have to tell your children they don't get to eat because you didn't pick enough items."

> When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are.

Tell that to the guys in logistics who don't get any options and bear the brunt of Amazon's bad management.

Logistics workers aren't stack ranked, so that's a completely different problem

I believe they are actually just stacked.

Where I live engineers aren't stack ranked either. Doesn't speak highly of the engineers to be honest to accept such conditions. Why should you? Money? Not really a problem in the industry, is it?

Although I do think that Amazon probably pays much more, it just doesn't seem worth it. It is hard to work with people in an eternal dick measuring contest. It just isn't fun.

Up until a couple of years ago, they did get stock (Amazon doesn't give you options, but stock grants). Not sure if that ended when they made the salary $15.

If by 'logistics' you mean the people who pack/ship etc, warehouse work sucks, but Amazon has better salary and conditions than most others (pee bottle jokes aside).

If you mean the warehouse supervisors, analysts, etc, they get paid fairly well.

The injury rate of Amazon's warehouse employees is the highest in the industry[0]. Annual turnover is almost double that of the retail and logistics industries [1]. On top of that, as you note, the work sucks. I would call those conditions bad, and the turnover suggests that the pay is not sufficient to retain employees.

[0] www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-osha-injury-rate/

[1] https://www.adpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/19220244/Th...

Why, exactly, is the pee bottle situation a "joke"?

Parent comment is referring to any crude joke or non-inspired replies regarding the peeing in bottles situation (which isn’t isolated to Amazon alone)

It has the worst results in the industry - most injuries, most turnover.

Where do you get these "better conditions" from?

Unions are usually a good starting point.

yeah, they are already leaving in droves.

No, they are not. Amazon logistics employees get paid significantly higher than any other blue collar job in the region.

Someone else posted this in response to a similar comment further down:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...

.. and significantly less than other logistics workers.

So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?

> Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according to a new report

Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...

I know I will never work for them, they constantly reach out to me and its all nope on my side.

As a side note there's always new college grads(a sucker born every minute according to PT Barnum) willing to suffer for their chance to work at a FANG.

I haven't seen too many threads on HN complaining about the work conditions at any FAANG other than Amazon though?

> Why aren't they?

Do you have evidence they aren’t? I was under the impression Amazon warehouse logistics employees had extremely high turnover (averaging less than 1 year).

I suspect I agree with you that logistics workers realize they are on a lower rung of the ladder and are willing to work for less compensation. I suspect much of janitorial and security staff in Amazon HQ probably have no access to stock options either.

> I suspect much of janitorial and security staff in Amazon HQ probably have no access to stock options either.

It's likely that security and janitorial are 3rd party contractors and have no access to anything available from Amazon whatsoever.

Amazon's security works for Securitas at the Seattle campus, and turnover is extremely high as they try shenanigans like "Cover the Alarm Panel, do entryway guarding at the main entrance at the same time (despite both requiring 24/7 physical presence and not being in the same area of the building)".

Amazon has very high security staffing requirements compared to most other Seattle companies. Absolutely bonkers IMO

> So, elaborate on your model of the world. Shouldn't the logistic employees already be leaving in droves since they're not getting stock? Why aren't they?

Wait, does “logistics” include warehouse, where the article mentions they had reached 150% annual turnover prepandemic? Sounds a lot like “leaving in droves”.

Yeah, they're leaving in droves. They're also arriving in droves, which is why Amazon has been able to withstand 150% turnover.

But Amazon is now worried that they've worn out much of the US workforce available for "industrial athlete"positions. (Their term.) The droves of arrivals may slow down to dribbles.

"Arriving in droves" is much more telling about the external conditions of the job market. I think it's safe to say that it sounds like a good gig before you have a good understanding of what the work is. Then, after working for less than a year you see it for what it is and get out of there.

Quite amazing you can interpret "150% turnover" as "arriving in droves".

150% turnover is unconditionally bad.

On top of what other folks said, the warehouse folks not getting stock is a fairly recent development (2018, when minimum wage was raised). They do have a shockingly high turnover rate, but not sure if there is much that can be said about that relating to stock price currently, given how soon it's been since their stock comp went away, combined with the general strangeness of the Covid-19 pandemic

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/amazon-hourly-workers-lose-m...

Getting your salary raised is probably a better deal. I don't think you can fund a stock purchase program at those wages (obviously you can take RSUs though) and the main effect might be they have to pay for Turbotax.

because they may not have other job opportunities ? Because being screwed is better than having no job at all ?

Depends on who is classified as logistics: warehouse workers are a key component in the logistics l, and they have %150 annual turn over rate.

I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"

When I interviewed with the AWS team I definitely did not get the impression that they were a happy bunch. Then again, periodically being on-call with a 6 minute response time for critical emergencies can do that to you.

Hell, Amazon doesn't even give its employees free Prime accounts.

I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here.

Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic.

Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles where they're unhappy.

Amazon can't certainly do better in how it scales its business, but alot of the posts here that give the appearance that everyone at Amazon is unhappy are exaggerated. Alot of people don't like Amazon, period, and think the company should be broken up. While I think we can do alot of things better, I also believe there's a particular agenda pushed because Amazon is perceived as a threat across many industries, not just retail sales or cloud services.

FWIW, I know quite a few people from FAANG and associated companies, and those coming from Amazon are consistently the most unhappy about work there. So, while this may not be universal inside the company, Amazon definitely does have a problem compared to the industry at large.

To be fair, most employees leaving their company are _likely_ to be unhappier than average.

Not necessarily. Jumping around is fairly common practice for those who seek fast promos in large tech companies, because it's usually a faster track to get up to the higher levels than just grinding in place. It's not all that uncommon to find people who went Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook full circle, for example. And they aren't necessarily unhappy about their past stints. But, again, the recurring theme seems to be that Amazon is the worst of the bunch in terms of hours worked (and work/life balance in general) and career opportunities.

I will offer my perspective, and this is not to disparage or dispute anyone else's experience at Amazon or any other company.

Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon.

I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce.

Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic problem in their work force? Probably not. I did know folks who were plenty satisfied and didn't leave, who didn't follow me even after I tried to recruit them.

All I'm saying is – it's easy to draw a conclusion and the wrong one. When you have a company that hires at Amazon scale, 1% of your workforce being unsatisfied and some percentage of that 1% willing to speak out about it means you have a lot of negative press. At that point, your rival companies, especially in the news media, have plenty of ammunition to run campaigns where that 1% seems like it's 80% or 99%.

Lastly – there is a negative Amazon article on HN just about every single day, and from reading those articles, it seems like people out there wish my mental was suffering or I hate d my job, even if I feel great and like the people I work with.

No, your experience does not represent a systemic problem.

It represents your lived experience.

(I'd also say that with only three different company cultures that you have personally expirenced, your perspective is skewed).

What you are missing is that you do not see similar news reports about (say) Google, Netflix, etc. Sure there will always be individual stories in any organisation but the fact that there are *continual* stories about Amazon in all areas (blue collar, white collar) indicates that this is a systemic, widespread problem that they are either unaware of (unlikely) or do not care about.

Whether it is not caring (probably) or unawareness you have to be worried if an organisation like Amazon is this complacent.

[ note: I work at AWS, and I've experienced all this bullshit from the inside. When people I know ask me for a referral in, I tell them to run away. I'm looking to leave shortly ]

We're comparing companies that all hire at Amazon scale, at least when it comes to tech talent. If scale was all there is to it, they'd all have the same reputation. They do not.

I believe you, and just for context, I have spent 600k on AWS over the past 3 years, when I could have spent it on Azure. I don't think AWS should be shut down.

I absolutely don't believe AWS should be shut down. I do think AWS and Amazon(retailer) should be split up, and thats what a majority of sensible people believe.

Source? I consider myself “sensible”, do not agree with this statement, and haven’t seen any data that would suggest the “majority” would agree.

59% Americans support breaking up big tech.

https://www.vox.com/2021/1/26/22241053/antitrust-google-face...

What percentage of "sensible" Americans? If there's anything we've learned over the past several years, many Americans are not sensible.

My point is that I don't think sensibility is measurable so there is no way to assert "sensible" people want Amazon broken up.

Did you try actually looking for any data? It's trivial to find and another poster did your work for you.

-sensible guy who also wants the cruel monopoly broken apart.

You're right that those engineers would jump ship: their primary reason to stay (pay) evaporates into thin air. But more importantly, if Amazon wants to keep them, they have to do one of two things: issue more stock, or compensate with better cash salaries.

Both of those solutions further impact the stock price. Paying more cash reduces free cash flow...the main determinant of Amazon's obscenely high P/E ratios. Issuing more stock dilutes ownership. Both solutions will push downward on stock price.

And of course, if the stock price drops, that completes the feedback loop...pushing more engineers out, with even more costly retention measures.

Amazon has successfully grown in mind boggling ways, and they might continue growing for the foreseeable future. But the way they have structured incentives, it seems to me that if Amazon has a negative shock to the stock price, it could quickly death spiral into a threat to the whole company, with a simple feedback loop that causes all of their engineering talent to jump ship.

I think the market will solve this soon on its own and it won’t be pretty. Amazon may be a great stock but everything falls in a market crash. I wonder what will happen internally when that happens. I never knew so much of Amazon structure was tied to the stock price until reading this thread.

> So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing to put up with straight up torture. They are deluded into thinking that their metrics and PIP plan work well because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price.

I feel like that's my problem as well in the company I work for (a well-known multinational, but not FAANG). I have a good compensation (although nowhere near the levels of FAANGs), yet I feel a little bit burned out.

If they didn't pay so well, I would have have left and taken a sabbatical (or two) to recover and rethink my life. And probably I would even return - and it might be more productive for all of us in the end. But I don't want to leave the golden cage because of the money, so I trudge along. It's weird how it is a perverse incentive. (And I wonder that it seems to be even worse for my coworkers who moved from another country here, and have now family dependent on this particular job.)

I think we are conditioned to take the money, instead of quality of life, because we worry about the modern neoliberal precarity, uncertainty about the future. Mark Blyth theorizes that the precarity might be bigger issue for most people than social inequality.

Your friend could switch jobs, then use his salary to buy Amazon's stock :)

Would you?

Over the past 9 months though the stock has been flat, so this willingness to suffer for rewards will hit a brick wall soon

I always worry that companies that run like this will rapidly implode as soon as the crazy growth and market dominance begins to be threatened. As soon as you're no longer king of the hill - what happens? Seems like you would rapidly shed talent.

> because their best employees are staying but it’s really just the stock price

What is the point of hiring the "best" employees except as an optimization of the stock price?

You'll find plenty of people who will leave a profitable company or a lucrative position if they value intangibles over cash.

Golden handcuffs? More like golden shackles.

> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.

It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.

The poor fellow at Amazon can always go to Zillow or Microsoft not really the same as deaths of despair here.

Reminds me of the poor fellow who jumped off a Facebook building because their manager blocked their transfer. I bet you wouldn't tell them "they could have gone to a different company". Visa issues non-withstanding, a rational, hopeful frame of mind is not always available to us at all times. (Not even talking about the stresses of immigrating itself).

Depression, despair etc are illogical narrowing our frames of minds and not being able to see any out. Kind of like getting stuck with a coding problem until you walk away and take a break, except you can't think of a way of walking away. (Or your "way" may manifest itself as psychosis or self harm.)

Hear, hear!

Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!

Interviewing is probably too hard to contemplate if you're depressed. Especially if you've been around long enough to remember Google-style torturous brainteaser interviews (whether or not those were real.)

If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.

> for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class

Wait, what?

I was curious about the first bit - the lower social class stuff is mostly right, I think, because of the huge gap between national narrative and reality on US socioeconomic mobility [0].

[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20162015

> a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear

Fantastic analogy. The same fundamentalist narrow-mindedness only about "growth at all costs"; no regard to content of that growth. Just make the stock go up.

Kind of like King Midas wanting to make everything gold. No regard to the interiority of the objects, nor their real use. Just make them gold on the outside.

As they say in The Wire, "The whole world shines shit and calls it gold."

6

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment.

Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no guarantee it will double effectively taking a pay cut.

That logic applies when you joined a while ago. However, with the stock sky high (P/E 66, double GOOG 33), joining Amazon right now may not give you that potential upside anymore. Your managers and long time careers will get a larger portion of the upside. It's already evident by the stock growth of GOOG compared to AMZN in the past one year/quarter. The P/E of Amazon is high, compared with the growth potential vs others in FAANG. Picking a company to join is also akin to pick a stock to invest. Low P/E is not everything, but it's an important part of the equation.

For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.

> For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.

No, because mr. Market has been looking at everything except P/E, more essentially you can't spend P/E. You spend price.

If you want to throw in P/E in the analysis fine, but then you have to throw in every other element which makes the stock move:

1) Cult CEO who is able to sell the narrative

2) Fed policy

3) Macro environment

4) Odds of company being targeted by the DOJ

and all the other trillions of factors which influences the price of a security.

As Druckenmiller reminds us: "There is not a phenomenon in the world which doesn't affect the price of a security in some shape or form, no matter how small"

Amazon's PE has always been this high

But their market cap hasn’t. Odds are they won’t 5x their size in the next five years as they did in their last five.

That's what people said 5 years ago.

Eventually they'll start being right. Not even Amazon can grow at this pace forever.

Their retail business is still in a tiny portion of the world.

not to mention continued cloud growth, not just as a market, but the AWS share of that growing market.

I’m not seeing estimates of Amazon at 5x larger business (revenue). Estimates have Amazon at ~2x revenue ($850ish B) in five years and earnings growth slower than current levels. Folks think they’ll grow, just not quite as fast.

We’ll see. I think it’s going to be hard to maintain today’s growth rate at this size.

You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest

That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.

Except that their competitors are giving you 25/25/25/25 vest with 100/0/0/0 signing bonus.

True, there isn’t a real concept of a bonus of any kind* at Amazon. They definitely lean on the stick more than the carrot.

But you’re vesting 40% of your initial grant this year was the point, not that you didn’t get the initial “fill in” cash bonus.

Fair but if you decide to invest in Amazon with the proceeds you’re in the same boat. And other companies do frequently at least attempt to match scenarios like this (if you’re smart enough to get better offers).

That makes sense. I wasn't sure if SDEs get x units or y dollars worth of stock units each year. The former is most common, but everything about AMZN is unusual, including the vest schedule.

Amazon does it in dollars. Employees have a target comp figure in dollars, the annual stock refreshers are based on the price of the stock at that time, so if you got 100 units one year, and the stock doubles, all things being equal, you would only get 50 units the next year at refresh time.

In practice this means you can make good money off your hiring grant if price keeps going up, but you will also see your total comp hit a cliff / drop after a few years, since while stock going up is usually good, in Amazon's eyes, you've been lucky to be making more than your target comp those years and they aren't going to keep giving you the same amount of units if those units are worth more.

> The employees value the money more than they value well-being

yeah, if it's that then Amazon is not to blame.

Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.

Grants vest over a period of 4 years, with overlapping grants generally granted each year. So you don't need to wait a full 4 years to begin selling.

Right I know, my point is that if AMZN doubles two years in and GOOG doesn't, the AMZN worker is better off because their entire grant has doubled. The GOOG worker buying AMZN has only doubled half their grant, the unvested portion is in GOOG which hasn't moved.

Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.

Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.

Compare the performance of GOOG vs AMZN over the past 6mo, 1 yr, 2 yr.

Amazon's pandemic growth is leveling out.

I'm not a lawyer.

Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph. Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws based on the training I recalled.

It looks a problem peculiar to Seattle as there are not many choices of hyper-growth companies. I can't imagine the same dilemma in the bay area, where one can switch from one promising company to another every week from weeks.

This happens in the Bay Area for a similar but different reason, the promise that you’re on a rocket ship that is pre-initial exit can hold folks tight with sub dollar stock options that promise to 20-30x in value if you win the lottery.

Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs, this is one of the reasons “job hopping” is looked down on for high skilled workers and attributed to attitude and not the companies’ failed promises. Obviously not keeping people is painful for growth too, but it’s still a very one sided power dynamic.

> Smarter folks have just gone for the one or two year cliffs

Four year cliffs are much better for employees. Shorter cliffs will cost people a lot of money if the valuation shoots up.

I don’t understand. In fast moving small companies (<150) employees this sounds absurd. Are you talking about different companies?

Can you maybe give me an example, or something concrete to root your statement in?

I misspoke and used cliff as the length of the grant instead of when it started vesting. Short cliffs are good, some companies are starting to vest equity grants immediately. I haven't heard of a two year cliff.

Some companies are also doing one year grants instead of four year grants, like Stripe. That's costing employees a lot of money.

Got it, we are very much on the same page.

Just curious, what hyper growth companies (with public stock) exist in the Bay Area that don't also have offices in Seattle?

Roblox? I'm not sure if it's still in the class of hyper-growth companies, though. That said, what I had in mind were more of those pre-IPO companies. Some companies do set up office in Seattle, but not all. Plus, Seattle teams often had to struggle to get impactful projects given most of the executives and teams are in the Bay Area.