An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/open-letter-jeff-bezos-contract-workers-amazoncom/

by credo • 13 years ago

230 173 13 years ago

anigbrowl15• 13 years ago

An outsider was brought in who knew nothing about X-Ray. I was later told the new manger was hired based on management experience. She spent her first week being trained by one of the temps who had been deemed unqualified for the product manager position. After spending a week training the manager, and being her go-to person for the next three weeks whenever there was a problem, he was let go because he reached the maximum of eleven months on his contract.

I fail to see how it would be worse to make a commitment and provide some employees with benefits and some sort of job security. This HR policy is pathologically dysfunctional, and seemingly widespread, not just in the tech sector. I really wonder how long CEOs and management people in general think this party can go on.

Silhouette• 13 years ago

I really wonder how long CEOs and management people in general think this party can go on.

The trouble is, many tech-based industries today have little effective competition in the short term. No-one is going to disrupt Amazon and take over "We own on-line sales for the entire universe" because someone made a dumb hiring decision. No-one is going to beat Google out of the online advertising space because they have terrible customer service.

Sure, they might succeed despite these obvious failings rather than because of them, and they might have succeeded more if they'd been smarter, but in a very real economic sense, success is relative. Until these kinds of screw-ups make a dent in the bottom line that is both significant and clearly visible, there's nothing to drive a change unless something catches the eye of a few people who are very powerful but even more busy.

anigbrowl15• 13 years ago

Very true. I think the Internet accelerates superstar effects to the detriment of the economy as a whole. I hope Alibaba/Taobao decides to leave the Yangtze sooner rather than later.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/30/unleashing-the-crocodile-wh...

pyoung• 13 years ago

re: "management people"

That is part of the problem. You will often find that the skills it takes to climb the corporate ladder are not the same as the skills it takes to be a good manager. Management in bigger companies tends to be littered with well connected but incompetent people who are really good at bullshitting and 'looking the part'. This doesn't apply to every manager, but it is common enough that you are almost guaranteed to work with plenty of them throughout your career.

ryanobjc5• 13 years ago

The problem boils down to that managers are rewarded by their upper-managers for doing things that make the upper-managers happy, and are rarely rewarded for doing things that make their TEAM BETTER.

So as a result, most managers practice schmoozing the management hierarchy, and not at all about making more effective teams. And then guess which one they get better at? (hint: the one they do more of)

And then which one do they do MORE of?

And the cascading spiral ruins modern corporations.

cgore• 13 years ago

This is rather strange if it is accurate. Everywhere I've worked where they hired contractors as developers, the company always preferred contract-to-hire, assuming the person worked out well. I've had two jobs that way, 6-12 month contract to full-time regular employee. The only time people didn't transition to full-time is if they sucked, basically a 6-month interview. And sometimes they would go full-time even if they did suck.

lambersley2• 13 years ago

In one organization where I was a manager, our HR policies limited the contractors we hired to 'two terms,' 36 months. If I wanted to keep that person on staff, I would have to wait 12 months before I could bring them back. The result: The really good people I WANTED on my staff could not keep any longer than three years.

anigbrowl15• 13 years ago

Did the HR people ever provide any rationale for this? I mean, I know that hiring people full-time creates a bunch of additional costs and liabilities. But did they ever quantify what those costs would be, so that you could weigh them against the projected benefit of a hire, not to mention the opportunity cost of cutting someone loose and hiring a new person, with the resultant drop in productivity?

I mean, it's not going to get better until HR people and CFOs are called on the carpet for poor decision-making in a situation like that.

marcusf• 13 years ago

From the story, the author doesn't sound like a developer.

sonabinu• 13 years ago

Agree

mabbo2• 13 years ago

Speaking as a developer at Amazon.com, what contractors? I've never met any, and I only have heard of one who left a while ago.

Edit later: Developer contractors at least. I mean, sure, cleaning staff are contractors/temps.

waitwhatwhoa• 13 years ago

Presumably this person was annotating movies with which actors were on screen when, and possibly where in the frame.

anigbrowl15• 13 years ago

I mean, sure, cleaning staff are contractors/temps.

Obviously people like that don't deserve any kind of job security and should be fired annually.

/sarcasm

samstave• 13 years ago

Those uppity cleaning staff better not get the balls and gall to make a blog on-line about it either!

Kapura4• 13 years ago

I find at Amazon that the close you are to the core business, the better you get treated. The engineers seem to be very well compensated and get benefits and shit because they make the company what it is. I hate to break it to you, but the people who empty the bins are not essential. They should still be treated with the same respect as any human being, but you are absolutely smoking rocks if you think that Amazon has any incentive to give a shit about them.

justin_vanw2• 13 years ago

Yea, I'm sure that's what he meant. /sarcasm

bobbles• 13 years ago

I remember a receptionist in a UK office complaining about the cleaning contractors the company was using. When I asked why they hadn't changed she mentioned there is apparently some union set up so that when you 'fire' the contractor, the new cleaners that you get are actually the same people, hired under a new contract.

xxpor• 13 years ago

They aren't temps, they're staff of an outside janitorial company. How they staff up I have no idea.

mabbo2• 13 years ago

Valid criticism. I'd prefer to see them as full time, but I think most large companies today use contacted companies for cleaning staff, etc. It's what it is, and that whole problem is bigger than just one company.

msg• 13 years ago

My org hires contract for various understaffed projects. Often for SDET. Sometimes they make a transition to full time.

ntkachov• 13 years ago

I've been a dev at Amazon. They don't hire devs as contractors. They hire the people that support the devs. Testers, validators, vetters, etc. If you need someone to manually poke, prod, click on a button all day long, they hire temps for that. The testers for our app were temps, same thing with the people that would click the "approve" button on user submitted images or uploads.

maddalab• 13 years ago

This is not correct. I left Amazon last year after 3 years. I had a temp sit besides me for about 1 year. He did the same job as a SDE-2 would do. He worked for a team writing software for inventory management, my team worked in the same space. A month after he left, my manager asked me if I knew anyone who would be a good fit. I immediately mentioned his name based on what I had seen for over an year. I never heard back again.

Amazon has less then stellar hiring practices even for full time employees. From personal experience in no particular order (a) low balling new hires in salary and position (b) bar raiser ego trips and (c) if it isn't my answer it isn't the right answer.

I have also seen an engineer promoted to Principal for having accomplished nothing during the entire year (imo), and another principal say to me, why would anyone who has an offer from Google ever pick Amazon.

pasbesoin2• 13 years ago

Ama-Mart

Wal-zon

Take your pick.

I don't care whether you are "online" or off. Treat your workers like shit -- yes, your workers, you wankers; I don't care what shell employment manoeuvring you use -- and run a business model that takes advantage of, if it's not outright predicated upon, the public dole, and I will be disinclined to send my business your way.

Other readers here: If you don't like it, vote with your dollars (or whatever currency). It's the only way, in today's world.

And name them for what they are. They hate the bad publicity.

HN relevance: Being a "tech" company does not absolve you of being a good citizen. Some "tech" advocates are sounding far too much like Wall Street bankers, these days.

----

P.S. Good grief -- a bit of upvote. Karma negating though it may prove to be (feh), I'll add that while authoring my original comment I was thinking more of the now much reported warehouse staffing situation than of the OP's situation. ALTHOUGH... I, too, have experienced the "blessed" "management" employee phenomenon -- more than once, when I stop to think about it.

Once even personally, where a VP's... "pet" was moved into a role that I was in line for. They received some months of half-day or more one-on-one training from a senior supervisor. They never really got the hand of the role, especially the technical details; nonetheless, it was enough of a resume builder for them to shortly thereupon move on to "bigger and better" "management" things.

Whereupon, they belatedly put me into the role. Which I then did from day one, with effectively zero additional training. Oh, and while holding down my old job -- and at times, repeatedly, also portions of the job I'd left before that, which they continued to underhire for and so continued to fail to fill successfully.

"Management". The best management I've seen worked up to the role. "Formal" credentials are to me not outright anathema, but definitely a caution.

bmelton13• 13 years ago

The worker was grateful for the opportunity, and enjoyed his time at Amazon, though he felt unmotivated toward the end.

He was paid fairly, and presumably commensurately to either his skills, experience, or what he was willing to accept. He entered into the contract freely, was not abused by the employer in any way, and knew full well going in that his employment term would be most likely limited to 12 months. Yet still, he would like to return to Amazon for gainful employment.

How exactly was anyone taken advantage of?

anigbrowl15• 13 years ago

'Freedom' becomes a slippery concept when you're dealing with contracts of adhesion, though. Non-executive workers have little or no negotiating power over their terms of employment, and the greater the asymmetry the less of a free economic choice it is. Obviously he's not that happy about it or he wouldn't have written this screed.

Jormundir3• 13 years ago

You don't know what taken advantage of means do you?

These days any given new graduate who didn't attend an ivy league is in a situation where it is extremely difficult to get a job.

The alternative to working as a contractor at Amazon is not working at all. This is the situation these contractors are in. When the alternative is being in extreme debt / homeless, a choice cannot be made freely. This is the situation that Amazon and Walmart are taking advantage of, employee these people as hourly, no benefits contractors.

Obviously there's the argument that Amazon and Walmart are being 'good' providing them with hourly pay when they would otherwise be paid nothing. This, however, doesn't mean they're not taking advantage of the people they hire as contractors. I would also not argue, but hold as a belief that it is extremely immoral to not pay the people who are struggling to help the company succeed, in order to pay people who are already wealthy more.

Before you explode with economic principles of how they are being paid what they're worth due to the harsh job market conditions, save your breath, I already know. The thinking is right from a market philosophy perspective, but these principles also weaken the company, and I would say are actually wrong from a perspective of building and growing a successful business.

grecy3• 13 years ago

The worker was grateful for the opportunity

Uh-huh. And if I give you no food for a week then throw you a dog bone you'll be grateful for that too.

What a disgusting way to behave.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

Social, cultural and political context.

The entire concept in which Amazon use temporary contract workers is seen as an exploitative abuse of the power by the employer the majority of societies outside the US.

The use of the term "wankers" leads me to believe that pasbesoin is not American, which means there's a pretty big chances he's used to different employer - employee relations and probably stricter laws limiting this kind of thing.

Personally, I don't consider this kind of thing to be "employment". It offers neither the security of being an employee, nor the freedom of being fully self-employed.

vacri3• 13 years ago

It's nice how you do the "he was paid fairly with unicorns and rainbows, with sweet choirs singing him to his rest... .... ... ... (or what he was willing to accept)", front-loading the idea that the employment was an ideal situation rather than what the guy may have had to take at the time. You could say exactly the same thing about illegal jobs paying under minimum wage.

Kapura4• 13 years ago

hey, uh, did you read the article? The guy seemed to not be complaining so much about how him and the other staffers were being treated and more concerned with the fact that his team had really quick turn around and the people who he felt were the most qualified for the work were not being given the positions they deserved.

I replied further down the page, but there are a lot of employees who amazon treats pretty well. They are just much, much closer to the tech core of the business. Engineers especially get a pretty good deal; a friend of mine went out of undergrad to work at amazon for a six-figure starting salary plus additional dosh for moving expenses.

I hate to break it to you, but Amazon is a really, really fucking huge enormous gigantic company. And maybe you should talk to people who work there rather than just judging the company based on a few negative internet articles.

Jormundir3• 13 years ago

They're not judging the company on a few internet articles, they're judging the company on the immoral hiring practices they use. Even if it's not for the entirety of the company, it is still significant.

Obviously they pay tech workers well, they have to in order to get them to work there. They would have a very difficult time contracting tech employees, because there are so many alternative places to work. A perfect contrast of how they're taking advantage of those they can take advantage of.

subsystem• 13 years ago

I sometimes think that tech is worse than banking. Banking is about being "in the club", but if you ask them behind closed doors they know what they're doing. While in tech people seem to actually believe they are righteous. Looking at organizational structures law firms, somewhat paradoxical, seems much better than both tech and banking.

davorak• 13 years ago

I sometimes think that tech is worse than banking. Banking is about being "in the club", but if you ask them behind closed doors they know what they're doing. While in tech people seem to actually believe they are righteous.

My initial impression of this description is that it should easier to correct bad behavior in the tech world. For two reasons. If the tech leader becomes convinced they are doing the wrong thing they will want to change to doing the right thing. Also since they are being transparent it is easier for the public to know and understand their policies and apply pressure if they are disliked.

On the other hand it seems like it would be very hard to change bad behavior in the banking world from your description since they are already convinced their actions are non-optimal for society, it is difficult to apply social pressure since they are not transparent and are incentivized to be deceptive or lie.

nhangen• 13 years ago

I downvoted you because your comment doesn't recognize the context of the article. It's not about being treated poorly, but making stupid decisions that lead to poor product.

rogerbinns2• 13 years ago

If you believe the workers are taken advantage of, could be managed in a different way that increases productivity, or providing far more value than they are paid, then you have an opportunity to start a business and profit handsomely at the expense of those "wankers".

For some reason all the people making those observations never seem to start those businesses to show the "bad" guys up.

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

Econ 101 is simple and all, but in the real world the barriers to entry are more complex. I can see I now:

"Hey Mr. VC, do I got a pitch for you! We're going to compete directly with Amazon, but pay our people more! Are you in?"

kalleboo• 13 years ago

Other readers here: If you don't like it, vote with your dollars (or whatever currency). It's the only way, in today's world.

If you see shitty management as abuse, I hope you're ready to boycott 90% of everything else in addition to the 90% of manufactured goods you must already be boycotting.

tnuc2• 13 years ago

Did this person actually go ahead and apply for any other full time jobs that were on offer on the amazon job site?

I have seen this before where people expected to be presented full time jobs, when all they needed was a little prodding to go through the hoop jumping and formally apply.

anigbrowl15• 13 years ago

A few of the temps, who had been on the project since X-Ray’s inception, applied for the now vacant position of project manager. I was convinced the position would be filled by one of two individuals who had trained me and acted as point people for questions and concerns when the manager was in a meeting. None of the temps who applied for the position got it, which most of us on the team found confusing because they were basically already doing the job.

pasbesoin2• 13 years ago

It's been some considerable time, but I spent some time some decades ago working as a temp. In many cases -- institutional and/or individual perspectives -- it's essentially a class system. Regardless of ability, temps are "second class citizens".

Or perhaps we should start to think of it as a "caste" system. Once you are "labelled" at an institution, depending on for whom you're working, your only way out may be to move to a different institution. These days in the U.S., that's not necessarily an easy proposition.

It used to be that many business would hire temporary workers as essentially a "trial" period. If they liked you, you might well be offered a permanent position.

These days, temporary employment has indeed turned for many into a shell game limiting liability and obligation to the employee.

Truly fungible employment.

It can be hard to be rid of that "fungible" label.

"There are people who count, and people who don't."

tnuc2• 13 years ago

That doesn't confirm that he applied for anything at all.

fady• 13 years ago

http://blog.seattlepi.com/trevorgriffey/2011/04/03/top-10-re...

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/668688/is_amazo...

http://www.thenation.com/article/164823/cyber-monday-click-a...

ryanobjc5• 13 years ago

I used to work at Amazon, and this is disturbing, but not really surprising.

A focus on cost instead of value is a core element at Amazon. I ultimately left because what could be described as a failure to recognize value over the actual cost. 5 years of controlling high-value but high-cost things left my department with a shredded staff. By the time the economy was improving in the 2006-8 timeframe, nearly all my colleagues left.

And these were people at the TOP of the foodchain - senior full time software engineers.

Unfortunately Bezos is more lucky than a skilled manager. He has some useful values, mostly around being frugal, that has served the company well. But in a competitive hiring market, one would be making a mistake joining up with Amazon if you had an alternative.

garybizzle• 13 years ago

The author also mentions "Although it may seem like the company is saving money — because you don’t have to provide temporary workers with medical coverage or paid vacation time."

I just want to point out that contractors actually cost the company MORE money than employees, on average around $30k/year per worker. I think the main reason contractors are used is because many full-time employees "settle" somewhat and don't have the same drive that contractors do (i.e., contractors feel they have more to prove and are thus more productive). Also, contractors can be fired without any consequences, which is not to be said about employees. But I don't think cost is the main driver here.

ryanobjc5• 13 years ago

It's hard to say if specifically someone did a cost/benefit/value analysis.

But when you work in a culture of doing things that are frugal, cheap, and those are rewarded, you will be rewarded for doing things that SEEM frugal and cheap.

So even if there is long term value reduction, no one realizes this, or has done the math, and thus it seems like Amazon is saving a butt-load. After all, the face value (in terms of salary) and flexibility of temp workers seems like a win-win, especially emotionally.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

I used to work for Amazon, in a different department than the author, and I agree with this part. My old team employed two contractors "in perpetuity", to my protestations, and the reason wasn't monetary.

Not directly anyways.

At the time (circa 2009-10) upper management was freaking out about the economic downturn. Hiring caps were put in place, and every team was watched like a hawk for "unnecessary" headcount. Bringing in a full-timer was basically impossible, especially for a position that was "second class" (read: not a PM/TPM/SDE).

Turns out though, you can hire contractors just fine so long as you could prove need - and this conveniently let you hire someone without exposing yourself in upper-managerial whack-a-mole.

All in all, I learned a lot at Amazon, but it is a terribly managed company as a whole. There are good parts, there are bad parts, but much of the upper management is more interested in politics than the product/customer/company. This sort of systemic dysfunction was just one of many "quirks" of working there.

Funnily enough, that same hiring cap was what eventually got me to leave. During this whole time the team had a need for more software engineering hands, but we were always turned down by management since other teams had more acute needs and needed to fit under the hiring cap. We built up a massive tech debt in the meantime as our maintenance and workload increased at breakneck pace.

Eventually, a couple of years later, the hiring restrictions were relaxed and my team of 3 engineers opened up seven positions in the same month. I spent the next 3-4 months basically interviewing and sitting in meetings full-time. Then I decided I enjoyed coding more than interviewing people and explaining why interviewing people for 5 hours a day was causing nothing to get done.

stevewilhelm• 13 years ago

Sounds to me like the work his team was doing, annotating films with meta-data, is a stop gap situation. I presume Amazon is working on an automated system based on Mechanical Turk or crowd sourcing to do the annotating.

If this is indeed the case, it would not make sense to hire a full-time team.

antinitro• 13 years ago

I assumed the work he was doing was at a higher level than that - i.e. creating the software which allows the end user to see these annotations. In this case, it would need ongoing maintenance, which would be done best by a full time team who understand the code.

Either way, if he's good at what he does, it would make sense for the company to keep him on even if they move him to another project.

jmduke2• 13 years ago

A lot of people are jumping to the comments and assuming that the worker is either a developer or a warehouse worker, which makes me assume they didn't finish the article. The OP worked on quality assurance, which is staffed by a lot of contractors because (ideally) the ramp-up time for the position is much smaller than that of an SDE, and a lot of these positions don't last long enough to warrant full-time employment. (That being said, a lot of the full-time QA people start out as contractors.)

The clarion call about the dangers of bad management (and not even "bad" in the Dilbert sense, but "bad" in the "these people are not qualified to do what they need to do" sense) is extremely well-taken. This is why documentation at MegaCorps is so incredibly important, especially with high turnover: if your institutional knowledge is confined to a person, not a wiki or a sharepoint doc, then you're unnecessarily exposing yourself to risk and ruin.

205guy• 13 years ago

Actually, I'm not sure the OP ever stated his job or job requirements. From reading between the lines, it seems like the OP and the other temps were content taggers: to watch a video/film and identify the characters and actors on the screen in real time.

If that is the case, I would guess it's a low-skills technician-like job, and frankly, I'm surprised it isn't automated with image recognition software.

On the one hand, I could understand how a company would want a group of temp workers to do this one-time essentially data-entry type work. On the other hand, if they make it temporary to avoid paying benefits, that's a loop-hole that needs legislation to close.

But I'm also sympathetic to what the OP is saying: event entry-level workers get better at their job with time and experience, they think of better ways to do their job, they learn the corporate culture and can even contribute outside of their job. I think it is a shame companies have practices like this.

shard• 13 years ago

Based on the article, it seems like there's a bit of artistry involved in the tagging. They had to choose a time (and possibly a place?) to show the tag, and probably needed to make a choice that would disrupt the flow of the narrative the least. I don't think software is quite up to snuff just yet when it comes to this, though I am willing to be surprised.

mathattack• 13 years ago

This type of job sounds like it may not be permanent. But when you do perpetual contracting for grunt work, your quality suffers. This type of contracting only works when the best people insist on being contractors and you can't hire them full time.

It would be interesting to hear Amazon's side of the story.

famousactress• 13 years ago

My first experience in a technical position was exactly the same. I was a temp employee at a major computer/printer manufacturer. In their case the policy (law, I think) was that you could work for as a temp for 6 years before you had to take something like at least 6 months off. There were loads of people who'd been temps so long they'd had one or two of these 'vacations' (unpaid, of course).

It's unfortunate. It sets up a nasty little caste system, but my understanding is that it's done not because it produces better work but rather because as a public company it allows to you constantly "right-size" your headcount without firing actual employees, which you'd have to report to your shareholders.

I'm sure at the location I worked at temps out-numbered full time employees by a factor of at least 4-to-1. After being passed up for a couple of full time positions (it was a joke or legal loophole that we were even allowed to apply) the best employees would jump ship and the workforce would maintain a consistent average/below-average pool of pretty apathetic clock-punchers. I don't think that was misunderstood by anyone in a position to control things though.

rthomas6• 13 years ago

So it sounds like part of the problem could be fixed by requiring corporations to report "right-sizing" of temp workers to their shareholders like they do for layoffs.

Wingman4l7• 13 years ago

Sounds like an excellent loophole for a company to keep its health insurance costs low, too.

pisarzp• 13 years ago

I'll try to play devil's advocate role.

"One day that all changed. Our experienced team leader was transferred to a different department"

It looks like the main problem was not Amazon's practices, just poor performance of the manager. However, we cannot blame Amazon for not giving managerial position to one of the contractors, when they have experienced internal candidate for this position. People get bored and like to change roles, and it's important to give them the chance to try something new within organisation or they will leave.

I agree though, that having a 11-month max policy for contractors seems stupid, but it may be caused by legal issues. At least in Europe it would be illegal to have someone work as a temp for extended period of time.

wildwood3• 13 years ago

I can almost guarantee that the 11-month max is Amazon's policy response to the Microsoft permatemps lawsuit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp - scroll down to the Vizcaino v. Microsoft section.

Yhippa• 13 years ago

What I've seen at different companies is the idea of using an internal employee vs hiring a temp. You have a temp staff and they take the brunt of the job cuts as they invariably happen. This allows the core workers the flexibility to move around the company in case of redundancies.

baddox• 13 years ago

I don't have much of a problem with the argument that worker conditions are bad and should be improved. It's a valid subjective call. But I'm more skeptical of this argument:

Although it may seem like the company is saving money — because you don’t have to provide temporary workers with medical coverage or paid vacation time — the revolving door of new hires encourages low quality work, inconsistent productivity and wastes useful resources on training.

I find it very hard to believe that an Amazon contract worker, based on his experience, is more qualified than Amazon management to judge whether this practice is financially good for Amazon.

tieTYT• 13 years ago

An outsider was brought in who knew nothing about X-Ray. I was later told the new manger was hired based on management experience. She spent her first week being trained by one of the temps who had been deemed unqualified for the product manager position. After spending a week training the manager, and being her go-to person for the next three weeks whenever there was a problem, he was let go because he reached the maximum of eleven months on his contract. Since the new manager never completely grasped the program, she asked a select few of the oldest temps to train the newest temps. It seemed to me that these people were not chosen based on merit or capability, but more like she was putting together her own collection of “cool” kids. The best way to be put in a leadership role was be a pretty girl or a dude who used liberal amounts of Axe hair gel.

I can't figure out what's going on here. Who is "her" and who is "him"?

thetrb• 13 years ago

her is the new manager

him is the temp who trained her

nostromo• 13 years ago

In this terrible economy, I am grateful for the work

Seattle's unemployment rate is 4%, which is basically optimal and near what it was before the recession.

https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+unemployment+rate

Seattle real-estate has almost completely rebounded.

http://www.zillow.com/local-info/WA-Seattle-home-value/r_160...

People may not realize it yet, but the recession is over. If Amazon values the work these people do, they shouldn't assume that there is an unending supply of people waiting to fill these positions.

zwily• 13 years ago

Amazon will realize there's not an unending supply when an unending supply stops showing up.

WalterBright3• 13 years ago

A quadruple negative! My brain just assploded.

wpietri3• 13 years ago

if you're looking at how hard it is to exploit workers, I think U6 is a better measure than U3, the one you're referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bure...

Nationally, that measure is still quite a bit worse than it was in 2007, and is twice as bad as 2001: http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

ctdonath• 13 years ago

There is a significant stratification of unemployment levels based on education. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm shows last year's breakdown; how that interacts with U6 is not immediately available, but is worth considering. Just a thought.

barista• 13 years ago

Given the razor thin margins that Amazon runs with, I am not surprised. This is a company that is struggling to make any money even after people bought hundreds of Billions of dollars worth of stuff from them. They are bound to cut corners to stay alive.

xyzzyz2• 13 years ago

Amazon works hard to have a minuscule profit. If they have no profit, they don't have any tax liability. The business they're in lets them adjust their profits in real time -- whenever they expect to have large profit, they just lower their prices to eat it. Consumers love this, so they have huge turnover, and thanks to this, small increase of prices earns them big profit, if they ever need cash to fund acquisition, or new warehouse, or whatever.

fauigerzigerk• 13 years ago

They're not fighting for survival, they're optimizing for market share.

jellicle• 13 years ago

Ha! Funny. Actually Amazon makes plenty of money, they're just recording their income in other countries as a tax dodge, like every other megacorp nowadays.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-brit...

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

People may not realize it yet, but the recession is over.

Nobody wants to "realize" it. It makes for a better narrative if we're still in the throes of depression. "In this tough economy..."

It's easier to rationalize negative things in your life if you can attribute them to things outside your control, like the economy.

fungi• 13 years ago

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1952/never-ha...

rayiner• 13 years ago

And LA used to be la la land.

wdr1• 13 years ago

People may not realize it yet, but the recession is over.

- Median wages are still down from 2009[1]

- Compared to 2000, national unemployment is still up significantly. [2]

The reason so many people may not realize it yet is for them, the recession is still a very real thing.

[1]http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Job_Creation/NELP-Fact-Sheet-Ineq...

[2] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_...

_pmf_• 13 years ago

People may not realize it yet, but the recession is over. If Amazon values the work these people do, they shouldn't assume that there is an unending supply of people waiting to fill these positions.

Your grasp on the theoretical situation is quite firm, as is your apparent ability to ignore reality.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

This situation is not unusual in the corporate world. Contractors -- many times temporary workers from another country -- are brought in, kept for a fixed number of months, then let go. This is all done without any clue at all as to how it's actually affecting production.

I worked at one place that was 70% contract workers. Every year, they would have to leave. No fooling around -- nobody worked a day more than a year.

With people staggered throughout the project, all coming on at different times, it was like productivity roulette. One month a team might lose somebody who wasn't such a great worker. Whew! Dodged a bullet! The next month they might lose a third of the team within 2 weeks.

I know what you're thinking; just make a chart and keep track of when folks are leaving. But replacements weren't available until there was a documented need, which couldn't happen until the vacancies appeared. Sometimes then it would take a month or two to get one.

All of this organizational cruft was created at the highest levels, where everything is always peachy. I don't think the people creating this mess were trying to do anything bad. They just couldn't see the impact of what they were doing. By the time status reports moved up through several levels of management, things were looking good. Always.

So don't feel bad. You're not alone.

grecy3• 13 years ago

So don't feel bad.

It's a disgusting practice that's bad for employees and good for lining corporate profits.

You should feel extremely bad, and make lots of noise about it.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

Good grief. I wasn't trying to excuse this behavior, I was trying to tell the author not to feel as if Amazon is an exceptional case.

And in case you missed it, this is terrible for productivity.

If you want to make a stink about it, call your representative. Most companies would love to keep great folks on forever, but tax and immigration law won't allow it. There are reasons for these activities that don't involve evil profit-mongering corporate overlords.

ignostic2• 13 years ago

An open letter to Jeff Bezos, and it's practically worthless to a CEO. If the point is, "stop hiring contract workers," the letter should get to that point rather than complaining.

Let's look at the merit's of the authors argument, stated mostly in the second paragraph. Allegedly contract workers produce low quality or inconsistent work, and that training costs are wasted. All of the supporting evidence is anecdotal, and most of the anecdotes contain heaps of information that is completely irrelevant to the argument. What does the author's bad manager have to do with any of these arguments? Whether Amazon has poor management hiring procedures is another issue altogether.

If a CEO made any decision based on this article alone, he should be fired. At least it may raise enough awareness to get someone looking into it and gathering facts and options for action.

GoodIntentions• 13 years ago

I agree that it is nothing any CEO would act on of itself but..

I suspect the point was to put enough personal context into the complaint to provoke sympathy, provoke noise, get it widely read and even hopefully get it across the CEO's desk at some point where the author's thesis will at least fleetingly get considered.

At that point, gathering information to test whether the temp system is a net loss or a net gain could begin.

ignostic2• 13 years ago

Calling it a "thesis" is awfully generous. It really doesn't matter if it accomplishes the same, but I have a hard time believing that the author was so deliberate. The simpler explanation is that he was just emotional and complaining about perceived unfair treatment.

Sympathy can lead to action, but provoking sympathy on an irrelevant point can lead to action you never expected. It might simply lead to finding the manager in question and dealing with that one problem. Whether thoughtful or emotional, focusing on the process itself would be more likely to inspire the prescribed changes.

kilroy1232• 13 years ago

I was a contract developer at a very large "shoe and apparel company".

I saw the same thing. Low quality / skilled developers were hired on in droves. Only to "train" other new contractors. (e.g. copy all these files from my machine and do these 30 steps, and then the local environment should work)

They were hiring guys right out of India. Which made team communication difficult. It was a mess, and code quality really suffered.

I immediately started looking for a new job after started.

general_failure• 13 years ago

How is the shoe company doing? I bet they are doing just the same...

kilroy1232• 13 years ago

Revenue is way up actually.

ArtDev• 13 years ago

As I understand, all of the large tech companies do this. We do the same work as employees, but without any benefits or job security. The best permatemps get jobs elsewhere and the worst are let go. The rest of us try are left in limbo hoping to be hired someday..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp

smsm425• 13 years ago

I'm confused as for why one would let go a successful employee that worked for 11 months just not to let them work for 12th. Is there some regulation there that significantly changes the cost structure and forces this behavior? Is the change of the cost structure so great that it actually exceeds the cost of constant retraining and the risk of a team completely disintegrating like we witness in the OP article? We're not talking about digging holes there, it takes significant time even for experienced programmer to get into the project and become productive, and the knowledge transfer is always flawed and incomplete even with best intentions, I can only imagine how flawed it is between two "I'm only here for 11 months" people...

wildwood3• 13 years ago

If the workers are being classified as contractors, then it's important to have an arbitrary cut-off that limits how long they can work at your company. Otherwise some people can get kept on as contractors indefinitely, when they should have been re-coded as full-time employees.

Of course, this isn't a limit on length of employment, just a limit on the length of someone's employment as a contractor. Plenty of companies use more of a "contract to hire" approach, and make a decision whether or not to convert employees to full time at the end of the contract.

smsm425• 13 years ago

Yes, I know this model - the company I work for has been using it quite successfully to hire candidates in some cases. But usually it is clear if the candidate is good or not in 2-3 months, so a limit at 11 months and firing successful workers because they reached 11 months and then hiring untrained workers for the same position seems strange. So I wondered what causes such behavior.

justin_vanw2• 13 years ago

This is a social commentary thinly veiled as feedback on how to improve productivity.

Companies are going to spend the smallest amount of money possible on every employee. If they are paying someone more, it's because that employee would go somewhere else if they paid less.

If you don't like the policy of firing contractors, don't blame Amazon. If you were running a company that was barely breaking even, and there were a law that would make your company spend way more money on employees after they stayed more than a year, you would make the exact same call. Or would you let the company go out of business, and put thousands of people out of work, and screw over your investors, to make some impotent moral stand?

kevando• 13 years ago

I also feel like much of the criticism revolved around a single hire. Everyone makes hiring mistakes and it sounds like this female manger of yours hits that mark. It's unfortunate she stuck around, but maybe focus more of your feedback on the contractor's role at Amazon.

And congrats on directing your letter to Jeff, but if you were there for 11 months, you probably learned that someone else is in charge of these smaller matters.

bane• 13 years ago

What's the deal with the precise 11 month figure? Is that a Washington State legal thing or some bizarre arbitrary Amazon thing. Seems downright stupid for a skilled position IMHO.

wildwood3• 13 years ago

They're contractors. Treating contractors like they're full-time employees, without giving them full-time benefits, can get a company sued, not to mention dinged by the IRS for back payroll taxes.

One way to keep the contractors separate is to only have them employed for a limited time, usually in stints of less than a year.

IzzyMurad• 13 years ago

An open letter... ... Sincerely, Steven Barker

Relevant last name.

libria• 13 years ago

On the plus side, he doesn't have that 18 month non-compete. A current SDE would have to flip burgers till 2015 if they want to work at Google.

walshemj• 13 years ago

Well if your going to pay me for 18 months not to work at Google I am fine with that.

Non competes are hard to enforce especially for low level staff) and in fact almost impossible in CA.

retr0h• 13 years ago

"I was one of only a handful of employees who didn’t need their work checked before pushing it to live status..."

This is poor practice no matter who you are.

roasm• 13 years ago

Having worked in management in a large company, I have a little perspective from the other side:

Yes, there are laws that prevent you from employing a temp for an extended period of time. It's somewhere around a year; I forget exactly, but it's a law that attempts to protect temps from indefinite temp status. It's supposed to compel the company to hire that temp if they really want them.

There are also laws that prevent you from hiring a temp back within some period of time, so the company doesn't just skirt the issue by firing-then-hiring the temp with a one week break in the middle.

The reason a good temp isn't hired has nothing to do with benefits. Benefits aren't really that expensive relative to a knowledge worker salary.

The reason is because FT headcount is one kind of expense and contractors are another. The budget for FT head is very difficult to drop (it's called layoffs) and actually grows every year because of raises. Contractors are part of slosh money (e.g., "program spend").

So departments are told: "You can have a head budget of $XX and a program budget of $YY." The implicit understanding is that $XX will hold or grow across budget planning (i.e., "We won't make you drop your head budget unless we're actually doing layoffs or moving teams out of your department") and that the $YY can fluctuate.

Departments can generally spend the $YY any way they see fit, and often times, they need workers, so... temps. And if the company is financially stable (which I assume Amazon is), $YY doesn't drop that much so you end up with a long time with enough $YY to keep temps on for a long time, but there isn't enough faith in needing the department at that larger size to increase $XX enough.

I've also seen a lot of temps hang around for a year then get let go because there were just mediocre. Good enough to be productive, not bad enough to go recruiting again, and definitely not good enough to go use a bullet on fighting for increasing $XX. I'm not saying the OP is that case, but I'm sure we've all seen the mediocre temp (or FT) worker hang on.

EDIT: I should add that I'm not at a large company any more. Co-founded a second startup. Woohoo!

smutticus• 13 years ago

Management will never understand the benefit of institutional knowledge because they have not yet devised a way to measure it. Managers love metrics because they cover their asses.

People hired to make decisions don't like to make decisions. But it's not a real decision if the metrics told you to do it. Blame the spreadsheet.

So institutional knowledge gets discarded like yesterday's dirty laundry because no one in a position to do anything recognizes it as valuable. Or even if they do recognize it as valuable it's certainly not more valuable than the cost of some employee compensation. Health insurance costs are quantifiable, institutional knowledge is not. And in the land of cover-your-ass with metrics qualitative values are useless to decision makers.

davidw• 13 years ago

This was actually surprisingly evenly written - I was expecting one of those "OMG this sucks!!!" rants about how everyone are cruel bozos and so on. He very clearly indicates how, at least from his vantage point, the company itself is suffering due to the policies.

drderidder• 13 years ago

Unethical companies are doing a similar thing with temporary foreign workers in Canada. I want an app with an ethical rating system for companies so I can research easily and buy from companies that aren't jerks. Something based on environmental stewardship, treatment of employees, customer support, etc. As for Amazon, this article made me resolve not to use them, but I'd prefer not to wait until a story blows up to be informed enough to be an ethical consumer.

An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

Related Stories