
An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com - credo
http://www.geekwire.com/2013/open-letter-jeff-bezos-contract-workers-amazoncom/
======
pasbesoin
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.

~~~
bmelton
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?

~~~
anigbrowl
'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.

~~~
jkonowitch
Is there research to back this up? Ie is it really the case that 'non-
executive' workers have no negotiating power? Is this true in all sectors or
only some? Anecdotally I've seen instances where non-execs successfully
negotiated a salary increase, etc.

~~~
hobs
Check middle class salary increase the last 30 years.

------
nostromo
> 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](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...](http://www.zillow.com/local-info/WA-Seattle-home-
value/r_16037/)

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.

~~~
barista
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.

~~~
xyzzyz
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.

~~~
sopooneo
I don't understand why you'd want to minimize profit just because of tax
liability. Even if I paid 60% in taxes, I'd still be better off keeping 40% of
a higher salary. What's the rational?

~~~
saalweachter
It's the difference between a business and an individual. Individuals pay
taxes on incomes. Corporations pay taxes on profits, so they can have
arbitrarily large incomes while maintaing zero profits.

"Profit" is either "money you haven't spent yet" or "money you need to return
to investors". Modern corporations have been telling investors to eat a bag of
salted peanuts lately, so they really don't care about returning profits to
investors. So if "profit" is just "money you haven't spent yet", you're better
off spending it before you pay taxes, because then you get to spend X% more.

The individuals running the company are presumably compensating themselves
lavishly to run a company with no profits.

~~~
Filligree
So.. hold on.

If the companies have no profits, and investors get no return.

..why would you want to invest?

~~~
saalweachter
Hypothetically you are betting on future profits.

Historically, business ventures like Amazon have had two phases: a fast growth
phase, and a long, stable, profitable phase. You don't expect profits while
the business is still growing. You expect them to plow the profits back in to
make it grow more. As long as companies can maintain absurd year-over-year
growth, investors are willing to pretend that the company needs its giant cash
piles to grow more faster. This is actually the rational reason why the stock
market shoots a brick whenever one of these tech companies only increases its
profits by 23% instead of the projected 27%.

Hypothetically, what Amazon's share price means is that investors believe that
it will return more than that many dollars per share to its investors once it
switches from its fast growth to its slow-and-steady phase.

Hypothetically; stock also has value because the expectation that it will go
up or down creates a class of investor who buys or sells it based on its
expected price regardless of its fundamentals, which can affect the price in
either direction.

~~~
Filligree
Then it'll be interesting to see what happens if they hit their stable phase,
and proceed to give out no dividends whatsoever.

------
ryanobjc
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
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.

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
ryanobjc
Another thing is don't forget that Amazon is a cult of personality. The cult
of Bezos. Upper management needs to cater to that cult, and it creates a lot
of noise that may or may not be making the product or the company better.

Some of Bezos's urges and reactions are good, some are bad. It's not too much
unlike Microsoft.

As a species we can do a better job at running companies!

------
anigbrowl
_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
_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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/30/unleashing-the-crocodile-what-
alibabas-jack-ma-can-teach-american-entrepreneurs/)

------
famousactress
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
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.

------
ignostic
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
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.

~~~
ignostic
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.

~~~
keithpeter
_" The simpler explanation is that he was just emotional and complaining about
perceived unfair treatment."_

I didn't get 'emotional', I thought the OA was actually quite measured and
well written. The audience isn't Mr Bezos of course.

What I did get was annoyance at the lack of quality in the process. I agree
that the author has not _established_ that the lack of quality arose from the
hiring policy. If the first manager had not been reassigned, would things have
been better?

------
stevewilhelm
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
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.

------
jmduke
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
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
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.

------
smutticus
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.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
grecy
> 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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

------
pisarzp
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.

~~~
wildwood
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp)
\- scroll down to the Vizcaino v. Microsoft section.

------
justin_vanw
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
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.

------
baddox
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.

------
fady
[http://blog.seattlepi.com/trevorgriffey/2011/04/03/top-10-re...](http://blog.seattlepi.com/trevorgriffey/2011/04/03/top-10-reasons-
to-avoid-amazon-com/#.Uap2aqcVWss.email)

[http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/668688/is_amazo...](http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/668688/is_amazon.com%27s_pennsylvania_warehouse_a_textbook_sweatshop)

[http://www.thenation.com/article/164823/cyber-monday-
click-a...](http://www.thenation.com/article/164823/cyber-monday-click-
amazoncom#)

------
roasm
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!

------
tieTYT
> 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
her is the new manager

him is the temp who trained her

------
mathattack
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.

------
smsm42
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...

~~~
wildwood
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.

~~~
smsm42
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.

------
davidw
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.

------
mabbo
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
_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

~~~
Kapura
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
I have no notion that they're essential to the business in any way. But firing
people after 11 months just to avoid a deeper employment relationship is a
terrible way to treat people.

~~~
mustafakidd
I think having people willing to clean up after others and keep the
environment tidy and hygienic offers a lot of value.

~~~
anigbrowl
I agree, having been one of those people. I just meant that those jobs are not
so specialized that it's hard to find other people if you fire your existing
cleaners regularly; unfortunately there are more people who need the money
than can afford to give such unethical employers a wide berth.

------
drderidder
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.

------
kilroy123
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
How is the shoe company doing? I bet they are doing just the same...

~~~
kilroy123
Revenue is way up actually.

------
cgore
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.

~~~
lambersley
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
Aloha
Microsoft got sued in the 90's for not extending retirement plans to its
temps. Since then the two track system developed.

~~~
anigbrowl
This isn't unique to the tech sector, there were companies operating this sort
of policy before MS. I'm not asking why, I'm asking whether it is actually
economically efficient or whether people just take HR's say-so that it is.

~~~
mpyne
It's kind of the same way in the military, at least for officers.

Once an officer gets around 18 years of active-duty time the law _requires_
that they be permitted to serve 20 years if they wish (to qualify for
retirement).

So one of the things the Navy looks at when deciding whether to mobilize an
Reserve officer is whether they would possibly hit that 18-year point "by
accident" as then they'd have to keep them on the active-duty list for even
longer than they thought.

------
retr0h
"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.

------
ArtDev
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp)

------
Yhippa
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.

------
tnuc
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
_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._

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

~~~
anigbrowl
He's not saying that he shouldn't have been let go. He's saying that the
experienced team members, who _were_ best qualified to fill the management
position based on their visible competence, did apply and got nowhere. Why are
you trying to make his application (or lack thereof) for a full-time position
the critical factor?

------
bane
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.

~~~
wildwood
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.

------
libria
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
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.

------
IzzyMurad
> An open letter... > ... > Sincerely, > Steven Barker

Relevant last name.

