
Amazon fired hundreds of workers a year from one warehouse over ‘productivity’ - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations
======
Waterluvian
Some of these facilities have thousands of employees. A few hundred firings in
a year seems, at a glance, plausible.

In my experience when I was younger, low skill labour in warehouses often were
employed with a wide net. Hire just about anyone and then fire the ones who
show up drunk, high, not at all, slack off, pick fights, etc.

It's hard not to sound politically incorrect but these jobs attract
unemployable people and they end up doing unemployable things and find
themselves fired. My wife has similar stories about a Chrysler plant but holy
cow those ones are unionized and never get fired.

I don't have all the facts but I'm just saying that on the surface, this is
just kind of how it works. For all I know there may truly be something rotten
and Amazon is being far more of a slave driver than is normal.

~~~
subway
> Some of these facilities have thousands of employees. A few hundred firings
> in a year seems, at a glance, plausible.

The article mentions these numbers are for a specific warehouse, and provides
the total number of employees at that warehouse (~2500).

If you're firing over 10% of your workforce annually for performance, you have
fucked up expectations.

~~~
post_break
I bet Fedex and UPS have a higher churn rate. I quit after the second day
working in the hub.

~~~
subway
Remember, this isn't the churn rate we're talking about. It's involuntary
separation. I'd imagine the annual churn rate is _way_ above 10%. I don't
doubt FedEx and UPS have high churn rates, but I also suspect they don't fire
10% of their package handlers annually.

~~~
sct202
That 10% fired doesn't adjust for churn tho. Over the course of a year there
were at minimum 2500 employees working there, we don't know how many unique
people worked there over the course of a year to find out their firing rate.

------
millzlane
A friend broke his foot, and couldn't take off to recover because if he called
out sick it would mean a week or two of not being scheduled. So he worked he
can't be more than one minute late for a bathroom break or he is docked pay.
They consider it stealing. If you get docked too many times you're fired. Some
people have it shittier than others.

------
noego
> _" Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10
> percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons._"

This is very common at a lot of white-collar places that do stack-ranking.

From a different perspective, places like Google reject 99% of candidates
because they "only hire the best." Whereas Amazon warehouses seem to do the
opposite - they are liberal in giving people a shot, and then rigorously weed
out anyone with lagging job performance. I suspect a lot of people who get
rejected at the interview stage for bullshit reasons would actually prefer the
latter approach.

------
maximilianroos
Productivity is a really good reason to fire people!

(I'm not advocating for Amazon's labor practices, but the headline should read
pro-Amazon)

~~~
gist
> (I'm not advocating for Amazon's labor practices, but the headline should
> read pro-Amazon)

Your view of 'amazon's labor practices is most likely gleaned from what you
have read about them in stories which is most certainly slanted in one
direction because it makes interesting reading. Kind of a 'where there is
smoke there is fire' situation.

I don't know where it is written that warehouse jobs have to be non stressful
or easy and they shouldn't push you. If you think the job is to hard for you
at Amazon then don't work there or for them. Do people complain that sign up
to be firefighters that they have to run into burning buildings? No that is
part of the job. [1]

[1] Go ahead and figure out a way that 'no that's different' or 'no but that
doesn't mean they need to assume all negatives and risks.

~~~
maximilianroos
Not advocating != Advocating against

------
Animats
_Machines should think. People should work._

That used to be a joke. Now it's the new normal.

------
ignoramous
Amazon has begun surveillance on their engineers too. There are variety of
schemes in-pilot or deployed company-wide that downright scream 'dragnet'.

First, the revamp post _that_ New York Times article ended with a new HR head
at the helm with new ideas that aren't strictly worse but none too much
better.

Second, the peer review system, Forte, is a hogwash, from what I hear. It
isn't taken into account for the infamous OLRs where employees are stack-
ranked, which are now based exclusively on the inputs from the managers and
the metrics they choose to focus on and the supporting documents/emails they
bring to the table to support their bias.

Third, the metrics collection is relentless. Right from tickets resolved
during on-call, to issues resolved during regular maintenance work, to code
reviews or commits pushed, to design documents/wikis created/edited, to time
spent building software, deploying it, code velocity... it's a mess.

Fourth, the employees get sent a daily questionnaire. And it is evident from
the type of questions that they're trying to collect information on how
employees react to those and if their answers are outliers or if their answers
are trending towards employees who have shown poor performance previously and
so on. The worse part is, when I refused to answer any of those questions, I
was warned of "consequences", just as how I was warned of consequences for not
submitting patents on behalf of Amazon for what they thought were valuable
inventions.

Fifth, there are other internal tools (including build/deploy/test tools) that
have sprung up that collect metrics per developer to see who's productive and
how.

Sixth, the promotion process has changed so much that it has been reduced to a
checklist and only when a manager deems his reportee fit enough, does the
stars align and they get to tick off things on the checklist to get promoted.
If you're not in the good books of your manager, or simply report to a manager
who's biased, good luck with ever getting any recognition _despite the
metrics_.

A lot of policies are straight out anti-employee, imo, right from how they
decide compensation year-on-year, to their OLR process, to international
transfer policies, to how employees are sometimes treated by the HR, to how
'well maintained' the offices are... it isn't even funny. Some engs truly are
having a blast working at Amazon. I can't help but think they are in the
minority (and these are mostly folks stack ranked in the top 10% to 20%). I
can see them defend Amazon to death. I wouldn't fault them. They will come
around some day.

I think, this culture/behaviour takes its seeds right at the top of the
executive chain: The kind of hypocrisy that goes around at Amazon is plain for
the HRs and Executives to see, and if they can't, I believe it's the stock
price that is blinding their mind, clouding their judgement.

Apologies for the rant, and I admit that Amazon, specifically AWS, is
otherwise a great place to hone your skills even if its relatively akin to
baptism by fire.

