
Amazon soars to more than 341K employees, adding 110K people in a single year - prostoalex
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-soars-340k-employees-adding-110k-people-single-year/
======
mabbo
It's not simply an e-commerce giant, it's a logistics giant.

Hundreds of warehouses, hundreds of delivery stations, thousands of shipping
containers, dozens of planes (plus an airport soon), a container ship is
rumoured. That 341k number probably doesn't even count the independent
contractors (both through Flex and through Amazon Logistics) handling
deliveries.

The tens of thousands of software developers are there to (among other things)
optimize the efficiency of those workers, make them achieve more with less
effort via technology.

~~~
petra
My contrarian opinion: Walmart is going to create some hard times for Amazon.

Walmart ackuired jet.com just 4 months ago. Jet.com, a startup, has managed to
create a logistics network being able to do 1-day delivery to 50% of the
population(or at least they claimed so), reached $1B in sales rapidly. Walmart
has recently started to offer free 2-day delivery($35 minimum), which means
that now, even for Prime memebers. shopping comparison is a reasonable option.

Furthermore, Walmart has curbside pickup for groceries, a very convinient
service to get your groceries on the way from work, is seeing a lot of sucsess
according to Walmart, with availibility in 500 stores, and planning to be in
600 more soon.

And Walmart definetly has got a huge logistics chain, maybe less in areas
where Amazon is strong at, but they're probably better at the china/usa
logistics part, that's why Amazon is doing some of those moves.

And Walmart does have enough capital to compete.

And once this impacts Amazon, will Amazon be able to keep it's very high stock
price ? and how will this affect talent and growth ?

In short: finally , we're in for some very interesting times.

~~~
s4vi0r
Unless Amazon really fucks something up, Walmart will never be able to attract
the tech talent that Amazon does. Nobody wants to work for Walmart.

~~~
SatvikBeri
FWIW, this is definitely not what I hear from my network. Amazon has a
reputation as a high-variance but usually bad place to be as a tech worker,
while people love Walmart Labs.

~~~
praneshp
I interviewed there a year ago, at least to me it looked like they were
absorbed (or at least parts of the Labs team I spoke to) into Walmart
e-commerce. Five excruciating 1-hour rounds where we ran out of anything to
talk about because they refused to ask me any coding or architecture or CS
fundamental-related questions.

~~~
0xCAFEFARE
What? They refused to ask CS related questions? Did you discern a reason why?

~~~
praneshp
Well it's not like I asked them and they refused to ask me any questions. 3/5
people asked me "what happens when you boot a VM in openstack", which was a
kind-of-shitty question because I can know the answer from just looking at a
picture in the docs. More than that, I went in expecting a grilling interview
(because Walmart Labs) and it was a huge anti-climax. I wasn't hugely
impressed by the people that interviewed me too, except for one guy who has
now left.

As to discerning a reason, no clue. At least 2 of them were competent coders,
so no idea why they never asked me anything.

------
grabcocque
Assuming constant rate of growth that means every man, woman and child on the
planet will be an Amazon employee within eight years.

~~~
sorenjan
And in less than 50 years the entire surface of the earth will be covered in a
layer of Amazon employees more than 10 meters thick.

~~~
Terr_
And in 188 years the Earth may be a neutron star of about 1.2 solar masses, at
last delivering on the ancient promise of a geocentric solar system.

------
saycheese
As a comparison:

Walmart had 2.3 million worldwide and 1.4 million in the US as of 2016.

FedEx globally had 400k+ as of the end of 2016.

USPS had 493,381 career employees 131,732 non-career employees as of January
2016.

~~~
thewopr
This is a really interesting comparison. Probably a better comparison than
Microsoft or Google, as is done in the article.

~~~
zardeh
Why? In this case, the majority of these employees are likely not in tech
roles, but in various parts of the fulfillment pipeline. That makes them more
similar to FedEx or Walmart.

Edit: Disregard this, I can't read.

~~~
btym
Yup, that's... exactly what they said.

~~~
zardeh
Ah, I entirely misread that as "probably a better comparison _is_ " instead of
"than".

Whoops.

------
pm90
So this seems like a reorganization of the market of sorts, isn't it? As
retail stores like Macy's, Sears report losses after losses, Amazon keeps
adding more people to support its merchandise business. Love how the free
market works!

~~~
simias
Maybe, but don't forget to factor in the relative quality of the jobs that are
being replaced. I don't really have a strong opinion on the matter, and it
would be a bit hypocritical of me as an amazon prime customer to complain
about the working conditions at Amazon but not every job is equal to any
other.

Furthermore I wouldn't be surprised if many of these new jobs ended up being
automated in the near future. The free market still hasn't figured out a
solution to that particular problem last I checked.

~~~
jdreaver
> The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular
> problem last I checked.

Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a very strong counter
example to that statement. We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the
planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and
prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. Should we lament over
those subsistence farming jobs that were automated away?

The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before
they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. We currently
don't have mass unemployment from automation, and I don't agree with many of
the reasons people express for worrying. The only arguments I've seen against
mass automation are hints of some dystopian future where somehow robots are
prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people, and goods will somehow
be cheap enough from automation that non-automated manufacturing can't
compete, but still expensive enough that if we don't work 40 hours a week
we'll starve.

~~~
spenczar5
"Subsistence farming" is not an accurate description of the European world
before the industrial revolution. Farmers worked cash crops like wool, made
plans years in advance, and there were substantial markets. See for example
Christopher Dyer, "Making a Living in the Middle Ages" (2009) [1]:

> "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of
> medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to
> receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the
> practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned
> for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-
> managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of
> the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would
> allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting
> a variety of crops. _At no time or place within our period can they be
> described as 'subsistence farmers'_ [emphasis added], in the sense that they
> ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their
> own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a
> surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or
> for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their
> own land.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was _obviously_
bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a
complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier
in an industrial economy than an agrarian one.

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-
EDisC](https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC)

~~~
greedo
"it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial
economy than an agrarian one."

Plague, famine, et al, sure sounds happier and healthier than compared to
modern (First World) living.

Even if you look back at hunter-gatherer societies where it's been claimed
that leisure time was substantially greater than today, things like infant
mortality make that seem like hell.

I take these type of historical deconstructions with a large grain of salt; it
used to be the idea of the Noble Savage, now it's moving on to medieval times.

~~~
spenczar5
I agree: modern life is better than ancient life, in general, for the reasons
you describe. But that's not the two choices I was putting forward, which are
an _industrial_ economy or an _agrarian_ one.

Those changes in infant mortality, for example, are largely due to better
hygiene around births and in handling infants. Wash your hands and boil your
water; you can still be in an agrarian economy and do this.

~~~
afarrell
But you also need the technology and culture of birth control or else you run
up against the ability of your methods of food production to prevent
starvation.

------
quantumhobbit
Most of that increase is in warehouse and "fulfillment" workers.

I wonder what changes tech employment at Amazon has seen since the NYTimes
article a year or so ago.

~~~
satysin
Good. Humans are wasted on such mundane tasks. I am sure many of those people,
given the opportunity, could do far greater things for humanity than picking
books and consumer electronics off shelves and put them in boxes.

However we need to make sure as such jobs are automated away that we give the
people who would do those jobs the opportunities to become more with training
and education.

~~~
Clubber
Half the population has an IQ at or below 100. That sounds great on it's face,
but what would you train and educate the bottom half to do?

~~~
satysin
I am not saying they can all be doctors or other very high aptitude roles but
I have no doubt they can learn new skills that will enable them to do more
productive things with their minds than warehouse work for example.

I don't have an answer to be honest though and I am not sure [m]any people do
right now. It is a difficult problem but one we need to discuss and work on a
solution for. I don't feel a universal basic income is the answer like some
have suggested. Not that I am against UBI as part of a bigger solution but it
is my personal opinion that a mind wasted is a tragic thing.

~~~
bsder
> I am not saying they can all be doctors or other very high aptitude roles
> but I have no doubt they can learn new skills that will enable them to do
> more productive things with their minds than warehouse work for example.

I have less faith than you that the _market_ will value those new skills at
the same level.

The Rust Belt in the US is the example I would point to. No job has appeared
in those areas to absorb those people who would have been working in the mills
or the mines.

I'm no romanticist. Those jobs sucked.

However, the market valued those jobs rather well at the time. Nothing has
come along since that valued those people at the same level.

------
tptacek
I'm guessing this tracks the rollout of Prime Now and the scaling up of
Fulfilled By Amazon. Prime Now went from zero to "basic fact of life" in
record time here in Chicago.

~~~
joezydeco
In my neighborhood near Chicago there's a constant presence of white delivery
vans with magnetic Amazon logos on the door.

I thought maybe these were all temporary holiday rush workers, perhaps they're
all permanent now?

~~~
tptacek
It seems obvious in retrospect that Amazon would vertically integrate into
FedEx's market. In 2017 they've become sort of like the Akamai of logistics
and delivery.

~~~
joezydeco
Remember that Amazon has also been in a private contract with the USPS since
2013 to perform Sunday deliveries. Wanna bet that contract expires soon?

------
hhw
Not to detract from this, but just curious how many retail jobs have
disappeared in that same amount of time? My google-fu is unable to turn up any
stats for 2016 yet. I would think with the improved efficiencies, fewer people
would be needed for shipping logistics and software development than the
retail jobs being replaced.

~~~
at-fates-hands
You could also look at how many businesses have gone under the last year or so
and took a bunch of jobs with them:

Sports Authority - 460 stores

Kmart/Sears - 78 stores

Aeropostale - 154 stores

Walmart - 269 stores

Where I live, a lot of these are already gone and the retail space has been
vacant since the summer. Same thing in a lot of the malls I used to frequent.
Hell, the Mall Of America's 4th floor was vacant for decades after they closed
down all the bars. The sad thing is, nobody is filling the vacuum when all
these stores close. They just sit vacant for years.

And 2017 doesn't look to change that trend:

A giant wave of store closures is about to hit the US:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/stores-closing-macys-kohls-
wa...](http://www.businessinsider.com/stores-closing-macys-kohls-walmart-
sears-2016-12)

~~~
matwood
Part of that is Amazon (online shopping in general), part is the whole buy
local, and part is fleeing from traditional malls. People either want really
cheap (online) or boutique type shops in nice outdoor shopping areas.

I've seen the same thing happening with chain restaurants for years.

------
openmosix
I cannot imagine a sound hiring process to get 110k people in the door. Even
if you assume a 1 to 10 ratio between interview-to-hire (that is low), it's a
1.1M interviews. Must be fun.

~~~
Taylor_OD
You under estimate the numbers of recruiters that work at Amazon. I had a team
of 8 recruiters at my last position and half of them now work at Amazon.

~~~
openmosix
Sure, but processes - like software - have to be designed for the right scale.
The hiring process for a 15 people startup, is different than the 5k people
company. At certain scale, things start to break. Imagine sourcers that need
to reach out to candidates while (hopefully) don't reach the same candidate
another sourcer, in another department, has reached out to. Imagine reaching
out to a candidate who's already being in process or rejected. The recruiting
team must be huge, and so the recruiting coordinators team.

------
sqeaky
That chart looks like the beginning of an exponential curve or an "S" curve.
How long will that be sustainable and what might layoffs look like when Amazon
invents a new robot or has a sales downturn.

Just to share some of my perspective. The US DoD and the India Railways are
the two largest employers I am aware of. Each has just over a million people.
For a private company breaking 300,000 is very impressive, that is larger than
some governments.

~~~
btym
Walmart currently has over two million employees[1]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers)

~~~
sqeaky
Crap, my numbers are old. That is huge.

------
soheil
Here is a chord graph we did at NetIn that visualizes this:
[https://netin.co/#filters](https://netin.co/#filters)

~~~
rajacombinator
Neat looking graph but there's no explanation of what it represents. (I can
guess but the data does match the most obvious option.) Also clearly has
little to do with the OP.

~~~
soheil
Color of band matching color of company indicates direction of flow of
candidates

------
lend000
I keep foregoing Amazon stock because I always think it can't keep up this
pace... Say what you will about employee relations, but the sheer growth power
of this business is exceptionally impressive when you look at its steady, high
growth-rate even after it became the market leader in retail.

~~~
Clubber
Their PE ratio is over the top. I know Bezos reinvests profit, but that's
always scared me, having invested during the dot bomb era. I stick to funds.

------
allengeorge
At one point I was worried about Wal-Mart becoming Buy-n-Large from Wall-E.
Now I see my concern was misplaced: it's actually Amazon ;)

~~~
slackoverflower
I never thought of it that way. Buy-n-Large does sound a lot like something
Walmart could've been, being the Fortune #1.

------
tempVariable
They opened a distribution warehouse in west Brampton, Ontario that looks like
an airplane hangar. For the time it was being built, I was sure it would be
some sort of FedEX, Air Canada type of business. Well, Amazon it is and it's
huge.

------
njx
Relevant visualization on employee growth
[https://my.infocaptor.com/dash/i.php?viz=mzmnjgyt](https://my.infocaptor.com/dash/i.php?viz=mzmnjgyt)

------
poorman
Let's be straight.... Acquiring a company with 110K people is not creating
110K jobs. Those people had jobs before you absorbed them into your company.

~~~
rezashirazian
And now the job they had is available for someone else?

~~~
Archio
If Company A (40 people) buys Company B (20 people) to become Company C with
60 people, Company B doesn't continue to operate and suddenly need to hire 20
people.

~~~
thmsths
And company A may lay off 5 people because now they are redundant.

------
dijit
That's an astonishingly large number of employees.

For reference, the third largest publisher of video games clocks in at 11,000
employees globally.

------
ChuckMcM
That is quite a few employees, while at IBM I found their nearly 400,000
employees to be a bit overwhelming. However with Amazon's already remarkable
"cloud" infrastructure (IBM was still integrating SoftLayer when I arrived) it
gives them tremendous leverage for implementing company wide business
practices. Google of course set the standard initially, from the outside it
seems Amazon is the leader now (captured so well by Yegge[1]), and even
Microsoft's Azure cloud as large internal customers as well as external
customers. I was in the wrong place to be able to convince IBM to dedicate a
couple of data centers to run the enterprise. Too bad really, they really need
that agility.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

------
110011
Is it not stunning that in a highly industrialized nation like the US there
are so many people whose main option for a job is to work in a warehouse. That
there is a large swath of the population who are unable to educate themselves
out of this situation? Especially in this day and age where learning new
skills has only became easier.

~~~
grapeshot
There are plenty of people with degrees working in those warehouses because
it's the only thing they can get due to their circumstances and it pays a
little better than retail. (I know this because I was one of them until a few
weeks ago.)

~~~
110011
Thank you for the perspective. The reason I find this incredible is also that
this statistic does not include seasonal workers, so I made the inference that
they chose this job out of lack of alternatives.

Also, what did you major in?

~~~
grapeshot
Chemical Engineering. It seems that the only growing industry in the Inland
Empire right now is warehouses.

------
dmode
This is great, but as someone mentioned, would have been good to see these
numbers against retail job losses. Macy's announced 10,000 layoffs in January.
American Apparel is shutting down their business, Limited is bankrupt, Gap was
struggling, Sears is closing shop. It is very very hard for brick and mortar
retail right now (disclaimer: I shop at Amazon all the time). This along with
automation driven by SV companies is a massive jobs transfer from rest of the
country to the West Coast.

------
iandanforth
This sounds extremely dangerous. How can a company integrate this many new
people without bringing the rest of the organization to a standstill?

~~~
maxxxxx
A lot of the new workers probably work in warehouses where they are basically
a kind of more intelligent robot. I know a guy who worked in one and you can
learn that job in a few days. It's harder to maintain the required pace for
long though.

~~~
tfryman
I worked at a warehouse during college on the weekends (3 12-hour shifts Fri-
Sun) and on day one was assigned to the conveyor line where I used a broom to
free stuck packages and then a while later got "promoted" to gift wrapping
where I stayed until I left when I got my degree.

------
kevin_thibedeau
Do these employee counts include the Integrity Staffing warehouse workforce?
The ones who aren't actually Amazon employees.

------
dfrey
The author acknowledges that comparisons to Microsoft and Google aren't apples
to apples, but posts a big graphic showing just that at the top of the
article. You might as well add Walmart and McDonalds to the graph. Both of
those have around 2 million employees.

------
mlkmlksmdf
110k hired, 80k quit?

~~~
harryh
No, this is net adds.

------
artursapek
> Amazon adds 110K soon-to-be-robots in a single year

~~~
riebschlager
The 21st century John Henry will be an Amazon order picker who goes up against
a robot in a head-to-head order picking competition.

It will not end well.

~~~
gowld
the robot will get a virus and crash

------
known
I think AMZN is indulging in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing)

------
ctingom
I'm currently encountering customer support nightmare where Amazon charged my
credit card for 13k after someone hacked my Seller Central account and sold a
bunch of fake products. What a nightmare!

------
NinjaViktor
Too bad they didn't share the job categories. I would love to see the
percentage of job positions spread across this number.

What do you guys think, what are some of the highest job positions on demand
in this 110K?

------
paulddraper
...but technology and automation...it's taking away all our jobs.

~~~
gowld
Consider how many competitors went out of business due to Amazon competiton

~~~
bduerst
And yet unemployment (U 1-6) is nearly back at pre-recession levels.

~~~
bsder
Give the Republicans a couple of weeks ... they'll fix that.

------
6stringmerc
Useless trivia without a demographics breakdown. Age. Gender. Wage. You know,
helpful information to examine what kind of jobs these are and who is taking
them.

------
zkhalique
Hmm, I wonder how long it will last... if they invest more in automation.

------
X86BSD
The only thing that matters to me is, is Amazon still not making a profit?

~~~
btilly
Why does this matter to you?

Stop thinking of Amazon as a business. Start thinking of it as tightly managed
private VC fund with a shared management structure. As successful startups
start spinning off cash, it reinvests in more startups. Most fail, some
succeed, and the cycle continues. As long as they do this well, the result is
no profit and rapid growth.

Amazon can turn a substantial profit at any moment that they want by just
cutting back on this internal reinvestment cycle. The second that they do,
that will be a sign that they have internal trouble.

~~~
X86BSD
But.. it, IS a business. No profit = FAIL. At some point the funding they are
getting, from investors and stock owners is going to dry up like the Serengeti
when they realize they won't make money.

It's fine to invest and take losses if you're a new start up. Amazon is
neither new nor a startup. At some point they need to start _making_ money.
Otherwise they are just a bucket for fools to throw their money in.

It's shocking they still don't make money. "We will make it up in volume!".
Talk about a tech bubble.

~~~
jsolson
> No profit = FAIL. At some point the funding they are getting, from investors
> and stock owners is going to dry up like the Serengeti when they realize
> they won't make money.

An explicit part of their business plan is maximizing free cash flow (not
profits).

I'm not sure what funding you think the company is getting from investors.
Amazon's stock price could drop through the floor and the biggest issue the
company itself would face is the departure of a workforce who take a
significant chunk of their compensation in AMZN shares. Unless they're hoping
to do another public stock offering the share price is mostly useful as a
gauge on Jeff Bezos's net worth.

When the company _does_ want outside funding, it hasn't turned to public stock
offerings in recent years. Instead they've secured it by issuing corporate
bonds[0]. THERE is somewhere they might have to worry, but as long as their
credit rating stays high, they'll find plenty of institutional buyers. Their
credit rating is maintained by people who understand that profitability has
little to do with how well a large business is doing, and is sometimes an
indication of failure to manage funds well (failing to employ depreciation
appropriately to minimize tax liability in very successful years, etc.).

[0]:[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-02/amazon-
se...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-02/amazon-
sells-6-billion-in-biggest-bond-deal-for-online-retailer)

------
etaty
Great another too big to fail!?

~~~
wmeredith
Hardly. Walmart employs north of 2m.

~~~
logfromblammo
Wal-Mart just fired a second warning shot across Amazon's bow with its
announcement of free 2-day shipping (for orders above $35, on specified items)
without any annual fee.

Many stores are adding drive-through pick-up lanes, too. I imagine the plan is
for customers to order online, then either drive to their local store to pick
it up immediately, or just wait a day or two for it to come to them.

As Wal-Mart focuses on low prices for those things that people predictably buy
in high volume, Amazon would likely be left with the long tail of niche goods
that are not worthwhile for a general retailer because the volume is not high
enough. Wal-Mart's competitive advantage is largely in its supply chain
management system and market penetration. Unless Amazon can quickly get
robotic picker/packers online, and fire all those warehouse workers, Wal-Mart
could eat the sandwich, chips, and juice box out of Amazon's lunch, leaving
them with just the pickle and some strange marzipan-cayenne candy.

~~~
zzzzzzzza
walmart is doomed by their management. the cultural difference between bezos
and bentonville arkansas... how many of the people on wal mart's leadership
team have a good understanding of what sql is? possibly 1. Amazon? possibly
50% or more. it makes a real difference in the long run. not sql in particular
but knowing exactly what's running your business...

~~~
Murdodc089
Do you honestly think (and buy the stereotype) that people from Arkansas are a
bunch of inbred, shoeless, hillbillies? If so, how do you explain the size and
success of Wal Mart so far? Do you really think that Wal Mart is delivering
products to over 10,000 of stores worldwide without an understanding of SQL?

Wal Mart is doing some pretty cool stuff with technology. Maybe not on the
level of Amazon, which might end up biting them in the long run, but Wal Mart
definitely knows their way around a database.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart#Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart#Technology)

~~~
zzzzzzzza
To answer your first question, I'm from Fort Worth and yes; not exactly that
stereotype though. The difference runs really, really deep. I interviewed with
them once as well.

Some people at wal mart know their way around a database (database being
euphemism for a broader "tech culture"), they are not well represented in
management and wal mart is trying to change that (with jet acquisition). but
too little too late.

~~~
zzzzzzzza
though obviously they will fare better than sears, imo

