Citation(s) needed. They specifically work (publicly and privately) to undermine local taxes, enforce non-competes/NDAs, capital gains, income taxes, etc. Then they do small investments like Mary's Place and point at it as being big community efforts. In fact, one can argue that it's Amazon's extensive work behind the scenes to that causes many contorted decisions that the city council and others make.
MSFT is investing $500M in Seattle (many through loans, but $25M is outright grants). Where's Amazon's similar commitment?
You can't (and they don't promise) encryption such that AWS can't see everything, if they were in fact malicious. This is true of every cloud.
That said, it's not illegal for them to see that xxx vendor increased their storage costs/bandwidth costs by $yyy every month, and that you could look into it - without using one piece of encrypted data.
(We were well aware of this thread, and others like it, internally)
Something that exists, but has absolutely no investment and unknown support is probably not a great thing. Given that EC2's recent outage was because they hadn't restarted their services in a long time[1], what problems exist here? I think that Google probably should have a SUPER long deprecation policy (24 months feels right), but a year isn't terrible - and I'd rather explicitly get a statement like this than the zombie services elsewhere.
Disclosure: I used to work at AMZN and am highly biased.
Amazon makes $3B a year selling ads. You think they're just guessing about personal information? Please. They lay cookies everywhere (including off site) to target you properly.
I was expecting some real wisdom in this story, but I don't think this qualifies him as a technical leader in any way. I don't even think this needed the cargo-cult-y "leaving the room and coming back with a paper that changes everyone's mind." Couldn't he have just asked for a plan? And the ROI? That seems like management 101.
I have no love for him, but he is a genius. This story doesn't do him any justice (nor is the paper particularly compelling).
You did not say roles were increasing at 50% per year as an example - that was your stated fact.
I'm saying unless they had 10 employees in 2000 (wrong) or only started the 50% hiring last year (so we have no longitudinal data to go on), there is no number where that level of exponential growth of employees wouldn't result in either a) a company that was bigger than Walmart in employees in just a few years or b) MASSIVE firings. Maybe that's what you're saying? They hire that many people and remove them from the company that fast? I know the removal from the company is certainly correct.
As far as the increase in costs of RSUs, there is a perfectly alternative solutions to your proposal: their stock has increased by 10x in 10 years. So in that way, they're EXACTLY keeping track (https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=amzn+Interactive#{"range...), and not increasing people collecting RSUs at all. You'll note that you list amount of money required for the RSUs, not number of shares. (This is, by the way, another way that Amazon misleads their employees - your yearly cash bonus actually goes down when the value of the stock increases).
So by that logic, they have, in fact, not kept pace with the rise of their stock. New employees are receiving substantially less new grants than older ones (bordering on zero, which can't be true), or they're being removed before they vest.
Further, the 24k in Washington also include many thousands of non-tech roles (Amazon Fresh warehouse in Redmond, Customer Support in Bellingham, some portion of the more than 2500 sales people for AWS, etc etc), so your math does not add up for adding new 25k tech roles, even if we multiply by 40% as a reduction. Doing some approximations using LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?keywords=amazon&f_CC=1586...) they do appear to have ~24k employees in Washington, but only ~8k in engineering (they appear to add another 4k engineers in India).
Again, these are all public numbers, so they are inaccurate, but they should be good enough to substantially disprove your point. So, without question, your statement about increasing hiring by 50% y/y has no facts to back it up.
As far as active hiring, that is absolutely correct. They are extremely active in hiring - but they have to be because people leave so fast that unless they do, they'd be out of people.
> Your comment on "retention" is factually incorrect.
I disagree.
> First the number of Amazon hires in "tech roles" increases by ~50% per year. i.e., in year 1 there are 1,000 SDEs hired, year 2 is 1,500, year 3 is 2,250, year 4 is 3,375 and so on.
This could not possibly be true. If it was, they would be hiring ~1.5M technical people a year (since they've been in business since 1997). Perhaps you meant since 2005, but that would still represent 58k people per year hired. According to this article (http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...), they only have 24k in the state of Washington, where the vast number of people are. So nothing about this statement is true.
> "Attrition" represents the number of individuals who leave for any reason. This may be because the employee terminates employment or the company terminates employment. Attrition levels are comparable to the rest of the tech industry, ~15% of the current population per year.
Can you show me that data? about 15% per year? I've seen vastly different numbers internally, but would prefer not be sued in sharing them.
> "Tenure" is the length of employment. Because hiring greatly exceeds attrition you should expect a relatively low average and median retention. As I recall Amazon is approximately 12 months median tenure. This is comparable to Google at ~13 months, for example.
Correct, but these numbers are heavily obfuscated due to part time hires and vendors.
> Lastly the employees current tenure does not have a substantial impact on the probability of their attrition. Indeed the average tenure at exit is somewhere around 3 years.
Again, show me the data. I've seen the internal stuff. If you'd like not to believe me, feel free; I know I don't believe you.
We'll agree to disagree. Tension is good, when that's all it's used for. When it is specifically used to tear people down (either with a purpose, or just for vindictiveness), I think the original benefit is lost.
In the previous comment, I was worried that people would know who I was if I had said where I worked (what groups and how long). The truth is I had worked in the group I moved to for exactly a year, but I had been at Amazon for 3.5 years.
The level of retribution at that company is substantial, and I was quiet worried they would hurt my ability to get a new job.
I have a nice new job now (I was still searching when I posted that), and am less worried. It's really not hard to figure out who people are on HN.
I disagree. There are many leadership principles which are contradictory either in part or in whole (e.g. Dive Deep vs. Bias for Action; Insist on the Highest Standards vs. Invent and Simplify). You can squint and see how these would be the same, but often they're just used as arrows in a quiver to knock someone down and/or put someone on a PIP (performance improvement plan).
Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized):
A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action)
B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards)
Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it.
I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter.
Absolutely, if you stayed, the numbers definitely add up to what you see here. However, because the attrition was so high, you were not likely to stick around to get a bonus to make up for it.
When I was there, managers were guided to PIP (performance improvement plan) to make these numbers. Whether that meant grinding people into the ground, natural attrition, or making up excuses to out people - I saw all of them happen.
Citation(s) needed. They specifically work (publicly and privately) to undermine local taxes, enforce non-competes/NDAs, capital gains, income taxes, etc. Then they do small investments like Mary's Place and point at it as being big community efforts. In fact, one can argue that it's Amazon's extensive work behind the scenes to that causes many contorted decisions that the city council and others make.
MSFT is investing $500M in Seattle (many through loans, but $25M is outright grants). Where's Amazon's similar commitment?