Obviously true, but Amazon never wanted top tech talent. They wanted disposable tech talent. When I was there the expected tenure was 18 months. Managers were expected to fire 10% of their team every year. Benefits were mediocre and the pay was so so. They chewed through devs by putting them in brutal oncall rotations with expectations like, "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Everywhere."

So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.

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viraptor 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go.

Why is that brutal? That's what on-call is. That's literally the point of paying someone extra for being available.

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ElevenLathe 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They don't pay extra.

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viraptor 3 days ago | parent [-]

You mean AWS doesn't pay for on-call at all? I'm sure it happens at least in some regions where it's mendatory by regulation.

	▲	ElevenLathe 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I only know second hand about some corners of AWS and Kindle where I know people, but no, they don't. Under US law, AIUI, you can be classified as exempt from overtime pay like this if you use a computer in your job (which is a weird standard leftover from decades ago when this was rare) and make more than some minimum salary, about 50k I think (changes every year). Since essentially all IT labor makes more than that, it is rare to be paid extra during oncall. This of course means that the company is not incentivized at all to minimize oncall time by doing things like investing in cross training, or backfilling after resignations, since it's just cheaper to make your engineers be on call half of their (waking AND sleeping) lives. This is obviously unjust and one of the reasons we need to increase our sector's union density. If you're actually interested in that and don't know where to start, I would recommend CWA's CODE training: https://code-cwa.org/upcoming-trainings You can learn about the organizing process (which is not as mysterious and daunting as you probably think) and, more importantly, get in touch with experienced organizers who can help get you started and help an the way through the process. CWA has had a lot of successes recently, and the momentum continues to grow.
	▲	sniffers 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Correct, on call in AWS earns no additional pay.

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QuiEgo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What’s this “paying someone extra for oncall” concept you speak of :|

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r_lee 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Right.

I saw one comment here replying to a post about why companies wouldn't just hire from Poland/India/etc. if they could do remote-only

He replied that you must hire in the US to get "high quality talent"

And the first thought I had was: is that really the case anymore, that companies are so desperate for "high quality"?

It increasingly seems like there is no such demand for that anymore, it's just about "how can we cut costs?" (the greatest corporate innovation ever)