Excerpt from the linked content^1 by Eugene Kim:

>Amazon had little oversight over its job opening process until last year, allowing managers to recruit far more, and ultimately hire more employees, than they were approved to bring on, Insider has learned.

>For example, the utility computing team at Amazon Web Service had 24,988 hiring job posts opened in 2022, when only 7,798 positions were approved for, according to an internal document obtained by Insider.

>That means the utility computing team had over 3-times more job postings than the headcount target at the time.

>The document points to Amazon's lack of standardization and governance for the gap between the job postings and open headcount.

> 

>The result was "a process prone to inconsistency, error, and potential mis-use," including "over-hiring," the document said.

>"This enabled over-hiring in certain cost centers and contributed to span of control and level ratio defects," the internal document said.

>Levels is tech-industry speak for an employee's seniority level, which determines their pay. In theory, if multiple job postings for the same job called for different seniority, a unit could wind up with more over-qualified, or under-qualified, people in the unit than planning budgets assumed.

>"Span of control" is industry jargon for the number of direct reports under each manager, according to Gartner.

^1 Eugene Kim for Insider/Axel Springer, 21 Mar. 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-flawed-job-listing-process-over-hiring-layoffs-2023-3

They’re paying out the salaries for an excess of labor cost. No one looks at the balance sheet after several months and notices results far in excess of budget?

I thought oversight and excess is very common in big orgs.

Revenue/cost center owners receive balance sheets monthly at very large companies I’ve worked at. We meticulously manage headcount, being one of the largest expenses.

The amazon recruiters were cold calling like mad too. Not just emails, but phone calls too. They dug up old ass resumes of mine and were still interested even though the listed dates were stale as hell.

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They were the worst too. One would be hyper interested, then ghost only to have another reach out 1 hour later as if it was first contact. There was zero coordination and it was clear they neither cared about the roles nor candidates.

Now they just making up shit to cover up their actual reasons to lay employees off!

If anything engineering is understaffed at amazon, many core teams pulling 60-80 hour weeks plus 24-7 oncall 1 out of every 5-6 weeks

I had this experience. I went through 3 recruiters that simply disappeared partway through the process, and finally got a 4th that was super responsive, right up until they were laid off. At that point I moved on.

Even corporate positions. Used to be difficult to get a corporate job at Amazon but I have seen colleagues get them easily. I seen a controller get hired as a senior staff accountant lol. Not sure what’s going on with their hiring.

So Amazon created jobs, even too much jobs? And this is a bad thing?

Right. Comprehensive "oversight" is hard because teams are different and specialized. There's not some omniscient team who is able to watch all details. Parts of the business consider normal what other parts consider excess.

But go over your budgeted costs and that'll be noticed real quick.

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Ex amazon worker here,this makes me sick, so many of us on the shop floor were over worked, I'd end some shift with my feet bleeding because of the distance I'd walked, only 1 member of staff to deal with 30 trucks in a night, targets for this targets for that, reports every 15 minutes to ensure the shift was on track.

People broke down, they were stressed to hell and now I hear other departments had 3 times the staff they needed, we were pulled up if they over booked agency by even 1 and we didn't correct it by sending someone home. Oh I was technically management by the way, very low level, I left because I couldn't face pushing people like they wanted anymore.

Fucking shift show of a company.

Amazon needs to mass fire it’s management, including all the way up the chain. This doesn’t just happen because of employees. Someone was signing off on all this supposed overhiring.

So why are the employees bearing all of the cost alone? Fire the managers which make more than them and undoubtedly cost the entire organization a huge amount of money between recruitment/on boarding, salaries, severance, and naturally opportunity cost.

Indeed, from what I was reading about Amazon six months ago overstaffing seemed the least likely scenario. But then I don't have a publicity arm to generate news articles, I just read comments in tech subs.

In classic BI style, you have to be careful with the wording in the article RE: sensationalism.

The practices they're talking about are pretty standard (and IMO, can be smart moves) in tech - creating multiple postings for the same job with different titles/geos (to cast a wider net), in particular.

The memo IS NOT saying they hired 3x the allocated positions; rather, it's saying the additional postings have caused an increase in instances of mistakes being made (e.g. backfill hired for a person who ended up staying on, etc.)

I never applied, but I had Amazon recruiters hitting me up from my LinkedIn profile, sometimes three recruiters for the same position within a few weeks. I told them I wouldn't work for Amazon, since it was evil, they agreed, but then all called me again a month later with no memory of the previous contact.

Look over there!!! Its their fault ! Not ours!!! Now buy more stuff !

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Can confirm, worked 8am-1am Tuesday. I was bed-ridden sick Monday and still got on a conference call on my phone to help a teammate. We both knew it was messed up, but the deadlines don’t care.

They fired my manager because he refused to downsize our team 10% while we work 12-15h daily and he was begging for more help or to drop work. He was a minority leader too in our org.

This is not the company I originally joined, its been reinvented into a toxic waste. There’s so many good people, sad that most stay out of leadership.

>creepystepdad72

>The memo IS NOT saying they hired 3x the allocated positions; rather, it's saying the additional postings have caused an increase in instances of mistakes being made (e.g. backfill hired for a person who ended up staying on, etc.)

According to the title of the linked content:^1

>Leaked document shows Amazon's flawed job-posting process led to 'over-hiring,' with one team listing 3 times more openings than approved for

According to the text of the linked content:^1

>But for Amazon, most job posts were being actively filled, even if they weren't approved for, in part due to the lack of internal governance, the former recruiting manager said.

Emphases added.

^1 Eugene Kim for Insider/Axel Springer, 21 Mar. 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-flawed-job-listing-process-over-hiring-layoffs-2023-3

They’ve always had an impossible number of job openings.

Highly dependent on org. In my org there are a ton of "engineers" that probably write ten lines of code a week.

To be fair, they can do with 10 lines what a lesser engineer would need 14 for

How much of that is the terrible internal processes. When I worked there a few years ago, the Alexa team I was on seemed to be hamstrung by old and very outdated tech and processes. MRs took forever to get through the system

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They passed on me earlier in the pandemic and were still spamming me right up until the layoff announcements. I don't get why they bothered because I'm not going to waste the time to memorize hackerrank to pass their interview process so another round would end the same way.

And they will waste a billion for the illusion of cutting costs.

I can confirm, have one ticket in to an engineering team that hasn't been touched in a year.

In 3 months time, we will hear more whining about how they can’t find skilled workers. I’ve already read about callbacks to reemploy niche workers. These kind of ppl would have to pay a small fortune to get me to do something like this, otherwise I’d be happy to tell them to eat my ass.

I’m not sure what we expected. An Amazon recruiter is penalized if their pick time average drops.

/s?

I left in 2021 because I saw the toxicity growing. It looks like Jassy’s AWS culture is spreading into CDO from what I’m seeing in threads like this. I’m glad I got out when I did.