Slashdot Mirror
Amazon To Experiment With Part-Time Tech Teams (usatoday.com)
Elizabeth Weise, reporting from USATODAY: In an effort to lure hard-to-hire tech workers and possibly recast its reputation as a harsh workplace, Amazon plans to pilot a program of part-time teams composed entirely of employees putting in 30-hour weeks. The Seattle company will test using entire teams of engineers and tech staff who will all work 30 hours a week, thus side-stepping many of the problems faced by part-time workers in a full-time environment. The pilot teams' core hours would be Monday through Thursday from 10 am to 2 pm, with flexible hours throughout the week. The 30-hour groups would receive the same benefits as 40-hour-a-week employees but less pay, Amazon said. The plan is smart from a recruiting standpoint and a unique strategy in the highly competitive tech world, said Kate Kennedy with the Society for Human Resource Management.
I would love the option to work for 20 or 30 hours/week even for half the money. I've always felt like I had to choose between 40-50 hour weeks or nothing.
Do you just check out at 2PM, or are you obligated to stay behind and put in extra hours to get the project done? I am guessing they hope for the latter.
I'm pretty sure their goal is to pressure people into actually working less hours and have a life outside of work (while maybe saving the company some money in the process), not trick people into working two 30 hour jobs a week. I could be wrong, but this seems to be a whole different concept from "I work at McDonalds in the morning and as a janitor at night and I hate my lif!"
Isn't Amazon one of the tech firms that famously burns people out working them 90+ hours a week? If so, it just sounds like they're doing an experiment to see if hiring more people but working them less produces better results (Hint, it does in non-dysfunctional workplaces.)
The 30-hour groups would receive the same benefits as 40-hour-a-week employees but less pay, Amazon said.
It's right there in the summary. These employees will be getting benefits.
I'm sure a large company would love to hire people for 30 hours or less a week, thus dodging any requirement to give them full-time benefits.
<reads rest of summary>
The 30-hour groups would receive the same benefits as 40-hour-a-week employees but less pay, Amazon said.
...hmm. Now I'm intrigued. Count me among the group that would happily accept a 25% pay cut for a guaranteed cap at 30 hours per week, if I didn't have to give up benefits.
Actually, given the cost of benefits, the pay cut would probably have to be more than that, because the cost of benefits is mostly constant. If your 40-hour week earns you $100K/yr take-home, and your benefits cost another $50K, Amazon would want to pay $150K * 0.75 for three-quarters of the work, or $112.5K, of which you'd see $62.5K -- a 37.5% cut in take-home pay. But I still might consider it.
What fun is that?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is what I think too. I have always worked in "normal" environments, but there are plenty of stories about people in tech companies getting worked 90+ hours a week simply because that's the culture. Microsoft in the early 90s was like this, every dotbomb SV startup in the late 90s too -- and it's getting repeated for this current tech bubble.
I think part of it is companies self-selecting people who will put up with no life and love the idea of an "all inclusive" workplace. Not surprisingly, growing up and having real-life responsibilities like a family aren't compatible with this lifestyle long-term. Google provides 3 meals a day, concierge service, beanbag chairs...everything a recent grad needs to continue the college lifestyle. Amazon probably wants to try expanding out of the monoculture they have and see what happens when they don't burn people out. Might just be the effect of a mature company - Microsoft is still famously all-inclusive, but people have the option of going home at a reasonable time. They operate more on the academic model than the sweatshop model.
The problem is going to come when the MBAs and management consultants pick up on this and pervert it into "oh look, Millennials don't want stable jobs. They prefer to string together 4 part-time gigs to get through life." Then it just becomes an excuse to hire part-timers exclusively.
I once worked at a company that's normal schedule was 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday and 4 hours Friday morning.
Absenteeism was lower and management happy with these and other metrics. People naturally scheduled offsite things like doctor's appointments for Friday afternoons. But more often they just started their weekend early. People were overwhelmingly happy with the schedule.
Alas California put an end to this. Employees apparently don't have the authority to move a non-overtime hour from Friday to another day of the week and exceed 8 hours in a given day.
I haven't applied to Amazon though I have applied to a lot of other major employers in my area. What is the most common response? Nothing at all. Not even a form rejection letter, just nothing - drawn out over a long time.
It seems the majority of employers in our country are reliant on various shitty HR algorithms to evaluate resumes en masse, and most often the employers don't know shit about how those algorithms work. The employers then congratulate themselves about how many resumes they were able to avoid reading, and then they get stuck with a thoroughly illogical collection of resumes written by people who happened to match the correct combination of keywords (which were often not included in the job posting).
If they would actually have human beings read the resumes, they would find hiring gets a lot easier.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a senior multi-language full stack dev, I have talked to Amazon before. The reason I laugh and hang up on their recruiters that cold call me is because they are dicks, not because the money is bad, or even the hours being uneven. They have a lot of people, like MS did 15 years back, who are convinced that because they work for a company that is currently doing well, that they are 'the shit' and anyone else is garbage. They earned the nickname 'Am-holes' for a reason.
Rather than trying to fire off the bottom 20% of the company's performers each year, perhaps they should be trying to fire off the 20% that are anti-social, abusive, or poor team players.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!