If it were Amazon, you know that at least 150 out of those 1000 workers had already been threatened with PIP before being put on a plan. Look up Focus and Pivot, Amazon's policy that puts around ~5-15% of corporate workers below director level a year on forced attrition.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nah, this was definitely outsourced to a company in India; you can abuse contract/vendor employees with way less effort than it takes to abuse full-time employees.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Perhaps, although many labelling teams at Amazon for other orgs are in-house or are part-time hours. Amazon likes keeping things in-house because they don't particularly give a fuck about abusing staff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

No, I can assure you even if they work directly in the building there is no way there isn't a middle man contract holder that allows the immediate firing of employees without effort. I work in this kind of tech. The goal is to have the least amount of actual employees as possible for these companies because it gives the least liability and the fastest route to letting them go.

Amazon does this with their delivery drivers what makes you think they aren't making sure there is a middle contract holder here too.

[–] Coniferous 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Previously worked for Amazon data labeling. The priority was largely having everything done in-house due to privacy concerns. It's a lot easier to act on privacy leaks coming from within. That said, the long term strategy is using crowdsourced labeling for anything not having to do with customers or customer data. So looks like you're both right :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Mostly because I work for Amazon, and can both see the org structure and know how it works in other orgs here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Focus and Pivot

This is also known as "stack ranking" and "rank and yank".

It's a super-gross way to run a business. I can see how you might want to "cut the fat" when starting out or growing. But keeping a policy like that for the long haul means selecting for employees that are good at that surviving. And that may not require one to even be all that productive, just good at working the system.

Anecdotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195136

It's also a recipe for a toxic work environment:

https://www.cultureamp.com/blog/what-is-stack-ranking