To be clear their retention is only bad in the fulfillment centers. Those are generally low skill, low pay, seasonal employees meant for short term stints - of which there is a near infinite supply.
For their core engineering, BD etc... teams in Seattle, retention is great.
>Those are generally low skill, low pay, seasonal employees meant for short term stints - of which there is a near infinite supply.
Low skill, yes, low pay, God yes, seasonal - not usually. At least where I am, they aggressively hire for full time positions, and clearly intend for non-temporary employees to consider it as a career. Retention is poor because of the environment and the workload.
And theft. Apparently there's a lot of theft. But that's bound to happen when you surround people with expensive merchandise, work them like dogs and refuse to pay them a decent wage.
Not sure how relevant this rant is; the last time Steve Yegge worked at Amazon was in mid-2005. For reference, this was even before AWS launched publicly.
For their core engineering, BD etc... teams in Seattle, retention is great.