zlacker

Their pool is not the entire US workforce, it's a relatively small group of highly skilled workers in a market where those workers can make tons of money at many different companies.

Alienating a fraction of that workforce will impact them, I think.

>>static+(OP)
Warehouse workers are not highly skilled. But, even if you’re talking just say programmers they still employ less than 1% of us.

>>Retric+Up
I am referring to programmers, and specifically a subset of programmers that can pass a difficult interview - most developers are absolutely terrible, probably > 50%, so cut that number in half at least. It's a relatively small number.

>>static+6B
You can cut 90% of programmers that would not pass an interview for whatever reason and there are still easily 10 times more people that qualify than work for Amazon. More so if you consider whatever fraction they need to onboard each year. Absolutely worst case is just slightly increase pay or open a few more offices across the US.

>>Retric+rW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

612k engineers. Let's assume that Amazon aims to hire the top 20% (I would expect software engineering skills to follow a power curve), so roughly 100k qualified workers.

That's pretty small if you're looking to employ 2-5k of them. That's a lot of competition given that there are likely at least 50 companies making Amazon-type offers.

I'm not saying they can't hire people if 10% of that pool decides they won't work there, but I'd imagine they would want to extend their pool to maybe top 30% at some point.

>>static+TZ
That’s more or less the numbers I was thinking.

Amazon does a wide range of software development from robotics, backend AWS, internal software, and front end web development. So, most developers have relevant skills even if some positions are much harder to fill. That said their dev teams have many non programmers like systems administrators and testers etc so I suspect it’s closer to 2k US developers than 5k. As it looks like many of their openings are in Canada, Ireland, India, etc.

>>Retric+Z31
To me, a company that wants 2% of a pool has to be extremely competitive. 2% is a lot.