Amazing Amazon

NYTimes: Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas.

…The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.

Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America….The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.

Comparing Amazon’s surge in hiring to that which occurred in wartime is a good reminder that the government failed to create a surge in contract tracers despite the fact that contract tracing saves lives.

I applaud Amazon’s ability to respond to crisis/opportunity. I do, however, worry a little about this but not too much since it’s obviously false.

To grow so much, Amazon also needs to think long term, Ms. Williams said. As a result, she said, the company was already working with preschools to establish the foundation of tech education, so that “as our hiring demand unfolds over the next 10 years, that pipeline is there and ready.”