341–347 of 347 posts
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A sane and healthy lifestyle. Do you have Stockholm Syndrome?
Bullshit. Reward without challenge is the fast-track to complacency and feelings of entitlement. When this is done to a child it's called "spoiling" them - for good reason.
Looking at this story (the wider Amazon story) it seems to me a lot of the value is getting extracted from employees in a sort of creeping way. So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You…
I just turned down an offer because of something like this. I went through a bunch of interviews and things seemed pretty peachy, until I interviewed with a guy (who'd have been a peer) who was probably way more candid than management would've liked. He said things like "I haven't gotten a raise in five years so make sure you negotiate hard when you come in", "I got an apartment close to the office so I can be here q…
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It makes more sense if you buy into the concept of hedonic adaptation [0], which I do. The gist is that your happiness is not influenced as much as you think by your standard of living, but rather by changes in that standard. Absent of changes, your happiness will return to around its baseline level, and this is true for both positive and negative changes. So if that is actually true, it's possible to have a signific…
I could not agree more. However, I will make the distinction between perceived happiness and experience. Put very simply: over a 10 year period I could invest in a BMW or flights back to Europe to visit family. I will spare no expense giving our parents time with their grandchildren before it's too late. I'm more than happy to drive my POS '04 Mazda 6. When I read 'to live frugally so as to retire at 50' I see a lot…
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-of...
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I've never understood the logic of giving up the things you enjoy in life to gain time in the future to enjoy life. I'm all for frugal but life isn't a dress rehearsal.
There's a great moment in the documentary about Joan Rivers[1] before she died (was killed, basically). Sitting in her opulent, probably immensely expensive Manhattan penthouse apartment, in the middle of a discussion about how much money she has to make to stay afloat, she said something to the effect of: "Sure I could live carefully and it would be easy, but who wants to live carefully?". The point being, if you en…
If you get run over by a bus and can no longer work, it's nice knowing you can still live decently.
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That might sound crazy but on a software engineering salary, you can retire before 50 if you get used to spending little on food, transportation and shelter. My most favorite online resource on how to live frugally is this: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-became-financially-i... .
I followed this advice as well. Squirrelled away as much as possible, became financially independent. I'm 54 and I was laid off in November 2014 after 26 years at one company. I would like to go back work, but the engineering job market in San Diego is awful. I can afford to be picky on who I want to work for. Needless to say this will extend your job search time with the current market conditions. It could be that I…
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Yes, because I think about profit more than one or two quarters down the road.
Are you saying that Bezos doesn't? And if your management strategy is better than just hiring cheap, open a company and you'll win on the long term.
It also ignores the fact that markets are structured to reward cheap and greedy behaviour and C-suite narcissism, and to punish - or at least get in the way of - bottom-up worker democracy and other more fluid and less myth-of-the-holy-CEO management structures.
As for Amazon - the company can clearly afford to treat its workers better. The actual effect on profitability is likely to be positive, not negative, because better people will stay for longer, less churn means more stability and less random technical debt for new hires, and better publicity makes it easier to keep customers than lose them.
Bezos seems to think the tradeoffs are fine as they are. I think he's wrong about that. Amazon's model is quite brittle, and it's open to any number of competitive attacks. And Bezos has made some very poor decisions (phone, etc.)
Amazon will be fine in the short to medium term, but I'll be surprised if its business model isn't seriously disrupted by competition within less than a decade.
IMO treating workers better would make the company more creative and resilient, not less - and probably more profitable too.
Of course there's selection bias, but the reviews for Amazon on Glassdoor [0] don't seem that bad compared to other companies.
0 - http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.ht...