231–240 of 289 posts
I (and people I directly worked with) have been interviewed a couple of times by what one would call "mainstream press". Once by a NY Times columnist and another time by TechCrunch. The resulting articles bore very little semblance to what we said, omitted crucial facts, and contained the kinds of exaggerations that neither I nor any of the people interviewed would ever make. I'm talking "breaking the laws of physics…
I love this article. It’s so hard to find moderate voices, especially when algorithmic curation tends to surface outrage first. As the author puts it: “I don’t object to journalists writing about the trials and tribulations of Amazon employees. I only wish they would do so fairly. Just because a journalist has found an Amazon employee somewhere who got sprayed with bear repellant, that doesn’t mean Amazon employees s…
Why would we expect journalists to write fair articles? They’re in the infotainment business and need to sell clicks. Reporting that working at a warehouse is “hard work but mostly okay,” is not going to advance that reporters career or help the publication make money. But finding a shocking and at least mostly true story, and ignoring whether or not it’s a 1% outlier, just might. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. W…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then let me try. I concede the GP's tone is off-putting. I don't watch John Oliver regularly because I generally find him more entertaining than informative. Yet I still think this piece is largely disingenuous claptrap. Kevin Mims is not a moderate voice. He's a unique voice. A white man "in my sixties" with bylines with NPR and the NY Times who works a second job at a small bookstore and still finds time to turn ou…
> This is not a balanced piece. It is a piece with a skillfully deployed pro-Amazon shareholder-friendly anti-organized-labor agenda. I read the article twice. First time it felt balanced (or at least an alternative view). Then I asked myself what happened to all the crap we already knew Amazon was pulling and read it again. This time it felt more like a shill.
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I once talked to a manager about how he handed out raises. He mentioned one engineer who was sick exactly 10 days out of each year. Coincidentally, the company offered 10 days of paid sick leave a year. He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.
So he decided he'd figured out her scam without ever bringing it up in yearly or monthly review. He also never asked for proof of the 10 days of sick leave after the first year, which is reasonable to do if he had a suspicion she was flouting a rule. If he wanted to factor sick days into his pay decision, he had a responsibility to make sure he was correct using the proper internal channels. An alternate and equally…
I was putting myself through University and still had about 2.5 years of work. I was taking 12-13 units at night year round. So, there were times when I'd use a sick day for study/project/etc time. But I was lead programmer on a critical system by then (including being on-call) and was my department's de facto liason to the computing center, so I got little friction about it.
> Apart from employing a lot of staff, Amazon does a number of things progressives ought to like. For instance, it employs a very diverse group of people. On my shift, I work with African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, white people, gay people, deaf people, ex-convicts, and people whose ethnicities and even genders are a mystery to me. This is a warehouse job with a medium low salary. If the author w…
If the author worked as a programmer and could still repeat the above
And we were awesome.
> Apart from employing a lot of staff, Amazon does a number of things progressives ought to like. For instance, it employs a very diverse group of people. On my shift, I work with African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, white people, gay people, deaf people, ex-convicts, and people whose ethnicities and even genders are a mystery to me. This is a warehouse job with a medium low salary. If the author w…
If the author worked as a programmer and could still repeat the above As a programmer for a "stodgy" defense contractor, the programmers in my group alone included our Chinese-born female project leader, a Hong Kong-born female, a deaf male (and new parent), an African-American female, a Cuban-born male, an Iranian-born male, a Kuwaiti-born female, an ethnic Chinese SF-born female, and me. And we were awesome .
That's excellent and I envy you, it must be a great team to work with and even hang out after work. But how is this related to Amazon?
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If the author worked as a programmer and could still repeat the above As a programmer for a "stodgy" defense contractor, the programmers in my group alone included our Chinese-born female project leader, a Hong Kong-born female, a deaf male (and new parent), an African-American female, a Cuban-born male, an Iranian-born male, a Kuwaiti-born female, an ethnic Chinese SF-born female, and me. And we were awesome .
> And we were awesome. That's excellent and I envy you, it must be a great team to work with and even hang out after work. But how is this related to Amazon?
Too many are not, but it's not because programmers from other demographics aren't available; it's because true diversity isn't wanted.
Look at the photos on the Careers page for your typical USA coastal tech company. I see over and over again 22-35 year old Asian and white males (mostly). Latino faces are rare; black faces are rarer still. And faces over 45 or so are non-existent.
It doesn't seem appropriate to discuss a Quillette article without mentioning that it's an alt-right publication. We must not normalize it, and I strongly encourage people to flag the submission. A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles. Posts like these are low-key attempts for Quillette to legitimatize itself.
It's penalized on HN the same way we downweight all mostly-political or ideological publications. But such sites do come up with the occasional interesting article, and on HN we care about the article, not the site. Same with Jacobin or something like that.
I like the author's take on warehouse work, probably because it squares with mine. I went to high school with almost entirely white peers, was going to college without having to take on any loans, and I got the warehouse job because my dad worked in the offices. I met people who lived in completely different environments and believed completely different things, and it was awesome. One thing I don't agree with: >If B…
If people feel they want points for work ethics, do bookkeeping or other stay-at-home activity. Answer emails. Spreading a virus and infecting people is unethical and a company policy that demand that of employees is indeed inhumane. It is also counter-productive which is why only companies that can easily and cheaply find replacement employees can do it.
When I was young I did agency employment for a few years between leaving school and figuring out what I wanted to do. A lot of that was in warehouses (I also worked in greenhouses harvesting cucumbers 45C and 100% humidity, a paint factory moving 15l paint tins all day - never eaten so much or been so fit, 15l tins of bitumen are heavy to handball all day, steel plant that powder coated so hot tanks of acid and full…
> never had an issue with hard work Very similar boat as you when I was younger. Lots of physical labor. No big deal when you're young. Extrapolate that out to a decade, two decades, or an entire career and I bet we would both be singing a different tune.
Again though I don't regret it, the training was useful and it taught me life skills that are applicable to software engineering (though the stakes are a little lower when not working with 11kV systems).