Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would immediately implement a special role for the head of HR: official decider of all firing decisions. No one will blame the head of HR because they'll know that they were only carrying out someone else's decision, while no one would blame the original decider because no one knows who it was.
Why would you want to create a workplace without personal responsibility for decision making? All I'm saying is to make that personal responsibility public. It's pretty telling to me that I'm being downvoted for saying that I think people should own up to their decisions in the workplace that impact other people and are questionable ethically. Removing any kind of moral liability for those decisions is how we wind up…
Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
321–330 of 399 posts
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is amazon so clueless. These firings seems like bad policy, seem to be very likely illegal (they have so much money it won't matter though to pay fines). And it's terrible PR. And for people that pay attention (including hacker news people) it makes them look terrible. Four bad outcomes. All they do is "remove a troublemaker" from their standpoint. Why not just address the issues? They look like they want to brin…
Forget about working there. Does it stop you from buying their products?
It doesn't really matter what Amazon does (see this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871216), the woke crowd has already made up their mind about the company and will criticize them regardless. The only thing that is going to satisfy the woke crowd is Amazon's failure.
Their best strategy is to focus on being the most customer centric company so that people like myself and millions upon millions of others keep buying from them.
I worked at another company the woke crowd loved to hate on and no matter how much more actual woke stuff our company did, the woke crowd still promoted the less woke company with the more woke brand because we were Goliath and they were David. We should have stopped wasting our effort to appease the unappeasable and just focused on being customer-centric like Amazon does. The loudest critics aren't trying to build a better world. They are trying to signal to others about how woke they want others to think they are.
This doesn't mean that Amazon and my previous employer shouldn't do good things. They should and do. What it means is that they should do it because those things are the right thing and they should pay no mind to the haters because haters are gonna hate. You can't be Goliath and not get hated on.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#323If you plan to speak out publicly regarding your employer, I would suggest you try to stay anonymous. 1. get a burner phone 2. get a cheap laptop and put linux on it 3. setup a non-domestic vpn on the device 4. don't use this equipment with any accounts tied to use 5. use the burner phone via vpn in order to establish social media accounts. 6. use these social media accounts over vpn to make your statements...
> 5. use the burner phone via vpn in order to establish social media accounts. This often doesn't work or is much more difficult than it sounds. Many social networks don't allow anonymity and they detect attempts to stay anonymous. In an extreme case your account might be blocked soon after creation and you might be asked to upload a photo or ID scan.
Even then, as long as you aren't working for the social network in question, it's less of a risk... highest risk is using the devices you have signed on with your work accounts, or using your real name.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know of a single employer that would be interested in hiring someone who insisted on including a list of nonfirable offenses which included making public statements which paint the company in a bad light. 1. Work for a company that you don’t feel the need to publicly criticize. 2. Start your own company. 3. Increase your market value thru hard work to improve your negotiating position. > There are many more…
Recall that your initial assertion was that "The employee should negotiate “fireable offenses” into his contract." I'm not claiming that this particular "freedom" to openly criticize your employer deserves government intervention, but I really don't see any of your proposed solutions as generally viable. Negotiating that into a contract is not something a significant number of people can do. >1. Work for a company th…
Most people will have to make major concessions to negotiate a clause like this into their contract. I am fine with this.
Do I think a hypothetical works where all employers guaranteed this power to laborers is an improvement over the current one? Maybe, but I am morally imposed to creating this world thru government intervention.
> I'm not claiming that this particular "freedom" to openly criticize your employer deserves government intervention
Noted.
> Absolutely, in an ideal world everyone should. But many people do not and switching jobs can be difficult, particularly for people outside the tech bubble that HN exists in.
It takes hard work to get a better job with more money and benefits, but this is being human. This situation pleases me.
> Not everyone can do that [start a company], and the skills required to start and run a successful company are almost completely orthogonal to those most people develop in their careers.
So prioritize learning these skills over starting a family or whatever else.
> There's a fixed number of people that can be at the top of any market (in proportion to market size), this will only work for a handful of people. It's not a general solution.
I am suspicious of this because there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. People at the top of their field create new wealth.
> As an example, a child could be coerced into cleaning their room by their parent shutting down the wifi until the chores were done.
Children make the issue confusing. Let’s say that a man wants to use the WiFi at Starbucks, but he can’t get the password until he purchases something. This isn’t coercion. Starbucks is selling a service, the man can accept or deny the contract. If men with guns force him to buy the coffee, then it’s coercion.
(Edited)
> Are you trying to say that people who don't productively use their minds to participate in society deserve to die?
Yes.
> How exactly would a hypothetical nonpunishable disparagement clause in an employment contract affect your "natural property rights" in any way?
If the government forces me to add this clause to employment contracts, then my right to free association has been violated.
> Do you think that the "government's cure" of ending slavery has left people worse off?
Slavery is evil. I don’t know enough about American abolition to address the specific point. But it is certainly possible to do something evil while intending to resolve some other evil.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't gauge the real.world based on Hacker News. 99% of keyboard warriors will sign 250k USD+ total comp offers in a jiffy.
The way I see it, in the right city somebody with our skillset can step outside and trip over an offer with a very comfortable salary. In that context, I don't think there's much excuse for going out and choosing to make the world a worse place, even if you'd get paid 2x that very comfortable salary.
Maybe I'm being an idealist punk for feeling this way but I'll take less pay to be able to live with myself... Especially in regards to the places that I've given a hard-no: Walmart and Facebook as these companies are actively hurting my country every day.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firing outspoken employees counts as an attempt to suppress information to me. The firing itself becoming news is the backfire. They essentially gave the warehouse conditions an extra news cycle.
We may be missing information here, but I am not sure these employees even had any first-hand information to suppress. I went to their twitter pages and couldn't find any myself.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Warehouse workers are not highly skilled. But, even if you’re talking just say programmers they still employ less than 1% of us.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I define coercion as initiating physical violence against another man. That seems oddly narrow. As a contrived example (I like stress-testing ethical intuitions) would you consider barricading the doors and windows of someone's home and waiting for them to starve to death to qualify as physical violence? (Assume for the sake of argument that noone else interferes with this, perhaps because you're in a isolated rura…
> That seems oddly narrow. As a contrived example (I like stress-testing ethical intuitions) would you consider barricading the doors and windows of someone's home and waiting for them to starve to death to qualify as physical violence? Yes, the barricader has “initiated force” because “man” owns his body and his possessions. Vandalizing the possessions is analogous to assaulting the body. (My language is clumsy.) >…
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you want to create a workplace without personal responsibility for decision making? All I'm saying is to make that personal responsibility public. It's pretty telling to me that I'm being downvoted for saying that I think people should own up to their decisions in the workplace that impact other people and are questionable ethically. Removing any kind of moral liability for those decisions is how we wind up…
Because that would just require corporations to have a "fall guy", which is basically what a lot of executives are already. Vessels into which the corporation can dump it's moral debt.
Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That seems oddly narrow. As a contrived example (I like stress-testing ethical intuitions) would you consider barricading the doors and windows of someone's home and waiting for them to starve to death to qualify as physical violence? Yes, the barricader has “initiated force” because “man” owns his body and his possessions. Vandalizing the possessions is analogous to assaulting the body. (My language is clumsy.) >…
Fair point. How about if they're in some public or abandoned building and the barricader locks or obstructs the exits to the same effect?
You go to a “friend’s” house. You go to the bathroom, but it’s actually a soundproofed room with a door that locks from the outside. He doesn’t let you out and you die from starvation. What is your view on this? The friend owns the home so the vandal-argument doesn’t make sense.