Looking forward to what tbray is on to next. He has co-authored W3C's original XML spec and the RFC spec for JSON while at Google. Now leaving AWS on matters of principle, he could just be the kind of person who can turn things around and being trusted by enough people to get behind new "digital humanism" initiatives in a post-cloud era, like cross-cloud computing/service standards, and digital media/privacy/advertising rights and standards in an increasingly monopolistic market.
Bye, Amazon
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: Bye, Amazon
#62> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…
i worked in a warehouse carrying boxes around right after high school.
the amount of brain effort to do this kind of job is close to 0. you need a bit of physical prowess, but this is easily attainable in a couple of week. since the job was basically the least complex job one can ever have, the pay was low. and it made sense back then: you want to move on to a better job/better pay/better conditions? get better qualifications, learn to do a different job etc. of course i can't comment on what happens at amazon, but these kinds of jobs are so easy to do that it's ridiculous they haven't been completely automated till now. i do wonder what will happen to all these people once automation is 100%.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#63I appreciate the candid statement he has made about one of the things that ails Amazon's leadership. > Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done. I wonder if there's any future opportunity for him in the existing set of well known names or large enough companies. I can't think of any widely known tech company that doesn't do "21st-century capitalism" (treating people as disposable cogs). S…
I doubt it's an in depth criticism of capitalism, rather the specific sub-branch of worker-exploitative practices that the company does.
He'd be quite happy (as are we all here, if we are truthful) making more millions in other more worker-friendlier ways.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion it was more from the perspective that minorities may have a more empathetic view on problems, after likely experiencing dealing with problems other more privileged people don't have to. In this case: one of the biggest benefits of hiring minorities... ending up being the reason you fire them.
I think he may have meant what I said in my sister comment but I think you're probably right about that being a factor. I googled "are minorities more likely to speak against injustice" hoping to find some threads of discourse or studies, but everything was coronavirus related... perhaps another time when search engines aren't trying to decide what I need to see.
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Re: Bye, Amazon
#65> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…
IT workers are partly to blame for it. By creating , embracing, extending, normalizing and advertising a culture where companies compete for office perks, they also allowed the creation of the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it's OK to treat them like wage slaves.
I doubt the tech office perks are taking employee money from other companies. Warehouse work wasn’t likely to ever be awash in cash to lavish on the workers because that’s coming straight out of the customers’ pockets; every other logistics company is competing on that basis and consumers are generally price-sensitive.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#66> It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done. Stung me the most. Capitalism seems to have such an increasingly firm grip on the world that I'm starting to think the only way out is from some drastic worldwide event (Corona?).
21st century? 20th century? 19th? Seems to me, this is the story of the industrial revolution and arguably all civilization pre-IR, when serfs were fungible labor units to the landed gentry. Standardize the design and production of something, then bring in labor to produce mass quantities to a certain level of quality. Coronavirus won't change this: with 8B people on the planet, we've come to depend on industrial pro…
Industrial production and capitalism are not the same thing. I don't know about the ethics nor the day-to-day, but Mondragon is a largecorporation and worker owned.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I have never run a warehouse, but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist…
>That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did. But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It's also hard when traditional means for…
I don't think GP meant that everyone who works in a warehouse should be joining 'coding bootcamps' and striving to become '10x ninja devs' instead.
I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!
Re: Bye, Amazon
#68How does resigning better serve the cause than conscientious refusal to take part in despisable activities and get fired instead?
Re: Bye, Amazon
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you can trust that it's the real reason, because either way it's going to make him radioactive for the next gig like this. No large company keeps its hands completely clean. Defense contracts, Chinese censorship, exploiting addiction, anticompetitive behaviour, sexism, the list goes on. Having a public figure at your company that's willing to martyr themselves to push the knife in just a little deeper when yo…
He's also 64. That's near retirement age, and I imagine he can afford to retire early.
He has a few reasons to retire -- and a few reasons not to retire. And he laid them out for us about a year and a half ago: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/10/25/On-Retire...
> Progressive friends, people whose opinions I respect, give me shit about working for Amazon. I claim that the problem is capitalism, flaccid labor laws, and lame antitrust enforcement, not any particular company; maybe I’m right.
And now he's basically admitting he was wrong. Impressive.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#70How many "Amazon VP"s are there, 1000? Whenever I see stories like this the majority of the time the position of the individual is embellished to make the act seem more dramatic.
"Distinguished Engineer" is kind of a big deal, title-wise. It's not something that is just handed out.