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Bye, Amazon

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#191

Post by tsco77 »

throw0101a wrote: post #97
labster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. From today's post: > Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison. In Ontario, Canada, which has a lot of auto plants, there's actually a controlled experimen…

Could you expand on that example?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#192

Post by lftherios »

scarface74 wrote: post #164
lftherios wrote: post #156

We need more Tims in the tech world. From a place for renegades, the valley has quickly become a safe place for "yes men", that all they do is to obey to their corporate overlords.

It’s easy to take a moral stand when you have millions and are close to retirement.

agreed. still very few do it.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#193

Post by adamc »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #18
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #2

> I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers Assuming this is the real true reason (I would trust Tim, but you never know, so just being explicit here), it takes huge balls to do something like this. The economic loss has to be somewhat taken in relation to your total wealth (e.g. if you lose $1M by quitting but you already have $10M+ in the bank, it's not as hard as if you had zero in the bank), but still... V…

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…

Wouldn't there be a potential opposite effect? Hiring someone like that helps establish (to techies, anyhow) that you are one of the "good guys"?

There are bound to be employers who would like to be seen that way.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#194

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

btilly wrote: post #166
toyg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's Canadian and lives in Canada. Canadian laws on libel and defamation might be less oppressive than US ones (hopefully they're not as bad as in the UK).

US laws on libel and defamation are shockingly good. Free speech is woven into our culture and the Constitution. This post is squarely in the center of what is meant to be protected. UK laws are so horrible that the USA passed a law that UK libel judgements are not enforceable here. See https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-10940211 for more. Canada is somewhere between the two. Incidentally the country with the worst libel la…

I'm pretty sure South Korea wins that contest: libel is a criminal offense and truth is not a sufficient defense.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fighting-for-jus...

Re: Bye, Amazon

#195

Post by gowld »

DagAgren wrote: post #89
morelisp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ranking virtue signalling over monetary gain I'll cop to not being completely au fait with current right-wing rhetoric, but I thought a core part of "virtue signalling" (insofar as it might actually exist beyond "position I disagree with", which your post suggests it might not) was that it was low-effort / low-cost. In other words, no action where the alternative is non-trivial monetary gain could be virtue signall…

In pretty much every case, "virtue signalling" is code for "this person is being virtuous, and I don't like it".

One side uses "virtue signaling" like another uses "Russian bot".

Re: Bye, Amazon

#196

Post by aguyfromnb »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #122

It's a wake up call, or at least an attempt at that, for the likes of Amazon that if they are looking to have reputable people, like Tim Bray, associate themselves and their name with you, there are certain standards that have to be met. Amazon, MS, Google, Apple, etc. rank among the most wealthy companies in the world and they've each had to deal with internal pressures where their employees voiced concerns about ce…

>It's a wake up call, or at least an attempt at that, for the likes of Amazon that if they are looking to have reputable people, like Tim Bray, associate themselves and their name with you, there are certain standards that have to be met.

Prominent VCs are calling for people to get back to work every day on Twitter. The rest of the world is waking up to these people, but we have a long way to go before Silicon Valley cares.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#197

Post by gowld »

stupidcar wrote: post #20

> 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…

Warehouse workers are disrespected for the same reason poor people are: because a nontrivial proportion are desperate and willing to act on it. Poor people get fired and prosecuted for things that rich people feel entitled to do every day, like fart around on HN at work while getting paid, or grab a soda or a whole meal from the cafe without paying for it.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#198

Post by felipemnoa »

toyg wrote: post #113
Someone wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.” They may exist, but I doubt there are enough of them, even in Amazon’s warehouses, to warrant the draconian rules for all employees. I also think people more behave that way then that they are that way. The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.

You know that stuff about the human brain being terrible at correctly calculating the odds? I think this sort of rule-making comes from that. Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at…

Another example is renting apartments. One bad tenant can cause a lot of harm, especially if you are a small landlord ie. three apartment house. You can go by years without a single bad tenant but all it takes is one bad one for you to start checking credit reports, references, etc.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#199

Post by gowld »

gadders wrote: post #4

As the saying goes "A principle isn't a principle unless it costs you money." Fair play to him for standing up for what he believes.

Hehe 64 and very rich. It cost his grandchildren money (if he has any), not him.
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