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Bye, Amazon

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#251

Post by MiroF »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #212
nicoburns wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle. On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the time. The world would be a better place if more people did.

Both you and I are speaking from anecdotal evidence and personal experience. I don't have a way to give you data about it. My feeling, based on experience and several conversations I had with colleagues and friends over the years, is that this is NOT happening often. But I don't know if this is a general rule, or not.

I also don't have more than anecdotes, but just to add to the collection - my top tier school has lots of people who boycott companies like Palantir and I, personally, declined an Amazon offer due to their business practices. (why did I interview? I wanted salary leverage while negotiating)

Really, the main reason you don't see stuff like this is because those people wouldn't work for Amazon to begin with.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#252

Post by lazyjones »

braythwayt wrote: post #224
lazyjones wrote: post #214

Somewhat understandable reaction, but wise? As a VP you should have some influence at Amazon. Even if not, you'd still do more good by speaking out about it internally instead of resigning, thereby harming mostly yourself and apart from HN drama having little effect on the problem. Unless the real problem is that there is no actual reasonable argument against Amazon's actions because the danger is exaggerated and all…

You make good point, but it can be extraordinarily difficult to change a company's toxic management culture from the inside. You speak out, you lead by example, you ask tough questions... Then you start getting bad reviews. Colleagues speak of you as being "difficult." You are passed over for involvement in important initiatives. You quit in disgust, but now they leak that you are a poor performer who is no longer re…

> You quit in disgust, but now they leak that you are a poor performer who is no longer relevant, and your speaking out about worker conditions is just a poor performer trying to distract everyone from their inability to get things done.

I'm not sure this is worse than quitting in disgust and then publishing drama and negative opinions about your past employer. At least the poor performance claim can be countered with actual past reviews.

> It is very, very difficult to win some battles from the inside

It's even more difficult if you don't even try and when everyone who wants to and could do it just leaves.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#253

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

paulintrognon wrote: post #162
ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it takes huge balls to do something like this. > The economic loss has to be somewhat taken in relation to your total wealth > Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle. A good number of engineers refuse to even interview with FAANGs and other nasty companies on principle and they don't get any public praise.

It's one thing to refuse interviews, and another thing to quit a job you love and invested 5 years of your life and that paysvery well.

The latter it's much easier: the stocks are vested after 5 years, the unspent disposable income is saved somewhere and now and you are ready to leave.

Also the turnover of engineers in Amazon is among the highest in the industry and only a few stay beyond 5 years.

In comparison, refusing to work for some FAANG takes 10 times more courage for someone out of college and without saving.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#254

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

kidintech wrote: post #222
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both you and I are speaking from anecdotal evidence and personal experience. I don't have a way to give you data about it. My feeling, based on experience and several conversations I had with colleagues and friends over the years, is that this is NOT happening often. But I don't know if this is a general rule, or not.

Sorry for not contributing to the discussion, just want to note that this is a very nicely worded reply. I usually stare in disbelief and am rude when confronted with this exact situation, so hats off to you.

Not GP, but want to mention:

I’ve found it invaluable to copy comments I like in to my quotes.txt and use them as inspiration / paraphrased / cited when I want to say something similar myself.

We model our behaviour on those we like.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#255

Post by alexandercrohde »

asdf21 wrote: post #95

It's crazy how stuff like this keeps coming out, but Amazon's stock just keeps going up..

Well, as somebody who is unimpressed Amazon's corporate dystopia, yet also owns a significant amount of Amazon stock, I don't think the stock market is the place to look for these changes.

At a stock level, I imagine their longterm plan is to replace warehouse workers with robots anyways.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#256

Post by tafox »

CalRobert wrote: post #235
bob33212 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warren Buffet's has a famous quote about time being the only valuable thing he has. Once you have enough money to cover food/housing/healthcare/transportation it seems stupid to spend a lot of your time helping an organization that you don't like, even if they are paying you well. What is impressive here is that he make his decision public. Plenty of people have moral issues with their company and just say that they…

This is the challenge with large mortgages and heath care requirements taking away people's moral agency. Maybe that's the idea.

I had a boss that would try to bully employees into buying expensive cars they couldn't afford, just so they had too much debt and he could exploit them... because they could no longer afford to quit.

One might be disappointed how effective this technqiue can be.

Now imagine you have car payments, a mortgage, and a family to feed.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#257

Post by User23 »

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…

The lone asshole taking advantage also makes the other 19 miserable. The effect on morale is crushing. Always think past the first order consequences.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#258

Post by matthewheath »

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…

UK libel laws aren't that bad for situations like this — if he were sued in the UK, he could rely on the defence of honest opinion and I imagine he would prevail.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#259

Post by alharith »

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…

I don't want to disagree with most of what you are saying, but this is where I can always tell the majority of HN hasn't started a non-tech, low skill business before (restaurants, sales, salons, construction, etc). Your workers consistently put you in bad positions. People will call out for no reason, no shows are frequent. Sometimes you just get people that completely disappear. That's fine in the tech world where most of our deadlines and time estimates are made up anyways, but when you have one of your line cooks or stylists or sales rep fail, to show on a busy Saturday it can be disastrous if you don't have the good will of another one of your employees covering.

Seriously, next time you get a chance, talk to your local restaurant manager, construction manager, barber shop owner or sales manager, they all say the same things: how difficult it is to find good workers. (and "good" here is a pretty low bar: show up when you are scheduled on time)

Re: Bye, Amazon

#260

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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