291–300 of 1001 posts
> I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right? Including this bit is interesting. So he is accusing Amazon of being both sexist and racist in addition to treating workers poorly.
And then the new employer can be the "villain of the month" on HN.
> 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…
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…
These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done
In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people's schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very little intervention necessary. I happened to take off one day a week at random no questions asked (combination of not being physically capable of doing 5 days a week of that job while also happening to be scraping paint off a house that summer)
So you don't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong
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As he said, you don’t go to the media when you’re a VP at a company. You go through channels. Anything else -would- make you radioactive, because it means you can’t be trusted to work at fixing things that you carry some responsibility for as a senior leader. Caveat: companies where everyone is a VP probably have another title that denotes senior leadership: Managing Director, Partner, etc.
While I see where you're coming from, "that's not how it's done" might not be the right answer when the things that are happening are already crossing ethical boundaries that are more serious than breaking with corporate traditions. I think I would agree that making media rounds would be a crude move, but there are actions you can take along a continuum before that (like this blog post) that might help apply external…
For roles where you are a voice of the company, you need people who will use channels, because the alternative is literally bad for the company in ways that are very concrete.
Put more viscerally, I would not want one of my peers going to the media before they talk to me and give me a chance to address their concerns.
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I briefly worked on a timekeeping system (the one that records work hours). When I started running it against real data, I hit some bugs. The system was reporting that people had worked a few hours rather than a full shift. I had no idea how this could happen. When I started digging into the data, it became obvious. People were punching in at 08:00 on Monday, and wouldn't punch out until something like 12:00 on Frida…
If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong. I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company. Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid. If the company trusts you, you…
It was a disaster and lead to all sorts of undesirable behaviors and malicious compliance.
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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…
“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.
So why do you think those rules exist? Because Amazon managers simply are bad people who like to torture their underlings?
To me, THAT sounds implausible. Maybe the rules are not well suited to solve the problems that arise in such work places. But I'd prefer the critics to propose better rules then.
So, let's go. Assume you are manager of a warehouse and you find many employees take extremely long breaks on the toilet. What do you do?
> 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…
Manual labor in many sectors is structurally underpaid. Nobody with half a brain would ever choose waiting tables as a career, even if they enjoyed it. So you're left with people with no choice or with mental-health issues (or both), who often resent having to do the job.
Whether that's by design or a collateral effect of certain societal and economic structures, is open to discussion; but this is definitely the case. Until we allow that waiter and that delivery driver a level of dignity equal to this or that white-collar job, the situation will not change.
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Which is the mythical company treating their low-skill workers far better than Amazon? Does the rest of big tech even employ their non professionals directly? Which of big tech directly employ their janitors and treat them much better than Amazon warehouse workers? Which of big non tech company does this? >its refusal to pay tax. What do you even mean by this? Companies can't refuse to pay tax. They have to pay tax a…
> Which is the mythical company treating their low-skill workers far better than Amazon? That's an easy one: Costco. Do a cursory Google search and you'll generally find positive stories going back years. There's nothing "mythical" here, it's a matter of explicit policy difference between the two retailers.
> 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…
Agree:
People can quit and say what they want.
People in high paying jobs can quit and often find an equivalent replacement; perhaps have one lined up before they leave; in such a case the impact is limited.
But if you quit on principle and take a public stand on it other large companies are more likely to treat your decision as a sign you are dangerous. So it takes not just the ability but also the willingness to take such action.
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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.
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>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!
And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.