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Bye, Amazon

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#381

Post by jeromegv »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #358
noelsusman wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen plenty of white guys blame minority quotas and nothing else after being turned down for a job. There is also little evidence that companies are hiring hoards of incompetent people to fill minority quotas. If they were, then why does every tech company still struggle with a lack of diversity in the workplace? It would be easy to just hire whoever can tick a diversity box and fix those numbers, but they're no…

Diversity quotas are absolutely real, and publicly documented all over the place. Activist shareholders are filing resolutions and threatening companies with lawsuits and bad PR. I was involved in hiring at some large tech companies and we had very specific targets to meet, ”or else” . I don’t know how anyone can still deny that this is happening.

Re-read again, OP did not deny that minority quota exists. OP refuted the somewhat popular opinion that incompetent people are being hired BECAUSE of minority quotas.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#382

Post by augustt »

koheripbal wrote: post #372
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.

...and that's why those companies become bastions for people who don't value (and indeed despise) socialist ideals.

As long as the top is rotten, there will never be some sort of successful moral coup d'etat.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#383

Post by globular-toast »

dunnevens wrote: post #170
globular-toast wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give an inch and they take a mile. You could pay a McDonalds worker all you like and he'll still just try to get away with doing less work.

Many people, maybe most, take some pride in their work. You pay people decently, give them trust, and treat them like adults, most of them will give good-to-great effort towards what they do. If you approach them with the attitude you currently have, then your prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

Then make your own profitable company that takes advantage of this. I don't want things to be this way. It doesn't make me happy to say it, but all of the evidence is on my side. I suppose all companies start out with good intentions like you have. But the successful ones always end up like Amazon. The others are confined to your imagination.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#384

Post by cowpig »

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…

Starting the comment with "assuming this is the real reason" seems disingenuous in a post that seems to be supportive of the author.

But that it's repeated again in the 3rd paragraph, and that the final paragraph then mentions that it'll make Tim "hard to hire"?

There's no basis in evidence: Tim's wikipedia page shows a history of activism consistent with taking this kind of stand, and a staggering resume that indicates it's unlikely he'll have any trouble finding work if he wants it.

I'm pretty disappointed in HN that this is the top-voted comment on this article..

Re: Bye, Amazon

#385

Post by southphillyman »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #344
CalRobert wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Talking to US friends about jobs is always weird because they're so afraid of quitting/being fired, because their health insurance is tied to their jobs. This whole system conspires to make people afraid and subservient. Why you guys haven't replaced it with someone that actually frees you, is always a mystery to me.

A handful of politicians have been trying to decouple health insurance from employment the last two election cycles but for whatever reason a significant portion of the country "likes their health insurance", whatever that means. Personally I've never loved any of my health plans and dread the yearly increases and frequent provider changes as I either jump between jobs or my job eliminates or adds new plans due to rising cost. As long as I can register with a competent physician and dentist and keep the cost low I could care less who administers my plan. It truly is a mystery but I suspect resistance is tied to a belief that a government implementation would some how be more inefficient than what we have and the general disdain people in the U.S have against taking "freebies" or public assistance due to the history of social/racial stratification in the country.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#386

Post by rdsubhas »

> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker

More and more victims of trickle down economics.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#387

Post by Apocryphon »

moduspol wrote: post #337
Pfhreak wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employing someone is not a gold star that entitles you to treat workers however you'd like. One cannot excuse terrible/racist/sexist treatment of workers with, "at least they were employed."

Nobody is excusing that. I'm pointing out the irony of the most probable outcome after all the moralizing and hand-wringing here by (primarily) well-paid, privileged, white collar tech workers. The jobs will be automated away, Amazon will be no more morally virtuous than they were the day before, yet the outrage will simply shift to the next employer. A fair assessment of Amazon's worker treatment would involve compa…

The amount of effort and time it would take to automate away warehouse work makes this whole question ludicrously moot, even concern-trolling. It’s akin to saying “at least Uber is employing its drivers because otherwise self-driving cars will automate them away.”

And Amazon is indeed a more convenient target because you would expect a company with its resources and power to have a higher standard of treatment of its employees. They can certainly afford to.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#388

Post by throwaway08320 »

artsyca wrote: post #139
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…

Somewhere between university and the present day we went from being idealistic to realistic to defeatist and the tone of this conversation stinks of pre-covid stereotypes let me guess you enjoy the free coffee and casual culture too much to walk away from a neo-fascist dictatorship with corporate characteristics or maybe you're mortgaged up to your eyeballs Edit: don't you think some liberal leaning corporate behemot…

> neo-fascist dictatorship with corporate characteristics

> Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance state

You seem very confused.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#389

Post by g_sch »

vorpalhex wrote: post #285
whymauri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently. > And by all means, if you are cap…

I think the idea that workers need "profitable" degrees to work "profitable" jobs isn't as obvious as you think.

It used to be said that a college degree was a ticket to a well-paying job. Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless. Who's to say that the criteria won't get even narrower in the future?

Degrees aren't a symbol of skill nearly as much as they are a way for the market to allocate well-paying jobs, and the allocation is getting smaller all the time.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#390

Post by koonsolo »

rerx wrote: post #282
koonsolo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. How is that a bad thing?

Not saying it's a bad thing, just saying that it might not improve productivity compared to their peers that still want to finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts.

But indeed those employees (programmers, etc) saw that as a benefit of doing no more than 40 hour per week.

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