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Bye, Amazon

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#471

Post by overthemoon »

generalpass wrote: post #405
generalpass wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse is when you evaluate hiring. It isn't unusual for a high-turnover entry-level type employer to have 15% or less of candidates who agree to fill a position still employed with the company 6 months later. The pure drag of having to deal with this, especially when it comes to all of the paperwork required, by law, to be completed with every single new hire makes this alone a huge expense. The vast majority of…

What a shocker that the upper middle-class users of HN immediately vote down a perspective on the world that they have never been exposed to. It must all be a lie, right? And even more shocking is the cowards can't even leave a comment. This is pervasive now and makes for terrible communities.

Come on. Forgive me if I don't take "low wage workers are inherently immoral by HR standards" seriously. Or whining about downvotes, for that matter.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#472

Post by whymauri »

toastercat wrote: post #402
vorpalhex wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever. That's not what OP said. It's not that they are incapable of acquiring new skills, it's that some people are generally more capable to acquire new marketable and profitable skills…

Completely agreed.

And, I'd like to add a bit more. When I say capable, I absolutely don't mean that in terms of intellectual capacity. I mean it in the context of actual, abject poverty. I'm talking about being incarcerated for a possession charge and having your young life spiral out of control. Or being raised in a homeless shelter while also being diagnosed with severe chronic disease (I've met students like this). Scenarios where there is just so much happening, that the idea of stopping to think about careers, college, or even learning English seems unthinkable. Cases where you have as many jobs as you have mouths to feed (not just children, but aging or sick family).

Peter Temin from MIT conjectures that it takes a person born into poverty nearly "20 years of nothing going wrong" to exit [0].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...

Re: Bye, Amazon

#473

Post by treve »

Nice to see someone standing up. I have a hard time understanding how developers with options to move to different companies ethically justify working for companies like Amazon, Facebook, Oracle or Walmart.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#474

Post by nixarian »

supergeek133 wrote: post #324
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 think this is a two way street. If you've never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has "low pay" labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales). For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was…

What do you expect, you delusional borderline psychopath. You have zero empathy, apparently. Why wouldn't they do things like that? They barely make enough to live. The whole system has told them they are barely worth anything. Why would they behave? Why are 2/3 of workers even decent, is the real question.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#475

Post by Naracion »

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…

As cowpig has mentioned in another comment, I also doubt Tim would have trouble finding other opportunities if he wants to. However, as Tim says:

"The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls."

What about these people that were fired? When people get fired for whistle blowing, what does that mean for their future job prospects? Does it severely hurt your chances at a faang?

As a PhD student of color guided by a moral compass who has to make employment decisions soon, this is an important question for me.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#476

Post by griffinkelly »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #361
gilrain wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're claiming that 1/2 to 1/3 of employees are criminally stealing time or product from their workplace. I need some robust citations for that, because it's ridiculous on its face.

When I worked at Kmart, on more than one occasion they were forced to first to fire a large number of cashiers (10+) due to stealing. And the Kmart I worked in was definitely in the 'good' part of town. Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got c…

I worked with a gas station chain and they had a similar approach. They cumulatively lost thousands of dollars from cashiers stealing from the registers, but I guess it was less than having to pay them more? They usually recouped the stolen money through store surveillance, but still, it was a surprisingly high amount of time and effort; I figure an easier solution would be just to pay people more.

Now working with grocery stores, they commonly tell me how difficult it is to find cashiers. Pre-COVID, I was at one, and they had 10+ cashier openings, and no applicants.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#477

Post by pleddy »

I worked there in 2004. Fired for insubordination. My team was harassed by the VP of QA, he was soon also fired, just to prove that I was indeed onto something in my whistleblowing. Larry something, can't remember. One of those super two-faced goofballs.

Amazon culture then? It was sad. Workers are pawns. The dreams of the Internet startup culture dashed and dying. I was on the team w the first Infosys flood.

Amazon is a place to make money. That's it. It's a strict military hierarchy like all US corporations. No real culture of betterment for humanity. Quite the opposite. Yes, those that got and kept their options possibly doing very well. Yes, if tech is what you live for, yippee! A better future for all of humanity: strong "no!". Stormtroopers and low flying helicoptors for any that dare organize.

Didn't you see the HR video where a plastic Jeff spews all the corporate lies and BS? Made me sick back when. I was an idealist. You were probably spared the worst and protected, given the humanist version on the surface.

There's a culture of trying to get rid of people after a few years. Not many make it over the 3-5 years mark, right? Policy of "fire the bottom 10%" thing every year, so trump up some lies to have excuses.

Anyways, better you got out before the rot set into your heart. No idealists there. The top guy is obviously quite extraordinary. Thanks for making a statement. Maybe something will break one day.

Whistleblowing needs to be kept alive. It's our only hope.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#478

Post by Emanation »

elliekelly wrote: post #396
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Kmart, on more than one occasion they were forced to first to fire a large number of cashiers (10+) due to stealing. And the Kmart I worked in was definitely in the 'good' part of town. Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got c…

Maybe if Kmart paid their employees a little more they could afford to buy themselves something to drink at work.

Why pay them more when you can offer some of what they're stealing as a benefit for working there. It's probably a lot cheaper and creates goof faith.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#479

Post by GVIrish »

sulam wrote: post #249
darkerside wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This takes more courage than quitting itself, in my opinion. What if he wrote this letter, sent it to the media, and then worked in good faith within Amazon to change things for the better? That seems like the hardest road, and also the one that might make the most difference.

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.

He did go through the proper channels:

"At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people. ¶

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned."

Re: Bye, Amazon

#480

Post by lotsofpulp »

elliekelly wrote: post #396
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Kmart, on more than one occasion they were forced to first to fire a large number of cashiers (10+) due to stealing. And the Kmart I worked in was definitely in the 'good' part of town. Now Kmart also paid literally the minimum wage, but it still shocked me the number of people who would steal when they clearly had video, and regularly fired people for doing so. And some of the people who stole got c…

Maybe if Kmart paid their employees a little more they could afford to buy themselves something to drink at work.

If Kmart paid their employees more, people would shop at Walmart.

And they did. Sears paid their employees very well, and consumers rewarded sears by shopping at their new competitors that offered lower prices.

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