Bye, Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Bye, Amazon

#481

Post by esoterica » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

hysan wrote: post #391

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…

All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side. I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the wo…

No one who runs a business that hires multiple employees can reasonably call themselves lower middle class.

Showing my work:

> My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1]

>His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers.

Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad's wage and Z be your mom's wage.

Then Z>Y>X, so Z+Y>2X. Any household that makes more than twice a "fair wage" is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don't even make 1x a fair wage).

Re: Bye, Amazon

#482

Post by Consultant32452 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

I worked at a major pizza chain in high school. One of the assistant managers would use his access to update his time sheet so that his login time was 12 hours off from his real login time. So if he logged in at 4pm, he would update it to really be 4am. At first glance his clock in times would look correct, but he was stealing 12 hours of wages. This went on for months before he was caught and fired.

That was the biggest thing I saw. There was a TON of smaller theft in the form of drivers faking customer complaints so that the order was freed out, even though the driver had been paid cash for the order.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#483

Post by econcon » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

otachack wrote: post #210

econcon wrote: post #172

I also quit tech, so I don't really respect the people who get job at these companies, they are basically modern day enabler for bad things that happen at these companies. Companies aren't nothing without their employees helping them do the things and that unfortunately includes the bad things. I now run my own business and pay everyone fairly and treat everyone well.

Is your business non-tech related? I've had ideas to leave, myself, but with the times we're in with small businesses getting hit hard it seems it'll take extra courage to do so.

It's small scale manufacturing for communities, I am doing this work in India where it can help quality of life of people who are not aware about mechanism/machines which can improve their productivity and safety.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#484

Post by euix » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

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.

when I worked stateside I knew a co-worker who had an auto-immune disorder and required medication which was heavily subsidized by his workplace insurance. Without it he would be in financial hardship. He was interested in moving into Machine learning and data science (he was a software developer by profession) and asked me for advise. I told him frankly he just needs to quit and learn the material, that's when I learned that was impossible for him to do that. (I was on my way out the door anyway by that time).

This was a at a medium size traditional corp along the metro-north line of coast of Connecticut. By all accounts and my own experience was a pretty good place to work, with minimal (but some) scum baggery, good but not FAANG level salaries and excellent healthcare benefits.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#485

Post by oppositelock » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

I can confirm this, having first hand experience with it. We hired many low-skill workers at a big tech company that you've heard of about ten years ago. These workers received a couple of weeks of training, and then were set to do a rather simple, menial, repetitive job.

These workers didn't sell products, but did very low level tech work, but the entire operation was mired in drama. For example, we had a strict no drugs policy, and no weapons policy on campus, zero tolerance. So, say that one of your employees comes up crying that she is getting fired because she did heroin during work hours, and she needs to money for her unborn child (this happened!), or a guy gets angry at being fired because he was pulling out his new .45 from his waistband to show his cubicle neighbors. We had a LOT of this stuff, and as a result, many zero tolerance policies.

It's difficult to understand how many hard living, disadvantaged people there are in this country, even in wealthy areas like the Bay Area of CA, who bring their rough living to work with them. What do you do as an employer? Do you tolerate this to be friendlier to the employees, and someone gets killed, making you liable? Do you come down like a hardass and dehumanize them even more, but cover your butt? Neither choice is good, but it's the latter that usually happens.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#486

Post by yhoiseth » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #287

Perhaps a little off topic but I notice that despite the huge number of upvotes, this thread is ranked below other stories with far fewer points from around the same time. Are people flagging this story? It would be interesting to be able to see the number of flags a thread attracts on Hacker News.

I think I read somewhere that the algorithm de-emphasizes controversial stories.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#487

Post by jasondclinton » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

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.

I downvoted your GP and I will tell you why: it wasn't the observations of the way that businesses are run. It was this: "there is a reason they are working entry-level positions". This is Just World Hypothesis or "people are miserable because they deserve it". I flatly reject any hypothesis that the world we are living in is fair. You can consider any number of anthropological examples of societies that are not organized like capitalism in the West to see that the portion of the population that are "freeloaders" is not as high as the number of people who are stuck in "low skill" jobs. Just to take an example, the Amish do not experience this high level of stratification and wage slavery misery. They have their own problems, for sure, but humans are not en masse lazy. Most of us want to contribute to society and our system is exploitative.

And before you accuse me of being upper class, I grew up on food stamps, didn't complete college because I was working full-time to pay my way through it and it just didn't work out, and I worked plenty of terrible, low-skill jobs before I landed a job in tech.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#488

Post by azinman2 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

ianjsikes wrote: post #409

supergeek133 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment was pure anecdote from years spent in retail (Best Buy) and co-owning a pizza restaurant. I'll update it if it helps. A quick google finds a number of stats referencing what I'm talking about, but probably nothing scientific. Here is an example: https://losspreventionmedia.com/theft-by-employees-more-comm... Reliable help in "low skill" jobs (although I don't believe they are low skill) can be notoriously…

And yet wage theft (by employers) seems to be the largest form of theft in the US by far. Is it really a wonder that people would steal / slack off when they are so consistently getting screwed at their workplace? https://www.nelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsRe... https://www.deseret.com/2014/6/24/20543670/wage-theft-how-em...

Both can be true at the same time

Re: Bye, Amazon

#489

Post by jonny_eh » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

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…

> This gets to the heart of the idea of "privilege", and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged

That's because basic trust and respect shouldn't be a privilege, the lack of it is the issue. Calling someone privileged for being respected almost sounds like an insult. Let's focus less on privilege and more on disadvantage.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#490

Post by peterwoerner » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #294

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…

Boeing tracked the projects people worked on to the tenth of an hour when I worked there in IT as a salaried employee. It was a disaster and lead to all sorts of undesirable behaviors and malicious compliance.

They are required to do that by law because they work on government contracts. I have worked at a couple of contractors, they are all required to do that. IN my experience it has all been self reported, but I wouldn't immediately assume that Boeing is being nefarious.