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Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

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Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#41

Post by pram »

the_jeremy wrote: post #38
outside1234 wrote: post #9

Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare.

It seems hard to find an ethical, large tech company. Amazon? Mistreats warehouse workers. Microsoft? Antitrust, baked-in telemetry. Facebook? Privacy, cambridge analytica. Capital One / credit card companies? Profiting off financial illiteracy / people in need. Apple? Anti-competitive app store practices. Google? Ban people with no visible justification or reasoning, no customer support, benefits off lack of privacy…

To be fair though, if you're working at Oracle or Comcast in particular you're probably not under any delusions about their ethics or morality. ;P

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#42

Post by easytiger »

greendave wrote: post #31

Would be interesting to see a comparison of Amazon's tactics and Walmart's. Traditionally Walmart has gotten a lot of bad press for its working conditions and its destruction of small businesses across the US. Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny.

> Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny.

Are you quite serious?

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#43

Post by munk-a »

chrisseaton wrote: post #39
grumple wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are on the lower end of big tech salaries. And the vast majority of their employees are warehouse workers, and they are paid very poorly.

> the lower end of big tech salaries This is for most people a life-changing fortune.

People should balance their concerns when taking a job like the relative pay, stress, work/life balance and ethics of the employer (if that's a thing you care about).

Amazon loses pretty big on relative pay & ethics.

Also, as a general note "be humble oh employee for the gift you receive from your benevolent overlord" is a big part of the philosophy that's utterly breaking America right now - we need less of it.

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#44

Post by munk-a »

the_jeremy wrote: post #38
outside1234 wrote: post #9

Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare.

It seems hard to find an ethical, large tech company. Amazon? Mistreats warehouse workers. Microsoft? Antitrust, baked-in telemetry. Facebook? Privacy, cambridge analytica. Capital One / credit card companies? Profiting off financial illiteracy / people in need. Apple? Anti-competitive app store practices. Google? Ban people with no visible justification or reasoning, no customer support, benefits off lack of privacy…

If by large tech company you mean one of the largest ten out there then yea - but widen that field a bit and you'll find some good ones.

And, I feel like this is sort of what we get as a society and marketplace that doesn't value ethical or enforce business practices. There is no penalty for acting unethically and there is a profit penalty for acting ethically - so the top performing companies are likely to be those that decided to ignore ethics and pursue the dollar.

Google, for a while, was an exception to this rule by pure luck - they so fully dominated search when it was just becoming a thing you could actually monetize that they had bails of money they could use to operate ethically and at a large scale... but they've since course corrected to be an unethical as anyone else.

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#46

Post by Anon1096 »

munk-a wrote: post #43
chrisseaton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lower end of big tech salaries This is for most people a life-changing fortune.

People should balance their concerns when taking a job like the relative pay, stress, work/life balance and ethics of the employer (if that's a thing you care about). Amazon loses pretty big on relative pay & ethics. Also, as a general note "be humble oh employee for the gift you receive from your benevolent overlord" is a big part of the philosophy that's utterly breaking America right now - we need less of it.

Why should you be the one to make that decision? I'm sure workers, especially highly skilled Amazon engineers, have the capacity to decide for themselves that Amazon isn't some evil company Hacker News paints them to be. And their warehouse workers are paid well relative to the position.

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#47

Post by rochester46 »

grumple wrote: post #37
chrisseaton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pay extremely well, don't they? And a huge number of people just don't care about these issues like you do.

They are on the lower end of big tech salaries. And the vast majority of their employees are warehouse workers, and they are paid very poorly.

This comment seems like it comes from a place that has a warped understanding of what typical pay is.

>They are on the lower end of big tech salaries.

Amazon pay may be slightly lower than FB, Google, or Netflix. But the $150k entry-level starting pay that most of the corporate workers get is still so so so much higher than the vast majority of companies pay that it's laughable to imply that Amazon doesn't pay them well.

>And the vast majority of their employees are warehouse workers, and they are paid very poorly.

Amazon warehouse workers get $17/hour minimum and amazing health insurance (probably better health insurance than most of the American posters on HN) for a job that requires no experience, education, or really any prerequisites.

When compared with a SWE job like most HNers are familiar with, it's really easy to look down on $17/hr as "paid very poorly". When compared with skilled manual labor like oilfield workers, $17/hr is low. But when put into perspective that this is a job available to almost anyone, even those unable to get job elsewhere, $17/hr is a huge amount to someone who was previously homeless or to a 16 year old getting their first job.

Again for perspective, McDonalds pays on average half of what Amazon's minimum pay is. And yet I can't even recall the last time I saw a post lambasting McDonalds as being an evil company for how it treats its cooks and cashiers.

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#48

Post by ForHackernews »

euix wrote: post #32
WilliamEdward wrote: post #14

Amazon is interesting because there is a rift in the company; on one side you have upper middle class engineers, and on the other working class warehouse labourers. It's easy to dismiss union organisation coming from the former side, but the real tragedy is the thousands of workers working in dangerous conditions. They won't get their union.

Yea this something I realized recently with the VP guy leaving. As a upper-middle elitist working engineering/ML/management how do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance? I have been considering a career changing and one of the things is studying for interviews at the FAANGS and I have trouble working for the "man" as it is and this whole affair is just turning me off more.

This isn't that hard: Just don't work for the evil ones! If their recruiters contact you, tell them why.

There are plenty of non-evil companies that will pay you well to do interesting work.

Even in your "FAANG" list, Netflix just makes entertaining videos. Apple makes pleasantly overpriced hardware and competes on privacy in software.

Apply to them, instead of ad-tech and sweatshops-as-a-service.

Re: Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

#50

Post by Ididntdothis »

pacala wrote: post #34
aphextron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare. Money. Lots and lots of money. Amazon also operates at a scale unimaginable for most of us, which I imagine is enough of an interesting problem for some people to look past everything else.

Therein lies the problem. As the machine scales larger and larger, the cogs at the bottom have worse and worse conditions. Almost as if 'software is eating the world' is not the key to unlock Utopia, as techno-optimists would have you believe.

It was always that way. It used to be that nobility lived the good life at the expense of the peasants. Now we have replaced nobility with educated office workers. And the system is set up that if you are part of the top x percent you will never have to see how the bottom lives. They are well hidden.
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