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Bye, Amazon

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Re: Bye, Amazon

#581

Post by jshevek »

esoterica wrote: post #481
hysan wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clas…

>I'm being angrily downvoted...

Your claim regarding others' emotional states sounds like speculation based on insufficient information.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#583

Post by Czarcasm »

jariel wrote: post #522
esoterica wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clas…

This is definitely not true. Literally drive down the street and look at those little no-name shops and stores: each of them have owners who employ other people. The lady who owns the salon and has 10 other ladies + receptionist working there is not wealthy, and is probably taking on a lot of risk. 'Small business owner' is one of the most precarious positions to be in - it's like all the low pay and crap of 'working…

As you point out, the risk is what people often forget.

My parent's have run a small business for over 20 years. Between 10 and 20 employees depending on the season and the economic situation.

When everything goes great, they can sometimes clear a few hundred thousand in the year. They are doing well and appear wealth.

But then a bad job comes around, and they can lose their shirts. 3-4 times over the last 20 years, a big job has gone south and they have actually personally lost money for the year. One year in particular, they had to remortgage their house to meet payroll because conditions out of their control lost them a big contract. All the employees still get paid, but my parents have to go into debt and deal with the repercussions.

The stress they deal with is immense. I've worked some high-stress corporate jobs, and it still has no compare to what I watched my parents deal with.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#584

Post by pm90 »

joeys7 wrote: post #572
ssklash wrote: post #539

I'm shocked that so many bright, talented engineers go to work for Companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook. While I'm glad some see the light about the real mission of these companies (it's not about "connecting people", "providing delightful customer experiences", "doing no evil" or any of that BS) and ultimately quit, but what concerns me is how so many clearly incredibly bright and talented people are able t…

Back when I was in university, I feel like they really brainwashed me to think these tech companies were making the world a better place. I was too naive. I think a lot of young software engineers started out like me. There’s also the fact that these companies are so big, they have a lot of variation inside them. For example at Amazon Music, there really isn’t a lot of evilness there, it’s just getting people to pay…

Same. When I was in college, all my peers talked about FAANG's in glowing terms. Doesn't help that these companies often recruit heavily from Universities, so you have alum networks that talk about how great the companies are etc. Its quite an evil genius. When people finally do get a job, they often realize its not always the cool shit that they heard about; most often than not its some uncool shit that brings in a ton of money.

This isn't to discount the amazing engineering work that these orgs tend to do. But look at their workforce numbers and tell me with a straight face that all their engineers are working on solving tough engineering problems and not just a cog in the optimization machine.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#585

Post by arkanciscan »

I don't see how quitting helps the workers he claims to care about. Many of them would probably love to have the amount of influence that a VP has. Seems disingenuous to claim that as a reason for quitting.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#586

Post by clevergadget »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #422
moduspol wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand the disease-symptom dichotomy, but if amazon is only a symptom then it is one of the biggest ones out there. This makes tackling amazon more important than tackling a mom and pop shop who treats their workers poorly, even if they're both symptoms of a bigger working class oppression disease.

you are really doing the good work of trying to find a compromise pov here and I respect it :D A+ discourse

Re: Bye, Amazon

#587

Post by blueline »

raven105x wrote: post #536
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. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for. I've wondered since coming to this country how such a large collective delusion continues to persist. The part…

> Based on my observations, SJWs are the modern day gestapo

really? are you sure? "SJWs" are comparable to the state-sponsored secret police of nazi germany, which had unilateral power to imprison (physically imprison, you know, in a real jail where they would be tortured. not on twitter) anyone without justification, and who were instrumental in the genocide of millions of people?

do you mind justifying that claim in any way whatsoever?

Re: Bye, Amazon

#588

Post by pm90 »

yalogin wrote: post #419
mercury_craze wrote: post #81

Amazon is a great evil. It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world but as a company that has treated its employees (both hourly and salaried) with contempt, driven independent stores out of business and refused to play on a level playing field both through its shady business practices or its refusal to pay tax. Well done to Tim Bray for acting according to his conscienc…

It's amazing that this is where it arrived. In its early days, the exact opposite was true. People loved Amazon because its going against the "big box stores". Movies were made romanticizing the downfall of the big box stores. Now Amazon became the villain. Similar thing is of course happening with Google.

Same with Google. Oh... remember Apple-David v/s MS-Goliath? or Apple-David v/s IBM-Goliath?

Corporations change, just like people. I'm not sure if thats something that can be avoided. Maybe Valve is an outlier, perhaps. Size seems to be the factor here...

Re: Bye, Amazon

#589

Post by ksec »

I am going to ask a slightly different question relating to the problem.

How do you get another job?

Do you tell your potential employer you quit because of (your) principle? That you fundamentally disagree with your previous company? How will the new company judge you?

Now of coz if you are in the market that is chasing for talent ( like programming and tech ) this wouldn't be a much of a problem. What if you were the Amazon Warehouse Manager? Which is probably 100x more replaceable than say a software engineer?

Most business seems to operate with talent are everywhere, opportunities are scarce mentality. They would much rather they hire a class B employees than a class A activist.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#590

Post by rosywoozlechan »

If conscientious people leave Amazon it will result in Amazon being less conscientious, but it will probably not result in Amazon being any less powerful or dominant.

I also think Amazon a right to expect its employees to abide by its rules. Individuals have a right to organize and to protest, even when they're supposed to be at work, but companies have a right to want to discontinue their business relationship, that is fire, their employees, especially if they're not working when they're supposed to.

Ultimately the employees made the mistake of organizing and being loud before they had the critical mass to have the leverage needed, and they outed their organization leadership.

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