Bye, Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Bye, Amazon

#591

Post by albinofrenchy » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

oppositelock wrote: post #485

supergeek133 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's amazing how this thread got derailed so quickly from "The power disparity between low skill workers generates worse working conditions" to "If we treat low skill workers well, don't we have to support them doing drugs and bringing guns?"

Of course not. Allowing needles and guns at your workplace isn't friendlier to employees in general.

The discussion went from "Maybe we shouldn't fire them for trying to organize so they don't die in a pandemic" to "Whats an employer to do with 33% time thieves and drug users?" embarrassingly quickly.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#592

Post by Czarcasm » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #482

supergeek133 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 big…

I've seen a lot of the same stuff.

A of my acquaintances from my hometown worked at a large retailer through highschool. They would hide merchandise under skids in the outdoor garden center during their shift, then come back at night to recover it. They would stuff small expensive items (ie: iPods), into the advertisement trays at the front of shopping carts, then recover them once the carts were pushed out into the parking lot. They built a "fort" between two aisles in the back warehouse to take naps during their shifts.

I could give stories like this for a long time. They never got caught (to my knowledge).

Not all low-level employees are thieves. But more of them are then most people realize.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#593

Post by ssklash » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

vdnkh wrote: post #577

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…

I think bright, talented engineers also want to get paid for their efforts. When FAANG pays 2-3x most other companies, it doesn't always make sense to go elsewhere.

Sure, but the idea is about why they pay more. They can afford to, because of how massively lucrative monetizing personal data is. Doing it at scale is hard, and they need the best talent. My comment was about how the best telnet sometimes seem to ignore the hard reality of what they are helping a company do in favor of enjoying the excellent pay and focusing on the admittedly interesting problems they are solving. An intentional effort by those companies to seem glamorous and recruit young engineers out of college makes it worse, as mentioned above.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#594

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:44 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.

[deleted]

Re: Bye, Amazon

#595

Post by shaan1 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

Made money, now is the ideal time to quit :-) Similar to the google engineers who quit after working for 10 to 15 years.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#596

Post by behringer » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #590

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…

AFAIK in the US it's illegal to fire somebody due to union organizing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting#United_States

Therefore, the employees made no mistake if Amazon breaks the law by firing unionizing employees.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#597

Post by fooqux » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

Frankly, I don't know what people are hoping to achieve by the whole 'privileged' thing. From what I've read, it's supposed to be an invitation to introspect your life and realize you have had various advantages. But:

1) The whole term "check your privilege" is a very accusatory phrase, and when somebody gets accused, they get defensive / offensive. Nobody is going to be very introspective at that point.

2) As you say, what is privilege? There's nearly 8 billion people in the world, and logically speaking, somebody out there is the absolute least privileged out there. And it's sure as fuck not some angry lady standing in line at Starbucks. Being a guy, am I more privileged than her? Sure, in certain (perhaps even most), metrics. But compared to the lowest people, we're about equal relatively speaking. Any change desired should be flowing to the lowest tier.

Personally, these things make the whole movement feel hypocritical to me. But when I bring this up usually the response is something along the lines of that I wouldn't understand because I'm privileged.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#598

Post by bendbro » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:48 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…

Why are you embarrassed? Embarrassment over their workplace implies you feel you have some level of stewardship of their workplace.

Re: Bye, Amazon

#599

Post by fchu » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

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…

> 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).

That's terrible math that proves nothing, besides that the owners as a couple is making more (including by a tiny margin) than a couple of workers

Re: Bye, Amazon

#600

Post by treve » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #579

treve wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't afford to pay employees a decent wage, you shouldn't be in business. Minimum wages should be raised and nonviable businesses should adapt or go under. Amazon is not in this category

> Minimum wages should be raised and nonviable businesses should adapt or go under. That's a recipe for significantly increased unemployment which would affect the most vulnerable workers the most. For most people in a low-paying job, the alternative is no job. If they were able to get higher-paying jobs they would have already done so.

Then why have a minimum wage at all?