Bye, Amazon

Just want to point out this:

>Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.

Having worked there, I 100% agree with this statement. I'd go so far as to say that the blame for this toxic and intolerable atmosphere lies with a single person who is not Jeff Bezos. His name is Dave Clark.

When I was in his org, I regularly interacted with FC General Managers, Ops Managers, and Area Managers. There was a humorous nickname that quite a few called him behind his back, and I think it fits him perfectly. It was Dave Mussolini. Not so much a nazi in his evil, but rather someone who desired and cultivated and enforced a pure cult of personality for his own personal ego gratification and career advancement. Amazon's "Disagree And Commit" leadership principle gets thrown out in his org and becomes "Disagree amongst yourselves if you want, but never ever disagree with me, never do anything that I do not approve of, and kiss my ass any time you are around me". Subsequently, all of his subordinates adopt the same attitude, and becomes a culture of complete subservience to your master, no questions asked.

I have personally witnessed people get fired within 10 minutes of sending out an email making a suggested path that Dave Clark had already decided. The email came out, Dave Clark walked into his managers office with an HR rep, and literally within 10 minutes they were packing their things and saying goodbye.

I have been in an elevator which opened up to him and his EA, and instead of getting in and going to his floor, he told us we needed to step out of the elevator and get a different elevator because he needed to talk confidentially. He couldn't wait to get to his office, he had to make one of his lemmings take the long way to accommodate 10 seconds of his time.

The Kiva acquisition was something he pushed for extensively. They weren't even Kiva customers at the time, he just jumped the gun and bought the company. It turned out that Kiva's productivity improvements didn't scale very well at Amazon's level. They really worked well for much smaller companies, but in large FCs, their optimization and routing algorithms hit NP Complete complexity bottlenecks, resulting in much lower productivity than had been advertised to them. But instead of taking the blame for his lack of due diligence, he created a hellfire and damnation environment, regularly storming into their offices and throwing Steve Jobs level temper tantrums. He made the entire place so toxic that half (not exaggerating) of the Kiva engineers that were acquired had left the company before their very lucrative aquisition stock grants could vest. We're talking hundreds of engineers who would rather give up hundreds of thousands of dollars than deal with Dave Clark (Mussolini) for one more minute.

Dave Clark is a toxic asset. He is failing at his job. Fulfillment costs are skyrocketing, inventory turns are tanking, and profitability of the retail division is at an all time low, despite all time high revenues. He has burned through staffing so heavily that they have had to abandon entire fulfillment centers because there aren't enough people in these small blue collar towns that are eligible to work for Amazon anymore because they've all been fired. He is a constant PR nightmare for the company. I have no fucking clue why Jeff Bezos hasn't fired him yet.

I'm not sure why he includes: "I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?"

Is race as issue here? I thought they were fired for whistle blowing? Is he saying a white whistle blower wouldn't have been fired?

> IMHO firing whistle blowers is the kind of action that should be called out as very negative and not something to be apologetic about.

Agree 100%. Daylight is the best disinfectant, especially in publicly traded companies. Every CEO, CMO, etc loves white-knighting ("We care about the environment/our employees!") until the shareholders start calling. Then they're the first to start covering up problems.

That's not to say that you can't have your cake and eat it too - the first place to start is that these corporations have to be honest with themselves and their shareholders about social commitments and financial returns.

It's not that complicated. If you look up Ocado, they have entirely automated their warehouses.

I think your hunch is right, but economists' definitions do tend to be tied to numbers. Pew Research and others -- although I doubt this is a universal definition—usually treat "middle class" as being two-thirds to double the median income in an area. That seems like an unusually high range -- I would have assumed two-thirds to four-thirds would make more sense, but I suspect it's to account for how sharply incomes rise at the high end of the scale (e.g., the median salary in the top quintile compared to that of the middle quintile is many times greater than the median salary in the middle quintile is compared to the lowest).

Even with that there's an awful lot of caveats, though; as folks have noted, regional differences can be huge. The median income in Silicon Valley as of last year is just under $100K (despite the picture that Hacker News can sometimes paint!), but in Tampa Bay, Florida, it was just under $60K.