Bye, Amazon

While I agree with much of what you say, I feel that speaking out against serious problems with working conditions and the media should always be an option. For the boots on the ground workers, ever more so.

For those in well paying, white collar jobs with plenty of other opportunities, even in the current climate, quitting with an exit statement is more appropriate than trying to burn it down from the inside.

I respect the exec in question, and the warehouse workers who speak out. The idological opportunists pushing an agenda, not so much.

First, I agree with your conclusion. The way to address this is to change the law, pushing individual corporation is ineffective.

However, you DON'T have to maximize your profits above all other corporations. There's no such actual fiduciary duty and there never could be. That's the point the poster is trying to make - something being legal doesn't make it ethical and acting in a unethical, but legal, manner does not absolve you of contempt.

I'll elaborate --

The first one was a large bank doing agile by coercion aka forced sprints to hell

A bunch of diddling directors convinced an airhead VP that it would boost productivity and then they got an army of middling managers who weren't at all invested to do their bidding

I was there for a year raising a fuss until I was let go and some of my code is still running in production

The things I've seen would make your skin crawl as a client of the bank but you've probably seen your fair share estimating points as days was the least of it and this is from people who call themselves university graduates and senior developers

The next was the largest private software company in North America a telecom giant again with the forced agile shit but with a different spin the motto here is 'initiative is punishable' but I just can't picture myself getting old with this tshirted bunch of wannabe googlers I went on the warpath and was personally let go by a VP how many of you coffee2coders have even sat down with a VP much less been sent packing by one?

I got what I wanted out of them though the memories are priceless including trips to California and Vegas the type of shit that being pliable and compliant never nets you

Finally an agency back home a notorious shithole of a ne'er do well agency so full of their own leadership bravado and entitlement that it somehow manages to hoodwink all sorts of rich clients a perennial start-up with no long term vision except selling out I had the distinction of being let go after showing them all up and walked away from the game with a master's in how false conspiracy has ruined software

A lot of us seem to believe we need to check our emotions and enhics at the door but it didn't work in that great war and it won't work here either

> These jobs are not intended to be long term employment where a person would support a family on

There's no intention provided by these jobs - I'm not sure where that would actually come up. 50% of fast food workers have more than one job. That alone indicates that at least half of those workers aren't dependent on another person. Average fast food worker is 29, 50% are over 25. 26% of fast food workers are parents with children.

I just wanted to say that to establish that there are many people who work fast food jobs that depend on it to live. Given that - and that there is no functional safety net to prevent someone from becoming homeless were they to lose their income, and that the minimum wage isn't a living wage, I'm advocating for it to pay a living wage. Its sort of strange to me that people prioritize the needs of dependents and children over unskilled people who are working as much as possible to keep a roof over their head.

If you need to work 2 jobs to make rent, you are not spending much time at all gaining skills to get a better paying "real" job, assuming they're available at all. You're trapped. A living wage would allow people to actually have the time to develop skills rather than trapping them in subsistence poverty. Because one person in 5 doesn't need the money, the other 4 should suffer? Should they not be treated for a flu that could kill them? Does their life have any value at all?

And if that means robots are suddenly economical? Why are they not economical elsewhere, where workers are paid a living wage? https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/li...

> Fast food will always be the lowest paid job in the economy and the idea that work is entitled to a high wage simply because it exists

I'm not making this argument. It is not a high wage, by any first world measure. That most people making that wage are both below the poverty line and get food stamps tells you its not a high wage.

Now, is it most efficient for the economy to be flooded with no-skill workers? Probably not, if there's some sort of floor on human dignity. In any system there will be leeches, people who game a system, etc. I'm concerned about them, but we should start by tracking actual outcomes. This is one of the reasons why the US is one of the least socially/economically mobile countries in the first world. We're closer to Russia than we are to the UK.