231–240 of 433 posts
Can any former Amazon employees confirm if Amazon is indeed a cult? Do we need an intervention? Blink once for yes, twice for no.
But if you want to keep your job, you don't speak out publicly ( https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/05/18/Fired-Amazon-Designer-Pun... )
This is a problem the Voice.com social platform is attempting to tackle, read more about it here: https://about.voice.com/learn-more/ . I'm not affiliated with Voice in anyway, just someone who is eagerly awaiting open registration.
It's funny how the ups and downs of evaluating a startup go: Phase 1: "Okay, it's a Real Names social network, seems probably fine." Phase 2: "Oh no, some sort of token economy. Well, maybe it--" Phase 3: "Nevermind, it said the word 'blockchain,' abandon ship, this is doomed."
Imagine being worth 185 billion dollars and still obsessing about your workers advocating for better pay and conditions? What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success. There is no joy in his life.
Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you. Here is the summary of the issue. Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to fr…
Edit: It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
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No, it is the downside. Everyone has 1 million different opinions that are going to be controversial to someone out there. I don't want it to be easy for anyone who disagrees with people, on anything, to track down someone physically, in real life. > Deciding who stays in and who stays Ok and I don't want you to be able to decide who stays in and stays out. It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't li…
>to track down someone physically, in real life. That's not the same as having a consistent identity on the internet. You can easily think of an identity provider on the web that doesn't expose who you physically are, think of like a crypto wallet, or something like Urbit attempts. Having a consistent identity is what matters with an incentive to be a good member, we don't need to expose your real world name at all.…
Its effectively the same thing, for most people.
If someone is only allowed to have 1 identity on the internet, then people would have to link it to their real life identity, for practical reasons. How else would people find me, when I want them to?
Most people have a public identity, and other private ones. If I am only allowed to have 1 identity, then most people aren't going to give up the ability to have a public one, because there is large practical value to having a public identity.
People only having 2 choice, choice 1 being to give up their public persona completely, or choice 2, having everything on the internet that they do, permanently linked to their public identity, is a horrible choice, that will have a huge chilling effect.
> There should be many different communities
Oh, if you want to participate in your own community, that require people to give you their government ID (Or crypto identity, or whatever) in order to participate, then I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with, is the authoritarian crazies, who want to take away other people's right to participate in the communities of their choosing.
If most other people choose to participate in the normal internet, where most websites do not require you to have a singular ID, then leave us alone and let us do that.
Go ahead and participate in your government ID facebook. (Or I guess that is just facebook already?) Just don't going around saying that no other communities, that value privacy more than you do, should be able to exist.
> That's what freedom of assembly is.
Freedom of assembly also includes people choosing to participate in communities where singular IDs are not a requirement, and alt accounts are allowed.
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Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you. Here is the summary of the issue. Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to fr…
Unionization is a correction of the market if anything, as labor has a buyer's market. Both by the immediate need of survival by the seller, and a similarly high rate of exploitation at competing jobs that limits real choices. And arguably an actual monopsony/oligopsony, but that's besides the point. Edit: It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
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Going to the toilet once per hour for 1-3 minutes is not going to allow a company to pay subminimum wages when the starting rate is $15/hour. It is a simple, basic, /reasonable accommodation/ necessary for me to be able to work, at any workplace, that Amazon is legally obligated to provide. In fact, it is the only accommodation that I would need to work at an Amazon warehouse! The law you mention above is exploited b…
Again, I agree with you. I do want to point out, though that those are not abstract concept or limited use cases. Any business, including competitive employment positions, can apply for that license, as long as they meet the parameters laid our in the law and regulation. I'm assuming that because of its size, Amazon would be excluded. Honestly, though, I am not familiar with the application process as we refuse to us…
As I said, it's life-threatening, and I can assure you that autonomic dysreflexia is one of the worst feelings that one can go through as a human. This issue is solvable via a basic reasonable accommodation, that I have a right to get. I also have a decent work ethic, and I understand that I am paid to work--and that is the only thing that I should be doing at work.
This is about common decency and basic human rights, not about entitlement. The fact that you are conflating the right to use restroom (a basic human need), at a consistent, non-excessive time interval (so that I do not experience a life-threatening state) to be some sort of entitlement is absolutely ridiculous. I hope you are not a lawyer, because if you are, you really need to change your perception around disability related matters. However, I will be mindful about the language I use, so thank you.
And no, I would not be looking for some settlement, which would be ridiculous, foolish, and incredibly short-sighted. The issue I am trying to address here, besides the matter of disability rights, is just human decency and respect towards others. Amazon does not exalt such values as a company, but especially so by how it treats its employees.
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Since HN loves to veer wildly into rampant ageism, I'll bite... :) When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical. Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who…
Wouldn't that happen in perpetuity for every generation growing up in technology? We want to shield our children from the rest of the internet, and so children grow up with an internet framed for them. Then, as they grow, they are forced to deal with the concept of the internet not being framed anymore and may therefore have some time in their teenage to young adult years where they may be susceptible to shit like eg…
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how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly? financial worth has nothing to do with it. if he feels that charge is untrue, he should push back against it. I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one
Financial worth absolutely has to do with the fairness or lack thereof. Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars (!) of wealth for himself since founding Amazon, so debating the moral value of those gains in comparison to how everyday employees are compensated is well within reason. And if my employees said I was treating them unfairly, I would try to understand their perspective and make changes to improve worki…
Bezos' employees have created nearly 200 billion dollars of wealth for Bezos
This old TechCrunch article from 2018 ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/what-is-this-weird-twitter... ) posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636153 has a former "Amazon Ambassador" actually explain that job: > An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch: >> When I…
Wow, does that ever sound inspired by the Kapo system in Nazi camps. (edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying "that sounds like a psychologically…
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I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias because it is partially true. The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positiv…
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? In fiction? Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.