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I lasted three minutes at Amazon

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Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#11
post #9
post #5

I had to read carefully into the article before I understood this is probably a fulfillment center job, not an AWS SWE.

what else did you expect from the antiwork subreddit? it's a boiler room for low-skilled wagies /s edit: c'mon people, stop the downvotes, this was a joke

There are plenty of white collar workers in that subreddit, including software engineers.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#13
post #9
post #5

I had to read carefully into the article before I understood this is probably a fulfillment center job, not an AWS SWE.

what else did you expect from the antiwork subreddit? it's a boiler room for low-skilled wagies /s edit: c'mon people, stop the downvotes, this was a joke

You misspelled "fellow human beings".

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#14
I clicked feeling like it would be impossible to give them a fair chance in 3 minutes, but reading it I definitely am on the workers side and he gave them way more than 3 min.

This is a Kafka level story, having long dealings with an obviously incompetent and labyrinthine organization, only to be immediately penalized for the slightest miss on his own part. Especially the "if you're not at your workstation in one minute you'll be penalized / where is my workstation / I dont know" bit is straight out of The Castle or something.

Anyway, I agree with his overall feeling on the state of labor now.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#16
post #5

I had to read carefully into the article before I understood this is probably a fulfillment center job, not an AWS SWE.

I've interviewed there twice and I gave up on them twice because honestly it was about the same thing with no one knowing what they were doing and being EXTREMELY slow about everything else. In the space between my first screening and an email to schedule an interview day, I applied at another place, did 3 interviews and a coding test, negotiated an offer, accepted an offer, and quit my current job. It was absolutely wild.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#17
Hmm this is an interesting anecdote to compare against the view ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29459245 ) that:

> In the Earnings Call in July of this year, they said they now employe 950,000 warehouse workers. They're probably over the 1 MM mark right now due to the holidays. Yes, there are plenty of people working there that are overqualified, but that is the beauty of what Amazon is doing. Their onboarding and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance.

I guess if you hire 500,000 people per year and 99% of people have an excellent onboarding process there will be 5,000 bad stories?

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#18
post #5

I had to read carefully into the article before I understood this is probably a fulfillment center job, not an AWS SWE.

Same. Do SWE/SDE roles also involve drug tests and orientations?

in Germany, they could do a background check

if you used cannabis and got caught, you'll have a police record for up to 5 years

when applying expect it not to be in your favour

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#20
I have no idea whether this story is real or not, given it is on a subreddit called "antiwork". But if true, that just sounds offensively miserable, unfair, and unprofessional. Rather that dissecting all those issues though, all I will say is that I wish we had more competition for these behemoth companies. They soak up so much of our economy that there can't be real competition against them. What scrappy retailer is going to have a chance against Amazon, who has their own marine shipping lines or whatever? What we need is stronger anti-trust legislation that is aggressively enforced. Or maybe a corporate income tax that is higher for companies with > $100B market capitalization. That way others can compete and provide an a better alternative, whether for workers or customers.
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