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I lasted three minutes at Amazon

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Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#101

Post by mikewave »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #79
version_five wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was broadly agreeing with the poster that it's worth crying over. Without writing an essay, automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work (maybe its always been that way), and people are treated at "resources". This happens at all levels but is worst, to the point of being potentially inhumane, in low skill jobs.

> automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work What's interesting though is I don't hear a lot of people on HN complaining about CI/CD, which IMO is part of an overall approach that treats devs like cogs in an automated process. In some ways, I think we even celebrate it because, as devs, we are the automators. But increasingly, we're becoming more beholden to the pro…

The big difference here is that CI/CD should ideally be taking away annoying work from devs so that they can more smoothly go from problem/feature -> hard thinking work -> code -> out the door, without having to deal with the highly repetitive part of the job.

The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living.

15 years ago in IT if you could automate things, you just ended up with less active work to do. Now that automation is the norm instead of a bonus cool thing, it has become formalized and measured, and you may not have the saved time as free time, you have to now double down on doing the hard parts of the job.

This doesn't actually work in reality for most people as we can't actually think hard for more than a few hours out of the work day (10x'rs exempt, of course.)

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#102

Post by mullingitover »

ebiester wrote: post #73
999900000999 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I took a drug test the company itself was absolutely horrible. Only place where my manager expected me to work multiple nights per week. This was as a software engineer! At this point drug tests are just a filter. Let's me know the company culture will suck.

So long as you are filtering out all companies with government contracts as "a company culture that sucks," that's true. https://www.samhsa.gov/workplace/legal/federal-laws/contract... requires any organization receiving a federal contract of over $100,000 or a federal grant of any size to do so. Tied to that is a page of HHS-certified labs for drug testing and federally regulated industries. It's pretty silly but it…

Nothing in the minimum requirements listing here mentions drug testing, though. So the places that are doing drug testing are zealously going above and beyond, which itself is a big red flag.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#104

Post by 93po »

idontwantthis wrote: post #24

I highly mistrust anything on /r/antiwork. So many of the posts are the “and everyone clapped” variety but get hundreds or thousands of upvotes, I’m pretty sure it’s at least half a troll karma farm.

I think it's likely people embellish frequently. But it doesn't detract, in my opinion, that working under capitalism is awful and absolutely messed up beyond belief.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#106

Post by mike22 »

999900000999 wrote: post #50
Johnny555 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured that out in the second paragraph when he said "drug test" - I think they'd have an awful hard time hiring engineers if they required drug testing. I don't do drugs (not even marijuana even though it's legal here), but I'd refuse to take a drug test just on principle - they are paying for my performance at work, not for what I do on my own time. The only time I worked at a job that required drug tests, was a…

The last time I took a drug test the company itself was absolutely horrible. Only place where my manager expected me to work multiple nights per week. This was as a software engineer! At this point drug tests are just a filter. Let's me know the company culture will suck.

I worked for a (small boutique) consulting firm and the much larger telecom company they placed me at required a drug test. The culture in my group there did happen to suck, bad enough that my form pulled let me come off the client after just a month.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#107

Post by coldacid »

nexuist wrote: post #45
ushakov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't this the same with tech jobs though? you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates it's only more intense because the cost/risk ratio is magnitudes higher

We don't earn better pay and benefits because we are special, brilliant people. We are given these benefits because there is a perpetual labor shortage of people who have enough tech experience to do their employers' bidding and nobody will show up if they don't doll these out. In other words, we are a fluke, and we'll lose these benefits once they figure out how to commoditize software development. Which is a pretty…

I look at things like Dynamics 365 and other no-code/low-code "solutions" and I fear that we're just about at that point.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#108

Post by throwanem »

908B64B197 wrote: post #74
nexuist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't earn better pay and benefits because we are special, brilliant people. We are given these benefits because there is a perpetual labor shortage of people who have enough tech experience to do their employers' bidding and nobody will show up if they don't doll these out. In other words, we are a fluke, and we'll lose these benefits once they figure out how to commoditize software development. Which is a pretty…

> Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union Wrong approach. Push for real engineering certifications instead. Keeps the free market (no promotions based on seniority) but weeds out the "6 month bootcamp fullstack engineer" disaster from your codebase.

That's going to be tough to get backing for, and should be. With no meaningful labor coordination, the only way that happens is for a few unaccountable people get together and dream up their idea of what that certification looks like, then do a lot of politics to stick everyone else with it.

Sure, maybe you open-source the initial development, but you can't open-source the politics because nobody can have a sensible conversation with a million people working at at least partial cross purposes, and so when you're doing the politics you make a lot of compromises that nobody gets a say in.

Best case you fail, worst case you succeed and everyone is stuck with the result, which inevitably favors employers because why do they even participate if they don't get something at least a little more like a buyer's market out of it?

So nobody with any experience, maybe even nobody with any common sense, participates in whatever process you have from the design side, because all that does is waste time lending legitimacy to something that's guaranteed to be a bad deal for labor. You haven't even sold me on it!

Of course, if you have buy-in and trust from a sizable and valuable labor base first, all this changes. But that means a tangible history of success as part of the leadership of a union, and you've already ruled that out. What you're proposing would be more like a guild, which is actually a model that can work when the people who run it also monopolize the local industry and can exclude anyone who doesn't meet their standards - including preventing other business owners from defecting and hiring skilled upstarts who the guild won't accept for inevitable and again political reasons. Management in this industry isn't that coordinated either, and can't be without being a lot more oligopolistic than it already is.

Maybe in a few decades. Right now I don't see it.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#109

Post by XorNot »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #79
version_five wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was broadly agreeing with the poster that it's worth crying over. Without writing an essay, automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work (maybe its always been that way), and people are treated at "resources". This happens at all levels but is worst, to the point of being potentially inhumane, in low skill jobs.

> automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work What's interesting though is I don't hear a lot of people on HN complaining about CI/CD, which IMO is part of an overall approach that treats devs like cogs in an automated process. In some ways, I think we even celebrate it because, as devs, we are the automators. But increasingly, we're becoming more beholden to the pro…

I don't know, my general rant on why all CI/CD is complete junk and everyone is cargo-culting a copy without an original in implementing it just never feels like something I want to post over and over again.

The entire concept of how people do code-reviews with PRs is completely broken and everyone's experienced it: when someone leaves a review, asking you to change a variable name, what is even the process? Can I just say "no"? Why didn't they with full access to the branch, just submit the commit? Or open a PR against the branch (did you know you can do that?)? Why aren't code reviews just cherry-pickable commits against branches by default? Why doesn't the PR process let me do a partial rebase as acceptance? Why does everyone do code reviews looking at diffs, when they can't possibly have enough context? (its because the tools are junk and make it difficult to do - I had an idea of doing some line number magic to do full-code commenting in gitlab review mode, but never got round to it).

Like...the situation is about as bad, we're all just salaried.

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