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What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

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Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#131

Post by nerdponx »

FC_Associate wrote: post #104
bkor wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to you mentioning saving 1500 USD: You commented in another post that you lived out of your car ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790455 ). There still seems to be something wrong. Maybe not Amazon, maybe all the companies around there. People with a fulltime job should earn enough not to be living out of a car!

Just to clarify that post was from quite a while ago and at that time I was living out of my car, I'm actually now sharing a room in an apartment. But I certainly agree it's not a good thing when people who are working are living out of their cars or worse.

People working a full-time job should also be able to afford their own room. It's no knock on you and your lifestyle, but I think we can do better than the standards of the 1920s.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#132

Post by nerdponx »

Terr_ wrote: post #95
agwa wrote: post #43

Let's say you're a company with a serious PR problem about the working conditions in your warehouses. You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various…

It's kind of like the Mere Exposure Effect, applied to talking points or claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

Gish Gallop + Mere Exposure Effect + Streisand Effect (from the negative news coverage)

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#133

Post by nerdponx »

jakeogh wrote: post #93
agwa wrote: post #43

Let's say you're a company with a serious PR problem about the working conditions in your warehouses. You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various…

I vote with my money, constantly. So Amazon was out long ago. Plenty of people I know pay attention to who owns what. To us, it's irrelevant how much they sockpuppet.

Where do you buy used books? I like the local bookstore as mch as the next guy, but I don't know of any reliable source for used books other than Amazon.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#134

Post by windows_tips »

Applejinx wrote: post #115
eksemplar wrote: post #68

Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? A company that big will have some terrible managers, and the fact that it’s not discovering those easily, is problematic, but that doesn’t mean the entire company is rotten. I’m a manager in a Scandinavian municipality, and because I work with lean and efficiency I get to see all sides of our operation. I’ve seen departments…

Bear in mind that being really crazygonuts evil is a weakness: it's a vulnerability, begging for legislation or boycott. There's absolutely not a direct correlation between evil and profitability, unless maybe you're a banker. Amazon's a storefront. They have to serve two masters, one of which is the customer. The other is their reputation among capitalists and rivals. On the one hand they must promise to deliver bet…

>Offering the chance to shill for part of your shift, and offering this only to an elite who're able to do it effectively, is a really clever social exploit. Will it continue to be allowed? Maybe. It's very much the kind of thing that's bending 'the rules' for their benefit, and to do it properly you kind of have to be Amazon.

That strategy or similar has been going on for a long time, Amazon isn't doing something unseen before and they are probably just copying it from what they've seen. I've seen a local utility run an ad featuring claimed employees talking about their employer/company in a positive on television.

I've also seen similar ads from an oil industry company, and others.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#135

Post by nasredin »

krapp wrote: post #121
Applejinx wrote: post #114

Shit, if I was an Amazon warehouse worker and had the chance to get paid the same except SOME of my workload was sitting down and shilling for Amazon on twitter, I would jump (well, sit) at the chance. It's a different kind of demanding, more like being a commercial writer, probably more open to people who are damn good commercial writers and happen to be working as a picker in an Amazon warehouse. It'd be like getti…

>Shit, if I was an Amazon warehouse worker and had the chance to get paid the same except SOME of my workload was sitting down and shilling for Amazon on twitter, I would jump (well, sit) at the chance. They probably wouldn't let you sit down, unless you were shilling on your lunch break. Amazon has a policy against their warehouse workers sitting down while on the job, not even HR is allowed to sit when they're staf…

>>>Seiza is the Japanese term for one of the traditional formal ways of sitting in Japan

I am surprised there's no workplace shootings in Amazon warehouses a la USPS.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#136

Post by wool_gather »

FC_Associate wrote: post #92
adventured wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward. Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees? If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon…

I'm not exactly sure how much better Amazon pays, if at all better, here in SoCal starting pay is around $12-$14 per hour for L1 associates, but anecdotally I feel like this is on the higher end when compared to similar jobs, at least compared to the jobs I've held. I can't speak to the insurance coverage provided since I'm a part time worker but from what I've heard, while pay isn't great, the insurance seems to be…

> He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me.

Just to be clear here: this is required by law, not something that the company is doing out of the goodness of its heart. It's also a fraction of what one's normal wages would be, which I would say is a more likely explanation for the injured person's eagerness to return than that "he missed his coworkers".

> they wanted to make sure he was completely healed and made it clear that he shouldn't rush things

I won't fault them for this, as I don't have details like what/how serious the injury was. But often a better alternative to no work at all is to temporarily reassign the person to another role where their injury is not an issue (desk job of some kind, generally). This way the employee continues to get full or near-full wages.

EDIT: Also, forgot to point out that work restrictions are defined by a doctor who treated the injured person, not by the employer. They can get in serious trouble for forcing someone to work in excess of those restrictions. So again, not really a sign of benevolence.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#137

Post by camtarn »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #75
eksemplar wrote: post #68

Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? A company that big will have some terrible managers, and the fact that it’s not discovering those easily, is problematic, but that doesn’t mean the entire company is rotten. I’m a manager in a Scandinavian municipality, and because I work with lean and efficiency I get to see all sides of our operation. I’ve seen departments…

The side of Amazon that works in offices and makes good money also has a reputation as a bad place to work, compared to other major tech companies. See the "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk" article from the NYT a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... Anecdotally, as you say, that does seem to depend a lot on your department--good local management ca…

Yep. It seems to be a US thing, incidentally. I worked at Amazon in Edinburgh for eight years, and it was pretty nice. Not perfect, certainly, but there was definitely a lot more respect for work-life balance, and a lot less pressure to perform or be fired.

One of our UK folks moved to the Seattle office, and noticed a serious difference in culture: much more pressure, more expectation that you would work any number of extra hours to get things done by the deadline, much higher rates of burnout and turnover.

For what it's worth, in eight years I never saw anybody cry at their desk.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#138

Post by jancsika »

adventured wrote: post #82
jancsika wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain a little about what you felt changing in your opinion here? What I got out of it was that Amazon had previously been dehumanizing their workers to the point that the PR drones have to now overtly brag about complying with OSHA laws.

The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward. Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees? If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon…

> Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea.

I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved?

Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the bathroom outside of breaks. And the same article mentions that the workers have to sign NDAs[1].

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-...

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#139

Post by JoeAltmaier »

wool_gather wrote: post #136
FC_Associate wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not exactly sure how much better Amazon pays, if at all better, here in SoCal starting pay is around $12-$14 per hour for L1 associates, but anecdotally I feel like this is on the higher end when compared to similar jobs, at least compared to the jobs I've held. I can't speak to the insurance coverage provided since I'm a part time worker but from what I've heard, while pay isn't great, the insurance seems to be…

> He was being paid worker's comp during this time. This certainly made a good impression on me. Just to be clear here: this is required by law, not something that the company is doing out of the goodness of its heart. It's also a fraction of what one's normal wages would be, which I would say is a more likely explanation for the injured person's eagerness to return than that "he missed his coworkers". > they wanted…

Right, worker's compensation benefits are paid by an insurance company, not by the employer.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#140

Post by camtarn »

rectang wrote: post #9
walrus01 wrote: post #2

Well that's not creepy at all. Tweets read like they're written by a PR agency. Never known a near-minimum-wage warehouse worker who answers tweets with turns of phrase like "On the contrary..."

It's like they're all wearing the happy helmets from Ren and Stimpy's "Happy Happy Joy Joy". Are there similar PR initiatives within Amazon engineering aimed at us?

From my experience - not particularly, but unless you work at AWS and get media training, Amazon engineers are heavily discouraged from discussing the company on social media.

My contract also explicitly forbid me from talking about any technologies in use within the company, up to and including programming languages. That might just be an artifact of the time and place that I was hired, though, as the company definitely grew much more open over the years.

I've been out of Amazon for nearly three years (after working there for eight) and I still find myself reflexively being nervous about what I say!

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