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I lasted three minutes at Amazon

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Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#141
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the top posts have very similar construction: Employee: I can't come in today for a very good reason. Boss (rudely): You have to come in or you're fired. Employee: I quit. +1000 karma

Why do you think this doesn't happen often enough to fill a subreddit? There are billions of workers around the world, tens of millions using reddit.

Above comment is being charitable. I think real people have the exchange above and should be proud.

The 1000+ upvote ones are long, overly personal explanations of why they can’t come in that make the boss look extra evil, but also sound fake as hell.

If someone just quits good on them, but that text exchange is not going to draw enough eyeballs.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#142
post #45
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 disagree we arent special. Not that we've been selected by the divine, but dont we sit down for long periods of time trying to model reality, speak multiple languages (sounds silly to a native english speaker but most of us non native had to first learn english just to make sense of programming languages constructs), do less drug, complain less, are more flexible to change, are willing to take ownership of creative work.

I mean this exists in factories and I ve seen it... but in the floor manager, not the dudes mindlessly putting small boxes into big boxes. I d love to put them in front of a computer and let them try but they dont seem to want to, or have the discipline to spend years learning english in the first place :s

And whatever the original reason, it's probably fair to say it's parental supervision, societal discrimination or whatever, but saying it's just experience is wrong imo. To even want to acquire this experience, is something I cant even explain, I just always wanted to and shaped my life around computers, and believe maybe naively that even with a difficult starting condition, I d have ended up coding eventually all things equal.

And it's okay to suspect capital owners will try to comoditize it but it's going to transform them into people able to talk to machines or transform us into capital owners - I dont think you can design algorithms to do what you want without willing to dig into them and for that you may always need special people ? We never comoditized electricians, and this is not a trade you can simply replace anyone with anyone, so...

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#143

I know Amazon isn't known for the same work environment as other SV places, but most of this post are about HR issues. And HR is awful in lots of places, and not representative of the rest of a workplace. Maybe at Amazon it is representative? But it's often not.

[deleted]

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>The big difference here is that CI/CD should ideally be taking away annoying

True. OTOH, I feel like some version of this is always sold as the worker-facing rationale for automation and increased productivity. For some jobs, it's "hey, we're going to automate your job away so you can go do something meaningful with your life". For devs, it's "we're going to automate this for you so you can focus on meaningful work here".

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

That's it in a nutshell. The "gains" don't accrue to devs, but to the never-ending hunt for still more productivity.

And, I think that's a feature; not a bug. That is, from an organizational perspective, agile and all that it's ushered in (including devops and CI/CD) were never intended to improve dev quality of life. Instead, they're all about the highest LOC in the minimum time, a.k.a "productivity".

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#145
My brother was the first driver employed in a brand new amazon warehouse. He shook hands with the manager and came home to tell us the good news. He was hired! His start date of the following week was rescheduled many times. In fact, it went from August to November.

The rest was a like landing in an island all by yourself. Nothing works, no one can help you, and you are on your own. Sometimes, he would just sit in the truck for a moment, holding his head together not knowing what to do. That was until the cameras were installed in the truck for them slackers.

The only way he managed to survive there was out the generosity of random old time drivers that he met on the street. They gave him the ropes, shared private WhatsApp group where they coordinate and help each other with tips and tricks.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#146

It’s always been surreal when I’ve had the chance to be/sit next to contractors whose every minute is accounted for and who cannot take a single day of vacation without finding someone to swap shifts with, every action under the scrutiny of a shift manager lording over them like a narcissistic parent. All the while, the salaried, fully insured and vastly more expensive ‘real’ employees all show up late to meetings, r…

As a contractor I account hours spent on my own without providing evidence further than the work done.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#147
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

I'm laughing because it seems every company has some variation of this kind of madness. They're like flavors.

>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?)?

As for some of these why questions, I think the answer is that they want to enforce that you follow the process. I've seen people get cartoonishly bent out of shape over exactly this kind of stuff, "you're supposed to do x!". It's part of how devs are "automated".

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#148

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.

just the fact that anti work grew to so many people is telling of the times we live in, that along with superstonk, crypto, wallstreet bets dominating reddit popular tells me that capitalism will implode without major rework in the next 20 years.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#149
post #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…

On the other hand people rarely share stories like this. "I could not make it through the first day of working at amazon" is something most of us would leave out from our resumes/conversations.

What if there are more than "5,000 stories" - There could be 50,000 of these.

Re: I lasted three minutes at Amazon

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a relative that’s an appraiser, and he’s basically been scratching by for decades.

I can’t speak to what it’s been like in the past, but this summer there were appraisals for basic houses being picked up for $2K. We’re so short of appraisers in our area that they are coming from the other side of the state - and it seems to be worth their wile $$$. On average they are running $800/ house… could it be that the AMS is taking all the money and the appraiser doesn’t get much? Maybe?

You can't build a market around a one time summer event followed by decades of low volume/pay.
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