Am curious, what happens if an engineer quit like this after writing a blog about the company, does it have a negative impact on their hirability? Do other companies not want him or does it not matter?
Bye, Amazon
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Bye, Amazon
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle. On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the time. The world would be a better place if more people did.
Both you and I are speaking from anecdotal evidence and personal experience. I don't have a way to give you data about it. My feeling, based on experience and several conversations I had with colleagues and friends over the years, is that this is NOT happening often. But I don't know if this is a general rule, or not.
Eh, I know several of engineers who wouldn't interview at either facebook or amazon, because of their reputations. Maybe not a lot of people quit in disgust on the spot, but I have a hard time believing that the "name value" and "resume value" of amazon doesn't go down a LOT after this. Suddenly it's not something to brag about anymore, but to apologize for.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhere between university and the present day we went from being idealistic to realistic to defeatist and the tone of this conversation stinks of pre-covid stereotypes let me guess you enjoy the free coffee and casual culture too much to walk away from a neo-fascist dictatorship with corporate characteristics or maybe you're mortgaged up to your eyeballs Edit: don't you think some liberal leaning corporate behemot…
Just out of curiosity, which neo-fascist dictatorship paying you lots of money did you walk away from? Which has offered you a job? An interview?
I've walked away from tons dude two mega corporations and an agency and at a heavy personal cost may I add but what choice did I have? Selling my ethics was too high a price
Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance state unless we drastically work against that tendency
As systems professionals we should know that by now but we collectively turn a blind eye need I remind you who was selling counting machines to the bad guys during that war in Europe all those years ago? How many engineers had the courage to step into their 1:1 and indict their managers for treason back then?
If you haven't become a corporate outcast by 40 you're a traitor
Edit -- before you say it's my way of claiming sour grapes for my failings as a software engineer you shouldn't be surprised that every corporation is essentially the same corporation with different plutocrats at the helm repeating each other's tired monologues to the same masses of unwashed pizza eating feature trolls
It's the same in north America as it is in socialist dictatorships only here the managers pretend they're our friends and there they're our dads
Re: Bye, Amazon
#234> I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers Assuming this is the real true reason (I would trust Tim, but you never know, so just being explicit here), it takes huge balls to do something like this. The economic loss has to be somewhat taken in relation to your total wealth (e.g. if you lose $1M by quitting but you already have $10M+ in the bank, it's not as hard as if you had zero in the bank), but still... V…
I think you can trust that it's the real reason, because either way it's going to make him radioactive for the next gig like this. No large company keeps its hands completely clean. Defense contracts, Chinese censorship, exploiting addiction, anticompetitive behaviour, sexism, the list goes on. Having a public figure at your company that's willing to martyr themselves to push the knife in just a little deeper when yo…
No, and not just because he's famous: the tech business is very big and had insatiable demand for talented people.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle. On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the time. The world would be a better place if more people did.
Warren Buffet's has a famous quote about time being the only valuable thing he has. Once you have enough money to cover food/housing/healthcare/transportation it seems stupid to spend a lot of your time helping an organization that you don't like, even if they are paying you well. What is impressive here is that he make his decision public. Plenty of people have moral issues with their company and just say that they…
This is the challenge with large mortgages and heath care requirements taking away people's moral agency. Maybe that's the idea.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
He has a few reasons to retire -- and a few reasons not to retire. And he laid them out for us about a year and a half ago: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/10/25/On-Retire... > Progressive friends, people whose opinions I respect, give me shit about working for Amazon. I claim that the problem is capitalism, flaccid labor laws, and lame antitrust enforcement, not any particular company; maybe I’m right.…
> And now he's basically admitting he was wrong. Impressive. From today's post: > Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison. In Ontario, Canada, which has a lot of auto plants, there's actually a controlled experimen…
Yes it's true. But Toyota has a very unique culture in which management are more like coaches, and every single employee on the line is expected to continuously introduce improvements in the assembly line. In such an environment, the employees are highly empowered. So it is natural that they would resist any attempt to prevent direct communication between them and management. When a union takes charge it is legally not permissible for workers to directly talk to management and vice-versa; they have to go through the union.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an utter disaster this society is if having a conscience makes you "radioactive" to employers. I can only aspire to be as radioactive as possible, then.
Well, this is interesting because, subset of people deciding one is "radioactive" is very small compared to whole society, but in general the society is selforganized. There is no oppression. People have money and power because other people give it to them. I guess people collecitvely want to have black characters in power to do the dirty, making their live easier overall. I don't see other reason "western" societies…
> There is no oppression
Please tell me you are being sarcastic.
> people collecitvely want to have black characters in power to do the dirty, making their live easier overall.
As if the appointment of people in power was decided democratically.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t require huge balls, it requires ranking virtue signalling over monetary gain. Firing whistleblowers is a terrible thing but after forming/joining an activist group demanding that your employer addresess climate change, and promoting Naomi Klein as a spokesperson for the blue collar workers at the same corporation, I suspect that your ability to distinguish between whistleblower and social justice activist…
I always find it amusing that people who decry "virtual signalling" seem to be oblivious to the fact that they too are virtue signalling by doing so.
Except it's more like "vice signalling."
Re: Bye, Amazon
#239> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…
I briefly worked on a timekeeping system (the one that records work hours). When I started running it against real data, I hit some bugs. The system was reporting that people had worked a few hours rather than a full shift. I had no idea how this could happen. When I started digging into the data, it became obvious. People were punching in at 08:00 on Monday, and wouldn't punch out until something like 12:00 on Frida…
The correct solution to that would be to hand some collective ownership and responsibility to the employees of a store. Make schedules public, or if that's a privacy issue (I don't think it should be), at least discuss overall statistics at some regular meeting.
"Hey team, we worked x hours this month, and our best employee worked 96 ours of overtime! Amazing!"
In your example, the "individual [having] an outsized effect on the group" is the store manager. They need some oversight to ensure they're correctly wielding their power over the timekeeping system and their employees. You could have the next manager in the chain conduct oversight, but then you might end of with the same issue. Better to distribute power to the employees, so no one person can ruin the store, and everyone feels a little more responsible and important.
Re: Bye, Amazon
#240> At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker... Whenever I speak to someone working in a "low-skilled" job, I'm always astonished and embarrassed by how different their work environment sounds to the kind of offices I work in. There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility. This gets to t…
i worked in a warehouse carrying boxes around right after high school. the amount of brain effort to do this kind of job is close to 0. you need a bit of physical prowess, but this is easily attainable in a couple of week. since the job was basically the least complex job one can ever have, the pay was low. and it made sense back then: you want to move on to a better job/better pay/better conditions? get better quali…
Just because something isn't skilled doesn't mean it's not important or doesn't bring value. The people who do these jobs deserve a decent wage and respect, not psuedo-wage-slavery