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An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

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Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#71
I was a contract developer at a very large "shoe and apparel company".

I saw the same thing. Low quality / skilled developers were hired on in droves. Only to "train" other new contractors. (e.g. copy all these files from my machine and do these 30 steps, and then the local environment should work)

They were hiring guys right out of India. Which made team communication difficult. It was a mess, and code quality really suffered.

I immediately started looking for a new job after started.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#72
post #54

> In this terrible economy, I am grateful for the work Seattle's unemployment rate is 4%, which is basically optimal and near what it was before the recession. https://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+unemployment+rate Seattle real-estate has almost completely rebounded. http://www.zillow.com/local-info/WA-Seattle-home-value/r_160... People may not realize it yet, but the recession is over. If Amazon values the work t…

Amazon will realize there's not an unending supply when an unending supply stops showing up.

A quadruple negative! My brain just assploded.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't know what taken advantage of means do you? Yes, I do, and I'd appreciate you not starting off posts being invective in the future. I'd downvote you for that if I could, even though I acknowledge you make an otherwise neutral point. I'm not suggesting that Amazon is being good or evil, but I don't see any advantage having been taken. As Nostromo stated in a higher-voted thread, the unemployment rate in Sea…

Fun bit of trivia: in a Marxist framework, where the whole 'exploitation' thing came from, it's actually assumed that the worker gets paid a fair market wage. Exploitation doesn't actually rely on someone being paid less than their fair share. I'm not saying that people here are using that term in it's technical way, but people have different opinions on what 'exploited' means, and it can cause friction.

Which is why I'm trying to figure out what, specifically, is being objected to. I'm getting the sense that there is a context beyond the article that I am not familiar with, which is fair enough, I suppose, but I don't see anything in the article to suggest that this employment was in any way unusual or exploitative, at least, not as I understand it.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#74

An open letter to Jeff Bezos, and it's practically worthless to a CEO. If the point is, "stop hiring contract workers," the letter should get to that point rather than complaining. Let's look at the merit's of the authors argument, stated mostly in the second paragraph. Allegedly contract workers produce low quality or inconsistent work, and that training costs are wasted. All of the supporting evidence is anecdotal,…

I agree that it is nothing any CEO would act on of itself but..

I suspect the point was to put enough personal context into the complaint to provoke sympathy, provoke noise, get it widely read and even hopefully get it across the CEO's desk at some point where the author's thesis will at least fleetingly get considered.

At that point, gathering information to test whether the temp system is a net loss or a net gain could begin.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#75
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know what taken advantage of means do you? These days any given new graduate who didn't attend an ivy league is in a situation where it is extremely difficult to get a job. The alternative to working as a contractor at Amazon is not working at all. This is the situation these contractors are in. When the alternative is being in extreme debt / homeless, a choice cannot be made freely. This is the situation t…

> You don't know what taken advantage of means do you? Yes, I do, and I'd appreciate you not starting off posts being invective in the future. I'd downvote you for that if I could, even though I acknowledge you make an otherwise neutral point. I'm not suggesting that Amazon is being good or evil, but I don't see any advantage having been taken. As Nostromo stated in a higher-voted thread, the unemployment rate in Sea…

Old Soviet joke: in capitalist America, man exploits man. In the Soviet Union, it is the other way around!

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#76
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey, uh, did you read the article? The guy seemed to not be complaining so much about how him and the other staffers were being treated and more concerned with the fact that his team had really quick turn around and the people who he felt were the most qualified for the work were not being given the positions they deserved. I replied further down the page, but there are a lot of employees who amazon treats pretty wel…

They're not judging the company on a few internet articles, they're judging the company on the immoral hiring practices they use. Even if it's not for the entirety of the company, it is still significant. Obviously they pay tech workers well, they have to in order to get them to work there. They would have a very difficult time contracting tech employees, because there are so many alternative places to work. A perfec…

So you're saying that this company, which is playing by the rules (in that they aren't breaking any laws with their hiring practices), ought to make a move away from the practices that made them a hundred-billion dollar company because you feel that it's immoral. Do you see how that might look somewhat idealistic and, dare I say, foolish?

I never supported the 'Occupy' protests mainly because you can't influence a corporation by yelling at it. Sitting in front of those banks in NYC or wherever didn't actually change shit. You know why? Because businesses are not in the business of making people happy. Shocking, but true. Businesses are in the business of business, which is to say they make money. Some day I'll write down something that I hope will illustrate in simple terms how huge corporations operate, but today is not that day.

My point is that successful corporations, a group to which Amazon.com obviously belongs, are motivated first, foremost, and entirely by the almighty dollar. I'm not going to argue about whether or not that should be the case, but you are an idiot if you don't believe that that is the case. So if you want to alter the way that big corporations work, you need to either change the rules to make it more profitable to support what you feel are moral hiring practices, or you make it actually profitable to retain these sorts of temporary workers for the long term.

But shakin' your fists ain't gonna work.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no notion that they're essential to the business in any way. But firing people after 11 months just to avoid a deeper employment relationship is a terrible way to treat people.

I think having people willing to clean up after others and keep the environment tidy and hygienic offers a lot of value.

They do, but there are a lot more people asking for that job than for the engineering jobs.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#78
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't know what taken advantage of means do you? Yes, I do, and I'd appreciate you not starting off posts being invective in the future. I'd downvote you for that if I could, even though I acknowledge you make an otherwise neutral point. I'm not suggesting that Amazon is being good or evil, but I don't see any advantage having been taken. As Nostromo stated in a higher-voted thread, the unemployment rate in Sea…

Old Soviet joke: in capitalist America, man exploits man. In the Soviet Union, it is the other way around!

I don't generally upvote jokes on HN, but I giggled like a schoolgirl at that one.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no notion that they're essential to the business in any way. But firing people after 11 months just to avoid a deeper employment relationship is a terrible way to treat people.

I think having people willing to clean up after others and keep the environment tidy and hygienic offers a lot of value.

I agree, having been one of those people. I just meant that those jobs are not so specialized that it's hard to find other people if you fire your existing cleaners regularly; unfortunately there are more people who need the money than can afford to give such unethical employers a wide berth.

Re: An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com

#80
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem boils down to that managers are rewarded by their upper-managers for doing things that make the upper-managers happy, and are rarely rewarded for doing things that make their TEAM BETTER. So as a result, most managers practice schmoozing the management hierarchy, and not at all about making more effective teams. And then guess which one they get better at? (hint: the one they do more of) And then which on…

This is part and parcel of current corporate theory. The mantra of "increase shareholder value" really means "make the investors happy", which currently means "make the quarterly number look great". Combine that with a giant primate dominance hierarchy, where the only goal is to please the bigger monkeys, and idiocy like this is basically inevitable. This isn't the only way to run companies, but it's the only way mos…

> which currently means "make the quarterly number look great".

Corporations with high P/E ratios are the counterexample to this, and Amazon in particular has a very high P/E.

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