751–760 of 764 posts
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How many pro immigration leftists live their life as if its no more valuable than anyone else's? .001% maybe.If you wanted to help the global poor sending them American dollars would go a lot further in their own country
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Can you expand on this a bit? What makes the work so fulfilling? Is it just knowing the impact? The team is good? Are you learning and improving as an engineer?
I'm glad you asked because it's a subtle thing, and may be related to me personally. But I would venture I'm not the only engineer like this. For me, I spent my whole career bouncing against the walls constraining of what an engineer role was supposed to be. I'd push back against requirements from Product Managers and be told I'm ruffling feathers. (Not directly, but indirectly). I'd see QA or Documentation strugglin…
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That sounds low to me
When you make an argument for companies paying that much, you are essentially saying "FAANG companies with lots of cash reserves should overpay new hires in the goal to attract as many of them as possible in hopes that a few of them make something profitable and offset the cost" While a viable business strategy, from a personal value perspective, if you are an average CS college grad, you are by far not going contrib…
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It's not, and the entire reason why markets exist is because two people can walk away from a trade better-off than they were before. It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor laws. "Voluntary" means that out of the incredible number of open job postings these days, workers picked Amazon's. Acting like the alternative to Amazon is hom…
sure. if the relationship was 100% downside it would be hard to convince anyone to do it. everyone understands this. of course there is an element of choice. but you are underestimating how immediate and real the threat of homelessness appears to the class of people who work warehouse jobs. >It's exploitation if Amazon is tricking workers into working for less than their time is worth, or if Amazon is breaking labor…
A shockingly large chunk of people making six figures live paycheck-to-paycheck. The perceived threat of homelessness is useless compared to actual homelessness statistics, which tell a different story.
> if Amazon wasn't getting more utility and value out of their resources than they spent, Amazon would not be profitable. it is okay to call that exploitation. it doesn't require tricking anyone.
It's not exploitation, and it's not OK to call it exploitation. All trades must create value for both parties, or else they wouldn't happen. It's the reason why civilization is able to exist at all.
Yes, Amazon gets more out of their workers than they pay them. Workers get paid more for their labor than they would get out of it themselves.
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Von Mises is generally a laughing stock in academia. Only the internet thinks he's worth dusting off. Von Mises has been missing from proper economic discussions in academia for half a century. He predates when economics was a science, and was expected to produce things that matched the data. Absolutely nobody with any actual training would take his name seriously in practice. Naming him in a non-critical is like men…
That's largely because academia favors central planning and doesn't trust those without a graduate degree to make socially optimal choices. They want to be the planners the masses depend on and Mises tried to show that desire was problematic from a first-principles, liberty-oriented perspective. What's really laughable is that academia thinks its policy prescriptions play no role in the ongoing economic mismanagement…
They did. That's what the "doesn't match the data" part was.
It's just that you haven't ever actually studied this, and are trying to wing your way through fake criticism, the way the kid who never read the book does their book report.
Buzzer sound.
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And the level of actual integration of various services varies a lot (I mean, you expect things like IAM to be included if it's AWS service, right? Lol nope) plus then there's stuff that will be documented with something like one paragraph in docs and highly paid support engineers will never find anything internal about it, so you end up building a complete SSO solution for AWS from scratch...
What services aren't currently integrated with IAM / didn't launch with IAM integration?
I'm glad we have bucket-owner-enforced now, but the correct time to add it was 10 years ago.
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I'm glad you asked because it's a subtle thing, and may be related to me personally. But I would venture I'm not the only engineer like this. For me, I spent my whole career bouncing against the walls constraining of what an engineer role was supposed to be. I'd push back against requirements from Product Managers and be told I'm ruffling feathers. (Not directly, but indirectly). I'd see QA or Documentation strugglin…
Thanks very much for this. I've been fortunate enough to find similar things (though at a much smaller scale than AWS) at my current workplace. If you're still reading this, I would love to know whether you can get the above with some kind of semblance of a worklife balance. Do you have coworkers that maintain a 40 hour workweek, and don't have to work on weekends? How far away from that "ideal" can one get while sti…
There are definitely horror stories of teams that are struggling to hire (because of misinformation like in this thread), yet still have to maintain a service operationally, so have an oncall rotation of 4 people. 25% of your life getting paged? No thank you, not for me.
Usually, these get identified, escalated, and some form of help is brought in. But it requires a manager not to be too proud to ask for help.
Most coworkers I know do maintain 40-45 hour weeks, and most oncall rotations are 8-10 people so you're oncall ~once every 2 months.
COVID has been interesting - some folks went off the deep end and ended up working too much and burnt out. Some found a happy work life balance and realized there are more important things in life than work.
That said, if you're a foundational AWS service, and when you go down half the internet goes with you, when there is an issue, it's all hands on deck to try to fix it (up to the CEO level. When there is a public announcement of AWS impairment, the CEO gets updates every 10 mins whatever the time of day. Because of deep deep ownership). Those don't happen very often (maybe quarterly?)
And if you're not on a team on such critical path, things are a lot more relaxed. But the people that are on this critical path think it's worth it because the fulfillment and pride in being on the critical path for so much technology is itself a worthwhile mission.
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If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA, which the HR team will discuss during almost any company's new-hire orientation... There are lots of government benefits that are restricted to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so that they can take advantage of it.
> That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level If that income level is the poverty line: Yes, it is.
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If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA, which the HR team will discuss during almost any company's new-hire orientation... There are lots of government benefits that are restricted to people below a certain income. That doesn't mean that it is unconscionable to pay people at that income level or to educate employees on what they are eligible for so that they can take advantage of it.
>If you're earning less than $130,000 a year, you are eligible for an FSA Assuming you mean a flexible spending account (for healthcare out of pocket), you're certainly not capped at $130K/year in the US. Your broader point is of course true.
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> Being unemployed is not better than making a low wage. You're presuming it's a binary choice; consider the systemic effect might not make it a binary choice. Let's accept that it is a binary choice, then no, it's not necessarily better to be making a low wage, because that presumes a value for your time that is effectively zero. In truth, with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself, provide yourself with…
> with your own time, you can find ways to feed yourself, provide yourself with shelter, etc. You still have the option to quit your job if you're employed and don't find it worth your while. > strategically & systemically quite harmful How?
Yes.
> > strategically & systemically quite harmful > How?
If that's more than rhetorical, I suggest you do some reading.
If it is rhetorical, I'll just assume you think everything would work great if we had a minimum prevailing wage of one penny for a lifetime's worth of labour. You know, because less than that would be slavery.