I clicked feeling like it would be impossible to give them a fair chance in 3 minutes, but reading it I definitely am on the workers side and he gave them way more than 3 min.
This is a Kafka level story, having long dealings with an obviously incompetent and labyrinthine organization, only to be immediately penalized for the slightest miss on his own part. Especially the "if you're not at your workstation in one minute you'll be penalized / where is my workstation / I dont know" bit is straight out of The Castle or something.
Anyway, I agree with his overall feeling on the state of labor now.
Kafka is one way to look at it, but if anything the description of the process evokes The Good Place to me.
It must be an accident that the process is so catastrophically bad that it leaves new hires drained and crying. But you'd almost start to wonder how much worse you could really make it, if you were optimizing for "plausibly deniable torment”. I don't have it in me to imagine how.
Well, as one prerequisite for further torment, you'd need a system that actually allows employees to work for some period of time, rather than the first-day experience being "lol I dunno, also figure it out yourself or you're fired".
Just because they say he would be fired does not make it so. We don't know what sort of follow-up torture was planned if the original poster didn't just up and leave.
I imagine you could get a lot of mileage out of a "documentation fuzzer". If you hire employees in batches, simply swap x% of the field values between each of their onboarding papers and then enjoy the show!
I can't help but think about POSIWID (the purpose of the system is what it does). This is not obvious for the stated purpose of the system. So what's the actual purpose?
Part of it's to make people feel powerful, like the person who gloried in busting people taking time off. Part of it's clearly conformance to plan, where people are rewarded for marking items in a list done, whether or not they were effective. And I'm sure there are executive metrics that hit targets, no matter how many unmeasured things get worse.
I have had similar induction experiences at some supposedly great academic institutions. The irony is that I am accepting a much lower pay at academia to, among other things, avoid experiencing this nonsense.
Dysfunctional organizations are something horrible we should punish as a society. They are an enormous waste of resources. I am surprised this Amazon department so dysfunctional, since the company as a whole is doing quite well.
The state of Amazon's blue collar working conditions are widely considered to be crap of course, and there are a lot of complaints about labor laws, unions, outsourcing and immigration, etc. I didn't quite see how he connected the issues in the post though. I mean beyond state of labor = not good (and maybe that's all you were saying too).
I was broadly agreeing with the poster that it's worth crying over. Without writing an essay, automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work (maybe its always been that way), and people are treated at "resources". This happens at all levels but is worst, to the point of being potentially inhumane, in low skill jobs.
>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 processes we've automated.
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 just say "no"? 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?)? Why aren't code reviews just cherry-pickable commits against branches by default? Why doesn't the PR process let me do a partial rebase as acceptance? Why does everyone do code reviews looking at diffs, when they can't possibly have enough context? (its because the tools are junk and make it difficult to do - I had an idea of doing some line number magic to do full-code commenting in gitlab review mode, but never got round to it).
Like...the situation is about as bad, we're all just salaried.
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".
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 things, you just ended up with less active work to do. Now that automation is the norm instead of a bonus cool thing, it has become formalized and measured, and you may not have the saved time as free time, you have to now double down on doing the hard parts of the job.
This doesn't actually work in reality for most people as we can't actually think hard for more than a few hours out of the work day (10x'rs exempt, of course.)
>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".
I dont automate CI/CD because I'd rather be sword-fighting on roller chairs, I automate because I value the cost of my own work time and truly would rather spend it on a more interesting problem. (To say nothing of the fact its all too easy to make mistakes where processes arent automated, and I dont enjoy making mistakes)
I dont disagree with your observations, just saying "productivity" gain is pretty far down the list of benefits to me personally
Mine is not an "automation = bad" position. Obviously, it has value. It's more to say that automation is frequently implemented in a way that treats devs as just another part of an automated pipeline, not much different than software.
>"productivity" gain is pretty far down the list of benefits to me personally
Yeah, in reply to the other comment, I was saying that automation from an organizational perspective is not so much about improving the quality of life for devs, as it is about increasing their productivity.
I think it's important to note that it has sucked the humanity out of levels of worker above the bottom-of-the-pole labourer, as well; the HR people and trainers in the post are similarly labourers, though instead of using their muscles they're using their words; but they're still required to work like hands of the automation, with scheduled onboarding sessions and processes they have to follow.
Given enough time, and a smooth process, eventually this should not be so painful; but when it is painful, it is supposed to be the job of a human (especially once in HR) to act as a bridge between process and person, so as to keep morale at a good level and to provide a channel for feedback from employees up to the teams responsible for process automation. It doesn't sound like this is in place here, at all; instead we have people who are displaying all the signs of not caring about the human anymore because they have become so subservient to the machine that they cannot afford to.
What's really grating is that these people and "low skill" jobs that form the backbone of our functional society have been abandoned by the political movement they bled to create (which is obviously now hijacked and totally perverted by the ruling class).
It makes me cringe every time I hear a "left" wing voter or politician boast about how much the uneducateds dislike them, and gloat about how worthless those people must be to be concerned about immigration policies affecting their jobs. It's no surprise their lot is not improving. I only hope they can band together and affect real change again before the ruling class is able to irrevocably divide people against one another. Maybe it's already too late :(
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.
While they usually seem to have started off fairly sincere, /r/antiwork like many of the subreddits dedicated to telling stories about ridiculous behavior in others seems to have quickly changed into more of a place where people practice creative writing. /r/TalesFromTechSupport, /JUSTNOMIL, /r/AmITheAsshole, /r/MaliciousCompliance, and many others.
The stories can be fun but under no circumstances should anyone take what is written at face value.
> I wake up with the worst existential dread I’ve ever experienced. I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
All you need to do is look at the subs the same mods mod...
I believe that the rule goes that for any popular "story" based subreddit with no verification, assume that 99% of the content is False. The more popular the subreddit, the faster this converges. These villain-based story subs typically come with a nice template of "X did Y to me, Y is obviously bad, I responded".
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.
>long, overly personal explanations of why they can’t come in
I mean, the OP post already alludes to the issue with american labor where you're pressured to do something like fake a death in the family to justify taking a day off of what should be a totally replaceable hourly shift. Hourly wage labour jobs are pressured to give those overly personal explanations to get managers to respect any request for time off and it's just seen as the norm.
Of course there's a subreddit for this: /r/nothingeverhappens/
But to be serious, I don't personally believe the stories, because I just can't know. Sometimes entirely plausible stories get debunked as fake, other times wild ones turn out to be true. I'm not committed to call them all fake, but we really just can't know.
Content from that subreddit has gotten a ton of play on social media in recent months. It does seem the most viral stories from the subreddit are embellished, but I can't pinpoint why they seem that way.
They feel like the fake LinkedIn stories about "someone showed up for an interview and they were late and had zero relevant skills and experience but I hired them anyway and they turned out to be the best employee I ever had", except with the polarity reversed.
Since you're on HN, I'll give you the benefit of assuming you're working a nice, solid, salaried job.
Retail is hell. It's the worst on-call you've ever experienced times a thousand.
If you haven't worked retail in the last few years, I'd actually suggest doing the following: Go on the dating app of your choice and put out that you're legit looking for coffee with folks who work hourly retail jobs. You're vaguely tech adjacent, you can automate those swipes. Literally just ask people who match with you to tell their worst experience in retail.
Ask those retail folks: Are you trained enough? Are you understaffed? Does your manager give a shit? Do you actually get the tips you're supposed to get? If you could walk away right now, would you?
Invite 'em to have a coffee/tea, etc in some public place. Talk about what's going on. Genuinely give a shit. What you'll learn is that most hourly retail folks are living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. A friend of mine in college was making $7.70 an hour as a shift manager at a Taco Bell. The straw that broke the camel's back was when his manager suggested he take a *decrease in pay* and an *increase in hours* in exchange for "maybe getting salaried". He left and now is paid $35/hr to sell marijuana.
As someone who works a salaried job at a MANGA/FAANG Forbes Top 100, I feel that some of us lose sight of what our retail-facing hourly folk are actually doing. Retail folks get the most abuse from both sides that I've seen.
Last week, in the grocery near me, I looked at a dude who was mad about a few labels being misaligned, screaming until he was red in the face at an employee about how he was being ripped off, about how this was terrible. It wasn't until I walked over and (legitimately wanting the thing he was mad over) asked him to politely shut up and get over himself for not reading that he stopped, stomping out of the store. This store, like many others, basically demand that these people be happy in the face of abject abuse. The security at the door? That's only for shoplifting. Being a complete jerk to the floor workers? Not that poor fuck's job, and they can be reprimanded for stopping a fight from happening.
I work in retail for 20 years, last ten years in C-level jobs. You are mostly right. Modern retail floor we call internally "battlefield", "bloodshed", etc. It is tough, it is non-human (not anti-human, but very robotic), yearly employee turnover hovering at 50%+
It seems more than a bit like quoting the front page of /r/relationship_advice to make a point about how bad relationships are these days. Even if you don't have any specific reasons to doubt it, how can you trust a source that adversarially selects stories for virality?
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.
meh. the world always had a brutal underbelly, now it's online and visible. and it seems especially drastic in places with high inequality, eg. "the West", and it hits hard especially in the US.
but the whole problem is that these people are powerless. they are not the majority[0] and of course they are the wrong minority (not the rich one, duh).
[0] which - compared to agrarian times - is great, [yaay progress!] but at the same time it's completely fucked up because the "median voter" [still] doesn't really care. (due to a myriad of reasons from the evo-psycho Dunbar's numbers reasons to the "Marx: capitalism is alienating the worker from its self", or in a bit more modern phrasing "neoliberalism atomized society [1] (by focus on individualism and individual rights)" - , plus things are changing too fast[2] and the vastly different responses by different ideological groups are leading to extreme political polarization, and so on).
I think it's likely people embellish frequently. But it doesn't detract, in my opinion, that working under capitalism is awful and absolutely messed up beyond belief.
> 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 and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance.
I guess if you hire 500,000 people per year and 99% of people have an excellent onboarding process there will be 5,000 bad stories?
I doubt it's as low as 1%. If you hire half a million people in a year, it's pretty much guaranteed a lot of the people involved won't know what they're doing. Many of the HR and recruiting people will be new too.
There was a new article a few months ago about Amazon being worried about that very thing. So they're aware of it but corporate America has an ace up their sleeve they can always rely on: work visas. Politicians aren't going to say no when Amazon wants to import guest workers. Amazon done it for the white collar workers for decades, no doubt they'll be quite happy to do it with their blue collar workforce too.
There is significant political support for effectively open borders, which has the effect of importing unskilled labor without the permit implied by a guest worker program.
I'm sorry, did you and I experience the same 2016-2020? The one with a border wall, Muslim country of origin ban, and H1B visa cuts?
I'm not arguing these are good or bad (H1Bs especially are abused) but they definitely happened and have a massive groundswell of support from one party.
In what universe is "there's significant political support for {X}" contradicted by "{not X} happened" or even "there's significant political support for {not X}"?
I didn't claim that there was support for specific special cases. I also didn't say that the general case supporters had gotten their way.
That said, if the general case folk get their way, I assume that your special case will be included.
I do note that folks who want lots of low-skilled immigrants (the "who's going to pick grapes" folks) might not care that much about every instance of high-skilled immigrants.
oh, this question is so good. governments have history of getting millions of people into unpopular jobs. maybe, one day all people not rich enough, will have to serve 2-3 years at amazon logistics, when turning 18 years old.
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.
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, randomly work from home because their ISP is upgrading their equipment and occasionally drag a lunch to two hours or more.
Perhaps I should have clarified that I am talking about closely managed shift employees and not the kind of contractors who self-direct the completion of project work.
> 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.
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.
Systematizing and optimizing every detail of operations to create as large of a pool as possible of positions requiring the least possible skill, reducing the cost of turnover, training, and management complexity... seems to be externalizing a heavy toll on mental health. Regulation can tackle many cases of "socialized losses, privatized gains" but I am at a loss to understand how we can mitigate this one.
this reads like the opposite of a systematised process - this reads like a bunch of departments who don't talk to each other striving to check off tasks in the onboarding process without actually making any effort to complete the intent of the task. Which would make sense at a highly metric-driven company like Amazon.
It's a systematized process that's fractured and whoever you talk to in HR is either too arrogant to help or too ignorant to know how to. I worked for Amazon twice.
Amazon has a tendency to go through the show and tell in the hiring process but not commit through it. It isn't his fault. I'm sure he could've stood up for himself. However this is the flaw when you're just too big to succeed.
There are many metrics that large companies can internally optimize for, one of which is ass-covering. It sounds like Amazon is no different from any other company in that regard.
There was this chap about 150 years ago, wrote about the alienation from labour caused by breaking down jobs into tiny, mindless motions that slowly eat away at your sense of self.
The one golden rule at Amazon is to externalize all costs that are paid by use of a human being’s labor and time.
Regulations don’t stand a chance of moving quickly enough to keep up with Amazon’s innovation budget. The only way to counter that is worker unions, which can make specific and timely demands that Amazon treat workers more humanely.
If workers unionize, Amazon has to stop externalizing the cost of labor.
Five years ago my daughter worked for Amazon in a fulfillment center for a few weeks. From her experience I developed a theory—Amazon expects a steady stream of new hires, figuring most will leave within a month. The job is low skill enough that that a new hire can hit a baseline throughput expectation (the stated goal is of course higher) within a day or two. Aggressive management demands probably pushes that baseline up pretty much until a few days before the eventual burnout.
The ones that stay long term are those people willing to overlook a shit job, aggressive output measuring, and draconian management. Those folks generally aren’t beating the union drum within the org as loud as the transient 30 day folks. Unions have trouble finding purchase because organizers are fighting that turnover and the folks motivated to unionize don’t have the patience to get there.
Other than the drug test it didn't seem like there was a single thing OP was required to do that wouldn't be solved by automation. At my current job we set up direct deposit, filled out info for background checks, completed training videos and quizzes, etc. all through online forms. Everyone OP interacted with shouldn't even be in the picture.
It's a warehouse job; I struggle to see why you even need any humans in the loop above the workers at all. Clock in, move the boxes, mark tasks completed on your handheld, clock out. Frankly I have no idea why the people org as described by OP exists the way it does for a company known for its cloud services. None of these morons OP dealt with needed to be employed.
I figured that out in the second paragraph when he said "drug test" - I think they'd have an awful hard time hiring engineers if they required drug testing. I don't do drugs (not even marijuana even though it's legal here), but I'd refuse to take a drug test just on principle - they are paying for my performance at work, not for what I do on my own time.
The only time I worked at a job that required drug tests, was at a transportation company where federal law required it.
So long as you are filtering out all companies with government contracts as "a company culture that sucks," that's true. https://www.samhsa.gov/workplace/legal/federal-laws/contract... requires any organization receiving a federal contract of over $100,000 or a federal grant of any size to do so. Tied to that is a page of HHS-certified labs for drug testing and federally regulated industries.
It's pretty silly but it seems to be a common thread.
Nothing in the minimum requirements listing here mentions drug testing, though. So the places that are doing drug testing are zealously going above and beyond, which itself is a big red flag.
I worked for a (small boutique) consulting firm and the much larger telecom company they placed me at required a drug test. The culture in my group there did happen to suck, bad enough that my form pulled let me come off the client after just a month.
I've interviewed there twice and I gave up on them twice because honestly it was about the same thing with no one knowing what they were doing and being EXTREMELY slow about everything else. In the space between my first screening and an email to schedule an interview day, I applied at another place, did 3 interviews and a coding test, negotiated an offer, accepted an offer, and quit my current job. It was absolutely wild.
Yep, the only place I’ve ever interviewed at where i had multiple no-shows in a row for my interviews. I had to notify my recruiter multiple times of this 30 mins after my interview was supposed to start, and she wasn’t even aware that my interviewer didn’t show up. The process that was supposed to take a month at most stretched out to almost 3.
Not even mentioning the whole bait-and-switch, where I was led to believe that i was interviewing for a position at Twitch, not at at Amazon itself. Turns out, after I got suspicious of it all and asked quite a bunch of very specific questions from my interviewers, it was revealed that it was actually for a role on an AWS team that worked as a partner for Twitch. After me asking the recruiter if I just misunderstood it all from the start, I was just met with “well, it is still working with Twitch, just for AWS”. I was kinda mad after spending those miserable months interviewing, especially since i made it clear to the recruiter from the very start that I am solely interested if it is a job at Twitch and not Amazon. Lesson learned though.
Sure (to orientations). Here's how a pre-COVID SWE orientation at Google (for folks in professional jobs in Mountain View, not data center contractors in The Dalles): there is a dedicated lobby and theater with multiple people staffing the area welcoming you in. You're handed a laptop, configure your credentials, log in, access benefits, etc, then sit down for a couple motivating videos/speeches and some details on your benefits. At this point you're ready to go to your team's work area (many details could be different outside the mothership).
The second time around it was even more polished than the first time, but contained much less useful information and more cheerleading, so I left once I had my axe and saw that it was sharp.
Fair enough, I was curious about that point too (but maybe they were working for govcloud, which probably has more onerous background checking).
Every single job I've had in California for the past 30 years (from academic software engineer to computer scientist to industry software engineer) has clearly stated that they do not drug test before I signed any paper. In fact, my manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (RIP) was specifically sent there after he refused to take a drug test at a more serious DOE lab, "so he could fit in with all the other hippies and druggies".
I can't speak to any of the other roles, although in my time in the food service industry there wasn't any testing either.
After reading that, I can’t help but feel like this is just someone experiencing awful anxiety and unable to cope with work:
“
I go home absolutely drained and i didn’t even do anything. I wake up with the worst existential dread I’ve ever experienced. I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
Sometimes id rather die then suffer until I die from an illness inevitably. I power through my break down. Leave for work to drive through a horrible storm. I ended up being a single minute late. I already get one point against me. Then I’m told if I’m not at my station by 7:05 I’ll get another point. I was never told where to report to. So I asked. In the rudest way possible they say they don’t know. I walk a little bit. 7:05 hits. And I just turn around and go home.
I did everything I was supposed to do but got shit on before I even officially hit the floor. From the time I applied to when I walked out. I tried so hard to be optimistic, but that was the worst experience I’ve had getting a new job. I can’t help but feel disappointed with myself. I’m not in a good financial situation, and my girlfriend is not going to be happy. But with it being a shit show the entire time I just don’t see how that was gonna work, especially at a company like amazon.
“
I feel like even if his onboarding had been perfect, he'd be chewed up and spit out by the normal difficulties of any moderately challenging job.
>I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
I mean... I can't imagine an emotionally balanced person writing that. I don't want to make this into a personal attack, so maybe it just needs to be recognized that a lot of jobs -- most jobs -- deal with numerous stresses, and some people are not fit for those jobs. It's sad, because it's a very important life skill.
The experience here, particularly being told to be at a workstation immediately without being told where that workstation is, goes well past mere anxiety into Kakfaesque absurdity.
Reddit is one of, if not the single least reliable source of information on the Internet.
You are looking at algorithmic feeds which propagate only information which has the majority vote. Not only that, but a majority vote of a community which becomes more radical as any opposition or moderates are pushed out.
Point a microphone at a speaker and crank the gain. That awful feedback noise is Reddit.
I don’t mean to be rude to those who are seeking a living, but let’s call this what it is.
It’s not a hiring process. There is no interview. They aren’t interested in working with you to figure out if you’re a good fit for each other.
They’re trawling the ocean and filtering the catch through drug and background tests. They process countless people every day, constantly replacing others who have broken down or reached EOL. Nobody here is meant to be anything but a cheap robot with decent sensor-end effector coordination. In fact, their humanity is a liability that Amazon begrudgingly tolerates, largely because it has to.
We need robots in the worst possible way to replace any and every job that people would never choose to do as a hobby.
Yeah, the idea of automation replacing manual labor to free the workers for higher value work never really panned out. All the free thought got automated and the only reason people are needed is because they are best at grabbing and manipulating arbitrarily shaped objects. It feels inhumane.
It actually did. Very few people are needed to do basic farm labor compared to 150 years ago, and way more people are in jobs that involve minimal manual labor and instead necessitate education.
You'll appreciate that HR is done through an app. If you want to quit you can literally do that on the app, no need to talk to anyone. Same with apply for the job, accepting your offer, etc. It's mostly computerized.
That said, it's not THAT hard to get through process, and something of the steps are just filter. We don't know the posters work history / capacity / etc. We do know amazon probably cares very little that this person made it only 3 minutes?
I did hear that for older workers they have a work hardening process during peak to try to harden up workers a bit more gradually to be able to handle full shifts.
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 strong argument for a tech workers union (as well as a warehouse workers union), if not now, a few more years down the line when salaries go down as a result of saturation.
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...
People have been trying to get low or no code solutions to work for a very long time now. The problem is that they a) they tend to be limited in the scope of the problems they’re appropriate for, and b) if you try to solve really complicated issues with them, you usually run into the same difficulty problems that you do with regular coding.
As we've been finding out with our org's migration to Dynamics from our homebrewed organizational software. (The auditing features in Dynamics are particularly limited.) Still, as time goes on these platforms keep improving on the complicated issues and the edge cases that tend to work better with bespoke software. Slowly but surely they are killing us off.
But conventional programming languages are consistently getting better too, and the needs and desires for what people want their programs to do keep getting more expansive. That’s why programmers still make so much money, why demand is so high.
It’s still possible for it to go the way you say, but so far there’s no evidence of that.
> Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union
Wrong approach.
Push for real engineering certifications instead. Keeps the free market (no promotions based on seniority) but weeds out the "6 month bootcamp fullstack engineer" disaster from your codebase.
That's going to be tough to get backing for, and should be. With no meaningful labor coordination, the only way that happens is for a few unaccountable people get together and dream up their idea of what that certification looks like, then do a lot of politics to stick everyone else with it.
Sure, maybe you open-source the initial development, but you can't open-source the politics because nobody can have a sensible conversation with a million people working at at least partial cross purposes, and so when you're doing the politics you make a lot of compromises that nobody gets a say in.
Best case you fail, worst case you succeed and everyone is stuck with the result, which inevitably favors employers because why do they even participate if they don't get something at least a little more like a buyer's market out of it?
So nobody with any experience, maybe even nobody with any common sense, participates in whatever process you have from the design side, because all that does is waste time lending legitimacy to something that's guaranteed to be a bad deal for labor. You haven't even sold me on it!
Of course, if you have buy-in and trust from a sizable and valuable labor base first, all this changes. But that means a tangible history of success as part of the leadership of a union, and you've already ruled that out. What you're proposing would be more like a guild, which is actually a model that can work when the people who run it also monopolize the local industry and can exclude anyone who doesn't meet their standards - including preventing other business owners from defecting and hiring skilled upstarts who the guild won't accept for inevitable and again political reasons. Management in this industry isn't that coordinated either, and can't be without being a lot more oligopolistic than it already is.
> you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates
That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves.
Truth is there are people out there that are trying really hard to commoditize software engineering, with bootcamps and whatnot. And honestly, I'm not impressed one bit. Best way to build the best software (it's a winner take all market remember?) is simply to bite the bullet and go get the best talent out there. The 10x rule is well and alive.
I think it captures the main point that Amazon hiring procedures for 99.9% of people are based on optimizing their bottom line. If they want something specific, they'll acquire it/copy the idea. Backend optimizations/tooling stuff I don't know. Maybe they're recruiting those people based on their research credentials.
I actually disagree. If you're going to look down at "those people" making the company run, then yeah, us techies are just as easily trawled through and filtered via intense programming interviews. What's the turnover time for SWEs at Amazon anyway?
A really bad pianist will maybe hit some if the notes correctly sometimes. Like a really bad software developer through sheer luck might hit copy and paste shortcuts on the right stackoverflow post from time to time. But you will fire both very fast.
A good enough pianist will proba ly hit all the right notes most of the time. Like a good enough software developer who will write software that works most of the time because he hit the right keys most of time. Probably a combination of being reasonably good at finding the right stackoverflow posts most of the time and some general knowledge of ifs and for loops.
Then there's the pianist that that actually feels the music on the sheet. That doesn't just read the sterile notes on the sheet. Or a software developer that writes readable, maintainable code in 'no time'.
Theres a nice TED talk on this topic. I think he compares pianists of various ages to show this. Benjamin Zander, a famous conductor. Worth the watch even if you don't like classical music if you ask me.
I think the last sentence is unrealistic. People work at Amazon or any other company because that's the best job they can find. A large fraction of the population does not have the brains for high-end white-collar work.
What's nutty to me though is that we don't have enough of any kind of skilled tradespeople either. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, cabinet makers, roofers - and I know it isn't just isolated to my geographic area. I've got a friend who is in the middle of building a luxury home to sell - he's basically doing all the work himself because he can't find guys who will just show up, stay off drugs on the job (hazardous!), and seek to do good work. Oh, and it helps if you don't steal tools from the job site too.
Here's a couple jobs that are in short supply: Home inspectors and appraisers. After the 2009 crash, they changed the licensing rules and it's led to a serious shortage of appraisers in particular. Both of these are gigs where you get to set your own schedule and can make some reasonable money while not needing to be a rocket surgeon. Yet, we can't find enough people willing to do it.
This is completely anecdotal and local but I am so with you there.
We have had really great experiences with tradespeople in one way and also incredibly bad with others.
A lot electrical work is required to be done by an electrician here. But what do you do when you have the electrician come out for a quote, you have the manufacturers manual opened to the page with the specs and the electrician can't make sense of it?
The specs clearly stated that the appliance needed multiple separate lines, including min wire gauge and the double pole breaker amperage. I knew I didn't have enough space in the panel for the required double poles. That's part of the reason I called the guy in the first place. And then he tells me it's no problem, the existing wire is sufficient and I can just order the appliance and he's gonna 'hook it up'. Unbelievable!
It took me quite some time of repeating (in different ways) all the info presented in the manual to get him to call his boss, read out the manual multiple times, telling me various half truths, being made to call his boss again and relay the parts of the specs he left out to arrive at the final answer.
The only thing that guy would've been good for is changing alight fixture, which is something you are required to hire an electrician for here. Where I grew up that is something an electrician will not even consider giving you a call back about if you were to try and hire him.
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?
Cute sentiment but wrong. These are skills, it's not Uber where you can simply choose to be a driver tomorrow without prior training. Lots of people simply cannot do these jobs, further, lots who might be able to are put off by the months/years of necessary training.
The money isn't reasonable for appraising. You are paid per appraisal, and the AMC will take 30-50% of that fee as a middleman. To even get to the point where you can make money as an Appraiser you need to be certified based on state level requirements. For my state
-154 hours of classes ($1000+)
-get initial license ($160)
-1,000 hours logged as a trainee of an appraiser (so anyone teaching loses money to pay a trainee or you work for free)
-apply ($35) to take and pass a state exam ($126)
- get full license ($175)
So it takes at least $1,500 and at least 6 months to even start making money. Then many appraisals require actually entering the home and taking pictures or a drive by, so there is massive amounts of travel on top of the paperwork. It's way more detailed than just picking a number for price based on X reasons, and anything that is inaccurate is on you to fix as part of the original fee.
Why does UBI follow a lack of useful labor? A dominant ideology in the US is that it is unjust to take from the skilled, so those without useful skills should simply be left to their struggles.
and in the meantime, we need to counterbalance the power of such corporations with workers' rights and union representation. I'm all on board for fully automated luxury c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶s̶m̶ democracy, but we still need to get through the next 500 years before that happens.
For those confused, you scan in your badge, that get's you through the door.
Then you check the monitor to figure out what job you will be doing (ie, pack or rebin)
If your station is taken for some reason, you should be able to just move to another station and log in there - you don't have to use station assigned.
You will also have a monitor which shoes your rate.
Managers probably won't even know your name, and if you are day one employee showing up late, will have no clue who you are.
Some of the safety rules (because amazon get's hammered on this) - SUPER annoying - no listening to music - are you kidding? The most boring job possible, and to keep folks safe no music, not even one earbud in.
It's easy to blame this on Amazon, but anyone who's worked in retail for a big company knows that this is just your standard low level employee incompetence and power tripping.
It's really a swamp down there. Glad I made it out.
The larger the organization, the more hamstrung it gets by its own bureaucracy. This applies to all large organizations - business, unions, government, religion. It's inevitable.
At my company I have seen several changes over the last few years:
- Work is getting shittier
- Corporate internal communication has become very intense: several emails a day
- Company news is mostly green-washing
- Corporate communication is shifting to non-work related topics like sport, charity actions and general well-being
- Trivial MOOCs are heavily promoted, sometimes made mandatory
- The intranet has been more vexating everyday.
Of course there is the "quest for sense" trend. But there is also a trend for selecting the most resilient to frustration and the most obedient. I interpret this as an influence low cost countries have on high-cost countries workforce.
Forget about creativity, efficiency, technical excellence. These are not the values cherished by many companies these days.
Applying for a new job shouldn't be this stressful & them being so unprepared is absurd considering the company.
It definitely speaks volumes about the environment that you will be subjected to for 8+ hours a day & its fair that you choose not to put up with it.
I have also experienced having to quit shortly after starting a new job, I soon realized that my efforts were not going to be matched or acknowledged in a place where there was little to no organization & the supervisor could treat you as he pleased, if he even allowed you to speak to him that is since he was always so "busy". :s
I recently found out there's a setting you can "opt out" of new design. So it reverts UI for reddit.com to old.reddit.com, and all your links/redirects work w/o having to append `old`.
Random anecdote: I remember trying to get a job at McDonalds and I had to take these tests like "would you rather kill 1 person or 5" it's like you had to choose one. I did not get that job. Similar process for other stuff like washing plates at chains.
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.
This description is highly Kafkaesque and I believe part of it because HR is usually where people who are in the [μ-σ, μ) IQ population fit.
But can we just talk about how every one of these people will have some bit somewhere down where “and my anxiety is getting worse” or “my ADHD is acting up” or something like that.
It’s like this universal phenomenon. Like, I fully expect to see it when I start something like this. Personally I had my money on “And she didn’t understand that I was having a panic attack”. But ultimately it delivered in a different way.
My impression of the hiring ethic at Amazon is that they deliberately ignore barriers to entry like this in order to select the set of workers that is most profitable/pliable while leaving them with an easy way of getting rid of folks they dont like.
It appears like they have failed to "raise the bar" in hiring the HR reps/middle managers that the poster interacted with. Not surprising given how fast they've grown, and I'd imagine it is hard to find competent workers at that level.
I have no idea whether this story is real or not, given it is on a subreddit called "antiwork". But if true, that just sounds offensively miserable, unfair, and unprofessional. Rather that dissecting all those issues though, all I will say is that I wish we had more competition for these behemoth companies. They soak up so much of our economy that there can't be real competition against them. What scrappy retailer is going to have a chance against Amazon, who has their own marine shipping lines or whatever? What we need is stronger anti-trust legislation that is aggressively enforced. Or maybe a corporate income tax that is higher for companies with > $100B market capitalization. That way others can compete and provide an a better alternative, whether for workers or customers.
What kind of guy cries for a whole hour just because he had some trouble at work? I wouldn't want such an unstable guy in my company and Amazon probably sensed that something is wrong with him
He has videos about picking jobs, application, first day etc.
Note that from what I've heard Amazon really leans on the tech (ie, Amazon A to Z). You can resign / quit etc even from the phone app you download.
Probably for the best for this person they didn't make it more than 3 minutes at the job - its not that easy in the end from what I've heard - much easier WFH type jobs these days if you can get them.
This is a Kafka level story, having long dealings with an obviously incompetent and labyrinthine organization, only to be immediately penalized for the slightest miss on his own part. Especially the "if you're not at your workstation in one minute you'll be penalized / where is my workstation / I dont know" bit is straight out of The Castle or something.
Anyway, I agree with his overall feeling on the state of labor now.