The Streisand Effect helps to some degree there.

IANAL, but I think he didn&#x27;t write anything that would put him in danger; plus, if Amazon would sue him, it would be one of the worst moves from a PR perspective.

He&#x27;s Canadian and lives in Canada. Canadian laws on libel and defamation might be less oppressive than US ones (hopefully they&#x27;re not as bad as in the UK).

it isn&#x27;t defamation if it is true and I think everything not pertaining to Tim Bray was already a matter of public record.

Agreed. This takes more courage than quitting itself, in my opinion. What if he wrote this letter, sent it to the media, and then worked in good faith within Amazon to change things for the better? That seems like the hardest road, and also the one that might make the most difference.

There don’t really seem to be any factual claims in the article which weren’t previously public?

Also takes huge balls to publish an article about it publicly (rather than just resigning quietly).I&#x27;d be worried about being sued for defamation, etc.

He&#x27;s also 64. That&#x27;s near retirement age, and I imagine he can afford to retire early.

&gt; Having a public figure at your company that&#x27;s willing to martyr themselves to push the knife in just a little deeper when you have a scandal is a dumb idea.Having a toxic work culture in warehouses seems a dumb idea too.

I&#x27;m not sure he&#x27;s radioactive. He probably saw some grey-area stuff being done, everyone who&#x27;s had a position of responsibility in such a large organization for any serious amount of time has.He didn&#x27;t quit over those. He quit over what seems to me to be flagrant disrespect for basic human rights.I want to hope most companies who can make use of a person of Tim&#x27;s skills - and those are few and far between - do not condone that kind of behavior and would appreciate him for it, not pass him over.

I&#x27;ve heard of his name, after reading this essay I looked him up on Wikipedia; impressive resume (TL;DR: specced XML, ATOM, JSON). But Wikipedia also mentions him being arrested protesting an oil pipeline. It seems to me he&#x27;s always been a man who&#x27;s looking out for the environment, and for the community. Not just to maximise his individual dollar amount &quot;ROI&quot; in prestigious jobs.

A company that hires him signals that it has nothing to hide, so I think this might just work out fine for him.

it goes both ways though: another company might hire tbray not only for his skills, but also to signal potential employees they&#x27;re taking the health and safety of their workforce seriously. at least i hope this might be the case.

&gt; it&#x27;s going to make him radioactive for the next gig like this.I&#x27;d gladly be radioactive for companies that fire whistleblowers and worker rights activists.

What an utter disaster this society is if having a conscience makes you &quot;radioactive&quot; to employers. I can only aspire to be as radioactive as possible, then.

He may not be planning on a &quot;next gig&quot; — he&#x27;s 64, so edging close to retirement. I&#x27;m assuming as a corporate VP at that age he&#x27;s probably got his pension sorted: he probably feels able to make a principled stand in a way that, say, a 34 year old (or a 44 year old) couldn&#x27;t.Even so, good on him for speaking out.

re, Bray being radioactive, on the contrary his appointment would be a PR coup for a large enough Amazon competitor. I&#x27;m thinking Microsoft or even Google (again)

&gt; it&#x27;s going to make him radioactive for the next gigNo. A couple of more questionable companies may choose to stay away, but the majority of companies would love to have Tim on board. Even if just for a few years or part-time.Most employees and owners think of themselves and their company as good so will not be concerned with having a man of moral as their employee. Not that they all are 100% &quot;good&quot; but most think they are.Also, Tim Bray is well respected and most companies know they can gain a lot by him helping out, and they know that.

&gt; No large company keeps its hands completely clean. Defense contracts, Chinese censorship, exploiting addiction, anticompetitive behaviour, sexism, the list goes on.One of these is not like the others. What in the world is dirty about working on national defence? It&#x27;s a positive thing, IMHO.

Wouldn&#x27;t there be a potential opposite effect? Hiring someone like that helps establish (to techies, anyhow) that you are one of the &quot;good guys&quot;?There are bound to be employers who would like to be seen that way.

No, and not just because he&#x27;s famous: the tech business is very big and had insatiable demand for talented people.

Yes, but he&#x27;s Tim Bray and has an amazing track record behind him, I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;ll have people beating down his door to make offers to come onboard.He&#x27;s also 64, not far from retirement age, he may not want to work again and instead devote himself to passion projects and being with friends and family, and who could blame him?

I think you can trust that it&#x27;s the real reason, because either way it&#x27;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&#x27;s willing to martyr themselves to push the knife in just a little deeper when you have a scandal is a dumb idea.

He has stated in the past that his short stint at Google gave him enough wealth that he never needs to work again.  Tim is known for stating things on his blog that are easily interpreted as self-complementary so the real reason for him doing anything, as stated from his blog, is irrelevant.

It&#x27;s one thing to refuse interviews, and another thing to quit a job you love and invested 5 years of your life and that paysvery well.

...and that&#x27;s why those companies become bastions for people who don&#x27;t value (and indeed despise) socialist ideals.

&gt; it takes huge balls to do something like this.
&gt; The economic loss has to be somewhat taken in relation to your total wealth&gt; Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.A good number of engineers refuse to even interview with FAANGs and other nasty companies on principle and they don&#x27;t get any public praise.

Yea the downvotes are designed to create a climate of fear<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;z3bjpj&#x2F;amazon-vp-tim-bray-resigns-calls-company-chickenshit-for-firing-protesting-workers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;z3bjpj&#x2F;amazon-vp-tim-bray...</a>Look it&#x27;s made the cool kid news

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?

&gt; neo-fascist dictatorship with corporate characteristics&gt; Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance stateYou seem very confused.

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&#x27;re mortgaged up to your eyeballsEdit: don&#x27;t you think some liberal leaning corporate behemoth would want this guy whoever he is to use as a pawn because he took an ethical stand and can lend a patina of legitimacy to their gray area shady dealings? the world has suddenly become too complex for the IT crowd it seems

Citation needed. From what I&#x27;ve seen, there tends to be other reasons, and the ethical issues are at best the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back, and at worst cover for quitting ahead of getting fired.(For avoidance of doubt, I&#x27;m not saying either is the case here.)

Warren Buffet&#x27;s has a famous quote about time being the only valuable thing he has. Once you have enough money to cover food&#x2F;housing&#x2F;healthcare&#x2F;transportation it seems stupid to spend a lot of your time helping an organization that you don&#x27;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 &quot;Retire&quot; or &quot;Want to spend more time with the family&quot; rather being honest about why they are leaving.

Both you and I are speaking from anecdotal evidence and personal experience.I don&#x27;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&#x27;t know if this is a general rule, or not.

VPs don’t normally quit companies over personnel decisions on line employees outside of their reporting chain. Especially Fortune 500 companies. Let’s give some credit where credit is due.

&gt; On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the timeAnecdotally, I would say it&#x27;s extremely rare for people to voice disagreement with their company&#x27;s management by leaving. The most common way to &quot;stand up&quot; to leadership seems to be to grouse about it with co-workers at lunch.

As far as I know, Tim Bray is the first person of his level (VP&#x2F;DE) to walk away from Amazon for ethical reasons, and talk about it publicly.

&gt; 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.

&gt; Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.I think assuming this is revealing of one&#x27;s own attitude more than anything.I also feel like big companies have people convinced that they&#x27;re being paid a lot because they&#x27;re exceptional or special in some way. Really, they&#x27;re being compensated for either stress or location or working more than 40 hours or giving away their morals.I say this because I know a few people who made this kind of decision. And speaking with them about it, it wasn&#x27;t difficult. They just had a more complete compensation model to evaluate against.

&gt; if you lose $1M by quitting but you already have $10M+ in the bankLosing money is hard, but if you reframe it as being rewarded $1M (with pretty low marginal utility after $10M) by losing your freedom, then such a choice is only rational.

He even alludes to it in his post when he mentions that he generally dislikes the toxic culture at Amazon.

&gt; 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.Agree:People can quit and say what they want.People in high paying jobs can quit and often find an equivalent replacement; perhaps have one lined up before they leave; in such a case the impact is limited.But if you quit on principle and take a public stand on it other large companies are more likely to treat your decision as a sign you are dangerous. So it takes not just the ability but also the willingness to take such action.

Seriously great move by Tim. He has power and celebrity (of a sort), so he&#x27;s likely insulated from any real blowback here, but it definitely makes Amazon looks very, very shitty.Well, shittier.Anyway, this is what a principled tech leader looks like.

In his post, he states...&gt; It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.So clearly he&#x27;s had other issues and encounters with the toxic work culture there.It really shouldn&#x27;t be any surprise that people usually have multiple reasons for quitting their job.

&gt; people here can&#x27;t claim it is not happening&gt; people can&#x27;t claim that Bezos knows nothing about that and isn&#x27;t involved in any of this.All of this assumes that people will believe Tim. People still can claim those things simply by saying they don&#x27;t believe him.

He is the only person resigning at Amazon over these firings. I’ve seen other emails sent to the activist email lists over people resigning due to this. But he’s the most high profile.I have tolerated a lot of evilness from Amazon and justified it as a “different organization”. I work in Amazon Music which isn’t responsible for facial recognition or warehouse abuses.But seeing them fire whistleblowers... that’s just heartbreaking to watch. Makes me want to quit too. The only reason I haven’t yet is to keep up the activism.

I am glad he said it so that people here can&#x27;t claim it is not happening.I&#x27;m also glad he is making clear these policies come from the top at Amazon so that people can&#x27;t claim that Bezos knows nothing about that and isn&#x27;t involved in any of this.These are the most important things to me. People with principles are rare these days. And people here can&#x27;t just spin these stories into something else now.

I don&#x27;t think employment insurance concerns him. He has earned way too much money for that to be a problem.

Assuming Tim is in Canada he&#x27;s probably not eligible for Employment Insurance too.

There are always multiple reasons. As people below had pointed out he is 64 and already planning on retiring per announcements a year ago. This is another reason on top of the previous ones he stated. The straw that broke the camels back?

&gt; There&#x27;s no basis in evidenceIt&#x27;s hard to rise to the top in a morally lax organisation without making some compromises on the way there.Furthermore, it&#x27;s easy to take a stand when you&#x27;re financially secure because of those compromises.So in my opinion the OP is right: it&#x27;s good for Tim to take a stance if truly, deep down, he feels this is morally wrong, but ultimately him being outspoken means little when compared to those who did the right thing from the start
and as such never got a position to make a headline on HN in the first place.Tim is assured of a cozy job with a &quot;good guy&quot; startup regardless. If genuine, it&#x27;s certainly a personal victory for him, but it doesn&#x27;t mean much for the rest of us (except, cynically, that selling out and then raising your profile by denouncing the party you sold out to is a valid career path).

I agree that the subtext of the parent comment makes it seem a lot like concern trolling. Even if it is sincere, the qualifications riddled throughout the comment totally undercut any message of support the author may have intended.

Starting the comment with &quot;assuming this is the real reason&quot; seems disingenuous in a post that seems to be supportive of the author.But that it&#x27;s repeated again in the 3rd paragraph, and that the final paragraph then mentions that it&#x27;ll make Tim &quot;hard to hire&quot;?There&#x27;s no basis in evidence: Tim&#x27;s wikipedia page shows a history of activism consistent with taking this kind of stand, and a staggering resume that indicates it&#x27;s unlikely he&#x27;ll have any trouble finding work if he wants it.I&#x27;m pretty disappointed in HN that this is the top-voted comment on this article..

That&#x27;s a pretty amazing comment. I worked at Amazon many years ago and recall many convesations where it was generally agreed that we were surely being paid better than at other tech companies because the compensation at other tech companies included all of the perks. It wasn&#x27;t remotely true, but it had to be true, because we were all smart people, and we were still here, weren&#x27;t we?

&gt; Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.No shit. Cognitive dissonance (in justification of Amazon&#x27;s policies) even from some of the smartest people I know is a sight to behold: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16249272" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16249272</a>

I disagree, I think it makes him more hirable.  I guess it depends, perhaps he is less hirable at a company that values profits over humanity, but definitely more hirable at a company that values humanity over profit.

&gt; It also potentially damages Tim&#x27;s ability to get hired in the future, as some other large organization might not like his behavior with Amazon and be reluctant to bring him on boardFor what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;m sure he would consider this a feature. Given his already stated beliefs, I&#x27;m sure he wouldn&#x27;t want to work at a company that would be turned off by this. (just to be clear, I don&#x27;t actually know Tim. I&#x27;ve never heard of him before this).

&gt;Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.Some people are wise enough to understand that having 20 million vs 10 million does not actually do much to improve your quality of life.

EDIT: Wait a second, I wasn&#x27;t able to read TFA originally since it was overloaded with traffic. It&#x27;s back up now, and I can see that Tim Bray was a VP.. This will probably have some impact on him getting more jobs as a VP at FAANG corps, haha. I doubt he&#x27;ll have trouble finding ethical employment and&#x2F;or starting his own company though...&gt; It also potentially damages Tim&#x27;s ability to get hired in the futureCan confirm that it&#x27;ll have zero effect. I know a guy who, when he left Amazon, sent an e-mail to about 5,000 people parodying the scene from Half Baked where the guy curses out his coworkers and quits. Amazon&#x27;s HR was furious with him, but all that came of it was that they didn&#x27;t give him severance pay. He didn&#x27;t have any higher purpose in quitting either, he just wanted more money and to work on something more interesting somewhere else.Apparently he&#x27;s on some sort of blacklist within Amazon, but he&#x27;s been doing fine at another FAANG company for years.

As expected: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timbray&#x2F;status&#x2F;1257383599424315397" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;timbray&#x2F;status&#x2F;1257383599424315397</a>

It might make certain large organizations reluctant to bring him on board, but I imagine those organizations wouldn&#x27;t be places he&#x27;d like to work. I think there will be other large organizations that would be more inclined to hire him; if nothing else, this makes hiring him a good branding exercise with other employees.Maybe I&#x27;m overly optimistic, but I&#x27;d like to think at least when you are talented enough, sticking true to your nature probably serves you better than to do otherwise.

Guessing he was able to leave because he is financially stable.

I&#x27;m not sure why he includes: &quot;I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?&quot;Is race as issue here? I thought they were fired for whistle blowing? Is he saying a white whistle blower wouldn&#x27;t have been fired?

As cowpig has mentioned in another comment, I also doubt Tim would have trouble finding other opportunities if he wants to. However, as Tim says:&quot;The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.&quot;What about these people that were fired? When people get fired for whistle blowing, what does that mean for their future job prospects? Does it severely hurt your chances at a faang?As a PhD student of color guided by a moral compass who has to make employment decisions soon, this is an important question for me.

&gt; I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowersAssuming 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&#x27;s not as hard as if you had zero in the bank), but still... Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.Again, assuming this is all true, I admire Tim for this move, and plaude him. I had my issues with Amazon when I was there (2008-2014), some of them made me uncomfortable, but I would have never had the courage to walk away.It also potentially damages Tim&#x27;s ability to get hired in the future, as some other large organization might not like his behavior with Amazon and be reluctant to bring him on board. At the same time, hopefully there are smaller startups that want exactly this type of courage and rectitude and will hire him for his talents.Good luck, Tim.

Hehe 64 and very rich. It cost his grandchildren money (if he has any), not him.

As the saying goes &quot;A principle isn&#x27;t a principle unless it costs you money.&quot;Fair play to him for standing up for what he believes.

I suspect Tim chose his words extremely carefully there, it&#x27;s bold because he intended it to be bold.

That is quite a bold statement. Perhaps he meant management is generally discriminatory against those with a minority representation within the company, which is a less aggressive framing.

I think he may have meant what I said in my sister comment but I think you&#x27;re probably right about that being a factor. I googled &quot;are minorities more likely to speak against injustice&quot; hoping to find some threads of discourse or studies, but everything was coronavirus related... perhaps another time when search engines aren&#x27;t trying to decide what I need to see.

Counterpoint: Since many companies are under (public?) pressure to fill in some minority quota, they with end with relatively incompetent people from the minority group.Also my personal observation: an incompetent person from a minority group is likely to see a failed transaction through their own colored &#x27;minority&#x27; lens. Eg. a woman who has been turned down for a job will attribute it to her being a woman and no other reason. For a white guy who has been turned down - it&#x27;s life as usual.

&gt; In my opinion it was more from the perspective that minorities may have a more empathetic view on problems, after likely experiencing dealing with problems other more privileged people don&#x27;t have to.It&#x27;s best to avoid making generalizations about people based on the color of their skin - even when you think it&#x27;s a compliment.

In my opinion it was more from the perspective that minorities may have a more empathetic view on problems, after likely experiencing dealing with problems other more privileged people don&#x27;t have to.In this case: one of the biggest benefits of hiring minorities... ending up being the reason you fire them.

Racism positions the fulcrum, you still have to push the lever yourself. And thus still participate in its effects.

That&#x27;s not what &quot;sexist&quot; and &quot;racist&quot; means unless you have evidence that sex and race are the cause of their overrepresentation.If not, this is just race&#x2F;gender baiting and it detracts from the broader issue of worker treatment.

I think it&#x27;s an important point. The warehouse staff get treated worse than the AWS staff because they&#x27;re fungible; easily replaced and cost little. But they&#x27;re also over-represented by women and people of colour, so the net effect is sexist and racist.The decision making might not be explictly sexist&#x2F;racist, but that feels like hiding behind an excuse. It is exactly a power dynamic.

Right at the end he says:&quot;Spot a pattern? · At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength.&quot;Pretty clear where the bottom of the power balance is... Sadly, sexism and racism is an inevitable fallout of that in contemporary American culture...

Yeah man. He let those emotions overwhelm him. Not like us: perfectly rational actors free of emotion.

Seems so, but it also shows he&#x27;s particularly concerned with such issues and might have let emotions and peer pressure overwhelm him.

The way they treated Chris Smalls in the news was clearly a veiled attempt to label him as the &quot;Stupid black man&quot;.

&gt; I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?Including this bit is interesting. So he is accusing Amazon of being both sexist and racist in addition to treating workers poorly.

The right thing to do.I&#x27;ve never met Tim and I will probably never meet him, I only know that he was one of first programmers&#x2F;computer people whose blog I started reading back when I got into programming (more than 15 years ago, closer to 20) and as such one could say that I looked up to him. I&#x27;m glad that I chose the right person to &quot;look up to&quot;.

In one case, an organizer was fired for refusing to not come to work after being put on &quot;quarantine&quot;, three weeks after he was initially exposed and not given any leave, and no one else involved in the exposure was quarantined.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;mar&#x2F;31&#x2F;amazon-strike-worker-fired-organizing-walkout-chris-smallls" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;mar&#x2F;31&#x2F;amazon-strik...</a>The specific incidents Bray discussed seemed to be on a private internal list, and specifically related to AECJ so probably not this issue - I doubt anyone will leak it as unless there&#x27;s something especially egregious (not just specious justification, but something like a racial or sexist slur) it doesn&#x27;t really benefit either side.

One was explained in the linked article:&quot;Amazon fired the warehouse worker Smalls on Monday, after he led a walkout of a number of employees at a Staten Island distribution warehouse. Amazon says he was fired for violating a company-imposed 14-day quarantine after he came into contact with an employee who tested positive for the coronavirus.Smalls says the employee who tested positive came into contact with many other workers for longer periods of time before her test came back. He claims he was singled out after pleading with management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about the number of workers who were sick.&quot;

Does anyone know what the &quot;laughable justifications&quot; for the firings were?

Industrial production and capitalism are not the same thing. I don&#x27;t know about the ethics nor the day-to-day, but Mondragon is a largecorporation and worker owned.

&gt; 21st century? 20th century? 19th?Does it matter? We can&#x27;t change the 19th or 20th centuries. Perhaps we can change the 21st...

21st century? 20th century? 19th?Seems to me, this is the story of the industrial revolution and arguably all civilization pre-IR, when serfs were fungible labor units to the landed gentry. Standardize the design and production of something, then bring in labor to produce mass quantities to a certain level of quality.Coronavirus won&#x27;t change this: with 8B people on the planet, we&#x27;ve come to depend on industrial production for food, medicine and more.

Because the way these people are treated relies entirely on the fact that their social status and education is so bad that they cannot effectively put demands on their working conditions, it&#x27;s not like if they quit there is magically a different job on offer they can get to; none of them are doing it out of authentic volition. You&#x27;re also completely disregarding the fact that people working in amazon warehouses are tracked the entire time, put under a lot of unnecessary stress and denied basic needs.

What is so bad about treating somebody as someone who can pick and pack your parcels? It&#x27;s just a job?And what does it have to do with Capitalism. You think under Socialism they would care about your individuality? No they wouldn&#x27;t - Socialism is a Collectivist ideology, after all.The way to strengthen workers is to increase demand for their work, or find ways to make their (limited) skills more useful, or give them new skills. Those are all compatible with Capitalism.

&gt; It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.Stung me the most. Capitalism seems to have such an increasingly firm grip on the world that I&#x27;m starting to think the only way out is from some drastic worldwide event (Corona?).

If that&#x27;s the case, perhaps it&#x27;s also newsworthy that only one VP stepped down from Amazon for these public reasons? And doesn&#x27;t that make him newsworthy anyway for being one out of a thousand?

iirc there are very few distinguished engineers at Amazon. Tim Bray is high flying from a technical standpoint.

As Napoleon said, a soldier will fight long and hard for a piece of colored ribbon.

&quot;Distinguished Engineer&quot; is kind of a big deal, title-wise.  It&#x27;s not something that is just handed out.

Amazon is not a bank where VP position is like a senior engineer. VPs are very few and wield a lot of power and influence.

How many &quot;Amazon VP&quot;s are there, 1000? Whenever I see stories like this the majority of the time the position of the individual is embellished to make the act seem more dramatic.

&gt;That&#x27;s why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs.I know it&#x27;s a common mantra in these circles to &#x27;acquire skills&#x27; and &#x27;learn to code!&#x27; And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did.But it&#x27;s really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you&#x27;ll have a home or food. It&#x27;s also hard when traditional means for acquiring skills, like going to college, no longer have the same returns they used to. All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. So it&#x27;s not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it&#x27;s a call to specifically learn profitable skills.

“perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don&#x27;t deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.”They may exist, but I doubt there are enough of them, even in Amazon’s warehouses, to warrant the draconian rules for all employees.I also think people more behave that way then that they are that way. The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.

I suspect the same percentage of people exploiting the system in warehouses as in office jobs, still you can see very &quot;inhumane&quot; rules only in warehouses.

You don&#x27;t think there are higher skilled people trying to exploit the system?I suspect the real difference here is developers are in higher demand. If we feel the checks becomes to unfair, we can go look for a different job.If a warehouse worker doesn&#x27;t like his smoke breaks being monitored, there is little recourse, someone else can be hired who will accept these condition out of desperation for a job.

&gt; I have never run a warehouse,You don&#x27;t know...&gt; ... but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don&#x27;t deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.... but you&#x27;re assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely.I think these biases are the issue being discussed.

My father works at a warehouse. I&#x27;ve worked in flooringThese are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who&#x27;s the slacker &amp; who gets shit doneIn flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks &amp; listen to gossip to get an idea of what&#x27;s going on. He&#x27;d shuffle people&#x27;s schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very little intervention necessary. I happened to take off one day a week at random no questions asked (combination of not being physically capable of doing 5 days a week of that job while also happening to be scraping paint off a house that summer)So you don&#x27;t need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise &amp; intervene when something is clearly going wrong

&gt; I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end).There have been large, profitable corporations that preceded Amazon and did not need to implement such draconian tracking systems.Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination.

That&#x27;s why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs.I have never run a warehouse, but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don&#x27;t deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.I found very interesting the book of the guy who founded &quot;The Big Issue&quot;, a magazine that homeless people sell in Britain. They also had to put some rules in place that seem strange, for example the vendors (homeless people) had to buy the magazines they wanted to sell. They are alcoholics, gamblers, addicts, so unfortunately some special rules were necessary to make it work.

No, indeed this gets to the heart of the idea of class warfare.

pretty sure &quot;the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it&#x27;s OK to treat them like wage slaves.&quot; existed long before computers were ever thought of

I doubt the tech office perks are taking employee money from other companies. Warehouse work wasn’t likely to ever be awash in cash to lavish on the workers because that’s coming straight out of the customers’ pockets; every other logistics company is competing on that basis and consumers are generally price-sensitive.

IT workers are partly to blame for it. By creating , embracing, extending, normalizing and advertising a culture where companies compete for office perks, they also allowed the creation of the underclass of unwashed workers whose businesses are not awash with cash and thus it&#x27;s OK to treat them like wage slaves.

You&#x27;re right, they&#x27;re not complex. For a personThey haven&#x27;t been automated because it is still hard to do. Simply carrying boxes is easy, but picking up products (of different sizes, shapes, weights, &quot;grabability&quot;, etc and putting them into orders is complicated.That being said, it might be that different companies have different stress and pressure levels and different working conditions.

Just because something isn&#x27;t skilled doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not important or doesn&#x27;t bring value. The people who do these jobs deserve a decent wage and respect, not psuedo-wage-slavery

So your perspective is that only employment which requires advanced thinking deserves good conditions and a living wage?What is society to do with people who don&#x27;t have sufficient brain power? Enslave them? Throw them in the wood chipper?

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&#x2F;better pay&#x2F;better conditions? get better qualifications, learn to do a different job etc. of course i can&#x27;t comment on what happens at amazon, but these kinds of jobs are so easy to do that it&#x27;s ridiculous they haven&#x27;t been completely automated till now. i do wonder what will happen to all these people once automation is 100%.

&gt; I&#x27;d suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren&#x27;t all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caringPay low wage, get low motivation. No one&#x27;s going to bust their ass over a mcgriddle for minimum wage.

&gt; I&#x27;d suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren&#x27;t all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring.As often as not, this is a failure of management. Of course no manager wants to admit to this. A great example is the turnaround at the NUMMI GM plant after drastic changes to the manufacturing process[1]. The same employees going from drinking on the job and creating tons of defects to a model of efficient manufacturing in North America.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thisamericanlife.org&#x2F;403&#x2F;nummi-2010" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thisamericanlife.org&#x2F;403&#x2F;nummi-2010</a>

&gt; There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility.I&#x27;d suggest working with or managing a place with low-skilled people. They of course aren&#x27;t all like that but it seems it attracts low-motivation, low-effort, or low-caring. I can only provide 2 anecdotes, but I can see why people get treated this way after time.I highly doubt there are many people that just start their management role in a hostile, suspicion, condescension kind of way. Normally it takes something repeated over time to build up those kinds of traits of dealing with somethingIn college I used to work for RPS (they got bought by Fedex or UPS, I forget) sorting packages. To get the job you had to lift up to 50lbs and memorize the first 2 digits of the zip code (just the region so it was like 20-30 numbers) and you&#x27;d stand in front of a big chute and sort boxes onto 1 of 3 conveyors. The amount of anger people would take out on other&#x27;s boxes was insane. Kicking, punching(??), throwing over the ledge (we were like 3 floors up), or just outright stamping of boxes was nuts. After working there I learned what it means to package something well as I could not count on any package of mine being treated with respect.The other anecdote are my wife&#x27;s pharmacy techs she has to manage. Some of them will bitch and moan if they have to remake a drug, sometimes outright REFUSE to make a drug if it means they have to gown back up and go back into the clean room. They will disappear for an hour after delivering a drug (up a few floors). They will take well over an hour for lunch breaks. It is a very maddening situation because all of these actions means the kids don&#x27;t get what they need on time.

&gt; There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility.That&#x27;s because, unfortunately, a lot of them do need their hands holding. Many of these people have very low IQ and will always avoid work if they can. You can&#x27;t compare them with the people in the offices you work in who have top 10% IQs. I know it should be like this, and should be like that, but if you would actually expose yourself to the kinds of people who work in these places you will see why these seemingly hostile rules are put in place. But think of it like this: these people get a safe working environment, comfortable lives which no high levels of responsibility, and they get to reap the benefits of living in a modern society. If they were left to their own devices they&#x27;d be in poverty.

It&#x27;s well established timesheets are an utter failure when concerning knowledge work and derived output. There have been times where every hour had to be accounted for, allotted to projects, cost centers&#x2F;departments and various general types of allowed &quot;hours&quot;. This is more unusual today because it provably reduced productivity and sometimes even led to pointless discussions where to &quot;punch in your hours&quot;, employees stopped caring as the time was not theirs anymore anyways. In the end, data quality would be destroyed, and the entire system a time-consuming pointless exercise in C&amp;C futility.The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There&#x27;s surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone.I&#x27;m sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.

If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong.I&#x27;ve seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company.Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid.If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust.This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.

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&#x27;s a privacy issue (I don&#x27;t think it should be), at least discuss overall statistics at some regular meeting.&quot;Hey team, we worked x hours this month, and our best employee worked 96 ours of overtime! Amazing!&quot;In your example, the &quot;individual [having] an outsized effect on the group&quot; is the store manager. They need some oversight to ensure they&#x27;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.

&gt; It&#x27;s not so much the individual being bad that&#x27;s bad, it&#x27;s that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group.If a business isn&#x27;t capable of supporting it&#x27;s labor at a rate where their employees can maintain their cost of living, then that business has already failed. It means the business subsidizing the cost of goods and services with the quality of life of the employees providing those goods and services. That&#x27;s not a sustainable economic model, because it means those same workers are effectively excluded from the economy; they&#x27;re only able to participate with essential goods and services, which harms the markets for anything else by artificially constraining demand. That means economics of scale won&#x27;t pay off, which increases the effects of overhead on business.

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&#x27;t punch out until something like 12:00 on Friday (change days as required). This meant that they were clocking 24 hours &#x2F; day. The only way this could happen is if they were colluding with their store manager, as the manager was meant to close out the time keeping system at the end of the day.The stores with employees that abused the system tended to have lower margins. This often led to them being closed down. It&#x27;s not so much the individual being bad that&#x27;s bad, it&#x27;s that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group.I expect over time (10s of years) the computer industry will get closer to other professional industries as opposed to being the wild west it is today.

Warehouse workers are disrespected for the same reason poor people are: because a nontrivial proportion are desperate and willing to act on it. 
Poor people get fired and prosecuted for things that rich people feel entitled to do every day, like fart around on HN at work while getting paid, or grab a soda or a whole meal from the cafe without paying for it.

&gt; There seems to be a consistent theme of employees being treated with suspicion, condescension and outright hostility.The reason for that is simple. For jobs with few qualifications, undisciplined people and people who struggle with thinking are in the highest supply. Ask anyone who operates a bar or restaurant what sort of behaviour they can expect from low-qualification employees, hired without significant attention, at the going rate.It may be a matter of privilege for a lot of people; I know many brilliant and well-intentioned people who have had a hard go of life because they picked up a counterproductive fear, insecurity, or opinion when they were young, but it would not surprise or offend me that their employers would grow to dislike them. I have had some advantages on this, because I was blessed with a referral for my first job, and my first colleagues guided me away from my self-destructive behaviours (I was 17).That&#x27;s not to say it&#x27;s all of them, but if you hire people for work that requires little or no discipline to meet the hiring requirements, you are going to be exposed to a lot of candidates who lack discipline.There are many people working jobs that have a low- or no-skill entry level, who are incredibly hard-working, disciplined, and passionate; but there are also many who are none of these things.You can observe a maybe-similar effect with specialized &quot;consultants&quot;, who merely have to claim to be able to resolve problems like one you&#x27;re experiencing; then they get paid for a few months to have a go at it, and it turns out they don&#x27;t know any more than you do about your problem.

&quot;If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.&quot;Manual labor in many sectors is structurally underpaid. Nobody with half a brain would ever choose waiting tables as a career, even if they enjoyed it. So you&#x27;re left with people with no choice or with mental-health issues (or both), who often resent having to do the job.Whether that&#x27;s by design or a collateral effect of certain societal and economic structures, is open to discussion; but this is definitely the case. Until we allow that waiter and that delivery driver a level of dignity equal to this or that white-collar job, the situation will not change.

I don&#x27;t want to disagree with most of what you are saying, but this is where I can always tell the majority of HN hasn&#x27;t started a non-tech, low skill business before (restaurants, sales, salons, construction, etc). Your workers consistently put you in bad positions. People will call out for no reason, no shows are frequent. Sometimes you just get people that completely disappear. That&#x27;s fine in the tech world where most of our deadlines and time estimates are made up anyways, but when you have one of your line cooks or stylists or sales rep fail, to show on a busy Saturday it can be disastrous if you don&#x27;t have the good will of another one of your employees covering.Seriously, next time you get a chance, talk to your local restaurant manager, construction manager, barber shop owner or sales manager, they all say the same things: how difficult it is to find good workers. (and &quot;good&quot; here is a pretty low bar: show up when you are scheduled on time)

Thankfully no &quot;high pay&quot; labor ever just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc) ;) And never at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered.Pay might be a factor. I think people are people, and their behavior and beliefs vary.

You&#x27;re claiming that 1&#x2F;2 to 1&#x2F;3 of employees are criminally stealing time or product from their workplace. I need some robust citations for that, because it&#x27;s ridiculous on its face.

Even worse is when you evaluate hiring. It isn&#x27;t unusual for a high-turnover entry-level type employer to have 15% or less of candidates who agree to fill a position still employed with the company 6 months later.The pure drag of having to deal with this, especially when it comes to all of the paperwork required, by law, to be completed with every single new hire makes this alone a huge expense.The vast majority of those employees left of their own will, not because they were fired. Usually when the leave, there is no notice. They just don&#x27;t show up leaving management short handed and wondering whether the employee will show up the next day. Consequently, the policy can be to over-staff so that whenever some percentage isn&#x27;t showing up the employer can still meet production needs.The employer cannot simply increase prices and pay people better. For the most part, employers already have prices at the highest their customers are willing to pay. Setting prices higher will result in loss of customers, less profit, then layoffs or business closure.Employees at this level are astoundingly uninterested in performing well, or, in other words, there is a reason they are working entry-level positions. This makes management yet more difficult because managers may have to become near micro-managers of cat herds trying to get the company to produce whatever it is supposed to produce.

&gt; This makes companies take extreme policy measures...Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management.&gt; ...because the financial impact is so disproportionate...For who? Bob &quot;steals&quot; an hour of overtime worth $25 but he&#x27;s still in your facility at your disposal. God forbid...&gt; &quot;If you pay me more I won&#x27;t act like this&quot;This I agree with. You get what you pay for. Period.&gt; But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.So why is it alright to allow a failing business who can&#x27;t create value in the workforce is allowed (and enabled) to stay open so it can ruin more lives and create more misery? Surely there&#x27;s a decent pizza place around the corner that&#x27;s well managed, creates value for employees, and deserves the business. Instead we crutch along shitty businesses for no reason. Case in point, at a debate in 2016 a woman asked Bernie Sanders how she would continue to grow her business if she had to offer her employees health insurance. She would have to scrap plans to open a second location.I&#x27;m sorry, but if your first location can&#x27;t sustain itself and create a meaningful work environment maybe nobody needs that second location of yours. Get health coverage for your existing workforce before you go hiring more.

If you can&#x27;t afford to pay employees a decent wage, you shouldn&#x27;t be in business. Minimum wages should be raised and nonviable businesses should adapt or go under.Amazon is not in this category

I worked at a major pizza chain in high school. One of the assistant managers would use his access to update his time sheet so that his login time was 12 hours off from his real login time. So if he logged in at 4pm, he would update it to really be 4am. At first glance his clock in times would look correct, but he was stealing 12 hours of wages. This went on for months before he was caught and fired.That was the biggest thing I saw. There was a TON of smaller theft in the form of drivers faking customer complaints so that the order was freed out, even though the driver had been paid cash for the order.

I can confirm this, having first hand experience with it. We hired many low-skill workers at a big tech company that you&#x27;ve heard of about ten years ago. These workers received a couple of weeks of training, and then were set to do a rather simple, menial, repetitive job.These workers didn&#x27;t sell products, but did very low level tech work, but the entire operation was mired in drama. For example, we had a strict no drugs policy, and no weapons policy on campus, zero tolerance. So, say that one of your employees comes up crying that she is getting fired because she did heroin during work hours, and she needs to money for her unborn child (this happened!), or a guy gets angry at being fired because he was pulling out his new .45 from his waistband to show his cubicle neighbors. We had a LOT of this stuff, and as a result, many zero tolerance policies.It&#x27;s difficult to understand how many hard living, disadvantaged people there are in this country, even in wealthy areas like the Bay Area of CA, who bring their rough living to work with them. What do you do as an employer? Do you tolerate this to be friendlier to the employees, and someone gets killed, making you liable? Do you come down like a hardass and dehumanize them even more, but cover your butt? Neither choice is good, but it&#x27;s the latter that usually happens.

Purely anecdotal, but my dad has a story around this--his company wasn&#x27;t doing great, and they needed to increase factory output, so one of the best ideas was to create a factory profit share amongst all the factory employees. They called a random group of employees together to run the idea by them, and after they presented, they asked them what they thought. 
One guy then asked, &quot;So does this mean I have to work harder?&quot; 
My dad replied something like, &quot;Well yes, but you&#x27;ll get a share of the factory&#x27;s profits if you work harder.&quot; 
Random guy, &quot;Well I don&#x27;t want to work harder...&quot;I think it just puts a voice to what a lot of people think, but never say.[edit] Sorry, to add details, they were trying to increase throughput with the same number of workers. The factory already went 24&#x2F;7 under EU guidelines, so more hours were out of the question.

Right. Everyone who lives in that world knows and understands this.People who only read about the non college degree people can have some very clueless ideas.

&gt; If you&#x27;ve never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has &quot;low pay&quot; labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales)...You&#x27;d think Amazon treats its &quot;high pay&quot; engineers on-par with other FAANGs? It is not just the warehouse workers that they are paranoid about. They&#x27;re paranoid about the human nature to slack, to rest, to err, to relax, to let their guard down for a moment, to not care enough at times, to deal with life&#x27;s other problems, to fail... to live.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19751016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19751016</a>

I have been involved in both working in services and in the management level of a restaurant business. It is still my opinion that the pay, disposability, lack of dignity, lack of future, lack of community, and disrespect are the primary drivers for bad workplace behavior. Treat people like animals, and they will act like animals. It&#x27;s just exploitation, and I work my current job with fear of having to go back to that.&gt; But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.This is maybe a radical argument, but I make it in good faith; if your business can only exist by paying workers at or below poverty wages, and&#x2F;or enacting dehumanizing controls, it probably shouldn&#x27;t exist. If the demand for the product or service is sufficient, price should follow accordingly to make that business viable and profitable. Saying a business can&#x27;t afford to pay workers a living wage and treat them right is equivalent to unintentionally saying &#x27;the business can&#x27;t exist without worker exploitation&#x27;. I do not believe that is a defensible position if you don&#x27;t axiomatically accept worker exploitation.Maybe any given business model doesn&#x27;t have a god-given moral right to exist. It does suck if we lose that local pizzeria, but clearly we didn&#x27;t want the pizza enough to pay what it cost to ethically support such a business. If you&#x27;re worried about the job loss or availability of services caused by such a position, there a whole sea of political and socioeconomic thought on how to solve that. It&#x27;s probably beyond the current conversation.

This is why cooperatives are so much better for food service. Set up the incentives to align the success of the business and the honesty of the employees.

I think this is a two way street. If you&#x27;ve never been involved at a management or ownership level of a business that has &quot;low pay&quot; labor (e.g., food service, warehouse, retail sales).For every 2-3 decent workers there is one that just takes pure advantage of the environment (e.g., stealing product, stealing time, etc). Sometimes this occurs at great cost for a period of time before it is discovered. EDIT: This was meant to be illustrative, not an exact ratio.This makes companies take extreme policy measures for the few instances of this that impact everyone, because the financial impact is so disproportionate.Now, the argument can (and is) made that pay is a factor. &quot;If you pay me more I won&#x27;t act like this&quot;. But depending on the business (e.g., a local pizza place) there is no affording that.

&gt; Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for.This is exactly why privilege is not an accurate or constructive term to use in these conversations.Privilege implies something undeserved. So it sounds like an argument for taking away those bare minimums, so everyone is equally treated with suspicion, condescension and hostility.Better words are &quot;oppression&quot;, &quot;discrimination&quot; and &quot;bigotry&quot;. Make it clear that the goal is treating everyone with a basic level of trust and respect, as a bare minimum, and nothing less than that is acceptable.

No one who runs a business that hires multiple employees can reasonably call themselves lower middle class.Showing my work:&gt; My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1]&gt;His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers.Let X be a fair wage, Y be your dad&#x27;s wage and Z be your mom&#x27;s wage.Then Z&gt;Y&gt;X, so Z+Y&gt;2X. Any household that makes more than twice a &quot;fair wage&quot; is not lower middle class (many lower middle class people don&#x27;t even make 1x a fair wage).

&gt; People don’t default to cheating the system. It’s action-reaction. If there is a huge imbalance, if people think they aren’t being treated fairly...One of my HR friends was dismayed at the treatment of warehouse workers at Amazon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21217969" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21217969</a>

You&#x27;re totally right on the action-reaction bit. And it&#x27;s the same way at much bigger scales. This American Life did a story on NUMMI, a Toyota&#x2F;GM joint venture. Toyota took one of GM&#x27;s worst plants and made it well run and productive, in large part by treating the workers like people. It&#x27;s very moving: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thisamericanlife.org&#x2F;561&#x2F;nummi-2015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thisamericanlife.org&#x2F;561&#x2F;nummi-2015</a>The heartbreaking part is that even when GM saw it happen, they couldn&#x27;t really get it. Manager-labor hostility was too baked in on the management side for them to really change.

&gt; People don’t default to cheating the system.Some people don&#x27;t. I think you may be underestimating the degree to which A) your parents were good judges of people, and B) having ownership close to the metal can make things work well.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Selection_bias" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Selection_bias</a>

&gt; The workers in response didn’t cheat hours, they were flexible when the times got really tough, and in the end, they greatly respected my parents for running business the “right way”.The best way to get people who show up for work on time, don&#x27;t steal from the register and don&#x27;t call out sick is to pay them enough to have a life that isn&#x27;t sent into a stress spiral by an electricity bill thats 10% higher.Corporations especially in the service industry (Fast food, etc) have tested and to their bottom line workers stealing and missing shifts and calling out every 3 days isn&#x27;t worth more to them than paying people less. Not because they&#x27;re unprofitable, but because they can, and there&#x27;s enough desperate people EVEN WITH FULL EMPLOYMENT to not raise wages as long as none of the other corporations do.So now you have cargoculting amonst the business administrators that pay as low as possible is the only way to run a business. Except of course, when it comes to business administrators and those who interact with them.

All the example replies to this I’ve seen so far are where the power imbalance between business owner and worker is huge. So I’ll give my anecdote which is from the other side.I grew up watching, and often helping, my parents as they ran their own business. We were at best lower middle class. The economic gap between us and those we hired was far smaller than any of the examples given here. My parents treated the workers well, paid them fairly[1], and kept the business running as long as possible even after 9&#x2F;11 + the recession killed the business.The workers in response didn’t cheat hours, they were flexible when the times got really tough, and in the end, they greatly respected my parents for running business the “right way”.People don’t default to cheating the system. It’s action-reaction. If there is a huge imbalance, if people think they aren’t being treated fairly, if they see that it’s very much possible for the system to be improved, that’s when the thoughts of “this is unfair” begin to emerge.[1] My dad was by title the owner while my mom was in the union the workers belonged to. His salary was lower than my mom’s. Not lower than the workers, but far lower than could have been possible had they attempted to fight the union on pay to nickel and dime them.

&quot;Why should we focus on those &#x27;disadvantaged&#x27; people? My life is hard, too.&quot;

&gt; This gets to the heart of the idea of &quot;privilege&quot;, and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privilegedThat&#x27;s because basic trust and respect shouldn&#x27;t be a privilege, the lack of it is the issue. Calling someone privileged for being respected almost sounds like an insult. Let&#x27;s focus less on privilege and more on disadvantage.

We live in a society where the most important and essential jobs are treated with condescension.

There is the reality that ~ 10% of the population has an IQ so low, US army cannot recruit them by law. 10% is a lot of people, a few tens of millions in US. I have someone in the family that has the mind of a children of 8-10 years old, for that person a &quot;low skilled&quot; job in an Amazon warehouse would be excellent; the alternative is zero income.

There&#x27;s also the reality that &quot;low-skilled&quot; really means &quot;there&#x27;s more supply of the skill than there is demand&quot;, or &quot;depends purely on a skill that can be developed, as opposed to natural talent&#x2F;advantage that few people have&quot;.

I tell people I&#x27;ve never worked as hard as I did the morning shift at taco bell.Just being treated like a human with independent thoughts and needs is a huge benefit in so many workplaces. There&#x27;s a level of just violence and mistrust in the &quot;normal&quot; working world that is terrifying if you haven&#x27;t experienced it, and jarring if you haven&#x27;t experienced it in a while. The bean-counters who make up the systems where in human labor is a cog are really creating skinner boxes. The larger scale the corporation goes the less emphasis on empathy and human needs. You become a bit that can either do the work or can&#x27;t.Our cold &quot;efficient&quot; corporate machines has actively done everything it can to take humanity and empathy away from every process. Consumers are numbers on a dashboard. Workers are line items in an S-1. As much as people like to claim otherwise, the companies actions never take a hit that they know doesn&#x27;t have a benefit elsewhere. Amazon is a big pioneer in the space - take something and remove all human decision making from it, automate it and then move onto the next thing. Now they apply that against hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees.

It&#x27;s clear to anyone who isn&#x27;t mainlining USA jingoist media that USA is failing the current test, hard. It seems likely that expanded unionization would help us make wiser and more humane decisions. We should have laws like the ones you describe. The legislative process seems incapable of producing them, however.

&gt; Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for.To add: from an European perspective, much of US-Reddit&#x2F;HN and their stories are frankly unbelievable. &quot;Hire at will&quot;, bankruptcies because of cancer or people not calling an ambulance even if they are heavily injured because they fear thousands-of-dollars bills, MLMs, robocall terrorism, companies firing people for unionizing - basically unheard of, because there are laws that prevent this reasonably good, and transgressors will mostly be held accountable by courts and public opinion.

Why are you embarrassed? Embarrassment over their workplace implies you feel you have some level of stewardship of their workplace.

&gt; Things like acceptable workplace attire were issuesThat&#x27;s the norm for many (most?) high-paying jobs, even more so than the typical low-paying job. Tech is kind of the outlier, if you&#x27;re a banker or lawyer or consultant, you&#x27;re expected to wear a suit everywhere.

&gt; It&#x27;s hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today&#x27;s world.It would have to be a huge cultural shift away from profits being the #1 goal of companies. We need something to replace it.

A while back I helped a startup that was doing managed video services, specifically internal surveillance. A very logical &quot;service&quot; for them was to have actual humans review and verify various incidents and so they staffed up a small team of hourly video watchers.It was a culture shock. Things like acceptable workplace attire were issues; and there was no store-front or exposure to customers, it was just what&#x27;s acceptable in a professional office. Someone quitting with no notice wasn&#x27;t uncommon. I think the most shocking aspect was most lived in this sort of land of grand illusion, they had no concept that there were non-hourly jobs or workers building the system they used. All of them lived in a fairly delicate balance, a small inconvenience like some car trouble was potentially life altering for them. We did these somewhat terrible Thursday night deployments (think 4 hours most of the time) and more than a few times some of these guys wanted to &quot;help&quot; to get some overtime pay, they were incredulous at the idea that we didn&#x27;t get paid extra for that. Everyone deserves dignity and respect but it&#x27;s also easy to see how these untrusting sorts of institutions come to be.The big difference between ordering on Amazon and walking in to a Walmart is you have to look some of those people in the eye in Walmart. Credit to Tim for shining a little light on this. I&#x27;ve sort of thought that we might be in for a wave of 21st century unionization, I think the floor is a lot lower than that though. It&#x27;s hard to imagine what could spark a cultural shift that would unite workers in today&#x27;s world.

&gt; This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn&#x27;t want to acknowledge the privilege they&#x27;ve been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you&#x27;ve been in both.I agree. Anecdote: The difference in treatment between a permatemp (&#x27;seasonal&#x27; worker at an entertainment facility working more than 9 months per year, later round-the-clock) and F.T.E. is massive.In the former, you are guilty until proven, if not innocent, then merely suspicious.In the latter, you are innocent until proven guilty or more commonly incompetent.I&#x27;m glad I work at one of the latter places now.

&gt;software engineers didn&#x27;t want to acknowledge the privilege they&#x27;ve been living withMaybe people would be less hostile to the idea if you didn&#x27;t dismiss the fruits of their labor with accusations of &quot;privilege.&quot; It&#x27;s kind of insulting to be told that you effectively didn&#x27;t earn part or all of your success because of your race and&#x2F;or gender.

I&#x27;ve known of DBAs who had drug-testing.

When I switched from mechanical engineering to software engineering people would ask me how the switch went, and I would tell them it was like I became a new class of citizen. The pay was better, I didn&#x27;t get drug tested anymore, management was friendly, the rules were lax.This made a lot of people uncomfortable (software engineers didn&#x27;t want to acknowledge the privilege they&#x27;ve been living with and non-software folks interpreted it as bragging). I think it must be pretty tough to understand the gap unless you&#x27;ve been in both.

&gt; 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 &quot;low-skilled&quot; job, I&#x27;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 the heart of the idea of &quot;privilege&quot;, and why it can be so difficult to see yourself as privileged. Because it often involves nothing more than being given a basic level of trust and respect that, once you have them, can seem like a bare minimum, not something that you would need to fight for.

&gt; Reading through his post, it doesn&#x27;t sound like the goal was to change thingsI think he did everything he could think of to change things:&quot;At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.&quot;with no result, and no evident likelyhood of positive change.Which is why he had to quit.

Reading through his post, it doesn&#x27;t sound like the goal was to change things - he just didn&#x27;t want to be co-responsible for them.That said, it doesn&#x27;t sound like there was much more he could&#x27;ve done to change things from the inside-out; and even though it might not be the intention, this public statement does sound like it might contribute to changing it anyway.

He tried to use whatever influence he had to change things. It did fuck all. At that point, he would just be lending legitimacy to them by staying.

So if I get this right, now a VP will be hired that will approve of these things?I wonder if there&#x27;d have been utility to attempt to change the system from the inside out.I guess there wouldn&#x27;t be. Then this would be the only option left.

Genuinely inspiring. Made me realise how long it&#x27;s been since someone high up in tech actually took a stand and a risk and defended their principles publically. Thank you and know that your actions are meaningful and appreciated.

Yeah, his blog has previously indicated he’s been considering retiring.

I&#x27;m with OP on the non-profit route: if you&#x27;re a relatively healthy retiree who&#x27;s concerned about the future your children are going to live in (a recurring theme of his blog posts) there are a lot of activist organizations which can use serious talent which they can&#x27;t pay market rates for and he&#x27;d have the luxury of picking the one whose views most closely align.

I hear he&#x27;s 64, so this might not be a big deal for him going forward.

I doubt it&#x27;s an in depth criticism of capitalism, rather the specific sub-branch of worker-exploitative practices that the company does.He&#x27;d be quite happy (as are we all here, if we are truthful) making more millions in other more worker-friendlier ways.

I appreciate the candid statement he has made about one of the things that ails Amazon&#x27;s leadership.&gt; Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.I wonder if there&#x27;s any future opportunity for him in the existing set of well known names or large enough companies. I can&#x27;t think of any widely known tech company that doesn&#x27;t do &quot;21st-century capitalism&quot; (treating people as disposable cogs). Seems like getting into some non-profit that also has a decent track record may be the way to go for him.

Don&#x27;t let perfect be the enemy of good. It often takes a while for us to internalize and accept how some hard things and maybe he spent years trying to make sense of this problem and finally reached a breaking point.

with the emphasis on Capital (his millions)The joke being &quot;ally&quot; is a term used by those fighting against the injustices of capitalism, and this dude has millions from literally being the Boss and accrued from exploitation. Of course that doesn&#x27;t matter as he&#x27;s now a good guy speaking up for the oppressed. It&#x27;s quite amusing if you believe in anti-capitalism.

Excuse me? How many people with FY money do what he did? What he did IS the exception and henceforth noteworthy.

Do you think he would feel safe speaking up about this (or any) injustice if he weren&#x27;t financially secure? That&#x27;s sort of his entire point, imo, since the people Amazon fired certainly don&#x27;t have that luxury.

He&#x27;s just somebody with FY money in the bank so he can do whatever he wants in a larger scope than others. I&#x27;ll keep my hat on; this is nothing special in his position.

This is what being a capital-A Ally looks like. I take my hat off to you, sir.

Looking forward to what tbray is on to next. He has co-authored W3C&#x27;s original XML spec and the RFC spec for JSON while at Google. Now leaving AWS on matters of principle, he could just be the kind of person who can turn things around and being trusted by enough people to get behind new &quot;digital humanism&quot; initiatives in a post-cloud era, like cross-cloud computing&#x2F;service standards, and digital media&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;advertising rights and standards in an increasingly monopolistic market.

Not of all the web services. Amazon has a lot of VPs.

He wasn’t directly involved with the response to the whistleblowers, people higher up at Amazon were (it sounds like he wasn’t VP of the entire company but of the web services section specifically).

How does resigning better serve the cause than conscientious refusal to take part in despisable activities and get fired instead?

This is the fear.  Increased automation will come whether we resist it or not; what hardships will the breaking point bring?

&gt;I think it would be better for humans to not need to perform these jobs.Depends on how this plays out. Either some sort of UBI future...or potentially dramatically increased inequality and much suffering by a big chunk of humanity that can no longer economically compete at all. Could go either way I think.

I&#x27;m not sure what else you can expect in a world where jobs that require effectively 0 skill exist.I&#x27;d prefer the &quot;full automation&quot; route, as I think it would be better for humans to not need to perform these jobs. But until then, isn&#x27;t it a good thing that jobs which require no skills exist? Since there seem to be many people with little-to-no skills?

&gt;humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.That&#x27;s the part that scares me - it&#x27;s not just Amazon. Automation hasn&#x27;t even kicked off properly and we&#x27;ve already got humans being replaceable at best

Ignoring the bad faith questioning, I dont have to provide a gold standard in order to criticise Amazon. Everything I&#x27;ve said is extremely well documented.

&gt; Which is the mythical company treating their low-skill workers far better than Amazon?That&#x27;s an easy one: Costco. Do a cursory Google search and you&#x27;ll generally find positive stories going back years. There&#x27;s nothing &quot;mythical&quot; here, it&#x27;s a matter of explicit policy difference between the two retailers.

&gt; Again, which is the mythical company you are using as a benchmark here?Exactly. These kinds of criticisms are useless without a benchmark. Is Wal-Mart better, for example?

Wegmans is another good example. Decent company, happy workers.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wegmans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wegmans</a>

Which is the mythical company treating their low-skill workers far better than Amazon? Does the rest of big tech even employ their non professionals directly? Which of big tech directly employ their janitors and treat them much better than Amazon warehouse workers? Which of big non tech company does this?&gt;its refusal to pay tax.What do you even mean by this? Companies can&#x27;t refuse to pay tax. They have to pay tax as per law. If you mean they are using legal mechanisms to not pay their maximum possible tax, how is that different from Apple or other big tech keeping money in tax heavens.&gt; driven independent stores out of businessAnd which big&#x2F;successful comapny doesn&#x27;t drive out competitors out of business? Google&#x2F;FB have driven local newspapers out of business by sucking away all the ad money. MSFT squashed all the competition by extremely evil business practices.&gt; It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the worldAgain, which is the mythical company you are using as a benchmark here?

Same with Google. Oh... remember Apple-David v&#x2F;s MS-Goliath? or Apple-David v&#x2F;s IBM-Goliath?Corporations change, just like people. I&#x27;m not sure if thats something that can be avoided. Maybe Valve is an outlier, perhaps. Size seems to be the factor here...

I think that&#x27;s the nature of public corporations. Once the board starts to gain influence, the company is gradually steered by people who are not interested in image or philanthropy any further than necessary for growth.

It&#x27;s amazing that this is where it arrived. In its early days, the exact opposite was true. People loved Amazon because its going against the &quot;big box stores&quot;. Movies were made romanticizing the downfall of the big box stores. Now Amazon became the villain. Similar thing is of course happening with Google.

Amazon is a great evil.It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world but as a company that has treated its employees (both hourly and salaried) with contempt, driven independent stores out of business and refused to play on a level playing field both through its shady business practices or its refusal to pay tax.Well done to Tim Bray for acting according to his conscience. Hopefully this sets an example to other Amazon employees and other tech workers working in similarly morally compromised organisations.

It&#x27;s almost like people with morals and people investing in Amazon are two completely separate groups.

Well, as somebody who is unimpressed Amazon&#x27;s corporate dystopia, yet also owns a significant amount of Amazon stock, I don&#x27;t think the stock market is the place to look for these changes.At a stock level, I imagine their longterm plan is to replace warehouse workers with robots anyways.

It&#x27;s crazy how stuff like this keeps coming out, but Amazon&#x27;s stock just keeps going up..

It is surprising that the rest of the world is already woke, but the software engineers in these companies have not risen to the reality yet. And that has led to their successful manipulation of neglecting anything but money.

&gt;It&#x27;s a wake up call, or at least an attempt at that, for the likes of Amazon that if they are looking to have reputable people, like Tim Bray, associate themselves and their name with you, there are certain standards that have to be met.Prominent VCs are calling for people to get back to work every day on Twitter. The rest of the world is waking up to these people, but we have a long way to go before Silicon Valley cares.

It&#x27;s a wake up call, or at least an attempt at that, for the likes of Amazon that if they are looking to have reputable people, like Tim Bray, associate themselves and their name with you, there are certain standards that have to be met.Amazon, MS, Google, Apple, etc. rank among the most wealthy companies in the world and they&#x27;ve each had to deal with internal pressures where their employees voiced concerns about certain things or where there was some kind of whistle blower situation. And they each dealt with it in their own ways.IMHO firing whistle blowers is the kind of action that should be called out as very negative and not something to be apologetic about.So, I admire what Tim Bray is doing here and fully understand that he&#x27;s having a hard time justifying working for what he&#x27;s diplomatically not quite calling out as aholes; though the undertone is quite clear.Of course as he is pointing out, he&#x27;s in a position where he can afford to do so financially. But then, being able to and actually doing are two things and he&#x27;s showing some back bone here by 1) walking away and taking a hit financially, and 2) writing about it in the hope that leadership steps up and acts to correct the situation: compensate individuals affected, offer to rehire them, and discipline executives involved in pushing this through. Unlikely to happen, but one can hope for someone with a backbone stepping up. It would be the right thing to do. At the minimum, they&#x27;ve just been exposed for what they are and that might have consequences elsewhere for them.

Bye, Amazon