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Amazon in general, like Uber, considers that warehouse employees and driver are just a needed adjustment until robots take over. They have the consideration tha

by bertil 9y ago

Amazon in general, like Uber, considers that warehouse employees and driver are just a needed adjustment until robots take over. They have the consideration that Google/Waymo has for the people filling in “Is this a Stop sign” Catpcha. Thinking of it as sweat labor is not false, but it won’t convince the company change. If you think of it that way, you understand better how Amazon product managers and engineers are OK with the treatment. Also part of that vision: those employees benefit from constant iteration of the work conditions, from Bezos’ initial suggestion to get knee pad to help filling in boxes (rapidly replaced by the far better option to get tables). All the pain is just a step in the process that has not been automated yet, and the “handful” of people “temporary” suffering now are just there to provide training data for the order of magnitude more orders to come when running around, climbing on step-ladders, will be automated. And, in fairness, a lot of it has, or is about to: Amazon has robots to carry shelves around, raising platforms, etc. They are generally not used at scale yet, but teams are actively working on it. I’m not saying that to justify the company’s callous take, or pain their plan as a delusional grandeur, but to explain how the stress is part of the process: to reveal what hurts. As far as I can tell, all employees, especially desk-dwellers, are asked to do shifts in the warehouse to build some empathy. It’s far from perfect and seem to hide the reality of family life for the de-facto full-time workers -- but accusing Amazon of having inhumane condition is missing the dynamic angle to it. I believe there is a massive mis-match between how employees see their service and the efforts so many employees are putting in; I’m not convinced that you can reach automation faster by having humans run around and learn from their mistake. I would be a lot more comfortable with the experiment is participants where excited by the perspective of automation rather than working poor, but I’m not in charge of the company, so it’s hard to grasp exactly what could be done. I believe that warehouse employees with more free-time, more initiative and the ability automate themselves would automate faster than what Amazon is currently doing, but that’s just speculation.

djhworld 9y ago
> you understand better how Amazon product managers and engineers are OK with the treatment. Or do they really care?
- bertil 9y ago
  The closest example I can imagine is, the same way medical professionals care about you, or maybe surgeons more than others, or maybe pre-clinical bio-scientists: most of the time, not really. They have their own paperwork, debt, office rivalries, etc. They do when you are ‘interesting’ (you very much not want to be ‘interesting’) but they actually care about fixing your problem. They probably care more when they see you, just like Amazon employees care after they have been at a warehouse. It drives them to work on their project that will address one small pain-point -- but they can’t care too much, just because their fix takes so much time, if they cared, it would crush them. Both product managers and medical professional have to respect proper, long, tedious testing procedure to make sure their solution works as intended. I think few people measure explicitly the amount of that bureaucratic detachment (Chaplin, Kafka, Ionesco did) and even less see how it is necessary to progress.

by bertil 9y ago

djhworld 9y ago

> you understand better how Amazon product managers and engineers are OK with the treatment. Or do they really care?

bertil 9y ago
The closest example I can imagine is, the same way medical professionals care about you, or maybe surgeons more than others, or maybe pre-clinical bio-scientists: most of the time, not really. They have their own paperwork, debt, office rivalries, etc. They do when you are ‘interesting’ (you very much not want to be ‘interesting’) but they actually care about fixing your problem. They probably care more when they see you, just like Amazon employees care after they have been at a warehouse. It drives them to work on their project that will address one small pain-point -- but they can’t care too much, just because their fix takes so much time, if they cared, it would crush them. Both product managers and medical professional have to respect proper, long, tedious testing procedure to make sure their solution works as intended. I think few people measure explicitly the amount of that bureaucratic detachment (Chaplin, Kafka, Ionesco did) and even less see how it is necessary to progress.