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It's a warehouse. We life in the 21th century. In theory if we would sit together and structure the existing workforce without all the bullshit overhead of acco
by sigi45 7y ago
It's a warehouse. We life in the 21th century. In theory if we would sit together and structure the existing workforce without all the bullshit overhead of accounting, bullshit jobs and priorities life quality and sustainability, no one would need to work and we could achieve this in the next 5, 10, 50 years.
I get that amazon should pay there workforce properly and as long as we have this, it should be something people can and should do in a social way but Baltimore is a US City, they don't even have a working health care system.
A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers?
- alex_young 7y agoI guess it depends on how great you are at guessing what to optimize for. If you make a machine that just rewards completing tasks, maybe you'll get poor quality. If you add quality to the mix, maybe you'll fire everyone who has experience and you'll be left with only those yet to make a mistake.
- nkozyra 7y ago> A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers? Increasingly, this viewpoint bothers me. To be honest I don't know the ins and outs of working in an Amazon warehouse but I suspect it's not as brainless a job as you imply. Further, why does that attribute make this ok? Why wouldn't it similarly be ok if the computer could fire people automatically if a threshold of unit tests failed or if a developer failed to meet LOC quotas?
- gambiting 7y agoBecause there's more metrics to programming than LOC and if a company treats it like the only metric then they deserve to go under. Working in a warehouse does not have multiple dimensions to it. You are paid to pick up things, put them in boxes and then pick up more things. That's it. It's easy to measure. For comparison sake, I know someone who runs a company sorting refuse. Each person in the warehouse needs to sort through 500kg of refuse every day. That's it. Literally nothing else matters. It's not a complex job, so the metric is not complex either.
- nkozyra 7y agoForget the LOC example. Let's just say failing tests. Pick any single thing you think is critical to software development. Regardless of what it is, would it be acceptable to you to have an automated process simply fire someone for not hitting this metric? I feel like at some point we have to draw the line. We're going to have to coexist with automation and eventually it will get to software development, too. Some parameters about what we consider to be reasonable and unreasonable to automate make a lot of sense to me. I also feel like we get very classist as software developers and fall into the I-am-special trap frequently.
- paulcole 7y agoWe have drawn the line. Right now it’s at Amazon warehouse workers. Also there is a critical thing to software development: Working for a business that makes money. If you don’t hit that metric, you’ll eventually be out of a job. Plus, there are many more people who can pick up boxes than there are who can program.
- nkozyra 7y agoWe haven't draw any line at all, it's simply where it's been pushed so far.
- Aeolun 7y agoIt would be similarly ok, but not nearly as effective, I assume. Which is probably why nobody does it.
- notyourwork 7y agoI worked in a warehouse and it is as mindless as you can imagine. You receive a slip, pick things on slip, place in box, tape close and repeat.
- sigi45 7y agoI actually would love to see real statistics about my job performance. I'm doubting myself how good i am. I don't think its very objective how i or people around me earn money. But yes i don't look down to people working in a warehouse but i don't think that it takes too much knowledge. That is the reason why so many more people can do it. I have seen people struggling with my 'simple' tasks continuously and they are in the same field as i'm. There has to be a difference between software engineering and warehousing. I would prefer to have a proper social system and a future were we don't work because of work. Therefore this is an discrepancy in my world view: You should not need them and they should have a good life. But it is much more efficient and logical to have a computer system to fire people.
- s_kilk 7y ago> A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers? Because they're human beings. How'd you like to be treated in such a dehumanizing way?
- sevensor 7y agoWhy are you picking on accounting here? There's nothing more vital to the enterprise than understanding how its money moves. It's not easy, and if it doesn't happen nobody gets paid.