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That'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

That'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't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. I found very interesting the book of the guy who founded "The Big Issue", 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.

whymauri 6y ago
>That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did. But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It'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's not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it's a call to specifically learn profitable skills.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I don't think GP meant that everyone who works in a warehouse should be joining 'coding bootcamps' and striving to become '10x ninja devs' instead. I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!
  - DagAgren 6y ago
    We absolutely need people working in warehouses. Our society would collapse far faster without them than if all of us reading this would go away. And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.
    - defnotashton2 6y ago
      I'm not disagreeing people deserve respect. But with automation do we need people in factories? Answer is no.
      - GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
        It probably depends a bit more on how you define “need”. Do factory owners need people in factories when a robot can do the job? Probably not. Does society need people in factories so that the individuals have a job, which creates a sense of purpose and means through which people can provide for themselves? Probably.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently. > And by all means, if you are capable go for it And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever. That's false. Usually what many of these workers need is help navigating how to get a profitable job, what skills actually pay and where to learn those skills in a way that results in a job. As we've established above, "get a four year degree" usually isn't a great path and these folks know it - but right now our culture is stuck on that phenomenon.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    When people say the workers are incapable, some folks mean that there are systemic problems with capitalism (particularly in the US). The workers don't have a deficiency, the system is designed to keep them where they are.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      That seems a spectacular claim that will require spectacular evidence to support it. I realize it's a very trendy statement, but it does not appear supported by the data[^1]. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Real_median_US_household_income_through_2018.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        Sorry, it seems axiomatic to me. There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker. Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well. One graph does not tell the whole story.
- xondono 6y ago
  I’m sorry but the “day-to-day doesn’t let me learn” always sounded like an excuse to me (not implying anything personal). It can be true for some time, but it’s always a temporal situation. Adquiring skills has pretty much nothing to do with college, some of the most skilled people I know in sales or executive office didn’t even got a high school degree (they’re old, I live in Spain).
Someone 6y ago
“perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don'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.
- toyg 6y ago
  You know that stuff about the human brain being terrible at correctly calculating the odds? I think this sort of rule-making comes from that. Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at the other end of the country), we then assume employees are assholes until proven otherwise. It's shitty for everyone involved, really.
  - felipemnoa 6y ago
    Another example is renting apartments. One bad tenant can cause a lot of harm, especially if you are a small landlord ie. three apartment house. You can go by years without a single bad tenant but all it takes is one bad one for you to start checking credit reports, references, etc.
  - User23 6y ago
    The lone asshole taking advantage also makes the other 19 miserable. The effect on morale is crushing. Always think past the first order consequences.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    If the lowest tier of job is relatively easily replaced, one assumes the next tier is as well meaning the people who are often making these rules are not well trained veteran managers but people who may be first time people managers or not be cut out to be a manager. I had an early crappy hourly gig as a kid (as most do) at a major chain and in the span of my two years there we had one manager get caught doing crystal meth, another get caught flagrante delicto and a third who was just a jerk.
arez 6y ago
I suspect the same percentage of people exploiting the system in warehouses as in office jobs, still you can see very "inhumane" rules only in warehouses.
- fastball 6y ago
  The difference is that with unskilled jobs, you can immediately find a replacement for the position. It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency. I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.
  - arez 6y ago
    yeah definitely, but it would still be nice if workers would be treated more equal no matter their profession
lkramer 6y ago
You don'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'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.
- adamc 6y ago
  Your explanation seems off to me. Why would lower demand necessarily imply there was someone suitable who was desperate? It seems like your explanation suggests that the pool of "suitable" would be larger, i.e., the job is less skilled. I think it is definitely true that less skilled workers have bad options, because, by definition, they are easily replaced. More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too... it's just less automatic that they can be easily replaced. In a recession, or after structural changes that render many such workers redundant... sure.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too And the moment that happens, all those nice benefits go flying out the window and the SWE find themselves having to clock out when going to the toilet. Demand (and therefore the easy of replacement) is what makes the difference.
  - azernik 6y ago
    Low or high demand are always relative to supply. So think "high supply" rather than "low demand".
throwaway55554 6y ago
> I have never run a warehouse, You don't know... > ... 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't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. ... but you're assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely. I think these biases are the issue being discussed.
- mtrower 6y ago
  > You don't know... Do you? I've worked in plenty of these "unskilled" environments. It's absolutely the reason for these rules. Is every low wage worker like this? Certainly not. I assure you I've encountered plenty who are, and the system of un-trust tends to breed untrustworthiness in those who otherwise might be trustworthy. It's not just the system, however. My grandfather ran a small construction business. He had no such draconian rules (and paid far better than minimum wage). I can't count how many new-hires he had to fire for crazy things like constantly showing up drunk, showing up late or not at all, etc. One guy would only show up on payday when checks were being handed out, work two hours, then leave. (Obviously, he didn't last long; still, Grandpa was too generous.) I don't defend such draconian systems as just; I despise them. However they absolutely do exist so that large companies can just hire disposable employees en masse, regardless of their work ethic.
  - throwaway55554 6y ago
    > Do you? I worked retail for a dozen or so years after HS, before, and later during, getting my eng deg. The bad apples (so to speak) were rare. People showed up, worked, went home just fine. On the other hand, in the 15 years I've been a professional developer, I've seen people spend all their time looking for their next gig and doing the programming challenges necessary to get that gig. I've seen people skirt IT rules so they could access sites they shouldn't at work. I've seen people throw absolute 3 year old style tantrums because they were asked to fix bugs. People routinely show up late to meeting. All things low-skilled workers would get fired for but is somehow acceptable in our "bro" culture. It isn't an issue with the skill necessary for the environment. It's the people. And it doesn't matter if they're making minimum wage or 150K.
__s 6y ago
My father works at a warehouse. I've worked in flooring These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people'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't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong
- eightysixfour 6y ago
  Unfortunately that's incredibly hard to scale. I've seen many construction companies hit the growth wall thinking that they could grow using that model instead of building process.
- roosterdawn 6y ago
  This is one of the few voices of sanity I've seen on this thread. Your father seems wise. With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon is put in place beyond a certain size because manager quality cannot be guaranteed. Now, whether that's a sound reason for its existence or not can be debated (I'd tend to agree it's not), but it does seem to function efficiently.
  - miscPerson 6y ago
    Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that. Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer. Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?
rchaud 6y ago
> 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.
- schnischna 6y ago
  Can you give examples? "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." If that was the case, the same would have happened at the previous large corporations.

whymauri 6y ago

>That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs. I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did. But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It'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's not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it's a call to specifically learn profitable skills.

OJFord 6y ago
I don't think GP meant that everyone who works in a warehouse should be joining 'coding bootcamps' and striving to become '10x ninja devs' instead. I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!
- DagAgren 6y ago
  We absolutely need people working in warehouses. Our society would collapse far faster without them than if all of us reading this would go away. And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.
  - defnotashton2 6y ago
    I'm not disagreeing people deserve respect. But with automation do we need people in factories? Answer is no.
    - GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
      It probably depends a bit more on how you define “need”. Do factory owners need people in factories when a robot can do the job? Probably not. Does society need people in factories so that the individuals have a job, which creates a sense of purpose and means through which people can provide for themselves? Probably.
vorpalhex 6y ago
> All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently. > And by all means, if you are capable go for it And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever. That's false. Usually what many of these workers need is help navigating how to get a profitable job, what skills actually pay and where to learn those skills in a way that results in a job. As we've established above, "get a four year degree" usually isn't a great path and these folks know it - but right now our culture is stuck on that phenomenon.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  When people say the workers are incapable, some folks mean that there are systemic problems with capitalism (particularly in the US). The workers don't have a deficiency, the system is designed to keep them where they are.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    That seems a spectacular claim that will require spectacular evidence to support it. I realize it's a very trendy statement, but it does not appear supported by the data[^1]. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Real_median_US_household_income_through_2018.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      Sorry, it seems axiomatic to me. There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker. Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well. One graph does not tell the whole story.
xondono 6y ago
I’m sorry but the “day-to-day doesn’t let me learn” always sounded like an excuse to me (not implying anything personal). It can be true for some time, but it’s always a temporal situation. Adquiring skills has pretty much nothing to do with college, some of the most skilled people I know in sales or executive office didn’t even got a high school degree (they’re old, I live in Spain).

Someone 6y ago

“perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don'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.

toyg 6y ago
You know that stuff about the human brain being terrible at correctly calculating the odds? I think this sort of rule-making comes from that. Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at the other end of the country), we then assume employees are assholes until proven otherwise. It's shitty for everyone involved, really.
- felipemnoa 6y ago
  Another example is renting apartments. One bad tenant can cause a lot of harm, especially if you are a small landlord ie. three apartment house. You can go by years without a single bad tenant but all it takes is one bad one for you to start checking credit reports, references, etc.
- User23 6y ago
  The lone asshole taking advantage also makes the other 19 miserable. The effect on morale is crushing. Always think past the first order consequences.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  If the lowest tier of job is relatively easily replaced, one assumes the next tier is as well meaning the people who are often making these rules are not well trained veteran managers but people who may be first time people managers or not be cut out to be a manager. I had an early crappy hourly gig as a kid (as most do) at a major chain and in the span of my two years there we had one manager get caught doing crystal meth, another get caught flagrante delicto and a third who was just a jerk.

arez 6y ago

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

fastball 6y ago
The difference is that with unskilled jobs, you can immediately find a replacement for the position. It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency. I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.
- arez 6y ago
  yeah definitely, but it would still be nice if workers would be treated more equal no matter their profession

lkramer 6y ago

You don'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'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.

adamc 6y ago
Your explanation seems off to me. Why would lower demand necessarily imply there was someone suitable who was desperate? It seems like your explanation suggests that the pool of "suitable" would be larger, i.e., the job is less skilled. I think it is definitely true that less skilled workers have bad options, because, by definition, they are easily replaced. More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too... it's just less automatic that they can be easily replaced. In a recession, or after structural changes that render many such workers redundant... sure.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too And the moment that happens, all those nice benefits go flying out the window and the SWE find themselves having to clock out when going to the toilet. Demand (and therefore the easy of replacement) is what makes the difference.
- azernik 6y ago
  Low or high demand are always relative to supply. So think "high supply" rather than "low demand".

throwaway55554 6y ago

> I have never run a warehouse, You don't know... > ... 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't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately. ... but you're assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely. I think these biases are the issue being discussed.

mtrower 6y ago
> You don't know... Do you? I've worked in plenty of these "unskilled" environments. It's absolutely the reason for these rules. Is every low wage worker like this? Certainly not. I assure you I've encountered plenty who are, and the system of un-trust tends to breed untrustworthiness in those who otherwise might be trustworthy. It's not just the system, however. My grandfather ran a small construction business. He had no such draconian rules (and paid far better than minimum wage). I can't count how many new-hires he had to fire for crazy things like constantly showing up drunk, showing up late or not at all, etc. One guy would only show up on payday when checks were being handed out, work two hours, then leave. (Obviously, he didn't last long; still, Grandpa was too generous.) I don't defend such draconian systems as just; I despise them. However they absolutely do exist so that large companies can just hire disposable employees en masse, regardless of their work ethic.
- throwaway55554 6y ago
  > Do you? I worked retail for a dozen or so years after HS, before, and later during, getting my eng deg. The bad apples (so to speak) were rare. People showed up, worked, went home just fine. On the other hand, in the 15 years I've been a professional developer, I've seen people spend all their time looking for their next gig and doing the programming challenges necessary to get that gig. I've seen people skirt IT rules so they could access sites they shouldn't at work. I've seen people throw absolute 3 year old style tantrums because they were asked to fix bugs. People routinely show up late to meeting. All things low-skilled workers would get fired for but is somehow acceptable in our "bro" culture. It isn't an issue with the skill necessary for the environment. It's the people. And it doesn't matter if they're making minimum wage or 150K.

__s 6y ago

My father works at a warehouse. I've worked in flooring These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people'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't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong

eightysixfour 6y ago
Unfortunately that's incredibly hard to scale. I've seen many construction companies hit the growth wall thinking that they could grow using that model instead of building process.
roosterdawn 6y ago
This is one of the few voices of sanity I've seen on this thread. Your father seems wise. With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon is put in place beyond a certain size because manager quality cannot be guaranteed. Now, whether that's a sound reason for its existence or not can be debated (I'd tend to agree it's not), but it does seem to function efficiently.
- miscPerson 6y ago
  Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that. Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer. Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?

rchaud 6y ago

> 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.

schnischna 6y ago
Can you give examples? "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." If that was the case, the same would have happened at the previous large corporations.