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Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hadrien01 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seibelj 6y agoIf you are very idealistic I would recommend working for a smaller company that aligns with your values. It is naive to join a company like Amazon or Google and imagine it is some progressive utopia. These are mega corps, and in my imagination I see them like The Empire from Star Wars, and you will be a storm trooper on the death star - just one worker among many. You will be on the winning team, well compensated, and destroying your competition. But don't pretend you aren't employee #517384 even if you are a higher-ranking manager. Darth Vader will still strangle you if you get in his way. All that being said, I would still consider working for the empire, just as in the past I can envision myself working for a major European military power or the Dutch East India Company, or like ancestors of mine who worked for Standard Oil and AT&T. Amazon and Google are the big corporate powers of today and your silly blog posts about unions won't stop them.
- elliekelly 6y agoPerhaps if there were more people like Tim Bray the Death Star might be a little more progressive and might not be the de facto “winning team”.
- katmannthree 6y agoJust like with politics, those people have a way of letting their personal ethics select them out of the organization they were hoping to change.
- elliekelly 6y agoYes and the “noisy exit” is typically the strategy of last resort. Tim Bray is a smart guy, a respected leader, and a proven problem-solver. Imagine all of the other avenues to effect change that he exhausted before deciding to write this blog.
- toyg 6y ago"You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet." - Clerks, 1994
- ryanmcbride 6y ago"...I can envision myself working for a major European military power..." Hmmm
- seibelj 6y agoPrussian military, British military, French military. I am speaking about middle ages to modern era. A lot of management and scientific progress happened there, and it was a way for the lower classes to rise in a more meritocratic way. It was also a mechanism to learn sailing skills so you could become a trading merchant.
- goldenkey 6y agoSo basically, you are willing to sell your morals for scientific progress in the name of helping people? You sound conflicted.
- seibelj 6y agoI don't think it is possible to live your life entirely pure based on your morals. This is a philosophical question. It is possible to work for Amazon today or the large corporation of the past, and not be entirely morally OK with the situation. Many aspects of life are the same, unless you are a monk.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago"We can have all the morals, we can afford." - my old minister
- goldenkey 6y agoOf course it is. You just are arguing that morals need to allow for doing shitty things for great things in the end. Not very new of an idea...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- switch007 6y agoIn my experience, small companies are fine until the point they get board members who have run bigger companies. Which is quite early on. The only answer is to run your own company, with all the trade-offs that entails.
- Aunche 6y agoWorking for a small company just moves the problem to a place that's more difficult to see. If Tim was a VP at a boutique cloud provider, inevitably, some of their customers treat their employees even worse than Amazon.
- ericzawo 6y agoI read "your silly blog posts about unions won't stop them" in Chancellor Palpatine voice, fwiw. (Happy may 4th)
- brenden2 6y agoBlog posts about unions won't stop them, but actual unionization will.
- d33lio 6y agoI'm not that idealistic and I still found my time at Amazon overwhelmingly distasteful. The amount of shielding / work to just appear productive / effective at multiple levels of both tech and management was moronic. I'd work for a big tech company again but wow was my time at amazon something I regret spending waking hours doing.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoThe implication that race or gender is involved in the firings is pretty silly.
- goldenkey 6y agoYeah, money is always the bottom denominator. A thief doesn't care if you're black or white, as long as you got the green.
- astroalex 6y agoGenuine question: do you believe it's purely coincidence, then? I'm open to the possibility, but it seems kind of unlikely.
- missedthecue 6y agoWhat reason do they have to selectively fire based on gender?
- free_rms 6y agoIt's very obviously about class and material condition. We live in a society, and that society has correlations of these things with race and gender.. but from Amazon's perspective, they hire the people who don't have a better option for that job, and the demographics are effectively a coincidence as far as they're concerned.
- throwaway55554 6y agoWhy?
- whoisjuan 6y ago“In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.” ― Rex Stout
- Pfhreak 6y agoIf the firings disproportionately or systemically impact races or genders, the firings can be racist/sexist -- even if race or gender is not involved in the firing decision. Racism and discrimination are related but separate concepts.
- frpzzd 6y agoIn my opinion, it won’t do anyone any good for him to quit “in solidarity with” the fired workers. If he wants the situation to improve, he should remain VP and use his power to help make things better. Now he‘ll probably just be replaced with someone who is less sympathetic to the workers.
- sitkack 6y agoThis is a flawed rationalization that keeps the status quo, if your force commits nothing to the work, you move.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoSeems like he tried to. From the post on his website (HN discussion [0]): > 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. > That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782
- AtlasLion 6y agoUnless he realized that the company is too far gone.
- Traster 6y agoHe was quite clear, he tried to use the leverage he had without quitting, but at some point you have to draw the line and say "I can't change things from the inside, so either I put up with it or I leave". If Amazon starts to lose top talent because they can't treat their employees with respect and dignity hopefully it will force them to change, and if it doesn't, hopefully it'll cause them to fail.
- Frost1x 6y ago>If Amazon starts to lose top talent because they can't treat their employees with respect and dignity hopefully it will force them to change, and if it doesn't, hopefully it'll cause them to fail. I personally think that's overly optimistic. Modern corporate culture structures are toxic to society across the board. Some a bit less, some a bit more. The more leverage an entity feels they have (i.e. power), the more toxic they tend to grow against their own workers, consumers, etc. This problem is absolutely not isolated to Amazon, they're just the current poster child of what's toxic and growing in corporate America. This pandemic has put a spotlight on these practices (for the better I argue) and illustrated almost in caricature the divergence between business goals and societies goals. People are far to quick to defend these organizations' behaviors and give them the benefit of the doubt.
- bawana 6y agoWhy does big always become evil?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoHuman nature organizing itself within a legal and economic framework. Don't like the result, fix the frameworks. A quote I never get tired of using is, "Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand." If you can, be the change.
- domador 6y agoPerverse incentives and people who have been perverted into pursuing such incentives. The main such incentive is "profit at any cost".
- bt1a 6y agoBecause the people in charge are constrained to a narrow goal of bringing returns to shareholders
- kiba 6y agoWhat kind of return? Long term or short term? Destroying a company through mismanagement is decried as evil too.
- acdha 6y agoTheoretically but there are far more examples of people getting extremely rich than suffering consequences, especially in a period where deregulation means the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of punishment being a tiny fraction of the profits.
- kmbfjr 6y agoMy bet is that it was always evil, no one noticed because they were distracted by the amazing customer focus and service. Google may have touted the "do no evil" matra, but looking back, their plan was always to look over your shoulder. Nothing Google did was ever altruistic, and I think Amazon was and is the same way.
- rickyplouis 6y agoCredit is due to anyone willing to sacrifice, no matter how small, for the voiceless and underrepresented.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” -- Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison
- dman 6y agoBrilliant quote - going to use it in the future.
- throwlaplace 6y agoi think a lot about this (more than i think about my research). i wholeheartedly agree not because i feel obligated but simply because i'm able to - my life is not precarious (it used to be) and others' lives are. i've argued it from many perspectives (pragmatism, morals, etc) but the simple truth is i'm pained by the fact that other people are living hopeless and miserable lives. so i help and give and sacrifice because i can and it's the only thing i can do. unfortunately most people simply don't care. maybe they're lucky for that but there's a sartre quotation that comes to mind (i think it's from no exit): the only pain you could've avoided was being ignorant of others' pain. edit: sorry i was wrong it was kafka "You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid."
- mysticmode 6y agoThe fact that you are acknowledging what you are feeling about others when they are in a miserable situation and the empathy that you show to them is a gift. You don't need to research about this more! Just try to do what you can do to others :) If you help others' you help yourself.
- cryptos 6y agoWe really need more courageous people like Tim Bray!
- trenning 6y agoSeeing this on CNBC really makes me happy that it's getting some actual coverage. I hope having someone who isn't just a wagie quit in protest will make others at Amazon come to terms with their employer, and acknowledge their practices.
- anon102010 6y agoWas this the guy that brought us XML?
- konaraddi 6y agoHe was a co-author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray#XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray#XML
- mellosouls 6y agoYes he was involved, so this gets him some forgiveness.
- imglorp 6y agoHey we love to hate on XML now, but not only did a framework of markup and schema make sense at the time, markup as an interchange concept was a pretty new thing in 1986. We had some scattered formatter precursors like TeX and troff but not a general purpose framework like this. Look at everything SGML begat or enabled: Docbook, HTML, XML, SOAP, WSDL/SOA, and ecosystems around transformations like DTDs and XSLT. I think the biggest failure of XML was the pesky humans who kept trying to poke it by hand instead of working with abstractions so they never saw it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- finnh 6y agoGood for you, Tim! I've interacted with him once or twice via his blog and always found him to be a super nice, thoughtful guy.
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- rickpmg 6y agoI think it would have been more effective if he just 'called in sick' (if that was possible for him) or staged an extended walkout of engineers. I have all my infrastructure on AWS and the prospect that it could all come to a halt immediately and unexpectedly makes me think of other providers or at least spreading my workoad to azure, google, etc.. and that should get Amazon's attention. I really don't think a single top level engineer voting with his feet will have any measurable impact technically or financially on amazon.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI doubt AWS would immediately fall over if some engineers walked out for a few days. Might still send a message though.
- rickpmg 6y agoI agree.. it's the message that there is another 'point of failure' that no one has paid much attention to. If you want Amazon/AWS to change it's ways, then you need to get the attention of CIO's. And I think regular walkouts of 100 engineers who monitor the network is going to do a better job of getting it than a single architect leaving, no matter how much of a star he was.
- overgard 6y agoGood on Tim Bray for doing what he did, but imo the only solution is a union.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoI suppose the stock is rising because a traitor at such a high level being visibly removed from the company is a good sign.
- tompccs 6y agoAmazon needs to stop internally framing labour dispute problems as PR problems. Huge respect to Tim Bray for walking the walk in defence of his values, something I've only rarely seen from high-earning people with left-wing sentiments. My own sense of the situation (and I could well be wrong) is that Amazon is not a particularly bad place to work as a warehouse worker (they after all employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled people at $15/hr, no mean feat), but that they have a justifiably high exposure to the press for their workplace practices due to their scale. I think that this is why some middle-management jobsworths think it best to fire activist workers rather than address their issues. It's those managers who should be out of a job now, not Tim Bray. I feel Tim's railings against 21st century capitalism and praise for France for their bare-faced protectionism are misplaced, but understandable under the circumstances.