8 ms·

I clicked feeling like it would be impossible to give them a fair chance in 3 minutes, but reading it I definitely am on the workers side and he gave them way m

I clicked feeling like it would be impossible to give them a fair chance in 3 minutes, but reading it I definitely am on the workers side and he gave them way more than 3 min. This is a Kafka level story, having long dealings with an obviously incompetent and labyrinthine organization, only to be immediately penalized for the slightest miss on his own part. Especially the "if you're not at your workstation in one minute you'll be penalized / where is my workstation / I dont know" bit is straight out of The Castle or something. Anyway, I agree with his overall feeling on the state of labor now.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
What is your feeling on the state of labor? The state of Amazon's blue collar working conditions are widely considered to be crap of course, and there are a lot of complaints about labor laws, unions, outsourcing and immigration, etc. I didn't quite see how he connected the issues in the post though. I mean beyond state of labor = not good (and maybe that's all you were saying too).
- version_five 5y ago
  I was broadly agreeing with the poster that it's worth crying over. Without writing an essay, automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work (maybe its always been that way), and people are treated at "resources". This happens at all levels but is worst, to the point of being potentially inhumane, in low skill jobs.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Oh yeah I agree with you there. What's really grating is that these people and "low skill" jobs that form the backbone of our functional society have been abandoned by the political movement they bled to create (which is obviously now hijacked and totally perverted by the ruling class). It makes me cringe every time I hear a "left" wing voter or politician boast about how much the uneducateds dislike them, and gloat about how worthless those people must be to be concerned about immigration policies affecting their jobs. It's no surprise their lot is not improving. I only hope they can band together and affect real change again before the ruling class is able to irrevocably divide people against one another. Maybe it's already too late :(
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    >automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work What's interesting though is I don't hear a lot of people on HN complaining about CI/CD, which IMO is part of an overall approach that treats devs like cogs in an automated process. In some ways, I think we even celebrate it because, as devs, we are the automators. But increasingly, we're becoming more beholden to the processes we've automated.
    - mikewave 5y ago
      The big difference here is that CI/CD should ideally be taking away annoying work from devs so that they can more smoothly go from problem/feature -> hard thinking work -> code -> out the door, without having to deal with the highly repetitive part of the job. The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living. 15 years ago in IT if you could automate things, you just ended up with less active work to do. Now that automation is the norm instead of a bonus cool thing, it has become formalized and measured, and you may not have the saved time as free time, you have to now double down on doing the hard parts of the job. This doesn't actually work in reality for most people as we can't actually think hard for more than a few hours out of the work day (10x'rs exempt, of course.)
      - unclebucknasty 5y ago
        >The big difference here is that CI/CD should ideally be taking away annoying True. OTOH, I feel like some version of this is always sold as the worker-facing rationale for automation and increased productivity. For some jobs, it's "hey, we're going to automate your job away so you can go do something meaningful with your life". For devs, it's "we're going to automate this for you so you can focus on meaningful work here". >The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living. That's it in a nutshell. The "gains" don't accrue to devs, but to the never-ending hunt for still more productivity. And, I think that's a feature; not a bug. That is, from an organizational perspective, agile and all that it's ushered in (including devops and CI/CD) were never intended to improve dev quality of life. Instead, they're all about the highest LOC in the minimum time, a.k.a "productivity".
  - mikewave 5y ago
    I think it's important to note that it has sucked the humanity out of levels of worker above the bottom-of-the-pole labourer, as well; the HR people and trainers in the post are similarly labourers, though instead of using their muscles they're using their words; but they're still required to work like hands of the automation, with scheduled onboarding sessions and processes they have to follow. Given enough time, and a smooth process, eventually this should not be so painful; but when it is painful, it is supposed to be the job of a human (especially once in HR) to act as a bridge between process and person, so as to keep morale at a good level and to provide a channel for feedback from employees up to the teams responsible for process automation. It doesn't sound like this is in place here, at all; instead we have people who are displaying all the signs of not caring about the human anymore because they have become so subservient to the machine that they cannot afford to.
tux3 5y ago
Kafka is one way to look at it, but if anything the description of the process evokes The Good Place to me. It must be an accident that the process is so catastrophically bad that it leaves new hires drained and crying. But you'd almost start to wonder how much worse you could really make it, if you were optimizing for "plausibly deniable torment”. I don't have it in me to imagine how.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Well, as one prerequisite for further torment, you'd need a system that actually allows employees to work for some period of time, rather than the first-day experience being "lol I dunno, also figure it out yourself or you're fired".
  - Doxin 5y ago
    Just because they say he would be fired does not make it so. We don't know what sort of follow-up torture was planned if the original poster didn't just up and leave.
- chaorace 5y ago
  I imagine you could get a lot of mileage out of a "documentation fuzzer". If you hire employees in batches, simply swap x% of the field values between each of their onboarding papers and then enjoy the show!
haroldp 5y ago
The perfect representation of the corporate version of The Castle or The Trial has to be the orientation scene from the Hudsucker Proxy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS42yIDQX6s&t=6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS42yIDQX6s&t=6s
nextos 5y ago
I have had similar induction experiences at some supposedly great academic institutions. The irony is that I am accepting a much lower pay at academia to, among other things, avoid experiencing this nonsense. Dysfunctional organizations are something horrible we should punish as a society. They are an enormous waste of resources. I am surprised this Amazon department so dysfunctional, since the company as a whole is doing quite well.
wpietri 5y ago
I can't help but think about POSIWID (the purpose of the system is what it does). This is not obvious for the stated purpose of the system. So what's the actual purpose? Part of it's to make people feel powerful, like the person who gloried in busting people taking time off. Part of it's clearly conformance to plan, where people are rewarded for marking items in a list done, whether or not they were effective. And I'm sure there are executive metrics that hit targets, no matter how many unmeasured things get worse. What else to people see?

throwawaylinux 5y ago

What is your feeling on the state of labor? The state of Amazon's blue collar working conditions are widely considered to be crap of course, and there are a lot of complaints about labor laws, unions, outsourcing and immigration, etc. I didn't quite see how he connected the issues in the post though. I mean beyond state of labor = not good (and maybe that's all you were saying too).

version_five 5y ago
I was broadly agreeing with the poster that it's worth crying over. Without writing an essay, automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work (maybe its always been that way), and people are treated at "resources". This happens at all levels but is worst, to the point of being potentially inhumane, in low skill jobs.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Oh yeah I agree with you there. What's really grating is that these people and "low skill" jobs that form the backbone of our functional society have been abandoned by the political movement they bled to create (which is obviously now hijacked and totally perverted by the ruling class). It makes me cringe every time I hear a "left" wing voter or politician boast about how much the uneducateds dislike them, and gloat about how worthless those people must be to be concerned about immigration policies affecting their jobs. It's no surprise their lot is not improving. I only hope they can band together and affect real change again before the ruling class is able to irrevocably divide people against one another. Maybe it's already too late :(
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  >automation (and I mean mainly business process automation) has sucked the humanity out of work What's interesting though is I don't hear a lot of people on HN complaining about CI/CD, which IMO is part of an overall approach that treats devs like cogs in an automated process. In some ways, I think we even celebrate it because, as devs, we are the automators. But increasingly, we're becoming more beholden to the processes we've automated.
  - mikewave 5y ago
    The big difference here is that CI/CD should ideally be taking away annoying work from devs so that they can more smoothly go from problem/feature -> hard thinking work -> code -> out the door, without having to deal with the highly repetitive part of the job. The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living. 15 years ago in IT if you could automate things, you just ended up with less active work to do. Now that automation is the norm instead of a bonus cool thing, it has become formalized and measured, and you may not have the saved time as free time, you have to now double down on doing the hard parts of the job. This doesn't actually work in reality for most people as we can't actually think hard for more than a few hours out of the work day (10x'rs exempt, of course.)
    - unclebucknasty 5y ago
      >The big difference here is that CI/CD should ideally be taking away annoying True. OTOH, I feel like some version of this is always sold as the worker-facing rationale for automation and increased productivity. For some jobs, it's "hey, we're going to automate your job away so you can go do something meaningful with your life". For devs, it's "we're going to automate this for you so you can focus on meaningful work here". >The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living. That's it in a nutshell. The "gains" don't accrue to devs, but to the never-ending hunt for still more productivity. And, I think that's a feature; not a bug. That is, from an organizational perspective, agile and all that it's ushered in (including devops and CI/CD) were never intended to improve dev quality of life. Instead, they're all about the highest LOC in the minimum time, a.k.a "productivity".
- mikewave 5y ago
  I think it's important to note that it has sucked the humanity out of levels of worker above the bottom-of-the-pole labourer, as well; the HR people and trainers in the post are similarly labourers, though instead of using their muscles they're using their words; but they're still required to work like hands of the automation, with scheduled onboarding sessions and processes they have to follow. Given enough time, and a smooth process, eventually this should not be so painful; but when it is painful, it is supposed to be the job of a human (especially once in HR) to act as a bridge between process and person, so as to keep morale at a good level and to provide a channel for feedback from employees up to the teams responsible for process automation. It doesn't sound like this is in place here, at all; instead we have people who are displaying all the signs of not caring about the human anymore because they have become so subservient to the machine that they cannot afford to.

tux3 5y ago

Kafka is one way to look at it, but if anything the description of the process evokes The Good Place to me. It must be an accident that the process is so catastrophically bad that it leaves new hires drained and crying. But you'd almost start to wonder how much worse you could really make it, if you were optimizing for "plausibly deniable torment”. I don't have it in me to imagine how.

crooked-v 5y ago
Well, as one prerequisite for further torment, you'd need a system that actually allows employees to work for some period of time, rather than the first-day experience being "lol I dunno, also figure it out yourself or you're fired".
- Doxin 5y ago
  Just because they say he would be fired does not make it so. We don't know what sort of follow-up torture was planned if the original poster didn't just up and leave.
chaorace 5y ago
I imagine you could get a lot of mileage out of a "documentation fuzzer". If you hire employees in batches, simply swap x% of the field values between each of their onboarding papers and then enjoy the show!

haroldp 5y ago

The perfect representation of the corporate version of The Castle or The Trial has to be the orientation scene from the Hudsucker Proxy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS42yIDQX6s&t=6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS42yIDQX6s&t=6s

nextos 5y ago

I have had similar induction experiences at some supposedly great academic institutions. The irony is that I am accepting a much lower pay at academia to, among other things, avoid experiencing this nonsense. Dysfunctional organizations are something horrible we should punish as a society. They are an enormous waste of resources. I am surprised this Amazon department so dysfunctional, since the company as a whole is doing quite well.

wpietri 5y ago

I can't help but think about POSIWID (the purpose of the system is what it does). This is not obvious for the stated purpose of the system. So what's the actual purpose? Part of it's to make people feel powerful, like the person who gloried in busting people taking time off. Part of it's clearly conformance to plan, where people are rewarded for marking items in a list done, whether or not they were effective. And I'm sure there are executive metrics that hit targets, no matter how many unmeasured things get worse. What else to people see?