4 ms·

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 lo

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".
      - kilobaud 5y ago
        I dont automate CI/CD because I'd rather be sword-fighting on roller chairs, I automate because I value the cost of my own work time and truly would rather spend it on a more interesting problem. (To say nothing of the fact its all too easy to make mistakes where processes arent automated, and I dont enjoy making mistakes) I dont disagree with your observations, just saying "productivity" gain is pretty far down the list of benefits to me personally
- 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.

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".
    - kilobaud 5y ago
      I dont automate CI/CD because I'd rather be sword-fighting on roller chairs, I automate because I value the cost of my own work time and truly would rather spend it on a more interesting problem. (To say nothing of the fact its all too easy to make mistakes where processes arent automated, and I dont enjoy making mistakes) I dont disagree with your observations, just saying "productivity" gain is pretty far down the list of benefits to me personally
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.