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I'm torn here. On the one hand, part of me thinks "Yeah but this is corporate employees! This is people like me!". And then another part of me steps in and as
by mabbo 4y ago
I'm torn here.
On the one hand, part of me thinks "Yeah but this is corporate employees! This is people like me!".
And then another part of me steps in and asks "So what, the more than a million logistics employees aren't people? They don't count?".
I guess the point is that there are two classes of employees at Amazon. Most of us here on HN aren't used to seeing our class being impacted by job losses.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI agree with your analysis and your ability to introspect seems rare. That said, when Jeff Bezos looks down upon the Earth from his penis rocket, do you think he sees 2 classes of employee, or do you think that to him, they are a mass of undifferentiated human resources?
- Pigalowda 4y agoBezos thinking of employees as "human" resources seems pretty generous right now. I'm betting he has switched to calling employees "overhead" and is simply reducing it. Or maybe he likes a different food preparation metaphor and thinks of the trimmed employees as "fat".
- 33955985 4y agoNot used to seeing it but surely even the youngest in our cohort are aware that we’ve been here twice before. Tech is a big risk, big reward business. Charge ye Teslas while ye may.
- jrochkind1 4y agoI mean, not _that_ big a risk. Most people layed off are probably still going to manage to get another job making more than other occupations that never made the "big reward" salaries in the first place.
- 33955985 4y agoAgreed. The “risk” here is that you won’t get to stay with the same company your whole life and collect a pension. The “risk” is also that you’ll need to retrain yourself to match the change in the industry. This is different from the expectations that people have for other industries, though job security certainly isn’t what it used to be outside of tech either.
- jrochkind1 4y agoTrue to some extent. Almost nobody gets to count on staying with the same company their whole life and collecting a pension anymore, though -- so I would not say that expectation exists in other industries anymore. Especially a pension. I don't think anyone outside of government really has pensions anymore. Re re-training yourself as a software engineer... I wonder how often people really need to do this either... to keep getting top possible salary maybe, but just ("just"!) to keep getting a better salary than most of the USA? Maybe sometimes. But, I mean, there are still people making very very good money writing Fortran and COBOL... probably better money than you can make writing PHP -- and you can still make better money than most of the USA writing PHP! OK if you specialized in, like, Flash or ColdFusion, you probably had to learn something different.
- jrochkind1 4y ago(Now somebody is going to tell me they still make good money writing ColdFusion! Apparently there was a 2021 release with a 2023 release expected, it is still a going concern. I used to get paid to write ColdFusion, like 20 years ago).
- motoxpro 4y agoWell said
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- klodolph 4y agoOther tech companies have a class system too, it’s just between FTE, vendors, and contractors. Badge colors keep the classes separate.
- rnk 4y agoEvery 10 years or there has recently been a major economic event that impacts the 'programmer classes'. Welcome to the early 2020s one, hopefully it will be over soon. I remember in the dot com crash tons of people left microsoft, did a startup, then came back after it burned. Same in 2008. Now we have the pandemic leading to inflation, then the Ukraine war started, then this likely recession.