4 ms·

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects

• hintymad 2y ago
  > How petty are the tyrants. I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.
  • benoau 2y ago
    Tyranny is pissing in a bottle lest ye be fired for malfeasance. Now the rest of the workers can experience it!
    • kriops 2y ago
      Tyranny can only be enacted through force. Your example (while definitely unpleasant) is not an example of force. Find another word.
      • monadINtop 2y ago
        If I dont go to work I starve. If I organise with my colleagues for a more favourable contract I will be removed by security guards. If we protest this we will be arrested by police. Are you able to only recognise force the moment blood is being spilled?
        • kriops 2y ago
          The initial premise is that the universe/nature imposes a requirement upon you to sustain life. Nature can not be a forceful actor by virtue of not being an actor. Same problem with several of the replies sibling to yours.
          • youssefabdelm 2y ago
            This is perhaps the best counterargument I've heard, and I will say, it still doesn't make it not a tyranny. Let's call it then the tyranny of nature/the universe. The promise of technological progress will eventually help us out of it I believe.
          • monadINtop 2y ago
            Is it not forceful if I dangle you over a cliff and tell you to run your pockets, by virture of the natural origin of the gravitational potential that will accelerate your body into a jagged rock face at terminal velocity should I release my grip?
      • youssefabdelm 2y ago
        Marche ou crève (work or die)
      • fn-mote 2y ago
        The example was literal. Force is not just violence. The threat of being fired is a use of force. I'm not clear if you missed the reference or think that this isn't force. I think it is. If you think otherwise, perhaps you could clarify where you think the line is. How about working in extremely hot conditions with no water breaks? Now do I think it is tyranny? No. I agree that there should be another word used. Citations: [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/delivery-drivers-sue-amazon-for-being-forced-to-pee-in-bottles/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56628745 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56628745 "Amazon apologises for wrongly denying drivers need to urinate in bottles"
  • the_lonely_road 2y ago
    You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.
  • lanstin 2y ago
    I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.
  • monadINtop 2y ago
    I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible). Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.
    • DiggyJohnson 2y ago
      Both employer and employee want the employee succeed in helping the employer provide value to the customer. I fundamentally disagree with the first paragraph, and don't see how it can be justified without an appeal to emotion. They are not perfectly aligned, of course, but no alliance is.
      • monadINtop 2y ago
        And why would the employer or employee give two shits about prodividing value to the customer? You understand that employees and employers don't act out of a sense of compassion for customers? They both want to "provide value" so the customer parts with his money. They want him to part with his money since the employer wants to reproduce their capital, and the employee wants to sustain himself. How is your premise in any way a more natural framing? To the contrary it seems extremely contrived in essentially restating what I did but keeping the actual material dynamics implicit. And again who is actually providing value, the employer that recieves the revenue by virtue of owning the cafe or factory or tools, or the employee who actually valorises whatever good or service is being put on the market by virtue of his labor? What appeal to emotion are you talking about, I fail to see any.
  • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word. Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.
  • fnordpiglet 2y ago
    For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back. For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it. I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.
• sorenjan 2y ago
  > How petty are the tyrants. Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.
  • adamking 2y ago
    > Having to work in an office for $300k/year More like $98k/year on average
    • sorenjan 2y ago
      As a senior person at AWS? Even so, that's more than most engineers earn at the end of their career here.
      • justin66 2y ago
        How "distasteful."
  • givemeethekeys 2y ago
    300k a year is what they get paid for making the company 3-4x as much, if not even more. If they can generate that value remotely, then being forced to waste another 1-2 hours of your life every day to go to the office should be worth even more pay.
  • haliskerbas 2y ago
    Just because we have it great as tech workers and much of the rest of labor is absolutely fucked up in many ways, doesn't mean we should stop fighting to make our situations even better and use the privilege to advocate for those in worse situations.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• politician 2y ago
  This isn't about pettiness. Amazon has a significant investment in commercial real estate in downtown Seattle. The foot traffic supports a thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, and housing. When the employees aren't coming to the these buildings, that extended non-Amazon environment withers and impacts city politics. Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further.
  • oblio 2y ago
    This can happen regardless, it's worse than Detroit, which ar least had 3 big companies supporting it. Seattle needs to hedge.
    • fnordpiglet 2y ago
      Downtown did just fine before Amazon too. And they need to realize Amazon has no loyalty to downtown seattle and depending on them alone is stone cold dumb. See Detroit.
  • fnordpiglet 2y ago
    On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.
• rachofsunshine 2y ago
  This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company... ...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved. Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia. So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in. Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.
  • fnordpiglet 2y ago
    As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit. Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls. In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings. In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different. There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.
• billti 2y ago
  > Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out largely independent work. I have a couple of folks like this in my team, and they are absolutely as good (or better) working from home, as they don’t really talk to others much or contribute in meetings anyway. But you can’t build a team/org out of those personality types. Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space. I don’t think it’s a requirement that everyone be in the office 5 days a week (I don’t do that myself), but I do see the negatives of letting the team work from home whenever they want and expecting to get the same level of work done over Teams/Zoom calls and email.
  • dymk 2y ago
    > Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space. Maybe for you. This is not a universal experience.
  • adnjoo 2y ago
    https://basecamp.com/books/remote https://basecamp.com/books/remote
• Bluescreenbuddy 2y ago
  Bro you were making more money than most people ever will. Unclutch your pearls. That's not tyranny. An annoyance at best.
  • pb7 2y ago
    If someone spits in your food, you better eat it because there are millions of people who don’t have food reliably.