So they got sent to the roof like Big Head?
Amazon's Silent Sacking
Submitted 10 months ago by EnderMB@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/
Comments
Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 10 months ago
superduperenigma@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If only. He was getting paid enough money to buy a boat and hire a boat guy.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I’ll be honest: I love this. If you have ever met anyone who works at Amazon proper, (ie not in a warehouse or delivering), they are the most insufferable people I have ever met. Basically all of them are just caricatures of people who are masters of throwing buzzwords around that only they would possibly know because its some ridiculous ‘Amazon’ spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
Then 5 minutes later the conversation topic shifts to them being very, very concerned about some social issue or tragedy at home are abroad, and they will always be blissfully unaware of how what Amazon does as a company usually causes the thing theyre very worried about in an indirect or sometimes pretty direct way, you know like gentrification or rising income inequality, or food deserts or collapsing economies of quaint and charming towns they want to retire to at age 42, but can’t because all the local shops collapsed due to everyone ordering everything from Amazon.
God help you if you point out the technicals of how most of their ‘unique and innovative’ software solutions basically always boil down to either stealing other people’s ideas, putting a slight twist on them to make them harder for users of their services to quit or enterprise partners to migrate, that you can do basically everything they offer for far far cheaper with libre code and 5% of the money Amazon is throwing at it.
Then, in private when they think no one else is listening, they giggle about how superior they are to other people because they work at Amazon, but they do it in a very muted, posh sort of way.
Then they’ll also have a bunch of hairbrained side projects for making money on the side that revolve entirely around wither exploiting the poor very directly, or being paid an absurd amount of money to develop some simple software that one of their other socialite tech bros or gals can convince their idiot boss to pay waaaay too much for because ‘you know this guy works at Amazon he really knows his stuff’ is sufficient to convince most boomer VPs.
I fucking hate Amazonians.
Wrench@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The irony is that you obviously think you’re so superior to these people who you think sound pompous for, in your opinion, thinking they’re superior.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The funny thing is that while your point is solid, he’s not wrong. He’s talking about a group of people happy to knowingly work for the same company that makes its delivery drivers piss in bottles, treats fulfillment staff as disposable, openly embraces counterfeit goods and scam listings, and does everything in its power to drive legit sellers off the site, but that’s all good because it doesn’t affect THEM.
And now it does. Amazon has finally come for all these employees who were a-okay with Amazon fucking everyone but them.
It’s a shitty thing to do, but Amazon is a shitty company to work for, and it was foolishness to expect Amazon’s usual employer fuckery would not ever affect them too. I don’t hate them like the other guy, and I do hope they land feet first somewhere else, but he’s not wrong: this is more Leopards At My Face material than Shocker: Reputable Company Mistreats Innocent Workers.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I dont think its ironic, I think it is pretty obvious that I feel superior to every Amazonian I have ever met.
june@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’ve worked with hundreds of Amazon and AWS folks over the last 4 years and never once had an experience even close to what you’ve described. I’ve got lots of friends who do or have worked for Amazon and one and all they recognize they’re putting in time working for the devil and hold their nose while they swallow that pill.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Cool, at least they recognize they are building their own personal wealth off of the suffering and exploitation of less well off people all around the world, sound like wonderful, moral people to me.
Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 10 months ago
its some ridiculous ‘Amazon’ spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
This explains why everything in AWS is named something weird. It's not "DNS" it's "Route 53." It's not virtual servers it's EC2. Makes learning it super hard, and I imagine it makes learning other things even harder.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
The /function/ of these stupid naming schemes, despite whatever explanation is proffered as to their origin, is exactly as you have pointed out:
It takes time to learn all this lingo, which makes people tend toward ‘specializing’ in that ecosystem, which makes you more hesitant to migrate or attempt to interface with some other software ecosystem with its own separate lingo.
It also serves to make you feel stupid for not understanding it, basically in the same way a group of friends laughing at an in joke that you dont understand makes you feel like a lesser member of the group.
Lots and lots of programmers, db admins, etc, are basically low social skills or on the autism spectrum, so keeping people feeling low on the social pecking order makes them easier to boss around, makes them more likely to accept ludicrous and technically inefficient solutions, accept being paid far less than what they are worth, etc.
Elliott@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Fuck Amazon. Friend moved to Seattle and got a job at the mother shop… Told me she could all but guarantee me a job there. I’ll brag…I have an impression resume and could have gotten on… Great pay, bonus etc …Nope. That company sucks ass.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
This part is crazy…
dojan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ugh. Seeing shit like this makes me question what the point of life even is. I don’t want to partake in this bullshit. Sure I can basically boycott Amazon (unless you count AWS which half the web runs on - can’t do shit about that), and it’s easy to do so here in Sweden since they’re particularly garbage and don’t really offer anything of value.
But Amazon was never the problem. The system is broken. Amazon is just one symptom, and there’s loads of companies out there operating at different levels but doing basically the same bullshit.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Exploitation has never changed.
This isn’t very different from the downsizing of the 90’s, every time we go through this song and dance they find new ways to screw us, because often we’ve legally fought for the previous ways to be denied. They’ll do anything to pay the least. They don’t actually care about remote or in-office at all based on this comment over at hackernews:
They’re happy to replace US workers with cheaper workers from other countries, they don’t care that they work remote.
Anyway, I don’t disagree, it makes me want to give up and I believe the system is broken, and it’s been broken since before I was born.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
It is the inevitable logic of capitalism operating as intended.
I suggest starting to build a backup I2P meshnet node/radio broadcaster, cancel your amazon prime and torrent all the shows, stop buying anything from Amazon and shop local instead.
drahardja@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This is likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO is a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.
The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave. As a Bonus, Amazon also got to shore up their real estate investment values.
Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Not enough people know about constructive dismissal.
My mother was approaching retirement at her old career, and right before COVID they dramatically changed her job and work hours to try and get her to just retire, and she did.
I convinced her to file for unemployment anyway due to constructive dismissal, and she won her case. She got full unemployment benefits PLUS the COVID bump for a long time while getting to retire early.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 10 months ago
If they aren’t going to fire you and you aren’t going to voluntarily take a worse job, what happens?
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 10 months ago
I think you become a professional job seeker until you land a better job.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Hilarity.
slurpeesoforion@startrek.website 10 months ago
I saw it happen once when I was young team lead. I had a number of people that worked on my team.
One day I was asked how many people we would need if we stopped doing one task. I was to naive to put two and two together.
A short time later I heard the ops manager talking to someone about offering the people they planned to get rid of other work with the express intent of avoiding paying out unemployment.
I couldn’t really do anything at that point other than warn my people, which I did. I found something else a short while later. I made sure to tell management why I was quitting, which was a long list of issues including them fucking over good people.
Magzmak@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Are you still getting paid but aren’t working? I’m just wanting to make sure I understand your situation. There are no more morals and ethics in company policies it seems like.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I am not the person who wrote the post, I am just quoting it.
WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social 10 months ago
There were never morals and ethics in company policies. Ever. The only time something that seems moral and ethical happens in corporate policies is either through happenstance or a law forces them to be that way.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
They all thought they would be so valuable that they would become the kind of rich that is capable of firing them.
They believed hook line and sinker all of the Amazon cultural bullshit and cannot understand that they too are just employees in a capitalist system that hates employees at the end of the day.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Severance is not required by law. It’s generally given to avoid lawsuits.
Personally I’d like to see a law around severance. I think it should be expensive to lay employees off. 401k should vest. Stock options should vest and severance should be a minimum of six months.
teamevil@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Wait…do you have any responsibilities currently? I’d use that time a hotspot and a personal computer to apply for another gig ASAP!
ridethisbike@lemmy.world 10 months ago
He was quoting the article, just so you’re aware