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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Is "treat your lowest paid employees like dirt" and "if people are desperate and really need the job, as long as you employ them you don't need to treat them humanely" part of it?

How about "If you are a rich owner you can safely distance yourself from lower management that does 'whatever it takes' to keep profits up and play the ignorance card"?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-ac...

http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/its-like-every-s...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/01/13/ama...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/22/amazon...

http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...

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It didn't touch on that, but there are these gems:

On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”

On choosing a romantic partner: When Jeff decided he was ready to settle down, his friends set him up on tons of blind dates. He eventually knew he’d found his wife when he met someone truly resourceful. “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison” Jeff said.

I am a former military wife, so I am pretty can do, and I believe that not letting kids do anything in order to "protect" them is actively harmful. But I wanted my sons to reach adulthood having learned to be resourceful without losing any body parts to do it. I succeeded in both those goals.

Edit: I guess I am partly saying "How resourceful is his wife, really, if she isn't confident she can teach the kids to play with knives safely?

Slacker.

> How resourceful is his wife, really,

Well, she married a multi-millionaire.

As a former military wife who helped build my husband's career, raised two special needs kids on a tight budget, homeschooled them when the school system failed them, etc, this comment really ticks me off. It is like saying women are only whores and their only measure of worth is being good at extracting money from men by sleeping with them. The more money they extract without really producing anything of value, the more we praise them. I find it grotesque that anyone would make such a remark.

It also feels very personally insulting to me as it dismisses my competence as a mother based on the fact that I failed to marry a millionaire. I really can't manage to express how completely inappropriate I feel the remark is.

To the assholes downvoting this: you are sexist pigs. May you burn in hell.

>It also feels very personally insulting to me as it dismisses my competence as a mother based on the fact that I failed to marry a millionaire.

How exactly does it "dismisses your competence" as a mother?

Parent commenter merely said (and that in jest) that Bezos' wife managing to snatch a millionaire proves she's resourceful.

So, even if the parent had said it seriously, at worst it would only imply that your failing to marry a millionaire means you've failed to prove you're resourceful in THAT particular way. You could still be resourceful in millions of other ways. It says absolutely nothing about anybody's general resourcefulness or competence "as a mother".

Nor it implies that women should do that (snatch a millionaire). If anything, even if the whole thing is obviously said jokingly, it implicitly would seem to condemn the practice.

>I really can't manage to express how completely inappropriate I feel the remark is.

Well, surely you can't seem to be able to express it in a coherent manner.

>To the assholes downvoting this: you are sexist pigs. May you burn in hell.

Or you know, they simply disagree with what you wrote. And your added swearing doesn't help your case either. Language.

I seem to be the most prominent woman here. I got there in part by biting my tongue a lot in the face of a lot of less than respectful stuff driven by sexist social norms. I generally go to pains to not cuss "at" people, even though I tend to swear like a sailor and use the F word like other people use very.

But this whole thing is simply beyond the pale. If I joked that Paul Graham married well and this clearly is evidence of his resourcefulness/his biggest accomplishment, that would get flagged to death so fast your head would spin.

There is absolutely nothing that makes his or your comment fit the guidelines of engaging in a generally respectful fashion. I am essentially being called a cheap whore and told to get a sense of humor for finding that incredibly inappropriate.

Is this really sexist though ? I mean, it's not like the opinions people have of men who have insignificant accomplishments but marry a rich woman are any different.

It is a left-handed way of dismissing me personally. I have already commented on that.

I plan to bow out of this conversation. The entire thing has been a really shitty experience for me. This plus other crappy things on HN today has me pretty fed up in a way I rarely feel. I usually have a lot of good things to say about HN. But this has not been a good day for me in HN land.

Adieu.

You're not as resourceful as you claim then. I mean you're already giving up.

I have been at this eight years. I appear to be the only woman on the leaderboard. I got there shortly after getting myself off the street.

A piece of mine was flagged off the front page in the last couple of hours after two people characterized it as SEO spam because I was talking about the service I worked for while homeless, a service recommended to me by patio11 who then dragged my name through the mud a few months later for repeating his advice on HN. No, no one is vouching for me and saying "she spent nearly six years homeless and was quite open about it. She is the real deal." Whenever I comment on the lack of that kind of support, a thing the respected male members of the community get, I get pissed all over. When I express my opinion that my intractable poverty is partly due to being treated different from the guys on HN, I get pissed on some more.

I have been diplomatic. I have been patient. I have been LNG suffering. I still have to put up with disrespectful snark like your comment here.

As usual, I don't know how I will early this week. As usual, I am failing to do paid work this weekend due to fever. As usual, there is no point in complaining about how hard my life is. It gets me zero sympathy or compassion, even when the callousness I face makes me suicidal. That is the wrong thing to say. It makes other people uncomfortable and a poor person and woman should not do that.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. We are getting well. I get no credit for that. When I talk about it, I get called crazy and a liar. (Pick one: either I am crazy and deluded but believe what I am saying, or I am lying. You can't actually have it both ways.)

So I am kind of at the end of my rope, not because of some stupid discussion on HN, but because of many years of enormous mountains of bullshit that would have broken most other people years ago. In fact, I am literally supposed to be dead from my condition.

But let's go with your theory that I'm just a sissy. The men here are far more comfortable with that idea.

"But we aren't sexist."

I would strongly advise against caring about any leaderboard position. Besides, you get banned here for having meltdowns or showing your true policital opinion. I feel it likely this is going to happen to you (and me) sooner or later. So ... just don't care about it. Care about the real world. Even money is a better thing to care about.

The leaderboard here is internet points. That and a sac of crap is worth significantly less than a sac. Keep that in mind.

There is contact information in my profile. If this advice were genuinely being given in good faith out of some kind of concern for my welfare, it could have been done privately.

Since it wasn't, I see no reason to take any of it at all seriously. Posting it publicly like this amounts to mudslinging. Publically announcing that me being upset over people repeatedly making personal attacks against me is, in your opinion, a banworthy offense amounts to planting ideas with ill intent. That in no way looks like any kind of good faith effort to be helpful to me personally. (Their personal attacks are a violation of the rules. If you want to crab at someone, it should be them, not me.)

I will add that "my true political opinion" is an incredibly specious characterization of my remarks. There is zero political opinion expressed here. I am one person who just happens to be female by accident of birth who is trying to figure out how to make my life work. That is it. There is zero political anything to my participation here. Getting fed up once in a while by the uphill battle I face for simply being female is not some political position.

> On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”

Sounds like, they are exaggerating the risk for dramatic effect :) Letting your kids help out in the kitchen, etc.. do wood works, etc.. is not without risk, but the risks are tiny.

Dramatic exaggeration is just a provocative counter balance to the many parents who won't let the kids peel potatoes because they could get hurt.

I used to pay accident claims. Here are some real life medical records I had to review in my job:

One child lost an eye because someone left a loaded BB gun laying around in the house and another child picked it up and shot them. The other child probably thought it was a toy gun.

A toddler fell and broke their leg. It took the parents two to four days of the child refusing to bear weight on the leg for them to decide that a doctor's visit was in order.

A child went for an unsupervised ride on an ATV on a weekend morning while the parents slept in. Result: Their lower leg was amputated in the accident. They were nine years old.

But you go ahead and keep thinking that nothing genuinely bad ever happens to children when their parents are cavalier about risks to their safety.

We also left out that he pretty much brought tax evasion to mail order. I would say that that's his single biggest accomplishment by far.

Don't worry, we are working on robots that will replace these employees. Then they'll not even have what to eat.

On a serious note, I don't think this is Amazon issue. Stop blaming individual companies. You can't expect them not to compete and cut costs.

It is the responsibility of the government to set and enforce the minimum wage and provide social services for the lower tier.

It's everyone's responsibility.

That's exactly my point. You can't expect people to behave, let alone corporations. You have to regulate them.

My point is societal pressure doesn't have to end with laws. If a company wants to play the 'but-it-isnt-illegal' game, they should still be subject to suffering a rejection by the public, and as members of the public, we have a moral obligation to reject those companies.

That would have worked if people did really act on "I don't consume from non-responsible company". But people pick cheapest, or nicest, or trendiest. They don't give a crap about the company practices.

The problem is, society interacts with companies as consumers, not citizens. Markets optimize for price and convenience, not ethical business practices, and market forces speak louder than societal pressure.

Unless Amazon does something to spark mass outrage on the scale of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, then society is going to be happy as long as they get their Kindles and Echos delivered on time.

>On a serious note, I don't think this is Amazon issue. Stop blaming individual companies. You can't expect them not to compete and cut costs.

Well, I can very much expect them -- and chose to do business with companies that do care.

But true, the social protection/minimum wage should also be set by law. Only that's a minimum limit -- I expect better than that.

In the end, I don't want businesses that merely say "compete to the full and fuck everything else".

> Well, I can very much expect them -- and chose to do business with companies that do care.

I'm 100% certain that most people will go with "cheapest" or "more convenient" regardless.

Most people would also kill other people if it was not for the inconvenience of being caught -- as they also harass, bully, and lots of other things.

Not the best criterion, what most would do.

Especially since it's more like "what most would do given a society that raised them like we do and given them the motives that we do".

No. Most people would not kill, that is BS.

If that is the case in your community, then I'm glad I don't live there.

I believe most places in the world, even some of the poorest and most desperate set a higher standard than "kill to survive". Given a chance most people will naturally form communities that will try to protect themselves from harm. Destructive behaviour is not a forgone conclusion and as soon as people start to understanding this they will stop being scared of their neighbours.

Won't their prices go up then? And won't that disproportionately hurt the poor people you're trying to help?

Right. “It’s a business” excuses all behavior. It’s all good as long as it makes a profit! I’m sure that made I.G. Farben’s managers sleep better during WWII.

Toxic work environments eventually change or fail. If talented people don't like it there they'll leave. If consumers don't like the company they'll stop supporting it. There are other economic systems, but that's how capitalism works.

>Toxic work environments eventually change or fail.

How soon that happens? Because it worked wonders for Walmart or McDonalds all these years.

>If talented people don't like it there they'll leave.

That would only matter if their operation depended on talented people. Which is not really required for McDonalds, Walmart, or Amazon (at the order handling side).

At best, those companies have to keep upper management and logistics people happy -- and can continue to screw the replaceable workers forever.

>If consumers don't like the company they'll stop supporting it.

Most of the masses don't care as long as the price is right. Few stopped buying Nike after the sweatshop complaints, at best they took their "word" that the issue has been solved (and they just moved manufacturing around through various third world countries and added more plausible deniability layers).

The hundreds of millions of lower middle class and poorer people have the same problems themselves in their jobs, which makes them thing that is just how things are.

The companies know how to put on a "humane" facade, and lots of jobs are not even public facing (the customer wont ever see an Amazon warehouse). And their friends, the media, were they advertise, will give them all the good public relations they need.

Thats not how capitalism works, thats what the theory predicts. The sibling comment has plenty of examples of it not working.

Anyone who knows just enough econ to be dangerous quotes this kind of crap without acknowledging all the counterexamples we see in the world. Experiment & Observation > Theory.

Capitalism takes a long time to work. Regulation can make it work faster or slower, depending on how you do :)

Pure capitalism works very very slowly, it takes decades and lessons often have to be repeated.

People can't account for every factor when they purchase a product. Being a conscious buyers is extremely hard work, a system that relies exclusively on that will take hundreds of years to make even modest progress.

We don't have that long time.

> I don't think this is Amazon issue. Stop blaming individual companies.

People in Amazon's warehouses were fainting because of heat and exhaustion. They finally installed an AC after protests.

“Be a high functioning sociopath” seems like it might save time...

Edit: It might also offend, but it's hard to contextualize the behavior of humanity’s apex predators without resorting to models of/like sociopathy. If you have a better model to offer which preserves their humanity in some way, and just paints them as incredibly ideological, deluded, etc, I'd be open to that.

Here's a better context. Primate groups label and shun members who fall out of line. When they do that you can get a better idea of what's happening by ignoring the labels and looking at situation of the ones doing the labeling.

That’s one hell of a diversion.

As always, I'm surprised to see outrage over employee wages from a startup and business focused community (Hacker News). What is it that you purpose Amazon just pay everybody $200,000 a year and then go out of business? This is really basic economics, and I strongly believe in the American dream, you can work your way up and Amazon provides ample opportunities for growth.

Curious, are you a US citizen?

The OP is talking about the way lowest paid employees are treated. Of course paying everyone 200k is ridiculous, but they didn't even come close to suggesting that should be the case.

You present a false dichotomy as your argument.

Reality is a continuum, not two simple poles of "mistreat your employees" or pay them $200k.

How about we let people have fifteen minute breaks and they don’t start until they get to to the break area

Baby steps.

And have their daily security searches of employees (and time waiting in line for same) be on company time, not employees' time.

Yes, it's the practical thing for a business like Amazon to do in the current economic and social environment. But you seem to be asking us to take quite a leap of faith from there to "this is how it should be and people who think otherwise are Unamerican".

If you're legally allowed to pay people $4.95 a week and work 'em at gunpoint, that becomes the new maximum efficiency point (provided enough humans and/or robots can be procured) and the existing Amazon goes out of business, unable to compete.

For that matter, if Amazon permitted just anybody to grow and work their way up, there'd be a lot of warehouse people or code-mongers thinking they should prosper, and there's not room for all of them. That's basic economics too, and it means that no, you can't work your way up nor can you grow. There's already a Jeff Bezos, and you're not it. There's also a 'your boss' and you're not that, either.

So, the practical implementation of human worker wages remains very interesting to people, and the fact that Amazon's the best at arbitraging this dynamic is relevant.

What you see as outrage is simply people's reactions to that very basic economics: to what extent can a company define the conditions for an industry (or all of society) by exploiting the rules and running as close to the edge as possible?

One assumes there's a spectrum and that you can get a 'good job' and have less misery than your fellow worker, if you try hard or you're lucky or wealthy or nepotistic enough. One also assumes that if you 'work your way up' you're wealthier and have it easier and can live large like some important person.

Amazon flips that on its head. If you're in the Amazon model, there is no 'up'. At every level, you're existing in maximum tolerable misery because that is your global strategy to outcompete every other business entity that threatens you or could ever threaten you. If you're 'winning' as an individual, that hurts the company: the company wins if everybody from bottom to top is struggling in the optimal misery/output balance, to the extent of applicable laws.

It's a conversation worth having. This is the formula for corporate efficiency, but to what extent should humans operate NOT at the point of maximum misery?

The American Dream is an intangible. If other people aren't impressed by it, then offering it as primary compensation is disingenuous. I'm particularly dismayed by trying to mandate it… it's a pretty lame dream if you look at things in a more systemic fashion. It has already led to the collapse of the American middle and lower classes, and this is only accelerating.

An American 'oh, hi, I'm awake now' might be a wiser alternative…

> What is it that you purpose Amazon just pay everybody $200,000 a year and then go out of business?

How about they just pay enough for full time employees to actually live where they work, without taking overtime, a second job and a roommate just to make ends meet? Pay in proportion to the standard of living?

>you can work your way up and Amazon provides ample opportunities for growth.

Yes, but most of those opportunities only present more responsibility, but not more (or barely more) pay, at least at the bottom tiers. You can work your way up from the bottom for years and still make less than someone sacking groceries.

> How about they just pay enough for full time employees to actually live where they work, without taking overtime, a second job and a roommate just to make ends meet? Pay in proportion to the standard of living?

I'd argue that they do. The market decides, and clearly people are still willing to accept the positions at the offered salary. Would you rather they be unemployed, or have a job at Amazon? This is at-will employment, nobody is forcing anybody to work at these positions.

True, Amazon tends to pay the minimum that the market allows, and people are willing to accept work for that pay, but they also have high turnover, and people also quit in droves.

It's rational for them, as a company, to want to reduce costs by keeping wages low, but I don't believe the labor market agrees with it so much as tolerates it. I'm also not certain they couldn't afford a few dollars more an hour for full time employees (in whom, it's assumed, they want to make a long-term investment), rather, that they simply have a culture of being as cheap about everything as possible.

But this attitude (referred to as "frugality" but in practice it's just cheapness) has negative effects in terms of employee morale, cultural investment, and labor quality that Amazon has apparently decided aren't worth improving.

Amazon barely makes profit in the divisions that treat employees this way.

The make it up in the stock market, in large part due to having those divisions.

Also make sure you have connections with the CIA so they can use your assets for god knows what (including WaPo).

Am I mistaken in thinking that if you're an owner or executive of a company that employees in the vicinity of half a million people, the specifics of how lower management operates is legitimately not your business? With an organization that large, anyone would have to delegate that responsibility to others.

If you run a company then everything is your business. He might not directly participate in the management of warehouse workers, but if the are being treated badly then it is his responsibility to fix it. It is his job to set the direction of the company and to hire people (who hire people, and so on) that will do the right thing. He is the one who has set a culture of competition among his developers and hard conditions for his warehouse workers.

Bezos clearly follows the news. He must have read articles mentioning the poor working conditions of his employees. That he hasn't fixed it- and doesn't appear to be trying to fix it- says that he doesn't think that taking care of his people is worth the cost.

From a business perspective, I get it. Amazon has thin margins as a computing, logistics and retail company. It's competing against Google and Wal-Mart.

From a human perspective, it sucks.

In a more abstract sense, if you say 'warehouse workers are being treated badly' it implies Bezos himself both seeks and has a more cushy, nurturing job: and therefore, is responsible for treating others as he would wish to be treated himself. Hence, a moral failing on his part, that works to his benefit.

I don't think it's a simple as that. Being a Bezos is sort of self-selecting: as the 'apex predator' he must motivate a whole corporation that functions on this ruthless moral model. I'm not sure how many miles he runs each day, but as far as people dropping dead of stress I think it's mostly the guy's extensive resources that stop him being one of the dead bodies left behind.

In other words, the CEO is crazy and driving himself impossibly hard. The CEO in turn expects everybody else to push just as hard. But the warehouse guys can't have a team of masseuses attending upon them after (or during) THEIR jobs, nor do they have journalists and celebrities fawning over them for being so hardcore: Bezos wishes to build a company that from top to bottom is ultra-hardcore and driven, but most people participating in the exercise get NONE of the benefits he gets out of coaching a giant corporation to develop that kind of killer instinct.

The behavior is in fact the way to make the corporation kill and defeat other corporations, but most of the people working for Amazon get only very intangible benefits from doing this. Unless they can be like 'yay team!' and personally identify themselves with, say, their CEO and his attitude, they're just chewed up and spat out.

It's interesting to follow the logic of it. By definition, Amazon can NEVER suck up fat margins and benefit its employees and rest on its laurels, because by definition if it does another Amazon will outperform it (at rather pedestrian tasks that are nonetheless valuable). So there must always be the worst possible working conditions attainable by law, from the bottom right up to the CEO. But the CEO gets a lot of side benefits and intangibles that the other workers don't.

It would be closer to fair if people treated Bezos with contempt, knowing that anytime he keeled over or lost his nerve, some other hard charger would jump in and become Bezos in his stead. Bezos could stop being Bezos at any time, but he's the richest guy in the world because he seems like he can't. He is more likely to stroke out in some meeting than to retire. He can only be replaced by someone else who is that ruthless or more ruthless… depends on whether society considers his attitude criminally harmful, and that depends on how he goes about being Bezos. See Kalanick and Uber as a counterexample, where the guy fully embraces ruthlessness but is far less interested in self-abuse and is more easily painted as an exploiter.

You aren't familiar with Amazon, apparently.

Yes, you are mistaken in thinking that.

I think you're confusing responsibility with micromanagement though. If you delegate a task, you don't have to be aware of the specifics of how that task is executed, but if it's executed badly, yes it is still your responsibility.

Yes, you're mistaken. Responsibility does not mutually exclude. You don't decide on the specifics, but if those specifics are unethical then you are responsible for them because you set the incentives which cause them to be prevalent.

There are a lot of organisations where top level management obtain plausible deniability by formally setting policies against abusing employees, but also set incentives such that low level managers can only succeed by doing so.

>Am I mistaken in thinking that if you're an owner or executive of a company that employees in the vicinity of half a million people, the specifics of how lower management operates is legitimately not your business?

Yes (you are).

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