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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider, "Approximately 300 employees turned over in Baltimore related to productivity in this timeframe.

Why do they talk like that? I think they're erasing doubt that this is a corporatist nightmare place to work.

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It's a warehouse. We life in the 21th century. In theory if we would sit together and structure the existing workforce without all the bullshit overhead of accounting, bullshit jobs and priorities life quality and sustainability, no one would need to work and we could achieve this in the next 5, 10, 50 years.

I get that amazon should pay there workforce properly and as long as we have this, it should be something people can and should do in a social way but Baltimore is a US City, they don't even have a working health care system.

A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers?

I guess it depends on how great you are at guessing what to optimize for. If you make a machine that just rewards completing tasks, maybe you'll get poor quality. If you add quality to the mix, maybe you'll fire everyone who has experience and you'll be left with only those yet to make a mistake.

> A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers?

Increasingly, this viewpoint bothers me. To be honest I don't know the ins and outs of working in an Amazon warehouse but I suspect it's not as brainless a job as you imply.

Further, why does that attribute make this ok? Why wouldn't it similarly be ok if the computer could fire people automatically if a threshold of unit tests failed or if a developer failed to meet LOC quotas?

Because there's more metrics to programming than LOC and if a company treats it like the only metric then they deserve to go under. Working in a warehouse does not have multiple dimensions to it. You are paid to pick up things, put them in boxes and then pick up more things. That's it. It's easy to measure.

For comparison sake, I know someone who runs a company sorting refuse. Each person in the warehouse needs to sort through 500kg of refuse every day. That's it. Literally nothing else matters. It's not a complex job, so the metric is not complex either.

Forget the LOC example. Let's just say failing tests. Pick any single thing you think is critical to software development. Regardless of what it is, would it be acceptable to you to have an automated process simply fire someone for not hitting this metric?

I feel like at some point we have to draw the line. We're going to have to coexist with automation and eventually it will get to software development, too. Some parameters about what we consider to be reasonable and unreasonable to automate make a lot of sense to me.

I also feel like we get very classist as software developers and fall into the I-am-special trap frequently.

We have drawn the line. Right now it’s at Amazon warehouse workers.

Also there is a critical thing to software development: Working for a business that makes money. If you don’t hit that metric, you’ll eventually be out of a job.

Plus, there are many more people who can pick up boxes than there are who can program.

We haven't draw any line at all, it's simply where it's been pushed so far.

How does that differ from any other situation? Something is acceptable until it isn't...

That's what I'm saying. We haven't drawn any line here, we're just acquiescing at every step.

Then nobody ever draws a line. We just acquiesce at every step.

I have drawn a personal line a long time ago. I do not use amazon at all. No PayPal, Hollywood, local restaurants without union contract for the employees and so on. The union have a search app to keep tab on what restaurants are ok. (Sweden only though). We don't have much laws for companies, the unions have to agree with the company organisations for a lot of the rules.

Yeah but a metric is a metric is a metric. That there are more metrics in one area than another is arbitrary.

You could just as easily say: all right LOC is the only thing that matters, we're not paying you to be right, we're paying you to write code so do it. And the warehouse could have thousands of metrics to measure the intricacies of working in a warehouse. Following that your argument easily applies to programmers as well. They deserve to be treated like crap.

That you view working in a warehouse as so simple,and that you talk about "deserving" so much reveals a lot. You're using metrics as an abstraction to hide behind so you can really say they "deserve" to be treated this way because they work in a warehouse.

But, really, whether someone deserves some treatment or not because of the job they work should be irrelevant.

My wife says programmers just press buttons and look at a glowing rectangle all day. I think you've just done the equivalent.

Having worked both in software development and at a warehouse, I can vouch that both have multiple dimensions.

Oddly enough, both jobs involve sorting algorithms, and both can be completely derailed by poor management.

Let me work in a warehouse. What do you think how long does my initial training will take to be a picker at an amazon warehouse?

I will tell you: between 2 days and 6 weeks.

"shrinking its warehouse training time from a conventional six weeks to as little as two days."

How long do you think i have to train your wife to setup a kubernetes cluster, make sure it is secure, backuped and works efficient? Then when she knows that, how to build images, and write code in java, go, bash, ansible etc.?

If the answer is longer than 6 weeks, you see the difference. And don't get me wrong, i have seen people who had a 3 year education and start as juniors and miss a lot for years until they get it all right.

It would be similarly ok, but not nearly as effective, I assume. Which is probably why nobody does it.

I worked in a warehouse and it is as mindless as you can imagine. You receive a slip, pick things on slip, place in box, tape close and repeat.

I actually would love to see real statistics about my job performance.

I'm doubting myself how good i am. I don't think its very objective how i or people around me earn money.

But yes i don't look down to people working in a warehouse but i don't think that it takes too much knowledge. That is the reason why so many more people can do it.

I have seen people struggling with my 'simple' tasks continuously and they are in the same field as i'm. There has to be a difference between software engineering and warehousing.

I would prefer to have a proper social system and a future were we don't work because of work. Therefore this is an discrepancy in my world view: You should not need them and they should have a good life. But it is much more efficient and logical to have a computer system to fire people.

> A warehouse job is a warehouse job. No education needed, why wouldn't a computer system should not fire people on simple productivity numbers?

Because they're human beings.

How'd you like to be treated in such a dehumanizing way?

Why are you picking on accounting here? There's nothing more vital to the enterprise than understanding how its money moves. It's not easy, and if it doesn't happen nobody gets paid.

Because the sort of person who thinks it's okay to rely on an algorithm to fire people doesn't care about their employees, but cares a lot about not getting called out for it. They think they're clever but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to work for a company like that.

You should always be required to a look a person in the eye when you fire them. There are way too many managers who will do anything to avoid uncomfortable situations (for them).

So we end up with things like this...

"Computer says you're fired" is the new "Computer says no."

And the best is when the cowards send an SMS instead of just saying it face to face..

Or by robo-call as in The New Deal's "Exciting New Direction" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0pmNDIXymc&t=2m37

It’s much easier as a company to introduce a system to automatically fire people than it is to teach your managers how to fire people without taking their own comfort into account (e.g. not firing because it’s a pain).

Also this is an easy way to claim that people were fired fairly and they weren't picked out because the manager didn't like them or was racist.

To derail on the sentence: "Approximately" so later they can say that it was actually 200 or 400. "related to productivity" hints that they turned over some more but not related to productivity as to lower the precision of this number even more. "in this timeframe" put all this in a timeframe said by someone else.

Every part of the sentence works hard to make the number 300 more imprecise. I think he talks like this because he has no idea about the actual number.

Yet another instance of Newspeak. It's quite common nowadays in the real post-1984 world.

The good news is people can recognize it for what it is.

Those are just datapoints, whats the big deal? It only becomes real when finally touching you directly, as some journalist learned recently #LearnToCode.

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