I work in an Amazon warehouse in West Sacramento | Hacker News Reader

I work in an Amazon warehouse in West Sacramento

quillette.com

372 pointsjuokaz261 comments

I like the author's take on warehouse work, probably because it squares with mine. I went to high school with almost entirely white peers, was going to college without having to take on any loans, and I got the warehouse job because my dad worked in the offices. I met people who lived in completely different environments and believed completely different things, and it was awesome.

One thing I don't agree with:

>If Bloodworth believes Amazon is inhumane for looking askance at a worker who asks for a sick day during his first three weeks on the job, then he and I live by different work ethics.

If a person's sick, they're sick. If they're faking, they're faking. Days with the company doesn't affect the ethics.

Yes and no. I was once in a HR seminar where they welcomed you to the company. When the woman said "we get 19 days PTO a year", you'd be surprised how many people shot up and said "can we start taking them right now?"

Before they had even worked a day! PTO days are accurred by hours worked. For me, it's ~6 hours per 15 calendar days. You think you're entitled to PTO having worked 0 hours?...

For vacation days, your point makes sense to me. For sick days, people don't get to choose when they get sick. Someone can just as easily get sick on day 1 or 2 of a job as on day 401 or 402.

I've seen and heard about many different sick pay schedules because of this. From ones that accrue like vacation and PTO from zero as hours are worked, ro ones where the days are all allocated on the first of the year to be used (I assume pro-rated for mid-year hires) to ones that are a hybrid where some portion of the yearly sick days are allocated at the beginning of the year and the rest are accrued. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, and probably a lot of interesting behavioral nudges in each scheme that affect different types of work in different ways.

I once talked to a manager about how he handed out raises. He mentioned one engineer who was sick exactly 10 days out of each year. Coincidentally, the company offered 10 days of paid sick leave a year.

He laughed, and said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't give her a raise.

Here in NL employees get 2 full consecutive years of paid sick leave before you are allowed to terminate the contract.

I honestly think that's a terrible idea, and that paid sick leave should be paid not by the employer, but from taxes. Which should be raised slightly to cover such a policy.

Otherwise, hiring someone presents a gigantic risk for smaller companies. Getting unlucky even once with someone that will use 1-2 years of sick leave (legitimately or not) would be enough to bankrupt them.

In general I think making employers pay for a safety net, instead of funding it from taxes paid by those employers, is universally bad. What it does is make employers discriminate against potential hires likely to need that safety net, which makes those in need even worse off.

I like the way it's handled in Germany: Your employer is on the hook for 6 weeks, after that insurance takes over. Cases like being sick for the same reason again are covered as well. And the employer may demand a signed statement from a special doctor if he suspects cheating (this will only say wether the person may work, no details).

It could however be that he's talking about firing the person, in which case it's pretty hard in Germany as well. As far as I know early retirement or a termination from the employee are pretty much the only way. Social security mitigates this risk, however, and the protections are lower for part time/student jobs, so hiring is not made too risky.

Risks like that are begging for insurance policies.

Net result it may not actually change much in practice.

You can insure against the risk.

to add to the other german poster. in germany you are required to see a doctor to have a sick day. because a signed statement is needed for the company. they get money back from the insurance for the singed doctor statement.

I'm not defending that kind of employee misbehaviour, but how to handle that doesn't need to be factored into the sick leave policy beyond making the allowed usage clear and reserving the right to ask for proof when the company has reason to be suspicious.

How to handle that, more broadly, is the same as how to handle any other pattern of employee misbehaviour: some appropriate level of employee discipline according to the misbehaviour's severity and the history of past incidents, ranging from an informal conversation to what the manager in your story did to firing, with many intermediate possibilities.

Asking for a doctor's note is for children. These are professional adults.

Often people who behave unethically at work believe they are getting away with it. But then they wonder why they don't get raises, are passed over for promotions, are let go in the first round of layoffs, and don't have the respect of their peers.

I mean, if that's the path we're going down...is telling someone they can only be sick for 10 days in a year treating them like a professional adult person in the first place?

You can take an unpaid leave if you need more. If you have temporary disability insurance through work (and I would imagine most US software developers do), you can file a claim to compensate you for lost wages due to a medical condition.

I've never in my full-time tech industry career had government-mandated disability insurance with a maximum benefit anywhere near my actual earnings, and voluntary plans were not offered at most of my smaller employers. Additionally most disability insurance has a nontrivial waiting period that only covers cases where it's a single absence lasting weeks or months.

Well, I agree with the other responses that the manager is being passive aggressive by just handling it at raise time. But professional adults don't behave unethically at work. (A lot of adults in positions labelled as professional do, however. I'd call them unprofessionals rather than professionals.)

People need explicit negative feedback sometimes, and if bad faith is proven and not reversed quickly, the termination process should start. The doctor's notes are for the category of people that behave unethically regardless of age, and when the latter is suspected, the former can be temporarily appropriate given good reason for suspicion and after trying the direct approach of discussing the problem. I'm a manager and have never requested a doctor's note. I hope never to have to.

If I were this manager's manager, I'd have two people whose performance and attitude I'd need to correct, not one.

Anyway, my preferred rule is unlimited paid sick days, even when vacation days are limited. And yes, I've worked at places that use that rule. Just like you don't get to choose when you get sick, you don't get to choose how severely you get sick when you get sick.

As others have said, a long sickness should not all be at the expense of the employer. But plenty of places have mandatory disability insurance paid for by payroll deductions and employer contributions, including New York and Canada to name two examples I'm aware of.

So he decided he'd figured out her scam without ever bringing it up in yearly or monthly review. He also never asked for proof of the 10 days of sick leave after the first year, which is reasonable to do if he had a suspicion she was flouting a rule. If he wanted to factor sick days into his pay decision, he had a responsibility to make sure he was correct using the proper internal channels.

An alternate and equally plausible view is that she had a condition that rendered her borderline ill more than 10 days a year, but couldn't afford to take unpaid leave. So she just 'toughed it out' instead for the remaining days.

Laughing vindictively as you deny a raise to someone isn't something be lauded or emulated under any circumstance.

I come to HN for comments like this.

Fair enough, I agree he was being passive aggressive, but on the other hand, if someone is doing something that has the appearance of impropriety, it's a good idea to proactively bring it up with the boss to head off the suspicions.

There’s not a fucking thing that’s even slightly improper about taking your allotted PTO days.

It is improper to take sick leave if you're not sick. It wouldn't be improper if it is labeled PTO. I.e. it depends on how the policy is written.

Define sick.

Contagious cold? A rough day with anxiety/depression? Struggling with the side effects of a new medicine? Hung over from a night of partying?

If the company’s policy is 10 days, then there is zero reason to negatively judge an employee for using those days.

My father once told me that honor is what separates men from animals, and honor is what you do when nobody is looking. We all get to choose who we are.

I was also fortunate to attend a university with an honor system, to the extent that exams weren't even allowed to be proctored. Whether you cheated or not was up to you, nobody would know.

I appreciated that system, and have tried to live it long after graduation. I could go on, but it has proved to be more than worthwhile.

The honor system should extend to trusting employee's assessment of them being sick enough not to be able to work.

No, we don't all get to choose who we are. People don't choose to have depression, or <<insert any chronic illness>>

Not when they get sick every year the last week of December.

That would be a valid reason to ask for a doctor's note. But even then I'd only do it if their absence is negatively impacting productivity and they're really needed at work. Or if there is something else in their performance I was concerned about.

Otherwise a lot of offices are basically empty at that time, so who cares? As long as they're not coming to work when they're actually sick so they can hoard sick days, does it matter?

:If your sick your sick,and you do not need a doctors note to take you sick time you just change it in your Amazon AtoZ. How you use your time is up to you. Rachel-Amazon FC Ambassador

Even then, and I can appreciate that it might not be likely, but what if the holidays are a rough time for some and their depression spikes?

I’d rather live in a world where I can believe that most people are trustworthy and only a few are not.

You don't want a world where being untrustworthy is easy to get away with and incentivized though, IMO. That contradicts your goal, since it means more people will decide to be untrustworthy.

The honor system in the university trusted people to not cheat and they did not proctor exams. That doesn't mean cheating was condoned. If two students made exactly the same mistakes on an exam, there'd be an investigation, and consequences if it were found they'd cheated.

Employment is a business arrangement and both parties are merely obligated to fulfill the letter of the contract they have entered into - honorable or not. If the company hits hard times will "honor" keep them from getting rid of the employee who keeps getting sick? If the company allots a limited number of sick days, the employee is entitled to take them whenever they feel they can't be productive, for whatever reason.

Honor, responsibility, and sacrifice are important in personal relationships. You should still be honorable and reliable in your relationships with each individual within the company.

Just to clarify, your argument is that sick days should be used as PTO, because the term “sick” is impossible to define and therefore meaningless?

I’m actually a big proponent of generous but reasonable PTO that doesn’t require a designation between sick and vacation.

You're supposed to use sick days to take care of a sick dependent, too. Most single parents I've worked with always take all their allocated sick days because they use them when they're sick or when they have to stay home with a sick kid.

That definition varies by jurisdiction and (where not legally mandated) by company... But yes, it seems fair to allow sick time to be used for that purpose too instead of requiring them to spend vacation time.

Did he prove she wasn't sick in those days?

No. His argument was "she only took 10 sick days, as many as our paid sick days policy", so he deduced she was faking it.

Such reasoning, especially when it affects promotion opportunities etc, is not just without proof, but also immoral, and punishable by law. At least in the civilized western world (Europe) it would be.

So she was given 10 days sick per year but she isn’t allowed to take all 10 without being up to no good?

What does "improper" mean and who gets to decide what actions are improper? Paid days are paid days and just because they have a certain name doesn't change a thing. Has anyone ever been accused of faking a vacation? Of course not, because that would be ridiculous. But since sick days are called sick days all of a sudden you need to prove you're bedridden or else face consequences? That's absurd. Treat your employees like adults.

Sick days and vacation days typically have different notification requirements- in most places that had them I've worked at, it was 2 weeks for vacation and asap for sick leave. Vacation time could be denied if, say, the job involved time sensitive equipment or safety related tasks (I.e. nursing) and others had already requested the time off.

Abusing sick leave- depending on the job- has very real consequences for your coworkers and company, if someone absolutely has to pick up your slack.

So do those consequences you mention suddenly disappear if you're _actually_ sick? The fixation on "abuse" and that it can be easily determined doesn't make sense.

No, the consequences don't disappear. But, if you're in a position where when there's a difference in notice required for planned (vacation) and unplanned (sick) time off, and you take sick time off for vacation, you're effectively creating an unnecessary disruption. Maybe the manager has to scramble to find someone willing to come in on short notice. Maybe a temp staffer has to be hired in from an agency. Maybe that's not feasible, and someone has to work a double shift. Depends entirely on the job.

If it doesn't matter, then the company shouldn't be distinguishing between vacation and sick time off anyway. If it does matter, then personally I wouldn't want to work with someone who would do that.

Why is it abuse if I use my PTO? The whole point of PTO is that the company is agreeing to give you 10 days worth of slack. So obviously it shouldn't be a problem if you use that 10 days of slack. Are you telling me that the company is lying about the benefits it provides, and that it doesn't actually provide 10 days of sick leave? What else are they lying about?

In reverse order:

> Are you telling me that the company is lying about the benefits it provides,

No, I'm telling you that there's a difference in requirements for taking sick leave versus vacation. The only reason that sick leave doesn't have the same requirement as vacation is you don't choose when you get sick. If you take a sick day as a vacation day, you're forcing others to scramble to make up for you not being there.

> Why is it abuse if I use my PTO?

Perhaps you missed my intended emphasis on certain jobs that have time or safety sensitive responsibilities, such as nursing. It may not hurt the company for you to take those 10 days, but it does hurt whoever gets called in to fill in for you when they otherwise would have had off.

Here's a simple, real-world example: A company that runs a group-care home for disabled adults is currently understaffed due to a number of circumstances (the difficulty of the job being the biggest). There are four employees to cover 21 8-hour shifts each week (24 hours a day, 7 days a week total).

If someone calls in sick, the one of the others has to cover the shift. Under no circumstances can the house ever be unstaffed. Aside from a bit of overtime pay, the company isn't hurt, but everyone else is.

Not all jobs are like this. The consequences of taking a sick day as a vacation day (or simply being sick) usually aren't that severe. Maybe it's a manufacturing line and the manager has to step in to fill your role or something. Maybe it has no effect at all on anyone around you. In those cases, maybe it doesn't make sense for the company to distinguish between time off for being sick, and time off for vacation.

> The whole point of PTO is that the company is agreeing to give you 10 days worth of slack.

No, that's only true if the company doesn't distinguish between sick time off and vacation time off. Typically, where I've worked, all PTO was lumped into a single bucket, and no-one really cared. However, that is really more true of white collar work with long timelines and not so much in most other jobs (or the parent post I was replying to).

Understaffed is a management issue, not an employee problem.

I suppose the disabled adults living there have the biggest problem ...

Are they hostages?

Well, I disagree with your assessment that by taking my sick days I am hurting another employee. It's actually you, as the employer, who offered me 10 days of sick leave, and who knowingly understaffed your workplace assuming that I wouldn't use that time off, who is hurting your employees. Don't rationalize it by putting the responsibility on me. You're the one who told me I was allowed to do it. If you don't want to offer 10 days of paid sick leave then don't offer it, but don't punish me for using it, and don't try to guilt me out of using it by pretending that I'm the one creating the situation. It's your job to staff your workplace appropriately.

Confirmed. I'm a manager right now, and I get emailed to approve vacation days but I only have on-demand visibility into my team members' personal and sick days. Those last two types are auto-approved if the employee hasn't run out of them, since nobody gets to choose when they're necessary.

All three of these paid leave types are limited in number of days per year at my current employer, despite my preference as per another comment for paid sick days to be unlimited. I don't make those rules here.

However there are labour laws in force which protect the right to total (mostly unpaid) sick leave for 26 weeks out of every 12 months, including rights to return to the company afterward. (Special cases allow different totals, sometimes even two years for things like a minor child dying. And yes there are government-paid sickness benefits here in most long-lasting sick leaves.)

I agree that those kinds of statutory long durations are pretty different from the kind of sick leave I think should be unlimited, but having to care about 5 vs 10 vs 15 days total per year is not conducive to a healthy workplace, absent reason to suspect fraud.

Have you ever been managed by a passive-aggressive person? I haven't personally, but I know many people who have been, and the stain they leave on a team lasts years.

Your implication here is that it the the subordinate's job to read the mind of management. She must know what is 'proper' in her manager's mind outside of the explicit rules of the job. Management, however, is allowed to read her state of mind incorrectly and adjust her pay accordingly.

Obviously power imbalances like this exist everywhere, and it's wise to be proactive and careful, but that doesn't mean we should hold up examples like these as just or reasonable outcomes.

This was my immediate thought: "I bet she's sick for more than 10 days a year".

But who knows. Maybe one of his employees trying to work through being sick will come in and give him norovirus. A man can hope.

Personally, I think PTO subsuming sick leave ought to be illegal. I've seen multiple people with bright, red noses in the office unable to function much but won't go home because they can't afford to take the day off and they already have plans to take PTO two months out.

Why should I have to risk getting the flu because of this nonsense?

In Sweden at least, it ("PTO subsuming sick leave") is illegal. Vacation days (of which minimum is 25 for full time employees, but often 30 or more) are a completely separate thing from sick days. When you're sick, you're sick. The employer pays for the first 14 days (minus a deduction of a fifth of a average week's pay and 20% per day) and the state pays after that. Those 14 days are per incident, not per year, and being sick is not a valid reason for letting someone go. If you happen to be sick during your vacation, that too counts as sick days and not vacation days. All of this is by law.

I find int helpful for companies to convert unused sick time into vacation time at a rate like 2/3. This provides less incentive for faking sick.

Alternately, it incentivizes coming in sick and making your co-workers sick.

As an epidemiologist, I hate policies that allow sick days to be converted into something of value, or that put's restrictions in them.

I understand hating that from a health perspective, but for a profit-driven entity there's no resolving this issue without compromise. Sick time will always get abused by someone, so you might as well provide some incentive to not abuse it.

That's one possibility. But there's also the possibility that encouraging presenteeism (which is what incentivizing hoarding sick days is) results in a net loss of productivity as sick employees both half-ass their work and also get their coworkers sick.

Which a profit-driven entity should care about.

My first programming job was for a defense contractor. There was no PTO concept, just vacation (2 whole weeks a year) and sick leave (12 days a year). Unused sick leave accrued indefinitely but was not usable in any other way.

I was putting myself through University and still had about 2.5 years of work. I was taking 12-13 units at night year round. So, there were times when I'd use a sick day for study/project/etc time. But I was lead programmer on a critical system by then (including being on-call) and was my department's de facto liason to the computing center, so I got little friction about it.

I think asking for a doctor's note for sick leave ought to be illegal. Doctors have got better things to do!

Maybe they do, but in the US FFS re-imbursement regime, it's what they do.

That said - it is still ridiculous simply because the doctor can't do anything about whatever I might be most commonly sick for (migraine, flu, bad cold, bad seasonal allergy). I'll happily go to the doctor when I have a broken leg or a heart attack, but I'd prefer to stay home and sleep in a dark room and drink water when I have the flu...

Unfortunately, in my experience, denying a raise is the standard.

We seem to believe that sick always means some type of physical illness that means we can't work, which is completely wrong. Taking a sick day for mental health is totally OK. Taking a sick day to deal with a sick child or spouse or s.o. is totally OK. Leaving sick days on the table at the end of the year is not something that should be valued, whether they are paid or not. I'm sure HR makes every attempt to spend their entire budget before the year is out, so why should employees be held to a different standard? If you get 10 days, take all 10 days. If your bonus is determined by the number of sick days you take vs. the number given, then you need to find another employer. We need to stop letting this bullshit slide - you should never be penalized for accepting and using the resources given to you.

> If you get 10 days, take all 10 days.

So you don't agree with vharuck who said If a person's sick, they're sick. If they're faking, they're faking?

Are you really suggesting faking sickness, or am I misreading you?

Taking a sick day and calling on sick are two different things.

I had a job where all unscheduled days off where taken from sick days based on company policy. Vacation days needed or be scheduled ahead of time therefore people valued sick days a little more than vacation days.

Others just put them all into the same pool. It’s more about what the policy actually is than what you call it.

> Taking a sick day and calling on sick are two different things.

I think there's a locale difference here. Here in the UK, they very much are the same thing (faking sickness could get you fired if you're somehow found out), and we don't generally treat sick days as a pool to be drawn from.

You're misreading, I'm not suggesting anyone fake being sick.

I reckon results should be rewarded, not presenteeism. I might be more interested in results, who knows.

I'd be the first to agree with you. However, allowing a stellar performer to come and go as they please tends to have a bad effect on morale of the rest and impairs team cohesiveness.

Sounds like they're not a stellar performer then? Unless they're a solo founder with no funding, they don't work in a vacuum.

Edit: changed you's to they

I guess it depends on the team dynamics. If someone's good and show up for the big pushes, I'd take a lot. We had a chap on our team at my current company who worked from home every Friday, even though it was sub-optimal for planning meetings around sprint boundaries. But he was very productive.

One of the reasons I decided not to move to the US after I got my H-1B was because of the parsimonious approach to vacation days. Only 10 days of paid leave, for someone who's moving across the Atlantic. If I wanted to spend some time with my friends and family, it would need to be two weeks to make the flight time worthwhile, and that would take 100% of my vacation for a whole year.

And it was non-negotiable. Vacation increases beyond a one-off for the first year was a perk for tenure, not a negotiable form of compensation. And even if I didn't want to come back to Europe; why would I take a job that only gave me 10 days a year to do with what I want? Life is for living, not just working. It was a crunch point, a decisive factor in not moving to SV for me.

That seems plausible to me, especially if they have a chronic illness. Places I have been would make you use PTO if you had no sick days so then it becomes a cost/benefit analysis. Do you feel bad enough to use up PTO or can you "suffer through it".

I can believe someone taking 10 sick days off a year and no more. You take the paid time off if you're sick without much hesitation, and after that you weigh up whether you're sick enough to cost you a day's pay.

People should use their sick leave - that's what it's for. This "no raise for using sick leave" argument is no better than the overwork culture that's been discussed at length lately.

Mind you, I'm not an engineer, I'm a teacher. Unless it's seriously contagious or I'm basically unable to function I don't tend to use my sick leave because it's more work to prepare lessons for a replacement teacher than it is to come to work and teach.

Lots of comments, but no one has just come out and said it:

Fuck. That. Manager.

They care about butts in seats more than results, and they've deliberately sought out the metrics to justify it.

Paid sick days aren't just for when someone is contagious

Taking all 10 and just those has no indication on anything

Sounds like a horrible manager.

Wow.

A male manager denies a raise to a female engineer on the basis that the female engineer takes 10 sick days per year that their contract says they are entitled to.

Why is it important to emphasise sex in this? Periods.

The experience is different for each person but the fact that they didn't feel able to take 12 may itself be a problem. And even 10 would only allow the taking of a single day each month during the worst symptoms. Whilst at the same time leaving yourself with no days were you to get a cold later in the year.

I'm from Sweden and I used to work at a warehouse before and between my stuides. Here, everything if focused about the rights for the employee. As soon as you have worked for 6 months at one place, you have what we call "permanent employment", which basically means that you can't be fired unless you repeatedly fuck up big time (coming drunk to work repeatedly, steal from the company etc).

Anyway, here you can be sick for 5 days in a row (and get 80% of your salary), after that you have to go to a doctor and get a paper that you are in fact sick. Futhermore, you can be sick for 6 times a year, after that you have to talk to the boss and explain yourself. People used this to the maximum, meaning that on top of the 5 weeks per year people got payed vacation, they were all "sick" an additional 6 weeks, always 5 days at a time. The employers can't do anything, as people with permanent employment can't be fired.

Then he is an absolute idiot. The engineer could be sickly and be sick 20 or more days in a year, but only take the minimum allowed (to not lose her paycheck).

I'm down with flu, stomach issues, gout and a few other things far more days in a year than the company's paid sick leave. And while I might not take all of them, and go to work sick, it's within the rights of anybody to do so.

If the company is offering 10 paid sick days, and he is discriminating based on using those, then he should be sued to extinction...

A new environment with exciting new microorganisms seems especially likely to cause this.

Seriously?

That's the first/only question I ask about vacation policy because it's usually the only detail that isn't included in the first draft of the offer letter. Of course, I also ask before signing the contract.

PTO is a significant part of your total compensation. Not clarifying how accrual works is just irresponsible.

I honestly don't see how this is any different from asking about other time-based things, such as:

- whether your salary is paid every other week or at the end of the month.

- when your signing bonus is paid and how long you have to stay to keep it.

- when your stock units are granted and how long you have to stay to keep it.

- when the company's 401(k) contribution will hit your account.

All of which you should definitely be asking... and preferably before accepting the position.

" Of course, I also ask before signing the contract."

I can't stress enough how important that is. You better know what you're signing.

"How does it accrue?" might be a better way of asking than "Can we start taking it right now?"

It's a warehouse job, not the PR department. Maybe pay a little better if you expect employees with refined diplomatic skills.

I have absolutely no skin in this game.

The worst place I was at treating vacation as if it was granted (it expired at the end of the year) but actually accrued it to you

You're making a few massive assumptions here.

The first is that PTO is accrued by hours worked. This is not the case everywhere, some places refresh your PTO allowances at the start of the year and some will give you partial PTO when you start working.

The second is you assume that they, literally, want to take it right now. They might want to start making plans, or they might've been hired close to a holiday etc.

Also the way you phrase it as 'entitled' is worrying, because it's a two way street. I signed an offer letter because I felt working at X company would be beneficial for me. If a company is giving me PTO, then I'm going to use that PTO and I want to know when and what restrictions there may be.

I'm owed whatever the company decided to offer me during the process of interviewing and recruitment.

entitled? PTO is part of my compensation, of course I'm entitled to it.

As MuffinFlavored wrote, not unless it is accrued.

some companies let you take your 3 weeks off in a calendar year so you can actually start taking them your second day.

PTO is a very strange concept for much of the world.

I'm in the UK and get work full time and get 25 days holiday to take, plus the national/bank holidays.

If I'm sick I take a sick day. If I take a significant number of sick days, I'll be asked to produce a note from my doctor confirming that I'm sick.

If I get really sick, then myself and my employer both contribute to insurance that (I think, not checked for a while) gives me 75% of my salary until I'm well.

It's not quite a socialist paradise - but the general idea is that if you're an employee, there is a collective system that doesn't punish you for being ill.

Vacation days are for vacation.

I do work for an international company, so was interested to note on my portal (where I can check my benefits) - a new metric of "15 unused sick-days" had appeared... ..maybe my hay-fever is more debilitating that I thought...

typically there's a sick and vacation subset for "PTO". like you get 2 weeks vacation and a week of sick days. Sometimes they're interchangeable sometimes not. It all depends on where you work. My employer only deals in vacation days, sick days are basically "don't abuse it and we don't care" similar to your setup.

here in Germany that's the legal framework, i.e. you have a balance of vacation days (I get like 3 every month when starting a new contract, and after a year I get the whole allowance of vacation days in january).

Sick days are sick days and are not taken from that balance, I think a doctor's not is required after about 3 days of sickness, some employers demand it on the first day.

Also: With a doctor's note, you can also reclaim vacation days when you have been sick. So, suppose you took one week vacation, but you contract let's say pneumonia the week before, you get a doctor's note on your sickness, and neither go to work or on vacation but can reschedule these vacation days.

I do think its a fair system overall, employers are typically large enough to buffer the risks, and I think there is a difference between being employed and being contracted.

We have this in Fiji, plus a new one that started this year called Family Care Leave. Family Care Leave is 5 days/yr you can take off to care for a family member.

There's still some uncertainty about how it can be used... some employers don't require a sick sheet (of your family member), so you could use it to support a child on a day they're playing a rugby match, or when you can't get a babysitter. Other employers require you to present your family members' sick sheet.

What if you need to take some time off? Your brother is getting married? Or you just haven't had a vacation in a while? You take your PTO now, and you don't take it later. If you leave the company before that PTO accrued it's taken off your salary.

Yes! you can take vacation before it's accrued in any normal workplace.

One of the surprises I had when I was first hired and introduced to the benefits package I would be receiving was the fact that not only would I be receiving Paid Time Off (PTO ) but that I'd also receive a paid Vacation time on top of it all. This was a surprise b/c usually you either receive Vacation time that you gain a certain amount of allotted time from the start or you get PTO, or time that accrues over each work week. Here at Amazon we receive both on the first day of employment. Although they both are accrued over time, each Amazon employee starts off with 10 hrs of PTO each year while it will begin to accrue on top of that. - BrianD.J, Amazon FC Ambassador

Did you know that 40% of sick days are on a Monday or Friday!

I would not stay at a company that expect me to work next to people who are sick. The only exception is if I worked at a hospital and then I would enter the job knowing the risk and also expect the extra vaccination and procedures which is involved when you work with people that are sick.

If people feel they want points for work ethics, do bookkeeping or other stay-at-home activity. Answer emails. Spreading a virus and infecting people is unethical and a company policy that demand that of employees is indeed inhumane. It is also counter-productive which is why only companies that can easily and cheaply find replacement employees can do it.

The author seems to very much worry that negative press is going to be the cause of him losing his job due to automation:

>Just about every job in my sortation center could probably be done by a robot. In fact, it amazes me that Amazon hasn’t simply automated the entire facility. [...] If I had to guess, I’d say that Amazon continues to employ lots of human beings because, by putting money into the pockets of working-class people, the company creates more customers.

>If Amazon is going to be castigated publicly every time one of its 650,000 employees has a bad day, it may well decide to automate as many positions as possible and do away with most of its human workforce.

>But if John Oliver and his ilk keep harping away at how inhumanely Amazon treats its workers, Bezos might decide to completely automate his operation and people like me will be out of a job.

It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction.

> It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction.

Be that as it may, agitating for rules that make it more expensive to employ people can make the scale tip the other way sooner. It's not unreasonable to prefer a $15 job to a "$25 job" that promptly gets automated away because the automation threshold is currently e.g. $22 (and will be $19 in five years).

That's a valid concern and I think there's no really great path forward, aside from broad structural changes that will blunt the negative consequences of automation: how do you balance good working conditions with the specter of automation? If human labor forever has to undercut the cost of automation, then we can't discount the human cost of doing so.

The problem isn't actually automation. If a job gets automated, now the thing being produced costs less. At scale it means you can have the same standard of living with a lower salary -- a boon for the poor.

The real problem is when some of the things have artificial scarcity. If we have zoning laws that prevent new housing from being built, the poor can't afford housing. If we have restrictions on the number of new doctors and regulations that create high compliance costs and barriers to competition in medical services, the poor can't afford medicine.

You can't make a robot to build housing for people in a place where there is effectively a law against building new housing. So that's where we get into trouble -- people building moats around stuff that make it more expensive, to prevent its cost from staying in line (i.e. declining) along with everything else, until those things are unaffordable.

The real problem is the high cost of housing and medicine and education.

> If a job gets automated, now the thing being produced costs less. At scale it means you can have the same standard of living with a lower salary -- a boon for the poor.

This is making the massively optimistic assumption that cost savings will be passed onto the consumer rather than hoarded for executives & shareholders.

Automation is a fake problem which has yet to reduce the number of jobs in the world.

People think it's a huge issue because they misread a study about computer manufacturers producing exponentially faster computers since 1970 as saying the manufacturers fired all their workers.

I think I disagree.

If job roles are arranged like a pyramid (wide base of lower paid jobs, with lower number of higher paid jobs above) - the largest benefit is always going to be automating away the high number of low paid jobs.

Amazon might roll out some pick-and-pack droids - but are unlikely to replace Jeff with an AI farm of CEO-leadership.

If you say look at say what Uber or AirBNB have done, it's replacing the very bottom interface layer connecting what you want with who provides it. People are still driving people and cleaning rooms for their arrival.

I don't see how this contradicts the argument above.

I don't think I was specifically seeking to contradict anything you said.

If it's cost-effective to replace you with a machine, then it's probably going to happen. You can present your shareholders with the nitty-gritty numbers and the result is given.

I was just pondering the idea that as you rise up the pyramid we still retain the idea that these people are irreplaceable.

If you read any corporate history, there's always somebody portrayed as the bad-guy who clung onto some random notion that then caused the failure - and conversely the good guy that saved the company.

You can boil this down a bit to statements like "Why don't we all own an Atari console today?" (usual answer is that people at the top made made decisions, and bottom of the pyramid didn't matter).

A more modern example of "AI-CEO-wins" would be say... "Butterfly keyboards on Macs"

Data-mining reports that nobody likes them, and correct decision would be to revert to the previous standard.

This is seemingly about to happen after many years, many revisions, much expense and ridicule - and my postulated idea as to why this long saga happened, was because the decision was left to exceptionally well paid people, with vested personal interest.

> If job roles are arranged like a pyramid (wide base of lower paid jobs, with lower number of higher paid jobs above) - the largest benefit is always going to be automating away the high number of low paid jobs.

Not quite. If you can automate a CEO you might cut a million dollars out of the budget -- maybe even ten or a hundred million in some companies. But if you can automate 500K people making $15/hour, that's over fifteen billion dollars a year. Plus benefits and employment overhead. So yes, there's more incentive to automate the larger number of people.

But if the same number of people made $25/hour, then it would be over 25 billion a year. So it's both.

This has actually played out in practice with both automation and outsourcing. The auto workers were some of the first to go, specifically because there were both a lot of them and they had high wages, resulting in a very large incentive to reduce those costs once they had real competition from Japan.

It's not unreasonable for people to be willing to accept less money as one of the ways to stay competitive. The problem is when that amount of money isn't enough to make a living -- but it's not automation that makes stuff cost more. Automation makes stuff cost less. The problem is the high cost of the things that haven't been automated, and the barriers to entry preventing all of these people from doing those jobs, which should in turn bring down those costs -- unless we're dealing with artificial scarcity like zoning regulations. In which case we've identified the real source of the problem.

> if you can automate 500K people making $15/hour

They have 500K total employees, not 500K warehouse workers. That's closer to 90K. Divide your automated-away figure by 5.

Suggest a correction, more than 250K making atleast $15/hour - https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment/our-fulfillme...

A large part of the reason a lot of companies keep jobs only partially automated, is so that they can flex capacity up and down with demand.

With automation you have to buy all that capacity upfront and pay for it if you're using it or not. With labor, you can send people home early or cut hours if you don't need them.

The author is a libertarian think-tank shill, not actually worried about his job.

Yep. These lines made me squirm.

Amazon probably isn't a bad employer even by warehouse standards. But these kinds of statements are paternalistic propaganda on behalf of capital.

> If I had to guess, I’d say that Amazon continues to employ lots of human beings because, by putting money into the pockets of working-class people, the company creates more customers

I've never accused a piece of content like this of being a shill, but it's taking some mental gymnastics to convince myself that a person could really believe this.

why, its not far from the philosophy of Henry Ford, thus completely plausible.

I had read a few of these negative articles about Amazon fulfillment centers and then a guy we know working the counter at our local pizza place got a job at one of them. That made me change my mind and doubt the reporting after talking with him. The pay was much better better, the benefits if he transitioned to full time were much better, and he was really excited about a program Amazon has to cover tuition after (I think) a year for some educational programs.

Reminds me of the classic Nicholas Kristof article, “Two Cheers for Sweatshops”. (http://archive.is/W6ABE) The gist of which is, a job can be ‘not good’ from the perspective of the privileged but still ‘much better than the alternatives’ from the perspective of the people who take that job.

If the employer of a “sweatshop job” is not coercing or lying to its employees, then I have a hard time faulting the employer directly. We may still want systemic change to create more options and more equity for employees, but the “sweatshop” (that pays more than alternatives and which employees freely choose) is not the villain in this story.

I saw a documentary once on a slum in Kampala, where they interviewed a guy living in the slum who's job it was to clean out the public toilets there. He claimed it was one of the 'best jobs', because he was paid on time, given a uniform/gloves to wear instead of having to buy one himself, set his own hours, and the labor was not back breaking agricultural labor in the open sun all day. He also remarked he was able to contribute to his community in a positive way by keeping it clean, something all the other residents rewarded him for with various tips as thanks for his service since they had to use those toilets everyday. Wasn't the response I expected.

That's very interesting, I don't suppose you know the name of the documentary?

I wonder if the biggest reason he didn't hate his job was the gratitude from other people. One of my first jobs was stocking shelves on the graveyard shift at a grocery store, and the 1 hour or so before the store closed I would occasionally help shoppers find things, help take heavy things to their car, or help them reach items high on the shelf. A sincere thank you always made the 7h of mind numbing stocking go a lot faster.

Indeed.

As I can't find a reference, you can treat this as anecdotal - but there was a radio story about 2 fifteen year old siblings who'd both 'taken up sweatshop work'. One was stitching trainers, one was doing embroidery - for very low wages.

Initial 'outrage at child-labour' was confused slightly when they both said they were very happy, as they'd previously been working on their parents farm - and their sweatshop labour had allowed them to contribute towards a tractor for their village (replacing the labour of a whole load of children) - and for the first time they had some personal savings.

> The gist of which is, a job can be ‘not good’ from the perspective of the privileged but still ‘much better than the alternatives’ from the perspective of the people who take that job.

If you want to go deeper on this subject I highly recommend reading Factfulness.

Consider that cartels are known to work, they allow more profit for participants. The reason they work is because the price of maximum profit is typically higher than the equilibrium price.

Outlawing sweatshops effectively creates a wage / work conditions cartel.

Did he manage to transition to full-time/permanent?

Where I live, I know some people who work/have worked in the local fulfillment center, and say that few people manage to transition to full-time/permanent, they seem to find ways to fire/lay off people before they get there, the workforce is constantly turning over.

Different locations may be different though.

It feels to me like some of these articles (at least past one) and the overwhelming majority of the anti-Prime Day posts on Facebook were written by people that had never worked even a single day at a warehouse job. The plight of the warehouse worker isn't unique to Amazon by any means. Not even close. From personal experience, I'd say the Amazon fulfillment gigs are way better than ones I did for other companies years ago.

I (and people I directly worked with) have been interviewed a couple of times by what one would call "mainstream press". Once by a NY Times columnist and another time by TechCrunch.

The resulting articles bore very little semblance to what we said, omitted crucial facts, and contained the kinds of exaggerations that neither I nor any of the people interviewed would ever make. I'm talking "breaking the laws of physics" kind of exaggerations, and making it look like we said things that not only aren't true now, but will never be true in the future, which is something that would be immediately obvious to a technically competent person in our field of work.

Nothing changes one's view of the press quite as readily as being a part of the news. I'd wager the majority of what you see and read is handpicked BS made to fit an agenda, and outright lies to drive traffic aren't as infrequent as you think. If you think the tech press is any different, you're naive. There's really no incentive structure currently in place for reporting to be factual and balanced. You always get the behavior you reward.

I now always try to "read between the lines", like I would back in the Soviet Union when reading Pravda.

Were you quoted by name?

Don't think I was, but our CEO and CTO were.

I was going to ask if you contacted The Times about this. It used to take such things very seriously.

Then after I did a search for the Times' ombudsman, I came across an article stating that it eliminated its Public Editor position in 2017.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/public-editor/liz-spayd-f...

While The Times is prolific in its corrections, all I can find now is this sentence: "Messages on news coverage can be e-mailed to nytnews@nytimes.com or left toll-free at 1-844-NYT-NEWS."

What would be the point? We got our "free PR", and nobody reads retractions anyway.

Retractions are always a small corner while the original story got a full page. They fear saying "we were wrong" too many times could affect their credibility and therefore their (economic) bottom line.

Note that the publishing title of the article is “Tourist Journalism Versus the Working Class”, which should be an indication of the author’s bias. The story initially begins with comparing the personal, working experience of the author with what he has seen depicted in the media. I thought it was compelling, even if the author worked in a “sortation warehouse” instead of the “fulfillment center” frequently covered, and only represents one datapoint.

But then he interjects his argument with how working for Amazon has allowed him to interact with diverse colleagues? The story felt like it went from an appreciation of the working class to a defense of corporations and capitalism, with a bit of nationalistic pride sprinkled in. I don’t know what to think.

> a defense of corporations and capitalism, with a bit of nationalistic pride sprinkled in

About what you should expect from that awful publication.

It seems kind of like people who go to volunteer in Africa to "earn" themselves a story of adversity and dealing with rough situations.

"I don’t know what to think." I believe the author's point was that John Oliver's agenda doesn't match his own personal experience (his own 'agenda', which you now question), so dissonance comes down to who's agenda seems more genuine, who benefits most, who has more to lose, who has more to gain.

I think what you are confused about is that these days most talking about diversity is for the purpose of signaling the tribal identity of the speaker, as opposed to conveying some message. Thus, once someone signals their belonging to the other tribe (“I work for amazon and it’s quite okay, those damn journals don’t know a thing about life”), the other signal sounds strange and out of place.

I worked as a union picker for a warehouse in 2001 - I was just there until I went to college, but if I had stayed for a year the 12.50 an hour I was making would have been raised to 16.50, and subject to raises as I stayed longer.

Nearly 20 years later, and under a tighter labor market, amazon has raised the minimum for pickers to $15 an hour. It's great that this guy likes his job, but I have no doubt that amazon has been a suppressive force on waged labor.

Anecdotal, but I have a pretty good before/after view on a community that got an Amazon fulfillment center.

As far as I can tell, there hasn't been much impact on wages in either direction in that particular local labor market. Without strong unions, the labor market keeps warehouse wages at "just high enough that you can have a slightly better life than what you could get working in the service industry". There's always excess supply because warehouse work -- although physically demanding -- is relatively accessible.

Meanwhile, over 6 years ago, when the economy had barely even started bouncing back, Walmart was paying me—and other newish employees with short tenure—over $17/hr for this type of work. But look at mainstream attitudes towards the two companies and try measuring opinion about willingness to say something like "I bought it at Walmart" vs "I bought it from Amazon".

There's more, though. And I write all this as a pro-social, anti-libertarian leftist:

The obsession with trying to "help" the workers in these jobs—and in industries like Uber—mirrors a lot of the arguments you'll see in the pro-life vs pro-choice debate. People are fond of pointing out that conservatives care disproportionately about unborn fetuses when measured against how willing conservatives are to let infants be thrown to the wolves after birth. I see the public outcry that something has to be done about these companies (so as to help their workers, but comparatively little care for what's in store for those workers after the movement's immediate goals are met) as the left's own paradox (to call it by a charitable term; "hypocrisy" if you're less worried about hurting anyone's feelings).

Shouldn't be surprising. Most "opinion" is accounted for as a bunch of dumb trends and fashion and idpol talking points more than it is arrived at by thoughtful consideration.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

As David Runciman has pointed out in his book How Democracy Ends and on the Talking Politics podcast - https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/71-how-demo... - if you could only ask one question of someone you'd never met before, which would give you the best possibility of guessing whether they'd voted for Brexit, it would be whether they went to university (Remain) or not (Leave). He argues that, in the UK at least, there's a bubble of professional politicians who all went to university and were completely blindsided by the result of the Brexit referendum because they knew almost no-one who'd consider (or admit to) voting Leave.

Also John Lanchester's compelling (to me) argument that the bailing out of the banks after the crash (which was, on balance, right) followed quickly by austerity (where everyone else unfairly picked up the cheque for the bailout) lead directly to Brexit and Trump, because people were (to paraphrase the film Network) "mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore!" https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall

It really does feel that the university crowd (which I'm a part of) have completely detached from the lives of large chunks of the rest of the country. I get that this account of Amazon workplaces may be rose-tinted. Perhaps this facility is run by a good manager, and others aren't. But as it says, for this to be a specific kind of evil it needs to be compared to all other jobs in a similar environment. There are things that can be made better, sure, as there always are. But I find quite a bit of this middle-class hand-wringing tricky because it always seems to be well-paid journalists going "undercover". They'd probably find any manual labour degrading when compared to their comfortable Aeron chairs and plate-glass offices.

I think when it comes down to it labor conditions are in the details, and it depends on the work. External pressure can help workers get a better deal, but often, especially if there is a collective bargaining agreement in place, coverage that's more salacious than accurate can harm their ability to negotiate.

It's like the guy who had the made up story about Foxconn on NPR, with whole bits about how they were flagrantly violating child labor law. It doesn't mean conditions at Foxconn are good, but the lack of accuracy means the company can't and won't make concessions where there's a real problem.

That University disconnect is powerful and cuts across issues.

I remember hearing a freshman lawmaker talk about transitioning from other fields into politics. The first thing campaign advisers did was cut all references to advanced degrees from her website, replacing them with stories about how her grandfather was a farmer.

30 Rock's Duffy--a caricature of someone unrelatable--described his politics as "Fiscal liberal, social conservative" in one throwaway joke.[0]

I thought it was pretty clever at the time, but the college-educated writers of 30 Rock and I probably underestimated the relatability of Duffy's position.

I read a political attitudes survey a few years later that contrasted beliefs of constituents with representatives. It found that Republican constituencies are far more sympathetic to large government programs and redistribution than their reps, and Democratic constituencies are far more supportive of morality-based restrictions and social regulations than their reps would suggest.

Maybe most of the population is far more like Duffy, but education operates as a filter, making you either passionate about fiscal responsibility from econ classes, or passionate about social freedom and tolerance from liberal arts classes, or some mix of both.

That is likely to cause some friction.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/30ROCK/comments/88ztl8/dennis_duffy... He naturally meant liberal in the American sense.

[1] I've done a quick review of political attitudes lit and sadly can't find the study at the moment, will update if I find it and would welcome anyone pointing me the right direction if this sounds familiar.

> I read a political attitudes survey a few years later that contrasted beliefs of constituents with representatives. It found that Republican constituencies are far more sympathetic to large government programs and redistribution than their reps, and Democratic constituencies are far more supportive of morality-based restrictions and social regulations than their reps would suggest.

> Maybe most of the population is far more like Duffy, but education operates as a filter, making you either passionate about fiscal responsibility from econ classes, or passionate about social freedom and tolerance from liberal arts classes, or some mix of both.

That reminds me of the research this group is doing/has done, which is somewhat related to your points here. The basic upshot is that most people really are moderate, and share more views in common than we tend to appreciate.

https://perceptiongap.us/

Disclaimer: I've only skimmed that stuff, so I don't vouch for it, but its interesting

Firstly, this is factually incorrect. The biggest predictor was age, not education. Up to age 24, there was a huge preference for Remain. Up to age 35 there was a slightly smaller but still significant preference. Over 65 the preference swung the other way.

Education was significant, but not decisive.

But in fact the dirty secret of all politics is that democracy is decided almost entirely by the C2 political class. Everyone else votes fairly predictably. But with the right rhetoric, C2s can be persuaded to vote against the status quo - whatever that is.

The university educated class is most accurately represented by the B class, who tend to lean progressive and are more likely support pro-worker politics than other classes.

The A class - the true elite who own things - leans reactionary, and uses media ownership to propagate grudge and paranoia rhetoric against convenient victims (unions, foreigners, immigrants, non-conformists of more minor kinds) to herd the C2s into voting against their immediate interests.

That's exactly what happened with both Trump and the Brexit vote - although the Trump vote was complicated by the fact that Clinton ran a spectacularly ineffectual and tone deaf campaign which alienated C2s who might otherwise have supported her, and who would almost certainly have supported Sanders.

But other than that - the same class that created austerity as an institutionally abusive political dogma used its media leverage to channel anger away from itself and towards perennially reliable by-the-numbers xenophobia.

It's not a stretch to suggest Amazon benefits from the same pattern, albeit in a less partisan way. Bezos has made it clear he's interested in efficiency, and not in the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses.

Amazon as a company could easily afford to run an operation that's famous for being a world leader in humane employment - but it doesn't, because it chooses not to.

I'm willing to be corrected on best predictor of Brexit voting, but even if that's the case, as you say, education was a significant factor, and I think contributed hugely to the blindness of the political class.

Your analysis of the various classes (which has a whole other discussion attached to it) comes across as pretty patronising. The idea that the result was caused by "herding" C2s uses metaphors of cattle that are pretty demeaning, as if Bs aren't subject to similar forces with different aesthetics.

It also negates the idea that they have a real beef with the establishment, which I think they do. They may be voting against their own interests on the issue of Brexit, but in the service of a big, satisfying "f__k you" to the people who've shafted them in the name of "balancing the books" while bailing out their City mates. I'd feel pretty aggrieved if I saw City boys swanking around while my right to incapacity benefit was challenged again and again.

I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence. But I can't think of many organisations who would meet that standard, and I have direct experience of white-collar jobs that are more soul-destroying than the work described in the linked article. Even Amnesty International was hemorrhaging staff because of a toxic work environment while they were running that "protect the human" campaign.

What I found useful about this article was that it gave a sense of perspective from someone who does this kind of work for a living. Did those journalists interview anyone like this? (Not a rhetorical question - I haven't read the book by Bloodworth, but I'm skeptical given the tone of the excerpts I've read that it would fit his narrative.)

I thought bringing back the death penalty was a stronger correlate than university education? (Also I wonder if David is related to Steven Runciman)

When I was young I did agency employment for a few years between leaving school and figuring out what I wanted to do.

A lot of that was in warehouses (I also worked in greenhouses harvesting cucumbers 45C and 100% humidity, a paint factory moving 15l paint tins all day - never eaten so much or been so fit, 15l tins of bitumen are heavy to handball all day, steel plant that powder coated so hot tanks of acid and full PPE and a cardboard box factory) and almost nothing I’ve read about amazon surprises me much.

Warehouse work is often physically demanding and rote, same thing over and over again, I never had a problem with that because I’d just go on autopilot and the day would pass in a blur - never had an issue with hard work and got multiple full time offers, I’ve always been a naturally hard worker, I always figured I’m here for 8-12 hours day goes faster when you are busy.

It was an interesting experience and after moving into enterprise software development served me really well when it came to producing things operatives actually got a benefit from.

It also makes me think that TUI’s with shortcut keys are often massively more efficient than a pretty GUI but I digress.

> never had an issue with hard work

Very similar boat as you when I was younger. Lots of physical labor. No big deal when you're young. Extrapolate that out to a decade, two decades, or an entire career and I bet we would both be singing a different tune.

Oh I'm sure, some of those jobs would break you if you did them for a decade or two, it's why I got into programming after training as an industrial electrician, I looked at the guys I was working with who where 20-30 years older than me (40-50) and they where messed up so I took a different path.

Again though I don't regret it, the training was useful and it taught me life skills that are applicable to software engineering (though the stakes are a little lower when not working with 11kV systems).

Serious question, you don't think programming is going to break you after a decade or two?

I've been doing it full time since my mid-20's and I'm 39..so no?

Same here. Every day I am grateful that I can earn a large multiple of my former living by just sitting behind a desk.

Last year, I was interviewed for a public radio show in Europe. There was nothing more exciting for me to be in the spotlight. A week later they ran the interview and it was eerie to hear myself say things I didn't remember saying.

I mean, I said it, but I didn't say it like that. At first I thought I was crazy and didn't remember the interview correctly. Luckily, I had recorded the whole session on my computer. I was not crazy.

The interviewers questions were rephrased, and my answers where edited to make them more dramatic.

I had received many calls from journalists, and many didn't run the story at all after I said I will only answer some parts Off the record.

Most often then not, the journalists already has a story when they come to you. All they need is a quote of you saying what they already wrote.

That's so dishonest it isn't even funny. I was interviewed a few years back because I built an - unreleased - search engine and the interviewer wanted me to say some particular stuff about Google. I refused and the interview atmosphere was definitely very much different after that. There are plenty of good journalists but there are also a bunch of them that are complete jerks that fabricate stuff rather than report on reality.

My friend's friend interviewed me for the college paper re: online poker. Her final article had quotes taken out of context here and there. Painted me as a degenerate gambler drowning in luck. In reality, I had 2 years of positive cash flow and stable, increasing profits with records of every single hand played. Fortunately, the editor threw the article away (I'm not sure why, but I like to think it was seen as biased). How naive I was, though. That article could have been on the reasonably prominent paper website, available to anyone googling me even now. I lost a friend over it. Everyone's got their own agenda. Journalists are just closer to the public eye.

I remember the day I realized that most of "journalism" is basically a narrative confirmation machine.

each newspaper or media got a well defined narrative and they make the facts look like the narrative by using the "omission" technique: Basically removing the inconvenient facts and publishing the edited facts that fit their world view.

Every English class I've had growing up in America has a bunch of assignments like this:

1. Pick a topic.

2. Pick a position.

3. Find sources that support your position.

4. Write.

If English were held to the same high standard as the sciences, it would go:

1. Pick a topic.

2. Research sources.

3. Pick your position.

4. Write.

It's not surprising that the people who do the best in English have carried this mindset with them to their job.

I especially liked the points about how often we vary our criticism of journalism based on the topic.

Reminded me a lot of Gell Mann amnesia, which I catch myself suffering from a little too often:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

This is great, we all do this too.

Even when you try not to you’re still bombarded with ‘news’ all the time and can only invest so much cognitive effort to each. So we end up deferring so much of common knowledge to news sites. Only a small percentage of those are trained journalists with time and budgets.

Honestly, most trained journalists make similar mistakes, simply because they're not people with experience in a field or industry.

Even assuming they're 100% honest about their intentions and trying to minimise factual errors overall (which isn't always the case), it's still a person/people at an organisation doing research into something they're not experts in and trying to distill their findings down to a level understandable by their publication's audience. Usually with limited time and a limited budget.

By definition they will make mistakes, and probably quite a lot of them too. Just like a software engineer would if they were told to write an article on astrophysics or molecular biology without any real experience in either field.

The Gell-Mann thing is dangerous pseudo science, stay away. It's not even invented by a scientist. It's the excuse people go to to disbelieve something they see in coverage, or to win arguments about "the media" or "fake news". If you want to dismiss something as a falsehood, you have to do it with evidence, not quips. This article is an excellent example.

Most fallacies weren’t coined by scientists, they were coined by philosophers. This one was coined by a writer. That makes it intrinsically invalid?

Your criticisms of the effect are pretty vague, can you give an example here where it’s been misapplied?

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect doesn't say "all news is bunkum", it says "the news media consistently make obvious errors when they report on physics, they probably make similar errors when they report on your field of expertise, so take what they say about other things with a pinch of salt". There's a world of difference between cynicism and scepticism.

I didn't realize this had a name, thank you for the link!

There is similarly a great EconTalk episode from 2009 about what working at WalMart is like http://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-mart/

One thing I took from that episode is how so many people yearn for the mom-and-pops to come back, even though their prices were awful, selection poor, service subpar, working for them had less protections, and on and on.

WalMart is actually a pretty good employer compared to many other low-wage industries and the benefits in terms of price and selection for rural areas should not be underestimated.

Lots of interesting and worthwhile detail, none of which undermines reporting about what goes on in warehouses in which the author does not work, nor does it undermine the argument that paying $30,000 a year for full time work in California is only possible because America maintains a permanent underclass willing to work for next to nothing.

In which other country can unskilled workers earn $30k?

OK maybe a handful. (AUD has gone down since 2013) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/media/File:Hourl...

I can kinda-sorta see what you mean by a "permanent underclass", but in what capacity does america "maintain" that class?

I love this article. It’s so hard to find moderate voices, especially when algorithmic curation tends to surface outrage first.

As the author puts it:

“I don’t object to journalists writing about the trials and tribulations of Amazon employees. I only wish they would do so fairly.

Just because a journalist has found an Amazon employee somewhere who got sprayed with bear repellant, that doesn’t mean Amazon employees spend their days in mortal fear of a chemical attack.

...we need fair-minded and accurate reporting about the companies we patronize, not scaremongering polemics preaching a black-and-white gospel of tyranny and exploitation. ”

Why would we expect journalists to write fair articles? They’re in the infotainment business and need to sell clicks.

Reporting that working at a warehouse is “hard work but mostly okay,” is not going to advance that reporters career or help the publication make money. But finding a shocking and at least mostly true story, and ignoring whether or not it’s a 1% outlier, just might.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. What we ought to do is ignore it.

I think the biggest problem is that most people want to be genuinely well-informed, won’t accept that this isn’t actually possible, and thus accept a lot of commercial infotainment because it provokes strong feelings, makes for good shared outrage dinner chats with “in the know” friends, and helps you imagine that you are well informed.

> Why would we expect journalists to write fair articles? They’re in the infotainment business and need to sell clicks.

Because if journalists stop writing fair articles in the longer term our societies will lose a lot more than just a bunch of $ in the coffers of the press owners.

"We shouldn’t be surprised by this. What we ought to do is ignore it." Impressive challenge. Rush Limbaugh was a voice for Gen-X neocons much in the same way John Oliver is today for Millenial neo-libs. In their time, they are hard to ignore..it's the diet being consumed.

The logic applied in the article cuts both ways, however. I've seen my fair share of companies find one happy employee, and use that to try and sweep all of the bad shit going on in the background under the rug. Look at John Manson and how happy he is. All of the other stories are just workers looking for revenge, lazy good-for-nothings, etc.

So while it's true that the writer of this story might not be abused or experiencing disparate work conditions, there are many others that are.

Glad to hear a different side to this. There absolutely are not any robots that can do all of the tasks the people in the sortation center do as quickly as they do them. Not even close. I actually think that deep learning systems can be trained for all or almost all the fixed tasks already, but there are no robots that have anywhere near the combination of mobility, power-to-weight, flexibility, speed and agility necessary to replace humans in those jobs.

I think that it's going to take a new type of more effective artificial muscle to get there.

But then absolutely all of those jobs will be eliminated.

I think Marshall Brain's books are pretty good on the subject.

Oliver’s researchers even uncovered an incident in which a worker had died on the job and her co-workers were told to carry on working in the presence of her corpse.

No, they didn't. This was about a different company.

> Apart from employing a lot of staff, Amazon does a number of things progressives ought to like. For instance, it employs a very diverse group of people. On my shift, I work with African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, white people, gay people, deaf people, ex-convicts, and people whose ethnicities and even genders are a mystery to me.

This is a warehouse job with a medium low salary. If the author worked as a programmer and could still repeat the above, that would really be commendable.

  If the author worked as a programmer and could still repeat the above

As a programmer for a "stodgy" defense contractor, the programmers in my group alone included our Chinese-born female project leader, a Hong Kong-born female, a deaf male (and new parent), an African-American female, a Cuban-born male, an Iranian-born male, a Kuwaiti-born female, an ethnic Chinese SF-born female, and me.

And we were awesome.

> And we were awesome.

That's excellent and I envy you, it must be a great team to work with and even hang out after work. But how is this related to Amazon?

It addressed the parent comment that implied that programming organizations are inherently not diverse.

Too many are not, but it's not because programmers from other demographics aren't available; it's because true diversity isn't wanted.

Look at the photos on the Careers page for your typical USA coastal tech company. I see over and over again 22-35 year old Asian and white males (mostly). Latino faces are rare; black faces are rarer still. And faces over 45 or so are non-existent.

>Warehouses, such as the one I work in, have huge cargo bays that are almost always open to receive the back ends of incoming tractor trailer rigs. When these bays are open it is virtually impossible to control the temperature inside the warehouse artificially.

Why can't they section off the loading zones and put something like air doors or strip doors to keep the cold/warm air from escaping?

The company I work for encloses the entire dock area with a giant overhang and there's a giant door for the semis to drive thru into the warehouse. It's totally a thing, but it costs extra. We do it because some of the products are temperature sensitive.

Everyone drinks some flavor of Kool-Aid. Confirmation bias: it's the human condition. Do and think whatever whimsical thing you want to, then do the cognitive contortions later to justify it.

Warehouses, such as the one I work in, have huge cargo bays that are almost always open to receive the back ends of incoming tractor trailer rigs. When these bays are open it is virtually impossible to control the temperature inside the warehouse artificially

When I worked in a warehouse in a northern state, they kept the bay doors closed when there was no truck there, and even when the doors were open, they were covered by strip curtains to help keep the heat in.

Even when it was below freezing outside, it was warm enough inside the warehouse to walk around in an insulated shirt and no jacket (~50 degrees inside, ~20 (or less) outside).

Of course, they didn't do it for the employees, we dealt with a lot of food products that couldn't be allowed to freeze. So climate control even in a warehouse is possible, but maybe not cheap in 95+ degree Sacramento summer days.

John Oliver did not say that Amazon had an employee die. John Oliver started off talking about Amazon and then switched the discussion to the companies trying to keep up with Amazon (in the order fulfillment business) which is where said death occurred. These competitors apparently have far worse employee treatment than Amazon but claim they have to in order to keep prices down due to Amazon's efficiency.

You'd think the role of regulation and oversight is to force the company into bankruptcy before allowing it to have far worse employee treatment including coworking spaces with corpses.

I believe the specific incident is xpo logistics

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/21/business/preg...

For example, last October, a 58-year-old woman died of cardiac arrest on the warehouse floor after complaining to colleagues that she felt sick, according to a police report and current and former XPO employees. In Facebook posts at the time and in recent interviews, employees said supervisors told them to keep working as the woman lay dead.

A relative worked in a big bank in the 80s where a vendor CE died of a heart attack while doing maintenance on a mainframe at 6AM.

Directed by operations management, security did a “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” move, rebuffed first responders, who shrugged and left. Employees in the data center were directed to go about their business. They rolled the guy around for most of the day until someone told a bigshot of sufficient stature to override the lunacy of the production control people.

Given sufficient empowerment and toxic enough culture, people are capable of anything.

Well, it's not like they're going to be able to help her at that point. Might be that supervisors were just trying to get employees to clear out of the way of police ect. Without knowing the exact wording of what employees were told, it's kinda hard to judge the reaction.

This comes across as click bait. This is not the opinion of an actual warehouse worker but someone with an agenda who has taken the job specifically for that purpose which only becomes clear once you click through to read the article. What value can this have? How can this be taken seriously?

Let Amazon workers fight for their rights, why are outsiders who do not do that work skeptical of their concerns? What is the basis?

We are always talking about free speech, democracy and protest and yet it seems when people use these rights a whole group of prosperous and well off individuals who don't have anything to do the conditions of the protestors rush to trivialize and dismiss their concerns. There is something extremely mean and smallminded about this.

I was agreeing somewhat until this part:

> “Never take a sick day during your first year of employment with any company, no matter what.” My wife and I have literally gone years between sick days.

And it all went downhill from there. God forbid this guy be struck with cancer or a chronic disease.

I for one cannot buy the fact that this article is authentically written by a worker in Amazon warehouse. Seems like a shadowed approach from a different segment of media to just do cleanup or take a shot on Oliver's program.

So, you think this article is some shill..to what end? Just a potshot at John Oliver? Who is this 'shadow' you perceive?

The issue is that John Oliver whole business is to try to make humorist exaggerated content look like real life facts.

Every other week there is a John Oliver monologue that gets hyped and it seems that no one looks at it with a critical eye.

John Oliver is to the left what Fox News is to the right.

For a second I thought nobody was going to stick up for the bajillion dollar mega corporation.

Every employer I've worked for has had: * Billions of dollars less money than Amazon * Better working conditions

Amazon doesn't need your voice. The workers who fear an extended bathroom break might get them fired do.

How happy were your customers?

I generally like John Oliver, although I find most of his content geared toward a shallow journalism that I don't enjoy.

If he were an amazing man, he would read this piece, decide this critique made sense, and run a new episode in which he corrects and fixes everything that was not super accurate in his previous take on Amazon.

John Oliver, I know you lurk on Hacker News every day, for several hours, under a fake username. Please, do this!

I saw that this was a link to the quillette and wondered how they would tackle the topic. I thought, "I bet they are somehow going to say working there is great."

I guess if nothing else you can say quillette is predictable.

I wonder if different warehouses could have different working conditions.

A related recent thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485859.

> or that workers somewhere in Iceland (360,000) have been required to work around a fallen co-worker. But neither of these things, if they happened, would be proof that working conditions in Luxembourg or Iceland are appalling.

They would however be proof that working conditions in a company in Iceland are appalling.

Not really, since they are single events you don't know anything about the frequency and how it compares to the frequency in other locations.

The law of large number causes unusual events to happen every day, which means the more globally your news operates the more freak events you can accumulate. Your town newspaper regularly reporting that someone had to work next to a corpse would be concerning. BBC world news reporting that this happened somewhere in the world might be statistical blips.

"The weak law of large numbers states that the sample average converges in probability towards the expected value"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

Ah, I was thinking of "The Law of Truly Large Numbers"

I wish this was the only report about Amazon's poor working conditions. But it's not true, is it?

No, the article has multiple arguments.

One is reporting on extremely unusual things (working next to corpses), which hopefully don't happen in amazon facilities more regularly than in any other facility but due to amazon's size even a low probability of such a thing happening on any particular day means it's eventually going to happen in one of their facilities.

Another is that the undercover reporters come from an environment where what's considered normal or even better-than-averagee in manual labor jobs would seem outrageous if someone demanded it from them in their regular jobs.

Combining unusual cherry-picked events with their own perception tinted with nightmare vision goggles leads to biased reporting that may not necessarily reflect the experience of most workers.

But I commented on one argument, which is that it's basically a fluke. But for some reason I keep seeing streams of reports of many different flukes. Are they all unrelated?

So if that AMA reddit thread describes working conditions where people don't want to drink water because they don't have time to pee, is it unrelated to reports of warehouse workers defecating thrash cans or drivers peeing in bottles?

One common thread there is that workers seem to have pretty steep quotas that don't tolerate breaks of any kind. Is then the situation of working next to a corpse at Amazon really comparable to a similar unusual situation in Luxembourg?

I don't know, the point is that we would need statistics to judge better than with the anecdotes we have now.

Amazon might be an especially egregious case of soulcrushing manual labor and exploitation of poor people who don't have many options. Or they might be a far less headline-worthy case of having an incident rate no worse than industry-average but with above-minimum wage pay (as TFA claims) and the reports we're seeing are mostly due to their size amplifying any tiny signal.

Anyway, your initial post about the mere existence of incidents at X being proof that working conditions at X are appalling. Which is incorrect because it doesn't tell us anything about whether the incident rate is above the base rate outside X or not. Of course one can still find those incidents appalling, but if X is nothing special compared to its environment then we would have to improve things everywhere and can't uniquely blame X.

The problem with this argument is that with a large enough company anything can be considered an anomaly and hence tolerable.

"Jeff Bezoes killed his secretary and buried the body in his backyard? I bet one CEO somewhere in Iceland also had done it."

You seem to conflate two different cases of tolerable here. Of course murder is usually not tolerated by society, so the individual case would hopefully still lead to a murder conviction. But you wouldn't blame amazon for fostering murderers unless you could show that its ranks commit more murders than the general population, i.e. amazon has a rate of murder that has not been found intolerable.

Related: The Jungle purportedly was a similar piece of propaganda.

It doesn't seem appropriate to discuss a Quillette article without mentioning that it's an alt-right publication. We must not normalize it, and I strongly encourage people to flag the submission.

A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles. Posts like these are low-key attempts for Quillette to legitimatize itself.

Quillette is not an alt-right publication. At “worst” it is a center-right publication, and if you can’t see the value of such a publication existing then you should probably question your own epistemology.

Re: the “cement milkshake conspiracy”, the Portland police’s official twitter account posted a warning about cement milkshakes. For a (short) period after that, it was entirely reasonable to mention it as a real possibility.

Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Quillette pieces (~50/50 for me), it should be obvious that it is a legitimate, even valuable publication. If you’re having trouble seeing this, perhaps you’ve been caught in a social media echo chamber.

Quillette is strongly associated with "the intellectual dark web," which is associated with the alt-right. Quillette publishes prominent alt-right individuals. Several articles on the front page, including the one you mention, favorably portray alt-right individuals.

You seem to be familiar with them, so I think that you're aware of this, to be honest.

>Quillette is undeniably associated with "the intellectual dark web," which is undeniably associated with the alt-right.

You state this as if it's fact, instead of just your opinion.

People who consider themselves public figures from "the intellectual dark web" have time and again made clear that they have virtually nothing in common with the alt-right (Sam Harris on countless occasions, for example).

In your OP you say,

>A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles.

Can you list some examples please? This hasn't been my experience as a casual reader of Quillette.

The “intellectual dark web” isn’t a real thing. Outside of Eric Weinstein, who coined the term, those who try to trade on being part of it (e.g. Rubin, Shapiro) are largely the reason why the term has become associated with toxicity. Indeed some of the other “members” of the IDW (e.g. Harris, Rogan) find the whole idea to be a bit silly.

I’ll also point out that you’re calling me “disingenuous” in one breath while broadly painting several individuals with wildly different politics, audiences, and personal ethics with the term “alt-right” in another.

It seems more to have a libertarian bend rather than a populist alt-right one. So citation please.

It's penalized on HN the same way we downweight all mostly-political or ideological publications. But such sites do come up with the occasional interesting article, and on HN we care about the article, not the site. Same with Jacobin or something like that.

Maybe if Jacobin published articles on Lysenkoism and denounced rootless cosmopolitans.

I haven't examined their corpus. But actually the worst articles aren't particularly relevant. On HN we're interested in the good articles. Bad sites sometimes produce good articles, and those are the ones we want here. Conversely when a good site produces a bad article, we don't want it here.

Going by article quality rather than site quality works well for HN and has been this way for a long time. We have various penalties for various lower-quality (for HN) sites and various ways to override them.

And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten's sake.

While this is a reasonable standard when it comes to brimstoning cities, I don't think it's a sane way to moderate a forum. Send forth your angels to Quillette and I imagine they'll quickly report it's a site that advocates phrenology and can be nuked safely. Having it appear on HN is bad for HN and not principled even-handedness.

Where do you draw the line? People have submitted VDARE.COM links, and, in fact, more of them have survived flagging than not. I assume there's some kind of threshold past which we're not accepting articles no matter what their quality.

Non-racialized Quillette articles, by the way, have mostly served to endumben HN. See, for instance, "Sokal Squared" and "Mathematics Intelligencer".

(Jacobin doesn't belong here either!)

"ideological" meaning not matching the HN ideology of course

Leftists think HN is rightist, rightists think HN is leftist. We moderate on both sides of the ideological abyss, in the hope of preserving HN for intellectual curiosity rather than ideological battle. One can't have both.

That doesn't stop anyone from perceiving bias, indeed obvious bias ("of course"). It's the instant reflex that every ideologically committed user experiences, but it's in the eye of the beholder. People's own views determine how they imagine HN's bias or mods' bias—not only which polarity they perceive, but how intensely they perceive it. If you tell me what bias you perceive in HN, I can tell you what your own politics are. This is perhaps the most reliable phenomenon we see on HN.

Quillette is not an alt-right publication. It probably doesn't feed easily into your liberal world-view narrative, but they are the other side of the spectrum of publications like the NYT and it is more needed now than ever.

...Wow. This article changed my opinions dramatically. Really thankful to see an article like this. It puts the emphasis on irresponsible (whether it's intended or not) journalism as a huge problem here in the US, as opposed to all the dystopian news stories that come out these days.

Of course there are real exceptions, like stories that turn out to be true about really bad working conditions in some places. But it particularly struck me to see this example, of John Oliver and his team grasping at straws to put together a damning narrative about Amazon, only for one guy with firsthand warehouse experience to come out and tell a much more positive and convincing story about his job.

We definitely live in a time where social media and the news tend to make us think the world is a hellscape of things like big tech and AI, corrupt politics, and corporate greed, all coming together to destroy our world as we know it. I don't think the world is perfect, there's still tons of problems that really suck (homelessness, poverty, actual corruption and greed, ...) but I feel like we're gonna be totally fine and this is pretty manageable overall. We'll figure it all out.

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