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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

He's also 64. That's near retirement age, and I imagine he can afford to retire early.

I wouldn't dismiss how hard it can be to quit a job you love, just because you're 64. I know people that love doing what they do well in their late 70s, and job satisfaction for them is way more important than any monetary aspect.

There might be charities, non-profits or other organizations that would appreciate his skills.

I remember my dad spent all of about two weeks "retired" (resigned in protest in similar circumstances, but from a staff of maybe 100) before finding a part-time job at a local charity he liked.

Its funny that 64 is now considered retiring early.

It’s because most of us won’t get to retire, so much as will have some event cause us to no longer be working.

He has a few reasons to retire -- and a few reasons not to retire. And he laid them out for us about a year and a half ago: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/10/25/On-Retire...

> Progressive friends, people whose opinions I respect, give me shit about working for Amazon. I claim that the problem is capitalism, flaccid labor laws, and lame antitrust enforcement, not any particular company; maybe I’m right.

And now he's basically admitting he was wrong. Impressive.

Both his friends and him could be right. If you attempt to survive in a caustic environment, you will become caustic yourself.

Show me one corporation that doesn't have some scandal in it. Or even better a multinational corporation.

If you play by the "rules" and don't anger anyone, you're going to lose to everyone not playing by them.

Never underestimate how quickly you will become like the environment you spend 8+ hours every weekday in

I meant on a more global scale. Each corporation through competition or acquisition of people became evil.

> And now he's basically admitting he was wrong. Impressive.

From today's post:

> Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.

In Ontario, Canada, which has a lot of auto plants, there's actually a controlled experiment of sorts that is going on: the unions are in the GM, Ford, and Chrysler plants since forever. Meanwhile they've been trying to get into the Toyota/Lexus plant for a long time and the workers always vote 'no'.

Same industry, same geographic area and culture, different results.

Turns out that if you respect your employees they often respect you back.

Could you expand on that example?

Yes it's true. But Toyota has a very unique culture in which management are more like coaches, and every single employee on the line is expected to continuously introduce improvements in the assembly line. In such an environment, the employees are highly empowered. So it is natural that they would resist any attempt to prevent direct communication between them and management. When a union takes charge it is legally not permissible for workers to directly talk to management and vice-versa; they have to go through the union.

If the employees were unsatisfied with that arrangement, they would bring the union in. That's the point.

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