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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I don’t mean to be rude to those who are seeking a living, but let’s call this what it is.

It’s not a hiring process. There is no interview. They aren’t interested in working with you to figure out if you’re a good fit for each other.

They’re trawling the ocean and filtering the catch through drug and background tests. They process countless people every day, constantly replacing others who have broken down or reached EOL. Nobody here is meant to be anything but a cheap robot with decent sensor-end effector coordination. In fact, their humanity is a liability that Amazon begrudgingly tolerates, largely because it has to.

We need robots in the worst possible way to replace any and every job that people would never choose to do as a hobby.

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Yeah, the idea of automation replacing manual labor to free the workers for higher value work never really panned out. All the free thought got automated and the only reason people are needed is because they are best at grabbing and manipulating arbitrarily shaped objects. It feels inhumane.

It actually did. Very few people are needed to do basic farm labor compared to 150 years ago, and way more people are in jobs that involve minimal manual labor and instead necessitate education.

You'll appreciate that HR is done through an app. If you want to quit you can literally do that on the app, no need to talk to anyone. Same with apply for the job, accepting your offer, etc. It's mostly computerized.

That said, it's not THAT hard to get through process, and something of the steps are just filter. We don't know the posters work history / capacity / etc. We do know amazon probably cares very little that this person made it only 3 minutes?

I did hear that for older workers they have a work hardening process during peak to try to harden up workers a bit more gradually to be able to handle full shifts.

isn't this the same with tech jobs though?

you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates

it's only more intense because the cost/risk ratio is magnitudes higher

This is a gross simplification and really trivializes the struggle of people not privileged enough to work in our industry.

I actually disagree. If you're going to look down at "those people" making the company run, then yeah, us techies are just as easily trawled through and filtered via intense programming interviews. What's the turnover time for SWEs at Amazon anyway?

I think it captures the main point that Amazon hiring procedures for 99.9% of people are based on optimizing their bottom line. If they want something specific, they'll acquire it/copy the idea. Backend optimizations/tooling stuff I don't know. Maybe they're recruiting those people based on their research credentials.

We don't earn better pay and benefits because we are special, brilliant people. We are given these benefits because there is a perpetual labor shortage of people who have enough tech experience to do their employers' bidding and nobody will show up if they don't doll these out. In other words, we are a fluke, and we'll lose these benefits once they figure out how to commoditize software development.

Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union (as well as a warehouse workers union), if not now, a few more years down the line when salaries go down as a result of saturation.

yes and i don't disagree with that

yet, have you seen how many bootcamps and hype there is about tech industry?

anyone wants to be in, anyone wants the perks

the companies will do anything to trivialise our job and race wages to the bottom, so they could justify spending less money on "human resources"

Well, yes. As an engineer, you are a very expensive resource, probably working in a department that's considered a cost center.

"Rightsizing" those is great for the bonus.

> Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union

Wrong approach.

Push for real engineering certifications instead. Keeps the free market (no promotions based on seniority) but weeds out the "6 month bootcamp fullstack engineer" disaster from your codebase.

That's going to be tough to get backing for, and should be. With no meaningful labor coordination, the only way that happens is for a few unaccountable people get together and dream up their idea of what that certification looks like, then do a lot of politics to stick everyone else with it.

Sure, maybe you open-source the initial development, but you can't open-source the politics because nobody can have a sensible conversation with a million people working at at least partial cross purposes, and so when you're doing the politics you make a lot of compromises that nobody gets a say in.

Best case you fail, worst case you succeed and everyone is stuck with the result, which inevitably favors employers because why do they even participate if they don't get something at least a little more like a buyer's market out of it?

So nobody with any experience, maybe even nobody with any common sense, participates in whatever process you have from the design side, because all that does is waste time lending legitimacy to something that's guaranteed to be a bad deal for labor. You haven't even sold me on it!

Of course, if you have buy-in and trust from a sizable and valuable labor base first, all this changes. But that means a tangible history of success as part of the leadership of a union, and you've already ruled that out. What you're proposing would be more like a guild, which is actually a model that can work when the people who run it also monopolize the local industry and can exclude anyone who doesn't meet their standards - including preventing other business owners from defecting and hiring skilled upstarts who the guild won't accept for inevitable and again political reasons. Management in this industry isn't that coordinated either, and can't be without being a lot more oligopolistic than it already is.

Maybe in a few decades. Right now I don't see it.

A union could choose to not seek promotions-based-on-seniority as part of its negotiated contracts, if its membership actually wanted that.

> Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union (

Yeah, let's do it when we get there

I look at things like Dynamics 365 and other no-code/low-code "solutions" and I fear that we're just about at that point.

People have been trying to get low or no code solutions to work for a very long time now. The problem is that they a) they tend to be limited in the scope of the problems they’re appropriate for, and b) if you try to solve really complicated issues with them, you usually run into the same difficulty problems that you do with regular coding.

As we've been finding out with our org's migration to Dynamics from our homebrewed organizational software. (The auditing features in Dynamics are particularly limited.) Still, as time goes on these platforms keep improving on the complicated issues and the edge cases that tend to work better with bespoke software. Slowly but surely they are killing us off.

But conventional programming languages are consistently getting better too, and the needs and desires for what people want their programs to do keep getting more expansive. That’s why programmers still make so much money, why demand is so high.

It’s still possible for it to go the way you say, but so far there’s no evidence of that.

I disagree we arent special. Not that we've been selected by the divine, but dont we sit down for long periods of time trying to model reality, speak multiple languages (sounds silly to a native english speaker but most of us non native had to first learn english just to make sense of programming languages constructs), do less drug, complain less, are more flexible to change, are willing to take ownership of creative work.

I mean this exists in factories and I ve seen it... but in the floor manager, not the dudes mindlessly putting small boxes into big boxes. I d love to put them in front of a computer and let them try but they dont seem to want to, or have the discipline to spend years learning english in the first place :s

And whatever the original reason, it's probably fair to say it's parental supervision, societal discrimination or whatever, but saying it's just experience is wrong imo. To even want to acquire this experience, is something I cant even explain, I just always wanted to and shaped my life around computers, and believe maybe naively that even with a difficult starting condition, I d have ended up coding eventually all things equal.

And it's okay to suspect capital owners will try to comoditize it but it's going to transform them into people able to talk to machines or transform us into capital owners - I dont think you can design algorithms to do what you want without willing to dig into them and for that you may always need special people ? We never comoditized electricians, and this is not a trade you can simply replace anyone with anyone, so...

>tech workers union

Yeah, let's cartelize a real free market.

> you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates

That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves.

Truth is there are people out there that are trying really hard to commoditize software engineering, with bootcamps and whatnot. And honestly, I'm not impressed one bit. Best way to build the best software (it's a winner take all market remember?) is simply to bite the bullet and go get the best talent out there. The 10x rule is well and alive.

what would be your suggestion then? become a 10x developer?

i think we should stop competing and just self-employ ourselves

> That's one way of running a tech company

at least as far as TFA is concerned, it's not really about "a tech company", but a shipping/receiving/warehouse facility.

This is a ridiculous view. So then all software engineering is pressing the right keys on the keyboard at the right time just like a pianist.

Reductionism used to throw rocks at a labor intensive enterprise that Amazon is preposterous and distracting from real issues.

I like the piano analogy.

A really bad pianist will maybe hit some if the notes correctly sometimes. Like a really bad software developer through sheer luck might hit copy and paste shortcuts on the right stackoverflow post from time to time. But you will fire both very fast.

A good enough pianist will proba ly hit all the right notes most of the time. Like a good enough software developer who will write software that works most of the time because he hit the right keys most of time. Probably a combination of being reasonably good at finding the right stackoverflow posts most of the time and some general knowledge of ifs and for loops.

Then there's the pianist that that actually feels the music on the sheet. That doesn't just read the sterile notes on the sheet. Or a software developer that writes readable, maintainable code in 'no time'.

Theres a nice TED talk on this topic. I think he compares pianists of various ages to show this. Benjamin Zander, a famous conductor. Worth the watch even if you don't like classical music if you ask me.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/benjamin_zander

I think the last sentence is unrealistic. People work at Amazon or any other company because that's the best job they can find. A large fraction of the population does not have the brains for high-end white-collar work.

Yep. Which makes the entire thing absolutely ridiculous when the argument becomes “we need jobs for people to do jobs.”

UBI and whatnot is inevitable.

Why does UBI follow a lack of useful labor? A dominant ideology in the US is that it is unjust to take from the skilled, so those without useful skills should simply be left to their struggles.

What's nutty to me though is that we don't have enough of any kind of skilled tradespeople either. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, cabinet makers, roofers - and I know it isn't just isolated to my geographic area. I've got a friend who is in the middle of building a luxury home to sell - he's basically doing all the work himself because he can't find guys who will just show up, stay off drugs on the job (hazardous!), and seek to do good work. Oh, and it helps if you don't steal tools from the job site too.

Here's a couple jobs that are in short supply: Home inspectors and appraisers. After the 2009 crash, they changed the licensing rules and it's led to a serious shortage of appraisers in particular. Both of these are gigs where you get to set your own schedule and can make some reasonable money while not needing to be a rocket surgeon. Yet, we can't find enough people willing to do it.

If people aren't doing it, then the money isn't reasonable.

Or the people are irrational and self-destructive.

Cute sentiment but wrong. These are skills, it's not Uber where you can simply choose to be a driver tomorrow without prior training. Lots of people simply cannot do these jobs, further, lots who might be able to are put off by the months/years of necessary training.

The money isn't reasonable for appraising. You are paid per appraisal, and the AMC will take 30-50% of that fee as a middleman. To even get to the point where you can make money as an Appraiser you need to be certified based on state level requirements. For my state

-154 hours of classes ($1000+)

-get initial license ($160)

-1,000 hours logged as a trainee of an appraiser (so anyone teaching loses money to pay a trainee or you work for free)

-apply ($35) to take and pass a state exam ($126)

- get full license ($175)

So it takes at least $1,500 and at least 6 months to even start making money. Then many appraisals require actually entering the home and taking pictures or a drive by, so there is massive amounts of travel on top of the paperwork. It's way more detailed than just picking a number for price based on X reasons, and anything that is inaccurate is on you to fix as part of the original fee.

I've annecdotally heard that appraisers do not make good money.

However after getting several houses inspected, making good money doing that, I can believe.

I have a relative that’s an appraiser, and he’s basically been scratching by for decades.

I can’t speak to what it’s been like in the past, but this summer there were appraisals for basic houses being picked up for $2K. We’re so short of appraisers in our area that they are coming from the other side of the state - and it seems to be worth their wile $$$. On average they are running $800/ house… could it be that the AMS is taking all the money and the appraiser doesn’t get much? Maybe?

You can't build a market around a one time summer event followed by decades of low volume/pay.

This is completely anecdotal and local but I am so with you there.

We have had really great experiences with tradespeople in one way and also incredibly bad with others.

A lot electrical work is required to be done by an electrician here. But what do you do when you have the electrician come out for a quote, you have the manufacturers manual opened to the page with the specs and the electrician can't make sense of it?

The specs clearly stated that the appliance needed multiple separate lines, including min wire gauge and the double pole breaker amperage. I knew I didn't have enough space in the panel for the required double poles. That's part of the reason I called the guy in the first place. And then he tells me it's no problem, the existing wire is sufficient and I can just order the appliance and he's gonna 'hook it up'. Unbelievable!

It took me quite some time of repeating (in different ways) all the info presented in the manual to get him to call his boss, read out the manual multiple times, telling me various half truths, being made to call his boss again and relay the parts of the specs he left out to arrive at the final answer.

The only thing that guy would've been good for is changing alight fixture, which is something you are required to hire an electrician for here. Where I grew up that is something an electrician will not even consider giving you a call back about if you were to try and hire him.

and in the meantime, we need to counterbalance the power of such corporations with workers' rights and union representation. I'm all on board for fully automated luxury c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶s̶m̶ democracy, but we still need to get through the next 500 years before that happens.

Strongly support this. There’s a long way between here and fully replacing all these meaningless drone jobs.

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