Amazon Says Sad Workers Can Shut Themselves in “Despair Closet” (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Says Sad Workers Can Shut Themselves in “Despair Closet” (2021)

futurism.com

35 pointstype014 comments

Is there a restriction on when/how often a worker can use the booth? Are they policing what they do in the booth?

Frankly if you can put in headphones or eat a snack in there, then isn't it really just a break? It's good for workers if they're being given more breaks, even if the messaging and form are corny.

>Are they policing what they do in the booth?

I have a close family member that works in an Amazon warehouse, and from what they tell me, Amazon polices everything you do in their warehouses, with the assistance of the same camera system you see deployed at Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores. Stats regarding your movement and where you spend your time inside the warehouse are tracked. Things like standing idly for <arbitrary and opaque period of time> can get you questioned by management, who supposedly receive automated reports concerning worker behaviors that meet certain patterns or thresholds. Workers themselves have metrics shared with them concerning not only obvious things like pick rate, but also their pace of movement and aggregate duration of movement ranked relative to peers.

Even if the booth itself isn't being monitored (which would be surprising), the booth's usage would certainly be scrutinized.

I worked at AWS in a technical role, and we had similar systems at our office.

If Covid rules were being broken - too many people in an office, people standing too close together - an alert would be sent to the office manager.

In one case, this was escalated to the country director, who chewed out the sales people who had broken the rules.

Jeff Pezoz needs more money.

Jeff Pesos

I'd bet it's more likely o become somebody's office, like the folks who set up shop all day in the phone booths

The headline is funny (in a bleak way), but the use of quotation marks in conjunction with the "Amazon Says" headline strongly suggests to me that Amazon actually called it that which is misleading. I don't defend Amazon at all but the way clickbait headlines have become normalised bothers me.

Anyone who's worked in a modern company knows it would never actually be called a despair closet. The euphemism would go the other way like "wellness maximization chamber". At least let them have a little fun with the headline.

It may not have been given that name formally, but that’s exactly the kind of nickname that would emerge organically in those conditions. So, yeah, let’s allow it.

Sounds like the scene in Soylent Green where Roth gets to listen to classical music and watch calming scenes of nature... as he is euthanised.

When your workplace starts emulating 70s dystopian sci-fi, that's a sign you might be doing something wrong.

That reminded me of this: https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538

"All employees please NOTE that on a random basis, 1 in 10 employees using the box will be terminated, and 1 in 1000 employees using the box will be shredded by rotating knives and dumped into city sewers."

i'll just leave these here https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wage-cage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_hrTsswfmg&t=124

Waiting for Google to counter with actual, literal hugboxes (squeeze chutes) for their employees.

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