I think it's good that you have an independent sense of what's 'right' and 'wrong' for you to do, and you follow your internal moral compass on big decisions in your life. Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with.
But I also feel that it's important not to be naive: the sad/harsh reality is that there are people and bodies and organisations out there who will exploit others, and will use their gains to further carry on exploiting.
Now obviously, "exploiting" here is paying huge salaries, shiny offices etc. but I think HN is generally in agreement that Amazon is one of those organisations that regularly oversteps the mark with employee rights/respect.
If we accept that, then I have a really hard time shaking the idea that responding to them making employees lives hard by continuing to perform above average is no different to appeasing an alligator.
What if employers exploit employees because they know there will always be employees who respond to it like this? It kind of makes sense. If we accept that, then all of a sudden "I'm doing the right thing of working hard for my own moral compass" becomes "I'm helping the bad guys because, because it makes me feel better".
Again, I'm aware that thinking about this in terms of "exploitation" and "suckers" is a little extreme, but thinking about it in terms of incentives: isn't this person letting their moral compass incentivise a behaviour they object so much to that they're looking to leave?
edit: for clarity, I do hugely respect working hard for personal motivation of "doing the right thing", and I have taken this approach before. But when I got older, and reflected, I concluded I let my own ego enable things which make the world a worse place, which is a bigger no-no for me personally. It does need to be balanced off against falling into an almost paranoia of "is this person/group just trying to exploit me".
My understanding is that in iterated prisoner's dilemma, "tit for two tats" will often outperform "tit for tat", so in its original setting that's not really the case.
Here in reality, of course, "tit for two tats" can be better exploited if it can be (easily enough) identified and there are more potential ways of doing that.
I disagree, because sometimes your integrity might justify their behavior. People do bad things because they think they're good, and they think they're good because people tell them via their actions.
Being a good employee tells amazon their employment policies are fair, and they should continue them. Therefore, IMO, you not only should be a bad employee - you have a duty to be a bad employee.
When I command my computer to remove a file, I don’t think about the morality of destroying things. I issue the command and it does it. And I know my computer doesn’t care about personal integrity as it churns through its instructions. Amazon works the same way.
These companies are all lawn mowers, just like Oracle. A lawn mower just cuts grass and does not deserve or respond to things like integrity and personal honor.
Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.
And this is Amazon, they are normally so careful about mental suffering of coworkers... ...
The tech hubs (SF, Seattle, NYC are pretty small communities.
In a town of 50k people you'll die not knowing probably 80% of them.
Anyhow, corporations exist just as much as any other collective entity and have their own behavioral norms.
Corporations on the other hand exist purely in the mind, it's not about scale. It's just a tool, a mental framework. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person
> A juridical person is a legal person that is not a natural person but an organization recognized by law as a *fictitious* person such as a corporation, government agency, non-governmental organisation, or international organization (such as the European Union).
Also limited liability companies did not really exist until the 19th century. It's just useful abstractions above people interacting with each other. I get it's easier to live not being conscious of the bare metal, too bad people lose their humanity in the process.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
Personal integrity must always be in play, or else it means nothing.
Don't sell yourself short.
Be a person who isn't fooled into thinking corporations are people.
One could prompt their local LLM with some psychopathic verbal abuse-- "Do it or I drill a hole in your skull!!!" -- you don't need to be nice to the LLM, it doesn't have feelings or memory, etc. The LLM doesn't deserve your kindness or benefit from it. But if you do this often can you really be sure that it will have no effect on how you treat people, or how you think of yourself?
And corporations are a lot more human than some LLM-- they're made of people, they pay people, they buy from people, they're owned by people. Abusing them can harm people, though, sure it doesn't always. You can't always tell when it will harm people, and your reasoning may not be the most unbiased when your own personal benefit is on the other side of the equation.
But even if it didn't matter, that no humans would be hurt. Do you want to push yourself towards the kind of person who will behave in an exploitive way when they can get away with it? Or do you want to be the kind of person who is confident enough in their own merit that they can play life on a slightly harder mode and walk past 'opportunities' that are less obviously upstanding?
People constantly set goals for themselves that go above and beyond what is required of them because it helps develop their skill, their character, or because their wiliness to face the challenge forms part of their identity.
In any case, I'm not judging anyone here-- just offering a different perspective.
That's taking it way too far.
I think the important factor is the kind of relationship involved, specifically how does a modern corporation like Amazon view its relationship with you. I'd argue that it's fundamentally sociopathic and exploitative, so it doesn't deserve anything better than what it gives.
Individuals and different kinds of organizations can be deserving of your integrity.
So on the moral realities of Amazon...
"What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money.
Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
I thought you meant ‘immoral’, and do believe that word is probably correct, but objectively ‘amoral’ is accurate according to https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/amoral-i...
A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.
Some VP's still need to show headcount to justify their own jobs?
Unless their current manager is colluding with them, they would have been ranked into a pip by now.
Amazon tried to hire me back 6 months later, from multiple recruiters. My former manager and I had a good laugh that somehow I wasn’t blacklisted.
I wouldn’t worry about it, too much.
There are new people entering the industry all the time, they don’t necessarily need any one given individual again ever.
Which means you are the one with the power in the negotiation (the party with the most power is the one who needs the other the least).
So they have a codified sour grapes rule to punish people who they don't have power over? To punish people who weren't begging to please continue being allowed to work there? That is actual insanity right there.
The work equivalent to that is a URA, for a manager.
If you’re that manager and now ‘single’ (have open headcount) and looking to find someone to ‘date’, would you hire that person back, or go find someone else - even if they were a complete question mark?
If hiring managers/recruiters have more candidates than they can handle, a prior URA can impact a candidate the same way. ‘There are many fish in the sea’
Does that mean you’d never get hired back? Nah, it happens. But it isn’t likely to help.
But are any of them hiring, and what are the odds of being hired? The market is trash right now. If it wasn't, Amazon wouldn't have pulled this shit.