[HN Gopher] Amazon is using algorithms with little human interve...
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon is using algorithms with little human intervention to fire
Flex workers
Author : carride
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-06-28 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| FredPret wrote:
| How very on-brand
| robotnikman wrote:
| Robots are not taking our jobs, they are becoming our bosses
| metalliqaz wrote:
| being the boss is a job
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The photos appear to be verified by image recognition
| algorithms. People who have lost weight or shaved their beards or
| gotten a haircut have run into problems, as have drivers
| attempting to start a shift at night, when low lighting can
| result in a poor-quality selfie._ "
|
| Image recognition works great, as long as you have enough
| reserves that its failures don't hurt you.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| Face recognition is different from face identification, which
| is what Amazon is attempting (and failing rather spectacularly)
| here. Extrapolating from one image is a doomed prospect.
| Ultimately, this is an example of extreme technical
| incompetence on Amazon"s part.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I was fired by an algorithm in early 2019 when working for Amazon
| Flex. Basically, on the app, "blocks" would appear, which would
| be a set $ amount for approximate X number of deliveries to X
| location. Then you would drive to a "fulfillment" center to pick
| up your boxes. You had to be quick to grab a block before someone
| else did. Occasionally I would drop a block and grab a higher-
| yielding one. It wasn't clear to me that this was frowned upon by
| the app. After a few weeks of this work, I was "deactivated"
| without any warning. I called their customer "service" line and
| was told that I was deactivated in their system and there was no
| recourse for me. That really sucked.
| kobalsky wrote:
| The gig economy industry has managed to steal back decades
| worth of workers rights, and the worst thing is that this will
| take decades to undo.
|
| Almost everyone has been groomed to defend these corporate
| behemots' rights to stomp on our lives like if they were
| defending the right of a small mom and pop shop to kick out a
| rowdy drunkard.
|
| When a company has a bigger revenue than most contries' gdp
| they shouldn't play by the same rules, they need to be held to
| a different set of standards.
| zouhair wrote:
| This reads like from some dystopian sci-fi book.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| It's better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for
| permission.
|
| But what happens when there is no one to ask for forgiveness
| from?
| pasquinelli wrote:
| to me it sounds idiotic. i guess if you consider idiocracy a
| dystopia. "the computer did the auto-layoff thing and now we
| don't have any money!"
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Amazon has plenty of money though? Their bet is that no
| matter how badly they treat their workers, there will be
| more. They seem to be right. Worse case they have to start
| treating them well now and still saved all that money in
| the past. Hardly idiocracy.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| oh, i just realized that maybe you don't know i'm
| referring to the movie "idiocracy".
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Oh, I knew the reference,I just had you confused.I
| thought you meant Amazon was the idiot running out of
| money in this situation, but I think now you meant the
| workers working for them are? That makes more sense.
| akudha wrote:
| _The only question was how much poo we wanted there to
| be._
|
| Though gross, That one sentence should tell us their
| entire line of thinking.
|
| Absolutely nothing will happen to them and they know it.
| Mistreat one guy, there are 10 others to take his place.
| There is zero incentive to treat people well.
|
| Unionizing would help, but that doesn't seem to be
| happening either
| pasquinelli wrote:
| brawno made a lot of money too
| fumar wrote:
| Don't you ever think - "what would the world be like if the
| bad guys won?" Who said they didn't? It is all in the eye of
| the beholder. If we apply some ethics like the golden rule to
| modern existence, then you spend your time debating where to
| apply it because it's near impossible.
| excalibur wrote:
| Yet still preferable to the alternative
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| I guess we could literally be shot as soon as you leave
| the womb, so I guess you're right
| kache_ wrote:
| You're in one
| tryingtogetback wrote:
| Fascinating tech. imagine if human element is removed from
| critical decision making, meaning bias is drastically reduced (if
| not completely eliminated in this case). All decisions are
| strictly based on your output which eliminates corruption,
| nepotism, and unfairness. Isn't this system better that what we
| have now (flawed and unpredictable humans driving critical
| decisions)?
|
| Yes, they highlight transparency issues which is the problem.
| When using a tech like this objectives must be clear, workers
| should know the system and know the expectations and productivity
| criteria
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Were you dropped on your head as a baby?
| CPLX wrote:
| There's a difference between unpredictable and unbiased that
| you seem to be skipping past here.
| aikah wrote:
| > Fascinating tech. imagine if human element is removed from
| critical decision making, meaning bias is drastically reduced
| (if not completely eliminated in this case)
|
| The algorithm could be biased at first place.
| if(employee.isnt_somehow_white()){
| employement_service_provider.fire_quicker(employee)} if
| (employee.is_pregnant()){employement_service_provider.fire_the_
| quickest(employee))
|
| I'm being hyperbolic but you get the gist. Somebody wrote that
| program.
| tryingtogetback wrote:
| algorithm could not be based on that. what you described is
| highly personal and doesn't make sense when optimizing for
| profits. When optimizing for profits all that matters is
| value created/delivered (or loss reduced, risks averted).
|
| One can speculate about possible (and/or highly personal)
| correlations while not realizing that the outcome is
| completely fair.
| aikah wrote:
| > algorithm could not be based on that. what you described
| is highly personal and doesn't make sense when optimizing
| for profits.
|
| That's irrelevant. My point is that no bias is eliminated
| at first place, since the algorithm is still man made. You
| could argue that since there is no human intervention the
| same input would lead to the same output, but again,
| neither you or I have read the code to claim that it is
| somehow "bias free" or even completely deterministic,
| especially if the input relies on computer vision.
| tryingtogetback wrote:
| 1. "no bias is eliminated at first place, since the
| algorithm is still man made" -
|
| This is a straw man. if specific criteria are being
| automatically evaluated bias is most certainly reduced
| (if not eliminated).
|
| 2. "especially if the input relies on computer vision" -
| evaluation criteria can be infinitely improved upon
|
| 3. "neither you or I have read the code" - I highlighted
| transparency concerns in my original comment
|
| 4. Unavoidable, unintentional implementation flaws (bugs)
| are expected but so are fixes and continuous
| improvements.
|
| I would certainly trust an algorithm to make a decision
| about my employment over an unpredictable, flawed, and
| (often times) incompetent human management
| hef19898 wrote:
| No straw man, that algorithms cam be biased has been
| already proven.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Yeah, value created can go badly too. if
| (employee.pregnant()) { employee.lifetime_value *=
| 0.5 } if (employee.can_be_pregnant()) {
| employee.lifetime_value *= 0.8 }
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I feel like this is a very disingenuous way to put this
| issue. It's not that people write a program that actually
| have lines of code like this in them but rather machine
| learning algorithms operate on our current reality rather
| than any ideal. With few exceptions a pregnant employee is
| worse than a non pregnant one so if all employee data is fed
| into a nice ML black box with all things being equal it's
| going to start firing the pregnant ones.
| [deleted]
| shrubble wrote:
| 'If a driver loses the appeal, they can ask for arbitration,
| though it costs them $200.'
|
| How is this considered acceptable?
| mcguire wrote:
| Presumably, it's in the contract and the contract is iron-clad.
|
| Many years ago, I had a friend who was questioning a lawyer
| about a general indemnity clause in a contract. The lawyer
| said, "Don't worry about it too much. The courts don't like it
| when someone tries to take away your ability to seek legal
| satisfaction." I guess that has changed.
| aikah wrote:
| I thought the cost of arbitration was solely the
| responsibility of the employer? How is not a scam then to be
| forced into paid arbitration?
| TX0098812 wrote:
| That may very well be the case. Companies tend to put all
| sorts of things into contracts that courts would never
| enforce. It pays because people believe the contract is
| valid and abide by it.
| cryptoz wrote:
| This sounds wildly illegal. I don't know the laws on different
| states, but do none of them require a reason for termination?
| Seems ridiculous. If they are using facial recognition are they
| also making systematic racist or other illegal 'decisions' when
| firing?
|
| This is at least super immoral and fucking gross.
| zippergz wrote:
| Most states in the US have at-will employment, which means the
| employee or employer can terminate employment at any time for
| any reason (other than some carved-out exceptions) or no reason
| at all.
| gruez wrote:
| Does at-will employment even apply here? Aren't they
| contractors?
| cryptoz wrote:
| "At-will" employment does not sound like it would apply here.
| While searching for this, I found a quote "At-will does not
| apply if there has been a breach of good faith by the
| employer." This is clearly a breach of good faith. I do not
| think these firings are legal based on my admittedly weak
| understanding of the issue.
| thrill wrote:
| it's not even close to "clearly a breach of good faith".
| cryptoz wrote:
| Really? Hiring someone who starts working a night shift,
| and then firing them _because they look different during
| the day time_ is _not_ a breach of good faith? Firing
| someone for shaving their beard is not a breach of good
| faith?
|
| I guess I need to read up on legal terms. How are these
| obvious problems not breaches of good faith? I can admit
| I don't know much here, but, I'm shocked to find out that
| none of the examples in the article are considered "even
| close to" a breach of good faith?!
|
| What would it take for Amazon to fire someone and breach
| the assumed good faith? Do you have an example? I'm
| curious and honestly trying to learn. I googled this
| obviously but since I'm not a legal expert the results
| are iffy and can be difficult to interpret so I
| appreciate the conversation on this, cheers.
| luhn wrote:
| Good faith is a lower bar than you think it is. Basically
| you can't screw someone over by firing them.
|
| "Examples of bad faith terminations include an employer
| firing an older employee to avoid paying retirement
| benefits or terminating a salesman just before a large
| commission on a completed sale is payable. There have been
| relatively few cases in which employers were found liable
| under an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing
| theory."
|
| Being fired by an opaque, capricious algorithm is not bad
| faith. It's likely more legally sound for Amazon than
| firing someone the "old fashioned way"--There's no
| potential for personal biases to get in the way, and I'm
| sure the software squirrels away all the necessary
| documentation should a wrongful termination suit arise.
| cryptoz wrote:
| > Basically you can't screw someone over by firing them.
|
| Every person in the article seems like they were screwed
| over when they were fired. All of them.
|
| > Being fired by an opaque, capricious algorithm is not
| bad faith.
|
| Yes, it is. When the 'algorithm' is already known by
| executives to make horrible mistakes, it definitely is.
|
| From the article: "Executives knew this was gonna shit
| the bed,"
|
| > There's no potential for personal biases to get in the
| way,
|
| I do not agree with this at all. Someone - people - wrote
| the code that they use to do the firings. Just because a
| 'computer' took the steps does not mean that there is "no
| potential" for personal biases to get in the way. In fact
| there is unlimited potential for that, and it's sneaky,
| because you can just blame the software!
|
| > and I'm sure the software squirrels away all the
| necessary documentation should a wrongful termination
| suit arise.
|
| Are you really sure about this? Why are you so sure? I
| personally would be confident that it does _not_ do that.
| If it did, wouldn 't it be possible for it to not make
| these decisions in the first place?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Being fired by an opaque, capricious algorithm is not
| bad faith. It's likely more legally sound for Amazon than
| firing someone the "old fashioned way"--There's no
| potential for personal biases to get in the way, and I'm
| sure the software squirrels away all the necessary
| documentation should a wrongful termination suit arise.
|
| Given the well-known problems with computer vision and
| race (and the lighting-related problems this have which
| have similar source), I'd be very surprised if this _didn
| 't_ constitute disparate impact racial discrimination if
| someone actually did the legwork to gather the relevant
| data.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Most states in the US have at-will employment
|
| In the sense that 50/50 is "most", yes.
| zippergz wrote:
| Fair. I was hedging because I was too lazy to look it up
| and confirm there are no exceptions. "Every state makes
| their own rules" can create weird situations and I didn't
| want to mislead anyone....
| [deleted]
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Well thats not much different how they deal with their 3rd party
| sellers. An automated system detects "problems" and then just
| freezes your account, without much recourse except talking to the
| useless seller support that cant speak english properly and do
| anything about it. In the case of being an amazon vendor (selling
| stuff directly to amazon in bulk), you receive orders from a
| computer system and if you dont deliver in the allowed timeslot
| they penalize you. Minimal human interaction necessary. Amazon is
| truly the pioneer in this type of development.
| slownews45 wrote:
| However, if you do deliver they pay you. In some areas
| (publishing) this is not always the case.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I recently accepted a 30 day delivery delay to avoid buying some
| items off Amazon. I got anxiety from trying to buy from Amazon
| and couldn't do it, 2 day shipping or not. The company is a
| nightmare
| gruez wrote:
| >I recently accepted a 30 day delivery delay to avoid buying
| some items off Amazon
|
| 30 days? Did you order from aliexpress rather than amazon?
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Small book publisher from Europe. Interestingly, even after
| expensive shipping, it cost less than via Amazon despite
| Amazon's fake "free" shipping
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| If you want to see very clear examples of ridiculous Amazon
| pricing, just look up boxes of nitrile gloves. Found some
| in stock at Target last week for about 2x what I'd expect
| them to cost normally, yet on Amazon they're all about 10x
| normal prices. I really like the longer gloves in larger
| thicknesses for working on mechanical stuff, but I'm not
| paying $1/pair for disposable nitrile gloves.
| cyral wrote:
| I find myself ordering less and less from Amazon. For almost
| any product now there are tons of foreign "brands" with random
| all caps names that are whitelabeling products with
| questionable quality. With no oversight, if anything goes
| wrong, doesn't conform to safety regulations, etc, they can
| easily just go and set up shop under a different name.
| FredPret wrote:
| What is the deal with those weird names? I have a lamp called
| the "Deunbr". Maybe there's an AI creating Amazon shops and
| randomizing the name every time
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Don't forget how they also remove and re-list items all the
| time to avoid bad reviews, and copy/paste reviews and ratings
| from other unrelated products. I'm guessing that it's worth
| it to pay people in call center type operations pennies per
| review to do this if the bot detection is usually good enough
| to catch it, or if they're doing the "verified buyer" thing,
| to pay people to "buy" their products, etc etc. The point is
| that what Amazon does to try to stop this isn't working, and
| Amazon feels like a flea market with a few "official" stores.
| The categories and requirement to pick a category before
| getting more advanced parameters has been broken for years,
| and I doubt anyone in power there is very interested in
| fixing it.
|
| I've also been buying less on Amazon, but their easy returns
| if something arrives truly broken or mismatched from the
| description are a lot more peace of mind than one typically
| gets with random small businesses. I've had to file a
| chargeback before after a small biz refused to let me cancel
| an order after informing me after charging me that one thing
| I ordered was no longer available in the configuration I
| ordered it (auto parts so it literally wouldn't have worked).
| It was a huge hassle and a few hours of wasted time, plus I
| still had to find the hard-to-source part somewhere else. On
| Amazon I've been refunded immediately, no questions asked,
| when I've been sent the wrong thing. I'm sure that people who
| return stuff at a higher rate are super annoying for
| merchants with how Amazon puts seemingly all of the burden on
| them, but for consumers who mostly buy stuff in good faith
| (e.g. not buying a tool to use it then return it when done),
| it's a great experience. I'm sure they have metrics on
| customers around how much they return and what that "free
| shipping" really costs.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Good for you. I try to as often as I can, not that it makes a
| difference though. I also definitely try to buy more things
| locally but sometimes Amazon is just by far the cheapest plus
| fastest option.
| codekansas wrote:
| In the Cory Doctorow book "walkaways" there's this central
| version controlled repository that basically makes all the
| decisions for this commune about who should do what. Anyone can
| contribute to it (although AFAIR the review process wasn't too
| fleshed out).
|
| Regarding Amazon, Uber and other "instant employment" type
| companies - it's a weird world, where you can basically get
| automatically hired and fired by an algorithm. It creates, in
| theory, full employment (although not very good employment, at
| least right now) and gives workers more leverage if they want to
| quit another job, but also more instability if the rules for the
| new job aren't made clear or are applied arbitrarily. It also
| feels like we're in a very nascent stage for this. Maybe this
| could be done better - it seems like an area that is ripe for
| disruption.
| dwater wrote:
| Like unions or not, the contracts they have were arrived at over
| decades of negotiations between companies and employees. So while
| many will bemoan that unions make it impossible to fire bad
| employees, the purpose of those provisions is to make sure that
| companies aren't firing workers without cause, or because of the
| companies' own fault, as appears to be the case here. Amazon may
| have stopped most of its employee unionization efforts so far,
| but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive
| class action lawsuit to me, and it almost certainly wouldn't have
| happened if these employees had the bargaining power of a group.
| gruez wrote:
| >but this automated firing system looks ripe for an expensive
| class action lawsuit to me
|
| On what basis? Aren't they contractors? Do contractors get
| protections against arbitrary "firings"?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| And a automatic metrics based firing system is probably much
| fairer than a human. Hard to sue for discrimination when you
| can prove with code it was based on metrics.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| Actually, it will be easier to show any labor law
| violations with an automated system. Any kind of wrongful
| termination or bias will be easy to show in the logs.
|
| Note that getting a computer to do something doesn't make
| it unbiased. People can, and often do, write bias into
| programs.
| retrac wrote:
| And easy to prove when you can show a correlation like the
| employee being black results in being downrated. Code and
| especially machine learning systems happily encode our own
| biases.
| croes wrote:
| Fairer? You mean like Amazons AI recruiting system that was
| biased against women? You can simply put discrimination
| into every metric.
| tyingq wrote:
| Amazon says they are contractors. The US government (some US
| States as well) has been pushing pretty hard on that view
| recently.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Contractors get protections afforded under established
| contract law and principals of executing a contract in good
| faith. If Amazon has built a system that they know to be
| inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed then they are
| violating the terms of the contract.
| gruez wrote:
| So let's say I have a startup that uses 10 different SaaS
| providers. Suppose I decided one day to randomly pick one
| SaaS provider and stop using them. That sounds
| "inconsistent or unfair or otherwise flawed" to me. Would
| that get me in trouble?
| ineedasername wrote:
| Depends on the terms of the contract. Contracts must be
| executed in good faith. That is the law. If you with your
| SaaS vendors or Amazon with its Flex workers isn't
| conforming to that part of the law then there is the
| potential for legal liability.
| FredPret wrote:
| What if paragraph 144 (a) (iii) subsection b of the
| contract explicitly states that the employee _ahem_
| contractor has a 0-day notice period?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| People aren't software.
| mister_tee wrote:
| Not the same thing as contracting employees, especially
| in the eyes of the government.
|
| Plus cancellation terms are likely codified in terms of
| the license agreement.
| TX0098812 wrote:
| > Aren't they contractors?
|
| Question is, according to whom. For example, Uber got hit
| with a pretty big fine in Italy because in the view of the
| court, the people working for Uber should be viewed as
| employees.
| sneak wrote:
| What's wrong with firing employees without cause?
|
| A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent.
| Either party can opt out at any time.
|
| I'm not sure this is something that needs fixing. You seem to
| feel differently. What am I missing?
| TX0098812 wrote:
| > A business relationship like employment is by mutual
| consent.
|
| This is a childish fantasy.
| ineedasername wrote:
| They're not employees, they're contractors. Meaning the
| relationship is governed by a contract. If a system that
| Amazon knows to be flawed is being used to terminate
| contracts incorrectly then it is a contractual issue.
|
| Contract law requires good faith execution of the contract.
| It is not good faith to terminate contracts using a known bad
| system.
| woodruffw wrote:
| At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in most of
| the developed world.
|
| It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally
| terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that
| companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions
| that _would_ be illegal (discrimination against protected
| groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs
| fixing.
|
| But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is
| least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such
| balance exists in the employer-employed relationship:
| employees are _de facto_ dependent on their employers for
| their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
| sneak wrote:
| > _employees are de facto dependent on their employers for
| their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves._
|
| This is false. This presumes that all employees are
| incapable of saving money or seeking alternate employment
| quickly.
|
| Neither is true.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Not being able to (meaningfully) save money is a harsh
| reality for many people, what are you talking about?
|
| The fact that some (tech/highly skilled) workers have
| actual leverage doesn't negate the fact that many, MANY
| others don't have _any_.
| pope_meat wrote:
| 50% of the US population would be ruined by an unexpected
| $500 bill.
|
| We can't operate on how things ought to be, we have to
| look at how things are actually...and they're bad.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Don't forget that 40% of the population is above or below
| working age. So perhaps it's only 20% of working age
| people.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad, career Air Force, was once given the job of
| coaching the privates on the Air Force base. It seems
| that about 50% of them were unable to pay their bills,
| which caused friction between the base commander and the
| local merchants.
|
| The privates were all paid the same, every two weeks.
|
| Half were able to pay their bills and did well. The other
| half would spend their paychecks as fast as possible, and
| would run out of money after 1 week. The 2nd week was
| spent begging, borrowing, and in general being a
| deadbeat.
|
| My dad would sit down with them, go over their spending,
| and prepare budgets for them. Literally none of them were
| able to adhere to those budgets.
|
| Again, 50%.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > This presumes that all employees are incapable of
| saving money or seeking alternate employment quickly.
|
| It doesn't presume anything of the sort: you don't need
| to make a statement about "all" employees to observe that
| the average American under 35 has under $10,000 in liquid
| savings[1]. That can disappear pretty quickly with a car
| or home accident, unexpected injury, or legal liability.
| Even outside of those, it's not very much to live on
| outside of LCoL areas for more than a couple of months.
|
| The average American is also not a tech worker: they're
| somewhere in the lower middle class, and may or may not
| have the ability to transition rapidly between jobs (our
| current funhouse-mirror economy aside). You're making
| extraordinary presumptions about millions of people,
| presumptions with very real and material consequences.
|
| But to go _even_ further: we should not be punishing
| people with the threat of hunger or exposure for failing
| to keep liquid savings! The current economy doesn 't
| encourage liquid (i.e., conservative) saving techniques,
| and American education does not consistently include
| financial planning. The vast majority of Americans are
| blamelessly "winging it" and should not be punished for
| that.
|
| To tie a bow around it: I don't need to make a universal
| statement about _every_ employee in America to correctly
| observe that _many_ employees are materially threatened
| by at-will employment. Attempting to promote this into
| universal claims is bewildering at best; it 's
| immediately obvious to everyone that plenty of people can
| survive an unexpected firing.
|
| [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-
| finance/average-ame...
| gruez wrote:
| > At-will employment is the exception, not the rule, in
| most of the developed world.
|
| How does this work elsewhere in the world? From a legal
| point of view at-will employment seems like the default
| when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor). If you rent
| a server from amazon you can stop the rental anytime you
| want, and they can kick you off anytime you want.
| tolbish wrote:
| But do they also control your healthcare?
|
| Your boss does.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Not in the big majority of developed countries... The US
| is also the big exception in that.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > From a legal point of view at-will employment seems
| like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie.
| labor).
|
| I think this gets to the heart of the difference:
| Americans tend to think of their employment as a
| continuous exchange of dollars for their labor, whereas
| most of the world takes the concept of an employment
| _contract_ to heart.
|
| That contract, in turn, contains both legal and
| contractual stipulations that prevent firing without
| cause: employers must give you so-and-so many weeks of
| notice before beginning the process of firing you, must
| pay you for so-and-so many months if you present an
| argument to a labor board, &c. There's nothing informal
| about it: it's the difference between continuous billing
| for a service and a fixed-length contract.
|
| Here's a random PDF I found that explains some of the
| difference between US and French labor contracts[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/insight/
| publicat...
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Employing someone in most of the world is not seen as
| simply buying a service. It's not a subscription. Are you
| aware of the concept of Noblesse Oblige[1]? As the worker
| is smaller and more fragile the business can handle the
| burden better. The business has lots of employees whereas
| the employees have only one employer.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
| mister_tee wrote:
| This will depend on your views on
| politics/society/humanity. I know that there one side of
| the argument that workers should be basically hot-
| swappable and rack-mountable. I am often a bleeding-heart
| liberal and am pretty far to the other side of things.
| Underneath everything here it's more a question of
| feelings and values more than any sort of logic.
| Different countries' laws may come down on different
| sides of the argument here.
|
| A virtualized server from Amazon does not need food,
| clothing, and shelter to survive. It does not have a
| family to support. Simply, it is not alive. and laws
| around humans and commodities should probably be very
| different.
|
| More cold-hearted practical arguments for businesses: the
| virtual machine cannot vote in the next election, it
| cannot contact the local news media to complain about
| working conditions, it cannot unionize. If things get
| very bad it cannot buy torches and pitchforks.
| mc32 wrote:
| You're only looking at it from one side.
|
| What if I want to quit?
|
| If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I
| cannot quit.
|
| There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company
| and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse
| the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there
| is a great solution, other than a command economy (but
| there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).
| barbazoo wrote:
| Of course you can quit. The power imbalance is mitigated
| in other countries by making it hard to terminate without
| cause and on the other side you will have to give more
| notice when you quit. In Germany when I lived there it
| wasn't uncommon to have a contract that let you quit your
| job with 3 months notice or even 3 months from the
| beginning of the next quarter, things like that. Sure
| that's inconvenient for some but it's a good trade-off
| for others.
| unicornfinder wrote:
| Indeed and it's worth mentioning that when every job has
| that sort of notice period it's less of an issue than you
| might think. Not to mention there's always room for
| negotiation with these things.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > What if I want to quit?
|
| Is there supposed to be a catch here? If you want to
| quit, then you should be allowed to quit.
|
| To make it explicit: in the vast majority of the
| developed world, the individual employee's autonomy is
| given priority. Companies _still_ have broad discretion
| when it comes to firing; they 're simply held to a higher
| standard of justification than "we don't like you
| anymore."
| hef19898 wrote:
| The same termination periods for both parties, e.g. 3
| months to quarters end, or month end. And you are very
| far from anything even remotely resembling command
| economy. Unless of course most of the developed free
| world, excluding the US, is communist command economy in
| your eyes.
| mc32 wrote:
| A compromise if not a great solution, but it is a decent
| solution.
|
| This compromise does make sense in a slightly unchanging
| economy.
|
| Also, if you have highly sought skills this is a
| detriment, if you have skills that are not in demand,
| then this is nice to have.
| hef19898 wrote:
| When everyone has the same periods, they don't matter.
| For e declining economy, we have various forms of state
| sponsored half unemployment, meaning that you work less
| while keeping your job and the state sponsors your salary
| to a degree.
|
| You can also always negotiate an earlier release. These
| periods offer stability for both parties.
| jhgb wrote:
| > What's wrong with firing employees without cause?
|
| For starters, the unequal status of corporations and their
| employees?
| croes wrote:
| Ever tried to cancel your phone contract? Cancelation at
| anytime is the exception not the norm. Same with most
| contracts, they all have notice periods. >What am I missing?
| People have obligations like rent, health insurance, school
| fees. They have families and children, so a minimum of
| planning is important. Everything else is inhumane.
| hobs wrote:
| Empathy for other human beings who will have negative
| outcomes if for pointless reasons their employment is turned
| off by a computer.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| Give severance? If a person is getting fired they're
| obviously not a net positive to their manager, so why would
| you want to protect them
| ineedasername wrote:
| You are assuming they are being terminated after a
| correct assessment if their value. Good employees still
| get fired. Managers can be wrong, or play office
| politics.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| You say "obvious", but in the real world, the lines of
| net positive or negative have more inputs than that.
| Adding an algorithm to the mix that may or may not be
| operating correctly is not a human way to operate.
|
| In civilization, we make affordances for people that go
| against the razors edge of pure efficiency.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| Tell me you're a naive and idealistic capitalist without
| telling me that you're a naive and idealistic capitalist.
| sneak wrote:
| What empathy? Why would anyone want to continue in a
| business relationship where the other party doesn't want
| to?
|
| There are tons of places hiring right now; Amazon isn't the
| only game in town for labor.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This shows a distinct lack of understanding of how crappy
| it can be when you're poor.
|
| It takes awhile for a new job to cut that first check. In
| America, usually around a month.
|
| That month can be insanely scary with no money and mouths
| to feed.
| sneak wrote:
| That's why welfare, food assistance programs, and
| unemployment exist. Amazon (and every other employer)
| pays in to those programs by law when employing people.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Hah, is this naivete, or just obtuseness?
|
| And the CEOs or their lobbyists go to state and federal
| capitols to lobby for destruction of these programs, or
| "donate" to politicians' election campaigns with "wink
| wink, you know what we want."...
| alo45 wrote:
| Because you're talking about people who don't have
| extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement
| accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding
| their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on
| their purpose as a class on HN? This comment is extremely
| tone deaf and betrays why this industry is fundamentally
| flawed when it comes to human factors. Engineers and
| product leads building these systems have simply never
| experienced the other end of the table, and then reduce
| the equation to a "business relationship" just like
| you're doing here.
|
| I realize it's easy to forget you're discussing human
| beings when computers make much more sense. I don't know,
| call me crazy, European, idealistic, whatever, but
| putting a human in the loop to say "eh, that's a bad
| call" isn't a lot to ask nor the demise of capitalism. If
| a human being double checking and delivering bad news is
| the only thing holding the economy back from grand
| designs of glorious, automated scale, I'd prefer another
| economy that pays more attention to its purpose - which
| is the sustenance of humans, not the concentration of
| wealth based on flagrant disregard for the welfare of
| people it serves.
|
| I like the way Sorkin put it: "we used to wage war on
| poverty, not poor people," and I think your initial
| question about empathy illuminates much of that
| sentiment.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Because you're talking about people who don't have
| extensive cybersec experience and multiple retirement
| accounts, who see a job as the thing, you know, feeding
| their kids for the next two weeks while we pontificate on
| their purpose as a class on HN?_
|
| This strikes me as ad hominem; I'm talking about standard
| unskilled workers. Anyone who doesn't have enough savings
| on hand to buy food and shelter for the short period of
| time while switching jobs in one of the best labor
| markets for workers that our generation has ever seen is
| simply irresponsible.
|
| There are _so many_ unfilled jobs right now.
|
| > _I realize it's easy to forget you're discussing human
| beings when computers make much more sense_
|
| Oh, come on. We're talking about consent to a business
| transaction between _human beings_ here, obviously.
| Please do try to comment in good faith.
| alo45 wrote:
| Seriously, though, what the fuck is a "standard unskilled
| worker?" Did that sound like anything but a reductive
| take on people less privileged than you in your head? At
| the least it's a further elimination of empathy and human
| factors from your point. I didn't think there was much
| left to discard, but here we are, with the lower social
| strata in an Excel column.
|
| Luckily for us, I'm not debating you and need not concern
| myself with whatever you'd like to call the argument. I'm
| simply appealing to whatever sliver of empathy you have
| to consider that _just maybe_ firing someone with a batch
| job is a good place to think about an ethical line. I
| didn't even advocate to draw one, just introduced nuance
| to think about as a counterweight to your extraordinarily
| simplistic view of labor and its role in society.
|
| If you can't meet me even there and instead take an
| opportunity to call people who just might starve to death
| on the other end of such an experience "irresponsible,"
| based on ostensibly a distant understanding of finance
| and employment for lower social classes, we are not going
| to agree on anything. The ad hominem would be noting that
| from your views it reads like you have next to no
| experience with the financial circumstances you're
| discussing, which given the topic seems an interesting
| but unnecessarily personal observation.
|
| If these comments are in bad faith in this forum then I
| have absolutely no interest in baptizing my views.
|
| Honestly, I'd be curious how your interview at Dominos
| would go. I'm not being snide. You should take a break
| from this line of work and go after the _so many_
| unfilled jobs you're talking about for a while, because I
| think it would refine your viewpoint on this (speaking
| from personal experience). You know how one can interview
| for a cybersec gig and disclose that they were fired once
| for some bullshit and everyone shares a good laugh about
| the story while cutting an offer letter? That doesn't
| happen at Dominos.
| pope_meat wrote:
| You do have to admit, Amazon has reduced the number of
| options you can have for employment. Last I checked, toys
| r us ain't hiring, cause Amazon ships the toys now.
| Noos wrote:
| It wasn't Amazon's fault; Toy stores had been declining
| well before it, with companies like KB toys going defunct
| in 2009. In general what was happening was that it was
| much harder for retail speciality stores and small chains
| to compete with Wal-mart and other megastores, and the
| market seemed to collapse.
|
| A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s,
| with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being
| bought out and merging with other companies that folded.
| alo45 wrote:
| That's a lot like saying it was the patient's underlying
| cancer that ultimately killed her, not the pillow held
| over her face by an overly ambitious family member eyeing
| the lucrative estate she would leave behind.
|
| Amazon accelerated what you describe in every
| quantifiable way and it was undoubtedly baked into the
| overall strategy. Yes, the situation was already terminal
| thanks to the Internet and poor online shopping execution
| by the incumbents, including Walmart, but overlooking
| Amazon's involvement (going so far as to call it not
| their fault) and pointing at Walmart as the disease
| itself is a tiny bit of revisionism.
|
| Am I the only one old enough to remember discussions in
| older forums like these about how brilliant Bezos was to
| identify and exploit such a now-obvious opportunity? It
| was obvious then to the point of being damned near
| Amazon's entire thesis.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Toy R Us went bankrupt in large part due to executives
| selling itself to a private capitol firm that saddled it
| with so much debt that even with its stores maintaining
| decent operating profits the company as a whole could not
| maintain the debt payments.
|
| Amazon certainly didn't help their bottom line, but it
| wasn't the nail in the coffin either.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Walmart delivers groceries to my door and lets me tip the
| driver in the app, have they similarly limited employment
| opportunities or do they expand them?
|
| I'm not sure at this point, both are horrible
| corporations I've resisted as long as I can can, yet both
| regularly siphon money from my checking account.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Are you looking for hypotheticals? Maybe a person has no
| financial safety net and has a sick family member at home
| that requires all of their time outside of work, leaving
| none for a job search.
| alex_c wrote:
| >What empathy?
|
| Feels like this sums up so much of our world, it's scary.
| Anyway.
|
| Main issue is with "mutual consent", or more
| specifically, negotiating power.
|
| A contract negotiated between two parties with similar
| amounts of power will have terms that protect both sides.
| These will often define things like advance notice for
| cancellation, or penalties for early cancellation. The
| paying party usually wants the most flexibility for
| cancellation, the counterparty wants certainty of
| revenue, so a balance is found. Assuming everyone did
| their work, both sides should be reasonably happy with
| the terms of the contract.
|
| A negotiation between a large corporation and an
| individual (low-level) employee is not really a
| negotiation, the individual employee can only accept or
| reject the corporation's offer but they cannot typically
| negotiate specific parts of the contract. Individually,
| they have no leverage. If they decline the offer and move
| on to the next company, they don't have any more
| negotiating power over there either.
|
| Let's also talk about BATNA a bit here. BATNA for a
| company: they just hire the next person that comes along,
| still with the terms dictated by the company. BATNA for
| an employee: accept an offer somewhere else (again with
| the terms dictated by the company), or starve.
|
| So what can an individual employee do to get more
| leverage and get an outcome closer to a "mutual consent"
| contract? Well, the obvious option is to coordinate their
| negotiation with others who also have low individual
| negotiating power but share similar interests. Combined,
| they should have a lot more leverage.
|
| We could call this negotiating process "collective
| bargaining", and the group of individuals a "union".
| ineedasername wrote:
| The market-driven counter to this is that if companies
| don't offer terms that employees agree to, they won't be
| able to get any employees and therefore over time, in the
| aggregate, they will move towards outcomes similar to
| what would be achieved in a mutual consent arrangement,
| without the need for unions.
|
| Of course if that was _correct_ we likely would not have
| seen the rise of unions in the first place because things
| would simply have adjusted over the many decades if
| industrial revolution leading up to wide scale
| establishment of labor unions. When it comes down to
| being able to survive, people will accept the terms they
| 're given. They don't have the luxury of waiting for a
| "market correction" on labor rates and benefits.
|
| Open markets can find efficient solutions to complex
| problems. Unfortunately, much like waiting for evolution
| to find a solution for a problem, it doesn't always
| happen at a time scale suitable for human lifetimes.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| lol your life is so privileged that you don't realize it
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Why would anyone want to continue in a business
| relationship where the other party doesn 't want to?_
|
| Because people arrange their lives around their work
| situation and it can be significantly damaging to them to
| lose their jobs due to a bad manager or, as in this
| post's example, a flawed algorithm.
| [deleted]
| notyourwork wrote:
| I'm not sure but was always under the impression at-will
| employment is essentially that. The employer and employee
| maintain an agreement that either party can terminate at any
| point in time. Is that not the right interpretation of at-
| will employment?
| high_byte wrote:
| "shaved their beard" and got fired by a bot. dystopian present
| CPLX wrote:
| This is dystopia and we should work together to stop it.
|
| It's no more natural or inevitable than rows of 12 year old
| sewing clothes or dead mine workers.
| belval wrote:
| Yeah remember how the world came together and stopped child
| labor in third world countries? /s
| monkeydust wrote:
| Amazon treating humans like servers. When you need to scale fast
| you fire up some more and when you're done you shut them down.
| That's basically what's happening here. Question is, are we OK
| with it...?
| tyingq wrote:
| I would guess this only works for so long. I'm sure there's a
| big supply of people that will fall for it, but it's not an
| infinite supply.
| sschueller wrote:
| In essence financial slavery...
| zouhair wrote:
| Seeing the amount of people still using Amazon I'd say as a
| society we are more than OK with it. Some life destroyed is
| worth the price of having my toilet paper sent to my home
| diligently.
| FredPret wrote:
| I don't know about that. A lot of people don't know how awful
| they are yet. Personally I've been a very enthusiastic Amazon
| shopper until I started seeing the recent surge of Amazon job
| reviews.
| Clubber wrote:
| There are other ways of inducing reform than boycotting the
| company. Maybe we can pressure our politicians for better
| workers rights rather than worse like we've gotten over the
| last 4 decades.
| pjerem wrote:
| I agree with that.
|
| While I don't morally agree with Amazon policies, we must
| understand that companies will always optimize to win the
| capitalism's game whatever the human cost.
|
| However, as a society, our role is not to ask Amazon (or
| whatever misbehaving company) to stop being bad guys, but
| to change the rules of the game so that immoral behavior
| ceases to be a competitive advantage.
| FredPret wrote:
| Publicly-traded companies are owned by a subset of
| society. Sure we can tell them to stop being bad guys.
| Ever hear of activist shareholders?
| wvenable wrote:
| You going to do that with every company?
| Clubber wrote:
| The only activist shareholders I'm aware of, like Carl
| Icahn are activists for themselves.
|
| Plus, you really have to have 50% + 1 to make a
| difference, and then there are still mechanisms against
| you. You just need to come up with half of $1.74 trillion
| as of today, and of course enough people who want to
| sell.
|
| No, I think there are more effective strategies than
| that.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's only ineffective because it hasn't been tried at
| scale. If you can co-ordinate enough voters to move an
| election, you can co-ordinate enough money to influence
| corporate governance.
|
| A lot of AGMs are simply rubber-stamping exercises (look
| at how many directors are voted in again and again with
| 80-95% of the vote?!) It does not have to be this way.
|
| You don't have to literally own Amazon to change their
| ways - in theory you can buy one share and ask some
| pointed questions at the AGM. If the other shareholders
| see that change is in their best interest, they will vote
| accordingly. Sadly, most are asleep at the wheel.
| mcguire wrote:
| Apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27664846
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Like cattle not people?
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Upcoming Amazon medium post: Firing at Scale
|
| For real though. We need some labor protections in this country.
| Remember when we robo-signed ourselves into fraudulent
| foreclosures?
| ryandrake wrote:
| We're getting closer and closer to Manna [1] every year.
| Dystopian stories are meant to dissuade building the dystopia--
| not to encourage it! If you're a software engineer working on a
| project with ethical implications, please consider the kind of
| world you're building.
|
| 1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| > If you're a software engineer working on a project with
| ethical implications, please consider the kind of world you're
| building.
|
| You'll find them on Twitter falling over themselves to tell
| everyone how morally upstanding they are
| newobj wrote:
| Do you want a dystopia? Because that's how you get a dystopia
| profmonocle wrote:
| > Flex drivers' forums are littered with posts from people
| complaining that their accounts were terminated because their
| selfies did not "meet the requirements for the Amazon Flex
| program." The photos appear to be verified by image recognition
| algorithms.
|
| If these algorithms work better with lighter-skinned people (as
| has happened in the past), could they have a discrimination issue
| on their hands?
| kjhughes wrote:
| Bad automated policy is bad because the _policy_ is bad, not
| because automation is bad.
|
| Automation applies policy evenly. An employee can be sure that
| the firing wasn't due to a boss having a bad day, not liking the
| employee personally, not noticing worse performance of
| colleagues, etc.
|
| The real problem comes when automated assessment is poorly
| designed. And it's a shame not only because of the heartless
| actions that impact real people's lives and the needless public
| relations damage that is bound to emerge. It's also a shame
| because of the lost opportunity to help workers' performance
| improve via feedback at a level of detail that the automated
| systems _could_ provide.
|
| Damn the secrecy. Develop an open rating system that provides
| continuous feedback to the worker. Build in dampers that provide
| ample time to learn, correct mistakes, and improve. Publish every
| factor, every consideration, every weight that goes into the
| assessment. Openly. Refine over and over until both management
| and the workforce see it as fair and helpful.
|
| I would take that system over the subjective, unevenly applied,
| unclear criteria that's historically been used to assess
| performance. No surprises to the workers, and management has to
| own the criteria rather than hide behind unpublished automation.
| Objectivity should be a virtue. Without transparency, it's going
| to prove to be quite the vice.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is a great point.
|
| However, I'll just add that, having tried to design such
| systems in the past (for large-scale Mechanical Turk work), it
| is _fiendishly_ complex. Not only is it incredibly difficult to
| turn our intuitions of "what's fair" into formulas, but then
| you've got to deal with people trying to game those rules for
| their own advantage once they figure them out, which ultimately
| means you can only ever be partially transparent at best.
|
| In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's impossible for all pretty
| much practical purposes that need to be cost-effective, sadly.
| It's a _really_ tough problem.
| derefr wrote:
| > people trying to game those rules for their own advantage
| once they figure them out
|
| I mean, good for them. They deserve my money for obeying the
| letter of my requirements. That's exactly what I want them to
| do. If the letter of the requirements don't accurately and
| precisely represent the spirit of the requirements, that's on
| me.
|
| IMHO that sort of adversarial relationship is extremely
| helpful at developing a good formal spec for the requirements
| in the first place. It's TDD, but with a monetary incentive
| on the part of the developer to "code to make the test pass"
| and nothing more. You don't get to rely on the developer's
| charitability--the only knob _you_ get to turn, is what test
| you write!
|
| Of course, in the end, the "tests" might need to be
| Sufficiently Advanced for this to work, e.g. a spec that
| specifies something as "what a layman would understand X to
| be" -- where actually evaluating that in an automated way
| would involve automating a "jury of your peers" type setup to
| act as the "layman."
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| This is one of those things I wish more people understood.
| Second-order effects can be hard to predict, but if it's a
| rule and it involves human beings, then you can be pretty
| sure the second-order effect will be "people try to game the
| rule."
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Automated policy like this will be bad until we have general
| purpose strong AI, because there's no room for people to be
| edge cases in human ways. You need to automate room for life to
| happen.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Any algorithm can and will be gamed. Making it public means
| people will adhere to every detail, and yet still be
| unproductive.
|
| There's even a name for it: "work to rule".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
| kjhughes wrote:
| I understand work-to-rule. It arises due to misaligned goals.
|
| Poor objective functions can be gamed; good ones align goals
| such that gaming and aligned goal attainment become the same.
|
| I'd rather face the (admittedly formidable) challenge of
| designing such objective functions in the open than rely on
| undefined or secretive policy that's hidden.
|
| Assessment requires definition, by definition.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I was thinking similarly in the "FU IG" thread.
|
| The only way I see capitalism surviving long-term is if we can
| embrace data collection in all aspects of life and make it work
| for us to internalize negative externalitites on an ongoing
| basis.
| burkaman wrote:
| Why do you think that evaluation period, where there are still
| humans involved tweaking the system, would ever end? The world
| is going to keep changing. An attendance policy that everyone
| agreed on suddenly isn't going to work in a pandemic, and
| humans will need to intervene. A rating system will need to be
| changed when someone finds a vulnerability in the website and
| spams every worker with a thousand bad reviews. It's going to
| constantly need changes, need constant supervision and review,
| there will never be a point when the humans can step away and
| let the algorithm run the ship. It just seems like, at the
| absolute best, normal human management with extra steps.
| kjhughes wrote:
| You're right: continuous refinement will indeed have to
| continue indefinitely.
|
| This is true with and without policy automation because
| policy itself has to evolve to address, as you say, a
| changing world, as well as the organization's changing goals
| and its outlook on the effectiveness of the existing policy
| in meeting those goals.
| brundolf wrote:
| Totally disagree. No system of rules could ever handle all the
| obscure edge-cases that humans can. Just look to all the Google
| account automated-flagging issues that pop up on HN, for
| reference.
|
| What could maybe work is an automated system for the "easy
| 90%", paired with an appeals system well-staffed by human
| beings. But that isn't Amazon's plan (or Google's, etc),
| because that 10% will cost much more than the first 90%, so
| it's easier for them to just write it off as a loss. And at
| their scale, that margin of error translates to thousands of
| potentially-ruined lives.
| kjhughes wrote:
| If no system of rules can ever cover the policy space, then
| the policy itself is necessarily ill-defined. That alone is a
| problem before automation considerations. I'm arguing that
| automation provides the opportunity to make good, open
| assessment part of a process of improvement rather than
| opaquely driving firings.
| brundolf wrote:
| > then the policy itself is necessarily ill-defined
|
| I'm saying no policy could ever be defined well enough to
| cover all possible contingencies of a messy, human world.
| The conceit that it could is one of the biggest driving
| factors of our nascent tech-dystopia.
|
| An open policy would of course be better than a closed
| policy, if only because it would lay bare all of its flaws,
| but even then it could never be completely _fixed_.
| Retric wrote:
| Often in Amazon's case it's not about the policy as written
| it's about trying to break the law.
|
| Laying people off is very expensive. However, constantly fire
| people at random and you can quickly grow and shrink your
| workforce for free!
| smoldesu wrote:
| Meanwhile, they're also relentlessly sending me (and many others)
| ads about how great of an employer they are. I suspect that the
| labor shortage is going to hit Amazon the hardest here.
| rxhernandez wrote:
| Yeah, there isn't a chance in hell I would work for Amazon for
| the foreseeable future. I have plenty of opportunity with
| employers who pay me to live a comfortable lifestyle and treat
| me well.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| you would if you had a car payment due that you couldn't pay
| ebiester wrote:
| There is a difference between developers, who today have
| many options, and those who are affected.
|
| I, as a developer, would not choose to work at Amazon
| because of how those who are affected are treated. That is
| because I have options.
|
| I do not blame anyone who has to take a position there due
| to their economic position. That is not the general
| position of people talking here, though.
| rxhernandez wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly what I intended to say. I should
| have said that they also need to treat other employees
| well too but I fell asleep shortly thereafter.
|
| I'm not comfortable working for any company who treats
| any of their employees like garbage.
| shadilay wrote:
| Don't worry, Amazon will just buy up every other company and
| then you will have no other choice.
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