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    iamcorocticusHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:53pm

    Why don't you tell us a little about the corporate culture at Gawker? That is, if you can take off time from defending Gawker's right to have unpaid interns.

    Here is an argument that interning at Gawker amounted to nothing more than a training program: "The training program was not a formal process. We explained the required tasks when the interns first arrived and then gave them lots of feedback over the first month or two to make sure they were on track. For example, when interns carried out research, they would often come back with insufficient results. I would tell them how they missed important things that were necessary to make the research truly complete enough for a story. After giving them research tips, I would send them back to try the research again."

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      nevermindiamcorocticus
      5/01/14 4:01pm

      What you describe is not bad. It's actually letting interns develop their skills as opposed to hiring free secretaries.

      (FWIW, I think interns should be paid. But when they aren't, you need to have them doing tasks that will help them get jobs — tasks they will do badly at first and have to repeat.)

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      iamcorocticusnevermind
      5/01/14 4:05pm

      Most people at most jobs do tasks and get feedback from their superiors, which is precisely what was described in the declaration. Many interns may do the tasks worse than most of the full-time staff, but that doesn't mean the tasks aren't being done and aren't relevant to the business.

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    OrtizDupriHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:25pm

    I'd love to hear something from more recently than 2009 - half a decade ago is a huge amount of time, especially with a tech company.

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      Hamilton NolanOrtizDupri
      5/01/14 3:28pm

      Me too, so if you know any Amazon executives, please have them email me.

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      theconcretegardenOrtizDupri
      5/01/14 3:32pm

      my brother is a CS Major working in seattle at a huge company for the last year now. it's a wonderful place to work, but he still talks to his friend from college who worked at amazon for about a year. his life was hell. they treated him like shit and was constantly stressed, put in insane hours and they were constantly telling him how people want his job. when you talk to the computer people around here, you'll here the same thing. amazon is the WORST place to work. they survive on recent grads like my brother's friend, who are just trying to land a job.

      (all this was in 2013ish, so really recent)

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    nevermindHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 4:07pm

    Professionals need to unionize and stop thinking they're special. Also, the government needs to do something about the ridiculous workweeks that companies like Amazon expect.

    It's bad for society to have people work this much. It completely disengages people from communities and makes them miserable, angry, petty individuals. It also feeds a stupid idea that future employees should suck it up and act the same.

    I sometimes work too much because I'm an idiot. I try not to because it sets a really bad precedent for my staff, who I want to have productive non-work lives where they have hobbies that make them happy, exercise, friends, and spend time with their kids and not raise a future generation of sociopaths who didn't get enough love.

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      SimuLordnevermind
      5/01/14 4:42pm

      True professionals don't need unions because they have trade associations and industry standards (and enough money that they can afford to be out of work for a while to cherry pick.)

      White-collar commodity grunts? That's a different story.

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      nevermindSimuLord
      5/01/14 4:55pm

      That's not really true. It's a lie we tell ourselves that justifies the "choice" to work excessive hours. I work with many people at the top of their fields (I wouldn't consider myself one of them, I'm still early career) who are expected to put in constant effort. Their option is to leave their fields of expertise.

      That is stupid.

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    La.M.Hamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:28pm

    My god those people put away some booze, ON THE CLOCK, IN THE OFFICE. It's acceptable!

    Artist rendering of my cubicle if I worked at Amazon.

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      captain_spleenLa.M.
      5/01/14 4:02pm

      Swiss Bank O'Connor (investment bank in Chicago): back in 1995, on Saint Patrick's Day work stopped around lunch time and a bacchanal broke out. I understand there was some making-out-on-a-desk involving a technical writer lady who used to be a stripper. But even on normal days the refrigerators on each floor were kept stocked with beer along with the soda and water.

      This may have been an annual thing; I was only there for one St. Pat's.

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      benchandbarLa.M.
      5/01/14 4:51pm

      I was in an office the other day that had a full bar in their breakroom. Every liquor imaginable just sitting on the counter like it was nothing.

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    workingpoorHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:45pm

    "You aren't worth anything to that company once you strap on that backpack. Every new employee is better than you and every future employee will do a better job."

    To be fair, this is every job. Everyone is replaceable. You are a pencil. Good to have around, but if you break, the company will replace you without thinking twice.

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      nevermindworkingpoor
      5/01/14 3:59pm

      This just isn't true. I'm always working out arrangements with my employees—I try to allow flexible hours, work from home as needed, encourage as much professional development as I can with the hours we have available/limited financial resources.

      There are many shit jobs in the world and many shit managers, but not all jobs are shit and not all managers are shit. I don't believe my staff are easily replaceable. Sure, they could be replaced, but it could take more than six months to be competent in this environment and it could take years to develop the networks across the organization that lets people cut through bureaucratic bullshit. I am not keen on losing that.

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      bnkyworkingpoor
      5/01/14 4:12pm

      Not every employer treats you this way. Good ones will always treat you with respect and appreciate your contribution to the company. I work for a great company that is consistently in the top 20 best places to work in America... people resigned to the fact that they are abused at the work place are the ones who will always work at these places and why they continue to operate in that fashion

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    dolphinshinerHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 5:11pm

    I used to work for Deloitte in their federal consulting practice, and a lot of this sounds familiar to me. When you're hired, there's lots of talk about how great their culture is, how they foster employee development, etc. In reality, once you're through orientation, it's up to you to figure out what to do for actual work. Literally, you're thrown into a pool workers, and you're forced to essentially find yourself a job.

    Hours/devotion to The Company are similarly horrible. Coworkers often (and cheerily!) reminded me that most Deloitte professionals work between 60 and 75 hours per week, as though this was a badge of honor. What kills me is that the accounting/law/consulting fields are perhaps the only places where your value to the company is directly quantifiable: You bill X hours at Y rate, which equals a net of Z for the company when they account for their personnel expenditures.

    Being federal, we typically weren't permitted by the client to bill much more than 40 hours per week (we constantly "burned hot" on projects, sometimes resulting in an early and unexpected freeze in labor), but of course you can't just work 45 hours and call it a day. You had to do... something with the other 20-30. What? Who knows! Find someone doing a white paper, and ask to help! Do biz development research, or any other kind of internal work. Fine, but there was "billable" and "non-billable" internal work, and only the billable kind counted towards your utilization... guess which kind was more available.

    Speaking of utilization, that's a baseline number of hours divided by the number you actually billed to come up with a "utilization rate," and the acceptable rate varied based on employee level (yes, higher paid people with more responsibility were mathematically allowed to work less). For consultant-level employees, I think the minimum rate was 90%, which came out to 50 billed hours. What's an employee to do when your client only lets you bill 40 hours and most internal projects don't count?

    Beats me, and I still don't know. I was laid off for "performance," even though I always scored high marks on my project evaluations. That was two years ago, and I miss neither the company nor the people who worked there.

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      ARP2dolphinshiner
      5/01/14 11:22pm

      Most consulting companies are the same way. You're expected to essentially work two jobs, your primary gig and you're secondary gig in order to reach your utilization rates.

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      nic10ARP2
      5/02/14 3:13am

      it's an awful lifestyle. some ppl take to it and do it forever but most ppl i know do it for 1-2 years and b/c it's so valued, use it to get an in-house job.

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    schmitterHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:25pm

    Life sucks, and then you die.

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      PrayForDentonschmitter
      5/01/14 3:29pm

      I know, this sounds like pretty much any office where I've worked.

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      ExtraExtraschmitter
      5/01/14 3:50pm

      Well employment shouldn't accelerate the death part, but lately it's all it seems to do. Most people work useless jobs too, for companies that could treat them as human with very little effort yet choose not to.

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    CPR14Hamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:26pm

    If that was the cleaned-up version of the email, I shudder to think what the original was like...

    ETA: This is the second time today I hit "cancel" after starting a comment and Gawker published it anyway. And of course there's no option to delete a comment. Arghhh.

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      PrayForDentonCPR14
      5/01/14 3:28pm

      I know, the emails from Amazon warehouse and Walmart employees were more readible.

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      Goats with JetpacksCPR14
      5/01/14 3:28pm

      I mean, it was cleaned up by Gawker writers. For all we know, they made it worse.

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    IngridableHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:25pm

    It sounds like they were trying to avoid paying unemployment.

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      PrayForDentonIngridable
      5/01/14 3:29pm

      Yup.

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    Fleur-de-litHamilton Nolan
    5/01/14 3:43pm

    True story: A friend of mine works for facebook and was recently notified by Amazon that he was scheduled for an in-person interview. He had never contacted them or been contacted by them before. They just sort of assumed that he wanted an interview. He told them to fuck off.

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      electricfeelFleur-de-lit
      5/01/14 3:58pm

      What's the matter with this country? Can't a man walk down the street without being offered a job?

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      Fleur-de-litelectricfeel
      5/01/14 4:02pm

      "Hey, person with an awesome job in a great city, wouldn't you love to leave it all behind to move to Seattle and work for notorious psychopaths?"

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