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    tito_swinefluBrendan O'Connor
    8/15/15 4:48pm

    I’m amazed that people put up with this, especially in what was a pretty union-friendly town. Amazon sounds like a terrible place to work, and you might make some money, but it’s not like you’re making the sort of money you make at a law firm. Law firms are also terrible places to work.

    They say they want smart people working there, but it seems fundamentally dumb to stay at a job where you are bullied and your hourly rate is going to be cut in half by the number of hours you work.

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      KlassyBobtito_swineflu
      8/15/15 5:11pm

      “Tech Seattle” is certainly not union-friendly. It’s an entirely different society unto itself. Amazonia and the “new” Microsoft are running tons of dedicated, good, smart people firmly into the ground.

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      MiloMinderbendertito_swineflu
      8/15/15 5:13pm

      I kept waiting for the part of the article where they would tell me just how much more people are making than if they left for a competitor. These people aren’t dumb, there’s got to be an incentive for this.

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    kristinbytesBrendan O'Connor
    8/15/15 6:01pm

    In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.

    “I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.

    Even better that the actual work you do doesn’t matter as much as how your co-workers see you. I’ve always hated that face-time bullshit. Nearly as annoying as the I worked more hours/stayed up three days straight/slept in my office nonsense. How about rewarding people for getting things done most efficiently? With an award of something other than more work. #TeamLazy4EVR

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      GoLikeHellMachinekristinbytes
      8/15/15 7:44pm

      “I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work”

      Then, full stop, you’re a fucking abysmal, useless manager. One of your main responsibilities as a manager is to ensure that your team can and does work together, and to ensure that backstabbing and envy don’t compromise your team’s integrity. Christ, even I know that, and I didn’t have to go to business school to figure it out.

      Also, any HR Director who would refer to layoffs as “purposeful Darwinism” should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into fucking space.

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    Wishbone of ArcBrendan O'Connor
    8/15/15 4:52pm

    I imagine Gawker employees chanting, “given the chance Gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives” in Starbucks lines.

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      SeriousAsAShartAttackBrendan O'Connor
      8/15/15 5:11pm

      So apparently Amazon lets employees take their dogs to the office. I’ve often wondered about places like these. What if your dog is a little too friendly? What if he stinks? What if a couple of employees are painfully allergic to dogs and can’t possibly get anything done in an office with dogs running about? I know people love their dogs. And I love mine. But I don’t love YOUR dog, and I’m aware that many people don’t love ANY dog.

      Then again, I guess if Amazon really wants employees to stay 18 hours per day, the good outweighs the bad. Wouldn’t want people to have to actually go home at a reasonable hour to feed the dog. They should probably let employees bring in newborns and toddlers too. Nobody will ever have to go home to tuck in their children if the kids sleep on an air mattress under Daddy’s desk.

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        Zoe is a ThugSeriousAsAShartAttack
        8/15/15 6:28pm

        There are rules on where the dogs go and required behavior. If you’re in a shared space everyone has to agree or you can’t bring a dog.

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        VeryVickyZoe is a Thug
        8/15/15 8:23pm

        I’ll bet being a hold-out earns you bad reviews from your dog-owning co-workers though...

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      EatTheCheeseNicholsonBrendan O'Connor
      8/15/15 4:36pm

      I’m only on board if the daily language and rituals are similar to those of these Amazonians

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        Mercury: The Sweetest Of The Transition MetalsEatTheCheeseNicholson
        8/15/15 4:54pm

        Call...And raise you...

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      GregIsNotAnAlienBrendan O'Connor
      8/15/15 5:35pm

      I work at a company that has adopted many of these ideas, the “rank and yank” particularly. Major layoffs several times a year. I’ve recently discovered that I’ve become a person that is so afraid of the explosion when something goes wrong, that I panic and and react, and am no longer that calm reasonable person who stops, and considers, and comes up with a good solution. Five years of this and I’m not the quality employee I was when I started, and now I’m mostly hoping that the next round of layoffs gets ME.

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        That Is Not IronicGregIsNotAnAlien
        8/15/15 5:40pm

        I’m sorry. That sucks.

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      DarkCountenanceBrendan O'Connor
      8/15/15 6:09pm

      This isn’t unusual... big corporations are all about this kind of weird brain-washy talk about values. They try with even the lowest level workers. I had training at Taco Bell where I had to talk about how their corporate values applied to my life, and portions of that training encouraged me to reflect on sample scenarios that had nothing to do with work. My husband’s company has this weird fixation on safety where they actually have like a “safety confessional” to talk about their personal lives and how they haven’t always lived up to workplace safety standards.

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        Cestrumnocturn1DarkCountenance
        8/16/15 12:46am

        I know. They all have a bullshit ‘message’ and ‘mission statement’ or ‘philosophy’ which has nothing to do with making a profit at whatever service or product they provide and they’re all obsessed with profit above all else. They’re like self-loathing Ferengi.

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        ZalmarDarkCountenance
        8/16/15 5:00am

        He doesn't happen to work at UPS, does he?

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      e.nonBrendan O'Connor
      8/15/15 4:45pm

      just looking at the photos of amazon’s various distribution centers provokes nightmares of what a soul-crushing place it must be...

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        redeyee.non
        8/15/15 5:08pm

        I worked at one it was hell. 10 hour shifts packing boxes on the graveyard shift. It was hot, loud, and soul crushing. I lasted 4 weeks because I couldn’t make the production quota. I quit because I knew I was going to be fired in a day or two and have to suffer the embarrassment of being escorted out by security.

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      TacitAgreementBrendan O'Connor
      8/15/15 10:52pm

      I’ve worked in tech in Seattle for 20 years and there is no one here who does not know what a nightmare Amazon is—we talk about it all the time as a kind of lower ring of Dante’s hell, an absolute last resort. In fact, Amazon never attracts seasoned talent, only bright young kids just out of college who don’t know any better or the dregs who have been been fired from normal companies. It’ll be interesting how that strategy plays out for them long term—I mean Dickensian sweatshops are pretty profitable, right? I’ll just say, no amount of money...none..I’d give BJs to the Donald before I’d work at Amazon, especially given how they treat reproducing women.

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        DonmiguelbeBrendan O'Connor
        8/15/15 8:56pm

        I would venture to say that there is literally nothing you cannot do to one of the technocrati (sic) if it was done in the name of capitalism. Couch it in buzz terms like synergy, abundance, exponential growth and you can get these folks to eat shit for hours a day as long as you intermittently reinforce the fantasy that somehow, there is some point to it all. Free snacks help, depending on the level of work. But really, most people are already primed to simply turn off their vigilance centers and voluntarily slave away for little or nothing. Worse than, say the stereotype of the South Korean or the old East German model of co-opted citizen/slaves, Americans go that one better. We are robots who think we are free - it’s because our slave user interface is more sophisticated. Because of the many cupcakes, types of pizza or cell phone we can buy - we, these Amazon and Microsoft employees, all of us - think things are mostly just fine. We see the shit eating at work as a loss leader in life, the outlier negative experience in a life we are otherwise are blessed to have. Alas, we have the geometry of shit versus shinola exactly ass backwards.

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