> The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are insane star collectors.”
Truly insane, there is nothing stranger (or more dystopian) than fiction after all. Rather than fix the system of working their employees to death (literally in the case of the tornado) or improving their conditions, Amazon tries to use virtual gold stars (not even physical stickers like kindergarten) as a band-aid. That list of banned words is right out of 1984 (as cliché as it is to reference at this point): ethics, fairness, freedom.
I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian. This is not “par for the course” for manual labor jobs as some people are claiming. Most manual labor jobs do not restrict you from talking about ethics or justice with your coworkers or have even a need for some virtual gold stars beyond a little whiteboard in the building with number of sales, employee of the month, etc. The fact that these techniques won’t work for Amazon just shows that their laborers are really over-worked compared to the norm. Unfortunately, Amazon is able to use their massive resources and capital to pay just more than the local factory, packing gig, etc. so they have a stream of desperate people willing to take it.
The scariest thing isn't that Amazon is a company worth nearly trillions and using that money to oppress workers to maintain their lead.
It's that tech workers are happily applying to get a decent paycheck and crushing people under them, just to protect the company's billions. Then they'll post online about how happy they are to have been smart enough to save up to buy a lakefront home and retire at 45, and say people should follow their path in tech if they're looking for a step up (after destroying the road behind them and making it easier to oppress workers), or worse, pretend to lament how hard it is for other people to follow their footsteps and how something needs to be done.
FAANG workers are really entering and sometimes fully into "just following orders" territory. The lame social media posts from fellow tech workers about how things "should" be regulated gets tiresome. The real solution is to simply not work for them.
> The lame social media posts from fellow tech workers about how things "should" be regulated gets tiresome. The real solution is to simply not work for them.
If you’re calling something a “real solution” it should have at least some chance of actually happening and solving the problem. Strong regulation from the government against union busting is both possible and effective (look at what FDR did if you want an example). Wishing individuals would live up to your standards of ethical behavior when they have no reason to (and may have personal/family reasons that make them feel they need the paycheck) will not ever change anything.
I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us, since there isn't really a road between "warehouse worker" and "software engineer", unless someone has the knack for coding (in which case there's a very clear and well-paved road within the company between those roles)
I think the best solution is to empower workers via unions or whatever else. It should be impossible for workers to get ground into dust by companies the way they do now.
A really great way to be able to quit your job and take a coding bootcamp is to make enough money that you’re not living paycheck to paycheck and can survive for a few months while you retrain. Poverty restricts your options and keeps you in survival mode.
But the overall point is that unions rely on solidarity, and any coder adding filters to an amazon chat app or whatever dystopian crap amazon is pulling next is displaying a massive lack of solidarity with their fellow humans
If I was a junior dev who got such a ticket, I can see myself implementing it all the while laughing at the utter ridiculous pointlessness of it.
I can also see the ticket being written with examples of “disallow a dictionary of forbidden words”, with a sample dictionary of [“motherfucker”, “slut”, <list of racial epithets>] and then the dictionary function being used later to include “union” etc.
If I got a ticket to block the dictionary containing MF and racial epithets, I’d also think it was pointless, would point out it was easily able to be evaded, but would implement it and implementing it would not be obviously evil or showing a lack of solidarity.
It’s not just jr devs that should be acting in solidarity with warehouse workers. Their team leads, IT, project managers, etc. I don’t care how much amazon stock you’re getting as part of your comp, until the capital gains on your stock outpaces your salary you’re closer to a warehouse worker than you are to an owner - and your allegiances should be with your coworkers, not jeff.
So yeah, this specific case might have flown under the radar - and got implemented unwittingly - but unless a top level exec got in there and edited the dictionary file themselves, there was opportunities in this being implemented to show solidarity and throw some clogs into the machinery
Ok. Preventing a coworker from calling another a “slut”, “motherfucker”, “fag”, or “n####r” seems like a pretty reasonable feature for a workplace chat system. Lacking such a system might even constitute creating or contributing to a hostile workplace environment.
What’s the level of dev who should show allegiance to fellow coworkers by refusing to implement that?
Then some non-dev employee realizes you can block these other words…
And then some dev can accidentally roll back the changes as part of a bug fix.
Actually we’re having problems with the whole filtering system, it turns out it relies on a library that has some security vulnerabilities and it’s no longer operational.
Or if you must, wait until it breaks on its own, and then refuse to fix it. “Suppressing labour organizing isn’t part of my job description”
Why assume this list is hardcoded? It's possible/likely it's controlled by an API (ultimately through a web frontend) and stored on a machine devs don't even have permission to access... that's pretty par for the course for Amazon. The person who coded that functionality, and the person who has credentials to edit the list are likely not one in the same.
(The exception would be, when the person who coded the API goes on-call. Still there's lots of checks and balances there and any such change would be quickly undone.)
You’re right - diffusion of responsibility and technological layering / obfuscation is a great way to avoid making anybody feel bad about doing something bad. It’s quite possible that this was done in a clever way that avoided anyone implementing anything they felt bad about. But ultimately, you can’t “just doing my job” or “i didn’t know it would be used that way” your way out of the harm your job does - it’s your responsibility to notice and act, preferably proactively, but there’s always retroactively.
It sounds reasonable and that is why it's dangerous to censor and everyone should fight against any censorship. If the guy working next to you is the type to send you slurs via messenger on company time wouldn't you want to know that so you could take the messages to management and have them removed? Or you would you want him to have a new imagined grievance on top of his already hateful viewpoint?
Coders may not destroy the road behind us (the software highway) - but much of our effort is spent destroying the roads other people are on. This is called progress, of course - but Amazon's dismal warehouses are 100% a side effect of the extreme efficiency gains we enable and champion.
> I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us
I agree, in fact I would argue the total opposite. Has any industry/skill group in history put so much effort in to getting more people involved than the software industry has?
Miserable attempts at getting a bunch of POC to participate in a majorly male dominated industry to get a sign-on bonus is barely effort. The very fact that unionization is a bad word in much of the software industry is proof of how selfish most of us are.
Massive salaries for programmers won’t last forever. Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up.
Eventually, large corporations will feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market, and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation. It’s no different from millennials resenting boomers for burning economic bridges behind them with outsourcing and so on just to save a few dollars on costs and pull in higher wages for themselves.
> feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market
unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen. Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion).
And if programming is valuable, why wouldn't these "low paid" programmers quit and take their skills elsewhere, including starting their own business selling their output?
> Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion).
You already provided a real world example of them doing it. So it does happen.
And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition. That's only going to expand going further. The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market, they shipped their factories off to other countries, and they still steal subsidies from tax payers.
Tech companies are going to happily follow that path.
> And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition
Now? I'm old and have heard that constantly my entire life. It still hasn't happened.
> The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market
I live in Seattle. The local politicians managed to do that all by themselves.
For example, there once was a car tunnel under the city. The city decided to build another tunnel. What to do with the dug out material, what to do ... I know! let's pack it into the existing tunnel! We spend billions and wind up where we started!
(The rationale was the old tunnel was, well, getting old. Nobody was able to explain why boring a new tunnel was cheaper than shoring up the old one.)
High salaries for tech workers are not a new phenomenon. So if programming were truly a skill a large number of people could just “pick up”, it would have happened already.
The idea that anyone can "learn to code" is a work of fiction. Nobody says that anyone can learn to do surgery, become a fighter pilot or become a barrister. I couldn't do those jobs. And lots of people couldn't do my job.
Telling people that effort is the only thing stopping them getting a 6 figure software engineering salary does real harm. Its notable that most people who say this aren't themselves programmers.
Its even true amongst programmers. I've struggled to learn modern deep learning. And lots of people here on HN struggle with "leetcode problems" - which is the exact sort of work I can't get enough of.
We aren't made the same. Software has been a highly in-demand skill for the last 2 decades, and I bet it'll stay that way for at least the rest of my life. Well, at least until AI gets good enough.
I know people that transferred from psychology degrees to programming jobs strictly through being self taught and they're making just shy of six figures. I know people who got web development jobs right out of high school.
Programming is infinitely easier to get into than any other high paying field. There's no standardized exam or certification board keeping people out. The problem is people need time to study it, and a lot of big companies very much have old boys networks thriving within them. Look at how many people are handed money to make a startup a year or two into Stanford, then hire a bunch of people who also went to Stanford or MIT, then put up 8 stage interviews spread across weeks for anyone who tries joining the company later.
It's honestly weird how some programmers get uncomfortable when it's stated that, yes, loads of people are self-taught. HN has nearly daily blog posts about people who studied in middle school and started a small company in high school and did fine for life, or someone who did a coding boot camp at 30 and got a fine job in a couple months after having zero experience beforehand. I mean, HN even gets literal kids (14 year olds) posting their apps--and sometimes they're actually good.
Nobody is doing that with the medical field or flying. Not everyone is going to make a world-class search engine after a few weeks in their basement. But a low double digit percentage of people could do programming in a workplace setting with good management if they had the opportunity to study. I had friends who got straight Ds in high school who are doing just fine with programming. They won't top leetcode charts, but they can make stuff.
When you take an intro CS class, just like Chem 101, you see a huge separation of people who "get it" from those who don't in the midterm exam score distribution. I realize you may know some diamonds in the rough who emerged later, but if the average residential college student with the time, lack of other obligations, ability to pass admissions to the school, and the mental suppleness of his age can't learn this stuff like a breeze, I don't think you should so easily dismiss the difficulty barrier.
I think also if you could practice medicine without a license and call yourself "doctor", you'd see a LOT more self taught people doing that who have maybe the capacity of a medical assistant, the brighter ones perhaps performing as well as a junior PA.
> Programming is infinitely easier to get into than any other high paying field
Being an average programmer is indeed easy compared to many skilled jobs. In some areas people are called "senior" after doing a 6-months bootcamp and landing a job copypasting stack overflow for 3 years.
Being a good software engineer is a different thing and takes endless learning.
We aren't talking about what it takes to be a good one though, just to be one. Your last sentence is true of literally any work or skill one chooses to master. And choosing mastery isn't required in any of them, there are other optimizations available.
I would pick different examples. All the ones you mention require access to some special resource like an airplane or cadavers, so you basically can't learn anything until after you get past the gatekeeper.
Computers are cheap enough for far more people, and you can learn without someone's allowing you to.
Having said that you do get the sense that some people will not be able to code regardless of access. I even hear about CS graduates who basically decide having learned a bit that it's not for them. This is somewhere between "can't be done" and "don't want to".
We can flood the world with more literature graduates than will ever be needed, but it's not the same for tech skills, somehow. I'm not sure it's intelligence, that seems to just punt the issue into "what is intelligence". But it's definitely the case that you get this sense that some people reach a point where they can dive into technical issues without limit (you see their hobby projects here every few days) and those who either can't or won't.
If you work outside of the US you'd probably need to spend a decade or more to hit a six-figure salary; you certainly won't walk into it right off the bat as a junior developer. It will likely still be pretty well-paid compared to alternatives, but the expectations have to be managed and your options might be a bit more limited until you can look for senior positions.
Disagree. Not only can anyone program. But anyone can do surgery, become a fighter pilot and become a barrister.
It's the same thing as how anyone can learn mathematics, algebra, biology and any of the typical subjects you learn at school. You struggle with deep learning only because it's a paradigm shift. It's too different from traditional programming so the initial learning curve makes it seem like you're incapable. Given enough time anyone can surpass the hump and become good at deep learning.
That is not to say that these skills are trivial. There must be a lot of training time to achieve these skills. But make no mistake... anyone can do it.
Your comment is typical of people with an average or high IQ.
There are people whose IQ is so low they can't even be legally enlisted in the army (the ASVAB test the Army does correlates with IQ).
Some people won't have the same learning ability you have.
I also thought that everyone could learn to program and organised bootcamps and education for developers (for free) - it turned out only a fraction of the people I've met would actually manage to learn some basic programming and a fraction of those people would move on to become a programmer.
As a mostly private teacher of mathematics with 7 to 10 years experience for both, children at schools and adults at university, and both, individuals and groups, and both, those who struggle and those who do not, I'd like to share my narrow experience and disagree.
Most people I worked with struggled with something entirely different than the actual content they are trying or forced to learn. I am certain the biggest obsticles are stress, fear and and hopelessnes. And often not towards the methematics, but rather something entirely different. E.g. issues in the family, fear of the consequences of bad grades, and no hope regarding their own future, regardless of whether they learn or not.
I expierienced some challenges as ADHD and expierienced them as somewhat orthogonal. And definitely additionally challenging for me as a teacher. I also expierienced people who did struggle a lot, independent of anything I mentioned so far. So I am sure, there is differences among people (you may measure that in IQ or whatever, I prefer not to). But for most people I met they are not the problem.
Appreciate your insight. I believe you're speaking accurately from your own experiences, but I do have another anecdotal countering viewpoint.
Like many on HN I went to a top engineering school. there I saw about 2/3 of my colleagues drop out within the first two years. At least half of them worked tirelessly and efficiently to pursue their goal, and still failed. This was a large public school that will admit basically everyone with a pulse into engineering, with the expectation most will fail out as unfit and filter into some of the programs my college was less known for.
I did not have a particularly exceptional upbringing, and went to a middle of the road country school without any special preparations that would advantage myself over these other middle-class white people I saw. I'm not saying this to brag, because no doubt many of these people are far more successful than me in other fields (one I know went on to become a doctor for instance) but there is definitely something at play that different people are 'wired' for different tasks. I could almost sleep through much of the engineering curriculum and remain near the top while I saw many smarter people than me struggle tirelessly with engineering; something else was going on in our minds.
Engineering programs especially in top schools are way too hard for what's required to learn programming. And by top school I mean a top school that admits less than 10% of applicants. These programs are way more challenging than normal. Failing one of these programs does not mean you can program.
Also when I say anyone can do it, I mean anyone with around an average IQ or above. Obviously if you're mentally challenged it's a different story. Obviously new born babies don't have the IQ to learn programming.
I've went to schools where they admit anyone with a pulse and I've also been to actual top schools that are highly selective. I can tell you these programs that admit anyone feel significantly easier because they are. Doing well in one of these schools is not an achievement. I remember coming out top of the class at these schools simply studying for a test the night before.
But the reasoning as to why people fail in these "easy" schools is not what you think. It's exactly what the other replier said but more. Learning programming is not easy, and many people don't have the discipline or the study habits necessary to achieve it in a class room environment as well. They may look like they're studying hard... but a good number them aren't doing the necessary studying to succeed. They may not even be interested in programming. But make no mistake, if you make the curriculum longer and easier or if these people spend the time to grind, most people will succeed in learning programming.
> Learning programming is not easy...discipline or the study habits...necessary studying to succeed... spend the time to grind...
Programming is what I did obsessively as a teenager. I didn't need any discipline or study habits. It was and still is exciting and creative. This is aptitude and interest, which obviously, few have.
Much less people have the aptitude for quantum physics which is way harder. Programming is so easy that even as a teenager you have sufficient background to learn it.
I assure you that as a teenager, it's very unlikely you had any aptitude for quantum physics or any of the hard mathematics required to understand general relativity.
That's funny, because I loved quantum physics and general relativity so much that I majored in physics, not computer science. I didn't find QM very hard, either. Having done both, I wouldn't say one is harder, only that QM requires more prerequisite knowledge, and I didn't have that as a teen.
I find doing advanced math relaxing and meditative during commutes. That's aptitude. It's probably much the same aptitude as finding programming enjoyable, but software is a much better career, so most of us end up there than in physics anymore.
Not many people have this aptitude, though. Most people would name hundreds of activities they'd rather do than either of them.
But let me put it this way. Much much much much much More people have done programming since they were teens but much less have done QM. You will find tons of examples of programmers and relatively few people who know QM or advanced mathematics.
That's the dichotomy I'm talking about. Programming is easy. QM requiring pre-requisite knowledge is part of what makes it so much harder.
It does. You have 20 minutes to mow the lawn or shoot a deer, starting now. Which task can you actually accomplish? Far more people will be able to mow the lawn.
You analogy is bad. But I get your point.
Let's put it this way. Something that is commonly done is LIKELY to be far more easier than something that is not commonly done. Full circle back to our other point on probable causes.
Pointless debate when you do not define the level. Anyone can be surgeon, if you define 'surgery' as being able to 'remove mole'. Many programmers just remove moles. Some do coronary bypass surgeries.
Claiming that if everyone programs the normal average person will achieve the average is claiming nothing. You're simply saying average is average. A lot of words without saying anything at all.
No I'm saying the average level of adequate programming for a software engineering job. The average for the job is higher than the average skill level for the population.
This is obvious. Your diving into technicalities of language, which is unnecessary.
My claim is that most of the population can achieve the average skill level held by an average developer.
Would it be easier or harder for the average person to reach the bar of 'average software engineer', since 'average person' is a less-selective barrier. Your selectivity theory yields the unintuitive result that it's actually easier to meet the bar of 'adequate for average software engineer' when starting from general population than starting from a selective group of software-engineer material. Or maybe, just maybe, it's possible to hold every cohort to an objective standard.
Harder than what? Harder then a smarter person? Then Yes.
I also wouldn't call it a "selectivity theory." It's more common sense. You select a group of people with a record of great past performance they are more likely going to have an easier time. It's actually your ideas about selectivity are counter-intuitive.
>I've went to schools where they admit anyone with a pulse and I've also been to actual top schools that are highly selective. I can tell you these programs that admit anyone feel significantly easier because they are. Doing well in one of these schools is not an achievement. I remember coming out top of the class at these schools simply studying for a test the night before.
Lol K bro, I didn't say this to brag, I said it because of what I witnessed. I don't think being good at engineering school is an 'achievement' or a sign of superiority, I just think it means you may be wired differently than some other people -- that's it. The school in question I'm referring to is ranked in the top 10 of US engineering programs, with much lower grade inflation than many of the private schools, and no one takes you seriously when you say this school is 'easier.' I lived with several of these people who were trying, and they were doing everything right and taking the necessary steps, with full family support, and working tirelessly and still just couldn't cut it. One of them I spent time with daily ended up becoming a doctor instead; these were not dumb or undisciplined people.
Many of the more 'highly selective' private programs are actually easier because they milk you dry in tuition and they want to keep the dollars flowing, so they will coddle you along.
Believe it or not there are public schools that will take essentially anyone with a pulse into engineering, and a handful of the more challenging and highly ranked engineering programs are included. These are not 'easy' programs, and attrition rates far exceed other programs at the same university. Personally I approve of this approach because it allows anyone to try their hand rather than depending on BS criteria like standardized testing or high school performance, or other dumb factors like whether your parents had the strings to pull in a non-profit to make you look like mother teresa. The kind of person who succeeds at engineering is often not the kind who has an impressive background coming out of highschool.
>I remember coming out top of the class at these schools simply studying for a test the night before
The number of people who received, or would be able to receive, an ABET accredited engineering degree at the top of their class from any of say the top dozen engineering schools while simply 'studying for a test the night before' is a much rarer trait than you think. Either you're unaware of your exceptional aptitude or you were blind to your surroundings.
>I don't think being good at engineering school is an 'achievement' or a sign of superiority, I just think it means you may be wired differently than some other people -- that's it. The school in question I'm referring to is ranked in the top 10 of US engineering programs
Bro, I went to a top 10 as well, and it's also not a private school. I'm telling you that it doesn't matter. Doing well in a school that has zero selectivity is not an achievement because you're competing with many people who don't even have the drive to succeed. Of course a huge number will be fodder for you to step on. Sure you're school is hard.. but that's a different kind of hard.
At a selective school, every student you're with has drive and has consistently placed number 1 at every previous school they've been at. The classes and challenge are normalized so that just being number one is now average or even below average. This is hard on another level.
>Many of the more 'highly selective' private programs are actually easier because they milk you dry in tuition and they want to keep the dollars flowing, so they will coddle you along.
Not true at all. Again, Selective programs normalize what is easy among top students. The curve becomes insanely steeper. Schools allow you to change majors to keep milking the dollars but they still fail you out of the class.
>Believe it or not there are public schools that will take essentially anyone with a pulse into engineering, and a handful of the more challenging and highly ranked engineering programs are included. These are not 'easy' programs, and attrition rates far exceed other programs at the same university. Personally I approve of this approach because it allows anyone to try their hand rather than depending on BS criteria like standardized testing or high school performance, or other dumb factors like whether your parents had the strings to pull in a non-profit to make you look like mother teresa. The kind of person who succeeds at engineering is often not the kind who has an impressive background coming out of highschool.
I never said it's easy. But it certainly is easier. Let's do a quantitative analysis then. Anyone with a pulse and let's say they fail out 75%. That's equivalent to a 25% pass rate. Then take a look at a selective school with a (in my case 20% failure rate and 10% acceptance). That's about 8% pass rate assuming anyone with a pulse applies (of course this is not the case, better performing students tend to apply).
By that number alone you know how much harder it is in a selective school. And the 20% failure rate is just a random guess, could be much higher than that as tons of kids switch majors after their first weeder class. Realistically I give it 50% failure rate if you count people who switch.
>The number of people who received, or would be able to receive, an ABET accredited engineering degree at the top of their class from any of say the top dozen engineering schools while simply 'studying for a test the night before' is a much rarer trait than you think. Either you're unaware of your exceptional aptitude or you were blind to your surroundings.
Let's caveat something here. I passed top of my class and studied the night before in a non-selective school. The other school I transferred to, (a top school) I could not do this. Also ABET is garbage, let's be clear about that. Many top engineering schools have certain programs that are ABET accredited, and many schools with ABET accredited programs are easy.
>I never said it's easy. But it certainly is easier. Let's do a quantitative analysis then. Anyone with a pulse and let's say they fail out 75%. That's equivalent to a 25% pass rate. Then take a look at a selective school with a (in my case 20% failure rate and 10% acceptance). That's about 8% pass rate assuming anyone with a pulse applies (of course this is not the case, better performing students tend to apply).
>By that number alone you know how much harder it is in a selective school.
You really don't. All you proved was that 80% (or whatever) of those who the school selected would pass. You know nothing of what percent of those who they didn't select would pass. You can't possibly make the assertion it would be lower than 25% example you gave for the "anyone with a pulse school."
I don't doubt you probably went to a more rigorous, challenging, and renowned school than me. I don't doubt you are more intelligent than myself or many who did well at my school. The fallacy comes when you conflate entrance selectivity with difficulty.
> I passed top of my class and studied the night before in a non-selective school.
Can you help explain to me why you went from a top non-selective public school to a different top selective school? In my experience after the first couple years everyone but the cream was filtered out, so by junior year it was effectively like I was in a 'selective' school. Or are you comparing a lower tier non-selective engineering school to a top selective school? My point of reference here is one of the handful of non-selective top-10 schools.
>Many top engineering schools have certain programs that are ABET accredited, and many schools with ABET accredited programs are easy.
Agreed. Was just providing some baseline for roughly the curriculum that was covered. You're right that ABET on its own doesn't speak thoroughly to the program, which is why I used a variety of other qualifiers beyond ABET.
>Can you help explain to me why you went from a top non-selective public school to a different top selective school?
Transfer. And change of major. I would say I went to an top 50 school initially, with average selectivity and the same amount of weeder classes in every engineering program. Then went to a top 10 public school with an even more selective engineering program.
The weeder classes for your school filtered everyone out but the people remaining are still only 25% of anyone with a pulse. I'd wager this school has an extremely low amount of high achievers joining, so while you're dealing with smart competition, it's nowhere near the level of what you'd be facing at a selective school.
At a selective school, you have the top 10% of kids from the entire nation, who again get weeded out by about 50%. Yes that's effectively the smartest kids in the country getting cut in half. Nothing here is statistically rigorous but you can't deny that this back of the napkin estimate says something about how hard these schools are.
>You really don't. All you proved was that 80% (or whatever) of those who the school selected would pass. You know nothing of what percent of those who they didn't select would pass.
The kids who were selected overall have a higher chance success and higher work ethic and higher intelligence then those not selected. There are definitely scenarios of people who are great at programming but can't do well in school but these are generally in the minority. Google for example doesn't hire people based off of school, but the majority of their hires have degrees from top schools. It correlates with IQ and general programming ability, but I would say google sort of over selects. They don't need people that strong.
>I don't doubt you probably went to a more rigorous, challenging, and renowned school than me. I don't doubt you are more intelligent than myself or many who did well at my school. The fallacy comes when you conflate entrance selectivity with difficulty.
Never claimed any of these things and who knows? Maybe you went to the better school. I simply stated my credentials to show you that I have anecdotal experience from both types of schools. The difference in hardness is palpable and can only really be truly known by someone who went to both types of schools.
In the first school I attended my mindset was like you. I thought I had a talent and that most people were stupid. That changed when I got into a top 10 highly selective school.
But we did kind of get side tracked here. My main point is that my experience with schooling is more extensive then yours. And from that experience I derive that anyone can learn programming. It wasn't mentioned before, but programming is much easier than school.
I should also mention that this experience is from both extensive experience in school AND work. School experience provides sort of a bubble, a partial picture but not the full thing..
You compared a top 50 school to a top 10. Of course it was different, and quite possibly more rigorous.
I'm comparing a (my non-selective public) top 10 engineering to other top 10s [engineering]. Near peer selective to near peer non-selective. You compared a top 50 to a top 10 ranked engineering, far from peer schools. Starting with 10% says nothing about the difficulty of the program. You don't even know that they were the best 10% of engineering material, just that they were the top 10% of what the school thought were picks as candidates. Selectivity does not confer difficulty. High (50%+)success rate of your selective cohort does not confer low (25%-) success rate of the non-selected group.
> My main point is that my experience with schooling is more extensive then yours.
It seems we have the same amount of experience with top 10 schools, where N=1 for both. I have been to a 'lower tier' school but not for engineering so I didn't even bother to mention it, and yeah I agree it was a joke comparatively.
>Starting with 10% says nothing about the difficulty of the program. You don't even know that they were the best 10% of engineering material, just that they were the top 10% of what the school thought were picks as candidates. Selectivity does not confer difficulty. High (50%+)success rate of your selective cohort does not confer low (25%-) success rate of the non-selected group.
It does. Like I said the the smarter kids the tougher the courses. Because smarter kids normalize easiness. The difficulty of the program is set by the kids who attend. The school absolutely cannot fail the entire class, they have to set the hardness so that a certain amount pass. It is absolutely a factor especially if most schools grade on a curve. So if any Tom Dick or Jane can join the curve however steep it is, will reflect the quality of those who join.
"Best engineering material" is a misnomer. the smartest kids from other schools correlate with best engineering material. I already stated that sure you can have some miracle kid that succeeds at engineering but bombs at school, but this is rare. Kids who do well in school tend to do well in engineering. Any other thing you see is likely to be an anomaly.
You're basing your argument off the erroneous notion that engineering talent in school is completely separate from all other subjects and therefore selectivity is completely irrelevant. That doesn't make any sense. I'm saying it's not completely separate at all. There is a strong correlation that if you graduated top of the class in your high school you have a higher likelihood of better performance in engineering at a top school. It's not always the case but the correlation exists.
>It seems we have the same amount of experience with top 10 schools, where N=1 for both. I have been to a 'lower tier' school but not for engineering so I didn't even bother to mention it, and yeah I agree it was a joke comparatively.
Sure it's N=1. But read my paragraph above. That's a common sense figure. Person A gets all F's in your classes and Person B gets straight As and takes a bunch of AP courses... by probability person B will be the better engineer. Common sense. We can make a good estimate based off of common sense logic without the need for statistically rigorous data. So based off of that logic, my reasoning goes beyond a N=1 sample size as we can use common sense induction to arrive at a broader conclusion.
>It does. Like I said the the smarter kids the tougher the courses. Because smarter kids normalize easiness.
False. There is no requirement that the course be made easier, nor that the non-selective school refrain from creating a much harsher curve to reflect a like-achiever performing similarly to like-achiever at a different school.
>The school absolutely cannot fail the entire class, they have to set the hardness so that a certain amount pass.
They absolutely can, and in fact most of the courses I took REQUIRE the teacher to fail everyone who fails to achieve certain ABET designated criteria, regardless of what percent fails to master the material. Although in practical case, this means the non-selective school just fails a lot more people than the selective school at freshman/sophomore level.
>It is absolutely a factor especially if most schools grade on a curve. So if any Tom Dick or Jane can join the curve however steep it is, will reflect the quality of those who join.
Only on the basis of the fallacy that curves cannot vary from school to school.
>That doesn't make any sense. I'm saying it's not completely separate at all. There is a strong correlation that if you graduated top of the class in your high school you have a higher likelihood of better performance in engineering at a top school. It's not always the case but the correlation exists.
How the top 10% or whatever n% performs doesn't say anything about how the bottom 100-N% perform, (other than the top performed better). It merely provides a maximum, which in your example was 50% passing. We've been over this fallacious assertion many times now.
>You're basing your argument off the erroneous notion that engineering talent in school is completely separate from all other subjects and therefore selectivity is completely irrelevant
Selectivity DOESN'T CONFER DIFFICULTY. Say that in your head 10 more times. That 50% of your selective cohort passes doesn't prove that the non-selective cohort will be below say 25% of your baseline "only with a pulse" group. A t best it suggest that they won't exceed the 50% of the favored cohort. I didn't make an 'erroneous notion' about selectivity or talent because I never claimed selectivity increased nor decreased difficulty, in fact that was your 'erroneous notion.'
>Sure it's N=1. But read my paragraph above. That's a common sense figure. Person A gets all F's in your classes and Person B gets straight As and takes a bunch of AP courses... by probability person B will be the better engineer. Common sense. We can make a good estimate based off of common sense logic without the need for statistically rigorous data. So based off of that logic, my reasoning goes beyond a N=1 sample size as we can use common sense induction to arrive at a broader conclusion.
I see no reason why person A and B alike couldn't be held to similar standards regardless as whether they went to a selective vs non selective school.
Your selective program is not more difficult on that basis alone.
>False. There is no requirement that the course be made easier, nor that the non-selective school refrain from creating a much harsher curve to reflect a like-achiever performing similarly to like-achiever at a different school.
>They absolutely can, and in fact most of the courses I took REQUIRE the teacher to fail everyone who fails to achieve certain ABET designated criteria, regardless of what percent fails to master the material. Although in practical case, this means the non-selective school just fails a lot more people than the selective school at freshman/sophomore level.
Of course no official requirement exists. But all schools must do this. Failing an entire class or most of the class is grounds for a lawsuit. It's also extremely bad for business as schools are basically businesses.
The only thing schools can do is grade on a curve and this curve must let a percentage of people through. The quality of that percentage depends 100% on the quality of the group that is in that class. Thus selectivity effects difficulty. If every student scored 99%, then 99% is now a C grade. See the logic? Selectivity is causative to difficulty in classes with a curve AND that is a quantitative inductive conclusion which is incredibly hard to counter with qualitative anecdotes.
I also don't know why you're bringing up ABET when we agreed it's trash and irrelevant.
>Only on the basis of the fallacy that curves cannot vary from school to school.
Curves are different, so are the students going in. But when you look at the whole, by the law of large numbers (aka basic probability) a pattern emerges. Selective schools have smarter people and are therefore harder overall because of these curves. The generality is true despite exceptions that may exist. You can say on average, what I say is more likely to be true.
>How the top 10% or whatever n% performs doesn't say anything about how the bottom 100-N% perform, (other than the top performed better). It merely provides a maximum, which in your example was 50% passing. We've been over this fallacious assertion many times now.
It already does. The top 10% indicates that the bottom 90% failed to perform at the level of the top 10%. That is something right there. Failure to perform. If you fail to be part of the top 10% then you're more likely to fail at other things INCLUDING an engineering curriculum. Correlation and probability. Your assumption which imo is much more far fetched is stating that this correlation DOESN'T exist. Think about it. It's much more logical to assume high performers in high school are more likely to be high performers in university.
>Selectivity DOESN'T CONFER DIFFICULTY. Say that in your head 10 more times.
Say it as much as you want. I am literally telling you that IT DOES.
I said two things that by induction leads to higher difficulty. Literally. Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has. THEREFORE difficulty increases. As I stated before this hinges on the correlation between performance before entering the university with actual performance at the university in an engineering curriculum. That's the basis of my thesis right there. It is unreasonable to deny that correlation.
>I see no reason why person A and B alike couldn't be held to similar standards regardless as whether they went to a selective vs non selective school.
You hold the standard too high, then nobody passes the course. A certain percentage has to pass, therefore, for a non-selective school the curve MUST be lowered for more people to pass. As I stated before, although there's no official rule stating that schools can't fail everyone, it's pretty stupid for a school to fail everyone. Bad for business and various other things.
Thus by this logic a non-selective school MUST lower the bar or too many people will fail. Keep in mind, selective schools also have high attrition rates, so we can do the math on this if you have statistics about your school. I'm guessing something like Georgia Tech which is like 40% percent dropout rate (could very well be a BS statistic as I've only heard people regurgitate what the dean says) and 75% acceptance, versus my school which is 11 percent acceptance and dropout is 10% (highly inaccurate as this is the overall dropout rate of the entire school... Engineering is MUCH higher).
This leaves Georgia Tech with 45% and my school with 10% of the initial group of people that applied. Assuming that both schools have the same distribution of talented people applying, there's no logic that can justify Georgia Tech being easier than my school. More people of the same level of talent out of this distribution make it through Georgia Tech than they do at my school. Therefore my school is harder.
Of course it should also be noted that my school is prestigious enough that most mediocre students don't bother to apply. So my school weighted towards a group with greater talent.
I don't know which school you went to but Georgia Tech is the only top 10 CS school that I know of that has a reputation for letting "anyone with a pulse" into their online masters program, so I'm using that as my model.
>Your selective program is not more difficult on that basis alone.
Certainly there are exceptions aka Anomalies, but the generality is impossible not to be true. It's an axiom of probability. You could very well be a genius of unparalleled talent that came out of a non-selective program.
In fact by probability, it is actually highly unlikely for anomalies not to exist. Somebody eventually gets struck by lightning.
>If every student scored 99%, then 99% is now a C grade. See the logic? Selectivity is causative to difficulty in classes with a curve AND that is a quantitative inductive conclusion which is incredibly hard to counter with qualitative anecdotes.
No I don't. The center of the curve ('C') doesn't need to be calibrated around the median. 'F' can be chosen as the median, or you can choose an objective scale (this did happen) rather than a subjective curve. I've seen 'qualitative anecdotes' that the curve isn't centered around 'C' and I reject the notion this anecdote is impossible. I don't know why you can't understand the curve can be adjusted so like-performers across schools get a similar grade, resulting in higher GPAs at selective schools and lower GPAs (initially) at non-selective ones.
>I also don't know why you're bringing up ABET when we agreed it's trash and irrelevant.
Because you made a false assertion everyone couldn't be failed, when in fact at least in the institution it was REQUIRED that everyone be failed if everyone fails to meet ABET designated criteria. It supports that your claim is specious.
>Curves are different, so are the students going in. But when you look at the whole, by the law of large numbers (aka basic probability) a pattern emerges. Selective schools have smarter people and are therefore harder overall because of these curves. The generality is true despite exceptions that may exist. You can say on average, what I say is more likely to be true.
False. Again you depend on the fallacy the curves can't be calibrated around something like 'the average student fails and the course follows the difficulty of <selective school>.' If I give an IQ test to a cohort to a group of lower intelligence people, the 'curve' looks bent and biased towards lower score. If I give it to people of upper intelligence, the curve 'looks' bent towards biased towards higher score. But in the end it is the curve that is objective across cohorts (schools), despite higher intelligence in one cohort ('school') than another. The difficulty is unchanged, even though selectivity is introduced.
>The top 10% indicates that the bottom 90% failed to perform at the level of the top 10%.
That only sets the ceiling. If the 'top 10%' have a 50% pass rate, that doesn't stop the bottom 90% from having a 49% one, well above your 25% threshold for 'anybody with a pulse.'
> Your assumption which imo is much more far fetched is stating that this correlation DOESN'T exist.
My assertion is that all we know is it's likely the top picks may tell us the ceiling for expection of the bottom, but not the floor. And it tells us little to nothing about how difficult the cirricula is, unless we compare to like-kind top picks at another cirriculum (which without selectivity, could be difficult to compare in practice.)
>You hold the standard too high, then nobody passes the course. A certain percentage has to pass, therefore, for a non-selective school the curve MUST be lowered for more people to pass. As I stated before, although there's no official rule stating that schools can't fail everyone, it's pretty stupid for a school to fail everyone. Bad for business and various other things.
> said two things that by induction leads to higher difficulty. Literally. Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has. THEREFORE difficulty increases. As I stated before this hinges on the correlation between performance before entering the university with actual performance at the university in an engineering curriculum. That's the basis of my thesis right there. It is unreasonable to deny that correlation.
Fallacious reasoning, the two schools could have the exact same cirricula, teacher, everything and merely different students and when graded against objective criteria, or appropriately calibrated (shifted down/up) shaped curves, they can have both equal difficulty and grade parity for performance. The university I went to is NOTORIOUS for having the least grade inflation, much lower than many 'selective' schools, which also helps fix the exact problem you are worried about.
>Thus by this logic a non-selective school MUST lower the bar or too many people will fail.
Not at all. They just didn't give a fuck. Engineering drop-out is their feeder program to the other programs; better to keep the rankings high to bait people in than make engineering easier resulting in lower rankings and lose the bait. Engineering drop-out commonly became successful engineering tech or even successful doctor, lawyer, etc via side-channeling of people who were baited into the university via engineering rankings. They would have happily failed out everyone from what I can tell, and if you didn't meet ABET designated objectives they were REQUIRED to fail you. You can't just wash this away with your vendetta not believing that this can be true -- I saw people with excellent performance fail merely for missing a single ABET criteria. Moreover recall at least one class where I believe the majority failed or dropped out, making the median an 'F' or 'D'. Apparently where you went, you implied the median was a 'C', so there's a difference already. This is a public school that couldn't give a flying fuck if most the undergrads failed out.
> Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has.
Having higher performers doesn't change the curriculum or necessary even the grading, it simply means those individuals may be better prepared to tackle equal difficulty found at both non-selective and selective schools. If I bring in the population at random to do 10 pull-ups each and seperately bring in a bunch of professional football players to do same, the difficulty is the same despite a massive change in selectivity.
>More people of the same level of talent out of this distribution make it through Georgia Tech than they do at my school.
I'm not terribly familiar with Georgia Tech or your school, and it's possible, I dare say probably even likely, your school was more challenging than both mine and Georgia Tech, but we can't say the delta in difficulty was BECAUSE of the selectivity. I'm guessing the university I attended didn't show up on your radar because you swapped us into the sciences (computer science) instead of engineering, and my university is not so remarkably ranked in computer science. In fact it would be impossible to gain a CS degree there without acceptance into an entirely different college of science (for which I have no basis for comparison).
> only top 10 CS school
I thought we were talking about engineering. I guess we can stop here. At the school I attended, CS is not engineering but rather science (which is in the name) so we don't even have a basis for comparison. It's a bit pedantic on face but it drastically changes everything to be in college of science instead of engineering from the bottom up where I went to university. Are you sure CS was in the college of engineering where you attended?
>Certainly there are exceptions aka Anomalies, but the generality is impossible not to be true. It's an axiom of probability. You could very well be a genius of unparalleled talent that came out of a non-selective program.
Having more qualified people attempt to complete the degree is not same as being more difficult. Moreover, attrition could be so high at the 'anybody with a pulse' institution that by the time junior year comes around the quality of cohort looks the same as at the selective school.
>No I don't. The center of the curve ('C') doesn't need to be calibrated around the median. 'F' can be chosen as the median, or you can choose an objective scale (this did happen) rather than a subjective curve.
What do you mean F is chosen as the median. The median is not chosen it's determined by events.
The curve isn't subjective. It's a probability distribution determined by scores from students. Nothing can be calibrated or adjusted here.
>Because you made a false assertion everyone couldn't be failed, when in fact at least in the institution it was REQUIRED that everyone be failed if everyone fails to meet ABET designated criteria. It supports that your claim is specious.
ABET requires it in name, but no institution does this. Think of ABET like the FDA. It has some oversight but there's also holes everywhere. School rarely fail an entire class. If a curriculum causes an entire class to fail the curriculum will be toned down otherwise students complain, launch lawsuits and eventually nobody attends the school. You need to work some common sense into your argument here, just because ABET has a stupid rule in name doesn't mean that rule is followed to the letter.
>False. Again you depend on the fallacy the curves can't be calibrated around something like 'the average student fails and the course follows the difficulty of <selective school>.' If I give an IQ test to a cohort to a group of lower intelligence people, the 'curve' looks bent and biased towards lower score. If I give it to people of upper intelligence, the curve 'looks' bent towards biased towards higher score. But in the end it is the curve that is objective across cohorts (schools), despite higher intelligence in one cohort ('school') than another. The difficulty is unchanged, even though selectivity is introduced.
First off the curve looks the same, it's not bent in anyway, it's usually symmetric, especially with student scores. The only difference is an offset of where the hump is.
Second your not understanding the argument. Imagine two groups of people. A high IQ group and a low IQ group. Both groups are given the exact same test. However both tests are graded differently based off a curve generated by the probability distribution of scores for each test.
The High IQ group has a mean score of 95. The low IQ group as a mean score of 50. So taking the same test among the high IQ group getting a 95 gets you a C taking the exact same test among the low IQ group and scoring the SAME score of 95 gets you an A. So by logic it's EASIER to get an A among a group of lower IQ people (aka a group of the same people from a less selective school). The test is harder among the high IQ group. This is definitive man.
>Fallacious reasoning, the two schools could have the exact same cirricula, teacher, everything and merely different students and when graded against objective criteria, or appropriately calibrated (shifted down/up) shaped curves, they can have both equal difficulty and grade parity for performance. The university I went to is NOTORIOUS for having the least grade inflation, much lower than many 'selective' schools, which also helps fix the exact problem you are worried about.
Fallacious reasoning my ass, your introducing qualitative speculation on specific attributes of your individual school and thinking that's enough data to generate a broad conclusion. That's the most fallacious style of reasoning in existence. I'm just axiomatically going off the law of averages. On average a less selective school will be easier. It's probability.
>Not at all. They just didn't give a fuck.
So they fail everyone in the class and the angry students take their outrage to the media? Then the parents come in and start a lawsuit which leads to a PR nightmare. Less students join the next year because nobody wants to be part of a school that failed an entire class.
Of course they give a fuck man. Don't be unreasonable. Schools are businesses and while they have to have a certain level of integrity when grading they ALSO need to be reasonable or they don't get business.
If this type of failing a majority of a class ever happens at all, it would be super rare. The subsequent class will for sure will be adjusted and the professor changed or reprimanded.
>Having higher performers doesn't change the curriculum or necessary even the grading,
You understand that curving a grade is based on average scores right? You realize that this is the topic and what I mean by easier? A curve. Higher performers score higher and influence the average making the curve higher. Basic math. The curriculum becomes harder because math works in this reality.
Here's some resources if you never dealt with this concept:
The difficulty rises not in the test itself, but in the grading of the test. To pass the class you need to perform much better.
So given your NFL player example. Let's say on average they do 20 pullups and regular people on average do 8. The grading for NFL players is much more strict as 20 pullups is an average score. So an NFL player who does 10 pullups which is above average for the normal crew fails because he's below average for the NFL crew.
>I'm not terribly familiar with Georgia Tech or your school, and it's possible, I dare say probably even likely, your school was more challenging than both mine and Georgia Tech, but we can't say the delta in difficulty was BECAUSE of the selectivity.
That's not the point. The point is on average, selectivity influences difficulty and by difficulty I mean grading on a curve. If all else is held exactly the same selectivity fucks up the curve by making it harder for everyone.
>I thought we were talking about engineering. I guess we can stop here. At the school I attended, CS is not engineering but rather science (which is in the name) so we don't even have a basis for comparison. It's a bit pedantic on face but it drastically changes everything to be in college of science instead of engineering from the bottom up where I went to university. Are you sure CS was in the college of engineering where you attended?
Doesn't matter. CS or engineering... the bell curve and the rules of probability don't change when you change majors. I thought we were talking about CS because my original post is saying "anyone can program."
>Having more qualified people attempt to complete the degree is not same as being more difficult.
It is if the school grades on a curve. Most schools do grade on a curve especially the harder schools. The curve makes sure that only a small percentage of people get an A and guarantees a percentage of people fail.
> Moreover, attrition could be so high at the 'anybody with a pulse' institution that by the time junior year comes around the quality of cohort looks the same as at the selective school.
Except I just did the math that shows this does not occur when comparing my school to Georgia Tech. Like I said assuming everything else is roughly the same, out of all the people who applied to my school, only 10% graduate. In Georgia Tech 45% of people who applied graduate.
This is assuming both groups that applied have the same talent distribution for engineering or CS or whatever. This means 35% of people of the SAME LEVEL of TALENT who would've graduated at Georgia Tech couldn't even get into UCLA.
Look even with the raw numbers there's a lot of fuzziness and leeway here. The story could go either way with a more detailed and well thought out measurement. But given the available quantitative data, this is the best possible estimation we have so far:
This was my experience as well. Another interesting point here is that a top programmer can singlehandedly do tasks that would take a dozen or a hundred regular programmers working together.
I'm confident that if you took a super-rare race condition in a web service and set me to figuring it out in parallel with a team of a few dozen random web coders off Reddit, I'd figure it out first
With factors like that at play you really can't commoditize software engineering. If all the local companies decided to put the squeeze on workers, new companies would spring up, poach the best workers, and crush the old companies. It's happened before, it's happening now, and it'll happen again.
There may be more people who can do it than one would instinctively think, but it doesn’t take long on a helpdesk or in any public facing role to conclude that many humans are maxed out with tasks that really aren’t that hard.
No, not anyone can do anything. I never said that.
I said anyone can master the subjects mentioned above. Including programming.
These subjects are so easy that anyone can do it.
If I said anyone can master chess and play it on the level of a grandmaster, I'd be wrong. But for just learning to be an adequate programmer or playing chess adequately... anyone can do it.
> Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up.
1) Self-taught isn't that relevant - where you learn something isn't the most important thing
2) There IS a large ability component to software, as well as education and motivation
3) With the exception that we're in a funny moment where web frontend is simultaneously easy and hard; the concepts are easy, but the proliferation of frameworks and ways of doing things makes skills scarce (though relatively easy to pick up). Once this is resolved, the numbers will drop, as current frameworks will replaced (or enhanced) with something more productive, but harder to use
Massive salaries will exist so long as there are 10x and 100x workers and throwing more bodies at a bottleneck scales horribly. Given the normal curve holds for skill distributions companies who look for bulk cheap unicorns will always be disappointed.
Remember all of those failed multimillion dollar coding contracts? They were from factory style management trying to apply it to coding. Reality slapped the fools upside the head enough times via absolute fiascos. Even if we take conspiratorial economics as a given we already know how this will end. History indicates their hubris will bring themselves only ruin, just like the legacy rust belt manufacturers.
Also how the hell will programming tools used by programmers be used against them? That is a shallow appeal to horror. Even if machine learning became good enough to automate the low end of the programming market that would only raise their salaries even higher. It is not an easy machine learning problem to solve at all. Esoteric, obscure, and highly complex skills which can make businesses have never come cheaply.
Unpopular opinion but you need a certain IQ in order to be able to program effectively. A large portion of the population is not capable of reasoning at the level required to develop.
I've organised bootcamps and learning spaces for wannabe developers and there are tons of people which can't get their head around programming.
I'm not talking about being able to do algorithms challenge. I'm talking about simple function calling, stacks, for loops, etc
That said, I've interviewed several senior programmers with a career who can't program and managed to coast in companies which are not capable or willing to test performances.
So the number of "programmers" may increase, given the salaries we can command, but the amount of developers in FANGs or companies that are capable to deliver something effectively won't increase dramatically.
FANGs are leaving a lot of good developers on the table with their ridiculous leetcode policies, but the population of effective developers is not as large as you think.
I see I.Q. in this thread and think that is a red herring.
It's deeper than that: there are a large percentage of people that do not want to code. It would be as artless and soulless to them as perhaps we think pounding nails into boards all day would be. But to plenty of people "an honest day's work" consists of doing with your muscles, your labor — having accomplished something "physical" at the end of the day.
"it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up."
Define "large number". You can have millions of programmers and it still be a small fraction of the population at large. Sorry to say it, but a lot of people are never going to become coders - it's our own AI systems that will bring coders down to earth, not the public at large suddenly learning to code.
Forget that, approaching 60, still code every day. Management is for those who have management skills and want to do it. Coding is for the rest of us who want it. Saw how strong software would be as a kid in the 1970's and realized it was an industry whose dynamics were unlike any other industry, ever.
Unfortunately brilliant software engineers are often managed by, what Steve Jobs called "bozos". That's why eng need to step up and do what they would never otherwise do and start managing. Otherwise bozos will keep gain power and being in control.
I think it's one of the first industries, if not the first, that has the perfect combination of scalable output from workers, workers being potentially smarter than their bosses, and success being much less about relationships than skills, compared to many other industries.
Everything at Amazon is a road between software engineers and warehouse workers, because everything SEs at Amazon (with the exception of AWS) are doing is serving its eCommerce business. And that eCommerce business is riding on the back of warehouse workers.
It's weird how the hard working people that don't like their job get paid close to nothing and the software people enjoying their jobs get rich. I'm lucky that I could turn my hobby into a well paying profession, but it's kinda weird...
One of the more compelling framings for democratic socialism to me, is the idea of taking profits from companies and using it to radically raise wages of people with "undesirable" jobs: janitors, garbage-men, warehouse workers. There's no market pressure to do so (not without unions!) but can be regulated.
Better than unions would just be increasing labor scarcity at the low end of skills. Protectionism in the form of a carbon tax with border adjustment would help quite a bit, I think.
If my country (Canada) is anything to go by, instead of allowing market forces to increase low wages, they just change the rules to temporarily import workers instead.
Artificial scarcity is a terrible way to generate wealth, and a carbon tax would disappoint given economies of scale in shipping are because per kilogram they are overwhelmingly efficient.
Seems odd to blame other workers here even if they do make a lot of money. The only way workers will be helped is other jobs provide better value to the worker or companies are regulated to provide better conditions. Personal and corporate interests will always trump community interests.
> Personal and corporate interests will always trump community interests.
People _are_ responsible for the choices they make _and_ the entities they choose to empower…
Anyhow… I’ve known engineers that have chosen community over themselves…
Regardless, you’re on HN, fortunately you don’t have to make that choice. Instead you can skip FAANG toxicity and join a startup “community” that aligns with your values. Even better you can start your own startup. The payout is also potentially far better than grinding at a soul sucking FAANG position for years.
> The payout is also potentially far better than grinding at a soul sucking FAANG position for years.
if you consider financial pay out, i really can't agree that it's a better payout for the risk you're taking. A startup can be a lottery, and "winning" can be difficult and has a chance element. On average, i think the payout is lower than employment at the FAANGs, esp. if you do good salary negotiation and move often to ensure you're not missing out any uptick in the market rate.
Of course, a startup, like winning the lottery, pays out a lot more when successful, and some people prefer the high risk high reward - it's not a wrong choice. But that should be understood first.
This is another transfer of responsibility from the government to the citizen. Same as carbon footprint being used to guilt trip the individual who cannot stop global warming.
No matter how many engineers quit or refuse to apply to Amazon they will always have a replacement. The solution for both climate change and Amazon is government intervention. Be it subsidies for Solar or regulatory fines for Amazon.
Phrasing this as a "transfer" is begging the question; it can't be a transfer if the responsibility is not decided. The word "responsibility" is also a moral conundrum, not an objective one, which gums up the works in terms of finding a good solution. People can bikeshed morals all day.
A clearer way to think of it is in terms of people who have the power to change the situation:
- Governments can issue fines, but this is unlikely to harm the corporate enough to make it change. It can win votes though, so it does happen.
- Governments can write regulations, but this is done sparingly because of all the unintended consequences of adding any regulations to any industry. Also, a common (intended, by the incumbents) consequence of regulations is adding ones that disadvantage new participants in a market.
- People can choose to change the company from the inside, or not work for the company. This can work quite well if changes are encouraged from various levels, but that's not common.
- People can choose to not use the company (e.g. not to shop at Amazon).
The second and fourth are the most powerful options, with the fourth being the very most powerful.
> skip FAANG’s 300k salaries and still do fine with 180k at a more ethical company. Those people are responsible.
they are ethical, or altruistic, but certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.
If they don't have dependents (now or in the future), then they can remain financially irresponsible, because it will have little effect. But if they plan on having dependents such as children, they will need the funds to compete for scarce resources such as housing and school etc. They will also need to provide for their own retirement.
If they choose to take a lower paying job (when a higher paying one is definitely available), they are making a sacrifice on behalf of their dependents, who may or may not appreciate this choice being made for them.
As another sibling comment mentions, making 180k vs 300k as an individual doesn’t lowers one’s quality of life that much; there’s still enough disposable income to take trips, save for retirement, etc.
The “I don’t worry about my next meal” threshold for a warehouse hourly worker ($18/hr * 40hr/week * 52weeks/year ~= $37.5k) can be drastically improved.
>certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.
My man, with 180k you can comfortably afford a house by the time you're 30, have a quick million aside _and_ do lines a cocaine off a hooker's ass every week. 180k is a salary way past the bar of "fiscal responsibility".
Taking a job that screws over workers below you is really just sticking a middle finger up to the world around you.
A typical programming job is more than enough to provide for a family, a home, and early retirement. Burning down the next generation by empowering mega corporations just "for your kids" is the definition of selfish. Boomers did selfish things "for their kids" and now their kids are absolutely screwed with climate change and a worse off economic system.
But yes, they did certainly provide for their own retirement--at the cost of the whole world. FAANG developers are the same. Amazon and Apple can pay fat checks to their tech workers because they cut costs and shamelessly exploit everyone working in their lower level positions. Eventually they'll push everyone down to lower levels and have the technology to enforce it without human interference.
But hey, someone bought their kid a nice car and they retired to the Bahamas and got a few maids with that huge developer check. Got to look at the bright side.
Quarantines have existed for a long time. Countries locked down for longer.
The most important thing holding the world together was the people out there risking infection to deliver things to people staying at home. The biggest difference between the 90s and 2020s is that people are doing it by pressing a button on their phone instead of pressing a button on their computer or making a call on their phone, and loads more people are working in the package delivery industry for low wages.
> Quarantines have existed for a long time. Countries locked down for longer.
Can you give some examples?
The rest of your analysis seems incomplete. Some examples:
Zoom, Slack Facebook and WhatsApp able to keep professional, personal and family relationships alive was essential to so much continuing to function, allowing a vast number of employees to shift to online working. One notable point (of thousands) here is that while healthcare waiting lists got longer, many consultations that could be done over video, a thing never thought feasible before, meaning more isolation possibilities for vulnerable patients (and clinical staff).
Having online shops able to update listings in seconds, rather than your example of the 90s where catalogues would be sent out every six months with new stock for you to phone up and buy, or rather, not be able to get through to, was also awesome. Modern logistics means packages and returns can be done incredibly easily and fitted into your day, rather than spending ages on the phone with a human operator.
Uber and derivatives meant that the increased load of shutting down public transport could be transferred onto a dynamic fleet of private citizens' cars, and the traditional taxi firms also didn't require scaling human operators to book, and Google Maps powered the routing for those drivers.
And the rise of cloud infrastructure has meant in general that many services, government and private, have sprung into being in record time.
And those are just the first examples that occur to me.
Those people taking 300k salaries and building amazon.com are also contributing to creating value for the customers of amazon.com.
Is the value created for the customers of amazon.com less or more significant for society at large than people who can't get a better job than minimum wage, voluntarily working for minimum wage?
There is no moral right or wrong.
I personally hate amazon and I would never work for them (even if I'm impressed by what Bezos achieved) but I don't judge people working for amazon.
I judge way more people working for the IRS, that's a proper criminal enterprise.
If you work at Amazon, as I did, regardless of what you do you are part of the system. And that system, ultimately, creates value for AMZN's shareholders. And first and foremost Jeff Bezos.
The line so is based on how far down the food chain you are. Blue Collar employees, the drivers, warehouse workers and so on, are not part of the problem. White collar employees, pretty much so. I say that as a former White Collar Amazonian. Amazon, so to be fair, is just among the more extreme manifestations of rampant, unregulated capitalism. And it's not that all the other logistics companies are treating their blue collar employees any better. On average, so there are always those exceptions of great employers and great managers everywhere. Unfortunately those are becoming rarer by the day.
I've turned down a bunch of jobs on moral grounds. I work for a charity organization now. I make less money but I'm much happier then I have been working in jobs with different / more shady objectives.
If we could convert the value you get from charity work in to dollars, you would be making more than people working for big corp. Your values are atypical, and I'm glad you are able to do the work that provides you with the most benefit.
"How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation." Machievelli
Most people are selfish and act in their own self interest despite what virtue signaling on social media they may do.
You really think people are willing to risk their 6 figure salaries for some anonymous warehouse workers...
Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it compelling.
This is Hannah Arendt's thesis behind "the banality of evil"[1]:
> Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
> Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief.
Sometimes it feels like people are confused about the nature of themselves. We have this idealized version of ethics and rationality that maps poorly onto reality. Yet everybody (especially on social media) talks as if this idealized version is the obvious natural state of all humans.
Our intellect as a species is a blessing and a curse. We are self aware, but only to a certain extent. The blanks are filled in by wishful thinking and hopelessly logical rationalizations.
It's fine and serves its purpose well as something to strive for. But it significantly hampers our ability to understand and empathize toward those that for whatever reason goes against the ideal.
> We have this idealized version of ethics and rationality that maps poorly onto reality. Yet everybody (especially on social media) talks as if this idealized version is the obvious natural state of all humans.
So i'm not sure how much of it is "natural" or "cultural", but as others have pointed out the vast majority of people are happy to cooperate and help one another... it's not an abstract ideal.
On the other hand, since we were kids starting at school, and across the media spectrum, we've been taught to crush others to move forward. That part is definitely not natural but cultural. If that's the "reality" you're talking about, we can do a great deal about it!
I'm more talking about opinions framed as "how could anyone do that" or arguments beginning with "I would never".
A good example is malicious actions by companies. You could probably follow the entire decision tree in a lot of cases and not find a single individual that was acting differently than the average person would in those same circumstances.
Systemic issues are becoming obfuscated because human nature is disregarded in favor of ideals. It's much easier to just nail someone to a cross than to empathize and find real solutions.
It's the meme that is evil. Human is merely the host and, depending on the sophistication of the meme and lack thereof of the human, perhaps very unwitting.
I think it's a compelling critique of Arendt that she basically just bought this characterisation wholesale - the Nazis had every reason to present their actions as 'banal' both in limiting the damages selfishly at an individual level and also limiting the damage to their ideology ('anyone could do it'). Eichmann was probably not the nazi-punchcard, mindlessly executing horrible plans, that she states.
The counter to that theory is the sheer amount of Nazi members in Germany - or really rank & file members in any fascist-like regime. That amount of people don't just go insanely evil on a whim, in most cases they are simply dragged there by mechanisms like Arendt describes.
Arendt was very specific though, her book was called Eichmann in Jerusalem. It wasn't 'mid-level German bureaucrat in Jerusalem'. After all, the railway workers (well, the unforced ones, since the Nazis did not have any compunction about slavery) who kept the trains running were fairly banal participants in the Holocaust, but we don't focus on them as the architects of it for a reason. Eichmann had every reason to present himself as a boring- somewhat clueless - bureaucrat as opposed to an architect of horrors of which he understood the full and gruesome extent. The right person in the wrong place can make all the difference.
I'd have to read her responses to the criticism she got again, I believe she did walk back the extent of her claims, but could be wrong (and in saying this, I'm sure someone will correct me if I am misremembering ;))
Of course, Arendt was a journalist so her work starts from an event. Not every Nazi member was trialled, Eichmann wad just one of the high-profile ones. The point is that from the particular situation we get a more generalised theory of the development of "evil" at the mass level, that works better than "people just like to abuse others, because the devil or something".
The problem really comes down to this: is Nazism something which we are all capable of quickly becoming, i.e. inherent to human nature, or do we only become this horrible when small groups of intelligent elites cynically exploit our psychology and concretely plan for us to become brainwashed slaves (the opposite of banality)? Perhaps a bit of both, but at some point someone definitely isn't a banal and clueless bureaucrat.
You can probably see how option A is a propaganda win for Nazism (and fascism in general). 'See, you're not so different to us!'. Was it the German people who became Nazis overnight, or did the Nazi elites (such as Eichmann) instigate what amounted to major social engineering campaigns?
The point is that in most cases you don't need any major social-engineering. The elements of efficiency and obedience to the hierarchy are already there, built-in in most orderly societies. You just need to veer the actual aims a little bit, and you are effectively in a regime not very different from the nazi one.
That's why seemingly democratic societies can turn into regimes almost overnight.
This is discounting all the times people fight back against fascism though. Lots and lots of people absolutely do not accept some natural link between orderly conduct and fascism, and so that goes back to my original point about Eichmann making Nazism seem banal as a goal for the Nazi ideology - if we're basically one step away from becoming Nazis at any point, is what they did really so bad?
Well, yes it was, because it was engineered. The Nazis never won a majority in any election, but once they were in power they were famous for their social engineering and propaganda. They're a classic example of how a minority of people in a population can absolutely gain control over everyone else and bend the majority to their will using highly cynical but intelligent tactics.
> This is discounting all the times people fight back against fascism though.
That's a personal interpretation. In fact, in many ways it doesn't discount it but actually inspires them, asserting that without such efforts society is likely to backslide into fascism fairly easily. Which tbh, if you've lived in the US from 2001 to 2005, or today in Russia or Hungary, you've basically experienced already.
I think it's correct to say that a lot of people are relatively passive and will eventually go along with whatever a government desires, but the crux of the 'banality of evil' argument was that Nazis at the highest level were also that kind of passive, bureaucratic evil, as opposed to being very explicit and knowledgeable in their plans. The critique of Arendt wasn't that there was no banality of evil, just that it didn't exist at the levels she claimed (Nazi leadership). They knew full well what they were doing. It's important to recognise this since otherwise you might say that the people in power aren't important as they're purely products of societal values etc.
Like in all things, it's important not to end up on the maximalist end of the spectrum. Obviously an individual is not only the result of a certain social conditioning nor only an isolated madman, and that's not Arendt theory; but it's undisputable how even the leaders brought to extreme consequences certain societal instincts that were present. When you compare the qualities of Italian fascist leaders with German ones, for example, you can see the differences: while Italians were focused on heroism and individual excellence (as expoused by D'Annunzio, for example), Germans valued more order in all systems - which is why the holocaust was as effective as it was. That's because the societal views that shaped them were different.
That does not mean that society carries all responsibility for the actions of this or that person, of course, that's never the case. What the banality of evil tells us is that society contains the conceptual germs for behaviour that can turn atrocious, when brought to extreme lengths by this or that individual.
It’s not compelling and it’s not true. In fact most people are inherently good, and enjoy being generous and helpful. Let’s consider this within the context of tech workers specifically. The existence of an enormous open source software community and huge crowd-built resources like Stackoverflow are two examples that demonstrate the willingness of tech workers to contribute, free of charge, to each other and to the world at large.
Or consider your own personal experience with people you have worked with. You may have had colleagues who were incompetent, unintelligent or annoying, but how many of them would you describe as evil? Over twenty years of working in the industry I have only ever encountered one person who I would genuinely describe, not as “evil” per se, but as lacking in certain moral qualities that we tend to take for granted among the people we know (and we take them for granted because most people are good). And he wasn’t a developer!
I believe it is much more likely that people work for Amazon because they either genuinely believe it is a good company (after all, it is lauded by many) and/or because they are ignorant of the nature of what people in socioeconomic classes far below their own are experiencing in Amazon facilities. Just how aware are each of us of the reality on the ground at companies we support? Do you know what it is like to be a worker at every company whose stock you own? What about the companies who make the clothing you wear or the device you’re using to read this?
If not, does that you make evil? Or are you a participant in a system that hides this reality from you?
I’m not saying that owning stock or wearing apparel is the same thing as joining a company, by the way. People should be very discerning about who they work for. But I think there are more plausible and positive reasons for human behaviour than Machiavelli proposed.
Let’s not view each other as evil and thus write off each other and in doing so, our future. Let’s work to change the system instead.
One of the truly unfortunate things about modern capitalism is that making money and doing good for the world are more or less mutually exclusive. There's little money to be made helping people, and even when you find an exception, it often gets quickly overwhelmed by grift.
Sounds like your definition of good is set far too restrictive to be "also a sacrifice madr without any benefit to themselves" as opposed to just "improving the situation" if you think they are mutually exclusive.
Does the sin of making money wash away the virtue of creating a COVID-19 vaccine?
I have to disagree that ehite collar folks at FAANG have more to loose. Blue Collar flks are employed at low salaries in economically weak regions, they loosr their job they risk loosing everything. Especially in the US with a non-existant social safety net. White Collar, especially tech employees, have the option to work for similar salaries somewhere else rather easily.
It's supposed to be a system where you enrich your country that you live. So you see less homeless people. But, Walmart and Amazon executives have focused on selling you things made in other countries. China, mostly. It has just taken a long time to catch up but the system has nearly perfected moving money up and out.
The calls for regulation recognise that these problems won't be solved by individual actions by employees. Only collective action, or political action will solve this.
Given that unions among tech workers are a non-factor; that leaves political action as the only thing left to call for.
Change starts with the individual. Inspire others with your actions.
For example I may lack the sway to affect political action on climate change but I can still change the way I live - solar power, consume less meat, etc.
> FAANG workers are really entering and sometimes fully into "just following orders" territory. The lame social media posts from fellow tech workers about how things "should" be regulated gets tiresome. The real solution is to simply not work for them.
The thing is, Amazon, Walmart and fellow profiteers set up shop precisely where people have not much other choice than to work for them - in short, they set up shop in areas with somewhat decent traffic infrastructure, cheap real estate and lots of unemployment (and the latter two often come together).
So yes, the answer to the problem that is exploitative labor practices is government regulation, as it has been for the last two centuries.
That is really dystopian stuff. Instead of electing goverment that would split monopoly, we will blame low level employees for not "resisting". Be quiet and toe the party line!!
In a government elected by the people, the people can't absolve themselves of guilt when they're willingly voting for corrupt officials.
In governments without elected representatives, the responsibility lies entirely with the people enforcing the oppression against those weaker than them and protecting those above.
So yeah. People happily enforcing a massive wealth divide are responsible. They just don't want to accept personal responsibility because their pockets are fat. And I highly doubt they're out on the streets demanding reform to close the wealth gap and risk bringing their pay down so that those warehouse workers can live better.
> In a government elected by the people, the people can't absolve themselves of guilt when they're willingly voting for corrupt officials.
it can be said, that increasingly its representatives that are choosing (gerrymandering) thier constituents instead of the other way around, and many districts are not competitive at all (e.g no alternative candidates)
As a tech worker who grew up in an ex-communist, then essentially 3rd world, country, I find calling $15/hour, 0-skill-required warehouse jobs "oppression" really laughable. American poor are quite a spoiled and entitled bunch. I don't work for Amazon but I would be quite consciously proud to. Upsetting the kind of people who use "oppress" non-ironically in a similar context is just an additional small perk :P
FAANG workers are SHEEP. I live on a lakefront at 35, havnt gone into an office in 5years, had FAANG recruiters at my door since i was 21 . They like to get you young because they can then set your expectations of what work culture is.
And while i am at it, LOL to the conferance culture, talk about collecting stars. Every framework needs a speaking circut so you can somehow bring the familiarty of university into your working life because you have never known anything more then this. Swallowed by the system, addicted to consuming, pushed forward by the prospect of making an impact, used and abused by capitalistic entity that courted you, young, impressionable, starry eyed.
> The lame social media posts from fellow tech workers about how things "should" be regulated gets tiresome. The real solution is to simply not work for them.
Just like Twitter can ban Donald Trump for using certain phrases (Steal, Election), so can Amazon ban certain words. They’re both private corporate entities.
Exactly as you said, if you don’t like it, move elsewhere.
I'm hoping - and expecting - Amazon workers will game, euphemize, parody, ridicule and covertly subvert this clueless attempt at coercive social engineering for as long as Amazon thinks it is a good idea.
And if Amazon is trying to set up a distribution center in your state, county, or town: fight it.
At the very least insist on language that prohibits any sort of corporate welfare. No tax breaks, no free infrastructure.
Bezos is the richest man in the world; he can afford to run a new sewer or water main to his big fancy warehouses, instead of making a county's worth of low-income blue-collar folks pay for it. He can afford to pay property tax. Etc
Same for Walmart.
Same for every fucking corporation.
Stop giving corporations breaks to "bring jobs" to your town. Soon as that corporation finds a better deal somewhere else, or the workers get too 'uppity', they'll shop around and move to a town more desperate than yours.
If the next town over does not follow this strategy, you will quickly find yourself in a diminished community with less public services and available jobs.
If we insist on giving up our principles because someone else may also give up their principles, then we’re damned to a race to the bottom that neither of us will ever escape.
If you have a senator or representative this would be a great time to ask what the fuck is the NLRB doing when there's this much anti union activity going on?
And if they don't respond some more direct action might be necessary.
But what shocks me most is what this implies about the (many?) managers at Amazon who are responsible for it. They must be either:
(a) under so much pressure that they decided to go ahead with it despite being aware of the horrifying similarities their New Approved Language has with Newspeak, the centrally controlled language that prohibits the use of certain words in Orwell's classic novel, 1984; or
(b) so poorly educated that they're blissfully unaware of the parallels, and perhaps even think of themselves as really clever for having thought up this Orwellian scheme on their own.
In my experience with managers of all sorts, (a) is incredibly common. Low-level managers everywhere are under a ton of pressure, and are often stuck in a position where they know the measures they are implementing hurt the people who report to them, but they've been railroaded into it and don't see any realistic alternative.
Well if thats the case then a lot of places are working employees to death and should all stop. Amazon clearly has the budget to look after its employees. Noblesse oblige and whatnot.
You clearly have some preconceived grudge towards Amazon or any big employer. They didn't die because they were "working to death." They died because the building collapsed. They deserve scrutiny for that that, but so do the building codes.
I've nothing against big employers, I think the more resources a company has, the bigger their responsibility is to their employees to keep them safe at work.
The fact remains that they were not working while the tornados struck, yet you claim that they were being "worked to death". Sounds like a preconceived grudge to me.
This is a reply to both you and the person above you.
There aren't building codes that can stop a tornado, not unless you want military style bunkers everywhere. Tornado's have approx double the windspeed of hurricanes.
In tornado prone places life doesn't stop when there is danger nearby. Instead people go to the safest place they can, knowing it can only help for glancing blows, or weak tornado's.
I quote:
"Thus, to make a structure totally tornado-proof requires that the structure be designed to withstand both the impact of a one-ton boulder being hurled at it at 100-150 miles per hour as well as wind loads of 300 mph or more. This means you need a structure made out of either foot-thick reinforced concrete or two to three inch thick solid steel armor plate. Doors must be solid steel with reinforced frames and extra strong locking mechanisms (otherwise the storm will just suck the door open). No windows."
But not all tornadoes are F5. Two percent of tornadoes are F4/F5. The tornado that hit the Amazon warehouse was an F3 with peak speeds of 150 mph. It's hard to say though what the wind speed was when it hit amazon.
And while most buildings won't completely survive an F3, many safety plans call for the use an existing basement or bathrooms. Some architectures will reinforce an interior hallway.
My point is that employers in tornado prone areas should have sections of the building that are sufficiently safe from tornados. As far, as I can tell, Amazon was following the rules, but labor activists are blaming Amazon for doing say, saying instead that they should have let them leave.
They did have a shelter area. It wasn't enough, most can't survive a direct hit, it's just a fact of life in that area.
And if you leave every time there a tornado in the area you don't work for many months of the year. Instead you go to the shelter when it's very close, which is what they did (10 to 15 minutes before).
Don't listen to activists, they usually aren't interested in the employees, rather they just want to criticize the "external enemy". Offtopic but I've noticed most "environmentalists" are the same way, they aren't interested in improving the environment, rather they are just misanthropes.
Yes, we all know that all social and labor progress was achieved by employers by the kindness of their heart. Those activists just complain and nothing progressive in our society was achieved by them.
Nobody suggested making an amazon warehouse tornado-proof?
You don't build a house to be tornado-proof. You have a tornado shelter. You build it at ground level with sloped sides, or below ground.
Cargo ships have life boats, so do oil rigs. If you've got a warehouse with hundreds of people in an area with lots of tornadoes, you build tornado shelters sufficient to accommodate them.
Cost of doing business in an area where the only reason you were doing business was likely cheap labor and land.
Daddy Bezos has more than enough bucks to build a tornado shelter or two at his warehouses.
You are thinking fallaciously in terms of absolutes. Any shelter is better than nothing against a tornado breaking your bones with thrown debris or outright impailing you with a 2x4. A shelter which would suffer only minor damage indirectly but would collapse on a direct hit is superior to nothing.
Honestly I like a ton of what Amazon does. AWS is great. Their shopping platform, I'm broadly a big fan of. I'm not a fan of union busting, employee smooshing and pee bottles. The latter two I suspect would go away if they stopped doing the first, but I digress. I didn't think that'd be contentious but here we are.
There's a difference between not knowing what your are supposed to be doing during a tornado in your home, and what you're supposed to do in an Amazon warehouse. In Illinois, commercial warehouses aren't required to have tornado shelters.
If you grow up in Illinois or anywhere around the midwest, there's a high likelihood you've been through a tornado drill in your childhood.
But was it broadcasted to the workers when the tornado warning happened?
Site safety plans typically include things about tornado warnings particularly in Illinois, where tornados are common. It's also common to have a site wide announcement system in case of fire or tornado warnings instructing people where to go and what to do.
Site safety plans typically exist to prevent lawsuits in the first place.
I think the end goal of Amazon is to replace these employees with bot and to automate manual labour work. Until then all this is just ways to delay the unionization as much as possible.
If people are willing to completely pointless busy work in mobile and MMO games and paying through the nose to be zombified and gain virtual stars, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do that in a virtual job (when they are being actually paid this)
> I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian.
HN has a large libertarian base who are against regulated unions. They are seen as bad government interference in the free enterprise system. I don't want to start an argument but there's a lot of economics science that supports that belief.
Well, if your arguments are coming from "economics science", feel free to make them. It's usually very entertaining to see what crazy things economists convince themselves to believe, while also thinking they are doing science.
HN isn't the best place for that (see the many emotionally charged replies to my comment). I just wanted to point out that it was possible to be anti-union without being contrarian.
What kind of libertarianism? Afaik left-libertarianism is in favour of unions. If it's right-libertarianism you're referencing then can you share some of the "economics science" that promotes it?
The left vs right dichotomy doesn't have too much to do with collectivism vs individualism. For example, social conservatism is a right wing idea, but it is highly collectivistic (prioritizing social mores over individual freedom).
Left libertarianism typically means free market economics + democratically organized and owned workplaces + social libertarianism (free love, free religion, free drugs etc). Right libertarianism is similar, but emphasizes contractualism instead of democratic control.
Left libertarians typically scoff for example at corporations for their limitations on the personal freedoms of the workers, viewing it as a form of slavery.
"Libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists,[6] especially social anarchists,[7] but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists"
Why don’t their employees quit then and work somewhere better if they have the opportunity? If they don’t have a better opportunity than seems like Amazon is providing a valuable opportunity. Not to mention we seem to be in a worker-favorable economy.
Say you’re a father. You need to support your family, and there’s an Amazon Fulfillment Center in town. It pays a whole dollar an hour better than the local fruit packing warehouse, which is a huge difference. Amazon is providing me a valuable opportunity!
Except now, I’m working myself to the bone trying to fulfill my package counts, peeing in bottles, shitting in bags, constantly stressed about if I can not only meet my quotas, but beat everyone else on the floor with me so that I can get more hours next time. I get back from work miserable, stressed, and probably angry from the constant competition needed to just survive. But this is a valuable opportunity, surely, except for the fact that I’m constantly stressed about work, and now I can’t even complain about how I’m stressed about work because Amazon won’t allow me to have my phone on the floor or say the word “restroom” in their internal chat app.
Oh but right, as you say, it’s a worker-favorable economy! Let me go to packing warehouse and try and get even fifty cents closer to Amazon with the leverage I obviously have. I’m sure the guy there is gonna say no problem, here’s a raise.
This is the lesson that we already learned in the 1800s with monopolies; they distort reality. It’s useless to argue “if you don’t want to work for them, don’t” because they often pay just better than your local alternatives, but by virtue of their economy bending power, they will exert an insane amount of control and influence until they are either regulated or there is no competition left and I don’t even have the fruit packing warehouse anymore, but the Amazon Oranges Fulfillment Center.
These working conditions should simply be illegal in the U.S. (and the countries it is not already).
There is no way around that. If society doesn't demand that then good luck to all of us. I am simply surprised again and again people haven't "broken" and keep putting up with this.
Yes, it should be illegal. Some of them were once upon a time. But businesses keep lobbying saying that conditions like these are hurting their ability to retain profits, and the laws tend to get clawed back under the pretense of "job creation". Amazon fights tooth and nail to not have to pay the externalities of their terrible working conditions, and stop people organizing to make their workplace better.
"businesses keep lobbying saying that conditions like these are hurting their ability to retain profits"
There are also plenty of ideologues in Washington who bristle at the mention of regulation, unions, and anything they don't deem as being "pro business".
(General question, I agree with your statement above.)
How is it pro business to ensure that employees -- a major stakeholder in businesses don't want to stay there? This historically, doesn't end well, right?
This is beyond splitting profits; it's driving back to Victorian era, and that did not end well for businesses. Increase in unemployment is just a sign.
If the conditions are that bad, are they really worth the extra dollar per hour? Seems like the fruit packing warehouse is a better choice for most people. Worse employment conditions will always come with a pay premium under competition.
Some people don't really have a choice; that extra dollar each hour might mean housing or food security. And, say, a parent in a household might think that's the trade off they have to make: they're horrifyingly miserable, but their spouse and kids get to be better off.
But that's a trade off no one should have to make: it's messed up that we as a society allow this state of affairs to exist in the first place.
And yet here I am, not canceling my Prime membership, because I suck. But hell, if Prime cost 2x what it currently does, and that got the workers involved good working conditions, I would still pay it. Not sure how many people would, though.
> And yet here I am, not canceling my Prime membership, because I suck.
I genuinely don’t understand. You have already argued that despite shitty conditions at Amazon, some people are desperate enough for money that the alternative (making less with better working conditions) is even worse. So if enough people cancelled their Amazon subscriptions that they had to scale back operations, wouldn’t those people be worse off than they are now?
I worked lots of minimum wage jobs. None of my co-workers would have peed in bottles / shit in bags / stress themselves out for 1 more dollar / hour. Me neither.
Your first hand experience here doesn't matter. You must listen to and believe the stories repeated by wealthy techies, who do not know a single person who ever worked an Amazon warehouse job, and likely don't know a person who worked a minimum wage job either.
Like the person above you mentioned: "we seem to be in a worker-favorable economy". Nobody would do what you said for another dollar per hour. I worked lots of minimum wage jobs and none of my co-workers would have shit in bags, pee in bottle for another dollar / hour. Please keep the conversation at an intelligent level.
>This is the lesson that we already learned in the 1800s with monopolies; they distort reality. It’s useless to argue “if you don’t want to work for them, don’t” because they often pay just better than your local alternatives, but by virtue of their economy bending power, they will exert an insane amount of control and influence until they are either regulated or there is no competition left and I don’t even have the fruit packing warehouse anymore, but the Amazon Oranges Fulfillment Center.
Amazon is nowhere near a monopoly (or monopsony), at least when it comes to employers.
Even as a homeless person showing up with drug addicts while waking up from a ditch, I found opportunities less demeaning than Amazon. If my only option was truly amazon, as a father, I would send my family to go live in the 3rd world and remit enough for them to live on while I live under a tarp rather than work full time at amazon again.
Amazon is 10% of retail and retail is only a slice of the economy. If you can't find an alternative to amazon, you aren't looking.
This is a terrible analogy and adds nothing to the conversation.
We aren't going to make children work in mines, because (as I'm sure you know), adult workers and children are not the same thing. There is a huge chasm between "adult workers making more than a lot of their other opportunities is slightly more cannot unionize as easily using Amazon services" and "put children back in coal mines".
I disagree. I think it’s a good reminder that if we do not regulate labor, businesses like Amazon will grow more and more nefarious. They already confiscate phones, have a built-in PIP revolving door, use their own employees to vouch for them on Twitter, recruit aggressively to have a never-ending stream of labor, and explicitly violate existing labor laws by setting up a system so competitive their own employees cannot take bathroom breaks and meet quotas, in essence giving them no breaks. You seem to be under the impression that companies have an inherent disdain for child labor, which historically is not true. I think actually society has proven that, as long as we don’t see it, we’re fine with the cost.
Also, do you know what stopped children in coal mines? Labor unions.
This is FinNerd's argumentation taken to it's logical conclusion - he is happy to sacrafice employee protections because X is the best employment avaliable.
They or you have not outlined where does this slippery slope stop, or ankowledged nessesity of employee protections.
I think you are still not seeing it, because the only protest from your 'but they are children!' - so if we exploit adults with a down's syndome, that's okay? Oh, so disabilities are protected, what if we spesifically target people who need money to pay for cancer treatment, and make them sign a waiver on safety equipment? I mean, they aren't gonna live long either way, it's a win-win!
I worked up to 60 hours a week (I'd say avg 50) from the time I was 13 years old making $6 an hour. It was backbreaking, grueling labor. But not a coal mine so no risk of black lung, so I guess everything is okay? Or maybe my parents should have taken advantage of economic opportunities that didn't exist (they looked, constantly, for options).
This was in the US. Most of the time I did my homework in school, cramming in assignments for second period during first period, then 3rd period hw during second period, etc. Child labor isn't dead, and if you truly think that everyone has the economic opportunities to avoid these circumstance then you don't have the scope of experience needed to accurately assess the state of society.
(And no, it wasn't a case of "well if you can't support children you shouldn't have them" The circumstances of the above situation came about long after I was born, though before I was 13)
Would your family have been better off if the income from your $6/hr job was lost? I presume this work was beneficial to your family somehow, otherwise you wouldn't have engaged in it.
Is "better off [economically]" you're guide on ethical labor practices? I don't want to read too much into your comment, but that is the implication, in which case any labor practice can be justified so long as someone is willing to do it. That's a rather extreme view.
Answer my question and I'll be happy to answer yours in kind. Please note 'economically' was added by you. I genuinely wondered if you and your family would be better off in general, not just economically. Usually economic effects have greater effects on the family outside of the economic outlook. It would be strange indeed if you toiled for years doing something to create a net hurt to your family.
I will say if you engaged in some unethical labor practices to help your family while earning those $6, I personally could look past them to some extent. I assume you did this to help your family survive so anything unethical you did was out of necessity. Personally I withhold judgement.
I can't give a full answer to your question without revealing things I don't want to put online. The best I can do is say I don't know. It's hard to judge what would have happened otherwise, what opportunities I might have pursued.
So, I answered as best I can. But even if, under yours or anyone's definition, we were better off, what does that say? An economic system or society (can't really full disentangle the two) where a family is either unable to survive or do more than barely survive unless their kids work in this way... That does not seem like a society optimized for for its own best outcomes as a whole or for many individuals either. I also don't have any magic answer that would fix things either, but acknowledging the problem is a necessary step along the way. Asking if my family was better off is just asking if a shitty situation would have been any shittier otherwise. I prefer to think we should work towards less shitty circumstances overall, and the entrenched systems aren't it.
>Is "better off [economically]" you're guide on ethical labor practices?
No. But live in reality. I know people have to make hard decisions. If the choice is "Family starves to death" or "Child labor results in survival of family", I would never try to stop this family from having that opportunity to survive. Whether it is better to ban the job so the family starves to death? My inclination is to say no. Clearly some better alternatives would be superior, but in the end you work with the options you have available and not the ones you wish you had. If superior alternative exists, we don't even need to ban child labor because the hand of free will will go towards the superior option.
I've also seen a number of circumstances where child labor is just genuinely what works for a family. Our neighborhood chinese restaraunt, even the 6 and 7 y/o or so work EVERY NIGHT for HOURS, basically when they get home from school until bed. These children are so young, they can barely enunciate clearly most of the time. They do their homework while taking phone orders and even ring you up at the cash register. I'm not even sure they get weekends off. Is it ethical? I don't know, but that family made the calculus it's right for their family and indeed I think it would be unethical for me to stop them. Who knows, their family may be better off for it and it may even be saving them from bankruptcy and losing health insurance and eventually even their lives (especially depending on their immigration status). Maybe the children will end up successful businesspeople as a result of their child labor and donate billions so 1000 other children DON'T have to work.
At the end of the day your situation may have been more iffy (you don't know whether it was actually beneficial). That indicates to me you weren't going to starve to death or anything if you didn't work, because if you were you'd have said right away you were better off than not earning any money. You may have a different outlook if it wasn't so iffy, like if the alternative was much worse.
I live there, grew up with a strong dose of it, but I take your point and understand. I'm not ideological on the issue except that I think we can do better, so a viewpoint rooted in (for me, cynical) practicality is easy for me to relate to. It's different than an ideological one, which is what was the question I was trying to understand from your statement. It's harder to have productive conversation on matters of ideology.
At the end of the day your situation may have been more iffy (you don't know whether it was actually beneficial). That indicates to me you weren't going to starve to death
Eh, yes and no. Again, personal details involved. But, mostly, not about extreme food security problems. A parent worked in food service as a second job, which helped. (No theft, just generous owners)
In general I find child labor laws to be deeply ironic in a Kafka-esque way for the reasons you touch on. Out socioeconomic system produces situations that all but require such labor, but then it is outlawed. Like so many other laws, it doesn't solve the problem that leads to the bad thing in the first place.
Better to have an extremely strong safety net w/ a strong job training & job placement system. It's often a catch 22 though. In my state unemployed people can go to community college for free, and there are even 1-year full time programs for in-demand jobs that have okay pay. The problem is, how do you love during that the new period? That's one gap. Another one are people who are employed but don't make enough money-- no free college for them, so they're stuck in their economic niche. And if they lost the job they'd still face the first issue of living while they learn. Another gap is the job market: fix the above issues and the college programs I referenced would be flooded beyond their capacity and wages in the job market kept low by a higher labor supply.
I think we could chip away at some of these issues, but the most common political solution, probably because it seems quick and easy, is to raise the floor on minimum wage. There's a little elasticity there, but I don't think it can be raised enough to solve these problems. Low-margin businesses (supermarkets!) especially will have to raise prices, which will then eat into the cost of living. The idea that minimum wage can be doubled without inflation always strikes me as wishful thinking.
>We aren't going to make children work in mines, because (as I'm sure you know), adult workers and children are not the same thing.
once upon a time, this was not obvious. this modern moral axiom is a result of of hard-won labor organizing over the 19th century. all kinds of exploitative practices were justified with the exact same "the workers are being given an opportunity so they shouldn't complain" argument. it's not an analogy.
taking advantage of people because they don't have any other options is the definition of exploitation.
Fast food joints are not safe. You can get seriously injured working a fryer or grill, and a 16 year old is less likely to be able to operate those things safely. Keep in mind also that a 16 year old is almost certainly going to school, so they will be working while already tired.
I say this as someone who started working at age 14: Children should not be allowed to work most jobs until they are much older than that.
These same arguments can be applied to other activities, like driving a car. I do support treating teenagers with more agency than children, so while I don't support letting 5 years olds work in McDonalds, I honestly don't see a problem with 16 year olds doing it.
Yes, the risk is higher than for a 25 y.o., but as someone who started working at age 15 - there are also rewards in experience, money, and figuring your own shit out. Nothing taught me about life like working.
No, I don't think the next step is passing laws to enslave children in coal mines. I am not advocating for child labor at all - just discussing the topic at hand, which in GP's comment was saying this link provided an example of children being made to work in coal mines. It was explicitly not.
I do not advocate for children's labor, but I also do not advocate for taking things to extremes in order to make a point. If you feel it's problematic for children to be allowed (not forced - allowed) to work in fast food, we can have that discussion. But talking about it as the missing link for returning to 19th century slave labor conditions, or the conditions currently in China is misleading and not worthy of a conversation.
"just quit and get another job" -- this is frictionless-plane-in-a-vacuum thinking. people have all kinds of life circumstances that means they can't act like perfectly rational economic agents, especially when they are poor.
turn it around: why doesn't amazon just respect its worker's basic human dignity?
> why doesn't amazon just respect its worker's basic human dignity?
Because that directly conflicts with making the highest profit possible (still legally).
What’s sad in these discussions is that it’s both true that Amazon is a terrible employer and that it often pays more than alternatives for many workers. This seems like a failure of policy (ex. Enforcing living wage standards) and American business well-being at least as much as a failure of Amazon to “do the right thing.”
Edit: Cracks me up that I got downvoted for telling the truth about capitalism.
I don't understand why we expect Amazon to do the right thing vs we should expect in this case all retailers to do the right thing? Unfortunately as consumers we are always looking for the best deal or the lowest price on everything. Which means retailers need to cut costs every way possible which in turn leads to sucking every ounce out of workers.
Let's assume that Amazon did end up making things way better for their workers. That means higher costs and hence higher prices. This will allow other retailers to win markets by setting the best prices.
I think we need regulation that applies to all retailers in this case or all industries that hire manual labor vs constantly targeting Amazon for being the bad guy.
It's funny that this logic is rarely applied to executive compensation or stock buybacks. Apparently it only hurts competitiveness to increase wages for the low-level workers. Any of the other ways that money gets wasted in a major retail corporation is fine.
And then there are the counterexamples, like Costco, that manage to pay well and be wildly competitive.
Let's do some math for fun. Amazon now employs about a million workers in the US. Let's naively assume 3/4 of them work in warehouses and delivery as opposed to corporate. Let's also assume they work, on average, 2000 hours a year (roughly full-time). For Amazon to raise those wages by $1/hr (or lower efficiency demands by ~7%) it would cost them around $1.5B every year.
Now, you're probably thinking that's chump change compared to Amazon's profits, but fun fact: Amazon's online sales segment doesn't make much profit. In fact, it lost $200M in Q4 [1]. So you basically want Amazon to either go deeply in the red, or else they have to raise prices on products to also raise worker wages.
Amazon doesn’t lose money with what you’re saying. They are moving money around. We need to stop trusting wildly rich and powerful people and corporations so much.
Rich man reasonable, but the idea Amazon sales are gross-margin-negative is borderline retarded. Margins on sales are going into other things, like re-investment in the business instead of wages. The loss is engineered to increase future revenue. That may create more jobs in the long run and make Amazon more competitive, but lets call a spade a spade.
Negotiations exist between two parties in a contractual relationship. Employment isn't a take it or leave it deal, it's give and take between two parties where terms of employment are decided by negotiations between both of them.
You mean like how I freely negotiate and accept the contract that describes CPUs backdoors (Intel Management Engine) in one of two computer CPU manufacturers in the world?
Or your cellphone contract, or apartment lease, or the terms of use for every web site, or End User License Agreements. They're all totally "meeting of the minds" mutually agreed upon between parties of equal power, open to negotiation by skilled end-users... LOL! Most contracts/agreements that end users are subjected to are far from freely negotiable. They are take-it-or-leave-it rule-making written by some company's legal counsel and enforced by the courts. Agree or don't do business with.
I've never been presented with an employment agreement where any of the terms could be negotiated. Salary and benefits? Yes, sometimes. But other terms? No way. I always try, but in every case, you get a stern message from corporate legal basically saying "Sign it unmodified or GTFO." I don't know who these HN Captains of Industry are who negotiate the terms of their employment, but that's the exception, not the rule. Maybe at the VP+ level, these things are negotiable (parties are more equal in power), but at the "5th grunt from the left" level, no way.
This is the point of unions, because atomized workers don't have much leverage by themselves to negotiate with an entities that have already consolidated their interests and power in the form of corporations. Unions help workers consolidate their interests and power in order to leverage them against the consolidated interests and power of their employers and negotiate better terms of employment.
Negotiations exist between a single employee and an international team of Amazon lawyers and professional negotiators. Whether that should really count as "two parties" negotiating on equal terms is up for argument.
I defend this because the union system, where the government mandates companies engage in exclusive bargaining with unions, is illiberal, unfair and economically destructive. What's fair is the right to quit. Nothing beyond that. No one is entitled to a job that some other party furnishes, and to effectively force that company, via labor regulations, mandated negotiation advantages for unions, etc, to provide them a job with the terms they want.
With government mandates against them, Amazon is fighting with both hands tied behind its back, and it's only a matter of time before social activists will succeed in putting the company's US based sites under the control of unions, as we saw happen to the Big Three automakers.
In comparison to what Amazon is up against, which is blatant violations of its contract liberty by the state and its apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons that compel compliance with state injunctions), these tactics by Amazon are extremely benign.
The existing government mandates - aka "laws" - exist as a compromise. They prohibit a company like Amazon from engaging in certain practices, and in exchange, some union practices are prohibited.
I'm fine with dismantling all laws limiting corporate interactions SO LONG AS all laws limiting unions are similarly lifted.
Get rid of Taft-Hartley, and bring back "jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns." (quoting Wikipedia).
Commonwealth v. Hunt shows unions don't require enabling laws. The economic power of the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker's Society came from the ability to quit - collectively.
> these tactics by Amazon are extremely benign.
I'll counter when a decidedly not benign - the Ludlow massacre, where companies worked with the government to attack striking coal workers, including firing MACHINE GUNS at them and their families.
That's literally the origin of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
The law that you seem so much against.
> blatant violations of its contract liberty
The Wikipedia entry for the NLRA specifically points out how it's meant to support contract liberty.
] Under section 1 (29 U.S.C. § 151) of the Act, the key principles and policy findings on which the Act was based are explained. The Act aims to correct the "inequality of bargaining power between employees who, according to the Act's proponents, do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association".
>>The existing government mandates - aka "laws" - exist as a compromise. They prohibit a company like Amazon from engaging in certain practices, and in exchange, some union practices are prohibited.
There is nothing of note that unions could do, that isn't enabled by contract-liberty-violating labor regulations and wouldn't break the law. Picketing Amazon's premises, and beating up replacement workers, as the illegal strikes of the past did, was justifiably punished by the state before the labor regulation era, and for that reason, unions had very little power.
All the power they acquired came from laws that abridged the freedom to contract.
>>The economic power of the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker's Society came from the ability to quit - collectively.
Industry would gladly give unions the power to collectively quit, if it meant they too would have their contract liberty restored, so they could choose to not employ unionized workers, or to replace them without government punishing them.
>>I'll counter when a decidedly not benign - the Ludlow massacre, where companies worked with the government to attack striking coal workers, including firing MACHINE GUNS at them and their families.
This leaves out a seminally important precursor to the attack on the striker's camp:
>>When leasing the sites, the union had selected locations near the mouths of canyons that led to the coal camps in order to block any strikebreakers' traffic.[17] The company hired the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency to protect the new workers and harass the strikers.
"block any strikebreakers' traffic" means viciously attack and sometimes murder strikebreakers, who were there to replace them.
The strikers were a violent force, engaging in aggression. The only basis for their actions is a victimhood narrative that argues the employer and replacement workers do not have a right to their contract liberty when workers strike. If you accept this illiberal premise, then of course any violence that strikers engage in is justified, and any response is a "massacre".
Speaking of precursors, your own citation [17] points out the dead strikebreaker was found AFTER company guards had used the machine gun on the Death Special to kill a miner and injure two kids.
] Through various agencies the company was able to hire men to take a more aggressive stance against the striking workers, armed guards were supplied to harass strikers and union organisers. An armoured car with a mounted machine gun was even built which was appropriately named the ‘Death Special’ by the company guards. As tensions escalated between CF+I and the strikers, miners dug protective pits beneath their tents to shield themselves and their families against random sniping and machine gun fire from the company guards. On October 17th the ‘Death Special’ was used to attack the Forbes tent colony resulting in the death of one miner. A young girl was shot in the face and another boy’s legs riddled with machine gun bullets also. Confrontations between striking miners and scab workers were also resulting in additional deaths. On October 28th the Governor of Colorado, Elias M Ammons called out the National Guard to take control of the situation.
] The miners however, persevered. Union members and organisers were kidnapped and beaten, shots being fired into the camps from strike-breakers and the National Guardsmen were a constant occurrence and the harsh winter was taking its toll. Worried about the continuing cost of keeping the National Guard in the field, Governor Ammons accepted an offer from the Rockefeller family to put their men in National Guard uniforms.
] On March 10th the body of a strike-breaker was found near railroad tracks near the Forbes tents and the National Guard’s General Chase ordered the colony to be destroyed. The strike was reaching a climax, and National Guardsmen were ordered to evict the remaining tent colonies around the mines, despite them being on private property leased by the UMWA.
] Ludlow was the largest of the colonies, and on the morning of April 20th 1914, troops fired into the camp with machine guns, anyone who was seen moving in the camp was targeted. The miners fired back, and fighting raged for almost fourteen hours.
The mine owners were an even more violent force, also engaging in aggression. The Pinkerton detective agency is still prohibited by law from doing business with the government of the United States or of the District of Columbia.
> any response is a "massacre".
It's been widely called the Ludlow Massacre for over a century.
Your putting words into my mouth means you would rather use personal attacks than talk about the real issue, which is that the government laws are supposed to take the edge off both union AND corporate power.
If you take away laws that support union power without also taking away laws that prohibit otherwise legal union power, like the ability to negotiate for a closed shop, then you aren't actually in favor of contract liberty but of corporate power.
That can be argued for pretty much any government activity. So by your logic lets abolish police, firefighters, the army. Why can't I choose my own police to protect me? That's a blatant violation of my contract liberty!!
P.S.: The US big three automakers went down because of complete management failure. They continued to build cars that nobody outside the US wants (seriously go to any other western nation and look how many US cars you see), and then were surprised that US customers started to want superior Japanese and European cars. VW in Germany is highly unionised and they are the second largest car manufacturer in the world.
>>That can be argued for pretty much any government activity. So by your logic lets abolish police, firefighters, the army. Why can't I choose my own police to protect me? That's a blatant violation of my contract liberty!!
I am not against government. The US had a government, with police, firefighters, an army and roads, in 1890, and no labor regulations that violated the freedom to contract, because during the Lochner era, the Supreme Court consistently struck down such laws as violating the Constitution's guarantee of substantive due process.
That you equate the provision of government services that are pure public goods, with restrictions that prevent people from exercising their contract freedom, shows you fundamentally don't understand the objection to these types of laws, or what "contract liberty" even means. I imagine you see "contract liberty" as synonymous with "anarchy".
Try to see it from the other side. The side where “contract liberty” is just a buzzword, and the real situation of real people in real life is horrendous and sickening. No amount of philosophical maneuvering is going to stop us criticizing (real and substantive) abuse and mistreatment of fellow human beings.
If you're interested in maximum freedom of choice, didn't people clearly choose that unions are supported, in large enough numbers to get it written into lawbooks? Or are businesses somehow more free than people, so laws don't apply to them?
>>The Wikipedia entry for the NLRA specifically points out how it's meant to support contract liberty.
I think you're confusing the freedom of the majority to repress the rights of the minority, with "contract freedom", i.e. the right to free assocation.
The right to free association and the right of the majority (power holders) to repress the minority (employees), yes.
And yes, I am in favor of limiting that. It has been used for many, many abuses through history. "Free association" really only exists when both sides have equal power, and oh boy is that not the case in most cases.
Truly insane, there is nothing stranger (or more dystopian) than fiction after all. Rather than fix the system of working their employees to death (literally in the case of the tornado) or improving their conditions, Amazon tries to use virtual gold stars (not even physical stickers like kindergarten) as a band-aid. That list of banned words is right out of 1984 (as cliché as it is to reference at this point): ethics, fairness, freedom.
I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian. This is not “par for the course” for manual labor jobs as some people are claiming. Most manual labor jobs do not restrict you from talking about ethics or justice with your coworkers or have even a need for some virtual gold stars beyond a little whiteboard in the building with number of sales, employee of the month, etc. The fact that these techniques won’t work for Amazon just shows that their laborers are really over-worked compared to the norm. Unfortunately, Amazon is able to use their massive resources and capital to pay just more than the local factory, packing gig, etc. so they have a stream of desperate people willing to take it.