Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

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> Imagine behaving this way. How do you look in the mirror and feel anything but revulsion? Happy that this guy's shitty behavior and Amazon's toxic culture is being put on blast like this. Hope Daequan gets a massive settlement.

Because from their perspective, things don't look like that. From their point of view, it probably goes something like this: "The worker is supposed to work extra hard, but now they are resting, AGAIN! Now I'm gonna say something so they finally start working again" without considering any other perspective about situations.

It's really hard to read people without speaking to them, and most middle-managers just try to read people even though most people are honestly pretty shit at doing that, so they misread situations all the time.

In this particular scenario, notice it says "I'm thinking..." instead of "I said...". Not sure why they didn't tell their supervisor "I'm hot and about to faint", but knowing the average supervisor at Amazon, I do understand why you wouldn't talk about it.

But... isn't that the job of a manager?

As an SRE it's my job to make sure the computers I'm responsible for are working properly, and to actively pay attention and gather information about whether that's true. If there's too much load on the site for our current set of servers to handle, even if it's not my job to actually order more, it's certainly my job to say something to the people who can. If we're okay now but we won't be in a month, that's also my job. And if a disk fills up on a server and it stops working, "Oh, I wasn't monitoring disk space, and the program never logged anything" is no excuse. Nor is it an excuse that I'm not good at guessing what problems are likely to happen; that, also, is my job and why they look for people with experience doing this job successfully.

Isn't there all the more reason that someone whose job is looking after people and not computers should figure out if they're overworked or about to be overworked and if they're in comfortable, humane conditions?

100%.

And if the manager is competent and actually does this, then he probably will end up managing something more important than Amazon warehouses. Don’t underestimate the mediocrity and pettiness of the people who end up in charge of petty things.

From their point of view, it probably goes something like this: "The worker is supposed to work extra hard, but now they are resting, AGAIN! Now I'm gonna say something so they finally start working again" without considering any other perspective about situations.

"Because Amazon never trained me in the basics of my job as a supervisor. Which is to understand obvious the fact in order for our workers to be sustainably productive, they need to take healthy rest breaks now and then -- especially during crunch time. Otherwise Amazon will lose. And because whatever natural sense of intuition I may have had about these issues was thoroughly beaten out of me by the time I got through all that Core Values training they made us do."

I'm not at all surprised that an overworked employee wouldn't talk back to their unreasonable boss. They need their next paycheck to eat and pay rent, and they don't want to risk getting immediately fired for "insubordination", or whatever other bullshit a power hungry sociopath might pull out of their ass in retaliation.

Sometimes what those kind of managers need is a complete unnegotiable refusal. They behave abusive because they think it’s worth their time, to challenge reality by fighting your perception. Make that worth less than nothing. CYA can be problematic though.

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