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Comment by Geisterde | Hacker News Reader

I know many old people at amazon who apparently decided they never needed to try in life. They found a role they were comfortable enough in, their joints creak going up stairs, they cant fit into tight spaces, and they refuse to take on any level of responsibility or ownership of anything. If you dont like the work, quit, but ill tell you right now that these people only pretend to care about themselves.

As the youngest person on my team, I work every day to give my people every kind of assistance, resources, and encouragment that they could need to succeed past the more physical role they work now. I can only spoonfeed them though, I cant make them swallow a promotion. Some people dont want to live into old age, thats all I can call it.

As to the interviewee, did you take pictures? Because you dont deny it, and you know that you are jepordizing the livelihoods of over a million of my coworkers in doing so.

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Getting old sucks. Your mind is fine but your body lags behind. I’ve noticed it a lot more after turning 40. My issue, as I’m sure everyone’s issue, is that in my mind I clearly remember being able to do things physically with excellence that today would send me to the hospital. Skateboarding (I can still kickflip), snowboarding, fighting (for sport, like mma), volunteering for habitat for humanity building homes (can’t do that no more). The best thing is that I work with computers so my job job isn’t physically demanding but boy does it suck bending over to drop trash in the waste bin only to have your back slip out.

>> their joints creak going up stairs

Maybe they ARE trying. Perhaps you don’t know what they are struggling with. Maybe their bodies ache all day long every day, but what keeps them going is providing for their loved ones.

Perhaps you dont know how easily they could step into a position that isnt physically demanding, several of them would be a shoe in for chief given their experience. They wont fill out an application if I put it infront of them, they would rather fix air conditioning units than have responsibility, and they will tell you as much directly.

I'm having such a difficult time parsing this comment. What do you mean to say with those first two paragraphs?

I read it as: commenter works in a physical job with older colleagues who, despite getting older and struggling more, are not attempting to get promoted or moved into a role they can continue to do as they age.

Accurate. And they will tell you that themselves.

What about the third paragraph? I can see how taking photos of a corpse might save lives, since it implies the death was suspicious, and might be part of whistleblowing about some sort of violation of regulations, or negligence. But how can it jeopardize the livelihood of millions?

Is the idea that their jobs might all have to vanish if a whistleblower reveals them to be fundamentally dangerous?

No, we have a strict policy of not taking pictures or video at work unless it has gone through a rigerous process and is explicitly approved. This protects company IP in the only way that should matter, but it also literally saves lives. Someone tried to bomb the building I used to work in. I do not need the layout of my site on public display, the security measures, the blast proof structures, the safe places to hide.

Sorry, whatever pictures the interviewee took takes a backseat to personnel safety. It is the paramount value at amazon, existing above any and all leadership principles.

Sounds less than completely ingenuous.

* The (putative) photos weren't published.

* They aren't photos of the building. Perhaps a hundred frivolous public photos could present a risk in this way. A few secret ones taken for a good reason do not.

* They were taken to protect safety, just not in alignment with the employer's particular idiosyncratic perspective on safety (which seems muddled up with concerns about IP and PR).

So this has no relation to the risk of bombings or shootings, and I still don't see the connection to risk to other workers' livelihoods (AKA jobs). Maybe Amazon are monitoring what you write here, so you're obliged to say this weird stuff?

You know whats better than trying to strategize and hypothesize around a million employees taking pictures with no approval or accountability? An iron rule that everyone is subject to. You might be right in the particular scenario, that is completely irrelevant.

Everyone gets alerts regarding every incident at amazon regardless of whether anyone was hurt. We have a very robust infastructure for identifying issues and correcting them globally. The best the interviewee could have accomplished is adding political complications that produce inferior results.

There are institutions for public safety outside of Amazon, such as regulatory bodies and laws, to which it is subject. Amazon is not yet a sovereign country, so the alleged robustness of its suspiciously self-serving internal safety procedures is not relevant here, since there can and should be such a thing as whistleblowing, in the civil society within which Amazon awkwardly sits prior to its secession.

Right, the epa did a great job with east Palestine and flint. Not having accidents is something amazon has an economic incentive for, what incentives do these other institutions have?

Iron rule doesn’t sound like somewhere I’d like to work.

I’m pretty sure personnel safety is not the paramount value at Amazon.

And for that matter, very senior people have been fired without a second thought for taking pictures at work.

> As to the interviewee, did you take pictures? Because you dont deny it, and you know that you are jepordizing the livelihoods of over a million of my coworkers in doing so.

I don’t understand the jeopardy from taking pictures. I understand it’s probably against the rules at Amazon.

If people can take pictures willy nilly then there will be entire layouts of sites on public display. Someone tried to bomb my site, and we have had rioters try to breach the perimeter. Further, if amazon IP were to leak you put our jobs at stake, which is how we put food on the table.

I also noticed that some people just don't care about themselves much. I know a person who opens beers with their front teeth. Many people seek abusive relationships. They don't have self preservation or their own well being as a core concept and it is sad. You're the only other person who seems to have seen this kind of character.

Unions won't save them, his mental health is being weaponized into politics.

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