I only use Uber/Lyft in Boston for routes where the T would be inconvenient or if the weather is really bad and I don't want to walk home from the T station.
I just hate Uber Pool and Lyft Line - the routes they take are often side streets with lots of congestion and turns, there's a lot of frustration when you're almost to your destination or to a major road and then the driver turns around to pick up another passenger. Drivers often play music I find annoying.
I worked with one person at Amazon who had a significant physical disability. I can't speak for him, but he is highly valued by the organization because of the quality of his work.
As an Amazon employee, I tend to think Amazon's reputation is overstated. Some teams definitely have very high operational loads, but in general my hours have been comparable to friends in similar tech companies and certainly less than friends in industries like medicine, management consulting, etc.
It's very strange to describe Amazon (at least engineering roles) as a sweatshop considering how well compensated employees are.
Well compensated? Amazon pays significantly below other mega cap tech companies, and as a PhD student in machine learning with a lot of friends interning and applying for jobs I can confidently say Amazon is nobody's first choice due to low salaries and working conditions.
I'd rather say I am amazed they get anyone great working for them because it really is clearly and painfully obvious that almost everyone would rather work for Google, Facebook or Microsoft regarding machine learning.
Have first hand knowledge of salaries. Amazon offers 30-50% less than other top tech companies for machine learning. There is literally no silver lining or upside as far as I can tell.
In that context, it does not matter if Amazon pays more than <other job> in <other industry> or treats employees better than <other company> in <other industry>.
Every measurable I've seen has Amazon very close to total compensation for similar levels. The real differences are in perks and vesting schedule (theirs is notoriously bad - 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% I think)
It's hard to make a case that they underpay by 50%, have horrific working hours yet still have / retain an engineering workforce that's talented enough to deliver consistently.
This is selection bias. You have first hand knowledge of what Amazon offers new graduates with little or no industry experience (and yes, PhD students fall into this category). The compensation for more experienced employees is substantially higher.
"The compensation for more experienced employees is substantially higher"
Citation needed. Higher than compensation for experienced employees at Google/Facebook? I am not even disputing Amazon pays more later, I am saying Amazon never pays top tier AND treats employees badly AND has no perks or particular benefits to make up for it, so nobody who has the option (that I know of) wants to work there.
Every company pays more later, I was trying to say that the pay gap between other companies disappears for mid+ level positions.
Also, they do not treat employees badly. Are there cases where certain managers treat their employees poorly? Of course, you can find the same anecdotal examples at company of sufficiently large size. Since the infamous 2015 NYT article, employees are treated very well on average. For perks, if you're referring to free catered meals then, yes, Amazon lacks there. But how about working in downtown Seattle instead of some random suburb outside of San Jose?
Finally, you ask for a citation about my claim while offering none for your own. My source: I work here so I actually have first hand experience.
No I am absolutely certain, I was offered more than 2x for the same position by another tech company.
I was so surprised by Amazon's offer I conducted a small survey amongst friends and acquaintances to find which of my offers (there were more) was 'normal'.
The thing is, you can, as Amazon shows, have an enormously successful business by treating employees badly and not paying top of the market. Of course you can. Paying more does not always get you the best, and for many many tasks you don't need Jeff Deans, you just need someone to work hard and get it done.
There is tons of talented people willing to work for less than the top to get a chance to prove themselves, to learn something, to get their shot. It's just that they tend to leave Amazon (c.f. retention rates) after that, and Amazon seems to be doing ok with that. It's just a fundamentally different approach to employee management.
It certainly sounds like a sweatshop in the descriptions I've heard from friends who work there, or have worked there in the past, compared to the experiences I and others have had in other large tech companies. I can only think of three people I know who have stuck it out at Amazon for more than two years. The egregiously back-loaded vesting structure is clearly built around the expectation of a high attrition rate, so I believe that the meat-grinder effect exists by design and not merely incompetence.
The blue collars make up the bulk, and while the accounts of white-collar sweatshop conditions are argued about, nobody ever contradicted the accounts of blue-collar workers, and numerous complaints have been filed: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-settlement-could-pave-wa....
>It's very strange to describe Amazon (at least engineering roles) as a sweatshop considering how well compensated employees are.
With a company as large and complex as Amazon, many things can be relative, but if you work as an engineer or programmer at Amazon, chances are that conversation doesn't apply to you, or at least, that it applies less to you than to others.
One example is when Google got the third party YouTube app removed from the Windows Store. Google had refused to make a decent YouTube port on the store, and so a very well made third party one was introduced. It had all the features that YouTube Red boasts today, but it didn't support ads. This was not because the developers were trying to make a play on Google, but because there wasn't an API to serve ads. They mentioned they were more than happy to comply, but were served a C&D and the app was killed.
like how you can't view amazon prime videos from android tablets (or at least, certain versions iirc.. amazon yanked it's apk from play store. i dont recall why, but some people simply side-loaded from amazon store).
I think this highlights a big difference between media and tech (or at least big tech companies). In tech, leaking is a cardinal sin. Foer chose to send information about a customer pulling an ad campaign to a friend, who then "excitedly" forwarded it to the New York Times. Foer was using internal company information as a weapon in a personal crusade.
You call it leaking, I'd say it's whistleblowing in abusive practices meant to stifle criticism. Same as the red flags raised about Uber's cultural environment can hardly be considered "leaks".
Are you saying that an advertiser deciding not to feed the hand that bites it (wait, that didn't work out right) is somehow the same as institutional employee abuse?
Every newspaper, every news magazine has had this same tension between the advertising department and the content department. Every advertiser should understand that; every editor certainly does. This isn't new.
The fact that this isn't new doesn't mean we have to condone it.
If we do (or are) then all a large corporation has to do to stifle most MSM criticism is to push enough money into advertising with those platforms. Of course we already have cases in this area [1], but hopefully the proposition as a whole sounds as ridiculous to you as it does to me.
However, the solution that was well developed in the 20th century, the "iron curtain" between the advertising and news departments of a publication, worked reasonably well (with editors being put into difficult positions periodically, though). Up until, that is, advertising dollars for news publications dried up almost entirely, creating an existential threat to the news organization.
Now, we are back in the pre-20th century world, where every publication is owned and published by someone with a particular viewpoint.
It looks more like a precipitate and emotional response that handed the initiative to his opponents. Whistleblowers have to be careful to not let their outrage get the better of them.
this is kind of irrelevant. why do you bring that up?
yes, he might get even more retaliation. but we should care about his message here, that Amazon control the news.
NYT could have reported that there is no longer Amazon ads on the magazine that told truths about them, like it used to have before. without ever receiving the "leak".
the "leak" just stated the obvious that everyone could see anyway.
Perhaps as a something to learn from? Foer appears to have let his feelings of outrage get the better of him, and went off half-cocked with a pointless and ill-advised gesture that only benefitted his opponents.
I greatly appreciate the fact that he made a stand, but he may have rendered himself less effective in doing that by forwarding the message to someone whose judgement he thought he could trust. Maybe the leak turned out to be the best outcome anyway, given the New Republic is still publishing.
Don't want to get into Trump vs Hilary debate, but don't you think it is a bit strange that nearly every rich individual has their own foundation? A foundation that most people don't know what is responsible for. Most of the time you don't hear it doing much either.
Why for example some political entities donate large amount of money to these foundations instead of the ones that are proven to do something (like red cross).
It feels like perhaps those foundations are there just to exploit a tax loophole, and that they donate once in a while to specific cause to satisfy their legal requirements.
> using the law as a bludgeon to force people into obeying arbitrary design policies
They're not arbitrary design policies at all. They're standards that exist for a reason. For instance, if you have some text, display it as text, not as an image of text, because a screen reader won't be able to read it.
> The inevitable effect of this kind of legislation is that technology gets worse for everyone, rather than better for a small group.
Actually, complying with accessibility standards makes the web better for everyone. Here's an example. The giant green table on this website used to just be an image[1]. That made the page useless for screen readers, but it also meant that you couldn't copy the data in the table, couldn't resize the text, etc. A common sense change to display this table as text made the page more useful for everyone.
I think his point is that standards are inherently arbitrary and inflexible and that these specific standards are only beneficial to a "small group". My point is that these standards aren't arbitrary, but well-reasoned, and that they are broadly beneficial (see my post elsewhere for some more examples).
Some standards are enforced by law - fire codes for instance, or food handling standards. Do accessibility standards merit similar treatment? I'd argue that most people now need to use the Internet for basic functions in their lives. For instance, you can't even get a job at a chain grocery store around here without filling out an online application. Given that, there's a strong social interest in making sure that everyone has access. That interest has to be balanced against other interests - costs to businesses for instance. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should treat WCAG the same way we would treat a fire code (which a government agency enforces) or as we treat ADA building compliance (where customers can sue to force compliance), but I do think that a debate on this issue should look at what these standards actually do, and try to balance the interests. I don't think the parent is doing that.
I just hate Uber Pool and Lyft Line - the routes they take are often side streets with lots of congestion and turns, there's a lot of frustration when you're almost to your destination or to a major road and then the driver turns around to pick up another passenger. Drivers often play music I find annoying.