
At Amazon, Employees Treat the Bathroom as an Extension of the Office - anu_gupta
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/at-amazon-employees-treat-the-bathroom-as-an-extension-of-the-office
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rm_-rf_slash
My roommate works at a call center. There is a rule there that you can't go to
the bathroom within 15 minutes of clocking in. He complains of the arbitrary
control of people's bladders yet in the same breath will complain of people
who go straight in at 9:15. To me that's where work culture gets despicable:
make people look down at people who don't approve of rules they themselves
don't like, and you've outsourced shame from managers to the employees
themselves.

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rancur
>outsourced shame from managers to the employees themselves

this is one of the major selling points of management.

McD has a policy that the managers have to tell the employees what to do.
Store managers don't. Which creates an inevitable 'but Doug didn't...' and
then a 'I know but, ...' dialog

having non-shitty store managers would solve this.

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steven777400
I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of Amazon's culture, but this person seems
to place more concerns on bathroom culture than most. Yes, I prefer to be
silent in the bathroom, but sometimes people talk and then I will respond.
I've talked work in the bathroom before, including to a supervisor. Not
everyone has the same expectations and in a large group it's inevitable that
some folks are going to want to use coincidental meetings in the bathroom to
have impromptu conversations about work or other topics. The idea of "hunting
for the perfect bathroom" strikes me as a bit of an overreaction to such a
situation.

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famousactress
"I regularly saw people bring their laptops into the bathroom, where they
would sit on the toilet and write code"

I would need some corroboration in order to believe this bit. The rest of the
behavior listed I've sadly seen in other companies, though I've fortunately
never been somewhere it was a cultural constant, as opposed to the lack of
tact of some individuals and double-digit tendency to hire folks who lacked
tact.

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dingaling
Many years ago when I started in corporate code-dronery I was at our US
headquarters for the first time when nature called.

At first I was merely amused at the diminutive vertical dimensions of US
toilet-stall doors ( they have a much larger gap at the bottom than Euroloos
).

But then I was stunned to pass one stall where there was a pile of Z-fold
green-bar printer paper sitting on the floor, with the occupant slowly raising
the pages in sequence and presumably reading the code...

We didn't have many laptops back then :)

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xcyu
I interned within AWS for a few month and never saw anyone carrying their
laptops into bathrooms. Although I do remember regularly doing a linearly
search of adjacent floor's bathrooms in order to find a seat.

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johnward
I worked support for a major shipping company and was told I could not use the
restroom without answering the phone while I was in there. I refused and
nothing really ever happened.

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11thEarlOfMar
It's called multi-tasking:

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-26](http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-26)

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itsdrewmiller
Seems a little uptight - who hasn't enjoyed a bit of toilet typing now and
then?

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shenanigoat
The horror! The hygiene!

