
Tim Bray quits as VP of Amazon Web Services, cites firing of activist employees - SirLJ
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tim-bray-quit-amazon-web-services-activist-employees-1.5555266
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subhobroto
Respect to tbray.

> May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web
> Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in
> dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse
> employees frightened of Covid-19.

> What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me
> over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had,
> working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

> remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I
> despised. So I resigned.

> The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of
> their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham,
> Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

Powerful stuff. He put his money where his mouth is. Very few do that ... and
he's extremely empathetic - something ironically Jeff Bezos' mom asked him to
be when he was young.

I'm personally conflicted on the efficacy of this move.

Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods
real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot.

The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs
"Made in Taiwan". They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.

The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages
and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bottle to meet
strict deadlines. They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.

The typical consumer does not care whether the IP of a company was stolen and
cheap copies were made that were defective and buggy compared to the original
product. They do care whether it's $9 vs $27.

If the $9 product does not work, they can buy 2 more to even break even or
just return it and get something cheap instead.

Thus, Amazon has figured out how to appeal to the typical consumer.

Exploiting workers, suppliers, distributors, the country it's founded in are
some of they way they deliver that promise.

Jeff Bezos is not the monster here - he's just responding to market forces.

The market wants him to exploit his workers to hell and they are paying him
billions to do it.

The typical consumer is voting for this behavior with their wallets.

Until the fundamental consumer model changes, where the typical consumer takes
these externalized costs into account, what effective progress is made?

That's the real question.

