
Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers - yoelo
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bjpj/amazon-vp-tim-bray-resigns-calls-company-chickenshit-for-firing-protesting-workers
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hadrien01
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065782)

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rickyplouis
Credit is due to anyone willing to sacrifice, no matter how small, for the
voiceless and underrepresented.

~~~
toomuchtodo
"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just
remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody
else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This
is not just a grab-bag candy game.” -- Nobel Prize-winning author Toni
Morrison

~~~
lotsofpulp
Most people are busy trying to free their children, spouse, and immediate
family, even if it means sacrificing others’ freedom to do it.

~~~
throwlaplace
>Most people are busy trying to free their children, spouse, and immediate
family

what you're basically saying is that most people are primarily concerned with
their communities. that's true and it's not even unreasonable but what's also
true is that the communities of most people in positions of power are not
marginalized/precarious.

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viklove
I think referring to your direct offspring as "the community" is a bit
disingenuous.

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throwlaplace
i don't get your point. are the direct offspring of a wealthy person more at
risk or less at risk than that wealthy person's community?

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viklove
I'm not suggesting either, just that hoarding resources for your immediate
family does not sound as altruistic or venerable as hoarding resources for
"your community."

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throwlaplace
but i'm not advocating for this? in effect i agree with you. i'm exactly
pointing out that it's disingenuous to say that someone is protecting their
family and that it does end up being just greed.

~~~
viklove
I never tried to indicate that I was disagreeing with you

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trenning
Seeing this on CNBC really makes me happy that it's getting some actual
coverage. I hope having someone who isn't just a wagie quit in protest will
make others at Amazon come to terms with their employer, and acknowledge their
practices.

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bawana
Why does big always become evil?

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outlace
Why does everyone assume the actions of the little guy are always morally
superior than the actions of the big corporation? I haven't delved into the
details of this specific case but this reaction is typical regardless of the
facts it seems. The big company is always the evil one and the employees are
always little enslaved saints.

Edit: Whoops this comment could have been made less controversially - I wish
everyone well.

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throwanem
When one side has all the power and the other side has none, to pretend that
the benefit of the doubt accrues equally to both is an act of moral cowardice.

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gwright
How about considering the facts of the situation and not generalizing and
applying a pre-conceived narrative?

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throwanem
I don't really know how to address the kind of confusion that mistakes a
statement of principle for an imposition of narrative.

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gwright
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but how can you know if your principle ("one
side has all the power and the other side has none") is relevant without
understanding the specifics of the issue at hand?

You seem to be suggesting that the only relevant information is that there is
a "big" corporation involved and that the particulars of the situation are
irrelevant.

I'm just suggesting that the particulars of the case are important to deciding
who is acting in a "morally superior way" (to use the phrasing from the
earlier comment.

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throwanem
I mean, for as much as I've said so far, I'm pretty comfortable working from
the knowledge that one side is a corporation worth enough billions that the
specific number is both indeterminate and irrelevant, and the other is some
people making minimum wage who'd like their working lives to be a little less
shitty. Also, the corporation can fire those minimum-wage workers at any time,
for any reason or none at all, and leave them zero effective recourse under
the law - because most of what the law says is what the lawyers convince the
judge trying the case it says, and one of those sides can afford hot and cold
running lawyers out of petty cash while the other is living paycheck to
paycheck and can't afford them at all.

That an engineer whose work I greatly respect, whose VP role gave him vastly
more knowledge of the corporation's inner workings, walked away from seven
figures of RSUs and whatever no doubt sizable other compensation, because he
agrees with the folks making minimum wage that their situation is bullshit,
I'd think should add considerable point to the argument.

But Bray's action, while commendable, is severable here. If you need
convincing that corporate power vastly outweighs labor power in the United
States of 2020, I'm not the person to do it, for the same reason I'm not the
person to convince anyone that water is wet or fire is hot. You might try
struggling along paycheck to paycheck for a while, working some place like an
Amazon warehouse, if you don't know what it's like. Or you might try listening
to people who do when they _tell_ you what it's like. Beyond that, I really
don't know how to help you.

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gwright
You have made the false assumption that I'm talking about _this_ particular
situation (Amazon/Tim Bray) when I was simply responding to the more general
comment about making judgements based on generalities and not on particulars.

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cryptos
We really need more courageous people like Tim Bray!

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seibelj
If you are very idealistic I would recommend working for a smaller company
that aligns with your values. It is naive to join a company like Amazon or
Google and imagine it is some progressive utopia. These are mega corps, and in
my imagination I see them like The Empire from Star Wars, and you will be a
storm trooper on the death star - just one worker among many. You will be on
the winning team, well compensated, and destroying your competition. But don't
pretend you aren't employee #517384 even if you are a higher-ranking manager.
Darth Vader will still strangle you if you get in his way.

All that being said, I would still consider working for the empire, just as in
the past I can envision myself working for a major European military power or
the Dutch East India Company, or like ancestors of mine who worked for
Standard Oil and AT&T. Amazon and Google are the big corporate powers of today
and your silly blog posts about unions won't stop them.

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ryanmcbride
"...I can envision myself working for a major European military power..."

Hmmm

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seibelj
Prussian military, British military, French military. I am speaking about
middle ages to modern era. A lot of management and scientific progress
happened there, and it was a way for the lower classes to rise in a more
meritocratic way. It was also a mechanism to learn sailing skills so you could
become a trading merchant.

~~~
goldenkey
So basically, you are willing to sell your morals for scientific progress in
the name of helping people? You sound conflicted.

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seibelj
I don't think it is possible to live your life entirely pure based on your
morals. This is a philosophical question. It is possible to work for Amazon
today or the large corporation of the past, and not be entirely morally OK
with the situation. Many aspects of life are the same, unless you are a monk.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
"We can have all the morals, we can afford." \- my old minister

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finnh
Good for you, Tim! I've interacted with him once or twice via his blog and
always found him to be a super nice, thoughtful guy.

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overgard
Good on Tim Bray for doing what he did, but imo the only solution is a union.

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anon102010
Was this the guy that brought us XML?

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mellosouls
Yes he was involved, so this gets him some forgiveness.

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imglorp
Hey we love to hate on XML now, but not only did a framework of markup and
schema make sense at the time, markup as an interchange concept was a pretty
new thing in 1986. We had some scattered formatter precursors like TeX and
troff but not a general purpose framework like this.

Look at everything SGML begat or enabled: Docbook, HTML, XML, SOAP, WSDL/SOA,
and ecosystems around transformations like DTDs and XSLT.

I think the biggest failure of XML was the pesky humans who kept trying to
poke it by hand instead of working with abstractions so they never saw it.

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tompccs
Amazon needs to stop internally framing labour dispute problems as PR
problems. Huge respect to Tim Bray for walking the walk in defence of his
values, something I've only rarely seen from high-earning people with left-
wing sentiments.

My own sense of the situation (and I could well be wrong) is that Amazon is
not a particularly bad place to work as a warehouse worker (they after all
employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled people at $15/hr, no mean feat),
but that they have a justifiably high exposure to the press for their
workplace practices due to their scale.

I think that this is why some middle-management jobsworths think it best to
fire activist workers rather than address their issues. It's those managers
who should be out of a job now, not Tim Bray. I feel Tim's railings against
21st century capitalism and praise for France for their bare-faced
protectionism are misplaced, but understandable under the circumstances.

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lawnchair_larry
The implication that race or gender is involved in the firings is pretty
silly.

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Pfhreak
If the firings disproportionately or systemically impact races or genders, the
firings can be racist/sexist -- even if race or gender is not involved in the
firing decision.

Racism and discrimination are related but separate concepts.

~~~
Udik
> the firings can be racist/sexist -- even if race or gender is not involved
> in the firing decision

Uh? Can you elaborate?

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Pfhreak
Racism is the systemic discrimination against a race -- ie, there may be
systems in place that cause a particular race to be disadvantaged, even if
those systems aren't consciously put there by anyone.

For example, post redlining, many cities still have economically depressed
areas that correlate with race. The policies that caused the issue are largely
gone, but the _systems_ created by them remain. (Systems, in this context can
mean both formalized systems, e.g. welfare systems, and de facto systems, e.g.
wealth inequality, incarceration rates, and prejudice).

Applied to employment decisions, there may be any number of factors that were
not directly discussed as reasons to fire someone, but still impacted the
firing decision. People may be unconsciously biased, there may be fundamental
attribution errors applied because the person is in an outgroup, etc.

~~~
viklove
Minor correction, racism does not have to be systemic in order to qualify as
racism:

> prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a
> different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior

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rickpmg
I think it would have been more effective if he just 'called in sick' (if that
was possible for him) or staged an extended walkout of engineers. I have all
my infrastructure on AWS and the prospect that it could all come to a halt
immediately and unexpectedly makes me think of other providers or at least
spreading my workoad to azure, google, etc.. and that should get Amazon's
attention.

I really don't think a single top level engineer voting with his feet will
have any measurable impact technically or financially on amazon.

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MaxBarraclough
I doubt AWS would immediately fall over if some engineers walked out for a few
days. Might still send a message though.

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rickpmg
I agree.. it's the message that there is another 'point of failure' that no
one has paid much attention to.

If you want Amazon/AWS to change it's ways, then you need to get the attention
of CIO's.

And I think regular walkouts of 100 engineers who monitor the network is going
to do a better job of getting it than a single architect leaving, no matter
how much of a star he was.

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frpzzd
In my opinion, it won’t do anyone any good for him to quit “in solidarity
with” the fired workers. If he wants the situation to improve, he should
remain VP and use his power to help make things better. Now he‘ll probably
just be replaced with someone who is less sympathetic to the workers.

~~~
sincerely
Is amazon one of those companies with a hundred VPs or does the title actually
mean something?

~~~
QuinnyPig
There are less than 20 Distinguished Engineers in all of Amazon. Today there's
one less.

