Where I work the security guards greet you as you walk through the gate. I've always thought this was a mechanism for making sure the guards were paying attention. If someone comes in you have to look at the screen that shows their name (and image) and then look at the person to greet them. You are forced, in other words, to do a basic visual check of the image on screen versus the person walking through the gate.
An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.
Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.
I think it really depends on the team you're on at Amazon. (well, the vesting, free drinks etc doesn't).
I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).
If anyone here honestly believes free food and office decor stack up as benefits right alongside retirement benefits and vesting schedules, please take a step back and evaluate your life. I'd rather live on a software developer's salary with no 401k access and a 6 year vesting cliff than live on 2/3rd the salary with immediate vesting and a generous 401k match.
In year 0-6, I would think the latter case comes up better, assuming (which is definitely true at like, all large tech companies) that yearly stock + 401k match (not even touching tax benefits) is better than 1/3 of your salary?
I would think stock + 401k > 1/3 salary basically
(this was true for me at Workday, anyway)
No, I couldn't live in such a city. If there was nobody to take out the trash we would have to raise more money to increase salaries for garbage men, etc. Some of it, I could live with less of, and some I'd pay more for.
Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.
To me, that reads as passive aggressive. "It's unfortunate you didn't do your job..."
I think it's a better approach to say "The problems are X. We know this because of Y. My proposed solutions are Z. If you agree, let's get together and figure out how to do Z. If you don't agree, let's get together and figure out where our analyses diverge and how we can come together."
It is a fine line, yes, but if you abstain from any accusations in the rest of the text, then my formulation is generally received as empathy. This is supported by the fact, that there are no lies there. OP _is_ sorry that things went as they went. And it also is objectively “unfortunate” in the sense that with a little luck there might have been a different situation.
The general point is that OPs partner is in a corner. Empathy is needed to allow him to be cooperative and understanding of his own mistakes.
I realize now that at some point in the last few years I totally lost any sense of empathy for my co-founder. As I write this I realized that today was the first time I've shown him any real sense of empathy in a really long time. Coincidentally I think we may have actually made some progress in turning things around today as well.
How about "Mind Makers". I think many people will have a natural resistance to joining a community named after how smart the members are. Imagine wearing a button that says "I'm the smartest".
Earlier today I was reading an old AMA by PewDiePie on reddit. A recurring theme was asking him how he got so successful. He talked about how he was there at the right time, had a good niche, great fans, got lucky, etc. Someone replied to him, reminding him that he also uploaded videos three times a day for years.
I agree that instant gratification is a problem, but it doesn't strike me as bad that kids might think YouTube or social media or whatever is an easy way to make money, and then try their hand at it. I think they'll quickly find that success still takes effort and perseverance.
>If you’re a single mom and the landlord is harrasing you for sex to pay the rent, is that okay? Where do you place that on the exploitation scale?
People are in that situation where prostitution is illegal and they do it anyway. What's your alternative? To force the woman to do it in secret? To punish her and the John if they get caught? Should she be kicked out? The landlord made to accept no rent? The woman forced to spend another 20 hours at work away from her kids where she might've spent one or two?
It's a shame generally that people have to work for a living. I think that's one of the things "we" are racing to solve by improving technology and automation. I hope there'll be post-scarcity society with a basic income and nobody will be required to make any bad choices. We aren't there yet, so we should try to get there.
I'd agree with you if people were forced into prostitution - and of course what you say does apply correctly to victims of human trafficking who are forced. But I don't think that's always the case.
Take a young woman who doesn't like school, doesn't like being a cashier or waitress, wants more money than she can get with the jobs available, etc, and she doesn't really connect promiscuity with indignity in the way that you're implying. Why should this woman be barred from what might be a lucrative and pleasant career just because you and others think it's undignified.
I might suffer from dignity issues if I had to work as a birthday clown, but some people enjoy it and that's great because some people want to hire birthday clowns. I think the same logic applies here.
But you present generalizations and assumptions specific to the scenarios that you describe without facts to back them up. The responder above presents a valid scenario that is no different than 15-20 years ago, college women with proper skills/looks/aptitude, might go work at the few strip clubs/bikini bars in the Bay Area while going to college.
I recall, while in college, being surprised by the roommate of a friend (who was a very good student) pulling in what was more than the highest CS grad made out of school when I graduated.
Exploitation is one thing, but this immediate jump to everything is exploitation is what leads to things like this particular law getting passed. Generalizations without facts.
I have thought about building a project that would try to maintain wealth after my death. I imagine the components of this as being...
1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains.
2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment.
3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money.
4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets).
I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions.
After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.
An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.
Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.