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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Oh, 1000%. I could write a book on how monumentally stupid the whole process is (and most Amazonians agree), but the fundamental points are:

    • The people that stay are of a certain mindset, where you don’t pick up “hard” tasks, and you are quick to establish blame/ownership elsewhere.
    • Data is king, but you can lie a lot with data.
    • Employees are customers also, and when you piss off employees you piss off customers and their families.
    • You spend a huge sum of money on hiring and training talent, only to send them to your competitors.
    • You spend money to give severance to active employees. That is still, to be, the dumbest thing ever. SO many people don’t resign, they just down tools or do a bad job to get the extra pay. PIP is called Paid Interview Prep for a reason.
    • Amazon’s Focus/Pivot has such a bad reputation that being fired used to mean that other big companies would happily tell you “if you have any trouble at Amazon, let me know and we’ll start an interview loop”.

    Most fundamentally of all…very few companies do this. It died with Jack Welch/GM and Gates/Microsoft, after they saw the same downfalls. Amazon is yet to learn their lesson, and it shows in how poorly the “Amazon Management School” under Bezos are performing. The other big tech companies also now do this, although less severe, and surprise surprise, they’re all going downhill - making awful decisions, delivering nothing of value, and ignoring customers over leadership.



  • True, paired with Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.

    With that said, a lot of people (like myself) joined Amazon when remote working was encouraged, only to then be told to go in 3 days a week. We lost loads of really great engineers that didn’t have opportunities in their local area. We’ll likely lose a LOT of people again, myself included, unless opportunities open elsewhere where I can transfer to a new area. Amazon are tricky, though, and they’ll preempt this by reducing transfers or laying people off soon to ensure that those that cannot adhere to 5 days a week are considered to have “resigned voluntarily”.

    That’s all to say that a lot of bad faith on Amazon’s part will likely scare people away from joining. After the NYT article dropped almost a decade ago, Amazon got around it being hard to hire by having great transfer opportunities and high salaries. Neither of those exist now, and with all the anti-worker rhetoric and lies about internal AI performance “saving x hours on upgrades” I don’t see Amazon ever getting top talent again. Amazon will slip into boomer tech soon enough.


  • Amazon gets rid of around 5-8% of their staff every year through unregretted attrition, where they’ll fire “underperforming” people, with maybe 10-15% of people being threatened with underperformance "

    Alongside this, to cut a long story short Amazon grew huge during COVID, and despite tens of thousands of layoffs the company has been trying to shrink everywhere possible, cutting fat wherever they can. IMO, leadership made lots of really stupid decisions, and the CEO has set Amazon on a course where irreparable damage has been made.


  • I work for Amazon. People are NOT happy.

    Sadly, this is exactly what Jassy wants. Amazon are desperate for people to leave, and this is another push towards this.

    It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but given that I’m unable to go to the office more than 3x a week due to having a young family to look after, my time.here is clearly limited - unless I’m able to work something out.

    There is a strong remote advocacy group at Amazon, but the best that was mustered last time was a one hour protest during lunch. This might be the catalyst for people to say “fuck it, let’s unionize”, but I’m not confident.


  • This really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Trump and MAGA came about from disillusionment in politics and the rural working-class feeling left out, with the right sensing an opportunity to say outlandish shit to stand out.

    Today, women are disillusioned because they can’t afford to buy a home, can’t afford basic healthcare like most civilised countries, have zero workplace protections, have zero control over their own reproductive organs, and are lumped into the “DEI” category whenever the right discusses whether they should have opportunities in the workplace.

    I say this every time an American article is posted around the sheer surprise that something is happening. It isn’t new. Trump was preceded by Brexit and the rise of the right in Europe. Thankfully, we’ve also seen the implosion of the right over the last year or two, so if Harris can win then you’ll all be glad to hear that it’ll be a bloodbath of back-stabbing and finger-pointing as the right fight for whatever scraps are left - all while the loser sits on the sidelines shitting on their former allies for having the audacity to succeed them.

    With all that said, it’s a great thing, but hopefully this isn’t just pushed as a women-only thing. Real change needs everyone pushing in the same direction, and that needs real unity - something a good leader can bring.






  • While I don’t agree, I used to spend a lot of time on /r/OnePunchMan. OPN is kinda a gag anime in that it plays on many stereotypes to comedic effect. One of the main characters is a woman that is very petite and didn’t grow up, and is also one of the most powerful heroes - alongside her sister who…did grow up.

    The reason I mention it is because that sub is 90% suggestive fan art of the girl that the show literally points out looks like a child. It’s a trope on the “sexualised minor” thing, but they’re fucking falling for it again! When you call them out for noncing, they argue “she has adult features” or “she’s in her twenties”.



  • Well, they’re dead, so not much else outside of that.

    It goes to show just how effective the brainwashing is, though. So many people were afraid of what is essentially science fiction. If we could inject nanobots into someone to control their mind and body, holy shit we’ve made one of the craziest scientific breakthroughs in a century! They were so afraid they ignored the fact that they were incredibly ill and tried to leave on the assumption that they had been attacked.




  • Several reasons:

    • Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
    • Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
    • The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
    • Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.

    Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?



  • Combat Sports.

    I got bored of the gym, so I decided to take BJJ. Grappling is really fucking hard, as in you have no clue what you’re doing, and no idea how to stop someone from fucking you up on the ground. It’s one of those sports that you can spend six months doing and barely get a feel of wtf is going on.

    Two years later, I was somewhat capable, and got my blue belt. I then noticed that I was actually pretty good compared to the white belts. Things started to make sense, and while I got absolutely fucked up by everyone else, the positions made sense. I’m now a purple belt, and the other day I did an iminari roll and a rolling guillotine on a white belt during a spar, just because I could.

    In the middle of this, I started doing MMA. Striking is also hard, especially when you mix with wrestling/grappling. I came in as the guy that was fucking useless with striking, but when we took 45 mins to do some grappling the coach was wondering why the new thirty-something idiot was tapping everyone. Eventually we found my level, and he gave me some solid pointers on how to work on my striking to bring it up to level with my grappling.

    All in all, combat sports seem pretty scary, but getting into it is just a matter of turning up and giving it a try. You’ll feel like a useless idiot for months, but before you know it people will be asking you wtf you just did to them…right after you had had the same conversation with the person that’s better than you.


  • Someone I don’t really know all that well, last spoke at school, has an autistic niece. She lost her toy and was distraught, so her aunt put up a post on Facebook to say it was discontinued, and to ask if someone could locate a second hand one somewhere. I’m not really sure why, but I felt bad for her and thought that maybe I’ll use my Google-fu to help.

    I did a reverse image lookup, found the original manufacturer, looked up one of the main execs, found their contact details against their personal domain, and asked them if they could help out. They said they’d be happy to help, and I said as a gesture of good will that I’d pay for the new toy - perhaps several so that she’ll always have one if it were to break.

    After speaking to the owner, I had paid for several toys for an autistic girl I had never met - probably around £500 worth. The exec went a step further and flew to the UK to give her and her aunt the toys, probably for some good press. I never told the aunt it was me, and I told the exec to keep it between us. They put out a press release where I was referred to as a “mystery hero”, and said that for her they would resume that line of toys, with her receiving a custom version with her name attached. To their credit, he said her aunt and mother kept asking who the person was so they could thank me, but they stayed firm and said that it was up to me to reveal myself.

    So, for £500 I made an autistic girl and her family happy, and got a nice photo of the workers with a note that said “thank you”. That money was supposed to go towards car repairs, but I decided that a month of walking and leftovers for lunch to make someone happy was worth it.