On the Nature of Things | Forum

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Experimenting in how far it can push white-collar workers,
redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.

“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Bo Olson, worked in books marketing

Our Leadership Principles


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I think that the Japanese expression for death due to over working, karōshi |過労死, has entered the English lexicon of slang.

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On the other hand.

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, lavender, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”

― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

Or as an earlier observer noted on his visit to the the predecessor of the contemporary office, the "dark satanic mills".

We came nae to view you warks
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to hell,
It may be nae surprise.

― Robert Burns

An interesting discussion of the Amazonian workplace practices at Slashdot:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/08/15 ... -at-amazon

All that whipping and driving and AMZN has yet to report an actual profit since it's incorporation.

To the warehouse . . .

BBC | How algorithms run Amazon's warehouses

Sharing experiences . . .

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/com ... ply_chain/

Amazon seems to me a typical example where one hopes that one day soon.. all the nasty boring repetitive dehumanizing work is done by robots.

for some reason i never liked amazon much and used alternatives whenever i could - now i will make an extra point of doing that.

Parodite wrote:Amazon seems to me a typical example where one hopes that one day soon.. all the nasty boring repetitive dehumanizing work is done by robots.

so you think dehumanizing humans is wrong, and dehumanizing robots is OK?

RACIST!

Amazon is evil, but customer service is excellent, and I like my Kindle (whose ebooks are on a different format to the global standard, to keep you locked in.)

Still, customer service from slave plantations was probably very good. Jeff Bezos is a megalomaniac who wants to take over the world, and so far is doing very well at it.

Torchwood wrote:Amazon is evil, but customer service is excellent, and I like my Kindle (whose ebooks are on a different format to the global standard, to keep you locked in.)

Still, customer service from slave plantations was probably very good. Jeff Bezos is a megalomaniac who wants to take over the world, and so far is doing very well at it.

Our future rulers:

Oceania - Amazon

Eastasia - Alibaba

Typhoon wrote:

Torchwood wrote:Amazon is evil, but customer service is excellent, and I like my Kindle (whose ebooks are on a different format to the global standard, to keep you locked in.)

Still, customer service from slave plantations was probably very good. Jeff Bezos is a megalomaniac who wants to take over the world, and so far is doing very well at it.

Our future rulers:

Oceania - Amazon

Eastasia - Alibaba

imagine this, in 1 day, Alibaba sold $ 14 Billion goods

http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/12/investi ... sales-gmv/


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A "bruising workplace" Please. Like I'm sure the NYT is just a cuddly play pen. I'll bet more people have cried at their desks there than Amazon. I've no direct experience with Amazon but the folks I know who do absolutely love the place. The key to understanding these pieces is that New Yorkers are extremely envious of Silicon Valley and the west coast working culture in general. Just take a look at a plot of newspaper circulation vs. time over the past 10 years and you'll understand why underpaid and overworked NYT staffers are bitter.

Zack Morris wrote:A "bruising workplace" Please. Like I'm sure the NYT is just a cuddly play pen. I'll bet more people have cried at their desks there than Amazon. I've no direct experience with Amazon but the folks I know who do absolutely love the place. The key to understanding these pieces is that New Yorkers are extremely envious of Silicon Valley and the west coast working culture in general. Just take a look at a plot of newspaper circulation vs. time over the past 10 years and you'll understand why underpaid and overworked NYT staffers are bitter.

I think that there is a bit more to it than that.

As always, it's probably better to be in management than a frontline worker:

MJ | I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

Of course, the final solution will be complete warehouse automation.

Although, these days being a cubicle warrior or executive is no longer a three-martini lunch:

MJ | All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup

The US economy has roared back since the Great Recession, but many employees are grappling with the same overwhelming crush of work that was a hallmark of the downturn. The phenomenon has fueled an extraordinary rise in corporate revenues, but it has also stretched workers to the breaking point.

At least you have cubicles . . .



The traditional J-office organization. The manager or section head sits at a desk at the end.

Typhoon wrote:

Torchwood wrote:Amazon is evil, but customer service is excellent, and I like my Kindle (whose ebooks are on a different format to the global standard, to keep you locked in.)

Still, customer service from slave plantations was probably very good. Jeff Bezos is a megalomaniac who wants to take over the world, and so far is doing very well at it.

Our future rulers:

Oceania - Amazon

Eastasia - Alibaba

I think that you're right.

And

Eurasia - Ulmart

Typhoon wrote: I think that there is a bit more to it than that.

As always, it's probably better to be in management than a frontline worker:

MJ | I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

I'd believe that the life of an Amazon warehouse worker sucks. But the NYT exposé was mainly concerned with the plight of Amazon's office workers.

Of course, the final solution will be complete warehouse automation.

Indeed. And this is something Amazon is at the forefront of.

At least you have cubicles . . .

Actually, we rarely do these days. Open offices are all the rage. A Facebook friend shared this horror story:

Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.

In actuality, Google doesn't necessarily use a fully open office plan. It's a mix of small offices shared by people, semi cubicles, and open space. At least that's how their NYC building is (I've visited once). What the WaPo article describes is something on the extreme end of poor office design. Music blaring over a PA system? I've never heard of such a thing and it sounds so obviously stupid that I'm surprised anyone signed off on it.

The finance industry has been using open office plans for a very long time, almost certainly to cut down on sky-high office costs in NYC. Some suspect that the whole open office trend is at least partly driven by economics. Some firms in Silicon Valley still retain offices. Apple is famous for this. I think Synopsys, an EDA tool vendor, does this as well, and I'm sure there are many other examples. Cubicles are by far the most common. It's a point of company pride at Intel, apparently. Even the CEO is said to have a cubicle.

I've only experienced open offices and cubicles in my private sector career. In graduate school, I had a spacious office with 20-foot ceilings that I shared with two other lab mates (and for a couple years, only one). IMHO, office > cubicle > open plan.

The traditional J-office organization. The manager or section head sits at a desk at the end.

This is not too dissimilar from my current office layout, except that there is no special seating for the managers. Our desks are long benches, basically, and a little more spacious, with walls of monitors (between 3 and 6 per person) acting almost to create semi-cubicles