I'm also glad he is making clear these policies come from the top at Amazon so that people can't claim that Bezos knows nothing about that and isn't involved in any of this.
These are the most important things to me. People with principles are rare these days. And people here can't just spin these stories into something else now.
> It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.
So clearly he's had other issues and encounters with the toxic work culture there.
It really shouldn't be any surprise that people usually have multiple reasons for quitting their job.
I have tolerated a lot of evilness from Amazon and justified it as a “different organization”. I work in Amazon Music which isn’t responsible for facial recognition or warehouse abuses.
But seeing them fire whistleblowers... that’s just heartbreaking to watch. Makes me want to quit too. The only reason I haven’t yet is to keep up the activism.
> people can't claim that Bezos knows nothing about that and isn't involved in any of this.
All of this assumes that people will believe Tim. People still can claim those things simply by saying they don't believe him.
On the contrary, bucketloads of people do this all the time. The world would be a better place if more people did.
What is impressive here is that he make his decision public. Plenty of people have moral issues with their company and just say that they "Retire" or "Want to spend more time with the family" rather being honest about why they are leaving.
It seems the default assumption is that the US government could never run something efficiently, but this is said in the same breath as claiming the US as the greatest country on earth. One of those things must therefore not be true. For a country with the resources and know-how of the USA to not be able to run a health service is not in doubt, what is in doubt is whether bad actors will deliberately underfund it and try to point to it as being badly run as a result.
Americans pay twice: Once over the tax bill for a system that aims to provide some coverage, and then again for private insurance.
If the US regulated healthcare properly, they could extend Medicare and Medicaid to most of the population without increasing taxes as a starting point.
Part of the problem is absolutely ludicrous limitations such as actively restricting Medicare from using its market power to negotiate drug prices the way the NHS does, for example.
It's massive corporate welfare.
EDIT: Here's a factcheck on a claim relating to prohibition for government to negotiate for a small part of Medicare as an illustration of the kind of messed up policies that drive up these costs: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jan/17/tammy-bald...
Easy to give an (incorrect) answer if you have an entire propaganda arm willing to support you.
at least in principle, I am convinced by the argument that single-payer healthcare is cheaper on average. I do have my doubts that partisan politics in the US would actually realize that potential for efficiency, given the usual sabotage of public services in this country. I also doubt that my income bracket would end up saving much even in an optimal implementation.
so at the end of the day, I don't oppose some sort of national healthcare, but I don't really see any personal incentive to rock the boat. possible outcomes for me range from "about the same" to "a lot worse".
This answers southphillyman’s question about why people like their employer health plans. Because they don’t want to help pay for other people’s healthcare, especially the sicker population that isn’t condoned off into white collar employer health plans.
The tax advantage is also a handout to big businesses, that people who are lucky enough to be employed by them get to enjoy and support, at the expense of the rest of the country.
So summary of US healthcare political situation is everyone is all talk, but when it comes time to vote, nobody wants to pay more in taxes in case someone else gets to benefit more from it than they do.
I'm not sure you understand the peace of mind that comes from being able to go to hospital or use other healthcare facilities without even having to think about the cost, because there won't be one.
I'm not arguing against national insurance, just trying to explain that the personal incentive isn't really there for a lot of professionals. I wouldn't vote against a candidate just because this was part of their platform, but it also isn't enough to make me overlook parts of their platform that I actually oppose.
But there would be no premiums.
As usual, this seems to be partisan politics at work. Though I don't really understand why the right portrays universal healthcare as socialism when it's so clearly more "free".
What the right really does in the US is protect massive wealth transfers from tax payers to corporations by restricting Medicare and Medicaid in ways that makes it impossible to make them cost effective.
What's strangest to me is seeing how many of the Americans whom I'd expect to benefit from single-payer health insurance seem to be the ones most wary of it and who argue most loudly against it.
Bought a house cash last year in an extremely low col area and honestly I think I might be _too_ uppity now. Find myself commenting how sad it is that people more senior than myself work on weekends (for the usual meaningless bs reasons). The freedom from having a roof over your head that is security for no loan, and affordable health insurance (about 200 eur a month for a family of 4), is amazing.
This was a at a medium size traditional corp along the metro-north line of coast of Connecticut. By all accounts and my own experience was a pretty good place to work, with minimal (but some) scum baggery, good but not FAANG level salaries and excellent healthcare benefits.
One might be disappointed how effective this technqiue can be.
Now imagine you have car payments, a mortgage, and a family to feed.
My employer and co-workers also all see me driving to/from work everyday, so they know when I get a new car.
More than likely, if you can afford another lawyer, you'll find one.
I drove my upset and blindsided friend to her first meeting with her new divorce attorney after her husband left her. We were early so were sitting outside the Palo Alto firm in the parking lot when a pearl-white Mercedes Maybach rolls in with R&B music bumping and custom plates "MKHMPAY"
She seemed like a very good attorney, but my friend ended up going with another firm because that lady was too expensive ($1500/hr). Even the paralegal there was $500/hr.
Ultimately, my friend told me her divorce was 2x as expensive as her wedding.
One wonders what this characterization is meant to imply.
He charged a healthy but not exorbitant amount for his legal services, and made no secret of the fact that he liked to go for a hike during his lunch hour and return to his exurban house on a few acres to do a bit of gardening and animal care after work each day.
Dude was calm, professional, and utterly ruthless about protecting our business interests while not putting on any pretense of being a slick trial lawyer.
Law is not inherently a "flash" field any more than sales is, unless you actually spend all day every day in a courtroom before a judge.
When most people cannot afford to express morals, you have a host of hungry attack dogs. Some of them start to rationalize that having morals is wrong, that caring about people is wrong because, after all, they can't afford it, so the government can't either.
And if there weren't people desperate for careers and education, the military wouldn't get enough volunteers. So it's very convenient to that whole system.
Propagating the myth of houses as an appropriate working-class investment also sustains this. Index funds are far more liquid, far more diverse, and don't require debt or even a large amount of cash to start with, but a large mortgage is a tight leash.
It literally is. The post-war housing boom was meant to discourage activism by having workers tied to something they could lose.
Hearing all this, and hearing that homosexuality used to be tolerated, it's scary to wonder how much of the status quo is not just _a_ social construct, but purposely constructed for someone's benefit, and recently. And we're expected to presume that it's natural, or at least old, and therefore correct.
Love the [citation needed] and lack of clarity in that second paragraph.
Six years ago I was cut to part-time but a year before that I got a raise. The raise wasn't a fortune just double minimum wage in my region. But after my hours were cut I was making essentially minimum wage with a few benefits (my country has socialized medical system).
There I was not really financially bad I had a lot of savings and a job. But going from 20 hour days, shift work, sometimes overnight, to four hour week days it felt like retirement.
I was loyal because I was at the company since day one. I ran network cable, set up equipment when the building still didn't have power or heat yet. But I didn't see the company was Theseus it was the same company but its bones were replaced many times over.
Anyway time for yourself is great intuitively people know it. But until you get to experience it you don't understand how much you're missing.
But after you can afford having savings as well as a desired lifestyle it always struck me as odd to still have money as the main factor on deciding where to work and why you would ever want to deal with a workplace you actively dislike.
he's 90 and works in finance managing money for other millionaires.
I don't have a way to give you data about it. My feeling, based on experience and several conversations I had with colleagues and friends over the years, is that this is NOT happening often. But I don't know if this is a general rule, or not.
Really, the main reason you don't see stuff like this is because those people wouldn't work for Amazon to begin with.
I’ve found it invaluable to copy comments I like in to my quotes.txt and use them as inspiration / paraphrased / cited when I want to say something similar myself.
We model our behaviour on those we like.
Anecdotally, I would say it's extremely rare for people to voice disagreement with their company's management by leaving. The most common way to "stand up" to leadership seems to be to grouse about it with co-workers at lunch.
(For avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying either is the case here.)
No large company keeps its hands completely clean. Defense contracts, Chinese censorship, exploiting addiction, anticompetitive behaviour, sexism, the list goes on.
Having a public figure at your company that's willing to martyr themselves to push the knife in just a little deeper when you have a scandal is a dumb idea.
Even so, good on him for speaking out.
That definitely puts things in a different perspective. It can't really damage his career much when his career is 20+ years old. At this point, if he doesn't have his own side gig, lots of companies, big and small, would still want him.
"See? You can trust us, otherwise Tim Bray wouldn't still be working here."
He didn't quit over those. He quit over what seems to me to be flagrant disrespect for basic human rights.
I want to hope most companies who can make use of a person of Tim's skills - and those are few and far between - do not condone that kind of behavior and would appreciate him for it, not pass him over.
You know. But this was a f good post. Yeah. He's friends with Tom Waits, dudes, and tons of other people, he'll get jobs like hell.
Brave move though. I love you Tim Bray been reading the blog for ages it seems. Tim things up. Good luck onwards.
Check out your email signature Tim Bray. Good luck onwards
EDIT: I might be totally wrong but I read somewhere he's friends with yes that guy.
No. A couple of more questionable companies may choose to stay away, but the majority of companies would love to have Tim on board. Even if just for a few years or part-time.
Most employees and owners think of themselves and their company as good so will not be concerned with having a man of moral as their employee. Not that they all are 100% "good" but most think they are.
Also, Tim Bray is well respected and most companies know they can gain a lot by him helping out, and they know that.
The business owners I know frequently complain about how difficult it is to fire underperforming employees. Trying to ensure they're legally protected from lawsuits requires keeping the inadequate employee on payroll for months in order to collect documentation that shows the employee is not fulfilling their contract. My guess is most business owners would be loathe to hire anybody with a history of making this process even more difficult for their employer.
Merely quitting would be one thing, but when you publicly excoriate your former employer like this (including allegations of racism and sexism without evidence), you become a massive liability to future employers. Quite frankly, I would never hire this man if I were a business owner. And the fact that the leadership of a left-leaning company like Amazon also seems to disagree with him makes me think I'm probably not alone.
I'd gladly be radioactive for companies that fire whistleblowers and worker rights activists.
I believe Tim is making a real sacrifice here, which is why it's so rare and impressive.
I remember my dad spent all of about two weeks "retired" (resigned in protest in similar circumstances, but from a staff of maybe 100) before finding a part-time job at a local charity he liked.
> Progressive friends, people whose opinions I respect, give me shit about working for Amazon. I claim that the problem is capitalism, flaccid labor laws, and lame antitrust enforcement, not any particular company; maybe I’m right.
And now he's basically admitting he was wrong. Impressive.
From today's post:
> Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.
In Ontario, Canada, which has a lot of auto plants, there's actually a controlled experiment of sorts that is going on: the unions are in the GM, Ford, and Chrysler plants since forever. Meanwhile they've been trying to get into the Toyota/Lexus plant for a long time and the workers always vote 'no'.
Same industry, same geographic area and culture, different results.
Turns out that if you respect your employees they often respect you back.
Show me one corporation that doesn't have some scandal in it. Or even better a multinational corporation.
If you play by the "rules" and don't anger anyone, you're going to lose to everyone not playing by them.
There are bound to be employers who would like to be seen that way.
Having a toxic work culture in warehouses seems a dumb idea too.
One of these is not like the others. What in the world is dirty about working on national defence? It's a positive thing, IMHO.
The careful planning to ensure that every possible Congressional district gets a subcontract under the F-35 program is a blatant signal as to how this all operates.
The part of the DoD that actually gets things done despite the red tape, obstructionists, career ass sitters, grifters and outright thieves, has my eternal respect.
That our military manages to project power even though there are ten thousand competing agendas is a miracle of the modern day.
former FT2(SS)
Start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Engineers at companies that sell missiles to Saudi Arabia have to take a more nuanced view, or a more laid-back view. As these are not universal, they have to be selected for at hiring time.
He's also 64, not far from retirement age, he may not want to work again and instead devote himself to passion projects and being with friends and family, and who could blame him?
Most people think of themselves as fundamentally good. Considering someone who has made decisions based on (well-argued) ethical beliefs to be dangerous would contradict their image of self. And if there's one thing people abhor, it's being inconsistent in their believes about themselves. Ergo: nobody not working for Uber or Facebook is going to have a problem with a do-gooder.
If you don't believe me, consider this: Do you believe this guy, Tim Bray, had both the power as well as the mindset to hire someone who had made a similar stand at a previous job?
Or consider the overwhelming majority in this thread seemingly supportive of this action, and registering disagreement with the idea of not hiring such people. Do you believe they all change their opinion if they are ever promoted into management? Would you?
There is also a vast universe of companies that just aren't in a position to generate the sort of ethical controversies Amazon invites, either by being small or by selling innocuous products.
As a cultural phenomenon, this idea is similar to believing that corporations never do anything that isn't in direct pursuit of shareholder value (they frequently do, sometimes even quietly where it doesn't even generate positive PR).
In a certain sense, these are examples of Keynesian Beauty Contests, where everyone considers the girl-next-door type to be pretties, but bets on the blonde playmate with fake breasts to be chosen by the majority.
In the first case the President put in quite a lot of effort and determined the person probably acted ethically before extending the offer. The individual (later proven correct) was exceedingly grateful and has since been incredibly loyal to the organization. He absolutely could have been recruited away a thousand times since but he hasn’t left because they gave him a chance when no one else would. His hiring has been, without a doubt, an excellent investment.
The second case was more or less the complete opposite. The CEO hired a friend who had been a “whistleblower”. His claims against his prior employer weren’t entirely without merit but it later became clear they were... tenuous. And it turned out he was a giant headache. He was difficult to work with, made mountains out of molehills, and didn’t last long at the company. The company lost quite a bit of money getting rid of him, the CEO lost a lot of respect internally, and he lost a friend. I think it’s unlikely the CEO would ever consider hiring a whistleblower again.
I don’t think companies or hiring managers see a whistleblower and are immediately turned off by the prospect of hiring someone with morals. It’s more that there are two sides to every story and they often don’t think it’s worth the effort to get the information necessary to make the decision: is this person a problem-solver or a problem-starter? If there’s another candidate with 90% of the qualifications that doesn’t require similar vetting it’s just easier and less risky to hire that person instead.
That being said, I’ve seen first hand that if you’re willing to do a little due diligence a recent whistleblower can be a really fantastic hire.
Everybody thinks they are the hero of their own story. In fact, its almost required that individuals view themselves in this way. If you think you are evil and cannot justify your actions, it is really hard to get out of bed in the morning.
Exactly what this whole conversation made me feel.
I guess people collecitvely want to have black characters in power to do the dirty, making their live easier overall. I don't see other reason "western" societies don't change people in power when they actually can.
The only way out is collective social or legal action (often seeded or inspired by martyrs).
Self-oppression? Sure. But it does not mean that oppression doesn't exist. It's just that it is self caused, and self here refers to society as a whole. Oppression exists whether it's self-inflicted or inflicted by one/many upon another/others.
See [1] pdf page 10.
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Please tell me you are being sarcastic.
> people collecitvely want to have black characters in power to do the dirty, making their live easier overall.
As if the appointment of people in power was decided democratically.
> Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.
A good number of engineers refuse to even interview with FAANGs and other nasty companies on principle and they don't get any public praise.
Also the turnover of engineers in Amazon is among the highest in the industry and only a few stay beyond 5 years.
In comparison, refusing to work for some FAANG takes 10 times more courage for someone out of college and without saving.
Tim, being a distinguished engineer, likely got a lot of RSUs. So while true his initial sign-on RSUs likely vested already, a sizable chunk did not fully vest yet.
So yeah I'd wager he still walked from ~1 million.
The RSUs are essentially going to show up as long as you stay employed. The same is not true of your salary (as a lot of people are learning first hand during this economic downturn). The value of RSUs changes with the value of the company, which is also not true with salary. While you could argue that RSUs granted at hiring might just be part of your comp, refreshers are generally seen as having been earned based on past performance, with income deferred to encourage retention.
As a consequence, when you leave a job and go work somewhere else, it's far more likely that you will find a commensurate salary somewhere else than something commensurate with unvested RSUs; even if you get something to match the RSUs, it's likely not going to "vest" on the schedule you once had.
Huh? I'm pretty sure they have to pay you a salary to keep you employed.
> refreshers are generally seen as having been earned based on past performance, with income deferred to encourage retention.
If they won't pay you money until you do X, then the money is payment for X, not payment for previous work, even if they try to market it as "deferred" payment for previous work. Gotta be clever enough to see through the doublespeak.
Future salary: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
Unvested RSUs: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
See the similarity? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck etc.
The whole concept of unvested RSUs is basically a clever psychological trick to exploit the endowment effect to make quitting seem more punitive than it actually is. People react more negatively to losing money that is "already theirs" than losing future income. If you trick people into thinking their $1 million of unvested RSUs is "already theirs" then they are more averse to quitting and losing that $1 million then they would be to quitting and losing the same $1 million in future salary.
> As a consequence, when you leave a job and go work somewhere else, it's far more likely that you will find a commensurate salary somewhere else than something commensurate with unvested RSUs; even if you get something to match the RSUs, it's likely not going to "vest" on the schedule you once had.
That's obviously not true, since people in RSU-ville switch jobs all the time, which they wouldn't do if the new job weren't at least matching their old RSUs.
That is pretty much in the definition of employment. However, what is not in the definition of employment is how much salary they pay you.
> If they won't pay you money until you do X, then the money is payment for X, not payment for previous work, even if they try to market it as "deferred" payment for previous work. Gotta be clever enough to see through the doublespeak.
Right, but the "gotta do X" in this case is, "still come in to work".
> Future salary: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
So that part isn't true, as many people have recently discovered. Your salary can be cut, either explicitly or implicitly by inflation.
> The whole concept of unvested RSUs is basically a clever psychological trick to exploit the endowment effect to make quitting seem more punitive than it actually is.
I think you misunderstand the value of RSUs. The trick you are listing above could be handled just as simply with "bonus cash payments". RSUs have other attributes beyond the simple endowment effect.
> If you trick people into thinking their $1 million of unvested RSUs is "already theirs" then they are more averse to quitting and losing that $1 million then they would be to quitting and losing the same $1 million in future salary.
I've never seen that play out. If anything, I've seen, relative to their value, people pay more attention to their future salary than their future unvested RSUs. Pay someone more than their market rate in salary, and it becomes amazingly psychologically difficult for them to step away from the job.
> That's obviously not true, since people in RSU-ville switch jobs all the time, which they wouldn't do if the new job weren't at least matching their old RSUs.
You may not have seen it, but I certainly have... first hand.
There's this reality that as you get farther away from the time of issuance, if the company is growing and doing well, the value of the RSUs go up. It can consequently become very difficult for a prospective new employer to match the value of the RSUs, as they effectively become worth more than the market value of the employee's skills. The employee might hope that new employer RSUs can similarly grow in value like the ones they have from their current employer, but the same growth could happen with their extant RSUs. This is a key aspect of how RSUs can be different from "future salary".
The key to golden handcuffs is that they get tighter as time goes on.
RSU values will also go down if shares prices go down. In practice they are much more volatile than salary, people's RSUs fall in value by >50% all the time, but it's pretty rare for people to get a >50% cut in salary.
Sure, rationally it's easier to quit. But humans are not perfectly rational spherical volumes. Quitting means not having a place to go every day, not seeing the tribe you're used to spending most of your day with, not knowing what "normal" will look like tomorrow, and signing yourself up for making a series of very difficult, stressful executive decisions around what to do next.
That's a bit patronizing. I quit Amazon myself.
I'd be worried about being sued for defamation, etc.
UK laws are so horrible that the USA passed a law that UK libel judgements are not enforceable here. See https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-10940211 for more.
Canada is somewhere between the two.
Incidentally the country with the worst libel laws in the world is Australia.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fighting-for-jus...
> Filing a report to police is not in itself grounds for a defamation action, but if a rape victim goes public with their allegations, a criminal complaint can be filed against them.
My God, that's horrifying.
Too bad I can no longer edit my comment
Caveat: companies where everyone is a VP probably have another title that denotes senior leadership: Managing Director, Partner, etc.
"At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people. ¶
That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned."
I think I would agree that making media rounds would be a crude move, but there are actions you can take along a continuum before that (like this blog post) that might help apply external pressure while still having access to the internal levers.
It reminds me a bit of Congresspeople who gain the courage to speak honestly after they've left their government roles. Yes, it's still courageous, and there are good reasons not to speak out while you're inside the system, but damn, you've just given up your best chance at making actual change.
For roles where you are a voice of the company, you need people who will use channels, because the alternative is literally bad for the company in ways that are very concrete.
Put more viscerally, I would not want one of my peers going to the media before they talk to me and give me a chance to address their concerns.
For what it's worth, I'm sure he would consider this a feature. Given his already stated beliefs, I'm sure he wouldn't want to work at a company that would be turned off by this. (just to be clear, I don't actually know Tim. I've never heard of him before this).
I think assuming this is revealing of one's own attitude more than anything.
I also feel like big companies have people convinced that they're being paid a lot because they're exceptional or special in some way. Really, they're being compensated for either stress or location or working more than 40 hours or giving away their morals.
I say this because I know a few people who made this kind of decision. And speaking with them about it, it wasn't difficult. They just had a more complete compensation model to evaluate against.
Well, shittier.
Anyway, this is what a principled tech leader looks like.
No shit. Cognitive dissonance (in justification of Amazon's policies) even from some of the smartest people I know is a sight to behold: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249272
Agree:
People can quit and say what they want.
People in high paying jobs can quit and often find an equivalent replacement; perhaps have one lined up before they leave; in such a case the impact is limited.
But if you quit on principle and take a public stand on it other large companies are more likely to treat your decision as a sign you are dangerous. So it takes not just the ability but also the willingness to take such action.
> It also potentially damages Tim's ability to get hired in the future
Can confirm that it'll have zero effect. I know a guy who, when he left Amazon, sent an e-mail to about 5,000 people parodying the scene from Half Baked where the guy curses out his coworkers and quits. Amazon's HR was furious with him, but all that came of it was that they didn't give him severance pay. He didn't have any higher purpose in quitting either, he just wanted more money and to work on something more interesting somewhere else.
Apparently he's on some sort of blacklist within Amazon, but he's been doing fine at another FAANG company for years.
"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."
What about these people that were fired? When people get fired for whistle blowing, what does that mean for their future job prospects? Does it severely hurt your chances at a faang?
As a PhD student of color guided by a moral compass who has to make employment decisions soon, this is an important question for me.
Is race as issue here? I thought they were fired for whistle blowing? Is he saying a white whistle blower wouldn't have been fired?
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I'd like to think at least when you are talented enough, sticking true to your nature probably serves you better than to do otherwise.
Some people are wise enough to understand that having 20 million vs 10 million does not actually do much to improve your quality of life.
Edit: don't you think some liberal leaning corporate behemoth would want this guy whoever he is to use as a pawn because he took an ethical stand and can lend a patina of legitimacy to their gray area shady dealings? the world has suddenly become too complex for the IT crowd it seems
> Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance state
You seem very confused.
Tell me O noble throwaway warrior
Edit: Fuuuu this is the comment that brought you out of hibernation? Geez welcome back to the land of the living
The first one was a large bank doing agile by coercion aka forced sprints to hell
A bunch of diddling directors convinced an airhead VP that it would boost productivity and then they got an army of middling managers who weren't at all invested to do their bidding
I was there for a year raising a fuss until I was let go and some of my code is still running in production
The things I've seen would make your skin crawl as a client of the bank but you've probably seen your fair share estimating points as days was the least of it and this is from people who call themselves university graduates and senior developers
The next was the largest private software company in North America a telecom giant again with the forced agile shit but with a different spin the motto here is 'initiative is punishable' but I just can't picture myself getting old with this tshirted bunch of wannabe googlers I went on the warpath and was personally let go by a VP how many of you coffee2coders have even sat down with a VP much less been sent packing by one?
I got what I wanted out of them though the memories are priceless including trips to California and Vegas the type of shit that being pliable and compliant never nets you
Finally an agency back home a notorious shithole of a ne'er do well agency so full of their own leadership bravado and entitlement that it somehow manages to hoodwink all sorts of rich clients a perennial start-up with no long term vision except selling out I had the distinction of being let go after showing them all up and walked away from the game with a master's in how false conspiracy has ruined software
A lot of us seem to believe we need to check our emotions and enhics at the door but it didn't work in that great war and it won't work here either
Listen every large organization becomes a leftist surveillance state unless we drastically work against that tendency
As systems professionals we should know that by now but we collectively turn a blind eye need I remind you who was selling counting machines to the bad guys during that war in Europe all those years ago? How many engineers had the courage to step into their 1:1 and indict their managers for treason back then?
If you haven't become a corporate outcast by 40 you're a traitor
Edit -- before you say it's my way of claiming sour grapes for my failings as a software engineer you shouldn't be surprised that every corporation is essentially the same corporation with different plutocrats at the helm repeating each other's tired monologues to the same masses of unwashed pizza eating feature trolls
It's the same in north America as it is in socialist dictatorships only here the managers pretend they're our friends and there they're our dads
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bjpj/amazon-vp-tim-bray...
Look it's made the cool kid news
But that it's repeated again in the 3rd paragraph, and that the final paragraph then mentions that it'll make Tim "hard to hire"?
There's no basis in evidence: Tim's wikipedia page shows a history of activism consistent with taking this kind of stand, and a staggering resume that indicates it's unlikely he'll have any trouble finding work if he wants it.
I'm pretty disappointed in HN that this is the top-voted comment on this article..
It's hard to rise to the top in a morally lax organisation without making some compromises on the way there.
Furthermore, it's easy to take a stand when you're financially secure because of those compromises.
So in my opinion the OP is right: it's good for Tim to take a stance if truly, deep down, he feels this is morally wrong, but ultimately him being outspoken means little when compared to those who did the right thing from the start and as such never got a position to make a headline on HN in the first place.
Tim is assured of a cozy job with a "good guy" startup regardless. If genuine, it's certainly a personal victory for him, but it doesn't mean much for the rest of us (except, cynically, that selling out and then raising your profile by denouncing the party you sold out to is a valid career path).
Losing money is hard, but if you reframe it as being rewarded $1M (with pretty low marginal utility after $10M) by losing your freedom, then such a choice is only rational.
I'll cop to not being completely au fait with current right-wing rhetoric, but I thought a core part of "virtue signalling" (insofar as it might actually exist beyond "position I disagree with", which your post suggests it might not) was that it was low-effort / low-cost. In other words, no action where the alternative is non-trivial monetary gain could be virtue signalling.
Between this and Bray's arrest for environment activism previously, I'd propose that this is not "virtue signalling" but simply being virtuous.
Of course it is weird because the person doing the accusation of hypocrisy is actually against the virtuous act, and is thus for people not believing in the virtue.
It's a weird rhetorical trick that sounds sort of unhinged the more you hear it.
To put things into context, I hear/see the above issue orders of magnitude less often than people parroting right wing talking points, but in the cases where I think the accusation is well-founded, I don't think it's about hypocrisy at its root. I think it's about being disingenuous. Then again we may be using two words to mean the same thing.
Huh. I’m sure I was introduced to the idea with the exact opposite. It was described as the moral equivalent of Rolex watches: pointlessly expensive if considered as a timepiece, and ownership of a fake has negative consequences.
But I agree with the general point that most of the people who use the phrase — and all who use it as an insult — do so without self awareness. It’s pretty much universal in human behaviour.
If you think people are being hypocritical then try to come up with a factual argument about why it may be, assuming by default that any moral stance is necessarily empty posturing is intellectually bankrupt and frankly quite terrifying.
Made worse by the fact that some famous and powerful people are phonies who in fact do things for bullshit reasons, which you can be convinced of by their past behavior. On top of that, doing stuff on the internet for attention is pretty common. People then make the leap to "doing X thing I don't like is virtue signaling". It's not that I think it never happens, people aren't always sincere and I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, but the accusation itself is just a baseless smear if it's not accompanied by something corroborating.
We should be skeptical, not oafishly dismissive.
Assuming this is the real true reason (I would trust Tim, but you never know, so just being explicit here), it takes huge balls to do something like this.
The economic loss has to be somewhat taken in relation to your total wealth (e.g. if you lose $1M by quitting but you already have $10M+ in the bank, it's not as hard as if you had zero in the bank), but still... Very few people would have the courage to walk away from big sums of money purely on principle.
Again, assuming this is all true, I admire Tim for this move, and plaude him. I had my issues with Amazon when I was there (2008-2014), some of them made me uncomfortable, but I would have never had the courage to walk away.
It also potentially damages Tim's ability to get hired in the future, as some other large organization might not like his behavior with Amazon and be reluctant to bring him on board. At the same time, hopefully there are smaller startups that want exactly this type of courage and rectitude and will hire him for his talents.
Good luck, Tim.