Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. Other employees aren’t nearly as lucky.

People working on oil rigs take serious risks, but they also make a lot of money relative to their skill set because otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to do the job.

Every company I’ve worked for has been a great place to work for some categories of people. If you weren’t in one of those preferred categories, your treatment could be anything from okay to grueling overwork depending on how easily they thought they could replace you.

As engineers we’re often lucky to be on the most generous end of this spectrum, especially in recent years. However, I made the mistake of joining a company where the CEO believed having engineers was an “unfortunate necessity” to run the business. It went about as well as you’d expect. Unreasonable expectations, demands, working hours, deadlines, and a constant groveling at our salaries.

IT admins are an example of chronically under-appreciated employees. They keep things running and supported in an office, but I’ve seen them treated as disposable in too many offices.

I’m guessing that’s about to change with all the generative models being developed.

These models might be useful for generating character concept art, but that’s a tiny fraction of the overall workflow.

It’s an interesting process but more trying to include X in a workflow than a significant advantage. Imagine trying to do a flight scene where characters are tossing fireballs at each other with that workflow.

That said, it’s very possible for this to be used on a specific movie. The pick a plot that works with the limitations and let the jank be part of the art stile…

There’s a common issue in AI generated still art for dynamic shots like someone dunking a basketball to have extra arms. This doesn’t show up in pictures of people standing still because the training set is completely dominated by people standing with their arms to the sides. But in dynamic shots either seems fine and it doesn’t understand the underlying limitations the way a human does.

I don’t think it quite needs AGI to “make a 30 second clip of a fireball fight” but it’s much much harder than a still image of a “wizard holding a fireball.”

My province in Canada has treated healthcare workers like absolute shit and now the leaders and the people who voted for them are genuinely shocked that those healthcare workers are leaving the industry or finding jobs elsewhere.

It's absolutely insane because you need these people to train the next generation of healthcare workers which isn't going to happen now because they're leaving.

It’s the heart of convincing people to work hard for very little. If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. The TikTok dances are nice, though.

most doctors don't participate in clinical trials, they just do what they are told to do by protocols.

(of course most startups fail, and they do whatever is hype at the time.)

Startups aren’t particularly human in average, neither in their goals nor internally.

It’s just that, at the beginning of a new industry, all the low hanging fruits like “Register everyone in a big directory with photos”, “Make a video app where you can learn things” seem like advancing humanity, because it’s a leap forward. But they’re no better than in a mature industry, doing proper business.

A doctor, a nurse talking with a dying person is advancing humanity. You, noticing a depressed man in the office; a kid talking to the bullied kid in class, that’s advancing humanity.

No, Jira isn’t advancing humanity, no more than Carrefour negotiating rebates on vegetables against farmers.

And ... selling weapons might be positive might be negative. Selling weapons to defend against Russia might be positive right now. Selling weapons to dumbass US civilians who then can't keep it safe seems negative.

How is talking to anyone dying actually advancing humanity? Hitting the brakes on the cult of meaningless clinging to life in hospitals would be some advance. Allowing people to say goodbye while they still can...

Jira definitely is from hell, but when it was not this cruel cloud-crazy incumbent it was doing some things better than the alternatives back then.

I'm not saying startups are good because they are small/new/risk-taking, but I'm trying to say that incumbents are usually bad because they have more monopolistic tendencies (than the startups that want of course also usually want to eat the market).

Both models match to some extend (i.e. potential to make life hell for everyone), when all productive capital is allocated to a single company.

Make the system shitty so that there is a justification to privatize. AB is just the most balls-out about it since Danielle Smith is basically a female Bill O'Reilly who got elected to Premier (aka Governor for the USA-ians).

Boomers dying earlier than their parents, and stressing the system in large numbers, are also stretching these systems. Even if a NDP-led-double-down-on-healthcare approach there would be serious issues due to demographics.

incompetence only matters so long as the company is doing badly. happy employees are tangential to successful companies.

Human resources, what a concept huh?

It's a little odd to use the abstraction when you know exactly the person you're dealing with, but like any jargon, people who live it all day end up using when vernacular is called for (e.g. the electrical engineer who tells their spouse that the dishwasher's heating element has become too resistant).

I think it's probably that, yeah. Just felt like a very de-humanizing label, for someone who isn't used to that world.

Beep boop, I am resource, here to provide service until ready for replacement with like kind, boop beep.

A pattern I've repeatedly seen is companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. This process enables executives to make decisions about costs, priorities and project funding. This works for it's purpose, however, the roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the fiction that people are interchangeable, that people can be generically abstracted over.

I agree with your whole post, but there is a nuance here that's important. This fallacy becomes true in a project large enough to average out individual variance. If you need 5000 software engineers, you probably don't care about their individual traits (you might care about the selection process and aggregate traits, but that's another level up).

So at a certain level of executive, this fallacy serves them well. And it probably serves their reports (who might manage 750 people) decently. But their reports, managing 150 people, hear the language and see the behaviors of their bosses and emulate this belief in fungibility, and it really breaks down at this scale. Even worse for the next levels down, who might manage 30 and 5 people respectively. Yet everyone who sits in at an important meeting of skip-levels and execs sees this model used for resourcing.

Organizations are not just people. Those days are a distant memory. The people will be the most replaceable components, due to their ephemeral nature.

source?

> claims that Amazon failed to warn employees of dangerous weather or provide safe shelter before a tornado slammed the Edwardsville facility

Such behaviour certainly warrants a lawsuit, and I hope Amazon gets into deep trouble for that, but what killed that employee was a tornado.

Now the meaning of "kill" would probably include using force to have an employee being hit by that tornado, but the article doesn't seem to mention anything like that either. The details are left out, so what most likely happened is that the employee was threatened with being fired (explicitly, implied, or at a different time) if they don't continue to work, so they did, and then got hit by a tornado.

So to clear this up: Are we actually talking about a case of manslaughter happening at Amazon, or is this a weird way of pointing out their abysmal workplace safety?

If a mining company doesn't warn their miners of an earthquake, and it kills their workers, it's absolutely the mining company's fault. So how can this be anyone else's fault, but Amazon's?

> So to clear this up: Are we actually talking about a case of manslaughter happening at Amazon, or is this a weird way of pointing out their abysmal workplace safety?

Is there really a difference? The definition of manslaughter depends on the juridistiction, but I think this is clearly a case gross negligence manslaughter, by Amazon.

Why are we even discussing this? I never asked whose fault it is, and actually asserted from the beginning that I think it is Amazon's fault. Such working conditions should not even be allowed by law.

What I did ask for is evidence that "Amazon literally killed their employee", which nobody has provided yet, and probably never will, because it is becoming very clear that it never happened, and that this is just a case of mis-using the word "literally" for dramatic effect.

See also, nerds favorite superhero: https://youtu.be/9jh4Mpgbi4A

We're descending into semantics. But I think many justice systems would classify the above as some type of homicide.

Are you implying that this word game ("Ha! Amazon didn't literally kill him by a physical attack!") somehow changes anything in terms of blame? Or are you just arguing semantics for the fuck of it?

> this is just a case of mis-using the word "literally" for dramatic effect

No, this is you not understanding that words have different meanings in different contexts. Amazon has literally killed them, as in, performed a manslaughter. The fact that it is not a person only changes the mechanism - instead of stabbing them, they performed gross negligence. Why you consider that a "literal manslaughter" must have an element of physical assault is beyond me, but in the end, it's just your own definition of the word.

From a legal point of view, yes Amazon is a person, and that’s the ground on which it can be sued, unlike "Nature" that generated the tornado — though lately things started to move a bit on that side all around the world.[2,3,4,6,7,8,9]

But even that is missing the forest for the tree I think. It seems to me that the point raised by moring is more like can these words be honestly stated as accurate as when The Mail & Guardian titles "The Nigerian government is killing its citizens — again[1]". Although it can be argued that this geopolitical entity is a pure human fiction, there are actual humans that are willingly planning to kill other people.

As awful as the resulting situation might be, I doubt that within Amazon case they were plans and orders to deliberately kill annoying employees. It doesn’t mean Amazon behavior is acceptable, nor is the fact that some government have let Amazon build this situation.

[1] https://mg.co.za/africa/2020-10-21-the-nigerian-government-i...

[2] https://theselfless.org/mother-nature-a-legal-person/

[3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transnational-enviro...

[4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/nature-legal-personho...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature_in_Ecuador

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature#Related_initi...

[7] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102022/celebrating-vict...

[8] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-46523-0_...

[9] https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publicati...

Yes, that was what I meant. It was admittedly fueled by the confusion when I started from "did I miss some major news", as well as a lack of knowledge of what "literally" means, as indicated by the other responses.

Had a rough couple of weeks and it seems it's getting the best of me.

I don't see anyone here say Amazon murdered (deliberately killed) people, but arguing they killed people. Kill can mean murder, which implies intent/doing so deliberately, but can also mean manslaughter, which does not require it to be deliberate.

To my mind, "kill" wasn’t something you might inadvertedly do, except maybe for bugs and thus small entities.

Anyway, once again, in no way I mean to play Amazon attorney here.

followed by

>What I did ask for is evidence that "Amazon literally killed their employee"

employees died, you agreed it was Amazon's fault, if it is Amazon's fault that an employee died then Amazon literally killed that employee. Notice it was never said Amazon is legally culpable for the deaths of employees which has a different meaning in English than 'literally killed'.

>this is just a case of mis-using the word "literally" for dramatic effect.

I must admit I find the grammatical high-horseplay evinced by the last bit rather weird, for the reasons I have outlined.

Warn of an EARTHQUAKE?

Am I reading your words right? Are you accusing hypothetical companies of negligence because they fail to do the impossible?

Bad analogy: tornadoes are predictable. Try to stick with reality.

But you understood what I was trying to say, so for what it's worth, it served it's purpose.

Can you explain?

1. company pays workers to work in warehouse

2. tornado warnings happen

3. company doesn't warn workers in warehouse

4. warehouse in a country where tornadoes happen often doesn't have a tornado shelter

5. tornado kills workers

I hope this makes it more clear! Feel free to ask if things are still confusing.

As far as I'm aware in the U.S. and Canada it's legally considered an act of god, a natural disaster, etc...

I am not a lawyer, I don't consider this particular question (whether it's legal to kill your workers or not) relevant to the question of whether they're responsible for their death (they are), and I don't consider lawmakers as the ultimate authority of ethics.

This does not seem to square with your prior comment.

Law comes from ethics, anyway. It's an imperfect reflection of the ideal of justice, and in this case, it is my personal opinion that what Amazon did should be considered gross negligence manslaughter.

In any case, they literally killed people.

Negligence causing death is a thing.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/report-amazon-employee-jumps-o...

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-though...

It prompted a lot of discussions in my workplace cafeteria and I recall it was discussed at length on Blind. The consensus I saw at the time was that Amazon has a really rough culture and something needed to change.

I have not worked at Amazon, so I cannot speak directly to any of this, though.

Regarding "death," warehouse workers are seriously injured twice as much as workers in other warehouses[6]. Amazon received numerous citations from OSHA last year for reasons including underreporting and mis-classifying incidents involving serious injuries and illness, as well as withholding information to OSHA. It's gotten bad enough even shareholders are pushing for change[7].

[1]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/they-think-they... [2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-nlrb-idINKBN28... [3]https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/23/22590134/amazon-harassmen... [4]https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2021/05/19/amazon-fi... [5]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/after-3-years-seattles... [6]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/amazon-warehouse-worke... [7]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-shareholder-revolt...

There have been multiple reports in the Seattle Times about how brutal of a place to work for. It's been a while but I recall a headline about how often an employee broke down and cried at their desk.

Open secret basically at this point.

I would go further and say: if your process cannot tolerate the things you should expect when working with humans (e.g. someone needing to go to the toilet, someone staying home sick), it is just a badly designed process.

As you said the cost of overreaching will show somewhere else. Maybe not immediately, but it will. And if you are unlucky it will show up with a literal bang and blood on your hands.

I'd say it entirely depends on industry, if it allows you to buy a bunch of expensive machinery that makes work of worker more efficient - solo craftsman can't afford and don't have volume to pay for say fancy CNC router - sure it can.

But on the other end, like programming, generally the bigger company is the more levels of indirection and waste happens, and small team can vastly outpace in per-developer productivity a big team.

Now when that team needs to buy 10 million worth of hardware to train their AI stuff that flips back to "corporate with bigger resources enhance productivity

Choice.

They don't have a choice about getting up and going through the M-F slog. They have to so that they can afford to live.

For personal projects, people have choice and can weigh in all of the other things their lives need. Including recovery time from the M-F slog. Their contributions to personal projects are not coerced.

Few actually make it and most who try and fail are pretty miserable later on.

The daily grind is also miserable, but it's a predictable misery.

I do side gigs occasionally and if I were to live off this, I would fail - first and foremost because until recently I was too afraid to charge people amounts that make it worth it for me.

The saying "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" seems reasonable at first glance, but it could also be something someone tells you to prevent you from seeking a better place beyond his influence.

Joining a larger entity insulates you from most of these directions and ways of trouble, well until the higher levels.

So what? Catastrophic, disastrous failure has long since been priced in. Remember the Exxon Valdez, one of the worst environmental disasters in history? Almost completely forgotten and to my knowledge no person was held accountable other than the captain who had to pay a 50.000$ fine.

As long as C-level execs can drive a company to the ground with completely no personal repercussions, why should they not do anything to maximize their ROI (=their bonus payments)?