The Rumors You've Heard Are True
Which rumors, you ask? Why, those would be about the recent bad press Amazon has been getting.
You know about Amazon, don't you? It's that place online that is sucking the profit from every corner of our economy. Everyone complains out loud about Wal*Mart sucking profit; but that's because it pays and treats its employees so poorly. Amazon treats its employees as bad or worse, but at least most of them are well paid.
I have good friends who rode this tyrant of an employer back in the '90s. Fresh from a stint at the State Department, traveling the world and being office functionaries, this married couple returned and briefly started back at their own life. The Captain at the family returned to the boat company where I first met him. Just a few months later, he quit. His wife had started at this start-up; he joined.
And a few months after that, I saw him and his wife strolling on the street, which was unusual. They didn't normally have that kind of time. They encouraged me to apply at this company . . . which was growing at something like 20% a month. Or was it 50%? I forget.
After which time I didn't see much of them. Oh, he called a few times, once (years later) to arrange an after-work beer. I said sure, but was taken aback by his next statement: "How does Wednesday sound?"
That call came on Friday.
Sure enough, I headed out Wednesday to the appointed bar, ready to show off my newly cludged-together electric motorcycle. He never showed up.
We saw quite a bit of each other about eight years later after he dropped by the electric vehicle shop where then I worked to offer me a job. He had been dropped by the Big A, cashed in his stock options, and decided to run a boat company for a change. I hired on as his first employee.
I haven't thought much about those days lately. Weirdness at work last week changed that.
As you might know, I drive transit now. After I got married, I didn't want to stay out driving boats until all hours. I young woman boarded the other day needing directions. She hardly ever took the bus at that time, the late morning going on afternoon, long after her commuter options stopped running for the morning, but before the afternoon options start again.
When someone sits in the seat just to the right and behind the driver, some of us call that the Confessional Seat. Mostly, it's to ask questions about scheduling or service. Often, this leads to complaints and a demand for explanations. Quite often, people just need someone to talk to (or someone who can't just get off their seat to avoid getting talked to).
She needed to talk.
In the course of deciding the best way to get home quickly-"to check the 50 emails I got since I left work, all marked 'Urgent'"-it turns out she needed to dump. She wouldn't have taken that job if it weren't for the burden of the student loans. Her co-workers have lost priorities about what is important, like a strong social life. They think work is more than what you do for a paycheck; it's a competition against the world.
And I agreed. Yes, her generation is getting completely screwed by loan debt that is completely avoidable in a civilized country. Yes, I have three brothers who all worked tech in various capacities at the same mega-corp, hers; yes, they report a similar autistic spectrum disorder when it comes to who gets to manage, and the priorities such people expect followed. Yes, yes, yes.
I went a bit further. Remember my last post, where I shared the heuristic terminology of human behavior, and how it comes mostly from drafting? I shared that with modification; never mind our built environment outside computers, I expounded that the rules of creating good code are far and away exactly the wrong rules for living a healthy social life in the natural world.
So we pulled into her stop, and she got up to leave . . . and she hugged me.
Hugged might be too weak a word. She clung to me as a swimmer might cling to a buoy in the middle of a vast and open ocean.
I guess a confession might be what she needed. No, a confession without penance for her spouting of techy heresy was exactly what she needed.
All of this, the rider needing to be heard, the friends I lost briefly to the Big A, all of this came back to me while reading this amazing article about how Seattle is dead and how Amazon killed it.
South Lake Union used to be a dump. Now, as in Brooklyn (as in San Francisco, as in Portland, as in Austin), cubical buildings and yuppie boutiques have emerged from the carcass of industry. South Lake Union is no longer a neighborhood; it is a boomtown, in all the worst senses. Not since 1897 has such a gold rush so remade the Seattle waterfront. SLU’s gender ratios, makeshift culture, and inflated prices recall the Klondike. A cruel irony of tech is that it should free work from geographical constraints; “you can work anywhere,” goes the bromide. If only. In real life, wealth concentrates in faceless hubs more than ever before.
Boomtowns like SLU are an effort to keep tech employees inside a self-sustaining, non-intrusive bubble. This is little more than a libertarian myth. The bubble leaks and spreads blight in all directions. New condos blemish old neighborhoods more than they relieve pressure on their housing stock. Everything around South Lake Union has declined in culture and risen in price.
It's a good piece. Read the whole thing. Remember, though, that this isn't the first time this has happened.
That rider who needed my ears and shoulder to soak up some woes? She was transiting from Redmond to her home in Issaquah. These are East-side "cities" in name only, now sprawling exurbs with only vestigial old-town cores surrounded by a choking auto-centric asphyxiation. Redmond is home to Microsoft's "campus." If Seattle is dead from Amazon's flood of money-without-culture, the source of the plague that killed it came from 'Soft-ville. That poor rider was a Microserf.
Though the Big Softie started the infection that led to the necrotic flooding, Amazon was far from the only company that caught it. RealNetworks had its day, and managed to get one of its founders elected to the Senate. Expedia, Groupon, Cray-hell, even Live Journal started here. And those are just the names I can remember without doing any research. There are others in the Petri dish phase of their planned growth, all hoping to attract the next Nick Hanauer and go totally Amazon themselves.
It goes back even further. Seattle used to be a hub of worker solidarity, a central part of the progressive movement's move to unionize workers and destroy the sweat shops all too common at the turn of the last century. Years later, a guy named Nordstrom moves back from that gold rush mentioned in the quote above with enough money-got by selling a worthless claim to someone with more dollars than sense-to open a shoe shop, one that has metastacized into the high-end clothier. They have a saying at Nordstrom: Rule One, the customer is always right. If the customer is wrong, refer to Rule One.
I fully admit it: Nordstrom has done wonders for service culture here. As in it's possible to find good service. In many places around the country, good service is rare; here, bad service is striking, as in when you get it you are struck by that fact.
Yes, it is possible to give someone good service and enjoy your job. I do that every day. It is also possible to blame the employee for everything. And when that attitude carries further, it is possible to prevent the employees from acting against abuses that are very real, even when that means challenging Rule One.
If the stories my former Amazon friend told are any indication, the situation for employees there is probably really, really bad. And it is likely to get even worse. Despite the numbers touted everywhere, our economy is contracting.
A contracting economy is like a Petri dish after the good nutrients remaining can no longer feed the next generation of nutrient-consuming critters. The fight over the last dribs and drabs of agar will be epic.
Amazon has posted such good gains over the decades past, it will likely expect those to continue. They will not. If they do, they will bankrupt an economy already reeling from blow after blow from the institutional impossibilities we call Unsustainability. Our system will follow Herbert Stein's Law. Not only will it collapse, it must.
And you can see signs of weakness everywhere. Consider that (in the UK at least) Big Softie is going to start dunning solitaire players with ads or demanding rent to not do so.
When one has a paradigm-changing bit of software, it sells itself. When one has something that is popular but not that profitable, one bundles this with the paradigm-changer and calls it good. But when one has no paradigm-changer in the chute, one must exact some revenue from what was previously not so profitable just to keep the gears turning and the lights on.
Even though it might just be time to start turning out the lights.
You can feel it, can't you? This sense that things are not quite right? This sense that everyone on the telly insists isn't there?
It's real. Just ask any of the maggots clinging to the corpse that is Seattle, who remember when it was a bit grittier but kinda cool. We're the ones who elected an avowed socialist to the city council-recently, not just during our Progressive past! We're the ones who packed the places Bernie Sanders came to speak (even though the first engagement was derailed by a Sarah Palin Christer radical).
The feeling in the air-the one that no one who gets paid by corporate commercial buys talks about-is that we need someone in charge who doesn't take any of that corporate money. Not Jeff Bezos', not Steve Ballmer's, not even Nick Hanauer's (though at least he is making some sense lately).
Maybe, just maybe, if we get people in charge who don't have to make pilgramages to the über wealthy to seek sponsorship or underwriting or patronage or kneepadding (to kneel and, let's say, grovel) or whatever you want to call it, maybe then we can create workplaces that will thrive outside their corporate walls by letting their employees work less.
And live more.
You know about Amazon, don't you? It's that place online that is sucking the profit from every corner of our economy. Everyone complains out loud about Wal*Mart sucking profit; but that's because it pays and treats its employees so poorly. Amazon treats its employees as bad or worse, but at least most of them are well paid.
I have good friends who rode this tyrant of an employer back in the '90s. Fresh from a stint at the State Department, traveling the world and being office functionaries, this married couple returned and briefly started back at their own life. The Captain at the family returned to the boat company where I first met him. Just a few months later, he quit. His wife had started at this start-up; he joined.
And a few months after that, I saw him and his wife strolling on the street, which was unusual. They didn't normally have that kind of time. They encouraged me to apply at this company . . . which was growing at something like 20% a month. Or was it 50%? I forget.
After which time I didn't see much of them. Oh, he called a few times, once (years later) to arrange an after-work beer. I said sure, but was taken aback by his next statement: "How does Wednesday sound?"
That call came on Friday.
Sure enough, I headed out Wednesday to the appointed bar, ready to show off my newly cludged-together electric motorcycle. He never showed up.
We saw quite a bit of each other about eight years later after he dropped by the electric vehicle shop where then I worked to offer me a job. He had been dropped by the Big A, cashed in his stock options, and decided to run a boat company for a change. I hired on as his first employee.
I haven't thought much about those days lately. Weirdness at work last week changed that.
As you might know, I drive transit now. After I got married, I didn't want to stay out driving boats until all hours. I young woman boarded the other day needing directions. She hardly ever took the bus at that time, the late morning going on afternoon, long after her commuter options stopped running for the morning, but before the afternoon options start again.
When someone sits in the seat just to the right and behind the driver, some of us call that the Confessional Seat. Mostly, it's to ask questions about scheduling or service. Often, this leads to complaints and a demand for explanations. Quite often, people just need someone to talk to (or someone who can't just get off their seat to avoid getting talked to).
She needed to talk.
In the course of deciding the best way to get home quickly-"to check the 50 emails I got since I left work, all marked 'Urgent'"-it turns out she needed to dump. She wouldn't have taken that job if it weren't for the burden of the student loans. Her co-workers have lost priorities about what is important, like a strong social life. They think work is more than what you do for a paycheck; it's a competition against the world.
And I agreed. Yes, her generation is getting completely screwed by loan debt that is completely avoidable in a civilized country. Yes, I have three brothers who all worked tech in various capacities at the same mega-corp, hers; yes, they report a similar autistic spectrum disorder when it comes to who gets to manage, and the priorities such people expect followed. Yes, yes, yes.
I went a bit further. Remember my last post, where I shared the heuristic terminology of human behavior, and how it comes mostly from drafting? I shared that with modification; never mind our built environment outside computers, I expounded that the rules of creating good code are far and away exactly the wrong rules for living a healthy social life in the natural world.
So we pulled into her stop, and she got up to leave . . . and she hugged me.
Hugged might be too weak a word. She clung to me as a swimmer might cling to a buoy in the middle of a vast and open ocean.
I guess a confession might be what she needed. No, a confession without penance for her spouting of techy heresy was exactly what she needed.
All of this, the rider needing to be heard, the friends I lost briefly to the Big A, all of this came back to me while reading this amazing article about how Seattle is dead and how Amazon killed it.
South Lake Union used to be a dump. Now, as in Brooklyn (as in San Francisco, as in Portland, as in Austin), cubical buildings and yuppie boutiques have emerged from the carcass of industry. South Lake Union is no longer a neighborhood; it is a boomtown, in all the worst senses. Not since 1897 has such a gold rush so remade the Seattle waterfront. SLU’s gender ratios, makeshift culture, and inflated prices recall the Klondike. A cruel irony of tech is that it should free work from geographical constraints; “you can work anywhere,” goes the bromide. If only. In real life, wealth concentrates in faceless hubs more than ever before.
Boomtowns like SLU are an effort to keep tech employees inside a self-sustaining, non-intrusive bubble. This is little more than a libertarian myth. The bubble leaks and spreads blight in all directions. New condos blemish old neighborhoods more than they relieve pressure on their housing stock. Everything around South Lake Union has declined in culture and risen in price.
It's a good piece. Read the whole thing. Remember, though, that this isn't the first time this has happened.
That rider who needed my ears and shoulder to soak up some woes? She was transiting from Redmond to her home in Issaquah. These are East-side "cities" in name only, now sprawling exurbs with only vestigial old-town cores surrounded by a choking auto-centric asphyxiation. Redmond is home to Microsoft's "campus." If Seattle is dead from Amazon's flood of money-without-culture, the source of the plague that killed it came from 'Soft-ville. That poor rider was a Microserf.
Though the Big Softie started the infection that led to the necrotic flooding, Amazon was far from the only company that caught it. RealNetworks had its day, and managed to get one of its founders elected to the Senate. Expedia, Groupon, Cray-hell, even Live Journal started here. And those are just the names I can remember without doing any research. There are others in the Petri dish phase of their planned growth, all hoping to attract the next Nick Hanauer and go totally Amazon themselves.
It goes back even further. Seattle used to be a hub of worker solidarity, a central part of the progressive movement's move to unionize workers and destroy the sweat shops all too common at the turn of the last century. Years later, a guy named Nordstrom moves back from that gold rush mentioned in the quote above with enough money-got by selling a worthless claim to someone with more dollars than sense-to open a shoe shop, one that has metastacized into the high-end clothier. They have a saying at Nordstrom: Rule One, the customer is always right. If the customer is wrong, refer to Rule One.
I fully admit it: Nordstrom has done wonders for service culture here. As in it's possible to find good service. In many places around the country, good service is rare; here, bad service is striking, as in when you get it you are struck by that fact.
Yes, it is possible to give someone good service and enjoy your job. I do that every day. It is also possible to blame the employee for everything. And when that attitude carries further, it is possible to prevent the employees from acting against abuses that are very real, even when that means challenging Rule One.
If the stories my former Amazon friend told are any indication, the situation for employees there is probably really, really bad. And it is likely to get even worse. Despite the numbers touted everywhere, our economy is contracting.
A contracting economy is like a Petri dish after the good nutrients remaining can no longer feed the next generation of nutrient-consuming critters. The fight over the last dribs and drabs of agar will be epic.
Amazon has posted such good gains over the decades past, it will likely expect those to continue. They will not. If they do, they will bankrupt an economy already reeling from blow after blow from the institutional impossibilities we call Unsustainability. Our system will follow Herbert Stein's Law. Not only will it collapse, it must.
And you can see signs of weakness everywhere. Consider that (in the UK at least) Big Softie is going to start dunning solitaire players with ads or demanding rent to not do so.
When one has a paradigm-changing bit of software, it sells itself. When one has something that is popular but not that profitable, one bundles this with the paradigm-changer and calls it good. But when one has no paradigm-changer in the chute, one must exact some revenue from what was previously not so profitable just to keep the gears turning and the lights on.
Even though it might just be time to start turning out the lights.
You can feel it, can't you? This sense that things are not quite right? This sense that everyone on the telly insists isn't there?
It's real. Just ask any of the maggots clinging to the corpse that is Seattle, who remember when it was a bit grittier but kinda cool. We're the ones who elected an avowed socialist to the city council-recently, not just during our Progressive past! We're the ones who packed the places Bernie Sanders came to speak (even though the first engagement was derailed by a Sarah Palin Christer radical).
The feeling in the air-the one that no one who gets paid by corporate commercial buys talks about-is that we need someone in charge who doesn't take any of that corporate money. Not Jeff Bezos', not Steve Ballmer's, not even Nick Hanauer's (though at least he is making some sense lately).
Maybe, just maybe, if we get people in charge who don't have to make pilgramages to the über wealthy to seek sponsorship or underwriting or patronage or kneepadding (to kneel and, let's say, grovel) or whatever you want to call it, maybe then we can create workplaces that will thrive outside their corporate walls by letting their employees work less.
And live more.