Brontoforumus

Everyone else sees this as a sort of honeypot trap, right? Like it looks outwardly like a simple cynical attempt to address their well known mental health issues, but that's a paper-thin mask for something that's meant to help identify people who are dumb enough to think they can walk into a "I'm having a crisis" booth in the middle of the factory and think they won't get flagged for termination over it.

Masking your, ah, Druugian furnace-feeding as simple half-woke obliviousness feels like a new one to me.

Long NYT article about Amazon's extensive HR failures in the last year regarding warehouse staff. The system has always been designed to chew up warehouse workers and spit them out after three years at most - Bezos believing that people would start slacking after that, to the point where Amazon creates incentive programs to quit - but the interesting point to me was that they're hitting a numbers problem in the US there: between their size and the incredibly rapid turnover in the warehouses, averaging a six-month tenure, they're running through a few percent of the entire US workforce every year. That can't last.

My understanding is that it's 2 years for technical staff, so in that regard the warehouse folk have it better question mark question mark.

That goes both ways. There's an old rule of thumb that says if you haven't been promoted in two years, you never will be.

I haven't been promoted in six years.

Well, do you want to be?

In any case, the rule tends to apply more to western corporations (especially American ones, obv); with the min-max short term attitudes they usually have.

Based on my admittedly modest exposure, I feel like Asian companies usually don't see anything inherently wrong with an employee who just steadily does a job reasonably well for years. But for western companies, loyalty has become a nearly alien concept so they see someone who's been getting years of raises without "raising" their performance as just another target to be replaced for cost reduction. Really, ignoring the hidden costs of continual replacement is just a shitty accounting scam that hurts everyone involved except the guy getting the quarterly bonuses.

YMMV with an Asian company which is operating offices in a western country as yours is, but I'm sure your brentacles will help you hang onto something.

Euro corporations seem to fall across a spectrum between those two.

In conclusion, corporate hell is a land of contrasts.

(this ended up rather a more serious reply than intended, lol)

Meanwhile my end-of-academic-year email to my boss and his boss included something to the tune of "Hey let me know what you rewrite my job description into this year, especially if it means I need to get in before the university opens for next year."

Brentai wrote:My understanding is that it's 2 years for technical staff, so in that regard the warehouse folk have it better question mark question mark.

Yeah, my vague understanding of current policy is that they fire 6% of tech staff every year to meet quota. It's not stack ranking, though, because PR will tell you at length that it's not stack ranking.

It's stack ranking.

I assume somebody somewhere in these organisations benefits from stack ranking because it keeps happening but I can't think who or why.

I fled a warehouse job once because a teenage management graduate tried to implement SR on the packing floor. Warehouse is dangerous enough without your peers turning it into Wacky Races.

There's something to be said for eliminating the lowest scoring contestants at fixed periods rather than on the day a security guard escorts you to your desk.

I mean. If you're going to compare those two.

In the latest comedy, Bezos' had a new megayacht built by a Rotterdam yachtmaker, only for everyone to belatedly realize there's a 19th century bridge which is too low to allow the boat out to sea. Of course since it's Jeff Bezos, Rotterdam has agreed to temporarily remove the bridge.

As a result a new joke is making the rounds describing the situation followed by (roughly) "Why not remove the boat?""Well then, why not remove Jeff Bezos?"


(articles I've seen are French or Dutch, hence lack of links)

So Amazon's finally absorbed Comixology directly into the Amazon site and the Kindle app, and from what I've read it's fucking terrible.

And it's a good thing I already downloaded all the comics I bought DRM-free, because haha fuck you you can't do that anymore; if you didn't download them when you had the chance you're stuck reading lower-quality versions in a worse app.

Pirates, as always, are unaffected.

I feel like we need to update that tagline; it implies a cause and effect that is the other way around more often than not these days.

I dunno, I've always thought of it as a selling point.

Er, so to speak.

Polygon has another, probably better, article: Amazon’s overhaul of Comixology ignites concern from comic creators and readers