[schnischna]

That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs.

I have never run a warehouse, but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.

I found very interesting the book of the guy who founded "The Big Issue", a magazine that homeless people sell in Britain. They also had to put some rules in place that seem strange, for example the vendors (homeless people) had to buy the magazines they wanted to sell. They are alcoholics, gamblers, addicts, so unfortunately some special rules were necessary to make it work.

[whymauri]

>That's why people work hard to acquire skills, to be able to work in better jobs.

I know it's a common mantra in these circles to 'acquire skills' and 'learn to code!' And by all means, if you are capable go for it - I know I did.

But it's really hard to do this when your priorities are your day-to-day expenses. When your uncertainties are whether you'll have a home or food. It's also hard when traditional means for acquiring skills, like going to college, no longer have the same returns they used to. All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees. So it's not even a call to learn fulfilling skills, it's a call to specifically learn profitable skills.

[vorpalhex]

> All of my friends who work at Amazon warehouses have college degrees.

Quite a few of my friends who work in dead end jobs also have college degrees, and they have them in the things you'd expect: the fine arts, intricate degrees on languages or theory, and other non-profitable skills. A degree does not equal a job, even if your college recruiter would like to tell you differently.

> And by all means, if you are capable go for it

And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever.

That's false. Usually what many of these workers need is help navigating how to get a profitable job, what skills actually pay and where to learn those skills in a way that results in a job. As we've established above, "get a four year degree" usually isn't a great path and these folks know it - but right now our culture is stuck on that phenomenon.

[g_sch]

I think the idea that workers need "profitable" degrees to work "profitable" jobs isn't as obvious as you think.

It used to be said that a college degree was a ticket to a well-paying job. Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless. Who's to say that the criteria won't get even narrower in the future?

Degrees aren't a symbol of skill nearly as much as they are a way for the market to allocate well-paying jobs, and the allocation is getting smaller all the time.

[vorpalhex]

> It used to be said that a college degree was a ticket to a well-paying job

I have never actually heard this said. Can you provide some sources or any kind of quote for this? I've heard references to this having been said, but never an actual source.

This is anecdotal, but even my older family members saw college as meeting gating requirements for some jobs, not a promise of getting those jobs.

> Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless.

I don't think a STEM degree promises you a job, nor is a STEM degree inherently valuable unless you otherwise have the qualifications to work in a STEM field.

> Degrees aren't a symbol of skill nearly as much as they are a way for the market to allocate well-paying jobs

They're a form of gating, agreed.

> and the allocation is getting smaller all the time.

That's not clear. For some fields like being a Doctor that seems to be true, but for many fields like being an engineer that's obviously not the case. That being said, I would be surprised if there's a compiled data set that accurately tells us one way or another - the BLS data might be the closest.

[jlbnjmn]

Here are a couple to get you started:

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...

[danans]

> I have never actually heard this said. Can you provide some sources or any kind of quote for this? I've heard references to this having been said, but never an actual source.

This is like asking for a source for the expression "You get what you pay for". There isn't a source - it's a folk saying. That doesn't make it either right or wrong, it's just a thing some people say.

[sosborn]

> I have never actually heard this said

I usually heard it phrased slightly differently: "Without a college degree you will be stuck doing low wage work."

[lotsofpulp]

>It used to be said that a college degree was a ticket to a well-paying job. Now, a few decades later, we're told to get a STEM degree, because other degrees are worthless. Who's to say that the criteria won't get even narrower in the future?

A degree was never a ticket to a well paying job. Showing that you have critical thinking skills and the ability to learn and a base level of organization/discipline in your life is what a degree might have meant when they were more rigorous and scarce.

Now that there are a billion schools offering a billion bullshit degrees in exchange for money, one way to cut through that is to bet on people who can do calculus and chemistry and physics, as those are better measures of analytical skills and whatever else employers are looking for.

[toastercat]

> And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever.

That's not what OP said. It's not that they are incapable of acquiring new skills, it's that some people are generally more capable to acquire new marketable and profitable skills than others.

I think it's a matter of interest or natural inclination. Inspiring interest in folks who otherwise would never be drawn to a profitable profession is difficult, and without interest it's nigh impossible to get them to effectively acquire the necessary skills to become employable in that field.

I think the most disrespectful thing to be applied to low wage earners, or people in general, is that they have no passion at all for any craft or hobby. I believe that everyone does, and that those things have intrinsic value, even if they may not presently be valuable to the market.

[whymauri]

Completely agreed.

And, I'd like to add a bit more. When I say capable, I absolutely don't mean that in terms of intellectual capacity. I mean it in the context of actual, abject poverty. I'm talking about being incarcerated for a possession charge and having your young life spiral out of control. Or being raised in a homeless shelter while also being diagnosed with severe chronic disease (I've met students like this). Scenarios where there is just so much happening, that the idea of stopping to think about careers, college, or even learning English seems unthinkable. Cases where you have as many jobs as you have mouths to feed (not just children, but aging or sick family).

Peter Temin from MIT conjectures that it takes a person born into poverty nearly "20 years of nothing going wrong" to exit [0].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...

[danans]

> And that is one of the most disrespectful things I hear applied to low wage earners - that they are incapable of learning new skills, that they're not as capable as other workers or that they they're doomed in be in low wage jobs forever.

That's not what the GP said at all. Rather, their statement acknowledges that there are low age earning people who are capable. All they said is that the challenges of daily subsistence in a low-wage situation add a significant additional obstacle to gaining the skills and experience needed to get a higher paying job.

[_qwfv]

When people say the workers are incapable, some folks mean that there are systemic problems with capitalism (particularly in the US). The workers don't have a deficiency, the system is designed to keep them where they are.

[vorpalhex]

That seems a spectacular claim that will require spectacular evidence to support it. I realize it's a very trendy statement, but it does not appear supported by the data[^1].

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

[Pfhreak]

Sorry, it seems axiomatic to me. There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker.

Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well. One graph does not tell the whole story.

[vorpalhex]

Ah, well I take it to be true that generally complex systems do not have intents, that complex systems do not select against subsets, and that complex systems with no single controller are in fact complex and made up of a multitude of push and pull pressures. That's just my take though.

> Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well.

There is not a single graph on this page which mentions rent as a percentage of income. You may see Taxes as a percentage of income[^2], but this does not touch in rent. One graph does not tell the whole story, but you must offer evidence for your argument. You can't simply shrug and say "well I disagree with the evidence!"

> There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker.

That's true for all of humanity. You haven't established that there's a special kind of pressure on low wage earners due to or related to capitalism. Whether you're a capitalist, socialist, or an 11th century peasant, you need to eat, work, pay your taxes, watch your kids and generally live life.

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

[dabraham1248]

Umm, you do realize that the top .001% of incomes going up will (with most distributions) raise the median income, even if the mode family income decreases?

[jason0597]

Sorry, I don't understand. What you said may be true for mean (aka average), but the graph shows the median, not the mean.

[vorpalhex]

That is not a correct understanding of median, though median will not always show certain kinds of disparities. However you're going to have to provide evidence and data if you're making a particular claim here.

[OJFord]

I don't think GP meant that everyone who works in a warehouse should be joining 'coding bootcamps' and striving to become '10x ninja devs' instead.

I took it as referring to people working hard (or to varying degrees) through compulsory education, and sometimes choosing to continue it. We need people working in warehouses too!

[DagAgren]

We absolutely need people working in warehouses. Our society would collapse far faster without them than if all of us reading this would go away.

And that means we need to treat them with respect, and pay them properly.

[defnotashton2]

I'm not disagreeing people deserve respect. But with automation do we need people in factories? Answer is no.

[GcVmvNhBsU]

It probably depends a bit more on how you define “need”. Do factory owners need people in factories when a robot can do the job? Probably not. Does society need people in factories so that the individuals have a job, which creates a sense of purpose and means through which people can provide for themselves? Probably.

[xondono]

I’m sorry but the “day-to-day doesn’t let me learn” always sounded like an excuse to me (not implying anything personal). It can be true for some time, but it’s always a temporal situation.

Adquiring skills has pretty much nothing to do with college, some of the most skilled people I know in sales or executive office didn’t even got a high school degree (they’re old, I live in Spain).

[__s]

My father works at a warehouse. I've worked in flooring

These are jobs where people work together. Everyone knows who's the slacker & who gets shit done

In flooring the owner would stop by for 10 minutes at smoke breaks & listen to gossip to get an idea of what's going on. He'd shuffle people's schedules around so that he could figure out who was the common denominator of trouble. For the most part there was very little intervention necessary. I happened to take off one day a week at random no questions asked (combination of not being physically capable of doing 5 days a week of that job while also happening to be scraping paint off a house that summer)

So you don't need to keep people on a tight leash. Learn to analyze the noise & intervene when something is clearly going wrong

[eightysixfour]

Unfortunately that's incredibly hard to scale. I've seen many construction companies hit the growth wall thinking that they could grow using that model instead of building process.

[roosterdawn]

This is one of the few voices of sanity I've seen on this thread. Your father seems wise.

With that said, I do understand why companies try and install panoptical surveillance practices in places where it's basically overkill. Competent managers, as you said, don't need to keep people on a tight leash. They do, as you said, learn to analyze the noise and intervene when something is clearly going wrong. The panopticon is put in place beyond a certain size because manager quality cannot be guaranteed. Now, whether that's a sound reason for its existence or not can be debated (I'd tend to agree it's not), but it does seem to function efficiently.

[miscPerson]

Not just because manager quality can’t be guaranteed, but because when you have 10,000+ employees, the odds that some are fired and subsequently make a false discrimination claim are high — and you need a lot to deal with that.

Look at how Amazon is treated: with nearly a million workers, a few dozen complaining is enough for major media outlets to broadcast that they’re a bad employer.

Can you point to any employer where 1 in 10,000 workers doesn’t have a bad experience?

[roosterdawn]

Right, that's the other side of the equation that needs to be fielded beyond a certain size in organizational scale. Organizational processes need to be in place that protect the organization from bad actors, in a manner which is most resistant to being corrupted. As you say, even a few parts per million is essentially enough to get a large scale PR headache.

With that said, the question of whether the system could improved (and significantly, in a step-wise manner) how it handled this situation remains an open question to me. I don't know well enough what happened in the cases that caused Tim Bray to resign to comment, but it's possible that actions taken by the corporate management, HR and legal have taken backfired in a way that will be looked at as unforced errors. At a company (ostensibly THE company) that prides itself on operational excellence, I'd be surprised if this doesn't end up being the case. High profile resignations like this are sometimes the spark that sets the whole process in motion and the few externally visible signs that you can see later on as evidence. If this was attrition was truly regretted by corporate, and was something that could be prevented ahead of time, it will have been a very expensive black eye, waste of resources and loss of true executive leadership talent. For folks like Tim Bray, the difficulty of filling the organizational void they leave is very high, and potentially not guaranteed.

I guess time will tell.

[lkramer]

You don't think there are higher skilled people trying to exploit the system?

I suspect the real difference here is developers are in higher demand. If we feel the checks becomes to unfair, we can go look for a different job.

If a warehouse worker doesn't like his smoke breaks being monitored, there is little recourse, someone else can be hired who will accept these condition out of desperation for a job.

[adamc]

Your explanation seems off to me. Why would lower demand necessarily imply there was someone suitable who was desperate?

It seems like your explanation suggests that the pool of "suitable" would be larger, i.e., the job is less skilled. I think it is definitely true that less skilled workers have bad options, because, by definition, they are easily replaced.

More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too... it's just less automatic that they can be easily replaced. In a recession, or after structural changes that render many such workers redundant... sure.

[luckylion]

> More highly skilled workers can end up in this situation, too

And the moment that happens, all those nice benefits go flying out the window and the SWE find themselves having to clock out when going to the toilet. Demand (and therefore the easy of replacement) is what makes the difference.

[azernik]

Low or high demand are always relative to supply. So think "high supply" rather than "low demand".

[Someone]

“perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.”

They may exist, but I doubt there are enough of them, even in Amazon’s warehouses, to warrant the draconian rules for all employees.

I also think people more behave that way then that they are that way. The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.

[toyg]

You know that stuff about the human brain being terrible at correctly calculating the odds? I think this sort of rule-making comes from that.

Maybe you'll hire a bad sheep every 20, but you'll be so scarred that you'll make a rule making 19 lives miserable, just to avoid the lone asshole taking advantage. In the same way as we think children shouldn't be left out on their own (because we read about some pedophile at the other end of the country), we then assume employees are assholes until proven otherwise. It's shitty for everyone involved, really.

[felipemnoa]

Another example is renting apartments. One bad tenant can cause a lot of harm, especially if you are a small landlord ie. three apartment house. You can go by years without a single bad tenant but all it takes is one bad one for you to start checking credit reports, references, etc.

[User23]

The lone asshole taking advantage also makes the other 19 miserable. The effect on morale is crushing. Always think past the first order consequences.

[vorpalhex]

If the lowest tier of job is relatively easily replaced, one assumes the next tier is as well meaning the people who are often making these rules are not well trained veteran managers but people who may be first time people managers or not be cut out to be a manager.

I had an early crappy hourly gig as a kid (as most do) at a major chain and in the span of my two years there we had one manager get caught doing crystal meth, another get caught flagrante delicto and a third who was just a jerk.

[bluntfang]

>The way you treat your personnel will affect whether they behave like that.

Anecdotally, I have family members that run a business that require low skilled workers. They don't really need full time workers, so they hire part-time and don't pay a living wage to them, even though it is viable to their business to do so.

So what do they get? They get unreliable people. People who steal from them. People who don't clock out. People who collude with the other employees to clock them in/out. People they can claim "make bad decisions" like buy lotto tickets or spend their paycheck on drugs and alcohol. etc.

It gives them a reason to treat them poorly. I've heard things like "if we paid them more they'd just buy more lotto tickets, so why should I?"

I often wonder how they would act and or who they could hire if they made full time roles, offering health insurance and treating their employees with dignity.

[Spooky23]

That's a pretty common rationalization to justify a certain hands off management approach. It's easier to scale certain businesses by just running them at arms length.

My first job was on a small family farm at age 12 -- we worked very hard but were treated fairly and well. The owner of the business would be hip-deep in the muck with us and was fully accountable for everything that happened on that farm. After that I moved on to different jobs in the mall, culminating in a semi-commissioned sales job that got me through college.

In that environment, you learned very quickly that most of the workers in that mall were completely disposable, and a significant population were discarded when the car that was handed down to them broke down or they were unable to float insurance. No car == bus, and more bus == more late arrivals, which resulted in termination.

The worst employers were run in a hands off way with straw-bosses (ie. people making 7.25/hr vs. 5.75/hr circa 1995) running the place, and the hire/fire decisions were made by an owner or manager at arms length. This was common with the smaller retailers, some behind the scenes jobs, and the food court. The turnover was 50% a week in some cases, and they would just over-hire and fire (or drop hours to nothin). The best paid gigs were janitorial and back of house restaurant workers -- they worked hard, but had steady work and often made off-book money. The easiest gigs were places with a salaried manager, and they usually had a cadre of full-timers backed by a bunch of part-timer people.

In the middle you had places with commissioned people, and there was always a tension between having too few and too many employees. Too many and your best salesmen would leave (and profitability drops, as you need salesmen to move margin enhancers like service plans), too few and you'd lose volume.

[odysseus]

On living wages in particular:

"A 2003 Cato Institute study cites data showing job losses in places where living wage laws have been imposed. This should not be the least bit surprising. Making anything more expensive almost invariably leads to fewer purchases. That includes labor."

Also:

"People in minimum wage jobs do not stay at the minimum wage permanently. Their pay increases as they accumulate experience and develop skills. It increases an average of 30 percent in just their first year of employment, according to the Cato Institute study."

Both of these are quotes from noted economist Thomas Sowell, who has done a lot of research into many studies on actual effects of living and minimum wage law.

As for the people you describe, there are plenty of people who make higher wages and are just as unreliable and untrustworthy. And there are plenty who do honest work for low wages, and work their way up.

[carti]

The Cato Institute, founded as the Charles Koch Foundation, is pro-capital, pro-deregulation, and anti-worker.

Being a noted economist doesn't mean that you aren't full of shit.

[bluntfang]

>The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.

I would be curious if there were any other organizations that came to the same conclusions.

[odysseus]

Sure, another example:

“... a number of American cities have passed “living wage” laws, which are essentially local minimum wage laws specifying a higher wage rate than the national minimum wage law. Their effects have been similar to the effects of national minimum wage laws in the United States and other countries—that is, the poorest people have been the ones who have most often lost jobs.”

- Thomas Sowell, referencing the Public Policy Institute of California’s “Scott Adams and David Neumark, “A Decade of Living Wages: What Have We Learned?” California Economic Policy, July 2005, pp. 1–23.”

[schnischna]

It's a nice thought. But where would all the unreliable people work then? Or you think they would just become reliable if they would get paid more? That seems unlikely to me. There are unreliable rich people, too. People with gambling addictions or drug habits. More money doesn't automatically cure bad habits.

[TulliusCicero]

> Or you think they would just become reliable if they would get paid more?

Quite possible. "Good morals start with a full pantry" and all. Comfortable circumstances may encourage better behavior, or put another way: treat your employees like shit, and don't be surprised if they behave shittily.

[jason0597]

Relevant book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

[rchaud]

> I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end).

There have been large, profitable corporations that preceded Amazon and did not need to implement such draconian tracking systems.

Perhaps these rules are in place because the people creating the rules know that rank and file have no bargaining power and cannot advocate for a less draconian system without fear of termination.

[throwaway55554]

> I have never run a warehouse,

You don't know...

> ... but I suspect that many of the strange seeming rules are in place because people otherwise try to exploit the system (like getting paid for smoking on the toilet for hours on end). It may seem inhumane, but perhaps it makes it possible to give people jobs who don't deserve automatic trust. Such people exist, unfortunately.

... but you're assuming low wage workers cannot be trusted and therefore treated humanely.

I think these biases are the issue being discussed.

[mtrower]

> You don't know...

Do you? I've worked in plenty of these "unskilled" environments. It's absolutely the reason for these rules.

Is every low wage worker like this? Certainly not. I assure you I've encountered plenty who are, and the system of un-trust tends to breed untrustworthiness in those who otherwise might be trustworthy.

It's not just the system, however. My grandfather ran a small construction business. He had no such draconian rules (and paid far better than minimum wage). I can't count how many new-hires he had to fire for crazy things like constantly showing up drunk, showing up late or not at all, etc. One guy would only show up on payday when checks were being handed out, work two hours, then leave. (Obviously, he didn't last long; still, Grandpa was too generous.)

I don't defend such draconian systems as just; I despise them. However they absolutely do exist so that large companies can just hire disposable employees en masse, regardless of their work ethic.

[throwaway55554]

> Do you?

I worked retail for a dozen or so years after HS, before, and later during, getting my eng deg. The bad apples (so to speak) were rare. People showed up, worked, went home just fine.

On the other hand, in the 15 years I've been a professional developer, I've seen people spend all their time looking for their next gig and doing the programming challenges necessary to get that gig. I've seen people skirt IT rules so they could access sites they shouldn't at work. I've seen people throw absolute 3 year old style tantrums because they were asked to fix bugs. People routinely show up late to meeting. All things low-skilled workers would get fired for but is somehow acceptable in our "bro" culture.

It isn't an issue with the skill necessary for the environment. It's the people. And it doesn't matter if they're making minimum wage or 150K.

[schnischna]

I know that the rules exist, so I can assign a highly likelihood for there to be a reason for the rules to exist.

Also I have read the one or other thing.

[arez]

I suspect the same percentage of people exploiting the system in warehouses as in office jobs, still you can see very "inhumane" rules only in warehouses.

[fastball]

The difference is that with unskilled jobs, you can immediately find a replacement for the position.

It's not as easy with skilled labor, so there is more leniency.

I think the leniency is inversely proportional to the replaceability.

[arez]

yeah definitely, but it would still be nice if workers would be treated more equal no matter their profession