[treis]

>Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace.

Amazon is creating an extremely detailed paper trail of their enforcement actions. It'd be trivial to show that, as an example, on average black workers got fired for 3 errors while white ones were fired for 5.

The warnings seem mostly fair too. Counting 19 items when there we 20 in a bin during inventory as an example. I can see why some look at this as dystopian but this sort of objective measurement is pretty darn appealing. If we had a programming equivalent I think it'd make my life better by weeding out the bullshitters and those that fake productivity by creating complicated solutions.

[skrtskrt]

Yeah what could go wrong when technocrats try to completely remove subjectivity from the world and optimize everyone's life and work towards some completely arbitrary measure so that my shitty things can get delivered 0.002 seconds faster.

I'm not sure if you've ever had a job where you worked to specific metrics exclusively, but it make's everyone's life worse and it makes the product/service worse.

[treis]

Because there's no objective metric for programmer productivity.

[Nasrudith]

You prefer getting vaguer metrics to work towards? Sucky and misaimed metrics exist with the qualatative too. Blaming quantitative efforts is misplaced. Subjectivity is not your friend.

[Anderkent]

pretty sure we've all been in school, and while it's not a great experience, you can work with it

i'm pretty sure amazon's optimizing the work more so that my shitty thing gets delivered at all, rather than 0.002 seconds faster. which is very valueable to me, as it happens

[skrtskrt]

As it happens your stuff still gets delivered when workers are unionized and treated like human beings

[djbebs]

If that's the case why are Amazon's competitors not as successful as Amazon?

[yurishimo]

Amazons competitors in America*

In Europe, Amazon has plenty of competitors found in regional companies (CoolBlue in NL/BE) and they seem to deliver within a day or two just fine.

[djbebs]

I live in europe, I tried smaller competitors. I refuse to buy from them as a result of the experience.

I never had trouble with Amazon

[specialist]

Initially, Amazon benefitted from lower cost of capital. Because of tax holiday and persuading Wall St to prefer (long term) growth over (short term) profitability.

Now, AWS prints money, fueling Amazon's entry into new markets.