(2020-05-04) Bray Bye Amazon

Tim Bray says Bye, Amazon. May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

Adjectives · Here are some descriptive phrases you might use to describe the activist-firing. “Chickenshit.” “Kill the messenger.” “Never heard of the Streisand effect.” “Designed to create a climate of fear.” “Like painting a sign on your forehead saying ‘Either guilty, or has something to hide.’”

It’s not just workers who are upset. Here are Attorneys-general from 14 states speaking out.

On the other hand, Amazon’s messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety. I actually believe this

But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

What about AWS? · Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.

Brad Porter's Response to Tim Bray's departure...

He’s right that we are prioritizing this issue… 7 days a week since this started. He’s wrong that we were slow.

When I first joined World-Wide Operations to lead Robotics, the very first thing I learned was that safety dictated everything.

If we want people to choose to work for Amazon helping deliver packages to customers, job number one is to convince those valuable employees that you are doing everything you can every day to keep them safe

Is everyone going to be convinced we are doing enough? No. When you have hundreds of thousands of people coming to work every day who are all experiencing this pandemic differently, you cannot expect everyone to react the same way. You can provide additional compensation. You can allow time off and leaves of absence. You can commit to taking care of employees if they do get sick, regardless of where they caught the virus. These are all things Amazon did almost immediately

Anton Okmyanskiy: Tim Bray quit Amazon. My thoughts...

Amazon is not evil, and his blog post reflects this. In many ways, it is an exemplary corporation run by great leaders

Amazon is the shining beacon of the productivity and consumer benefits it can deliver. But capitalism is also about effective use of resources including human ones and has no checks and balances against runaway power imbalances. We need to self impose them on ourselves. Amazon should stay ahead of anger-driven regulatory enforcement by becoming a leader on social justice issues. It is time!

Where to start with practical policies? Paid sick leave. C’mon! We can afford to give paid time off to sick people in the 21st century! The lack of paid sick leave is so prevalent in North America among businesses, but if you think about it — it is just appalling.

Bray summarizes Responses

Boy, when your I’m-outta-here essay goes viral, do you ever get a lot of input. A few responses came up often enough to be worth sharing. This was via email, Twitter DMs, blog comments, and LinkedIn messages