People that work on-call do this, especially in tech or security.

I’m considering making the switch because my paging calls are from a random set of phone numbers, so I cannot attach a specific ringtone to them. After a few horrible pages, you start to associate your phone going off as a world-ending experience, when it’s just your wife calling to ask if you want her to pick something up for you from the shop. A separate device that disassociates my phone from pain would be nice.

Oh, 1000%. I could write a book on how monumentally stupid the whole process is (and most Amazonians agree), but the fundamental points are:

• The people that stay are of a certain mindset, where you don’t pick up “hard” tasks, and you are quick to establish blame/ownership elsewhere.
• Data is king, but you can lie a lot with data.
• Employees are customers also, and when you piss off employees you piss off customers and their families.
• You spend a huge sum of money on hiring and training talent, only to send them to your competitors.
• You spend money to give severance to active employees. That is still, to be, the dumbest thing ever. SO many people don’t resign, they just down tools or do a bad job to get the extra pay. PIP is called Paid Interview Prep for a reason.
• Amazon’s Focus/Pivot has such a bad reputation that being fired used to mean that other big companies would happily tell you “if you have any trouble at Amazon, let me know and we’ll start an interview loop”.

Most fundamentally of all…very few companies do this. It died with Jack Welch/GM and Gates/Microsoft, after they saw the same downfalls. Amazon is yet to learn their lesson, and it shows in how poorly the “Amazon Management School” under Bezos are performing. The other big tech companies also now do this, although less severe, and surprise surprise, they’re all going downhill - making awful decisions, delivering nothing of value, and ignoring customers over leadership.

The best way to do this is to correlate downtime with main providers. If a cloud provider goes down when AWS has outages on related services, it’s probably using an AWS service.

True, paired with Amazon moving many roles out of North America and into India.

With that said, a lot of people (like myself) joined Amazon when remote working was encouraged, only to then be told to go in 3 days a week. We lost loads of really great engineers that didn’t have opportunities in their local area. We’ll likely lose a LOT of people again, myself included, unless opportunities open elsewhere where I can transfer to a new area. Amazon are tricky, though, and they’ll preempt this by reducing transfers or laying people off soon to ensure that those that cannot adhere to 5 days a week are considered to have “resigned voluntarily”.

That’s all to say that a lot of bad faith on Amazon’s part will likely scare people away from joining. After the NYT article dropped almost a decade ago, Amazon got around it being hard to hire by having great transfer opportunities and high salaries. Neither of those exist now, and with all the anti-worker rhetoric and lies about internal AI performance “saving x hours on upgrades” I don’t see Amazon ever getting top talent again. Amazon will slip into boomer tech soon enough.

Amazon gets rid of around 5-8% of their staff every year through unregretted attrition, where they’ll fire “underperforming” people, with maybe 10-15% of people being threatened with underperformance "

Alongside this, to cut a long story short Amazon grew huge during COVID, and despite tens of thousands of layoffs the company has been trying to shrink everywhere possible, cutting fat wherever they can. IMO, leadership made lots of really stupid decisions, and the CEO has set Amazon on a course where irreparable damage has been made.

I work for Amazon. People are NOT happy.

Sadly, this is exactly what Jassy wants. Amazon are desperate for people to leave, and this is another push towards this.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but given that I’m unable to go to the office more than 3x a week due to having a young family to look after, my time.here is clearly limited - unless I’m able to work something out.

There is a strong remote advocacy group at Amazon, but the best that was mustered last time was a one hour protest during lunch. This might be the catalyst for people to say “fuck it, let’s unionize”, but I’m not confident.

A lot of people see it as needlessly dragging a conflict on, but NATO (probably) knows what it’s doing, and has had plans for scenarios like this for years. Russian escalation in the region isn’t exactly new, and it’s the sort of campaign that NATO as a group will define its legitimacy on.

I’m sure that if both sides wanted to hurt the other they’d do so, NATO especially so - but to both sides it’s ultimately a game. NATO will flirt with weapons, and Russia will throw citizens at the problem and use grief/loss to restore the “fatherland”. It’s why I don’t see an end to the conflict for as long as Putin is in power.

My only fear with the indie gaming industry is that many of them are starting to embrace the churn culture that has led AAA gaming down a dark path.

I would love an app like Blind that allows developers on a game to anonymously call out the grinding culture of game development, alongside practices like firing before launch and removing credits from workers. Review games solely on how the dev treated the workers, and we might see some cool corrections between good games and good culture.

How is this going to work while OpenAI currently burns through an absolute ocean of cash to keep improving its services? Alongside this, a good software engineer or applied scientist can make close to $1m a year. While I do think professionals should earn what their value is to an employer, OpenAI still loses a ton of money.

As someone that works in AI, I think most of us know it’s full of people trying to make a quick buck while investors will stupidly throw money at it. OpenAI is ultimately the figurehead of this market though, because at least the big companies can prop their AI offerings with the money they make from shopping, cloud, ads, etc. The second OpenAI looks weak and needs money, the vultures will slice off a piece and we’ll see the AI market reduce to a wimper - just enough for tech to focus on the next grift.

This really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Trump and MAGA came about from disillusionment in politics and the rural working-class feeling left out, with the right sensing an opportunity to say outlandish shit to stand out.

Today, women are disillusioned because they can’t afford to buy a home, can’t afford basic healthcare like most civilised countries, have zero workplace protections, have zero control over their own reproductive organs, and are lumped into the “DEI” category whenever the right discusses whether they should have opportunities in the workplace.

I say this every time an American article is posted around the sheer surprise that something is happening. It isn’t new. Trump was preceded by Brexit and the rise of the right in Europe. Thankfully, we’ve also seen the implosion of the right over the last year or two, so if Harris can win then you’ll all be glad to hear that it’ll be a bloodbath of back-stabbing and finger-pointing as the right fight for whatever scraps are left - all while the loser sits on the sidelines shitting on their former allies for having the audacity to succeed them.

With all that said, it’s a great thing, but hopefully this isn’t just pushed as a women-only thing. Real change needs everyone pushing in the same direction, and that needs real unity - something a good leader can bring.

In my opinion, country-based immigration paired with needs-based works really well.

Ultimately, many of the best parts of the culture of a place are because of what people brought with them years ago. Some of the best restaurants are because someone in India moved to the UK, and then moved to the US and brought the culture of Curry Mile or Brick Lane with them, or because a community of Greek railroad workers decided to set up bakeries using their known recipes that all the locals love.

The same often goes for business. Look at the rise of Aldi and Lidl, and how cheap produce and great workers rights will suddenly make local supermarkets look in bewilderment at how markets they once dominated are being torn away from them.

IMO, if you have skills to offer, you should be welcome. I’m currently in the process of moving to the US on a high-skilled visa, and it is mad how one country will require thousands in legal fees and 24+ month waits while a country next door will say “Shit, you can teach?! Come join us! If you want to stay permanently that’s fine!”

America will never put an ex-president in jail.

I don’t like weed. I’ve tried it throughout my teens, but left it there.

With that said, it’s amazing to me that we’re still having the same conversations around drugs. Decriminalise EVERYTHING! Ensure what is on the market is clean, drive the costs down to remove criminals from the market, and dedicate every police force to protecting those on the bottom rung of the drug ladder.

I read a book from a former officer a while back, where he’d spent two years working on infiltrating a drug network. It was successful, and they not only shut down a major network of drugs, but arrested around 100 people, and removed tons of illegal weapons from the market, and arrested several people in the network known to police for being involved in several murders. They believed that the drug market in the UK during this time had been disrupted “for three hours”. That was all it took for another gang to take over, and apparently it’s those successes that cause a lot of people to leave drug enforcement - after all, what’s the point?

There almost seems to be zero benefit to drug criminalisation, other than “old conservatives hate it”.

Their dear leader was literally named as someone that participated in a billionaire pedo ring!

Who is still giving this man money?

Japan are not world-class. They’re a solid team, but despite being ranked in the top 20 they’re probably still considered weaker than many of the teams below them.

With that said, I always have a soft spot for countries that push players that play domestic football outside of Europe and in their own country. I’ve been on a Japan kick since Yu Hirakawa joined Bristol City on loan.

You can probably say the same about all fields, even those that have formal protections and regulations. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people that have PhD’s in the field and are trying to improve it for the better.

IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.

We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS’s are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.

Be that as it may, the man has influence and it would be incredibly foolish to discount this because he’s a fucking moron. Sadly, the world is full of extremely incompetent billionaires, and they hold a shocking amount of influence over the world, whether it’s through collusion on layoffs, enforcing RTO in tandem, cutting green initiatives within a month of each other, etc.

I imagine most of whoever is left at Twitter is on a visa, so yeah, they probably will follow Musk wherever he says to go. The alternative is people rip their families away from their homes that they’ve probably built over the years and move back to their old country.

Now, if Biden were to grant the power to protect re-employment to other companies for those on L visas, Musk is probably utterly fucked.