Amazon isn't alone, this is how we work now

If you've been in the workforce for the past decade or so you may have noticed subtle changes.  Sure it takes hard work and sacrifice to get to the top but does it feel like all that effort has left you just spinning your wheels?

It's no secret that we're all working harder and getting less for it.  Less pay, less benefits and less free time.  The old adage was that work was its own reward but the guy who came up with that didn't have a mortgage or a dwindling 401K to worry about.

He also had his weekends...

Consequently, it's no surprise that we find today's workplace increasingly demands more than just a job well done, it demands a lifestyle commitment.

As in your job is your life.  

So what? That's work and that's how it's always been.

Except it hasn't...

Where the baby boomers may have had a reasonable expectation of a shiny pot of gold at the end of their career rainbow those that came after found themselves without a pot to...well you know...

Without falling into the trap of every succeeding generation blaming its predecessor, the point is that the endgame has changed.

While we hear a lot of lip service about work/life balance and the importance of family it seems such things are at odds with expectations of the average worker in today's corporate culture.

So is it any surprise that when the NewYork Times peeled back the curtain of Amazon's corporate culture they found more in common with the Kremlin than KMart.

Horrific stories like...

"A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals." NYTimes

Or...

"Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell." NYTimes

If these were but a few isolated incidents they could be excused but it appears that rather than the exception, they're the rule...

"At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.)" NYTimes

None of this shakes the Wall Street Glitterati though...

"I envision all investors saying 'Great,'" (Jim) Cramer said Monday. "Do I want to work at amazon? No. If you want to play your money with companies that only treat their employees well and do everything right, it's harder than you think to find." CNBC

Which has to be the most stunning display of cognitive dissonance (one of my favorite phrases) since Bernie Madoff uttered this 2007 quote, 

"It's virtually impossible to violate rules in today's regulatory environment"

InformationWeek

Of course Wall street loves this stuff.  We all know that nothing will raise a share price faster than pulling the rug out from under workaday America.  So it was with Amazon the following Monday after the New York Times expose'.  Amazon's share price was effectively unchanged.

Which is strange because for all the conservative admonitions about self reliance and the glories of capitalism Wall Street heaps praise upon companies that have effectively adopted management based on communism.

Hypocritical.

That any company can be celebrated for a institutionalized policy of devaluing people should be cause for outrage.  But there's that cognitive dissonance again.  So long as Wall street gets its money nobody really cares how it got there or who gets  hurt.

Think it's OK to throw a little Chairman Mao in with your capitalism?  Consider how relatively backward communist nations were before they embraced some form of capitalistic markets.  China wasn't known for anything but making cheap knockoffs of American goods.  The Soviet Union couldn't make a decent car and Cuba might as well have thrown out the calendars after 1962.

Creativity, innovation and progress are not born out of repression and abuse.  These days, however, no matter where you work you will suffer it in some measure.

Your choices are to literally be a "Wage Slave" or strike out on your own.  Of course if whatever shingle you hang happens to threaten one of those places you choose NOT to work for, expect to be crushed. 

Ask Barnes and Noble how that feels...

Let's bring back the America we were sold.  The one where hard work was rewarded and CEO's didn't look to Chairman Mao for guidance.  Let's get the Labor Department to actually do something other than print lunchroom posters and spit out manufactured statistics for the crystal ball prognosticators on CNBC.

How far have we really progressed over the past two generations when wages remain stagnant, women are still underpaid and companies blatantly abuse their workforce without consequence? 

We need real progress, not just some dumb commercial of waving wheat fields complete with proclamations of America's greatness on Bloomberg.

There's only one way to do it, make them fail and to hell with what Wall Street thinks.  There are other places to buy crap that aren't Amazon.com, other retailers that don't have "Walmart" over their doors and other phones that don't have an Apple Logo on them.

Don't go to work

I've always believed that the work you do should matter to you.  If you're just plodding along day after day counting the hours till the weekend then frankly you're just wasting your and everyone else's time.

I know it's not always possible to "follow your bliss" but life's too short to only enjoy the weekends.

After over 20 years in the field I've come to the realization that the closest I can come to cubicle dwelling bliss is to either run the IT department or just blithely take my marching orders at its lowest rung.

Anything else just has me spinning my wheels.

So while my credentials include jobs in system administration, support and  project management not to mention creating a successful IT consulting business, my dreams of sitting in the big chair are about as likely as a winning lottery ticket.

So as I scan the job boards and the occasional craigslist posting I keep a vigilant eye open for positions that match the other end of my proposed  bliss...

I had thought I found one the other day.  It was a support job that was described as being part roving admin and part helpdesk.  The nice part was that if I had to go  anywhere the company provided the transportation. 

It seemed perfect.  The pay rate was a little low but if I wasn't shouldering the cost of transportation that was a leg up on anything else I'd seen. 

My application had apparently impressed the hiring manager enough for him to schedule a short phone screen.

In the course of the subsequent conversation the manager told me that the job would involve around 80 hours per week at all hours.  The prospective employee was expected to be available round the clock 24/7/365 and work from the office, home and wherever else he/she was required.

Believe it or not I was still considering the position even after I did the math and figured out that I would be making $9.61 per hour before taxes.

But that wasn't what really turned me off to the job. 

It was the realization during the Q & A part of the interview that this company, like many others, was built on making bad decisions.

Decisions like:

• Attempted "Cleaning" of rootkit, malware and virus infections off of PC's instead of reloading from a backup image. 
• Not providing adequate training to your technicians
• Not staying current with technical advances
• Supporting 20 year old servers with no hope of replacement parts
• Installing software that was no longer being supported by the manufacturer
• Not informing the client as to best practices or upgrade options
• Accepting liability for an SLA at a client where meeting that SLA is impossible due to the previously mentioned reasons.

It all amounts to billing for work that isn't really being done and I have a problem with that. 

IT is an uphill battle and if you're not moving forward it won't be long till you're moving the other direction.  It seems that most of the major players disagree, however, as they've built their IT support businesses off of doing what amounts to little more than "busywork"

It's one of the reasons I don't make the money in consulting that many think I should be.  I like to fix the problem once and move on from there.  I'm not one to keep beating a dead horse.  

The client is the boss but I'm being paid to know things they don't.  That's a level of trust that I refuse to betray.  That means that sometimes you have to have an uncomfortable conversation but I'd rather lose a client that wants me to do shoddy work than continue on and sacrifice my own integrity.

We're getting back to my original assertion that your work life should be meaningful and anything less is just a waste of time.

Making money off not doing the job your clients are trusting you to do is the ultimate expression of that and I can't stomach it.

www.sentrytechnical.com

Are you out of your F'ing....

Are you out of your F'ing mind??!

I just read this article and while I admit it is a bit old (March 2010) the premise is utterly preposterous.

Here's the link...Perspective: Keep working (Even if you don't get paid)

The author suggests keeping the same work routine you had before you became unemployed.

This assumes quite a lot such as; the work you were assigned was still relevant ( dubious if you've been downsized) and that you'll develop bad habits if you break your worker bee routine (god forbid you figure out that you'd be better off contracting.)

There's no doubt in my mind that this individual has never had the misfortune of going an indeterminate amount of time without a steady paycheck. Being a science publication it's also obvious that the author has benefitted from working in the public and/or education sector as well (tenure anyone?)

It's natural. When things are going well your mindset is totally different than if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel just to find enough money to keep the lights on and enjoy a hearty meal of ramen noodles for dinner.

There's almost a sense of euphoria among those who've never stared the specter of financial disaster in the face. They just don't understand how things can go wrong often asserting that they would never stoop to such degradation as taking unemployment or letting a credit card account go bad.

I'm unsure of the source of the quote (and I do paraphrase) but someone once said the measure of a man wasn't what they did in good times but how they weathered the hard times.

Yes, by all means do what you can to keep your skills up but this article suggests working for free for the company that canned you. I'm sorry but if you're let go for whatever reason consider those bridges burned. If they valued you you'd still be there. It's been my experience that once you've been escorted to the door there's no longer a desire to see you walk back in through it, even for free.

I could care less what the U.S. Bureau of statistics says about the bad habits of the unemployed. For one thing nobody I know or have ever known (including me) has ever been interviewed by them so I'm suspect of their findings.

The second assertion came shortly after the quote from a supposed hiring manager, "I have no problem hiring the unemployed. But I will not hire people who are not working"

Really? well thank god for that because you sir are not looking for a resource, you're looking for a slave.

I see the perspective of a taskmaster here. Perhaps because I'm someone who's spent most of his career as an independent contractor I have trouble playing devil's advocate in this case. I'm more about the product than procedure to make it which runs contrary to the prevailing 19th century work ethic.

That's the mantra that says no work gets done unless it's closely monitored and controlled.

The reality is that if you can't get work in your field, working for free won't pay the bills and at some point you're likely to end up pushing shopping carts around Home Depot to pay the rent. This isn't unlike the advice given in those outdated self-help books about how to land the perfect job. You know the ones that say to go work as an unpaid intern for a year hoping to get an entry level position. That's fine if someone can afford to support you but that's been a rarity for a couple of decades now.

The other thing that's not addressed is the cost of working. If you continue doing what you did before you got canned you'll soon find that you're going through an awful lot of cash.

Take the work for free at your old employer jazz. 

You still have the costs just to get there. Fuel costs, bus fare, etc. Then there's the costs for unimportant things like lunch, parking fees and dry cleaning. After all, even if you're sadistic ex-employer does take advantage of your "work for free" offer they won't be happy if you show up in shorts and flip flops. 

Let's also not forget that as a non-employee you will no longer have access to company resources like computers or the internet so you'll have to provide your own. That's at least $100 a month outlay tethering a laptop to a smartphone.

I'm suspicious of this entire article and find it almost insulting. What is even more insulting is the fact that it's on a site called, "sciencecareers"

I'm not the flat earth type but this type of advice makes everyone in the discipline look a bit naive.