Comment by Snow_Falls
4 hours ago
I would agree with you, I see people like Jeff Bezos who's unfathomably wealthy but also treats his workers so terribly that they have to pee in bottles and I wonder why? What compels someone to so obssesively seek wealth that they must treat people like that. I can only see it as some sort of mental illness. When someone compulsively hoards trinkets to the detriment of all around them, we call that a disease and I don't see why we should treat it differently when it's dollars they're collecting.
To be fair, I don't think jeff has proclaimed that their drivers need to pee in bottles. That's all mid level managers trying to show gains to their up-line reports.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
>Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost. Of course, when word gets out that people are forced to pee in bottles, he suddenly wants to change things, not because he cares about the conditions that led to it, but because it damages his image.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If you're in control of a company, and that company is an "orphan crushing machine", it's your responsibility because ultimately someone must be responsible. You could argue the board shares responsibility, and certainly every high level manager endorses it.
You have to say "Deliveries should be as efficient as is consistent with basic decency, anyone delivering Amazon packages will have breaks and schedules that are reasonable and achievable", in the same way that he mandated APIs[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18916406
To get to where Jeff Bezos is, it's almost mandatory to have sociopathic traits and to be genuinely incapable of regarding other people as anything but means to an end. It's a simple selection effect.
He took a course on how to use your laugh as a domination tactic.
Who knew dragons in real life could be so lame compared to fiction /s