The dude absentmindedly eats toe jam. He's um... touched. It really shouldn't be a surprising he lacks social cues, and probably has no idea how to interact with women besides blurting out the first dumb thought that comes to his head. If he isn't sexually or physically assaulting people, cut the guy some slack, and realize some of our genius are kinda nuts.
(Above is a piece by someone who worked with RMS for years, explaining why it was not this one event that got him canned, but a long pattern of poor behavior, which he partially bore witness to)
> And, I think, some of those focusing themselves on careful parsing of RMS’s words are falling into the same pitfall as he. His intentions do not matter nearly as much as his actions and their predictable effects. ... I was around for most of the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern at the time ... To my shame I didn’t recognize the dynamic myself when I was around it.
So it doesn't matter what he said, or what his intentions were, all that matters to the author is what they now believe, 30 years later, some people were feeling around RMS in the 90s.
I kinda feel like I'm giving the benefit of the doubt by disregarding that side of the argument. The linked article argues that everyone should avoid Stallman because he's smelly and rude and ate his toe jam one time - this is schoolyard bullying, not a serious argument.
I interviewed there a couple of years ago. I was really excited going into the interview because I'm a big fan of Atul Gawande and I thought there was huge potential for a transformative impact. But when I talked to them it was clear that they didn't have a clear vision of how specifically they were going to transform healthcare. I got the sense that the engineers were just messing around waiting for the healthcare and product people to tell them what to build. They clearly had a lot of talent and resources and I'm sad they weren't able to make it work.
This person is very clearly mixing things that he knows directly, things that he's read about in books (e.g. Amazon's strategy in the early days), and rumors that he's heard (e.g. Jeff Bezos' personal life). There's no way that a cybersecurity engineer at a company as sprawling as Amazon has reliable firsthand knowledge on so many different unrelated topics.
The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this.
It is verging on irresponsible journalism to give this person anonymity without providing any details on their knowledge or credentials and seemingly spending no effort challenging or fact checking any of these answers. That isn't how these pieces are supposed to be written.
I didn't even notice the total lack of bylines or masthead. I shouldn't have thrown in the "verging on" qualifier. It is just flat irresponsible to publish this in this manner.
> So if you have cancer and you might die from your cancer, we won't help you get treatment
It just feels.. off. I wouldn't go as far to say the person doesn't work at Amazon at all and instead wants to jab at them but I'm definitely thinking it loudly
To me it feels like someone was kind of bullshitting with their friends and maybe making themselves seem more knowledgeable and important than they really are. It's totally irresponsible to put it in print.
The point was regarding fulfillment center workers who don't work enough hours to get company healthcare. That is how it's handled.
If you get cancer or any other major medical catastrophe, Amazon won't do anything to you if you're a part time worker without health insurance. But even if you don't have the health insurance, Amazon will provide support if you catch COVID. Because it's good business to not have one uninsured person to expose an entire shift to a highly communicable disease.
Aye but it's more that it was mentioned at all rather than whether it's true or not
With the exception of it being a whistleblowing thing you don't often see jabs like that -- especially jabs at departments the person has no involvement with. Also if it is whistleblowing it's more a "they" than a "we" thing
> Jeff Bezos studies other “great men” in history and imagines himself to be a kind of Alexander the Great. There's even a building on the Amazon campus called Alexandria, which was the name of one of the company’s early projects to get every single book that had ever been published to be listed on Amazon.
I'd guess the building is named after the Library of Alexandria – one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world – and not because of a god complex as the story implies.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, he sounds like an experienced senior guy so he's surely plugged in to internal communications, discussions, and rumors. And a lot of times in security there are opportunities to work with a large cross-section of teams.
I've worked with engineers at Amazon up to the senior principal level. Even if you grant that people in cybersecurity see a broader swath of the company, there's just no way that he can talk authoritatively about everything from AWS sales tactics, to hiring practices for former DoD procurement people, to real estate strategy to Amazon's own supply chain, to Jeff B.'s personal life. It would be like a mid-level employee at State Department talking about how the Trump administration views farm policy, and what the National Park Service is planning, and what types of cool things the US Mint is cooking up. That State Department guy might have heard about a lot of those things either from reading the news or from talking to buddies, but he wouldn't come within a mile of it as part of his job.
They're clearly putting on an air of authoritativeness, but yeah exactly. I read this more like a very extended Glassdoor review. You're getting one person's perspective. Interesting interview, big grain of salt.
Which is fair. I don't think the interview is meant to be read as an authoritative source of truth on Amazon culture and sales and so forth, but rather just relaying what they've heard. They're more plugged into the Amazon rumor mill than I am and I think rumors often contain kernels of truth.
I don't think he said anything particularly insightful irt all those topics. A lot of the statements were superficial things that you'll pick up while working on adjacent areas (and as we know, it's pretty easy to jump around different teams/fields in Amazon) or from Amazonian friends.
Interesting things he didn't really talk much about: Alexa (there was 1 like 1 very superficial reference to it), Kuiper, and others.
I don't think this is a PR piece, and most likely it is not approved by the company (the reference about Jeff's Sex Life would've been removed). This does feel like a real view from an insider, it's very opinionated, and not all of it is right.
I'll add: even if he is speaking for AWS with some authority, he certainly doesn't speak for the rest of Amazon. I've seen some teams with _really_ bad practices (security and otherwise.)
As for your comment about the writer, the entire website feels very "off" to me - no author listed, no "About" page with names/links, nothing to give this credibility. I did see the link to the cofounder's Twitter page, so at least there is someone behind it, but it is pretty well hidden.
Maybe it's an interview of Bezos himself? It's written a lot like from someone's point of view who a) knows the early history b) is familiar with current daily business (like covid) c) is familiar with how different factions inside the company were years ago. If you look at the company from a global perspective but still from the inside, there are only few people around who can write such an interview.
Caesar wrote his books in the third person as well. Bezos seems to me like the kind of guy who'd do that.
Also I'm not too familiar with how Bezos writes, but from the few interviews of him that I've heard, it sounds a lot like him to me. See also this letter... guess the author :). https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/923473337115914240
> The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this.
Ferdinand Demara impersonated a surgeon on a Canadian naval ship during the Korean War. He performed a number of successful surgeries and was only caught because of a newspaper article about how he had successfully removed a bullet from a wounded soldier.
A friend discovered that he had a pocketknife with him just before he was about to go through security. So he went out to the airport smoker's area, dug a little hole in the ground, and buried the pocketknife. When he returned from his trip he went back and dug it up.
I had a family member who tried to do a similar thing with a potted plant in the airport lobby, but it was still gone as security apparently runs metal detectors over common hiding places every so often as part of a bomb sweep.
I worked on the Echo Show team. The product had been in development for over a year when we invested in Nucleus. I remember thinking it was very strange that Amazon was investing in that company when we were building such a similar product internally.
I've definitely seen the same thing happen – an org that isn't sure it can build function X well might invest in a startup building X just in case.
Of course, they may or may not take advantage of that situation by misusing confidential information.
Either way the startup could lose (or just not have much negotiating power).
So yeah, sounds like this may not be a case of AMZN misbehaving. But I'm still not sure I'd want to talk to them if I were a startup, at least until I know they really need us and are willing to pay a lot.
Nothing I saw indicated that the Echo Show was in any way influenced by Nucleus.
I suspect, but don't know directly, that this investment was more about trying to jumpstart an ecosystem of third-party Echo devices rather than hedging bets.
Fitbit users are probably more representative than Apple or Garmin users. Apple Watches are a lot more expensive, and Garmin markets more towards athletes.
There are a lot of regional differences within the US. In Massachusetts, it's a lot better than this:
* MA has 40 hours of mandatory paid sick leave a year
* Assuming that your employer doesn't offer health insurance, if you're a single person making minimum wage in MA, working 40 hours a week, you qualify for ConnectorCare, with $15 co-pays for primary care visits and no deductible. There's a $82/month premium, but you'd also qualify for a $276/month tax credit.
There are still plenty of situations where a person making minimum wage wouldn't be able to afford a doctor's visit. For instance, if you miss paying your premiums your health insurance can be canceled. Or you could be working for an employer that offers health insurance, but with a high deductible. However, the situation here is a lot less bleak than the thread - for many people here working in the fast food industry a doctor's visit and a week's time off are affordable.
