I was excited to read this, but didn't find any useful insights. Just the typical 1-2 childhood stories extrapolated to "success" and some superficial comments on work-life balance.
Luck plays a role, but it's not the difference between some guy being Jeff Bezos and working at McDonalds. It's probably more of the difference between being successful in a way that many are - maybe owning a local company or something like that - and having something that blows up like Amazon has.
I'd argue the reverse is the case. Between someone like Jeff Bezos and someone working at McDonalds, without disrespecting the latter as there's nothing wrong with it, is not luck but education, aptitude and so forth.
But I have trouble seeing the substantial difference between Jeff Bezos and one of his dozens of colleagues at his former job. Many people tried to open online businesses like this, and often it came down to very specific moments in time where the circumstances, the money, the people applying to your company specifically and so on all checked out. And there's really no or very little control you have about this.
As far as I can tell, you're arguing the same thing I am.
There are a bunch of people like him who are pretty successful people; quite a few who are very successful, but what separates him from them is probably due to some good luck on his part.
I’ve met a couple people who quit Amazon in under a month. One saw a poster that said, “work harder, smarter, or faster. But you can’t pick just two”
Like Microsoft, the cultural foundation is masochistic bullshit. They’ll never unwind that. And if that’s the only way to be rich then I’ll settle for successful and call it a day.
Bezos advocates an alternative perspective, which I think you missed.
Don’t view work as a necessary evil that you must cope with and minimize. Instead, embrace it as a core aspect of life. Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work.
> Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work.
That's nonsense, though, and it's coming from a man whose company will push employees into 60 hour weeks for arbitrary lengths of time, often with little forewarning, because they expect work to be personal life, because "customer obsession."
Sounds like a cult. One that’s a cross between John Calvin and Chairman Mao.
This route attaches all of your self worth to your job. You don’t control your success at work. And if you think you do I encourage you to evaluate your attachment to the illusion of control.
One day, when a series of setbacks at work happens, it will shake that self worth. And you will look up and realize you have sacrificed other things chasing after something that isn’t as rewarding as it used to be.
You’ll realize that you had time to get Good at your job and something else too, but habit took over and you believed the bullshit of people who got rich off of your hard work and then forgot all about you. And you don’t have your music or art or woodworking or running or your old friends to fall back on. Because you were at work for the last 15 years.
I’m not saying this because I am a lazy bastard, worried about other people making him look bad. I’m saying this as someone who tried it. Don’t do this. You’ll end up as a person full of regrets, trying to warn others not to do the same.
The moral judgments are important on a societal level if we ever hope to address problems like suicide being one of the leading causes of death for westerners between 25 and 44 years old.
Mathematically, something has to be the leading cause of death ages 25..44. What should it be? A leading cause may emerge simply because other leading causes were fixed, not because things are getting worse.
Agreed. If there's some non-related disease killing more people aged 25-40 than suicide does, the world is probably a more dangerous place than it is today.
>Mathematically, something has to be the leading cause of death ages 25..44. What should it be?
I'm a bit late here, but I think we could reasonably hope for things that are essentially random, such as car accidents, food poisoning, house fires, chronic birth defects or DIY mishaps.
If you look at the actual causes of death[1] You can see that in that age bracket, this is broadly the case. "Unintentional injury" is #1, followed by suicide, followed by homicide, followed by cancer (which includes lung cancer ofc) and then heart disease. (The exact ordering varies a bit depending on source, but accidents->suicide->lung cancer->heart disease is definitely a broad trend)
Your point is well made, but when suicide and homicide are above heart disease in the deaths of a nation famed for a national scale chronic weight problem, it's not hard to say that the US could probably do more on the mental health front. I'm of the opinion that the same is true for most of the western world.
2.5 more years until I get my stock... It is nice to have a good chunk of change to start a family with, but I hope to eventually find a job where I'm able to maintain enough time for side-projects and personal hobbies.
These stories are all the same but people like to read them, the entire self-help industry is based on this. All the major advice is already common sense.
Yeah, well. I grew up in the countryside. Recently spent some months back there. Connected with some people from kindergarten and primary school. I learned 6 people from back then died driving their car too fast when about 18~20.
Edit: I also remember two kids burn down the house of one of their parents, playing with matches. I hope they are resourceful now because that one put the parents in a very difficult position.
A usual Sunday afternoon for me as a young child was to cut pieces of wood with a pocket knife until I cut myself. Then I would go to my bedroom and read a book. I may or may not have learned anything.
A chopping knife is not a rifle.
It's really difficult to kill yourself by mistake while chopping carrots, especially if you are given a small, rounded knife.
I've got relatives down South who bought my cousin a pink .22 rifle for Christmas at around 8-10. Not sure if I would do it for my kids but I didn't hear of any problems.
My son has chopped vegetables with a sharp knife as a 5yo under close supervision. When he started to fool around, i took the knife away.
It was super stressful for me, but I rather teach him to use a knife correctly and responsibly. The alternative would be that he plays with it in secret and that is more dangerous.
Also, better use a sharp knife than a blunt one. ;)
Is "treat your lowest paid employees like dirt" and "if people are desperate and really need the job, as long as you employ them you don't need to treat them humanely" part of it?
How about "If you are a rich owner you can safely distance yourself from lower management that does 'whatever it takes' to keep profits up and play the ignorance card"?
“Be a high functioning sociopath” seems like it might save time...
Edit: It might also offend, but it's hard to contextualize the behavior of humanity’s apex predators without resorting to models of/like sociopathy. If you have a better model to offer which preserves their humanity in some way, and just paints them as incredibly ideological, deluded, etc, I'd be open to that.
Here's a better context. Primate groups label and shun members who fall out of line. When they do that you can get a better idea of what's happening by ignoring the labels and looking at situation of the ones doing the labeling.
Am I mistaken in thinking that if you're an owner or executive of a company that employees in the vicinity of half a million people, the specifics of how lower management operates is legitimately not your business? With an organization that large, anyone would have to delegate that responsibility to others.
If you run a company then everything is your business. He might not directly participate in the management of warehouse workers, but if the are being treated badly then it is his responsibility to fix it. It is his job to set the direction of the company and to hire people (who hire people, and so on) that will do the right thing. He is the one who has set a culture of competition among his developers and hard conditions for his warehouse workers.
Bezos clearly follows the news. He must have read articles mentioning the poor working conditions of his employees. That he hasn't fixed it- and doesn't appear to be trying to fix it- says that he doesn't think that taking care of his people is worth the cost.
From a business perspective, I get it. Amazon has thin margins as a computing, logistics and retail company. It's competing against Google and Wal-Mart.
In a more abstract sense, if you say 'warehouse workers are being treated badly' it implies Bezos himself both seeks and has a more cushy, nurturing job: and therefore, is responsible for treating others as he would wish to be treated himself. Hence, a moral failing on his part, that works to his benefit.
I don't think it's a simple as that. Being a Bezos is sort of self-selecting: as the 'apex predator' he must motivate a whole corporation that functions on this ruthless moral model. I'm not sure how many miles he runs each day, but as far as people dropping dead of stress I think it's mostly the guy's extensive resources that stop him being one of the dead bodies left behind.
In other words, the CEO is crazy and driving himself impossibly hard. The CEO in turn expects everybody else to push just as hard. But the warehouse guys can't have a team of masseuses attending upon them after (or during) THEIR jobs, nor do they have journalists and celebrities fawning over them for being so hardcore: Bezos wishes to build a company that from top to bottom is ultra-hardcore and driven, but most people participating in the exercise get NONE of the benefits he gets out of coaching a giant corporation to develop that kind of killer instinct.
The behavior is in fact the way to make the corporation kill and defeat other corporations, but most of the people working for Amazon get only very intangible benefits from doing this. Unless they can be like 'yay team!' and personally identify themselves with, say, their CEO and his attitude, they're just chewed up and spat out.
It's interesting to follow the logic of it. By definition, Amazon can NEVER suck up fat margins and benefit its employees and rest on its laurels, because by definition if it does another Amazon will outperform it (at rather pedestrian tasks that are nonetheless valuable). So there must always be the worst possible working conditions attainable by law, from the bottom right up to the CEO. But the CEO gets a lot of side benefits and intangibles that the other workers don't.
It would be closer to fair if people treated Bezos with contempt, knowing that anytime he keeled over or lost his nerve, some other hard charger would jump in and become Bezos in his stead. Bezos could stop being Bezos at any time, but he's the richest guy in the world because he seems like he can't. He is more likely to stroke out in some meeting than to retire. He can only be replaced by someone else who is that ruthless or more ruthless… depends on whether society considers his attitude criminally harmful, and that depends on how he goes about being Bezos. See Kalanick and Uber as a counterexample, where the guy fully embraces ruthlessness but is far less interested in self-abuse and is more easily painted as an exploiter.
I think you're confusing responsibility with micromanagement though. If you delegate a task, you don't have to be aware of the specifics of how that task is executed, but if it's executed badly, yes it is still your responsibility.
Yes, you're mistaken. Responsibility does not mutually exclude. You don't decide on the specifics, but if those specifics are unethical then you are responsible for them because you set the incentives which cause them to be prevalent.
There are a lot of organisations where top level management obtain plausible deniability by formally setting policies against abusing employees, but also set incentives such that low level managers can only succeed by doing so.
>Am I mistaken in thinking that if you're an owner or executive of a company that employees in the vicinity of half a million people, the specifics of how lower management operates is legitimately not your business?
My point is societal pressure doesn't have to end with laws. If a company wants to play the 'but-it-isnt-illegal' game, they should still be subject to suffering a rejection by the public, and as members of the public, we have a moral obligation to reject those companies.
That would have worked if people did really act on "I don't consume from non-responsible company". But people pick cheapest, or nicest, or trendiest. They don't give a crap about the company practices.
The problem is, society interacts with companies as consumers, not citizens. Markets optimize for price and convenience, not ethical business practices, and market forces speak louder than societal pressure.
Unless Amazon does something to spark mass outrage on the scale of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, then society is going to be happy as long as they get their Kindles and Echos delivered on time.
If that is the case in your community, then I'm glad I don't live there.
I believe most places in the world, even some of the poorest and most desperate set a higher standard than "kill to survive". Given a chance most people will naturally form communities that will try to protect themselves from harm. Destructive behaviour is not a forgone conclusion and as soon as people start to understanding this they will stop being scared of their neighbours.
Right. “It’s a business” excuses all behavior. It’s all good as long as it makes a profit! I’m sure that made I.G. Farben’s managers sleep better during WWII.
Toxic work environments eventually change or fail. If talented people don't like it there they'll leave. If consumers don't like the company they'll stop supporting it. There are other economic systems, but that's how capitalism works.
>Toxic work environments eventually change or fail.
How soon that happens? Because it worked wonders for Walmart or McDonalds all these years.
>If talented people don't like it there they'll leave.
That would only matter if their operation depended on talented people. Which is not really required for McDonalds, Walmart, or Amazon (at the order handling side).
At best, those companies have to keep upper management and logistics people happy -- and can continue to screw the replaceable workers forever.
>If consumers don't like the company they'll stop supporting it.
Most of the masses don't care as long as the price is right. Few stopped buying Nike after the sweatshop complaints, at best they took their "word" that the issue has been solved (and they just moved manufacturing around through various third world countries and added more plausible deniability layers).
The hundreds of millions of lower middle class and poorer people have the same problems themselves in their jobs, which makes them thing that is just how things are.
The companies know how to put on a "humane" facade, and lots of jobs are not even public facing (the customer wont ever see an Amazon warehouse). And their friends, the media, were they advertise, will give them all the good public relations they need.
Thats not how capitalism works, thats what the theory predicts. The sibling comment has plenty of examples of it not working.
Anyone who knows just enough econ to be dangerous quotes this kind of crap without acknowledging all the counterexamples we see in the world. Experiment & Observation > Theory.
Capitalism takes a long time to work. Regulation can make it work faster or slower, depending on how you do :)
Pure capitalism works very very slowly, it takes decades and lessons often have to be repeated.
People can't account for every factor when they purchase a product. Being a conscious buyers is extremely hard work, a system that relies exclusively on that will take hundreds of years to make even modest progress.
As always, I'm surprised to see outrage over employee wages from a startup and business focused community (Hacker News). What is it that you purpose Amazon just pay everybody $200,000 a year and then go out of business? This is really basic economics, and I strongly believe in the American dream, you can work your way up and Amazon provides ample opportunities for growth.
The OP is talking about the way lowest paid employees are treated. Of course paying everyone 200k is ridiculous, but they didn't even come close to suggesting that should be the case.
Yes, it's the practical thing for a business like Amazon to do in the current economic and social environment. But you seem to be asking us to take quite a leap of faith from there to "this is how it should be and people who think otherwise are Unamerican".
If you're legally allowed to pay people $4.95 a week and work 'em at gunpoint, that becomes the new maximum efficiency point (provided enough humans and/or robots can be procured) and the existing Amazon goes out of business, unable to compete.
For that matter, if Amazon permitted just anybody to grow and work their way up, there'd be a lot of warehouse people or code-mongers thinking they should prosper, and there's not room for all of them. That's basic economics too, and it means that no, you can't work your way up nor can you grow. There's already a Jeff Bezos, and you're not it. There's also a 'your boss' and you're not that, either.
So, the practical implementation of human worker wages remains very interesting to people, and the fact that Amazon's the best at arbitraging this dynamic is relevant.
What you see as outrage is simply people's reactions to that very basic economics: to what extent can a company define the conditions for an industry (or all of society) by exploiting the rules and running as close to the edge as possible?
One assumes there's a spectrum and that you can get a 'good job' and have less misery than your fellow worker, if you try hard or you're lucky or wealthy or nepotistic enough. One also assumes that if you 'work your way up' you're wealthier and have it easier and can live large like some important person.
Amazon flips that on its head. If you're in the Amazon model, there is no 'up'. At every level, you're existing in maximum tolerable misery because that is your global strategy to outcompete every other business entity that threatens you or could ever threaten you. If you're 'winning' as an individual, that hurts the company: the company wins if everybody from bottom to top is struggling in the optimal misery/output balance, to the extent of applicable laws.
It's a conversation worth having. This is the formula for corporate efficiency, but to what extent should humans operate NOT at the point of maximum misery?
The American Dream is an intangible. If other people aren't impressed by it, then offering it as primary compensation is disingenuous. I'm particularly dismayed by trying to mandate it… it's a pretty lame dream if you look at things in a more systemic fashion. It has already led to the collapse of the American middle and lower classes, and this is only accelerating.
An American 'oh, hi, I'm awake now' might be a wiser alternative…
> What is it that you purpose Amazon just pay everybody $200,000 a year and then go out of business?
How about they just pay enough for full time employees to actually live where they work, without taking overtime, a second job and a roommate just to make ends meet? Pay in proportion to the standard of living?
>you can work your way up and Amazon provides ample opportunities for growth.
Yes, but most of those opportunities only present more responsibility, but not more (or barely more) pay, at least at the bottom tiers. You can work your way up from the bottom for years and still make less than someone sacking groceries.
> How about they just pay enough for full time employees to actually live where they work, without taking overtime, a second job and a roommate just to make ends meet? Pay in proportion to the standard of living?
I'd argue that they do. The market decides, and clearly people are still willing to accept the positions at the offered salary. Would you rather they be unemployed, or have a job at Amazon? This is at-will employment, nobody is forcing anybody to work at these positions.
True, Amazon tends to pay the minimum that the market allows, and people are willing to accept work for that pay, but they also have high turnover, and people also quit in droves.
It's rational for them, as a company, to want to reduce costs by keeping wages low, but I don't believe the labor market agrees with it so much as tolerates it. I'm also not certain they couldn't afford a few dollars more an hour for full time employees (in whom, it's assumed, they want to make a long-term investment), rather, that they simply have a culture of being as cheap about everything as possible.
But this attitude (referred to as "frugality" but in practice it's just cheapness) has negative effects in terms of employee morale, cultural investment, and labor quality that Amazon has apparently decided aren't worth improving.
It didn't touch on that, but there are these gems:
On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”
On choosing a romantic partner: When Jeff decided he was ready to settle down, his friends set him up on tons of blind dates. He eventually knew he’d found his wife when he met someone truly resourceful. “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison” Jeff said.
I am a former military wife, so I am pretty can do, and I believe that not letting kids do anything in order to "protect" them is actively harmful. But I wanted my sons to reach adulthood having learned to be resourceful without losing any body parts to do it. I succeeded in both those goals.
Edit: I guess I am partly saying "How resourceful is his wife, really, if she isn't confident she can teach the kids to play with knives safely?
As a former military wife who helped build my husband's career, raised two special needs kids on a tight budget, homeschooled them when the school system failed them, etc, this comment really ticks me off. It is like saying women are only whores and their only measure of worth is being good at extracting money from men by sleeping with them. The more money they extract without really producing anything of value, the more we praise them. I find it grotesque that anyone would make such a remark.
It also feels very personally insulting to me as it dismisses my competence as a mother based on the fact that I failed to marry a millionaire. I really can't manage to express how completely inappropriate I feel the remark is.
To the assholes downvoting this: you are sexist pigs. May you burn in hell.
>It also feels very personally insulting to me as it dismisses my competence as a mother based on the fact that I failed to marry a millionaire.
How exactly does it "dismisses your competence" as a mother?
Parent commenter merely said (and that in jest) that Bezos' wife managing to snatch a millionaire proves she's resourceful.
So, even if the parent had said it seriously, at worst it would only imply that your failing to marry a millionaire means you've failed to prove you're resourceful in THAT particular way. You could still be resourceful in millions of other ways. It says absolutely nothing about anybody's general resourcefulness or competence "as a mother".
Nor it implies that women should do that (snatch a millionaire). If anything, even if the whole thing is obviously said jokingly, it implicitly would seem to condemn the practice.
>I really can't manage to express how completely inappropriate I feel the remark is.
Well, surely you can't seem to be able to express it in a coherent manner.
>To the assholes downvoting this: you are sexist pigs. May you burn in hell.
Or you know, they simply disagree with what you wrote. And your added swearing doesn't help your case either. Language.
I seem to be the most prominent woman here. I got there in part by biting my tongue a lot in the face of a lot of less than respectful stuff driven by sexist social norms. I generally go to pains to not cuss "at" people, even though I tend to swear like a sailor and use the F word like other people use very.
But this whole thing is simply beyond the pale. If I joked that Paul Graham married well and this clearly is evidence of his resourcefulness/his biggest accomplishment, that would get flagged to death so fast your head would spin.
There is absolutely nothing that makes his or your comment fit the guidelines of engaging in a generally respectful fashion. I am essentially being called a cheap whore and told to get a sense of humor for finding that incredibly inappropriate.
Is this really sexist though ? I mean, it's not like the opinions people have of men who have insignificant accomplishments but marry a rich woman are any different.
It is a left-handed way of dismissing me personally. I have already commented on that.
I plan to bow out of this conversation. The entire thing has been a really shitty experience for me. This plus other crappy things on HN today has me pretty fed up in a way I rarely feel. I usually have a lot of good things to say about HN. But this has not been a good day for me in HN land.
I have been at this eight years. I appear to be the only woman on the leaderboard. I got there shortly after getting myself off the street.
A piece of mine was flagged off the front page in the last couple of hours after two people characterized it as SEO spam because I was talking about the service I worked for while homeless, a service recommended to me by patio11 who then dragged my name through the mud a few months later for repeating his advice on HN. No, no one is vouching for me and saying "she spent nearly six years homeless and was quite open about it. She is the real deal." Whenever I comment on the lack of that kind of support, a thing the respected male members of the community get, I get pissed all over. When I express my opinion that my intractable poverty is partly due to being treated different from the guys on HN, I get pissed on some more.
I have been diplomatic. I have been patient. I have been LNG suffering. I still have to put up with disrespectful snark like your comment here.
As usual, I don't know how I will early this week. As usual, I am failing to do paid work this weekend due to fever. As usual, there is no point in complaining about how hard my life is. It gets me zero sympathy or compassion, even when the callousness I face makes me suicidal. That is the wrong thing to say. It makes other people uncomfortable and a poor person and woman should not do that.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. We are getting well. I get no credit for that. When I talk about it, I get called crazy and a liar. (Pick one: either I am crazy and deluded but believe what I am saying, or I am lying. You can't actually have it both ways.)
So I am kind of at the end of my rope, not because of some stupid discussion on HN, but because of many years of enormous mountains of bullshit that would have broken most other people years ago. In fact, I am literally supposed to be dead from my condition.
But let's go with your theory that I'm just a sissy. The men here are far more comfortable with that idea.
I would strongly advise against caring about any leaderboard position. Besides, you get banned here for having meltdowns or showing your true policital opinion. I feel it likely this is going to happen to you (and me) sooner or later. So ... just don't care about it. Care about the real world. Even money is a better thing to care about.
The leaderboard here is internet points. That and a sac of crap is worth significantly less than a sac. Keep that in mind.
There is contact information in my profile. If this advice were genuinely being given in good faith out of some kind of concern for my welfare, it could have been done privately.
Since it wasn't, I see no reason to take any of it at all seriously. Posting it publicly like this amounts to mudslinging. Publically announcing that me being upset over people repeatedly making personal attacks against me is, in your opinion, a banworthy offense amounts to planting ideas with ill intent. That in no way looks like any kind of good faith effort to be helpful to me personally. (Their personal attacks are a violation of the rules. If you want to crab at someone, it should be them, not me.)
I will add that "my true political opinion" is an incredibly specious characterization of my remarks. There is zero political opinion expressed here. I am one person who just happens to be female by accident of birth who is trying to figure out how to make my life work. That is it. There is zero political anything to my participation here. Getting fed up once in a while by the uphill battle I face for simply being female is not some political position.
> On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”
Sounds like, they are exaggerating the risk for dramatic effect :)
Letting your kids help out in the kitchen, etc.. do wood works, etc.. is not without risk, but the risks are tiny.
Dramatic exaggeration is just a provocative counter balance to the many parents who won't let the kids peel potatoes because they could get hurt.
I used to pay accident claims. Here are some real life medical records I had to review in my job:
One child lost an eye because someone left a loaded BB gun laying around in the house and another child picked it up and shot them. The other child probably thought it was a toy gun.
A toddler fell and broke their leg. It took the parents two to four days of the child refusing to bear weight on the leg for them to decide that a doctor's visit was in order.
A child went for an unsupervised ride on an ATV on a weekend morning while the parents slept in. Result: Their lower leg was amputated in the accident. They were nine years old.
But you go ahead and keep thinking that nothing genuinely bad ever happens to children when their parents are cavalier about risks to their safety.
Well that was a waste of three minutes. Felt as if I was reading a child's "10 awesome things about my favoritest CEO" homework assignment.
I expected at least a little insight. Building your own crane (how long does that take?!) as opposed to paying somebody a modest sum to help you move heavy objects is not a good lesson.
Amazon built their own crane back when no one had cranes. You can't just build an online book store today and expect it to snowball into any business you choose to build a new crane for.
I like the bit about how Pop would do everything himself. I think it's a huge skill just to realize how approachable things are. Especially with the increasing potentiality that the digital era gives us, it's important to have big ideas and go for them in smart & pragmatic ways.
I once hired a plumber to make some repairs around the house. Curious, and not knowing anything about plumbing, I watched what he did. Then I got an enormous bill.
Nothing he did seemed particularly hard, and since then I do plumbing repairs myself.
It's interesting that we tend to ask for advice from rich people. Once I've heard a very annoyed George Soros saying in an interview - CNN or similar - that "you got me here not because I know stuff but because I'm rich".
As a very very general and rough rule the fact is someone like Soros or for that matter someone who is just famous or even niche famous will hang around with a different group of people and be exposed to things that normal people are not and do not have access to. Of course there are a ton of exceptions but the fact is if you are Soros (or Jobs or Bezos or Jack Welch (GE)) you simply have access to a group of people that aren't available to an ordinary person.
Even take, say, Paul Graham or Sam Altman. They can reach out to anyone in the YC family and I would imagine get a very fast and motivated response and extra effort. Or for that matter anyone in the startup world who is familiar with who they are or what they do. There is no way anyone will convince me that isn't a very large advantage in either gaining information or access. And that information and access does mean something they are (in theory) better informed.
Of course Soros is on CNN because he is rich and known. But the truth is what he says people will take seriously more so than if CNN interviewed the local head of a 100 or 200 person manufacturing company.
It stands to reason that a rich person would know more about how to make money than a poor person, unless you believe it is totally random.
Similarly, if I was interested in an athletic career, I'd be interested to hear from a gold medal champion more than from someone who is out of breath going to the mailbox.
I don't think it's totally random, but I don't think that rich people have some unknown knowledge or quality that allowed them to become rich. Plenty of rich people are rich because of circumstance, others, because they were in the right place at the right time with the right knowledge.
I am really enjoying this subthread and I appreciate your contributions to it.
I think it is a little of column A and a little of column B. I think a lot of people want to emphasize the luck, happenstance and inheritance angle in part to try to make peace with not being rich themselves.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I am tired of being dirt poor and working so hard at solving my problems, seemingly without ever getting any credit while often feeling like the financial piece never really changes, no matter how much progress I have made. There always seems to be some reason why I am broke anyway.
I wish life would give me a break and I end up often feeling like the difference between me and more financially well off people is entirely "luck" (bad luck) that no amount of effort can reverse. On the other hand, I want success that I earned, not some winning lottery ticket.
I can't quite figure out if hoping for a break is worse or if wanting to stubbornly do it my damn self is stupidly and pointlessly masochistic.
I don't have the answer. I am just trying to say that I have a lot of sympathy for the people who want to claim that rich people were just lucky.
Yet, I have worked hard to get healthier and seen results for that while people dismiss that as wild coincidence and get incredibly defensive at the idea that making changes to their life might make a difference. And it gives me the sneaking suspicion that people who want to say rich people are merely lucky and that's it are people who don't want to examine what they might be able to do differently because it might involve admitting that their lack of money is partly due to not wanting to make certain hard choices.
Luck does play a role. But crucial to that is putting yourself into a position where luck can help you. I.e. if you're waiting for the wind to blow your way, you have to be out on the water in a sailboat with the sails ready.
I've read about many successful people, and in the early days they would take every opportunity for luck to happen, and one day it did. For example, the Beatles spent years playing for anyone who would listen to them, until one day it mattered. There's Ray Kroc, a 52 year old broke failed salesman, who one day noticed an opportunity to run McDonald's. It goes on and on.
Keep trying, and I wish you the best of luck(!). There's no country on earth with more opportunity than America, and it's never been easier in America. Heck, just recently on HN there was that guy who noticed he could buy stuff from Walmart and sell it on Amazon for a profit, and was making millions.
Yeah, Ray Kroc is a quintessentially American story!
Anyhow, it is not necessary to hit a home run to become wealthy. I've seen people do it with a series of base hits, and managing the results prudently.
I saw an episode about this years ago on PBS (Frontline?). They studied 401k investment results at a company where all the employees participated in the same plan, with the same choices.
The lower paid employees consistently had much lower investment returns than the higher paid employees. It was pretty clear that the higher paid employees were managing their 401k investments better.
In other words, it wasn't random.
The company reacted to those results by offering free investment education classes to all employees. What the outcome of that was I don't know.
It statistically stands to reason that people who are better at managing money, finance, and investments will accrue more wealth than those who are worse at it.
Nassim Taleb has built an entire writing/speaking career on the premise that most success (particularly in the financial industry) is predicated on N events, where N is low enough to statistically produce exactly the number of Warren Buffetts, George Soroses, Jeff Bezoses, etc that we see today, by mere chance.
I think 'luck matters' argument is applicable only if you have already few things going on in your life. I mean you are putting in the effort, doing what is necessary, everyday, in and out.
The other part is lottery by definition. If you stayed at home, played video games all day and won the lottery, then that is the very literal definition of luck.
Work life balance and Amazon ... sounds a bit ironic, but having worked there for a year, if you're at Amazon or thinking about working at Amazon, I want to leave you with one big, massive piece of advice - if you don't know how to say "no", Amazon isn't the place for you.
What do I mean by this? Amazon has an infinite amount of work they will gladly load you up with - on-call duty, maintaining legacy stuff and doing new projects.
If you don't know how to carve out your boundaries, you're going to be in a world of hurt at Amazon, get demoralized very quickly and either get axed after a bad review (like me) or you're going to quit or worse, stay miserable and go gray before your time.
Another tidbit of advice my boss - who also no longer is there - gave me, is you have to be a dick to succeed at Amazon.
I'll just leave you with that before you choose to surrender to the cult of Bezos.
Disclosure: Financially impacted by both Amazon and Apple. I know it's ironic to be in a position where I'm criticizing Amazon whilst owning shares, but I'm not the only one making decisions in my family's investment company.
Honestly other than Alexa, Amazon is such an underwhelming company.
Even AWS is completely overhyped and there are other products out there with betters interfaces (GUIs, APIs, and CLIs) and cheaper prices. Even S3 is a complete chore to work with and it's their simplest product.
I buy books and a couple knicknacks off of Amazon and I've semi-enjoyed one show they produced (Alpha House). But the list of things they've done to piss me off is getting pretty long:
1. Sex toys in "recent purchases". Thanks guys, because what I wanted was to have my conservative family members have a view into my sex life. I'm bi and semi-closeted, so this is even worse than you're probably imagining.
2. I've never had a more frustrating CLI than the one I had to interact with from Amazon for AWS. It was right during the transition to a new, better CLI, but that also just meant that the one I was using had wrong documentation. It literally took me 100 times longer than a couple DigitalOcean API calls would have run me.
3. Chinese crap. I went travelling with a motion activated camera that would SMS me if there was motion in my Airbnb room. Of course the motion camera didn't work for more than 3 minutes. Crashed constantly, etc. Then when I appealed for a refund the company listed on Amazon gave me $2. Right, thanks guys, I paid way more than that but it got around whatever refund system Amazon had in place because I couldn't escalate it any further. Don't even get me started on the fake knockoffs for sale all across the store. It's turning into Ebay with all these fly by night stores.
I could honestly go on much, much longer. This isn't just a product of me having had such a long relationship with the company, I've had just as long of a relationship with Apple and the only thing they do to piss me off is their constant slowness at their stores. The products themselves are great.
And I pin all the blame for this on the stupid Amazon philosophy where people have to be dicks to succeed at Amazon.
You shouldn't buy sex toys on amazon precisely because of reason number 3. Shit is straight up dangerous and someone is going to get hurt before long, it'll be a huge lawsuit and a PR disaster for Amazon and they'll finally crackdown on all the counterfeit chinese bullshit.
What a bunch of self selected myths. Jeff Bezos isn’t a sociopath and he isn’t Superman, he’s a clueless fucking human being like the rest of us. He’s not special, he hasn’t “figured it all out” and he doesn’t have some secret others lack. His shit stinks and I bet he can’t even make an omelette.
Yes, but somehow he has started an empire that ships thousands of packages every day and allows people to easily shop online. He might not be bright, but he did something right. Something that others didn't want to take the leap to do.
That is the only reason Amazon was ever price competitive. Without that, it wouldn't have grown. That's his great accomplishment.
Not just abusing workers, not just treating low paid employees like dirt, constantly firing the most vulnerable just to keep them down, and not just hiding from criticism on those actions [1], but also abusing the country as a whole, through massive scale tax evasion.
"Jeff’s Pop once tore the top of his thumb off. He had tried to jump out of his moving truck and unlatch the farm’s gate before the car slid through"
Jeff's Pop was a loony, but extremely characteristic of what Amazon became. Guy couldn't stop his TRUCK long enough to open a gate for that same truck to go through? That's an… unusual attitude to driving a truck.
The raising kids part was interesting and took me a bit off guard, but I do like his view on regrets. Look for to 80 years old and think what you can do to minimize your regrets!
Amazon is, based on my direct experience, on the list of companies partaking in some level of social shenanigans against US citizens, not completely dissimilar from folks who have overtaken content here on HN, and have done so on reddit in the past.
Seattle is a place full of extraordinarily smart individuals, and the probability that some non-empty subset of those extraordinarily smart individuals partake in sociopathic projects expressed through (and/or enabled by) technology approaches one.
This isn't necessarily related to Jeff Bezos, however.
> "Nouns, noun phrases, and some pronouns generally form a possessive with the suffix 's (or in some cases just by adding an apostrophe to an existing s)."
129 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadSome guy got lucky, nothing else...
But I have trouble seeing the substantial difference between Jeff Bezos and one of his dozens of colleagues at his former job. Many people tried to open online businesses like this, and often it came down to very specific moments in time where the circumstances, the money, the people applying to your company specifically and so on all checked out. And there's really no or very little control you have about this.
Success is one thing, but Amazon level success is completly different.
There are a bunch of people like him who are pretty successful people; quite a few who are very successful, but what separates him from them is probably due to some good luck on his part.
Like Microsoft, the cultural foundation is masochistic bullshit. They’ll never unwind that. And if that’s the only way to be rich then I’ll settle for successful and call it a day.
Don’t view work as a necessary evil that you must cope with and minimize. Instead, embrace it as a core aspect of life. Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work.
That's nonsense, though, and it's coming from a man whose company will push employees into 60 hour weeks for arbitrary lengths of time, often with little forewarning, because they expect work to be personal life, because "customer obsession."
This route attaches all of your self worth to your job. You don’t control your success at work. And if you think you do I encourage you to evaluate your attachment to the illusion of control.
One day, when a series of setbacks at work happens, it will shake that self worth. And you will look up and realize you have sacrificed other things chasing after something that isn’t as rewarding as it used to be.
You’ll realize that you had time to get Good at your job and something else too, but habit took over and you believed the bullshit of people who got rich off of your hard work and then forgot all about you. And you don’t have your music or art or woodworking or running or your old friends to fall back on. Because you were at work for the last 15 years.
I’m not saying this because I am a lazy bastard, worried about other people making him look bad. I’m saying this as someone who tried it. Don’t do this. You’ll end up as a person full of regrets, trying to warn others not to do the same.
There are real cults out there, Amazon isn't one of them.
I'm a bit late here, but I think we could reasonably hope for things that are essentially random, such as car accidents, food poisoning, house fires, chronic birth defects or DIY mishaps.
If you look at the actual causes of death[1] You can see that in that age bracket, this is broadly the case. "Unintentional injury" is #1, followed by suicide, followed by homicide, followed by cancer (which includes lung cancer ofc) and then heart disease. (The exact ordering varies a bit depending on source, but accidents->suicide->lung cancer->heart disease is definitely a broad trend)
Your point is well made, but when suicide and homicide are above heart disease in the deaths of a nation famed for a national scale chronic weight problem, it's not hard to say that the US could probably do more on the mental health front. I'm of the opinion that the same is true for most of the western world.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10lcid_all_deaths_by_...
It’s also easy to say when you aren’t in the same city as Amazon. There are ex Amazonians everywhere and they have strange ideas.
In hindsight, those 2.5 years will be just a heartbeat.
I suggest doing your best to find ways to enjoy the immediate presence, and the future will take care of itself.
I've personally experienced the "unhappy/bored at work -> bad at home" connection in my life.
"I'd much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid."
I love the idea in theory...but really wonder if I'd have the guts to actually pull off something like that in real life.
Of all the people I knew back then I'm pretty sure they all survived into adulthood?
The only thing that has changed really is that roads are a lot busier nowadays so you may be forgiven for exercising some caution with that one.
Edit: I also remember two kids burn down the house of one of their parents, playing with matches. I hope they are resourceful now because that one put the parents in a very difficult position.
It was super stressful for me, but I rather teach him to use a knife correctly and responsibly. The alternative would be that he plays with it in secret and that is more dangerous.
Also, better use a sharp knife than a blunt one. ;)
How about "If you are a rich owner you can safely distance yourself from lower management that does 'whatever it takes' to keep profits up and play the ignorance card"?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-ac...
http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/its-like-every-s...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/01/13/ama...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/22/amazon...
http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...
Edit: It might also offend, but it's hard to contextualize the behavior of humanity’s apex predators without resorting to models of/like sociopathy. If you have a better model to offer which preserves their humanity in some way, and just paints them as incredibly ideological, deluded, etc, I'd be open to that.
Bezos clearly follows the news. He must have read articles mentioning the poor working conditions of his employees. That he hasn't fixed it- and doesn't appear to be trying to fix it- says that he doesn't think that taking care of his people is worth the cost.
From a business perspective, I get it. Amazon has thin margins as a computing, logistics and retail company. It's competing against Google and Wal-Mart.
From a human perspective, it sucks.
I don't think it's a simple as that. Being a Bezos is sort of self-selecting: as the 'apex predator' he must motivate a whole corporation that functions on this ruthless moral model. I'm not sure how many miles he runs each day, but as far as people dropping dead of stress I think it's mostly the guy's extensive resources that stop him being one of the dead bodies left behind.
In other words, the CEO is crazy and driving himself impossibly hard. The CEO in turn expects everybody else to push just as hard. But the warehouse guys can't have a team of masseuses attending upon them after (or during) THEIR jobs, nor do they have journalists and celebrities fawning over them for being so hardcore: Bezos wishes to build a company that from top to bottom is ultra-hardcore and driven, but most people participating in the exercise get NONE of the benefits he gets out of coaching a giant corporation to develop that kind of killer instinct.
The behavior is in fact the way to make the corporation kill and defeat other corporations, but most of the people working for Amazon get only very intangible benefits from doing this. Unless they can be like 'yay team!' and personally identify themselves with, say, their CEO and his attitude, they're just chewed up and spat out.
It's interesting to follow the logic of it. By definition, Amazon can NEVER suck up fat margins and benefit its employees and rest on its laurels, because by definition if it does another Amazon will outperform it (at rather pedestrian tasks that are nonetheless valuable). So there must always be the worst possible working conditions attainable by law, from the bottom right up to the CEO. But the CEO gets a lot of side benefits and intangibles that the other workers don't.
It would be closer to fair if people treated Bezos with contempt, knowing that anytime he keeled over or lost his nerve, some other hard charger would jump in and become Bezos in his stead. Bezos could stop being Bezos at any time, but he's the richest guy in the world because he seems like he can't. He is more likely to stroke out in some meeting than to retire. He can only be replaced by someone else who is that ruthless or more ruthless… depends on whether society considers his attitude criminally harmful, and that depends on how he goes about being Bezos. See Kalanick and Uber as a counterexample, where the guy fully embraces ruthlessness but is far less interested in self-abuse and is more easily painted as an exploiter.
I think you're confusing responsibility with micromanagement though. If you delegate a task, you don't have to be aware of the specifics of how that task is executed, but if it's executed badly, yes it is still your responsibility.
There are a lot of organisations where top level management obtain plausible deniability by formally setting policies against abusing employees, but also set incentives such that low level managers can only succeed by doing so.
Yes (you are).
On a serious note, I don't think this is Amazon issue. Stop blaming individual companies. You can't expect them not to compete and cut costs.
It is the responsibility of the government to set and enforce the minimum wage and provide social services for the lower tier.
Unless Amazon does something to spark mass outrage on the scale of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, then society is going to be happy as long as they get their Kindles and Echos delivered on time.
Well, I can very much expect them -- and chose to do business with companies that do care.
But true, the social protection/minimum wage should also be set by law. Only that's a minimum limit -- I expect better than that.
In the end, I don't want businesses that merely say "compete to the full and fuck everything else".
I'm 100% certain that most people will go with "cheapest" or "more convenient" regardless.
Not the best criterion, what most would do.
Especially since it's more like "what most would do given a society that raised them like we do and given them the motives that we do".
I believe most places in the world, even some of the poorest and most desperate set a higher standard than "kill to survive". Given a chance most people will naturally form communities that will try to protect themselves from harm. Destructive behaviour is not a forgone conclusion and as soon as people start to understanding this they will stop being scared of their neighbours.
How soon that happens? Because it worked wonders for Walmart or McDonalds all these years.
>If talented people don't like it there they'll leave.
That would only matter if their operation depended on talented people. Which is not really required for McDonalds, Walmart, or Amazon (at the order handling side).
At best, those companies have to keep upper management and logistics people happy -- and can continue to screw the replaceable workers forever.
>If consumers don't like the company they'll stop supporting it.
Most of the masses don't care as long as the price is right. Few stopped buying Nike after the sweatshop complaints, at best they took their "word" that the issue has been solved (and they just moved manufacturing around through various third world countries and added more plausible deniability layers).
The hundreds of millions of lower middle class and poorer people have the same problems themselves in their jobs, which makes them thing that is just how things are.
The companies know how to put on a "humane" facade, and lots of jobs are not even public facing (the customer wont ever see an Amazon warehouse). And their friends, the media, were they advertise, will give them all the good public relations they need.
Anyone who knows just enough econ to be dangerous quotes this kind of crap without acknowledging all the counterexamples we see in the world. Experiment & Observation > Theory.
Pure capitalism works very very slowly, it takes decades and lessons often have to be repeated.
People can't account for every factor when they purchase a product. Being a conscious buyers is extremely hard work, a system that relies exclusively on that will take hundreds of years to make even modest progress.
We don't have that long time.
People in Amazon's warehouses were fainting because of heat and exhaustion. They finally installed an AC after protests.
Curious, are you a US citizen?
Reality is a continuum, not two simple poles of "mistreat your employees" or pay them $200k.
Baby steps.
For that matter, if Amazon permitted just anybody to grow and work their way up, there'd be a lot of warehouse people or code-mongers thinking they should prosper, and there's not room for all of them. That's basic economics too, and it means that no, you can't work your way up nor can you grow. There's already a Jeff Bezos, and you're not it. There's also a 'your boss' and you're not that, either.
So, the practical implementation of human worker wages remains very interesting to people, and the fact that Amazon's the best at arbitraging this dynamic is relevant.
What you see as outrage is simply people's reactions to that very basic economics: to what extent can a company define the conditions for an industry (or all of society) by exploiting the rules and running as close to the edge as possible?
One assumes there's a spectrum and that you can get a 'good job' and have less misery than your fellow worker, if you try hard or you're lucky or wealthy or nepotistic enough. One also assumes that if you 'work your way up' you're wealthier and have it easier and can live large like some important person.
Amazon flips that on its head. If you're in the Amazon model, there is no 'up'. At every level, you're existing in maximum tolerable misery because that is your global strategy to outcompete every other business entity that threatens you or could ever threaten you. If you're 'winning' as an individual, that hurts the company: the company wins if everybody from bottom to top is struggling in the optimal misery/output balance, to the extent of applicable laws.
It's a conversation worth having. This is the formula for corporate efficiency, but to what extent should humans operate NOT at the point of maximum misery?
The American Dream is an intangible. If other people aren't impressed by it, then offering it as primary compensation is disingenuous. I'm particularly dismayed by trying to mandate it… it's a pretty lame dream if you look at things in a more systemic fashion. It has already led to the collapse of the American middle and lower classes, and this is only accelerating.
An American 'oh, hi, I'm awake now' might be a wiser alternative…
How about they just pay enough for full time employees to actually live where they work, without taking overtime, a second job and a roommate just to make ends meet? Pay in proportion to the standard of living?
>you can work your way up and Amazon provides ample opportunities for growth.
Yes, but most of those opportunities only present more responsibility, but not more (or barely more) pay, at least at the bottom tiers. You can work your way up from the bottom for years and still make less than someone sacking groceries.
I'd argue that they do. The market decides, and clearly people are still willing to accept the positions at the offered salary. Would you rather they be unemployed, or have a job at Amazon? This is at-will employment, nobody is forcing anybody to work at these positions.
It's rational for them, as a company, to want to reduce costs by keeping wages low, but I don't believe the labor market agrees with it so much as tolerates it. I'm also not certain they couldn't afford a few dollars more an hour for full time employees (in whom, it's assumed, they want to make a long-term investment), rather, that they simply have a culture of being as cheap about everything as possible.
But this attitude (referred to as "frugality" but in practice it's just cheapness) has negative effects in terms of employee morale, cultural investment, and labor quality that Amazon has apparently decided aren't worth improving.
On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”
On choosing a romantic partner: When Jeff decided he was ready to settle down, his friends set him up on tons of blind dates. He eventually knew he’d found his wife when he met someone truly resourceful. “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison” Jeff said.
I am a former military wife, so I am pretty can do, and I believe that not letting kids do anything in order to "protect" them is actively harmful. But I wanted my sons to reach adulthood having learned to be resourceful without losing any body parts to do it. I succeeded in both those goals.
Edit: I guess I am partly saying "How resourceful is his wife, really, if she isn't confident she can teach the kids to play with knives safely?
Slacker.
Well, she married a multi-millionaire.
It also feels very personally insulting to me as it dismisses my competence as a mother based on the fact that I failed to marry a millionaire. I really can't manage to express how completely inappropriate I feel the remark is.
To the assholes downvoting this: you are sexist pigs. May you burn in hell.
How exactly does it "dismisses your competence" as a mother?
Parent commenter merely said (and that in jest) that Bezos' wife managing to snatch a millionaire proves she's resourceful.
So, even if the parent had said it seriously, at worst it would only imply that your failing to marry a millionaire means you've failed to prove you're resourceful in THAT particular way. You could still be resourceful in millions of other ways. It says absolutely nothing about anybody's general resourcefulness or competence "as a mother".
Nor it implies that women should do that (snatch a millionaire). If anything, even if the whole thing is obviously said jokingly, it implicitly would seem to condemn the practice.
>I really can't manage to express how completely inappropriate I feel the remark is.
Well, surely you can't seem to be able to express it in a coherent manner.
>To the assholes downvoting this: you are sexist pigs. May you burn in hell.
Or you know, they simply disagree with what you wrote. And your added swearing doesn't help your case either. Language.
But this whole thing is simply beyond the pale. If I joked that Paul Graham married well and this clearly is evidence of his resourcefulness/his biggest accomplishment, that would get flagged to death so fast your head would spin.
There is absolutely nothing that makes his or your comment fit the guidelines of engaging in a generally respectful fashion. I am essentially being called a cheap whore and told to get a sense of humor for finding that incredibly inappropriate.
I plan to bow out of this conversation. The entire thing has been a really shitty experience for me. This plus other crappy things on HN today has me pretty fed up in a way I rarely feel. I usually have a lot of good things to say about HN. But this has not been a good day for me in HN land.
Adieu.
A piece of mine was flagged off the front page in the last couple of hours after two people characterized it as SEO spam because I was talking about the service I worked for while homeless, a service recommended to me by patio11 who then dragged my name through the mud a few months later for repeating his advice on HN. No, no one is vouching for me and saying "she spent nearly six years homeless and was quite open about it. She is the real deal." Whenever I comment on the lack of that kind of support, a thing the respected male members of the community get, I get pissed all over. When I express my opinion that my intractable poverty is partly due to being treated different from the guys on HN, I get pissed on some more.
I have been diplomatic. I have been patient. I have been LNG suffering. I still have to put up with disrespectful snark like your comment here.
As usual, I don't know how I will early this week. As usual, I am failing to do paid work this weekend due to fever. As usual, there is no point in complaining about how hard my life is. It gets me zero sympathy or compassion, even when the callousness I face makes me suicidal. That is the wrong thing to say. It makes other people uncomfortable and a poor person and woman should not do that.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. We are getting well. I get no credit for that. When I talk about it, I get called crazy and a liar. (Pick one: either I am crazy and deluded but believe what I am saying, or I am lying. You can't actually have it both ways.)
So I am kind of at the end of my rope, not because of some stupid discussion on HN, but because of many years of enormous mountains of bullshit that would have broken most other people years ago. In fact, I am literally supposed to be dead from my condition.
But let's go with your theory that I'm just a sissy. The men here are far more comfortable with that idea.
"But we aren't sexist."
The leaderboard here is internet points. That and a sac of crap is worth significantly less than a sac. Keep that in mind.
Since it wasn't, I see no reason to take any of it at all seriously. Posting it publicly like this amounts to mudslinging. Publically announcing that me being upset over people repeatedly making personal attacks against me is, in your opinion, a banworthy offense amounts to planting ideas with ill intent. That in no way looks like any kind of good faith effort to be helpful to me personally. (Their personal attacks are a violation of the rules. If you want to crab at someone, it should be them, not me.)
I will add that "my true political opinion" is an incredibly specious characterization of my remarks. There is zero political opinion expressed here. I am one person who just happens to be female by accident of birth who is trying to figure out how to make my life work. That is it. There is zero political anything to my participation here. Getting fed up once in a while by the uphill battle I face for simply being female is not some political position.
Sounds like, they are exaggerating the risk for dramatic effect :) Letting your kids help out in the kitchen, etc.. do wood works, etc.. is not without risk, but the risks are tiny.
Dramatic exaggeration is just a provocative counter balance to the many parents who won't let the kids peel potatoes because they could get hurt.
One child lost an eye because someone left a loaded BB gun laying around in the house and another child picked it up and shot them. The other child probably thought it was a toy gun.
A toddler fell and broke their leg. It took the parents two to four days of the child refusing to bear weight on the leg for them to decide that a doctor's visit was in order.
A child went for an unsupervised ride on an ATV on a weekend morning while the parents slept in. Result: Their lower leg was amputated in the accident. They were nine years old.
But you go ahead and keep thinking that nothing genuinely bad ever happens to children when their parents are cavalier about risks to their safety.
The inevitable congestive dissonance in readers’ responses never cease to amuse me.
Starts with, “wow, yeah, Bezos is a legend. I’d love some insight into what makes him tick, so I can be more like him!!”
Then we quickly get to:
1. Oh, no way would I risk my child losing a finger!
2. Hey, work-life balance is important! It’s bad to work so much!
3. Maybe Bezos can focus on one task at a time — serial multi-tasker — but that’s not how I work!
I expected at least a little insight. Building your own crane (how long does that take?!) as opposed to paying somebody a modest sum to help you move heavy objects is not a good lesson.
Nothing he did seemed particularly hard, and since then I do plumbing repairs myself.
Even take, say, Paul Graham or Sam Altman. They can reach out to anyone in the YC family and I would imagine get a very fast and motivated response and extra effort. Or for that matter anyone in the startup world who is familiar with who they are or what they do. There is no way anyone will convince me that isn't a very large advantage in either gaining information or access. And that information and access does mean something they are (in theory) better informed.
Of course Soros is on CNN because he is rich and known. But the truth is what he says people will take seriously more so than if CNN interviewed the local head of a 100 or 200 person manufacturing company.
Similarly, if I was interested in an athletic career, I'd be interested to hear from a gold medal champion more than from someone who is out of breath going to the mailbox.
"The Millionaire Next Door" by Stanley
I think it is a little of column A and a little of column B. I think a lot of people want to emphasize the luck, happenstance and inheritance angle in part to try to make peace with not being rich themselves.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I am tired of being dirt poor and working so hard at solving my problems, seemingly without ever getting any credit while often feeling like the financial piece never really changes, no matter how much progress I have made. There always seems to be some reason why I am broke anyway.
I wish life would give me a break and I end up often feeling like the difference between me and more financially well off people is entirely "luck" (bad luck) that no amount of effort can reverse. On the other hand, I want success that I earned, not some winning lottery ticket.
I can't quite figure out if hoping for a break is worse or if wanting to stubbornly do it my damn self is stupidly and pointlessly masochistic.
I don't have the answer. I am just trying to say that I have a lot of sympathy for the people who want to claim that rich people were just lucky.
Yet, I have worked hard to get healthier and seen results for that while people dismiss that as wild coincidence and get incredibly defensive at the idea that making changes to their life might make a difference. And it gives me the sneaking suspicion that people who want to say rich people are merely lucky and that's it are people who don't want to examine what they might be able to do differently because it might involve admitting that their lack of money is partly due to not wanting to make certain hard choices.
I've read about many successful people, and in the early days they would take every opportunity for luck to happen, and one day it did. For example, the Beatles spent years playing for anyone who would listen to them, until one day it mattered. There's Ray Kroc, a 52 year old broke failed salesman, who one day noticed an opportunity to run McDonald's. It goes on and on.
Keep trying, and I wish you the best of luck(!). There's no country on earth with more opportunity than America, and it's never been easier in America. Heck, just recently on HN there was that guy who noticed he could buy stuff from Walmart and sell it on Amazon for a profit, and was making millions.
The odds seem pretty stacked against me for various reasons. Though I am currently 52, so I appreciate the Ray Kroc snippet. ;-)
Anyhow, it is not necessary to hit a home run to become wealthy. I've seen people do it with a series of base hits, and managing the results prudently.
The lower paid employees consistently had much lower investment returns than the higher paid employees. It was pretty clear that the higher paid employees were managing their 401k investments better.
In other words, it wasn't random.
The company reacted to those results by offering free investment education classes to all employees. What the outcome of that was I don't know.
It statistically stands to reason that people who are better at managing money, finance, and investments will accrue more wealth than those who are worse at it.
Nassim Taleb has built an entire writing/speaking career on the premise that most success (particularly in the financial industry) is predicated on N events, where N is low enough to statistically produce exactly the number of Warren Buffetts, George Soroses, Jeff Bezoses, etc that we see today, by mere chance.
The other part is lottery by definition. If you stayed at home, played video games all day and won the lottery, then that is the very literal definition of luck.
But not necessarily about raising kids, choosing a romantic partner, and even less about the work-life balance.
What do I mean by this? Amazon has an infinite amount of work they will gladly load you up with - on-call duty, maintaining legacy stuff and doing new projects.
If you don't know how to carve out your boundaries, you're going to be in a world of hurt at Amazon, get demoralized very quickly and either get axed after a bad review (like me) or you're going to quit or worse, stay miserable and go gray before your time.
Another tidbit of advice my boss - who also no longer is there - gave me, is you have to be a dick to succeed at Amazon.
I'll just leave you with that before you choose to surrender to the cult of Bezos.
Honestly other than Alexa, Amazon is such an underwhelming company.
Even AWS is completely overhyped and there are other products out there with betters interfaces (GUIs, APIs, and CLIs) and cheaper prices. Even S3 is a complete chore to work with and it's their simplest product.
I buy books and a couple knicknacks off of Amazon and I've semi-enjoyed one show they produced (Alpha House). But the list of things they've done to piss me off is getting pretty long:
1. Sex toys in "recent purchases". Thanks guys, because what I wanted was to have my conservative family members have a view into my sex life. I'm bi and semi-closeted, so this is even worse than you're probably imagining.
2. I've never had a more frustrating CLI than the one I had to interact with from Amazon for AWS. It was right during the transition to a new, better CLI, but that also just meant that the one I was using had wrong documentation. It literally took me 100 times longer than a couple DigitalOcean API calls would have run me.
3. Chinese crap. I went travelling with a motion activated camera that would SMS me if there was motion in my Airbnb room. Of course the motion camera didn't work for more than 3 minutes. Crashed constantly, etc. Then when I appealed for a refund the company listed on Amazon gave me $2. Right, thanks guys, I paid way more than that but it got around whatever refund system Amazon had in place because I couldn't escalate it any further. Don't even get me started on the fake knockoffs for sale all across the store. It's turning into Ebay with all these fly by night stores.
I could honestly go on much, much longer. This isn't just a product of me having had such a long relationship with the company, I've had just as long of a relationship with Apple and the only thing they do to piss me off is their constant slowness at their stores. The products themselves are great.
And I pin all the blame for this on the stupid Amazon philosophy where people have to be dicks to succeed at Amazon.
Stop this cargo cult of CEO celebrity worship.
Why not ?
Sales Tax Evasion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2017/03/27/tax...
That is the only reason Amazon was ever price competitive. Without that, it wouldn't have grown. That's his great accomplishment.
Not just abusing workers, not just treating low paid employees like dirt, constantly firing the most vulnerable just to keep them down, and not just hiding from criticism on those actions [1], but also abusing the country as a whole, through massive scale tax evasion.
Jeff Bezos truly has something to be proud of !
[1] http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_am...
https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...
Of course, he is also one of the richest people on the planet...
Jeff's Pop was a loony, but extremely characteristic of what Amazon became. Guy couldn't stop his TRUCK long enough to open a gate for that same truck to go through? That's an… unusual attitude to driving a truck.
The constant switching in and out of first person quotations in this article is weird and off-putting.
Seattle is a place full of extraordinarily smart individuals, and the probability that some non-empty subset of those extraordinarily smart individuals partake in sociopathic projects expressed through (and/or enabled by) technology approaches one.
This isn't necessarily related to Jeff Bezos, however.
> "Proper Nouns Ending in S"
> "AP: Add an apostrophe."
> "Charlaine Harris’ books"
> "the Joneses’ competition"
> "Chicago: Add apostrophe-s if singular, and add an apostrophe if plural."
> "Socrates’s tea"
> "the Obamas’ garden"
> "Les’s moor"
http://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-fo...
> "Nouns, noun phrases, and some pronouns generally form a possessive with the suffix 's (or in some cases just by adding an apostrophe to an existing s)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive