27 votes

Leaving Amazon - Tim Bray (former VP) on whistleblowers, climate strikes, sexism, and racism at Amazon

7 comments

  1. [3]
    aphoenix
    Link
    A summary: Tim Bray was, until today, a VP at Amazon Web Services. Amazon has been in the news recently for firing people in the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group - people who were...

    A summary:

    Tim Bray was, until today, a VP at Amazon Web Services. Amazon has been in the news recently for firing people in the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group - people who were blowing whistles about Amazon's actions. Tim was opposed to this; here's a direct excerpt:

    That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

    He makes a number of other points:

    • he lists the people who were fired
    • he points out that they were all women, people of colour, or both
    • he talks about the difference between warehousing and AWS, and how AWS is better

    It's not a long read - about 5 minutes - and Tim is a good writer. If my tl;dr was even remotely of interest, I recommend reading it.

    15 votes
    1. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. aphoenix
        Link Parent
        No, they are not exclusively (or majority) staffed by women or people of colour. The list of people is here. I took a random sample of 10 and got 7 white males. Edit: I took a random sample of 10...

        No, they are not exclusively (or majority) staffed by women or people of colour. The list of people is here. I took a random sample of 10 and got 7 white males.

        Edit: I took a random sample of 10 more and got 9 more white males.

        8 votes
      2. just_a_salmon
        Link Parent
        I believe he means that the fired people are in the mentioned categories.

        I believe he means that the fired people are in the mentioned categories.

  2. [2]
    aphoenix
    Link
    There's a secondary interesting thing happening with respect to this story, which is that the Guardian ran it as an op-ed piece without contacting Tim Bray beforehand, and despite his blog being...

    There's a secondary interesting thing happening with respect to this story, which is that the Guardian ran it as an op-ed piece without contacting Tim Bray beforehand, and despite his blog being licensed as Creative Commons - Non Commercial:

    https://twitter.com/timbray/status/1257345369824014337

    11 votes
  3. joplin
    Link
    Wow! Very powerful story. Thank you for sharing. I'm not sure I could make the same choice were I in his shoes, but it's nice to know there are people like him doing it.

    Wow! Very powerful story. Thank you for sharing. I'm not sure I could make the same choice were I in his shoes, but it's nice to know there are people like him doing it.

    6 votes