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Amazon Veteran On the Record and Off the Leash
krow writes: "Mike Daisey, an X Amazon employees has put up some really humorous stuff about the company on his website. A trailer to a film, information about a play that is being done in Seattle and more is there. This is pretty funny to anyone who has worked in the web industry for the last few years. Serves them right, hiring all of those college grads, and then laying them off."
What the hell kind of sense does that make? It is people like you that ruin the world. With that "Give me, give me, give me." attitude.
They obviously fucked up. If they give it to you, fine. If they correct their mistake, suck it up. You knew they fucked up. Only a dumbass would think they were really going to sell it for that low of a price. As for buying it at the current price and disputing it, that is another level of assholishness alltogether. Damn you bastards.
Geek bondage.
TO everyone who takes that comment seriously: losen up (particularly if you're British). It was supposed to be bitingly sarcastic, thus the long winded story (which some might consider a troll, and I have learned not to trust moderators with subtleties) about how things are vs. how they should be. And yes, I am graduating in two months, have no respect for philosophy majors, but I do have respect (and pity) for those continuing in their education.
Speaking of Amazon...
two nights ago I saw Amazon selling 256 MB of PC133 Viking RAM at $9.99. Obviously this was a glitch, so I wasted no time and took advantage of it. I was ecstatic, but I didn't want to be too greedy -- so I only ordered two sticks (a friend bought three, another friend ordered two plus two 1GB modules (which, incidentally, were also selling for $9.99)). Placed the order. Got the confirmatory email. For kicks, I checked the web page again -- the price of the 256 MB modules had mysteriously risen to $329.99. Waited two days. Tonight I received an email from Amazon telling me that my order had been cancelled and that Amazon had not charged my credit card. But I would be getting a $15 gift certificate, good towards any purchase on Amazon (hurry, this incredible offer expires soon!) I understand that a *lot* of people tried to place orders during the glitch's transiprance. Perhaps that spoiled the broth. Anyhow, it was fun while it lasted.
Now maybe if e-business would check *before* sending out confirmatory emails...
useless rebates.
RKatz
No, this can't be true! Everyone knows that if you go to college, you graduate and then get a job automatically (well except those who go on for more school or are philosophy majors). Then you work at that company (while getting in Nerf fights every day, and causing mischief and mayhem between them) until another one sees what fine work you do, and hires you for more money with more stock options and perks (and better-looking co-workers). The cycle continues until you retire early at 40, then decide to invest your millions into "side projects" that you've been meaning to do all along. So a few startups later and the federal government is asking you for loans. You tell them you will loan them money if you can drive their top-secret 'mechs (because when I get that old, they better have mechs dammit!) and they say yes, so you invite a bunch of your old college buddies over (who are all rich like you except that guy in philosophy who still thinks computers are for geeks) and you compare the real thing to Mechwarrior 46, and then decide they need a little bit more work, but that the government is making good progress. So you loan them the money afterall and then pause to reflect on all the goodness you've done in your life.
So what's this I hear about work sucking? I don't believe it. (And I've got another two months of covering my eyes and ears before I get bitchy, decide my employer sucks, and then wait until my NDA is up so that I can publicly trash my ex-employer in a desperate attempt at attention because I'm so distraught that everything didn't turn out like it was supposed to) I hope somebody will notice me and reach out to me, perhaps employ my sorry ass before I am forced to jump from the top of my two-story low-rent apartment complex in a weak attempt at suicide because I wasn't noticed by my bitching and moaning about the real world.
Moderators, I leave it up to you.
This has been in the Seattle Weekly a coupla times now. The website is for a play of the same name, which may or may not still be running in downtown Seattle. It was supposed to be a mediocre play, but a good commentary on dot-bomb life.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
The glue between apache and oracle is written in C and C++. It is enormous, it is an architectural nightmare, and its name is obidos. Compiled (for the Alpha), it weighs in at over 150M, and compiling it typically takes more than 12 hours. It is monolithic, and a new instance is created with each apache child. It has its very own garbage collector, and its very own web-scripting language (think asp or php, only much, much worse). The code was forked for the auction site, so it has an evil twin named varzea that has to be maintained in parallel. It is, without question, the biggest waste of good programmers that I have ever seen.
The company also uses a mountain of perl, some java, a trace of lisp, and the usual tangle of shell scripts, but none of that is "live" on the site. What you are looking at on their homepage is delivered through the world's most bloated apache module.
(In fairness to apache, it should be noted that obidos was originally written to netscape's nsapi).
That regarless of what confirmations we have, Amazon reserve the right to cancel the order at any time before charging your card. You aren't going to win this one...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Yea, no kidding. I was gonna say "lighten up", but I figured it would be in bad taste....
I saw the video. I hardly consider random musing by idiots funny and enlightening.
bp
I just got done watching the whole movie and as a failed dot-com refugee I must say it was damn, damn funny, and absolutely cathartic. That little section on Pets.com cut right to the meat of the matter. Now my friends and I have something besides Office Space to watch when we sit around and shoot the breeze about the bad old days of free bagels.
You've inspired me to dig out my digital camcorder again and have some fun. Thanks Mike!
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
This guy's "humor" is incredibly uninsightful and unfunny. His "wacky" views on the amazon and dot com culture may have been insightful FOUR YEARS AGO, but they're tired, stupid, and redundant now.
And as if that wasn't enough, his pining over his lost love for Jeff Bezos is equally pitiful and speaks to his intelligence (or lack thereof).
Basically, his whole shtick can be summed up as: "I joined what I thought was this wonderful cult called Amazon.com, but then it turned out to be not so great!"
The one thing this guy is good at, is self-promotion. His site makes that abundantly clear.
rather funny Indeed! I laughed all the way through. Definitely deserved a posting to the front page.
I didn't even bother to check out the videos on the site attached to this story because every page looked the same. I guess its the video thats supposed to be funny, the site is nothing but marketing hype.
---
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
We could always use them to power the computers in the beowulf cluster. Hey, it worked in The Matrix...
Nope, not really... just some stupid guy with a bone in his mouth talking about how he and some other people worked for 12 hours a day and thought they weren't being taken advantage of.
Huh?
I wish I could find people like that. I'd build up an army of them, then take over the world.
Offtopic??? ARe you nuts? man, the guy is sitting
there with a bone in his mouth..! Obviously you moderators suck at getting puns or something
Nevrar
mike -
just watched your whole webcast. i hate realplayer, but it was worth the effort to see your show.
i know that horrible, sinking feeling that comes from being in the midst of a whole company that can't possibly be producing anything, doing nothing, pissing money, surrounded by that horrible duo:
-impending doom
-clueless people who don't know you're doomed
your show is great. i think your talents are real, and they don't involve computers.
best of luck to you. hope you beat #5 at rogue someday.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
This claim would be inadmissable in a court of law. - Thank goodness the court of public opinion has a lot lower standards.
Moderate this one up someone! I'd do it myself but I squandered all my last points moderating Jon Katz down on his dribbling New Jerusalem Open Source heresy.
Fight the power! Fight the powers that be!
How sad is that?
I'm assuming I'm not only illiterate dork here with a disdain for articles, right?
If Bezos steps up to the plate for a rassling match with you, Sumo-suited or no, tape it. I would pay money to see a Bezos bodyslam. (I don't have anything against the man personally, but it isn't every day you get a chance to see a billionaire get squashed by a disgruntled ex-employee of his own company.)
/. people making comments about weight/appearance. I guess that's the downside of /. having a readership that so closely resembles the denizens of the J. Crew Catalog.
On a side note:
Depressing and unfortunate to see so many
I'm assuming I'm not only supermodel here, right?
you know /. gods, there really needs to be a way to preview your signature. Or you could at least do us the favor and limit the field input to 120 chars so we know when we're over the limit!
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
I can't imagine the size and power of all the web professionals who've been layed off in the last few months and now can't find a job.
It'll be really interesing to see all the startups and ideas that bubble up from the froth in the next 6-12 months. I know I'm cooking up mine. Getting layed off was the best thing that's ever happened to me.
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
Despite our best efforts, a small number of the more than 4.7 million items in our catalog are mispriced. Rest assured, however, that we verify prices as part of our shipping procedures.
* If an item's correct price is lower than our stated price, we charge the lower amount and ship you the item.
* If an item's correct price is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
Some people have commented that the site is lame, just a couple pics and comments. I'd agree, it's nothing special, and I'm surprised at the Slashdot description of it. But the site is about a play, how to get to it, when it runs, viewer comments. The play it's referring to is well done. Maybe not earth-shattering, but it's an interesting first-hand perspective on some of the dot com hysteria, with some amusing diatribes (if they amuse you) as well as personal insights and self reflection. For people who dismiss the site because "it's got a fat guy with a bone," I don't think you'll get much from the play, but if you're dismissive only because of the lack of content on the site, that's not really reflective of what its author has to say.
You can view the entire play in Real or Quicktime formats at different speeds from http://206.253.218.29/21dogyears/index.htm. The web page seems intermittently slashdotted at the moment, though I just watched the 100kbps feed for forty minutes or so, and performance was fine.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Got Rhinos?
Sorry, I don't have the inclination to waste time and bandwidth on stuff that looks like it might be crap. The guy with the bone in his mouth didn't inspire any confidence. Sites like fucked company or Netslaves and Bubble Economy do a fine job of pointing out the idiocy of the "new economy" thanks very much. As far as my story not getting posted - I'd like to see the submission queue opened up so people could vote on which submissions they'd like to see added.
Perhaps I have a low tolerance for stupidity but seeing a few pictures of a fat(ish) guy with a dog buiscuit in his mouth doesn't constitute fun stuff to me. Obviously I'm not 1337 enought to have stuff that I've submitted like this rather funny parody of /. that ddj is running posted. (not even in "ask slashdot" which will put up pretty much any crap). Granted, I didn't look at any of the videos etc for this one but it seemd a bit lame to me.
This guy looks like someone I would never hire in a thousand years in any capacity for an e-com. Hmmmm...why could that be? Maybe it's because there's a GIANT PICTURE OF HIM WITH A BONE IN HIS MOUTH on his page.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
But I thought Slashdot was against people making money on the Web. Google's suddenly a bad company for "selling out." Baseball's not allowed to sell subscriptions to their game coverage. You get the picture...
What do you expect? The "first impression" rule is as old as salesmanship. If he's got quality content, but hides it behind a particularly lame and off-putting homepage, then whose fault is it when visitors are immediately put off and promptly leave?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Perhaps you should rephrase that to:
Repeat after me: "Slashdot is not K5". Nor will it ever be. It is too huge, and too different. If you want to vote on stories go to kuro5hin and stop bitching."We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
I just bought two 256MB 133mhz DIMMs for $99 each, and they had just gone up from $89. ECC RAM from the same two stores I checked was only about 30% higher, so what's so special about this stuff?
And if anyone reading these threads is in the Puget Sound area, you can catch Mike's live performance on the weekend's for only ten bucks. I can't imagine he's really making much off that. I've only seen the online video; thought it was hilarious. I hear there's always an empty seat set aside for Jeff B, but he hasn't shown up yet ;) Sure he flames Amazon a bit, but overall it sets a pretty funny image about how all these dot-coms thought things were gonna happen.
Yeah, I caught the show last weekend. Never worked for Amazon or any other .com, but still thought Mike's insights into the culture were insightful and very funny. Plus Mike himself is just a damned hilarious guy (he also does sketch comedy with the Seattle group "Up In Your Grill").
In fact, the night I went most of the house was taken up by a group of .comers (although I didn't catch from what company), who were hooting there way through the entire show -- 'course the many beers they consumed beforehand might have had something to do with it...
"Courage is the price that life exact for granting peace. The soul that knows it not knows no escape from little thin
Thanks for the clarifications, Mike. BTW, saw your show last weekend with a whole house full of .comers, but still enjoyed it anyway -- good work!
And I'll bet you never thought you'd find a website with more rude, bitter and cynical people on it than TPS! (;-)
"Courage is the price that life exact for granting peace. The soul that knows it not knows no escape from little thin
While its easy to dismiss the whole site based on the front page, you'd really be missing something: the films. "Rear Entry: An Unauthorized Expedition into Amazon.com" was produced and realised by John Tynes (the famed game designer and author of the recent Salon article on Wizards of the Coast linked Monday on /.) is well worth seeing and received quite considerable media attention. The soon-to-be released "Barely Legal: Amazon.com Employees On the Record & Off the Leash" seems off to a good start too. You can grab the trailers for both here. (.mov only, sorry).
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
What is Amazon running? Perl? I cannot figure this one out. Any insight would be apretiated.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
His web site may be a bit - unpolished, but the webcast was great.
Someone can feel free to clue me in if there really was anything interesting on that site. Three pictures of some weirdo with a dog biscuit in his mouth are about enough for me. Someone might walk by and get the wrong idea...
-- dR.fuZZo
I keep hearing about the dot-com culure, but want I really want to see is a one-man act about the dotorg culture.
And please, no fat people.
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
yeah if we only had a whole bunch of unemployed .com people lying around. Hey wait we do, maybe we can make a beowulf cluster of them.
OK - you didn't mesh with Amazon.
OK - Amazon is version 0.9 of how to do anything remotely like this.
OK Jeff Bezos puts his pants on one leg at a time...
But you intend to make an industry of your response to your experience? Then start a biz and show us how to do it without all the alleged tragedies - unconstructive criticism is at best obvious noise. If it was funny, I could see - but this is strained at best. His NPR spot sounded like he was waiting for the laugh track to kick in - sort of "Just Jack" with a cloying, pseudo-hip web presence.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Since when are mean-spirited, thoughtless insults "(+1 Funny)"?
-- juju
I agree. It seems most everyone just spent one second of their life to view the front page of the site, made a split-second judgement of everything this guy was about, and then posted some dumb comment here. But then, the
-- juju
Who ever put this site together knew what they were doing. They made the 100kbs intro so cool you don't mind watching it over and over again as you try to get the %#@$@ quicktime movie to download. Too bad the 300kbs lacks this feature.
I would be extremely wary of posting a page like this. Especially the introduction. Considering whats happening to the guy that posted something resembling CNN's CNNFN, he could have a whole pack of lawyers after his pack of dog biscuits lickety split.
Anyone know about the legal ramifications of using some of Amazon's actual logos and pages on a page directing a lot of negative direction at Amazon? It seems to me they would be likely to throw everything in the book at this guy for doing this site..
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
...and it was great. Laugh-out-loud funny at parts, heady at others, Mike is a genuine performer with something intelligent to say during these crazy times. Mike has picked up quite a bit of positive media coverage from this latest work, and though the web site might be "primitive" according to some standards, it's the show and what Mike is saying about himself and his relation to Amazon.com that really matters.
End of Line
yeah if we only had a whole bunch of unemployed .com people lying around. Hey wait we do, maybe we can make a beowulf cluster of them.
What good will that do? Then we'll just have a bunch of people tied together with network cables. Then again we can use then for a wide area storage solution. hmmm... could work
Arathres
stainless steel
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It doesn't sound like this is completely what he does from his press releases, but it still reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where this female stand-up comedian based her entire show around "Jerry is the Devil".
I do support his right to do it, I just think he's a slimy troll for doing it.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Clarification: I left the corporate world, under my own power, a year ago. I have no steady job, which is my own choice, but it should be noted that I QUIT Amazon, in February of 2000, when the stock was still high. Also, I really loved working at Amazon--I believed in our mission to be Earth's most customer-centric company, and I still miss the frenetic pace and dedicated people. I just don't believe that what Jeff has built is on a supportable foundation--this doesn't mean I'm embittered or angry. I'm a little surprised that Slashdotters aren't more supportive: I live on $800 a month and voluntarily put all my content on the web for free. There was a time when that may have been admired in the /. community.
Course, if you think I suck, it won't matter much, eh? ;)
Hello--I'm the author, creator and performer of the website in question. Thanks to everyone that has watched the movie and enjoyed it, and thanks for all the valuable commentary on my weight--since I was unaware I was fat, it'll be very helpful to my future endeavors. I'm in a rush, but to answer a few questions: No, I don't need or want anyone to feel 'sorry' for me or other dot com people. I'm interested in the phenomenon from a social perspective, not as a pity party. If this is unclear and you have the time/bandwidth, the one-man show makes this abundantly obvious. The bone was a sanitary chew toy bought at a drugstore, though it did taste faintly of chicken boullion. Amazon has no official comment on any of this, but people who work under Jeff and senior management have told me they talk about the show all the time. There are standing orders to forward all press and emails people receieve or see to Jeff, so he's probably reading this thread now. I have challenged him to a sumo wrestling battle in those sumo suits...he's quite adept with them, and despite my obvious weight advantage I believe it could be quite a battle. I'll post to the site if they decide to accept, and what follows from that. Anyway, that's all I can think of now. Feel free to email me at mdaisey@mac.com if you like, or post here to make commentary. I'm happy to answer questions.