> Ghaderi was offered a new role with the opportunity to become an applied science manager. She rejoined as a engineering manager at the top of a salary band, leading a team of one scientist and two engineers.
So she was an L6 manager, maybe a lower-end L7 manager, but my guess is still L6. That's not even anywhere close to "exec" level. It's the entry-level management position at Amazon.
The sexism claims sounds brutal, but it grinds my gears when some news outlet tries to make it sound like some middle-manager grunt was "an executive". And if you take away the "Ex-Amazon exec" claim, this story really just becomes "yet another ex-Amazon person that was put on a performance improvement plan and feels wronged by it", which is understandable and maybe there's a valid case here for retaliation... but it's not newsworthy, and certainly doesn't fit the title.
edit: just read the complaint, she reported to an an L6, which means 99.9% she was an L6.
“The complaint argues the plan was designed to ensure Ghaderi's failure.
For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.”
I think the way this is worded is deliberately misleading. It's worded as if she needed to actually reduce the costs in eight days, but it can also be read as "create a plan in just eight work days". And that should certainly be doable. In fact you could do a little bit of research and then write the vast majority of that plan doc with AI and it would likely be good enough.
So, part of her role was, officially, to report copyright issues to the legal team, and she's claiming she was fired because she did that? She went to a lawyer to voice her concerns and the lawyer told here that there was no issue. And these claims are a side part of a suit where she's claiming she was fired because she had a kid? All of the claims are just so all over the place. What's the bit about Germany and some quip about nationality and not having feelings? This article reads like a complete fever dream.
The actual complaint appears to mostly be about discrimination due to maternity leave. Everything else seems to be details of specific incidents. The story is poorly written (perhaps an AI summary of the report?), and the title has so little to do with the actual complaint — it’s simply clickbait.
"While managing Ghaderi, the documents allege Krishnakumar made "numerous discriminatory and harassing comments" such as "Take it easy, I have young daughters, so I know it's hard to be a woman with a newborn," or "You should spend time with your daughter," or "You should just enjoy being a new mother.""
If those are the comments you are willing to complain about in a lawsuit I am absolutely sure that you have been demoted for the right reasons.
If someone is telling you that in your role as “responsible for reporting copyright issues” you should stop reporting copyright issues and focus on “being a new mom” instead then that absolutely is an issue. Essentially you are being told that they only need your name and your role on a piece of paper for compliance in case a lawsuit rolls in and they need your head on the chopping block, and that you need to stfu and pretend like there are no issues.
Y'know, I talk to a lot of unhappy Amazonians as a part of what I do. A sad number of stories I hear rhyme with this one. There's enough smoke there to clearly be a fair bit of fire.
It's way past the time for software engs to unionize. We're here defending and attacking this story which is one of many while meanwhile these mega corps run away with billions. Seems painfully obvious to me.
100%. People need to stop trying to defend corporations. They do not care about you and will happily wring you out for every ounce you're worth and throw you in the trash. It does not matter what the particulars are of this particular story are or what the person's level is. Everyone knows the absolute insidious PIP and constant firing culture of Amazon. Defend your fellow workers. These stories shouldn't be a dime a dozen. Especially for a singular company.
It’s amazing how much simping for corporations that goes on here. I almost have to believe it’s just paid PR people from those corporations, because I don’t know what else would motivate such defending. Do you really think that if you praise Company X on HN that they will suddenly hire you? Or that they’ll give you a bonus if you’re already employed there? Good grief!
> I almost have to believe it’s just paid PR people from those corporations, because I don’t know what else would motivate such defending
Have you never met an engineer who is arguing heavily over a topic with you, purely because they believe you are wrong, with zero other motivation?
Come on. Not everything is done for some benefit or gain. There are plenty of people here who would argue for certain positions despite having nothing material to gain from it (and having quite a few things to lose).
Sometimes, you know, people just genuinely disagree with your takes. Let’s not delve into the “if someone defends the position of a company, it means they are simping for them” territory.
> For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.
Oh sure, no big deal.
If true and if this description is accurate, this doesn't sound like a goal that Amazon could explain as anything other than a setup that's guaranteed to see her fail. If this goes to trial I'd be curious to hear how they justify setting this kind of goal.
Big tech has collectively decided to go for the “ask forgiveness later” approach and society hasn’t shown any coherent resolute decision either way.
In the absence of that it’s pretty much genie out of the bottle and every day that passes more so. Meaning legal system will have to bend towards reality and copyright is dead in LLM context and thus many other contexts as well.
>Meaning legal system will have to bend towards reality and copyright is dead in LLM context and thus many other contexts as well.
I certainly hope so. There are already a few text and data mining exemptions in place in Japan, Israel and Europe. The US has fair use, so we'll see what ends up being covered and what needs to be licensed. In my view just scaling up llms with more data isn't the future either way. We see this with llama 3, Claude 3, coheres model and gpt 4 being all pretty close together on llm leaderboards. If anything progress seems to be slowing down.
Clumsy as the copyright system is it does attempt to solve an actual problem. I do feel for the true artists getting their style ripped off for half a penny in image gen tokens for example.
Technically, copyright promotes creativity and patents promote technological progress. I think patents block progress more than they help it, especially with patent trolls and all, but copyright is probably a net positive for society.
I think copyright did, but no longer, benefit society.
The stated goal is to encourage creation of the arts, but looking at how hit-driven arts are, and also at how much more is created than bought[0], there's too much content being made.
Most people want to read books in the top 100 best seller list, of which there are necessarily 100 in whatever period that list is re-calculated; or to watch the latest blockbusters, whose number in any given month I don't know but assume isn't much higher than the number of screens in a large cinema complex.
But that doesn't mean get rid of it entirely; my (admittedly just a) gut feeling is that 20 years should be enough to claim a monopoly on derivative works, even if we retain an average human lifespan for the original and direct translations. This is separate to trademarks: I think by this point, I should be able to combine Short Circuit and The Matrix into a shared universe if I want to, but it's still a matter of consumer protection to make sure nobody mistakes such a creation for either of the source materials.
One thing I absolutely I don't buy is the arguments for copyright protection being "life plus 70 years", which seem to circulate around authors wanting their kids to inherit their residual income. Most people don't get to inherit almost anything, but even if they did, someone's kids will probably[1] live for as many years after the parent's death as the parent lived before that child's birth, not usually 70 years after the parent dies.
[0] with exceptions; furry artists report viable income.
[1] barring radical changes to life expectancy from global thermonuclear war and/or post-singularity life extension.
There are issues with patent law, but I think general concept of patents still does have utility in promoting R&D. Patent trolling is the exception, not the norm. And places that do respect patent law to a high degree tend to have higher rates of innovation.
The constitutional power is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Yes, that is the Intellectual Property clause, which covers all intellectual property, not just copyright. The 'authors' and 'writers' here are where copyright is derived from. The 'inventors' and 'discoveries' are where patent authority is derived from.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" covers the entire clause.
It's not just about science, but those goals have to work together. If a relatively narrow* section of copyright blocks much larger sections of science, something has gone wrong.
* When I say narrow, one benchmark is the original stable diffusion, which has fewer parameters than there are images in the training set. Or at least, a hypothetical version without overtraining mistakes. At that point it's remembering next to zero specifics from each image.
I do when I'm working on internal projects and there's no reason for me to relicense/release code that's still in development. There are practical limits to enforcement. I certainly don't contact the copyright holder when I see someone with an avatar of Family Guy, but you can if you wanted. It's exceedingly unlikely anything happens to them.
The goal is Copyright promotes the Arts, patents promote technological progress, they are different systems with different goals.
This line covers both: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”
Arts > Authors > Writings > Copyright
Science > Inventors > Discoveries > Patents
It’s arguable how effective this is, but I doubt anyone is spending 100’s of millions making a movie if there’s no copyright protection or something similar.
YouTube shares ~15 billion/year with its creators. A single video is never going to capture even 1% of that number because it would need to represent 1% of total watch time on the platform.
Mr Beast is pushing the limits of what you can spend per minute of video to ~150-250k, but he’s subsidizing that with in your face advertisements. With just product placement you’re down to perhaps ~10-15 million for a 90 minute blockbuster which just isn’t enough.
I'm not asking about a single video, I'm asking about the aggregate spending.
Mr. Beast spends over 2 million per video btw, not 250k
The point I'm making is that while copyright based business models might be the prevalent for high expenditures productions, that doesn't mean aggregate spending is increased. It may just mean that copyright incentives higher spending inequality and higher concentration of production, while aggregate spending remains the same.
YouTube compensation is based on watchtimes, which is why I didn’t simply go 2.5m vs 300+ million wow it’s not even within 2 orders of magnitude.
> that doesn't mean aggregate spending is increased
But the actual spending does. An Olympic Games costs as much as total aggregate compensation from YouTube for an entire year. They have multiple revenue streams but it just shows the scale we are talking about.
Netflix spends roughly as much on content as YouTube pays content creators. Add global OTA TV, cable, Movies, pay per view, and the other streaming services like D+ and you’ll get some idea of just how much is being supported by copyright. Hell, even some of YouTube’s compensation goes to old movies because of copyright.
Without copyright YouTube could pay nothing for old movies because copyright doesn’t exist and they or someone else would upload any ‘exclusive’ content.
Now YouTube itself might volunteer to pay something to actually get new content because that’s in its own self interest. But that’s going to be at roughly current levels rather than an extra “blockbuster” rate because again any website could trivially have the top 10,000 videos on YouTube so they can’t gatekeep the content behind a paywall etc.
So she was an L6 manager, maybe a lower-end L7 manager, but my guess is still L6. That's not even anywhere close to "exec" level. It's the entry-level management position at Amazon.
The sexism claims sounds brutal, but it grinds my gears when some news outlet tries to make it sound like some middle-manager grunt was "an executive". And if you take away the "Ex-Amazon exec" claim, this story really just becomes "yet another ex-Amazon person that was put on a performance improvement plan and feels wronged by it", which is understandable and maybe there's a valid case here for retaliation... but it's not newsworthy, and certainly doesn't fit the title.
edit: just read the complaint, she reported to an an L6, which means 99.9% she was an L6.
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