At Amazon, Employees Treat the Bathroom as an Extension of the Office(motherboard.vice.com)
motherboard.vice.com
At Amazon, Employees Treat the Bathroom as an Extension of the Office
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/at-amazon-employees-treat-the-bathroom-as-an-extension-of-the-office
10 comments
Seems a little uptight - who hasn't enjoyed a bit of toilet typing now and then?
The horror! The hygiene!
I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of Amazon's culture, but this person seems to place more concerns on bathroom culture than most. Yes, I prefer to be silent in the bathroom, but sometimes people talk and then I will respond. I've talked work in the bathroom before, including to a supervisor. Not everyone has the same expectations and in a large group it's inevitable that some folks are going to want to use coincidental meetings in the bathroom to have impromptu conversations about work or other topics. The idea of "hunting for the perfect bathroom" strikes me as a bit of an overreaction to such a situation.
"I regularly saw people bring their laptops into the bathroom, where they would sit on the toilet and write code"
I would need some corroboration in order to believe this bit. The rest of the behavior listed I've sadly seen in other companies, though I've fortunately never been somewhere it was a cultural constant, as opposed to the lack of tact of some individuals and double-digit tendency to hire folks who lacked tact.
I would need some corroboration in order to believe this bit. The rest of the behavior listed I've sadly seen in other companies, though I've fortunately never been somewhere it was a cultural constant, as opposed to the lack of tact of some individuals and double-digit tendency to hire folks who lacked tact.
Many years ago when I started in corporate code-dronery I was at our US headquarters for the first time when nature called.
At first I was merely amused at the diminutive vertical dimensions of US toilet-stall doors ( they have a much larger gap at the bottom than Euroloos ).
But then I was stunned to pass one stall where there was a pile of Z-fold green-bar printer paper sitting on the floor, with the occupant slowly raising the pages in sequence and presumably reading the code...
We didn't have many laptops back then :)
At first I was merely amused at the diminutive vertical dimensions of US toilet-stall doors ( they have a much larger gap at the bottom than Euroloos ).
But then I was stunned to pass one stall where there was a pile of Z-fold green-bar printer paper sitting on the floor, with the occupant slowly raising the pages in sequence and presumably reading the code...
We didn't have many laptops back then :)
My roommate works at a call center. There is a rule there that you can't go to the bathroom within 15 minutes of clocking in. He complains of the arbitrary control of people's bladders yet in the same breath will complain of people who go straight in at 9:15. To me that's where work culture gets despicable: make people look down at people who don't approve of rules they themselves don't like, and you've outsourced shame from managers to the employees themselves.
>outsourced shame from managers to the employees themselves
this is one of the major selling points of management.
McD has a policy that the managers have to tell the employees what to do. Store managers don't. Which creates an inevitable 'but Doug didn't...' and then a 'I know but, ...' dialog
having non-shitty store managers would solve this.
this is one of the major selling points of management.
McD has a policy that the managers have to tell the employees what to do. Store managers don't. Which creates an inevitable 'but Doug didn't...' and then a 'I know but, ...' dialog
having non-shitty store managers would solve this.
It's called multi-tasking:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-26
http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-26
I interned within AWS for a few month and never saw anyone carrying their laptops into bathrooms. Although I do remember regularly doing a linearly search of adjacent floor's bathrooms in order to find a seat.
I worked support for a major shipping company and was told I could not use the restroom without answering the phone while I was in there. I refused and nothing really ever happened.