Mother Brain

Right inside the entrance of BFI4, there’s a bulletin board that identifies key leaders in the building. Leftmost are the photos and names of the Operations Managers, the most senior leaders in the building. To the right, in neat columns, are the area managers for L4, L5, and L6, respectively. Today as I walked in and scanned my employee ID at the timecard machine, a young man dressed in a denim jacket had nearly walked past the board of leaders when he suddenly turned at the board, his face merely two inches from an L4 manager, his mouth opened wide enough to engulf that manager’s photo, and let out one long, startlingly loud scream. The sound was so explosively savage you could hear his vocal cords struggle and buckle midway before rallying back to hold the shout to its end. It was the type of scream that in other contexts might be described as blood-curdling, the type where you wonder whether you should call the cops or whether one of your neighbors might already have done so. Without pausing a moment longer than necessary to finish fully and to, no doubt, fog up one specific photo on the leadership board, Mr. Denim snapped back to resume his original path.

I looked, stunned, at the dozen or so associates around me, checking if any would follow the “see something, say something” exhortation in Amazon’s orientation video regarding mental health. Instead, everyone resumed walking towards their various posts as if nothing happened; one woman seemed to finish delivering what must have been a punch line, judging by the uproarious response of the man she was walking next to.

Perhaps I was the one too repressed by the polite civility expected, and sometimes feigned, in the various office jobs I’ve held. After all, who hasn’t, at one point or another in their career, felt like yelling out of frustration at their boss? Perhaps no one around me thought of the outburst as unusual or worthy of reporting because Mr. Denim simply did what few of us dare to. He didn’t like his job or his manager, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. He would express this his rage in one controlled outburst, directed at the smiling headshot of his boss, knowing that he’d continue walking directly to that boss’s area of the warehouse to begin his eleven-hour shift.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Mother Brain.

I’ve just reached the halfway point of my employment with Amazon. The work has been hard. Lifting six tons a day and standing eleven hours, not to mention averaging 28,000 steps per day, is quite taxing on the back and feet. My fingers stay somewhat curled on my days off, and it continues to be slightly difficult to straighten them, though I’ve tried to ice them at night according to instructions from the internet. But I have not yet peed on myself, despite fully expecting this, given all the news reports. People in the warehouse seem to go to the bathroom whenever they wish (to be clear, not on themselves — they first walk to the bathroom like normal people).

During the first day of Peak, Black Friday, I arrived at the entrance of the warehouse to an unexpected reception: speakers blared Pharrell’s “Happy” as six managers formed a welcome phalanx surrounding us under an arch of balloons, each manager shaking plastic clappers enthusiastically celebrating the entrance of employees like we were about to run onto the field for the Super Bowl. If I’m honest, I felt a bit heroic by this gesture, like I was personally contributing to the preservation and continuation of that most sacred of consumerist holidays, Black Friday. I was even more surprised when this happened on the second day of Peak. By the third day, it started to seem that we would experience managers clapping in employees at the start of every Peak shift, a sort of daily salute to the sacrifices we were asked to — well, truth be told, forced to — make. By the end of the second week of Peak, what was once an uplifting ritual became a sad simulacrum of the actual spirit of BFI4. The original six managers had whittled down to two. The two couldn’t summon the energy to rattle the clappers for the ten minutes that associates enter for their shift, so they settled for limply tapping them to the beat of whatever song was playing at the time. By the middle of the third week of Peak, no managers welcomed employees into the building; instead, the entry lobby now featured a desk where HR could address a queue of employees about their concerns. The music, similarly, would stop.

It’s not just the managers who can’t keep up their enthusiasm; there are also a whole lot of lazy associates in BFI4’s Ship Dock. This is partly because Ship Dock attracts that sort of personality, since a lot of its work isn’t as strictly metricized as the other departments’. But it’s also because Amazon has designed a system to crush ambition and diligence. The fastest and slowest employees all get the same $0.25 raise every six months. Worse yet, if you complete your work quickly, your spur looks empty (because it is, because you worked quickly to clear it). Yet another spur looks super full (because it is, because the associates working that spur have been re-enacting their favorite scene from Zootopia with the sloth that runs the DMV). Managers then take the person who has seemingly nothing to do and put them on the spur that seems to have A Lot of Work. This process repeats itself for weeks or months until all employees except those with the highest integrity join the lazy camp after having their initiative crushed out of them.

Some associates take shirking to almost mockumentary levels. There’s an ability that many associates have to watch others work while they stand idle, even while knowing that the working associates can see their idleness. This is a level of nonchalance that I’ve not worked long enough at Amazon to be able to imagine one day adopting. In all my previous jobs, there were strong social contracts to always pitch in if the team is behind on something. It was shameful to be seen as the laggard, as the one dragging everyone else down. But Amazon’s fulfillment center has shown me a whole other social contract that could instead exist between coworkers: labor goes to the greatest sucker.

I was once tasked along with another associate, Wei-Liu, to load a truck with boxes. Angelo, the lead who called us over to the truck, began to explain how to do the work once we were all inside the truck, but Wei-Liu cut him off: “I did this yesterday. No problem.” Angelo nodded in acknowledgment and walked back into the warehouse off the truck. As he was leaving, Wei-Liu began to load boxes diligently. But about thirty seconds after Angelo turned the corner, Wei-Liu dropped the box he held in his hands mid-motion, simply said the word “Later,” and literally ran out of the truck, faster than I’ve seen any associate run before or since.

Later that week, I was pulled away from loading trucks on three separate instances by Angelo to unblock busy spurs. In each instance, I went to the spur and began to furiously scan and sort boxes. But a few minutes after my arrival, the associates previously working the spur would quietly disappear, leaving me with the blue light still flashing and a pile of seemingly unstoppable inbound boxes. It felt like Lucy at the chocolate factory, me dealing increasingly clumsily with a conveyor belt of infinite plenitude. And the shirking associates, instead of running full speed, Wei-Liu style, quietly faded away when I was least aware, as if inspired by Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, where orchestra musicians each blow out their candles and leave the stage, one by one. By the third time this happened, I got a little grumpy and complained to Angelo. I explained that I had been pulled three times off a task I liked quite a lot, loading the truck, to rescue associates who had blue-lit spurs, only to have them all disappear shortly after my arrival. “You don’t have a workload problem,” I concluded. “You have a workforce problem.”

He sighed and nodded in quick recognition. “Yeah, some associates can be like that. And on top of that, you get paid the same!” I appreciated that he empathized, and anticipated he might do something about it. “You just do you,” was his parting statement. Nothing was ever done.

But that was no surprise. Over the weeks, I’ve met multiple associates trying to transfer into Ship Dock from other departments because it’s well-understood to be the easiest place to loaf.

This dynamic is, in fact, so well-known that I’ve had three associates in as many weeks explicitly tell me to slow down. Boris, an Eastern European who always wore a green cap and a grumpy look impressively mimicking the old man in the animated movie Up, was the first to step right in front of me, holding both arms out to stop any attempt to get around him, saying, “Slow down! Don’t just rush, rush, rush. You have to stack the boxes carefully, like this.” Here he started pantomiming cart-loading motions and periodically stepping back to inspect his imaginary work from various angles like a cake decorator not wanting to ruin someone’s wedding. “See?” he concluded, with what I could only assume was a rhetorical question in the Socratic method. I was frankly a bit offended at the time because I was already demonstrably stacking boxes more tightly than he was and didn’t know what to say, so I moved to another spur to avoid further confrontation.

Minutes later, I’d learn that he wasn’t really criticizing my understanding of spatial geometry at all. Boris showed up in my new spur and started stacking boxes into my cart, blocking me all the while by using slow and exaggerated movements. I grew impatient and switched spurs again, not wanting to argue. Ten minutes later, Boris showed up yet again to block me. He was determined to win his battle of forced work slowdown. I confess here that I did something I’m not proud of: I relented. I began to patiently wait for him to finish stacking his box into my cart before I then, similarly, gently set my box down quite carefully into the perfect — just the perfect — spot, occasionally even pausing to reconsider my choice and delicately move the box into an even more optimal spot before turning, meditatively and with much emphasis on being present in the here and now, noticing the sensation of the flow of breath through my nostrils and the rise of my pulmonary diaphragm, to pick the next box off the conveyor.

But the most colorful believer in slowdown was George, a talkative associate who I at first thought was likely someone visiting from Corporate. This is because I’ve rarely seen George work. I’ve only seen him sidle up to various spurs, nudge a few boxes, then start conversations with associates. After lightly petting a few boxes in my spur, George introduced himself. “How long have you worked here?” I asked. This is one of my favorite questions to ask associates. The most common answer is under two months.

“Nine months,” he beamed. This tenure indeed made him quite senior. I planned to continue scanning as we talked, but George held my arm and waited for me to meet his pointed, conspiratorial gaze. “Go the same speed as others. Don’t go faster, or they’ll ask you to do more work.” He released my arm to let me continue scanning as he talked. “When I first joined, I worked fast. But you know what? When you work fast, they just ask you to go do this and go do that, to help make up for others who are being slow.”

—

I’ve completed three weeks of work at Amazon and have never met my manager, Leanne. There doesn’t seem to be a practice here for managers to meet with new employees at least once or even know when new employees have started. I only know Leanne’s my manager because the Amazon A-to-Z app says so, buried under three levels of menus.

But in a way, names don’t seem to matter much here. A woman came up to me one day and brusquely asked, “Have you re-inducted before?” She then quickly explained the process of re-induction. Essentially, you roll carts full of missorted boxes to a spot right behind the box-labeling machine and insert those boxes one-by-one onto the fast-moving conveyor between other boxes already on there, like a game of Frogger. After explaining this, the woman led me with a cart to where re-induction happens and left me to handle the task, all without introducing herself or asking my name. In the Amazon design of a warehouse, much like Henry Ford’s original vision for an assembly line, the individual doesn’t matter. The fungibility, expendability, or easy exchangeability of each associate is assumed, so her behavior fell easily within the bounds of the social contract established in fulfillment centers.

To her credit, she came back to me several hours later. “I’m sorry I was rude earlier and didn’t introduce myself,” she said. “I’m Alice. What’s your name?” Though I was a bit disgruntled earlier to be treated so frankly as an anonymous cog in the tremendous juggernaut of commerce that is Amazon, I hadn’t expected Alice’s humanity to break through so as to come back and apologize later. This one small act improved my outlook on preserving some individuality as an associate.

This feeling didn’t last long, however. Several days later, I’d meet Lynn, the only lead who doesn’t seem at all like she rose up from the ranks. Instead, Lynn talked and acted like she was dropped out of an MBA program and only rotating through the warehouse as part of a Jack Welch-inspired cross-company tour to ready her for her next promotion in Corporate. One day she gathered five of us from Ship Dock, commanded us, without explanation, to follow her halfway across the warehouse, and then pointed towards Inbound and simply said, “Go there and get instructions.” And with that and a nearly West Point-level snap-turn, she walked away.

Part of me can’t blame Amazon’s managers for treating everybody so impersonally. Their staff turnover is so high that managers have come to rightly expect most people would quit within their first few months. But as an associate, I felt a little humiliated every time a manager treated me namelessly, which was nearly every time, even after working there many weeks. This made it hard to take seriously the daily, oft twice-daily, proclamations that the managers would make at team meetings “sincerely thanking all of you for the hard work you’re doing on behalf of our customers.”

Not everything is impersonal, though. For two of my shifts, I was chosen randomly to go help the Inbound Ship Dock team, and I loved the experience. Unlike in the other sections, where you work in an individual booth or small spur, at Inbound there’s a large open floor space where everyone works together to unload pallets and boxes from trucks. Now and then, when an adjustable conveyor belt machine needs to move to another truck — this is a huge machine, the area of three large dining tables, capable of being driven, complete with beeping noises warning nearby associates, at the same speed as the famous steamroller in Austin Powers — everyone in the dock stops their work and celebrates as if a parade was on. One associate would drive the machine, careful not to bang into metal posts and the pallets on the warehouse floor, while a second associate would stand on the platform of the machine waving his hands in the fashion expected of royalty and beauty contest winners: elbow, elbow, wrist-wrist-wrist; elbow, elbow, wrist-wrist-wrist. We’d cheer as this machine made its rapid-fire beep-beep-beep, a pace completely at odds with its comically slow crawl from the trailer of one now-empty truck into the open trailer of its newly arrived, fully laden neighbor. In all my time at Amazon, these shifts at Inbound Ship Dock would be the most fun I had with other associates while working. I felt recognized; I felt part of a team.

My job in Inbound was simple: wrapping pallets of freshly unloaded boxes. Whenever a pallet is stacked to about six feet high, an associate, the wrapper, takes a giant roll of plastic wrap and winds the plastic around and around all the boxes until they’re secured well enough to be moved by pallet jacks throughout the warehouse without any boxes falling over. I was one of two wrappers in Inbound, going from pallet to pallet as associates finished stacking them, typically jogging around each pallet perhaps fifteen circles with the roll of plastic wrap. My partner, Santiago, had been working in Inbound over three years, and liked to take a more relaxed approach. He looked to be around 240 pounds, and would lumber around the dock with the roll of plastic wrap mounted on a pole slung over his shoulder like some sort of industrial bindle stick, looking all the while like Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride.

One time, as I was busy jogging around a pallet, plastic wrap streaming behind me like some sort of rhythmic gymnast with an eighteen-inch-wide translucent ribbon, Phuong, an outgoing twenty-something Vietnamese pallet jack operator, placed his hand in my path to stop me. “Don’t do that.”

I waited expectantly for the explanation.

“I see you running around the pallets looking at the roll.” Here he gestured to the huge role of plastic wrap I had been wielding. “You will get dizzy if you keep staring at that, making tight little circles around this pallet. You need to look up, into the distance. Focus on something far away.”

“Wow, thanks!” I had been getting slightly dizzy, but didn’t exactly know what to do about it.

Phuong continued. “On my first day wrapping, no one told me that. I threw up in the bathroom.”

Later that afternoon, Phuong told me more about his background. Years ago, he had worked at Amazon Fresh, which pays a bit more. It turns out that the extra money is a sort of hardship pay. You spend a lot of your day walking through huge coolers picking out various food items. I’ve had several BFI4 associates all tell me the same story: they started out at Amazon Fresh, but hated the cold, so they transferred over to BFI4. Phuong, however, didn’t mind the cold. He transferred for a different reason.

While at Amazon Fresh, Phuong tried two different times to interview for a manager position. Each time, he was denied with no explanation. He had a good track record for performance and safety — but they just never told him why he was turned down, or what he could improve to become a stronger candidate. He was discouraged and stopped trying for a while. But on his third attempt, something different.

“My interviewer was Indian,” Phuong said. He leaned in conspiratorially and continued. “He told me, ‘Look, Phuong. I’m going to level with you, but don’t tell anybody this. Stop interviewing for this job. You’re never going to get it. Have you noticed all the managers at Amazon Fresh are white? Go to BFI4.’” So that’s how Phuong ended up in BFI4, in pursuit of career growth.

(For the extra-curious, there’s an outtake after the credits where I talk a bit more about potential differences in how East Asians and South Asians approach work.)

—

I was once called, along with three other associates, to help process a huge backlog of boxes in Spur 16. When the four of us arrived at the spur, I immediately started scanning and sorting boxes as quickly as I could. Boxes had jammed all the way up the spiral of the slide, which seemed like a pretty big deal. The other three associates, upon seeing my commitment to the task, began to idly chat about their day and their plans after work. Now usually, when I’m left alone in a spur, I can be quite fast and can clear a jam myself if given enough time. However, in this particular case, my three conversing teammates were physically blocking access to several of the carts needed to sort boxes into. Not deliberately, of course. If they happened to notice me approaching with a box towards a cart they were blocking, they’d shift weight onto their other foot at the end of a sentence or when a punchline landed so that I could slide the box between them and the cart’s sidewalls.

Deep into my solo quest to clear the backlog, two of the associates proposed a jam-clearing competition between them. This delighted me, since it would clearly help, but also surprised me a bit in that they had previously shown such a clear commitment to not addressing the jam. But my surprise had been premature, because their solution was to start a box-tossing competition inspired by three-point shootouts in basketball. With the third associate’s dramatic ready-set-go, no doubt inspired by the Fast and the Furious franchise, the two competing associates began grabbing boxes off the spur and shooting them across the conveyor belt in high parabolic arcs into containers on each other’s side of the spur meant for jam-clearing. Though both earnestly moved as quickly as they could, it soon became clear that one associate must have played a lot more basketball than the other. The better shooter had great jump-shot form, complete with the telltale loose-wrist flap displayed by some pros upon release of the ball. The ready-set-go associate happily cheered both contestants on even whilst they trash-talked each other. It was, in a way, heartwarming to see that the better shooter was the same associate who had been following the cheerleader around the past few days; this demonstration of skill would no doubt raise his profile in her eyes.

Many boxes made it into the six-foot-tall containers they were meant for, but quite a few ended up scattered across the concrete floor. Then suddenly, one disastrous shot landed in its container with the unmistakable sound of shattering glass — perhaps a crystal punch bowl, or maybe a nativity set; whatever it was, it sounded like a lot of glass. All three associates stopped and exchanged shocked looks with each other. Even I stopped scanning my boxes in deference to the severity of the situation.

The three associates stood frozen for a few seconds, gazing at each other, then proceeded to collectively holler various cheers. The two competitors began shooting again, still laughing, while the spectating associate clapped her hands. All this carefree hilarity during times of high stress reminded me, in the worst of ways, why I always hated group projects in school. There were so many times growing up where I was left to complete entire projects alone once groupmates figured out I was unwilling to go down with the ship. There seemed to be no choice about what to do unless I was willing to stall an entire pipeline within the warehouse. So here I went again on my own… going down the only road I’ve ever known: I resumed scanning and sorting my boxes.

There are, of course many dedicated, hard-working, and inspiring associates as well. One morning in the team meeting, Harris announced that BFI4’s Ship Dock was the fourth fastest in the network (“network” is what Amazon uses to describe the entire web of fulfillment centers). So despite what I’ve observed, there must either be a whole lot of productivity in much of BFI4’s Ship Dock, or even more shenanigans throughout the rest of the network. But I lean towards the former explanation. Madison, who started the same day as me and was working at Amazon for just a few months leading up to starting her certification to become a welder, was applauded team-wide just two weeks after starting for being the previous day’s top scanner. To Amazon’s detriment, she’d quit a week later, never to return. I once spotted Finn, the helpful Laotian I met early on, watching Amazon safety videos during his break time. This was a level of dedication that I admired and could not even muster myself; the last thing I wanted to watch during break was Amazon safety videos, or the various repeatedly advertised videos from Dave Clark, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, thanking all associates on behalf of customers for their dedication in delivering what Amazon calls “smiles.”

Examples like Madison and Finn abound in the warehouse. These employees burn with an unquenched fire lit from within, never flagging even under Peak conditions. Take Shayna, a longtime operator of pallet jacks in Inbound. During a particularly busy time, Shayna made eye contact with me while briskly pulling a fully loaded pallet, turned towards me, still maintaining her direction and speed, and released one hand from the load she was dragging to do an impromptu dance, mouthing the word “money” repeatedly like some sort of Gordon Gekko from Wall Street as she rubbed the fingers of her free hand together in front of her face to touch those crisp consumer dollars flowing straight into Amazon’s Q4 P&L. Shayna embraced Peak at a deeper instinctual level than any of the managers who couldn’t keep up their handheld plastic clappers even for ten minutes. Her red pallet jack could move the volume of $100M in hundred-dollar bills at a time, according to my internet research. Shayna would have had to pull seventy-two pallets full of hundred-dollar bills in order to haul Amazon’s Q4 2020 profit of $7.2B. There was no time to waste indeed, and lots to celebrate.

I remember LaDawn, who told me her story as we worked together to pack a truck full of boxes, pausing occasionally to teach me better strategies for doing so. LaDawn is getting her RN at nursing school by taking advantage of Amazon’s tuition assistance program. She works the full overtime schedule required of everyone during Peak — it’s her fourth year at BFI4 and her fourth Peak, so nothing rattles her. As if that wasn’t enough, LaDawn drives for DoorDash every week or two because, as she put it, you can sometimes make up to $250 in four hours if you pick the right jobs. Oh — and she’s raising two children. She credits her success to being disciplined with her schedule. I think that’s too humble a characterization of her accomplishments. LaDawn has an inspired drive that few possess.

And then there was Bertrand, one of a group of folks from the Democratic Republic of Congo who all knew each other within the warehouse. Angelo, who called me Peter all the time, asked Bertrand to teach me how to work a role labeled “Bottoms” on the job-assignment whiteboard. “Bottoms” is where you work below the conveyor belt that automatically sorts flat packages into carts, rolling them away before they overflow.

I could tell right away that Bertrand had a strong work ethic, walking quickly and filling any idle time with useful preparation for upcoming tasks. I got to know him better as he taught me how to perform the Bottoms role. Prior to the launch of BFI4 in 2016, Bertrand was in BFI5, the huge warehouse now adjacent to it, and rose to become a Process Assistant in Outbound Ship Dock for two years. He had to quit after that because Amazon’s scheduling was not flexible enough back then to accommodate his classes at the University of Washington. But he rejoined recently now that they’re more flexible, working thirty hours a week and studying the rest of the time, with the bonus that Amazon now offers tuition assistance, paying up to $5,250 every year for associates pursuing certifications or degrees. The only drawback of rejoining Amazon was that he had to start from scratch again — he was demoted from Process Assistant back to associate, working under Angelo.

This system might sound like it’s not rewarding the longest-tenured associates, and that’s because it isn’t. Jeff Bezos has said before that he doesn’t want the associate job to become a career for people, that he expects people will burn out and leave the job after a year or two. If you think you’re going to “rise up in Amazon,” you’re likely deluded, because if you look around the warehouse, there is perhaps only one manager for every fifty associates. Chances are incredibly good that you’ll instead become one of the several hundred thousand associates who leave Amazon after only a few months, no better than when you first joined. Career growth isn’t the core appeal of an Amazon warehouse job. Instead, one of the most positive ways to spin Amazon’s approach to its nearly one million warehouse workers is that Amazon views the job as a mill where your body is ground into pellets to fuel your future dreams. Amazon’s hiring page even prominently features a video highlighting an associate who, by working part time at Amazon, used its tuition assistance to earn his commercial driving license and now has a higher-paying job driving trucks. This is billed by Amazon as a shining success case. The baldest way for a cynic to frame the transaction would be thus: give us your youth and strength, and we will launch you into better things.

Not everyone, of course, seizes these opportunities. People like LaDawn might be relatively rare. It all reminds me of a thought-provoking conversation I once had with a cab driver in Cape Verde, an island nation off the coast of the westernmost part of the African continent that had been colonized by the Portuguese for centuries before winning its independence in 1975. Tanya and I had taken the kids on vacation to one of its smaller islands, named Sal by the Portuguese for the salt that continues to be its most exported natural resource. We spoke neither Portuguese nor Cape Verdean Creole, and so were largely at the mercy of our English-speaking cab driver during our entire trip. He was happy to have the steady work of driving us all over the island; we were relieved and thankful to have a local guide who understood us. He mentioned to me on one trip that learning English was the best career move he had ever made, since tourists from English-speaking countries were willing to pay double or more for their cab rides. This seemed a great life hack to me, but then came the surprise: he had apparently, for years, been trying to convince his friends, who also drove cabs, to learn English so that they, too, could earn far more for the same work. But they were unwilling. Not because they had beef against the Queen and her Received Pronunciation, but simply because, well, life as a cabbie was pretty alright. My cab driver was every bit as flummoxed by this as I was.

It takes initiative and drive to learn something new, especially something difficult, in hopes of bettering one’s life. This is made all the more difficult if you already have a full-time job. But some people do it, and thereby reap rewards for the rest of their lives; many simply don’t. I was quite enthused, then, to one day walk by the shelf in Ship Dock where associates store clear plastic bags containing their belongings, and see a bright red book within one bag: Elements of Programming Interviews in Java. Here was someone who would not only work eleven-hour shifts and an extra overtime day every week, but would, at the same time, strive to learn a new trade that might one day pay, easily, triple or more their current job. Bringing the book to BFI4, nonetheless, to fill their precious break time with study. It made me so proud to see this, to know that I was working amongst driven associates whom I might one day have the privilege of working alongside under completely different circumstances. Some people never fail to inspire.

—

One day, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went partially down on the East Coast for hours, impacting services like Disney+ and, notably for me, bringing all fulfillment centers to a standstill for over eight hours when our internal tools stopped working. We first stood for hours, idle, waiting for systems to come back online any minute. Eventually it became acceptable through non-enforcement by the managers to sit on various props in the warehouse which are normally verboten, like the stepladders each clearly labeled “Do Not Sit” and stacks of empty wooden pallets. Let me tell you — being forced to be idle for more than eight hours is no fun thing, especially if you spent the first few hours of that standing, avoiding eye contact with other associates and wondering whether you might surreptitiously use your phone. You couldn’t go to the break room because you weren’t on break, and the computers might come back online any moment. But you had run out of some of the more cheesy jobs that managers at first assigned, like picking up trash from the floors and rolling up the canvas straps used by Amazon’s trucks to hold carts in place during transport. So all there was to do was to stand and, hours later, sit.

The managers played music over the loudspeakers, each department choosing its preferred genre. I heard “Macarena” in the distance, perhaps in the Pick department. “Beat It” played in Inbound Stow. Outbound Ship Dock, my own department, let associates choose their own music, resulting in a wonderfully eclectic mix inspiring an ad-hoc dance party featuring “Gangnam Style,” Bollywood hits, and by far the most participatory song, “Cupid Shuffle.” The group shared a good chuckle at Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Then a surreal moment for me: “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds. It was the second time I had heard it publicly in a workplace. The first was when I was Site Director of Facebook’s London Engineering office. The band, Simple Minds, had come in to do a live performance in our cafeteria. I sang along enthusiastically and recorded a clip of their acoustic rendition of “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Even at the time I remember feeling the privilege of it all — a band I loved, performing live in, of all places, the cafeteria of a workplace I led. In a separate instance, the Backstreet Boys showed up in the office, not to perform, but to meet the employees and to do a press event. Then Maisie Williams, the actress who played Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, visited for similar reasons. There were semi-regular brushes with fame in the course of everyday work, no big deal. I would have never guessed, clapping along in that cafeteria as Simple Minds performed, that the next time I’d hear them would be as an associate in an Amazon warehouse, forbidden to sit or to use my phone for hours as we awaited the recovery of our robot overlord, our all-knowing Mother Brain, to receive our next tasks.

Somewhere in the sixth hour of this idleness, I ventured away from Ship Dock and took the rare opportunity to circumnavigate all of BFI4: its mile-long perimeter across all four floors. I finally found out where all the inbound goods are stored: in a near-dark ground floor area secured by fencing and guarded by security staff 24x7 against employee theft. It was near dark — lit in the sparse, spotlit manner of emergency lighting during a power outage — merely as a concession to human frailty or curiosity, because inside the fenced acres of pallets of goods hoisted on metal stands two feet above ground, only near-silent robots operated, gliding across the polished concrete floor, occasionally roaming under a metal stand to lift it and the pallet above it on top of the robot’s own head, taking it to its next algorithmically determined destination like some silent, futuristic salute to the African women who daily hoist improbably heavy jars of water on their heads to carry them great distances. I moved on to see stowers at their stations in a rare moment of sanctioned rest; they could pause from their relentless work of unpacking bulk goods from manufacturers to distribute them across yellow bins in manners directed, once again, by their inscrutable robot overlords. I walked across several floors of pickers, unable to pick because the robots that drive the shelves of goods which they normally pick from were completely still. The robots, unable to think for themselves, had all stopped moving once Mother Brain stopped communicating. It was all a bit like science fiction movies where humans settled on the classic strategy of destroying some sort of smart computer core, the moment in which all the evil robots threatening those humans would suddenly stop working, signaling the victory that would finally allow the credits to roll. Except in the real world, in the real version where our Mother Brain stopped working, not a single one of us for a moment believed that we had won, that she wouldn’t reboot herself — or, more accurately, that her human creators wouldn’t find a way to reboot her — to recover and once again issue her interminable demands. They would first cascade to her burden-carrying robot minions, then to the humans whose supple, dexterous hands could, for now at least, manage the only step in the whole process she had not yet mastered herself: deftly picking up, without damaging, some single item out of a bin only she knew the contents of. With that, a customer somewhere in the world — yes, BFI4 even processes goods bound for international destinations — could receive it in one day domestically, because at some point Jeff Bezos had intuited that two days wasn’t fast enough, that the already enormous consumer appetite for consumption was even larger than anyone had imagined, if you could but further shorten delivery times by inventing all the right optimizations. While their lord was away, the children did not play; they sat, mostly quiet and alone, each in their booths, relishing the unexpected respite before a return they were sure would happen.

I met Ben on my walkabout. Affable and enthusiastic, he welcomed me to Amazon upon hearing I was new. I had approached him during all this idle time because he seemed friendly when we had made eye contact as he was fixing a work station. My aim was to learn as much about various associates from different departments as I could during this rare downtime. Ben used to drive an Amazon delivery van and loved that job. He was interested in robotics and was studying how to write software in order to one day secure his dream job: joining the robotics team at Amazon. He eagerly described to me the various robots he had seen being experimented with, like one that used 600 PSI of suction to lift boxes or the one that automatically built custom boxes to fit each product perfectly, called the CW machine. Ben would be a great candidate for the robotics team, having served in nearly all departments in the warehouse over the years. He explained that he loved problem-solving, and confirmed that I understood fractals before putting forth the compelling dynamic of a fulfillment center when thought of as a fractal: each employee works a booth that’s nearly identical to every other booth, but those booths work in harmony with clusters of different booths from other departments; together, they join to produce the organism that was this fulfillment center, which breathes in bulk goods from manufacturers and breathes those same goods out scrambled in a new configuration aligned by the customer. But that’s not all: BFI4 was only one of a huge network of fulfillment centers internationally, so the pattern cascades ever upward in abstraction across wider and wider impact. I was impressed with his generous spirit as he eagerly described to me the various tradeoffs I might find in different departments, never disparaging any but always highlighting the best aspects of each job in the warehouse.

In my time at Amazon, I had not met another employee who came as close to an ideal ambassador for the brand and for the work as Ben. But I was floored by why he had given up the Amazon delivery job, the one he said was still his favorite job amongst all of them, in order to start at BFI4 a few years ago. He explained that his sister was quite shy and had been nervous about starting her own job at BFI4, so in solidarity and support of her, Ben gave up his job driving an Amazon van and instead started at the same warehouse. The two of them continue to work in the same department to this day, a generous big brother happy to support his little sister.

What would you pay to have such an employee in your company? I’m convinced these intangibles are undervalued by most large companies. But I’m also convinced that someone as proactive, team-oriented, curious, and driven as Ben will surely succeed in whatever he does, regardless of whether any particular employer recognizes his potential. People like Ben are what make all the beautiful and wondrous things happen in the world.

By the time I returned to Ship Dock from my multi-mile walkabout, most departments had turned their music off. Hours of it was enough for everyone. Except in the Packing department, which you could hear in the distance — which everyone could now at least faintly hear, given the silence that had fallen warehouse-wide, not only because other departments stopped playing music, but because all the machines, too, had stopped their usual whirring, clacking, beeping, and buzzing. In the quiet, the Packing department was playing “My Immortal” by Evanescence. No, it turns out — not playing it, but broadcasting an associate’s karaoke rendition of it. Who was this remarkable singer, nearly indistinguishable from Amy Lee, the original singer? Associates near me either subconsciously or consciously stopped talking as she hit the song’s memorable bridge. It seemed the entire warehouse fell to a hush as she hit the line that the entire song builds toward at the end of the bridge. When the instruments kicked in to punctuate the end of her incredible rendition of that climax, the Packing department could hold it in no longer and burst into applause and cheering.

Who was this amazing talent amongst us, who spent her mandatory overtime shifts, eleven hours a day, otherwise folding boxes, dispensing and applying wet tape to hold together the piecemeal demands of commerce? It took more than eight hours of stopping that great engine of consumerism, the Amazon backbone that runs all its fulfillment centers, in order to bring about this one uplifting discovery about our coworker. By numbers from Amazon’s previous Q4, an outage like this probably cost more than $26M of profit — not, of course, for Amazon’s associates, but for its investors. Think of it as a different form of wealth transfer: a bevy of stockholders each gave up a little something so that we, BFI4, could fan the embers of hope in each of us that we are talented, that we are meant for more than this, that we matter, are individual, and can amaze. I secretly wished her coworkers’ enthusiastic response to her talent would galvanize a conviction in her to leave this place, leave all of us, and fly.

Coming next week: I deliberately try to spend 100% of what I make in a day during that same day, which isn’t hard at all when you make $18.55 an hour. Pie baking, exotic cars, and even basketball on yachts with Larry Ellison — all of this in the coming episode.

Outtake

My wife is Indian, and I’m Chinese. This has spawned some interesting conversations about how differences between our cultures impact career outcomes. It all started back at Microsoft when I noticed there seemed to be far more Indian vice presidents in the company than East Asians, even though both backgrounds seem equally represented at entry levels. Tanya and I haven’t reached any firm conclusions about this over the years, but we’ve gravitated towards two theories. One is that people from India are more entrepreneurial and less risk averse. Tanya’s parents opened their own typewriter repair store, eventually morphing it into a computer repair shop, upon immigrating to the US. In contrast, many of the Chinese whom I met through my parents preferred stable jobs with good benefits.

My own experience growing up in the Chinese culture reflects the popular maxim, “MIT grads work for Harvard grads.” The engineer always works for the businessman. And the college-educated Chinese aspire far more to be the engineers. Sure, they’ll cheer for Michael Chang or Yao Ming on TV, but see what happens when you announce to your Chinese parents that you’d like to focus on your free throw instead of studying for the SATs. The other theory Tanya and I have about the seemingly faster progress that Indian people have in tech versus East Asians is around language. Many people grow up in India speaking English from a very young age; in fact, English is Tanya’s native language. This isn’t true of most East Asians, even if they take the occasional English class in high school or college. As you rise in leadership in a tech company, increasingly more of your time is spent speaking to people or sending out emails; as a result, perhaps people who communicate more easily in English end up having an edge that compounds over time.

I lead a seminar in the computer science department at the University of Washington each year focused on careers in software engineering. In it, I try to tackle both theories: I encourage students to deliberately improve their English if it’s not their native language; I also remind them that “MIT grads work for Harvard grads,” and that they need to take risks and put themselves out there if they want not to stagnate in their careers. Of course, there’s always the possibility that a bamboo ceiling exists — but we work on what’s within our control.

Tanya and I are both quite curious about the differences between our cultures, especially in how they might impact careers. If you have experience or thoughts around this, please reach out to me! I’d love to hear some other perspectives.

Have a great week!