Where Are They Now?

Today, November 15th, makes exactly one year since I started at Amazon. By 10:30am, I would have already done 10,000 steps for the day, and there’d be seven and a half hours of work left before I could go home. But today — today, I slept in until 8:20am, grabbed a coffee with a former coworker at a hipster coffee shop that brews its own chai, and then meandered my way into work: in an air-conditioned office, seated in an Aeron chair, next to a window that looks onto a greenbelt. The sun is out. I just had a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, not because it was break time, but simply because I felt like it. Just unwrapped one and ate it. Even felt a little lucky because it was one of those manufacturing mistakes where you get two wrappers over your chocolate, like you sometimes do with muffins and various foodstuffs that settle in corrugated paper. And this office with a window: I paid for it myself because I wanted a quieter place to work. It hasn’t escaped me, what difference a year has made in both my circumstance and my outlook. As I hit the one year anniversary of working Amazon’s peak season, I’m daily thankful for how my world has changed.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Where Are They Now?

A gentle reminder for those tuning in that Peak Salvation is a serial miniseries. If this is your first episode, you’ve started at a place that won’t make much sense; please consider starting the series from the beginning. If you’re instead just dropping in to cull some choice quotes that might finally get me canceled, you’ve arrived just in time. Come on in! 

A few questions always come up once people have heard this podcast, which I’ll try to answer here.

Has anyone from Amazon reached out? Yes, a handful, but likely not who you’re thinking. You might assume, given previous episodes, that someone who knows why things are designed a certain way might want to ring in, or to explain the many different aspects of the warehouse that seem inefficient or nonsensical. This has not happened. Or you might wonder whether Amazon has initiated any legal actions against me, which also, as of November 2022, has not happened. Instead, the people who’ve reached out have mostly been warehouse workers themselves. The most interesting set of conversations I’ve had was with an Amazon warehouse worker who has a bachelor’s degree in graphic design. Her story, as with many, starts with thinking that the warehouse job would just be temporary, a stepping stone on her way to doing what she was really trained to do. But before she knew it, three years had passed, and she found herself returning home every night completely wiped out, without the time or the energy to seek other jobs. The momentum of the job’s demands can be such that one finds it tremendously difficult to ever dig out.

Her predicament was not unique. Most of the Amazon warehouse workers who reached out to me felt a similar difficulty in digging out. Here’s a great example, verbatim:

I grew up poor. Extremely poor for American standards. A single parent house where we'd deplete our food stamps two weeks into the month and eat scraps until the following month began. 

With no money for university, how can I pursue [the goal of being] hired by prominent companies like you were? I applied to Shopify and wasn't hired, I've applied to Tesla and am waiting on a response, and I've also applied to Capri, which owns Versace. 

You talk about the pains in your hands during your short time at Amazon, but what can people in my situation, who have been doing manual labor for 15 years, do to mitigate the tiredness and strain of manual labor while also preparing for a white-collar job in a field like programming? I love programming, but after a hard day's work, I can do it for 15 minutes, maybe 30 if I push myself. Simply put, I'm filled with fear and exhaustion. 

This struggle is real, and I have no simple answers. In the past year, I’ve been volunteering at an organization called Formation, which has helped many people train into higher-paying jobs in tech, sometimes even tripling their salaries. Each of these people put in tons of hours after their day jobs to change their life trajectory. But many of those I mentored already had white-collar jobs, just with lower salaries. It’s the classic down-payment-vs-rent problem: once people have enough of their basic needs met, they can often stretch to improve their situation. But there’s a point in America below which, if you fall, or perhaps were even born there, it becomes even harder to rise. As a society, we should find ways to raise that floor so that everyone can flourish, especially those who already have the will, but not the means, to improve their lives.

Did you know you wanted to make a podcast before you got the job? I fell into the job, in under two minutes clicking around the internet on a day where I felt I just had to change something, lest I continue to fall into the hole of my depression. But even before the job started, enough funny things had happened — like the drug test, or the HR newsletter, or my obsession with the composite-toe shoes from Zappos — that I began to take notes, first as a diary to myself so that I would remember just how strange the world could be. A few weeks into the job, I got excited about making the podcast as a creative outlet, and as a way to hopefully increase our collective will to stem the rising income and wealth gap.

Am I really the 8th listener? You might be. But episodes have been downloaded twenty-three thousand times, which, surprisingly to me, puts it in the top 1% of podcasts of all time. Then again, over half of all podcasts have less than 30 downloads, so it’s not saying much. I’ve been grateful for all the people who’ve written in to say that they’ve benefited from listening to it, whether because their own work has been a struggle, or because they identify with descriptions of how debilitating I found the depths of my depression. I’ve most enjoyed the many thoughtful conversations started by listeners.

Speaking of which, did your depression stay gone? Did your hedonic treadmill stay off? Or do you already have tickets to the next Fyre Festival, and spend your days complaining to Sir Richard Branson on his yacht? Turns out the psychic benefits of being called Peter repeatedly while lifting three hundred boxes an hour don’t necessarily last forever, but I was thankful for the reprieve that the work gave me as well as the shift in perspective which I’ve mostly managed to retain. Producing the podcast kept me busy until the middle of March, after which I found myself regressing a bit, feeling lower. Not as bad as before Amazon, but it’d be wrong to say the job cured me of depression permanently.

Did anything bad happen as a consequence of the podcast? I came here for schadenfreude, but so far, I’ve gotta say I’m disappointed. Well, if you must hear bad news, I’ll say that the internet has been a mixed bag. I’ve had many people reach out to me saying that they’ve benefitted from listening to the podcast or reading an article about me online. But there’ve also been a whole lot of rock throwers and haters out there.

The screamers come in two forms. The first works a high-income job themselves, likely a management job at a big tech firm. This sort of person, well versed in progressive politics and eager to defend those in situations they’ve never been, fumes at what they feel is my “adventure tourism,” my so-called “slumming it” to derive joy from watching the little people suffer. The second works a warehouse job themselves, and is incensed I would imply that a job they hate, and can’t get out of, somehow helped me. The suggestion that the job had any redeeming value whatsoever was offense not just to them, but to all who couldn’t “jeeeest QWIT.”

A lot is revealed about a person’s psychology when they criticize others. A friend of mine asked me about what, for me, was my lowest point in the podcast: the point in The Major Lift where I broke down while recording. His question, earnestly stated, was whether I had faked that portion for ratings. I was stunned for a few seconds to be confronted with this Pandora’s Box of a question, the possibility and its presumed motivating “benefits” having never crossed my mind. The point isn’t my appalment — the point is, to what sort of person does this question even arise, to ask of someone they know? This would only occur to the sort of person for whom the questioned possibility is a staple in their world of motivations, and who thought so little of me as to genuinely need to ask.

A more serious example with graver consequences: I once spoke with the leader of one of Seattle’s largest unions. I had asked for a meeting to explore how we could change laws and regulations to better protect workers. This man, dressed suitably as a union leader — that is to say, clearly better than the factory floor while sidestepping even the remotest possibility of hinting he had lost touch — listened to my ideas and questions for a few minutes, then interrupted me. “Philip. All these ideas about how to improve things: they’re missing the point. It’s about power. Those who have power bend things in their favor. It’s that simple. When we have power, we’ll finally be able to fix this.”

Perhaps this sounds reasonable to you, and caused no surprise. Or perhaps it disturbed you as much as it did me. Your reaction might reflect your disposition on disagreements, in a framework which Scott Alexander calls “Conflict vs. Mistake,” in a great essay by the same title. When you and I disagree, are we conflicting because one of us has power that the other is being mistreated by? Or has one of us made a mistake in reasoning? People who believe the “conflict” model don’t think it makes much sense to clarify issues or debate solutions because they believe discussion is beside the point: they’d pick up the sword over the pen any day. “Mistake” people instead believe we disagree because one or both of us misunderstand something. Their first approach is to try to understand why the disagreement exists, in hopes of getting both sides to see the same truth.

The union leader is clearly a “conflict” person, not a “mistake” person. His version, shared by many revolutionaries, is that power corrupts, that the only way to right wrongs is to seize power. But this very trait is also why most revolutions end in dictatorships. Sure, it’s all “power to the people,” until you find yourself in charge after the former leaders are toppled and your right-hand lieutenant disagrees with you. No sense in trying to resolve that disagreement — he disagrees because he wants your power, no doubt. After all, you’d feel the same in his position.

This is what fundamentally scared me about the conversation that day in the Seattle union office. Nothing scarier to a “mistake” person than the ire of inarticulate masses.

A more lighthearted assertion about my critics would be this: the many people who said the benefits and insights I derived from working at Amazon were all bunk because “I could stop working anytime” also reveal something about themselves. They either discredit any upside to work that’s not elective, grossly underestimate how debilitating depression can be, or mistakenly think that money would make them happy. Actually, I should state that last one differently: money may well make those particular people happy. But they discount someone like me. When I think about a Wall-E future, one in which we’re all overweight, riding hovercrafts while sipping jumbo-sized sodas in front of our personal Netflix screens, I don’t think of that as utopia. The most hate I got was from the “antiwork” group on Reddit — the disposition of the average person on there is that work, a priori, is a capitalist evil and should be eliminated.

I simply disagree. I think they are mistaken. There’s indeed a whole lot of work that is overwhelmingly miserable and dehumanizing. Workers need far better protections in many cases. But I don’t agree that tough jobs have no redeeming value, that all remunerated work is kowtowing to The Man. In a time when America has two open jobs for every one job seeker, I also refuse to believe that Amazon is the worst place you could possibly work. Perhaps the most sobering thing that could be said is that it’s surely a sign of how bad some jobs truly are if Amazon is America’s top private employer during a time of such job abundance.

—

By this past summer, seven months after quitting Amazon, I found myself loafing about the house, drifting around with little purpose. Being away from white-collar jobs for eighteen months also significantly impacted my confidence. I saw others, who had previously been junior to me, excel beyond where I ever had in my career. More and more, I wondered whether I would be hirable, or whether I’d become a sort of emeritus professor shuffling slowly through the halls of society, mumbling about his glory days, back when youngsters had a little thing we called Respect.

Into this mire of self-pity came Microsoft, offering me a Corporate Vice President position, deus ex machina. I had, just a few weeks prior, been telling Tanya that maybe I should go back to Microsoft and just take a coding job as an anonymous coder, probably named Peter. But this, a corporate vice president role, was completely unexpected. It was like Mark Hamill, decades after struggling for roles, suddenly being asked to once again grab a lightsaber as Luke Skywalker. I felt like Stella getting her groove back (which belongs squarely in the pantheon of movies whose titles far outlast any memory of their plots, like Die Hard With A Vengeance). In a period of self doubt, it felt wonderful to be approached with a job opportunity far beyond what I had ever achieved while at Microsoft. Twenty-five-year-old Philip would have leapt at this right away.

Forty-six-year-old Philip even nearly took it. I imagined myself coming full circle back to where I started, returning like some sort of old Beowulf to face a dragon, to go out in fame. Recruiters stopped contacting me on LinkedIn the moment I put “Amazon Warehouse Associate” on my profile. When your career arc looks as mine has, which is what one might compassionately call “a beautiful rainbow,” there’s every temptation to instead go out on a high note. Surely if my last job was “Corporate Vice President” at Microsoft, people won’t ask me what happened with a seemingly promising career. They’d instead assume that I’m self-actualizing in some baking class that always opens with prosecco. And to be honest, in a faltering economy, making fifty times my Amazon wage was pretty tempting as well. (Saying that last sentence was… well, we really need to think about where this wage gap will drive our society. It’s crazy to me that this is the world we live in.)

As I talked with the team more, and reflected on the opportunity, I found myself suddenly sucked back into a mindset I had not had for many years. I started obsessing about things that only big-company people think about. For instance, did you notice that I’ve kept saying “corporate vice president?” If you work at Microsoft, you definitely did. Because at Microsoft, a “corporate vice president” is more senior than a mere “vice president.” I started asking questions about whether I’d report to another corporate vice president, or to the president directly. These things in a large company matter: your position in the Great Tree of Life™ largely dictates the heft of your words and your future prospects for promotion.

I caught myself wrapped up in minding these things, ruminating about these things. It’s like what a famous comedian once said about wifi on airplanes: when it blips out for a moment, there’s always the one guy who goes, “Ugh! Not again!” How soon we become incensed about missing something we only learned existed five minutes ago. Here I was, having gone from ready to be called Peter the ambiguously older coder to someone who minded whether my title would have the word “corporate” in it. To recover a lost sense of confidence in my abilities, I had begun falling back into bad habits, into chasing things I know wouldn’t bring me meaning.

I turned down the job and made a different decision. After talking about it for so many years, I decided I would finally really try to make it as a software developer building my own software. Instead of doing it halfway or on weekends, as I’ve done for many years, I would treat it like a full time job. I would also give myself twelve months to figure out whether it would work long term — in that time, I would neither consider other jobs, nor would I distract myself from working as hard as I could to make my own efforts successful.

One of the most surprising things is what a difference having an office makes. For the past few years, I had become used to working from home due to COVID. But I found it hard to stay focused. To give my year of building software as good of odds at succeeding as I could, I decided to rent a little WeWork office, which is exactly where I’ve been going every weekday for the past two months, working over forty hours each week. You might not be surprised to learn that I’m building a podcast player. Given the hours of podcasts I listen to every day (that’s real hours, not even considering the fact that I listen at 2.7x speed), a podcast app makes perfect sense. I truly love what I’m working on. I’m free to tinker with it as I wish, much like a whittler might spend a little more time on some parts just for the pleasure of it. And I’m my best customer. My hope is that some people in the world will have similar tastes as me — and in fact, that’s the only way this’ll ever become a business that at least pays the bills — but in the meantime, I’ve found a renewed sense of purpose that gives vigor to my days and provides the same type of structure that I found so useful at Amazon.

While it’s true I make far less now than I did at Amazon, and far, far less than I would have at Microsoft, I’ve truly enjoyed the past few months of work. Giving myself a time limit of a year, and splurging on dedicated office space, has helped me take the effort seriously. And it turns out, at least for me, that taking things seriously makes them more, not less, enjoyable. Burning the ships — declining the Microsoft offer — has also helped me become more committed to making the best of my time, because I now understand its opportunity cost and have conviction around why I chose this path.

My typical day now is waking up around 7am, dropping my daughter off at her bus stop, and heading straight into the office. I code for around 8 hours, sometimes stopping for lunch (if I remembered to bring it), and find that the time just flies. At first, I thought I’d feel lonely and want to have coworkers — and perhaps that feeling will develop at some point — but so far, I’ve found the time alone to be very enjoyable. I go down technical bunny trails when I come across new technologies I’m interested in; I change the app’s design when I get better ideas; I walk past the neighboring office full of programmers and am so glad I have the freedom to work on what interests me and to change direction on a dime. It’s early days, and winter is literally coming, but so far, I’m hopeful that having a steady occupation like this will keep me from feeling directionless and lost.

In leading up to the one year anniversary of working at Amazon, people sometimes ask me whether I’ll do it again. I don’t think so, at least not now. Though I benefited a lot from the job, and enjoyed several aspects of it, it’s ultimately not at all an attractive job (if there was ever doubt in your mind). It’s not the physical strain I found hardest. It’s the mental tedium, along with the frustration at being powerless to improve even the most inane of things in your surroundings.

When I code, I wouldn’t go so far as Chariots of Fire on you to claim that I “feel God’s pleasure,” but I certainly feel a sense of empowerment at being able to mesh the creativity of new ideas with the pragmatism of building something useful. At its best moments, I feel I’m doing something few people can; and by practicing that agency, I’m hopeful I’ll do something useful which I’m, in a way, “meant” to do. And this might just be enough, for now, to quell that nagging feeling that I don’t have a higher calling, that it’s all for senseless naught.

—

Thank you for your continued support of the Peak Salvation miniseries. This likely draws the entire story to a close. I had briefly considered, especially given the latest spurt of interest following coverage of this story on the front page of Yahoo, extending the podcast a bit more, especially to interview some of the folks who’ve reached out to me having done very similar dramatic changes in their own careers. There even was an ex-Amazon robot designer who I wanted to ask a lot of questions of. Not to mention last week’s announcement of Amazon’s “Sparrow” robotic arm, meant to do the types of repetitive tasks that warehouse workers currently perform millions of times a day. But in the end, I thought it was best to close where there’s tidy closure, of sorts, to be had. You might never find out whether the software I’m working on goes anywhere useful. Or whether in a moment of inspiration I end up back at Amazon, but this time in Corporate, grabbing coffees frequently in Bezos’s Balls as I complain about the rising cost of household “help.”

I’ll leave you with one last open-ended item. In reflecting on my Amazon experience recently, I was reminded of one of its highlights: the day everybody was given a free lunch (you’ll remember the Ship Doc manager proudly declaring, to much fanfare, that it’d be “bougie,” and that what made it so was the fact that lunch would be beef). It was the first time I had seen so many associates smiling at once. I wanted to re-create that joy, and also to give a little something back to all the hard-working people of BFI4. So I wrote to the HR team’s email alias, asking whether I could pay for food trucks to give out free meals during Black Friday, the first day of Peak 2022. I immediately got four automated emails back, informing me that various HR staff were no longer working at Amazon, a fitting reminder that its 150% annual turnover likely applies to its HR team as well. I’m cautiously optimistic this proposal might come together, but am also not holding my breath.

Part of me likes that these questions about my future will remain a mystery. The real story’s ultimately not about me, but about us — all of us — where we’re going as a society, whether swathes of people will be left behind, whether the dignity of work and purpose is thrown out with the bath water of oppressive labor. These are the things I hope we continue to talk about.

Speaking of which, please continue to reach out to me at philip@peaksalvation.com. I’ve enjoyed the many meaningful conversations I’ve had with those of you who’ve written me. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and the perspectives you bring.

If technology and its potentially devastating impact on society are interesting to you, you might consider a podcast called The Program (audio series), which I’ve recently tuned into. It’s like an audio version of Black Mirror, the British show about technical dystopias on Netflix. I’ve been impressed with its high quality production and its explorations of where society might be headed. My favorite episode is number 11: Motherboard. I won’t spoil it by saying anything more. If you liked Black Mirror, you should give The Program a spin.

Peak Salvation is a Spark Anvil production. Today’s episode was written, edited, and produced by Philip Su. If you like what you hear, please recommend us to a friend or rate us on iTunes and Spotify. And, as always, I’d love to hear from you, at Philip (that’s p-h-i-l-i-p) at peaksalvation.com.

I wish you the very best in the coming days, and hope to stand shoulder to shoulder with you as we together receive instructions from our robot overlords.