You Get What You Measure

A little over a week into the job, I’ve fallen into a predictable daily rhythm that will remain the same through the rest of my employment. The alarm rings at 5:40 a.m., and I allow five minutes of moaning to myself about the darkness before getting out of bed. Seattle sunrise by this point in the year happens two hours later, at 7:54 a.m., so I spend my entire Amazon career starting work way before sunrise and leaving work way after. Tanya, in gracious support, gets out of bed at the same time and begins to pack lunch and snacks as I get ready for the day. We’ve settled into a formula for each day’s food and drink: two snacks, one for the morning break and one for the afternoon; a simple lunch that’s nearly always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, needing no refrigeration and also bypassing the five-minute microwave line many associates seem not to mind; and two drinks totaling around 32 ounces — usually a lemonade made from Costco’s ReaLemon concentrate and a can of Coke to save me the $0.55 charged in the break room. While she’s preparing the food and I’m wrapping up my morning routine, one of us will start the minivan so that the windshield can begin defrosting and the climate control can begin warming up. The latter proves pivotal in that I’ve begun wearing shorts to the warehouse, given how hot I get during the day from all the physical activity, yet the outdoor temperature is often 40 degrees or lower as Seattle heads toward winter. We say goodbye to each other at the door, with me often making a lighthearted comment about “heading off to the factory” while on the inside being daily grateful for Tanya’s support. It’d be otherwise lonely to start every day before sunrise packing one’s own food in the dark and heading out of the house without anyone else being awake. The kids will remain in bed for another hour or two.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: You Get What You Measure.

I drive on the highway largely against morning traffic and arrive in the warehouse parking lot about twenty-five minutes later. I’ve discovered a parking strategy requiring more walking in the morning but less time stuck in the lot in the evening. Most associates like parking as close to the front door of the building as they can. I’ve found that this is a mistake — you end up getting in a bit faster in the morning, but the real issue with the parking lot is when you try to leave shift in the evening. When parking without a good strategy, it’s taken me up to twenty-two minutes to get out of the parking lot after work because the lines of cars trying to exit all at once are let out onto nearby arterials one car at a time, interspersed with cars entering for the evening shift. The real secret, I’ve found, is to instead park as near an exit as possible, ideally in a pull-through space that allows you to drive directly into one of the four lines of cars streaming out in the evening from within the warren of enforced one-way flows in the parking lot.

I enter the building by scanning my employee cardkey at the eight-foot-high, full-body padded turnstile flanked by security guards. Cardkeys with your profile photo and a barcode representing your employee ID have to be worn on lanyards the entire day, not only for security to infer that you belong, but also as a way to log in to a variety of machines and scanners you might operate throughout the day as well as to pay for any food or drink you choose to buy in the break room. You can choose, instead of the standard issue light-blue lanyards advertising Amazon Prime, to buy and use lanyards of your own, the most popular of which support the Seattle Seahawks; the key is that all lanyards must be break-away, featuring a clip that, given forceful enough tugging, breaks the loop of the lanyard around your neck, thus saving you from being wound horrifyingly into the gears of one of the many heavy-duty machines whirring throughout the building. On most days, I arrive before 6:25, the earliest that a person with a 6:30 shift is allowed to clock in. I’ll know that right away because the various electronic clock-punching machines will have queues of associates hovering around them, waiting for the magic time of 6:25 to roll around, at which point a flurry of cardkeys will wave in rapid succession in front of each machine as a stream of multi-tonal beeps and boops acknowledge each employee in turn as having clocked in. I’ve learned to avoid these queues and instead use the Amazon employee smartphone app, called A-to-Z in reference to the company’s longtime aspiration to sell you everything under the stars, to clock in virtually. There has been such a problem with employees virtually clocking in that they’ve added GPS capability to A-to-Z as well as several warnings that virtual clock punches are correlated with building turnstile information to make sure you were actually in BFI4 when you clocked in virtually, as opposed to, say, the Bahamas.

I walk around and under various conveyors carrying goods and packages until I reach the back of the building where the Outbound Ship Dock team operates. I put on the reflective vest required of everyone in Ship Dock so that employees operating pallet jacks or power industrial trucks don’t accidentally run into me. On top of this vest goes a web of straps that together form a harness used to hold the handheld scanner that will accompany me throughout the day. If time allows before the team meeting, I’ll grab my scanner from a metal cabinet full of them, along with a freshly charged battery from the cardboard box with green tape labeled “Charged.” Before lunch and at the end of each shift, I’ll reverse the process, logging out of my scanner and putting its spent battery in a box with red tape labeled “Not Charged.” I attach the scanner to my harness and finish the last steps of getting equipped for the day: I don the rubberized work gloves required of all Amazon associates, wrap my approved bone-conduction headphones around my neck (they’ll later go over my head once I start my assignment for the day), and also drape the foam earplugs connected by a thin yellow plastic band around my neck so I can better block out the perpetual din of the building. I then put the clear plastic bag with my food and drink — standard issue, you’ll recall, required by security so that nothing is stolen from the warehouse — on a metal shelf where all the other associates’ bags sit as well, each person’s bag easily identifiable by the contents therein.

At this point, the morning team meeting begins. A manager grabs a microphone and covers the typical topics of the day. They usually share the volume expected “in the first half” — the day, with its morning break, lunch, and afternoon break, is divided into quarters like a fiscal year, leading to people saying things like “Q3 will be busy” and “the first half will be 82,000,” meaning we’ll need to process 82,000 packages before lunch. There are almost always a few remonstrances, billed as “safety tips,” for associates to follow the rules. “Safety tip: always unfold carts when rolling them any more than five feet away from a truck. These carts are really heavy. We’ve had them fall on people before, and trust me, you don’t want that.” I surreptitiously eye my composite-toe shoes, which I, at long last, after much anticipation and worrying, have finally received, and think that I’ll likely be fine. But then again, I always follow all the rules, and so it’s a bit surprising to me that I appear to be one of the only associates who’s actually wearing the composite-toe shoes that were said to be mandatory, the very ones with what the industry calls protective “toe boxes” that enlarge the fronts of the shoes in a way most reminiscent of those worn by clowns. “Safety tip: when building box walls in a truck, make sure you’re joining them in T-junctions, not building up towers of boxes all the same dimension. You want to interlock them like bricks. We had a safety issue yesterday when a wall of boxes fell on an associate.” My rule-abiding shoes wouldn’t have saved me from that. The box walls are easily six to eight feet high; when that levee of cardboard-clad consumerism breaks onto you, your only hope is that someone sees your weak, upraised hand waving shakily out from under the rubble.

The convention at the end of every day’s two team meetings, the one in the morning and the one right after lunch, is to do what the managers call a “power clap.” Harris will say something like, “Power clap on three,” and then proceed to count to three, at which point everyone claps together, just one time. I prefer this way of ending the meeting over the alternative. When a lead named Angelo ends the meeting, he makes up a different chant each time — sometimes call-and-response, like “Ship!” “Dock!” “Ship!” “Dock!” and sometimes a phrase he’d like us to remember, like “Finish strong!” But the team never wants to do this, so each chant ends up sounding halfhearted, only becoming passable when Angelo at first threatens to make us do it again, then inevitably, painfully does. Once that’s over, everyone gathers around a whiteboard used to coordinate job assignments for the day. Areas of the whiteboard are marked with tasks like “East Spurs,” “Cart Waterspider,” “Flats,” and “Go Carts.” It will take me a few weeks to learn what all these different terms mean. Each area has a grid under it, within which are placed the laminated, magnetized profile photos and names of each associate. The name tags always start upside down. The convention is that you find your tag, which then tells you your job assignment until lunch or until the end of the day, and then you flip your tag right-side up so that the managers can later do what they cryptically refer to as “labor track.” Over time, you get good at spotting your upside-down name tag amongst perhaps 100 others on the whiteboard, and the moment is always a sort of small suspense followed either by relief at being given a job you like or despair at needing to now do a job for the next five hours that you dread.

I then work at the morning assignment for two and a half hours until the fifteen-minute break at 9 a.m. At 9:15, I return to the same assignment and continue on until lunch at 11:30. Lunch, required by Washington State to be thirty minutes, is unpaid and requires clocking out and back in. Upon returning from lunch, everyone gathers once again for a team meeting that runs identically to the one in the morning, complete with new job assignments on the whiteboard for the afternoon. Q3 and Q4 are each longer than Q1 and Q2, each running two hours and forty-five minutes, with an afternoon break in the middle. I’ve set my watch to buzz me five minutes before each break and before lunch so that I don’t miss them like I did when I first started.

Six p.m. never arrives soon enough, as everyone begins checking their watches more and more towards the evening. Around ten minutes before the end of shift, people start wandering back towards the team’s meeting spot to grab their translucent bags off the metal shelf, return their scanners, remove their harnesses and reflective vests, and prepare to leave the building. The walk to the front entrance will take two minutes. If you arrive even a minute before 6 p.m., you’ll pile behind a throng of associates all waiting for the electric clock punch to flip from 5:59 to 6:00. It’d be overly dramatic to say that there’s a stampede to leave the building the moment those clocks flip, but let me just say that I’ve in no other case seen associates as well coordinated amongst each other as during the end of shift streaming out of the building. Departure feels synchronized and choreographed with an urgency seen mostly in movies depicting paratroopers running and jumping out of the rear bay door of some military plane over enemy territory.

Leaving the building isn’t where the urgency stops, however. The parking lot is where the real battle begins. You need to walk quickly to your car, weaving between incoming and outgoing vehicles, each with their own urgency. It’s inevitably raining, always raining. It’s Seattle. But you need to get to your car quickly because every second wasted is a second where a different associate has reached their car first, started it, and inserted it into the back of the line to leave the parking lot. There is such a rush, in fact, that I always start the car and shift it into drive or reverse, depending on which way I’m parked, before I begin putting on my seat belt. This is a situation where having a Porsche would be genuinely useful. Porsches have always put their ignition left of the steering wheel, unlike most manufacturers, because it allows for you to start the vehicle with your left hand as you clutch with your left foot, brake with your right foot, and shift gears with your right hand. You know, to get a fast launch in one of the many older car races in which drivers needed to start their cars after the waving of the green flag. In my case, the Chrysler Pacifica minivan has its ignition in the standard position to the right of the steering wheel, but I still manage some decent speed between closing the driver’s-side door and getting the tires rolling. I spend somewhere between four minutes, my personal best, and twenty-two minutes, my worst performance, to get out of BFI4’s parking lot, and another forty minutes on the road before arriving home around 7 p.m.

The time at home flies quickly, since there are only two and a half hours between when I get home and when I need to go to sleep. I shower, eat after the family has already finished dinner, and try to spend a little time with each family member. I type some notes from the day’s work in hopes that it will one day become a podcast. Then I go to sleep, shocked that I’ll be back in BFI4 so soon again tomorrow morning before sunrise.

—

When you enter a fulfillment center for the first time, the whirring and clacking of machines all mixes together into one mechanical din. But as you work in different roles, you start to see that the rattle and hum of machines near you are differentiable and revealing. When I first started scanning boxes and loading them onto carts, boxes would sometimes stop coming down the spiral slide, leading to a halt in work. Veterans explained to me that the big sorting pipeline upstairs sometimes stops for various reasons, in which case we don’t get packages on the warehouse floor for a few minutes. After working a few days at scanning boxes into carts, you can tell that the boxes will soon stop coming even as a few final ones make it down the slide — some subconscious part of you has already detected that the low hum coming from above you, that you can feel even in your sternum most of the day, has stopped.

In this and many other ways, I’ve gotten more used to my job at Ship Dock. It’s now Day Six, and for the past few days I’ve been sorting and scanning packages. The job can be the most physically demanding in the entire fulfillment center. Understanding this explains one of the mysteries of my first day, when the lady who led my orientation, Monica, exclaimed “Fancy!” when she saw my name listed in Ship Dock. Perhaps it also explains why only the Ship Dock associates’ names were highlighted in bright purple on Monica’s list.

The sorting job involves working at one of around twenty-four “spurs” laid out in parallel in the back of the fulfillment center. Spurs are where miles of conveyor belt travel for a package finally come to an end. Packages slide off their conveyors and come to a stop at the end of a long row of metal rollers, akin to luggage coming out of an X-ray machine at airport security. The sorter’s job is to pick up each package and zap its barcode with a handheld scanner, put the package in the right cart according to its destination, and scan a barcode of another package in the same cart, thus notifying Amazon’s servers that a particular package is now next to all its buddies in a cart. You repeat this process around 200 times an hour until your shift is over ten hours later.

When you do this day after day for the majority of your waking hours, you start to really know package labels. Each package is labeled with a destination code: LAX5, DFW6, LAS5 — as you can guess, Amazon names many of its warehouses after the code for the airport they’re closest to. That’s why the building I work in is BFI4: BFI is the airport code for nearby Boeing Field (technically King County International Airport). The eight to ten carts that surround each spur are open cages about three feet deep, five feet wide, and six feet high. Once you’ve identified the cart to which a package belongs after scanning its label, you stack the box on top of others already in the cart and scan any other box in the cart to tie the two records together. So when everything goes well, your day sounds like BEEP-stack-BEEP, BEEP-stack-BEEP. Every once in a while, when you scan the wrong barcode on a box (since boxes are full of various barcodes, many of which are irrelevant to Amazon), you get an error that sounds like bee-BOOP-bee-BOOP-bee-BOOP. You can tell who’s sloppy when walking around Ship Dock by just listening to the spurs where you hear a bunch of bee-BOOP, bee-BOOP. When everything is working out just right, I’ve scanned and sorted at a pace of 380 packages per hour, about one every 9.5 seconds.

But several things can go wrong that make that peak pace unsustainable.

First, there’s the issue of how you stack the boxes. One day I was briefly assigned to work with an associate who was extremely fast at scanning. The trouble is, this associate, Kobe, didn’t so much stack the boxes as he simply made sure they touched each other. So after scanning each box, Kobe would toss the box towards its matching cart much like an NBA player flings the ball towards the backboard at the buzzer, regardless of how hopelessly far he is from scoring. Each cart filled by Kobe would then resemble not a neat pile of interlocking LEGOs, but a jumble most evocative of Santa’s sack of presents. Kobe would proceed to do this, hitting nothing but net with each jumper like he was in a three-point shootout, until he had cleared most of the boxes in your spur, racking up an incredible scan rate — at which point he’d promptly depart to play in another court, leaving you with a set of completely unusable carts.

Because the real trick with filling carts is that you need a stacking strategy. Amazon tracks the volume of each scanned box, so it knows how much space is left in each cart. You’re chastised for closing carts too early, which generates inefficiencies the entire way down the pipeline. Half-empty carts require associates to push them into a truck just the same as fully filled carts. Half-empty trucks require nearly the same amount of fuel and time to get to their next destination. It all cascades. So you want to pack a cart as densely as you can. It turns out the trick to this is to understand a few dynamics of the boxes themselves. As those of you who’ve ordered profusely from Amazon during the holidays know, Amazon uses a variety of standard box sizes. Several of them share the same length in one dimension, much like A3/A4 paper in Europe; with some boxes, their longest dimension happens to be the same as the shortest dimension of a box the next size up. Some boxes’ longest dimensions are an even multiple of the shortest dimension of a smaller box. By knowing dynamics like these, you can rotate and flip boxes so that they nest nicely next to each other and pack densely into the cart.

The other trick with boxes is counterintuitive: you want to put the largest boxes on the outside, closest to you. Each cart is like a six-foot-high cage with front doors like a wardrobe. You fill the cart from the front like you’re putting clothes in a wardrobe until it’s full, at which point you close and latch the doors. When filling carts, most beginners naturally stack big boxes in back to form a rising mound in the cart’s rear. The challenge with this strategy, you quickly find, is that things get difficult once the mound gets higher. As things get past waist height with this strategy, you find that the smaller boxes you’ve put towards the front can easily fall out if their neighbors are disturbed in any way. To prevent this type of instability, it’s best to instead fill carts in the counterintuitive way, placing the largest boxes closest to you, near the front. By doing so, you build a solid wall of very stable boxes behind which you arrange all the smaller boxes like little villagers behind the large stones of a keep. Taking this approach, you can easily build walls of packages that go up to six feet without any risk of crumbling.

The second issue that can slow you down relates to your coworkers. There’s nothing quite like being paired with a great associate. Just yesterday, I was paired with someone who was fast, stacked boxes reasonably, and even quickly separated packages between his and mine so we could each scan very quickly. It can truly be a joy to work in such an environment, where hours pass in a blink of flurried activity.

More often than not, though, having another associate in a spur only slows you down. I’ve already mentioned the problem of Kobe: a coworker who scans quickly but leaves each cart an untenable Jenga for you to untangle. But equally unhelpful is Kobe’s opposite, Ned. Ned is the type of guy who, as a kid on the beach, no doubt spent hours after all the other kids had built the sandcastle meticulously hand-crafting each crenelation individually on all its walls. A Ned in your spur isn’t interested in scan rates. He’s interested in redecorating the interiors of each cart. Ned can spend several minutes at each cart looking puzzled, occasionally pulling out a box and placing it just-so next to another which seemed a better fit. He’ll do this continually, oblivious to the pile of boxes coming rapid-fire down the spur, leaving you to deal with the flood of yet-to-be-processed packages on your own. He’ll make his masterpiece yet.

A different type of coworker focuses only on one cart out of the eight or ten in your spur. Sally, let’s call her, hails from Baltimore and only wants to process boxes destined for BWI2. She walks down the spur with its row of packages on metal rollers looking only for boxes labeled BWI2, scooting other boxes to look at labels underneath, pushing the ones bound for other locations away. When she finds the prized BWI2, Sally saunters with it over to her one cart and places it proudly within. She wonders whether Baltimore’s changed much since she left it fifteen years ago. She misses its world-famous aquarium.

Though Kobes, Neds, and Sallys can be found every day in BFI4, the most common associate archetype in Ship Dock is Sasha. Sasha wants to stay under the radar, doing just enough work to avoid being fired. She knows that she’ll get a twenty-five-cent raise for every additional six months she stays undetected, until at sweet last, the big $1.10 raise comes when she hits two years’ tenure. These raises are independent of performance — they’ll happen just for not being fired. Working faster, smarter, or harder won’t get you there any quicker, either. So Sasha bides her time. When packages in a spur slow to a trickle, she’ll just stand and wait instead of looking for a busier spur to help. When the spur is so full that packages occasionally fall onto the floor as even more packages come off the conveyor, Sasha stays calm, scanning one ever-loving package at a time, moving at a pace best described as “seaside resort afternoon.” Every once in a while, a package is heavy enough to warrant a bright red HEAVY sticker on it; these Sasha leaves to you, choosing instead all the little packages which no doubt contain cell phone chargers or the occasional cell phone case. When all the carts are full, leaving no place to put packages, Sasha checks out Instagram. Phones aren’t allowed out on the warehouse floor — but BFI4 is six football fields wide and Ship Dock has only one manager on your shift. Once in a while, a package is torn or its label is missing. Associates are supposed to take that package 50 to 100 yards away to a station marked Problem Solve — but Sasha leaves all those packages sitting on the spur for others to deal with because every minute you’re away from the spur is a minute your scan rate is dropping.

And who can blame Sasha? Amazon’s evaluation method doesn’t select for enterprising individuals by differentially rewarding them. The fastest and slowest workers on the line get paid the exact same amount. Amazon manages a baseline to trawl instead of looking out for stars. Being Speedy Gonzales won’t get you anywhere faster. But fall below baseline, and the Eye of Sauron will come for you by alerting Harris, your manager, on his laptop with a highlight telling him exactly why you’re in trouble. Sashas in the warehouse have figured this out; they play the game exactly the way it’s designed.

The last thing that can really slow you down is when a cart gets full. Say you’re loading a bunch of boxes headed for Salem, labeled DPD6. At some point, the stack of boxes reaches above your head, peering out from atop the cart’s six-foot-high side walls. Using the touchscreen on your handheld scanner, you press a button labeled “Notify WS to Close.” Closing a cart is where you shut its front doors and declare it officially ready to be wheeled into a truck — one of the long eighteen-wheelers you’ve no doubt seen on the highway painted light blue with an Amazon logo advertising Prime. More than a dozen of these trucks are backed into BFI4’s Ship Dock at any one time in various states of being loaded or unloaded. Your cart now belongs in one of them.

The “WS” referred to by the button is a “waterspider.” This is a term used in lean manufacturing to refer to the person whose job it is to support all the other roles by providing necessary materials in order to help everyone focus primarily on their assigned task. A water spider, in nature, is the only spider that spends its entire life in the water. It has many small hairs on its body that capture bubbles of air when the spider comes to the surface. It then takes those bubbles with it down to its underwater web and releases the bubbles inside the web, forming a sort of underwater Atlantis with all the transported air. It’s not clear to me whether “waterspiders” in the lean manufacturing sense were named that because of the air bubbles, but a waterspider in an Amazon fulfillment center is an associate who’s supposed to roll closed carts into a staging area for eventual loading onto a truck, and also supply your spur with a new empty cart ready to go. When everything is going right, this allows the associates scanning and sorting to focus completely on loading boxes onto carts. Whenever a cart gets full, they notify a waterspider, who closes the cart’s doors, rolls it away, and rolls in a new empty cart as its replacement.

That’s when all is going well. But in over a week of working spurs, I’ve rarely ever had an empty cart supplied by a waterspider. Instead, the button you press to notify a waterspider that a cart is full likely instead just makes a pleasant, reassuring sound on your hand-scanner, accompanied by a sentence proclaiming that the waterspider has been notified. It felt suspiciously like this button actually did nothing at all — and sure enough, three weeks later, someone confirmed to me that indeed, the button doesn’t do anything at all other than make a reassuring beep. As an aside: did you know that many pedestrian crosswalks work the same way? They figured out that people are less likely to jaywalk if you give them a button near the crosswalk that simply beeps but does nothing else. But as for Amazon’s waterspiders — they might be checking Instagram or recording a TikTok; the point is that I’ve nearly always been the one to stop my scanning, find an open truck with empty carts, and roll the cart back to the spur myself, nudging the full cart aside in hopes that TikTok videos are relatively short and quick to finish editing.

The single metric that Ship Dock workers are measured by is their scan rate: the number of packages they scan, sort, and load into a cart in an hour. This number is so essential that you are shown your own scan rate on all screens where you’ve logged in. For instance, you wear a two-pound handheld scanner all day whose screen shows your scan rate prominently at the bottom left. If your spur gets slow and packages start to trickle, you’ll see your scan rate drop as the average over the past few minutes gets dragged down. In periods of flow where packages are coming quickly and waterspiders are bringing fresh empty carts regularly to your spur, I’ve hit rates as high as 388 boxes an hour. Good workers on the dock sustain rates between 180 and 200.

But a well-known problem with a single metric is that you get what you measure. Some mornings, Harris announces the associate with the highest scan rate from the day before. This is celebrated by everyone with applause. The trouble, however, is that optimizing for this single metric degenerates into self-serving behavior that makes the individual look great at the cost of the team’s overall efficiency.

For instance, to have the absolute highest scan rate, you should first pop over to the busiest spur — look for the one piled up with a large queue of unprocessed packages — to pull a Kobe. Simply rapid-scan boxes and toss them into carts without arranging them. In fact, don’t ever scan big boxes, or worse yet, process the ones marked with the big red HEAVY sticker. Instead, focus only on the small, light boxes, since your scan rate doesn’t reflect the weight or bulk of packages scanned, but instead reduces all packages down to the same credit. As soon as the carts are nearly full or the number of available packages dribbles down, move to the next spur, leaving other associates to deal with the remaining heavy boxes, re-sort the jumbled messes in each cart, and walk halfway across the warehouse to grab new empty carts. If you do this enough, mooching from the sweetest nectar in each spur before moving to the next, you can spend the whole day scanning and loading easy boxes and never have to pause to do any of the work that accrues to the team or to the overall efficiency of Ship Dock. This can go on for months or longer without notice because the ethic on the floor is that Snitches Get Stitches. Leads don’t notice because they’re supervising too many people across a vast area several football fields large. When you’re spotted re-stacking a jumbled cart, is that because you didn’t have the foresight or experience to do it correctly the first time, or because you’re fixing someone else’s mess? When you’re not seen working a spur, are you recording another TikTok, or are you getting an empty cart because the waterspiders are busy discussing the warehouse at Dunder Mifflin from The Office? All the right behaviors you want of warehouse associates, other than their scan rate, aren’t tracked; in fact, because all those pro-team behaviors cause your own scan rate to go down, the system actively discourages the best behaviors.

The software industry, where I’ve worked twenty-three years, has a similar dilemma around metrics. Traditionally, managers have experimented with metrics like KLOCs, where a KLOC is a thousand lines of code written, or bug resolution counts, where you count the number of bugs fixed by a software developer. These metrics also begat abuse, rewarding behaviors that were most antithetical to the team’s broader interests. For instance, when you reward engineers for the number of lines of code they write, they end up writing overly complex implementations that use a lot of code to express a simple idea. Similarly, I once worked on a team where developers were graded on the number of bugs they fixed. In order to make sure that number was high, some engineers on the team would break one large bug into a series of smaller constituent bugs so that they could resolve a whole bunch of them with what amounted to one fix. It’s not just that these metrics don’t capture the core of the behaviors you want; it’s that many of these metrics actively encourage counterproductive behavior.

The good news with software and with the associates at BFI4 is that there are great workers in both spheres, no matter how poor the metrics. In my days at Ship Dock, I’ve run across plenty of dedicated individuals who worked hard to do the right thing even when it wasn’t being measured. One such person was Finn, who one day introduced himself to me, as we both loaded adjacent carts, with only one word: “Korean?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, or that I had understood his meaning, so I leaned in over the noise of the machines. “Are you Korean?” he elaborated. Finn was an Asian man in his fifties. “No, I’m Chinese, born in Taiwan. How about you?” “Laos,” he said, “though I was taught some Chinese by a teacher from Taiwan when I was growing up.” He went back to work, scanning boxes and stacking them quickly like some sort of impending flood had been announced. Except now that we had been introduced, he would often bring little stacks of boxes destined for the cart I was working on, making my scan rate faster while sacrificing his own. He even stopped his work once to re-pack the boxes in my cart more optimally. This is the type of indefatigable spirit that you want in an employee — and you should figure out a way to reward the behaviors you want.

When I next passed him during break time, I asked him how long he had been at Amazon, expecting it to be years given the speed of his expert movements and, frankly, his age. “Eleven days,” he replied. This struck me most not for the obvious reason, but for its precision. When’s the last time you remembered specifically your eleventh day on a job? You’re only that precise when something is either really special or really horrible. Mothers proudly say their child is nineteen months old. Finn, conversely, knew that it was not just “a little over two weeks,” but instead precisely eleven days. I met him on my sixth day — I’m sure of that. Perhaps we all, in a way, were marking the walls of our minds with a little chalk tally, ten hours at a time.

—

Now that I’m in my second week, the scanning and sorting job is getting more familiar. My feet are gently calloused from walking miles every day on concrete in composite-toe shoes. My heart rate still remains above 100 for the entire day, but I expect my cardio to get better; after all, I had been living an unemployed, sedentary life for months leading up to this job. Although when I get home from work, I still don’t want to stand a minute longer than absolutely necessary, preferring to sit whenever possible, my ankles are no longer as sore as when I first started. My back, similarly, is getting better at lifting over 2,000 boxes a day, though it reminds me every evening that I’ve done so.

Interestingly, it’s the small things I now notice. The handheld barcode scanner, for instance, is a little over two pounds. It runs Android, with a little touchscreen, and is housed within a thick rubber casing to protect it from the day’s adventures. To keep your hands free while ensuring that you never misplace your scanner, Amazon issues a sort of holster that you wear around your neck and arms made of adjustable black nylon straps. The scanner buckles to this holster and hangs at your side throughout the day swinging freely as you move, but always within easy reach if you let your arm drop to your side. The thing with hanging a free-swinging two-pound weight to your side for ten hours is that your body then needs to compensate that whole time. I’ve been experimenting with switching sides every other day, scanning with the left hand at times instead of the right. The jury’s still out on whether this will give the pulled muscles in my neck enough of a break to get used to this persistent new requirement.

My forearms are peppered with scars received from the corners of boxes. None of the scratches bleed — they’re more the type of scratch when a bunch of skin rubs off and then the capillaries break beneath. They look a lot more painful than they feel. In fact, they don’t hurt at all. I wonder whether other associates have this as well, though I did notice many associates wear long-sleeved shirts. But for someone like me who runs hot, a T-shirt and shorts are about as much clothing as I could take.

The other small thing I didn’t expect was all the cuticle damage. In Ship Dock, you’re required to wear work gloves all day. They’re nicely rubberized on the palm side, making it much easier to grip cardboard boxes and prevent cuts and scrapes. You also sweat inside the gloves all day, so you wouldn’t think cuticles would split. But by the end of my third day, the cuticles on all ten of my fingers were badly split to the point that it hurt to wash my hands or shower. All the abrasion within the gloves had been enough to cause this. I started to lotion my cuticles several times each evening, which seemed to solve the problem. After a few more days of this, however, I stopped lotioning and noticed my cuticles were still fine. Perhaps this is the classic thing where you can tell what type of work a person does by looking at their hands — my hands are likely getting accustomed to rougher use.

At this point, six days in, I’m starting to understand the job well enough to sometimes hit a state of flow. There are some tricks that make things faster. For instance, you go to get empty carts when your spur hits the occasional lull, like when the machines upstream get stuck and stop sending boxes for a minute or two. I’ve learned that I committed a faux pas on my second day by asking an associate in the neighboring spur whether I could commandeer one of his empty carts; this, I now know, cost the other associate time, since he had to get that empty cart himself at some point, so I only grab empty carts directly off trucks now.

Scan scan scan scan scan. Load load load load load. Scan scan scan scan scan. The rhythmic beeping of your scanner interleaves periodically with your breath, and it becomes a sort of meditation. Hours can fly by like this. I’ve even missed the beginning of breaks and lunches when I’m in the zone. Turns out it’s far better, in my opinion, to be so busy that you’re surprised when the day ends than it is to move more slowly, avoiding work, and find yourself checking the clock all the time. The work, in a way, is its own reward.

Somewhat. I don’t want you to get any strange ideas and quit a better-paying job for this. But should you find yourself in a similar situation as me, there’s a lot to recommend doing a great job even if you don’t get paid any more than the next guy.

The real benefit, though, has come in the immediately noticeable effect of the job’s rigor on my depression. I had already felt a little hope springing up when first applying for the job after having been unemployed for eight months and feeling more and more like perhaps I couldn’t hack it in a full-time job anymore. This positive momentum of hope was then boosted big time once I started the actual job. I could feel the difference within days of starting. A perennial alarm clock snoozer — my record was once having snoozed an alarm twenty times, or three hours at nine minutes a snooze, on a morning when I was due in at Microsoft — I found it incredibly helpful to know that snoozing was never an option in this job. If I arrived late by more than five minutes, unpaid time off, the dreaded, much-warned-about UPT, would be deducted in units of an hour or more. Stack up ten such deductions — or equivalently, miss any one single shift — and you’re fired. For someone who felt so easily overwhelmed during the past few months, I found this sort of pressure unexpectedly helpful. In a way, it eliminated what was once a very hard daily decision for me during the depths of my depression: when, or even whether, to get out of bed. The rigidity of the Amazon warehouse job took choices away from me, choices which, instead of freeing me, had begun to cause paralysis. Now every day had very few choices. I couldn’t choose when to wake up. I couldn’t choose not to go in to work if I wanted to keep my job. I never knew what my tasks would be for the day until I arrived at work. And even then, I’d often be asked, several hours into some task, to shift gears and switch into something completely different. And if no one talked to me for the entire day — which starts before sunrise and ends after sunset — I was to continue doing whatever I was last told to do.

My regimented days also eliminated stress at home in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated. When you arrive home after everyone’s already had dinner, and you only have two hours before you need to head back to sleep, your personal life also entails few choices. You have to shower and eat, at least. Bills, mail, messages, near-overdue insurance renewals, and the ever-so-persistent appeals from your daughter’s school for donations to their annual fundraiser all have to wait until you have a day off. If I’m honest, I was also a bit relieved to have an excuse not to tackle some chores. When failing some responsibility, I could simply appeal, if even just in my own mind, to the handy — and entirely truthful — excuse that I had no time. My prior need to stay on top of everything — after all, I was unemployed and had nothing but time, making the missing of any responsibility seem solely attributable to laziness — was greatly relaxed. I could occasionally forget something, or even feel too tired to do it, and everyone would understand. Look how busy I am! I’ve got no free time! And by “everyone,” the only people I really mean are the various judgmental voices inside my own head who constantly criticize me for falling short and not achieving better results, if only I had stronger character and endurance. My wife and kids had been supportive all along, faulting me neither during my months of idleness nor during my sudden shift into being so busy outside of the house all the time. The benefits of the job were instead all playing out inside my head.

Coming next week: Peak begins! The madness of Black Friday, the start of eleven-hour shifts, and a foray into Georgian economics. As if the days weren’t already hard, they’re about to get a lot harder. Would my optimism hold? Or will Amazon’s relentless demands grind me down?