[Aug. 22, 2015] Saturday meeting topic

Amazon is Great Place to Work (As Long as You Have no Personal Life, Never Get Sick) By Daniel Politi   We already knew that those who work at Amazon’s warehouses had to endure punishing hours and demands. But they’re hardly alone. The New York Times published a fascinating look at how Amazon is also pushing white-collar workers to the extreme. After speaking with more than 100 current and former Amazon employees, reporters Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld reveal how working at one of the great success stories of the digital age can be fascinating but often brutal. As several Silicon Valley companies try to woo talent with perks, Amazon “offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority.” Amazon does not hide the fact that its workplace culture isn’t for everybody. In fact, it says it outright in one of its recruitment videos. “You either fit here or you don’t,” says Nimisha Saboo, a senior technical program manager, in one of the videos posted on YouTube. Amazon’s top recruiter says so as much to the Times: “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.” Some clearly thrive in the cutthroat, almost dystopian work environment that encourages workers to turn into informants on their colleagues and chastises those who fail to respond to emails after midnight. One even describes the system that involves firing a certain number of employees every year as “purposeful Darwinism.” Yet on its way to “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable,” as the Times puts it, lots of people seem to have suffered horrific experiences. One former employee says that “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Apparently a popular saying in the company is that it’s a place “where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.” And the company helps them. One of the most shocking aspects of the story is how employees send secret feedback to each other’s bosses in a system that operates like a brutal game of Survivor in which alliances are formed to tear down certain workers. It’s also a system that seems to treat people as robots and any life event, such as having a child, or personal tragedy, like a cancer diagnosis or a dying family member, can get you in trouble. One woman who suffered breast cancer was criticized for letting her personal issues affect her work while another women who had a stillborn child was put on a “performance improvement plan,” which is described as Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired.”  An employee in the company is pushing back against the article. Nick Ciubotariu says the piece is misleading. Although he does acknowledge that things in the past may have been bad, the situation has improved in recent years. Ciubotariu insists he almost never works weekends and that horrific phone system is mostly used to leave positive feedback. “The Amazon described in this article may have existed, in the past,” he writes. “Certainly, I’ve heard others refer to ‘how things used to be’ but it is definitely not the Amazon of today.” <Questions>  1.  What kind of company do you want to work for? 2.  Do you think that Korea’s corporate culture has changed a lot? 3.  What should be changed in Korea’s corporate culture? 4.  What is your top priority in choosing a company and why? 5.  Are you satisfied with your company and job? Why and why not?               TED: Why I'm a weekday vegetarian About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian?" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. I started a site called TreeHugger -- I care about this stuff. I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do. I also knew that I'm not alone. We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. Yet, there I was -- chk, chk, chk -- tucking into a big old steak. So why was I stalling? I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. Imagine your last hamburger. (Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. Sound familiar? So I wondered, might there be a third solution? And I thought about it, and I came up with one. I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. It's called weekday veg. The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. On the weekend, your choice. Simple. If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. The program has been great, weekday veg. My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight. So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians.   Thank you. <Questions> 1. What do you think of vegetarians? 2. Have you ever thought of going vegetarian? Why and why not? 3. Currently, there are a lot of TV shows for food and cooking in Korea. Do you enjoy watching them? Why and why not? 4. How much do you care about what you eat? Tell me about your eating habit.