A story I don't really tell people is about my 3 days working at an Amazon warehouse.

The short version is, I'm a self-taught dev who didn't realize he was good enough to be a full time dev (spoiler as an L6 making >500k TC, I was!)

So I applied to a few labor jobs: Amazon Warehouse, pushing carts at WalMart, etc.

And a few dev jobs: Nothing fancy, a few local dev shops looking for a mobile dev.

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I get a job with a local dev shop, but I'm still not sure I can actually make it there. So I still take my Amazon Warehouse job thinking I can work both somehow... I fell asleep at my computer on my first day at the office, which is why I only worked at that warehouse for 3 days.

But those 3 days are permanently etched in my mind. BDL5, I still recognize it looking at random Amazon deliveries when I visit my parents.

I'm not sure what it is about that place that makes me slightly sick to even recall, I think it's a mixture of:

- The awful lighting. That place was lit in this sickly blue light that made you feel sleepy and wide awake at the same time, and stuck with you after you went outside

- The noise: BDL5 is a sort center. It's tiny compared to a normal fulfillment center. And it was still constantly noisy. Something like 3 acres of open warehouse, miles of conveyer belts, constant truck loading and unloading.

- The nature of the work: I think part of what makes me sick thinking about it is how depressingly menial the work was. Again, I was only there 3 days, but it's a nightmare to imagine standing on your feet for hours wrestling with comically large shrink wrap rolls for a living. Or packing useless crap into a truck for hours on end. I don't believe humans were meant for that kind of repetition. This was when BDL5 first opened and you could see how uneasy people seemed to get as the weight of the work landed on them.

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Amazon is such a depressing company. I mean I know all of this and of course, and I still use Amazon, it's just that ubiquitous and all-encompassing (although not as much lately)

It's just reached this point where something needs to give. I'm ok with not being able to place orders at 4 AM and getting them before 8PM. We'll live if 2 day shipping becomes 3 and that allows some shorter shifts for the same pay.

But yeah, devs have it easy compared to all that.