Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to ignore copyright law in race to AI
So, part of her role was, officially, to report copyright issues to the legal team, and she's claiming she was fired because she did that? She went to a lawyer to voice her concerns and the lawyer told here that there was no issue. And these claims are a side part of a suit where she's claiming she was fired because she had a kid? All of the claims are just so all over the place. What's the bit about Germany and some quip about nationality and not having feelings? This article reads like a complete fever dream.
Y'know, I talk to a lot of unhappy Amazonians as a part of what I do. A sad number of stories I hear rhyme with this one. There's enough smoke there to clearly be a fair bit of fire.
> For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.
Oh sure, no big deal.
If true and if this description is accurate, this doesn't sound like a goal that Amazon could explain as anything other than a setup that's guaranteed to see her fail. If this goes to trial I'd be curious to hear how they justify setting this kind of goal.
> "Everyone else is doing it."
That’s the crux of it
Big tech has collectively decided to go for the “ask forgiveness later” approach and society hasn’t shown any coherent resolute decision either way.
In the absence of that it’s pretty much genie out of the bottle and every day that passes more so. Meaning legal system will have to bend towards reality and copyright is dead in LLM context and thus many other contexts as well.
Discussion:[0] (19 points, 11 hours ago, 24 comments)
sounds like she didnt fit in with the cool kids and they bullied her out of a job. the real losers are amazon as a company and the plaintiff.
Copyright is intended to promote technological progress. I'm all for ignoring it, since it's so obviously a broken system anyway.
Nowhere other than HN have a seen such distain for copyright law.
Unless somehow it's AI-related.
[dead]
> Ghaderi was offered a new role with the opportunity to become an applied science manager. She rejoined as a engineering manager at the top of a salary band, leading a team of one scientist and two engineers.
So she was an L6 manager, maybe a lower-end L7 manager, but my guess is still L6. That's not even anywhere close to "exec" level. It's the entry-level management position at Amazon.
The sexism claims sounds brutal, but it grinds my gears when some news outlet tries to make it sound like some middle-manager grunt was "an executive". And if you take away the "Ex-Amazon exec" claim, this story really just becomes "yet another ex-Amazon person that was put on a performance improvement plan and feels wronged by it", which is understandable and maybe there's a valid case here for retaliation... but it's not newsworthy, and certainly doesn't fit the title.
edit: just read the complaint, she reported to an an L6, which means 99.9% she was an L6.