Glenn Fleishman
glog.glennf.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Glenn Fleishman is a technology journalist who writes about Apple, publishing, typography, and tech history on his personal blog.
What HN saysHN links it mainly for the Amazon door desk story, which a commenter says shows the desks were costly and partly a message to employees.
18HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
10stories submitted
170story points
6 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The true story of the Amazon door desk (2011)5 people · 79 points · first shared 2013 · 66 comments on HN
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
xentronium · 2014-10-22
Off-topic, but door-desks aren't really cheap at all.
Great recount by an old time employee: http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the_amazon_do…
jonatron · 2025-12-22
From iOS 11 it auto-corrects -- to — https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2017/7/6/dash-dash-it-all
spullara · 2023-01-16
The story I have heard about early Amazon was that everyone put together a desk from a door and sawhorses. Hmm, this also mentions that a garage was one of their locations:
https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the_amazon_d…
mattferderer · 2022-02-07
You may enjoy this article that argues the door desks were both more expensive & possibly more about marketing an idea to employees than actually saving money - https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the_amazon_d…
Either way the door desk is an interesting piece of tech history.
sparkzilla · 2018-12-21
Didn't News Genius run into trouble by copying articles for annotation like this?
https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2016/3/25/citation-appropriation-and-fair…
symmetricsaurus · 2014-10-13
In case you missed it they are also shutting down. [1]
It's unfortunate, I think, since the model for a publication was interesting.
[1]: http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2014/10/8/the-magazine-is-making-a-book-ag…
networked · 2013-10-17
Well, it sure worked for Amazon [1][2].
[1] http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks.html
[2] http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the_amazon_do…
dangus · 2026-05-15
"okay buddy you're not making very compelling arguments here" isn't even a basic contribution to the discussion. Your entire argument is just "all Meta employees are bad people" and you have spent very little effort justifying that position, including stating seemingly contradictory phrases:
> That being said, I still empathize with workers. I think people need to be treated like people and not some resource to be exploited.
> Meta employees work for and are well compensated for that work, by Meta.
> Meta employees aren’t DoorDash gig workers trying to feed families. These are well compensated workers.
It doesn't seem like you emphasize with workers at all! If someone works at Meta in any capacity, they're automatically responsible for the outcomes of the corporation as a whole.
I think about how professional sports, despite having relatively high pay, still have unions. Why is that? Well, think about how the NFL has covered up the effects of CTE, how players need lifetime healthcare for the profession to make sense, how the average player tenure is very short, how players are traded and relocated with short notice, and how the league is a legalized monopoly with no alternative employer at anywhere near the same level on the market. These are all very good reasons to form a union.
Does this mean that all NFL players are responsible for the negative actions of the NFL as an organization? Well, no, of course not! That's why they unionized in the first place. I don't know…