My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
qz.com
qz.com
So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders.
There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.
There's a word for this, beginning with "U", that a lot of people don't like.
Admittedly, there needs to be a new version of unions, the next evolution. We need the next Marx to bring the pendulum back.
The demise of unions is also a general phenomenon across the western world. It's not helped by the migration of lots of factory industries to parts of the world without strong unions and with plenty of hungry workers.
Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike. And if it's easy to replace striking workers, it's not an effective tool. It's also very disruptive (in the bad sense) when it is effective. UK public opinion turned against unions when they rationed electricity to 3 days a week.
We need a better check on unlimited greed than the blunt threat of going up against the wall in a Communist revolution. A lot of people have cited Piketty as the next Marx, but there don't seem to be Piketty-ist factions.
aka a reserve army of labour, just on a global scale. It's the XI century but Engels still makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it.
However you look at it, the game is still fundamentally the same; it's just that one side can play it so much better than the other. It's like that period in the '90s when football clubs using the offside trap and applying pressure up the pitch dominated the European scene.
> Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike.
That's not correct. Striking is the only legal negotiating tool; but it's not always been legal, nor the only tool. Striking is a type of industrial sabotage; being the most innocuous one, it's the only one that was made legal (and even there, its legal deployment has been progressively restricted in most countries since the '80s). If shit really hits the fan, a compact unionized workforce can do much more damage than "down tools". We've forgotten a lot about industrial relations, sooner or later we'll have to relearn old lessons.
> UK public opinion turned against unions when they rationed electricity to 3 days a week.
That's a problem for public services only (most recently, with the London tube). Unions in public sector and public services refuse to understand that their exposure damages the whole movement. It's a historical issue in most countries, a huge strategic problem for any progressive movement.
Most private companies likely wouldn't get public support in a fight with unions, but because public-service ones can (and will) abuse their role, the whole movement gets a bad rep.
> A lot of people have cited Piketty as the next Marx
Unfortunately, with all due respect, Piketty's contribution is nowhere as significant as Marx. Piketty tried to prove what a lot of people suspected, but I don't think he managed to reveal so many new elements about the structure of the game in the same way as Marx did, nor did he articulate solutions as powerfully as Marx did. Besides, there is little point in waiting for a messiah; what is required is a combination of analysis and prognosis that can resonate with an atomized and oevereducated white-collar workforce.
In respect of London's striking transport workers. The reason is simple, both London Transport and the rail networks are monopolies, so customers have no option.
Imagine if Tesco workers went on strike. Shoppers would go to Sainsbury's, Asda (Walmart), Morrison etc. Both managers and workers both lose if they strike. In the case of London Transport and the Rail Networks, commuters have no where to go and both strikers and management know that.
In a case where the service was not a monopoly the management would try to come to an agreement because of the competitors waiting in the wings. LT and the unions can both play hardball because the commuters are captive.
You can't always blame striking unions for LT's issues.
1) Figure out what's wrong at an early stage, why it's wrong and come up with a proposal of how it could be improved. Find solutions.
2) Always fix things despite the unreasonable amount of work or pressure. You wait until you'r almost broken and then say you can't take this anymore, it's too much. Problem needs to be fixed right away or you'll lose it.
We very much create our own situations too unfortunately.
I do think the FC workers should be in a union. Absolutely.
I know their pay isn't stratospheric, certainly not a shattering lifestyle change to leave. Many seem drawn to the allure of the name, it's a well known tech company.. Are these types capable of forming a union? by the time they are willing to stick their neck out to do something like form a union, it's just so easy to turn the page and leave.
I worked for a satellite TV provider years and years back, it was similar, very abusive, very demanding. I did my project and left, it just wasn't a good fit. In retrospect, the people that stayed all seem to be somehow damaged. It was just unhealthy, emotionally, I don't remember anyone that was actually happy in life being there. Also very similar to Amazon, they sell to the lowest common denominator, Amazon is effectively going toe to toe with Walmart, more so than google or apple.
In addition, we (IT workers) should look at other avenues. Like the AMA (medical) and ALA (legal) professions we need an organization (or PAC/lobby) with political clout that influences law makers and fights for IT employee/labor rights. I would love for a David Boies or someone with that type of clout/knowledge to grow such an organization.
Of course, time off in lieu may be arranged.
Full thing: It might not have moved because of the liquidity of the market. Due to their stock price, people won't generally own lots of the stock, so any sell orders would go through the SOES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-order_execution_system). I'm not sure whether a Level 1 book would include that information, I have a feeling it doesn't. [citation needed]
However, SOES only works for lots of at most 1000 and only on stocks up to a value of $250. Amazon is currently trading at $535.
Occasionally another instrument will be set up that works in parts of the stock, which will be a lot more volatile, so you could buy 1/10 of an Amazon share. Alternatively, people start trading in options on the stock.
So you get the situation where the share price for Amazon looks fine, but the options market dries up or the volatility of derivative instruments is massive.
http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/38856/why-is-it-tha...
Stock markets don't respond only to the possible long term effect.
HR gate is a relatively localized phenomenon - almost entirely considered fluff by the markets.
Data: "A company is making its workers work hard. They have bad press."
Questions: "Has anyone been fired/resigned? is there a new policy change which increases wages and reduces money to shareholders?"
Answers: "as of no, no one significant. No policy change, and no significant damage to brand.
Questions: "Is hiring/firing within normal ranges? How long will people remember this?"
Answers: "mostly normal. No impact to EBITDA. People will forget in a month, unless there is a significant miss step. Insufficient support for a policy or legal bill to be raised."
Conclusions: Has happened before, will happen again, with near 0 impact to cash flow. If something happens theres many ways to mitigate damage to shareholders.
In all honesty, this has near nil impact on the market.
Yes, we have at-will employment, blah blah. It's no reason to be a pushover. If you're skilled enough to get a job at a place like Amazon, there's plenty of less insane places you could probably work.
In Syria.
Right.
Plus it's not going to look good when you bring up the email ordering you to go to a war zone where the company has no business interests or even an active office during your wrongful termination suit.
So, obviously, that was an exaggeration for effect, yes?
If you want to keep coming up with excuses for why employees need to put up with bullshit from companies, by all means, knock yourself out. The more suckers there are taking the shit jobs, the less competition there is for the better jobs.
You don't need a commercial flight to go somewhere. Don't fight something you think is hyperbole with hyperbole.
> If you want to keep coming up with excuses for why employees need to put up with bullshit from companies
Slow down. I'm documenting the kind of BS companies pull. I'm not endorsing it.
My mom was essentially fired for having cancer. It was done very creatively and legally.
Are you seriously contending that sending an employee into an active war zone is something an actual employer [1] is actually capable of doing? Since you're documenting BS companies pull, care to provide any documentation of something like that actually happening? Whatever Amazon is like, I'm pretty sure they're not going to go to the trouble of flying someone halfway around the world and arranging transport into a war zone just because they went home at 5pm.
Yes, companies pull all kinds of shady shit, but they're not gods. There are laws, and failing that, public shaming. If you act powerless, you'll be powerless.
[1] Aside from the military, or a defense contractor, or other company where employees would be aware that such an assignment is a possible requirement of their employment.
And yes, my mother, while going through cancer treatment, was pretty much powerless, regardless of how she wanted to act.
I actually think it should be really easy for a company to fire someone, for whatever reason they want to.
And I think we should have social services that make you not fear for your life to be unemployed. Free education. Free health care. Basic Income on top of that.
But maybe I'm just completely nuts.
I don't really buy the argument that companies don't know how to get around this.
Hopefully the California legislature passes AB 465 and bans pre-dispute arbitration clauses.
Companies need to fear being sued in the courts if they misbehave, and should not be able to keep the disputes private and out of the court records.
I don't say that for us to excuse bad management. But I think it's very important to understand the "other side". Understanding them can provide you with options. Just saying they are idiots or evil bastards leaves you powerless.
- Does he keep asking for the impossible?
- Does he hang around or go home at 5pm?
- Does he at least do what he is able to do for the team, or does he just leave it all for the team?
Difference between competent and incompetent management can often be little things that help handle emotional stress for the worker.
Our goal as workers can't be to tell our managers about our emotional stress (which he doesn't care about), but showing him alternatives that contain less stress for us but at least the same amount of projectable success to him, and/or just doing them, because in the end not being informed how the success was achieved is less important to the manager than having spare time to get a massage or visit the golf club.
that's where this pressure on the worker comes from: there is systematic top down hierarchical pressure applied that works almost like hydraulics. A sociopath like Bezos only has to beat down his 6 reports into accepting impossible goals (for a normal working schedule) and they will beat down their aggregate 48 reports and they will beat down their 384 reports and so on.
2. The amount of fear increases geometrically as you descend the management tree from the root.
3. The amount of bonus money for meeting profitability targets increases geometrically as you ascend the management tree from the leaves.
The last point I put separate because I think that one might actually be just subjective. In my eyes it seems, as if they also have less work on their table, really. Example: There are a lot of things a product manager should do. For instance, he should learn to know the customer. But at least where I worked until now no product manager was asked by his manager how much time he spent with customers. So no product manager spent a single second with a customer. Also a product manager is in my eyes responsible that the user interface is translated correctly. He can pay an external office or convince some engineers to do it who have that other language in their repertoire. But when he constantly hears from the engineers that the three or four languages we can evaluate are so shitty that nobody can even closely know what the corresponding text says, then he should review his translation workflow. Never seen that either. The only situation in which a product managers needs to hussle is when the sales department that actually talks to the customer has a problem they can't communicate directly to engineering because both worlds speak different languages. And the only reason the prod manager needs to get active is because if the stress gets out of these two departments his boss needs to do work and then his boss will be angry. So in these situations he really has a lot of stress, because it's hard to convince engineering of some of the requests that come from sales, but sales needs some kind of results to make the customers happy. But this situation only happens in one of 5 feature or bug requests. Therefore I think the engineers have more stress. They have stress with all 5 requests, all the time. When they finish one, there are already the next three waiting. And in this one request that required prod manager intervention the final result that should be implemented is often so bad that this one is even more stress than the others.
To summarize, yes there is manager stress as well, but it's not as much. And if you get 120% of the pay of another coworker or more, I think it should be okay if you even have a little more stress. Therefore people working on the corresponding lowest level seldom have tolerance for the "hard life" of the manager.
Isn't that what this thread is all about? :-P People working without getting paid and/or getting a choice on weather they want to work more on their supposedly free time?
The difference is big enough to turn a shitty job in a good job :-)
Why aren't tech workers talking about overtime pay? That's the elephant in the room here. Everything about this situation screams 'underegulated industry.' Shame that techies themselves, let alone management, are usually far-right leaning. I think their political views are paying them a huge disservice right now.
Esp, when double time pay kicks in :-)
Because changing jobs is so difficult in Japan, there's often no recourse for the worker.
Alternatively unionize Amazon.
I felt like I'd been completely mislead by everyone else, and even if this guy had a chip on his shoulder and was intentionally lying to me -- which I doubt -- that in itself would have been a red flag.
One question, was this offer from amazon? I mean, are the things the guy said for amazon?
I am not trying to argue, just wish your two questions had a reasoning behind them as in writing they sound harsh to me.
I remember working for Van Blarcom Closures in NYC over 10 years ago. During interviews they said standard 40 hour weeks with occasional overtime. Except their occasional overtime meant every day was a 12 hour shift with some Saturday's and Sundays's as well. Let's just say, I didn't last more than 6 months there before moving out.
This is me in interviews. I ask for a private interview session and give the real lowdown. I refuse to become one of these assholes that drops all this PR speak and then you take the job and realize you've been misled. I air a little laundry and give real day-to-day stuff. I think it benefits everyone to be candid, at least towards the later stage of interviewing. There should be an informed "Do you really want this job" moment for someone considering the move.
>and even if this guy had a chip on his shoulder and was intentionally lying to me
He's most likely honest. He also doesn't want to hire a primdonna who is expecting a cush job.
Consider not getting a raise in five years. With inflation and (in most technology hubs) a skyrocketing rising cost of living, your company is effectively paying you less every year you work for them.
It doesn't make you a primadonna to question this premise -- it just means you're not a sucker. If you're in a career/company where your value goes down with every year of experience you get, it forces you question a lot of your life decisions.
And this is the biggest problem with tech hiring. The prospective employee can't know how bad it really is. So changing jobs is risky. Companies wanting to hire need to compensate for that risk with a definited benefit. Salary is the obvious and easy one.
For me, the inertia was a little stronger because of my gender transition. I had zero experience interviewing as a woman, and I wasn't sure if I passed, so I figured it was safer to continue working for the same company I transitioned at. The logic was "they know me, they knew me before transition, they know I've only been living as a woman less than a year, and I already know they don't care, so I might as well take the safe option and stick with them rather than risk freaking an interviewer out with my voice or accidentally wear something a woman shouldn't wear to an interview".
Mind you, my employer at the time wasn't great. I was underpaid (75% market value in pure salary, plus I got no insurance whatsoever), my boss couldn't handle stress and took it out by screaming at his subordinates, software engineering leadership was absolutely terrible for multiple reasons (I and others tried to change it, and we were rebuffed, so the people I worked best with quit in frustration one by one), and I had a months-long nightmare involving the building management discriminating against me where my employer offered me almost no support (it only ended when I got the city involved). There were a number of other minor concerns as well, but these were the big ones.
During the worst of the discrimination, the owner/CEO promised me a bonus if I stuck around until our next product entered production. Production was delayed by two months from what was originally planned, and even then getting him to actually keep his promise was like pulling teeth, though I eventually got it. Somehow, I ended up staying on even after that, though I should've probably at least started applying for jobs once the bonus cleared my bank account.
It took way, way too long for me to accept that I needed to find a new job. Ultimately, after a particularly bad incident of my boss taking his stress out on me, I finally got up the courage to put myself out there, I got a wonderful new job, and I'm more than happy with my current employer.
In the long run, the devil you know is the worse devil.
If you don't have any employable skills, get some. If you have genuinely no chance of being employed somewhere start your own business and graft graft graft until you are employable.
Life is too short to spend 6 years in a job that affects you and your whole family.
I went to a no-name company, I love the freedom that I have in a small team, and I leave work around 4-5 p.m., if I want. Also, I have still enough energy to do side-projects. That is something people working at more prestigious places probably lack. (I am based in Zurich and I love it; here a blogpost about living & working here: https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...)
The lucky schmucks. As far as I could tell from research, immigrating as a US citizen is not an operation they support at all.
Shoot me a mail, if you are interested in moving here; I can try to help out.
33 * Cost of Living / (Salary - Cost of Living)
Assuming for simplicity 3% real interest on investments once you stop working (which is close enough if you're trying to get out of the rat race quickly), and potentially infinite lifespan.
So if your cost of living is $10k and you earn $100k you get:
330,000 / 90,000 -> less than four years.
Great theory.
I don't want to live on oatmeal and tuna for the rest of my life. (I actually don't think we should be eating tuna at all and have stopped eating it although I love it.)
Now aside from obvious (e.g. kids, as you state) there's also:
* At some point you'll get a $500 optical bill or a $5000 dental bill (or a $50,000 medical bill if you live in the US) -- and let's not even get into chronic conditions.
* You may want to travel.
* At some point there will probably be a major economic shock and you may be utterly screwed. (But hey, so will a lot of people, and you'll be used to it.)
Finally -- you may enjoy working. I do.
While some people go the route of eating oatmeal and tuna every day, there are plenty of routes to financial independence that don't involve living a life devoid of nice things. It's less about never working again and more about having the freedom to choose what you want to do -- whether that's work for yourself without worrying about paying rent or working full time for someone else.
200 CHF for food might sound little but I actually eat way healthier than most of my colleagues. (The last thing you can afford in Switzerland is getting sick.)
I'm all for frugal but life isn't a dress rehearsal.
Put very simply: over a 10 year period I could invest in a BMW or flights back to Europe to visit family. I will spare no expense giving our parents time with their grandchildren before it's too late.
I'm more than happy to drive my POS '04 Mazda 6.
When I read 'to live frugally so as to retire at 50' I see a lot of lost experiences that can enrich both now and later.
Find the right job and enjoy life now.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-of...
The point being, if you enjoy your lifestyle, and you really enjoy working hard (she defined herself by her work, so there was no other option to her), what is the point of frugality? Why amass a huge bank account just to die and leave it to someone else[2]?
1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568150/
2. Some might argue that one ought to save so one's children can get a nice inheritance. I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for. I suspect some people have an ulterior motive: they use a large inheritance as a way of blackmailing children into taking care of them in their old age. I find that distasteful.
I hope your offspring never have any surprise medical issues or special needs, don't want to go to college, don't have surprise twins when they thought they were done having kids, etc. It is absolutely helpful to e.g. free your grandkids from student debt, and this does not conflict with instilling in them a work ethic.
Why would you not do that if you can. Having money gives your kids access to good education and freedom to stay away from a lot of crap poor kids have to deal with every day. Plus there is no advantage greater in life than getting a good head start over other people. A lot of people spend a big part of their lives just to get a decent start. Look up to this phenomenon called red queens race.
>>I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for.
That's a wrong way of looking at inheritance. Imagine what you could do in your free time if you had all the money in the world. Sure you could spend it away on wrong things. But you can also work on whatever you want and make a more meaningful difference through your work.
>>I suspect some people have an ulterior motive: they use a large inheritance as a way of blackmailing children into taking care of them in their old age. I find that distasteful.
Without money, you won't be able to take care of yourself. Also you would largely become a burden on your already financially stressed children. At least by having money you are saving them the financial struggle to see you through your old age.
(Not saying I won't want to help out my kids, but I think it's worth questioning / considering these things.)
One can't deny their children the right to a better life, simply because other children don't have it.
This isn't about an unfair award, but about an unfair punishment.
You just wait until you have your own "offspring". Inheriting money won't mean they'll grow up without work ethic -- that only happens when a parent fails to teach their child that skill.
You WILL be giving your child the freedom to explore his or her passion to the absolute fullest, and to arrive at his or her greatest potential.
Most people are not so lucky.
Can't compare her to some poor schmuck slaving away for Amazon (or some such), who most likely is NOT enjoying his lifestyle/work.
If you get run over by a bus and can no longer work, it's nice knowing you can still live decently.
I would like to go back work, but the engineering job market in San Diego is awful. I can afford to be picky on who I want to work for. Needless to say this will extend your job search time with the current market conditions.
It could be that I might just have to retire if conditions remain the same for a long period of time. So be it, I'll just direct my energies to my open source hardware and software projects.
There are many reasons why you may not be able to do what you like, let alone doing it for a living.
Being prepared for such things in the future not only saves you from all the trouble, it saves your family too.
That's not to say that I have trouble finding work in my decrepit old age, but that's a different discussion.
He says that the only thing you can expense without a manager's permission is a pager. Which, if true, tells you a lot about Amazon.
Don't work in low margin, hyper-competitive businesses, is the long and short of it.
The legality of uncompensated overtime drives me crazy. There is a lot that practitioners in our profession have yet to learn - valuing ourselves and what we do.
I didn't appreciate how great of a boon this was until I learned more about what it's like to work at other companies. Overtime isn't just about making more money, it's also about having realistic expectations of workers and not burning them out.
There is a pager that rotates
There are meetings after office hours
There is a night-shift that rotates
There is support that everyone is expected to do
There is no training paid for by the company
There is no advancement in career (small company)
There is no payrise for the next N years
All of these things are a huge RED flag for me and I move on to another interview.
Seriously, no thanks!
All of this for the amazing salary raise of zero dollars and zero cents over my existing salary! Needless to say I no longer work there - but they found someone else to do it.
If they grossly misrepresented the job you can just leave in the first month or two and not mention it on your resume. It's not like it's a tough job market out there.
Of course there is, I'd argue. Maybe not a direct one, though. I'm sure you've noticed the large amount of articles about these sorts of practices at Amazon. It might not have a huge impact, but if it is indeed true, then people are wisening up to what's going on there.
While it doesn't feel unbearable, and pays fairly well (at least for the area I'm in), it definitely has completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I no longer have anything near a 24-hour clock: I'll sleep for, at most, 3-4 hours at a time, usually twice a day. Those times change rapidly. As a result, many times I'll need to take modafinil to stay awake through regular shifts; coffee isn't nearly enough.
The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating.
"Why not quit?" is the usual: it pays too well, have a mortgage to pay, was described as being less work than it turned out to be in the interview, etc. But it really does make for a terrible work-life balance, and it's a shame people are so eager to accept on-call as "just the way it is to have a good middle-class job."
The thing I really don't understand is how they expect you to always be available, no matter what. The human body cannot physically go for seven days with no sleep, at least not without a complete psychotic break-down. Yet there's no sympathy or compassion for this simple biological fact by the higher-ups if you ever sleep through a text message.
It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours (+1 lunch) overlapped by their own work schedules. Yes, it's twice the rotation work, but it's 3 hours outside work each day instead of 15, and you could keep a consistent sleep schedule, and have a social life with times untethered to the internet.
Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.
Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.
(+ some de facto laws in other countries within certain sectors dominated by strong unions tightly connected with Socialist parties.)
- Work councils get input in whether you can lay someone off - it's a far cry from at-will employment.
- Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy - you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy.
All told, it was vastly more difficult than the US (where she had come from). I know in France you can only fire for cause.
In contrast India is pretty easy. It's a simple trade of money for labour, provided you stay out of the communist states. (Which of course you will if you are hiring devs.) The cost difference is actually only a minor reason to hire here - European devs are highly underpaid, and Indian devs are very much not.
I guess it's all much easier when you can just fire them.
I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy.
Incredibly, despite this obvious benefit, pregnancy is primarily seen as a good way to have a kid when you want one.
They just herded every one into a big room and said "company is bust - there is a pile of the RB2 forms over there"
Said no worker ever.
Ok, so that's RBS then. For the record, that bank embodies everything that's wrong with the UK banking system: huge, completely out of control before the crash, totally sclerotic internally, top-down managed, etc etc. Think of anything bad about banks you've ever heard; RBS is it.
> - it's a far cry from at-will employment.
And thank god for that. This island is still in Europe (at least until next year), and in Europe we have this old-fashioned notion of workers' rights, including basic respect for human beings. Firing people from one day to the next is barbaric, especially in huge organizations like RBS where you can probably give anyone a chance in some other department.
> - Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy
Honestly, sir, a bit of decency is called for. Do you really think people would get pregnant just to get some time off? We are not talking about benefit scroungers, these are middle-class workers for whom a kid is a big deal, financially and psychologically. I honestly don't see anyone getting "strategically pregnant" just to gain some time.
Btw, pregnancy laws came about because employers were being complete dicks, firing female employees as soon as they got pregnant. They would then have the gall to show up in church and talk of human values they clearly knew nothing about.
> In contrast India is pretty easy
Well done you for exploiting the reserve army of labor, that time-honored tradition of mean ruling classes. You are a shining beacon of progress to all of us. Have a good day, sir.
I'm also not familiar with anyone who has got pregnant to avoid layoffs, if nothing else given the cost of raising a child it seems like a very poor tradeoff.
A) Laid off in a bad economy, hunt for job, maybe find something. Then have children at age 33 or 34, only a couple of years into a new gig. (In banking they consider a couple of years to be a short time.)
B) Get pregnant at age 30 instead, avoid the current restructuring, and if you do hit the job market it'll be in a much better economy.
Really? You can't possibly see the benefit of (B)?
In any case, I only hire people who demonstrate the ability to think logically rather than emotionally - it's vital in software roles.
With that said; my Fiancee is a trainee nurse. She works three thirteen hour shifts a week. Which totally destroys your sleep pattern. Working two thirteen hour days in a row takes you out for a couple of days (she gets in at 9, has about an hour to shower and eat and is in bed for a 5am start).
All of this for a wage which is about half of mine. And with the massive responsibility that if she's tired and makes a mistake it's not a computer that dies but an actual person.
Puts it in perspective.
In Grey's Anatomy, you often see people taking a couple of hours sleep mid shift; is this generally accurate?
Less so with tech.
If you like long hours and chaos, work in the ER. if 5A-2P works, be a surgical nurse. There are lots of options that you can study for and get into. Also, in many states you're hourly, so you get paid.
2000's, I worked at a call center and then a large software company in Bangalore. Late nights, weekends and sometimes even doing consecutive days(2-3 days) at office were common. Some people I known of have clocked a record 7 days at office, sleeping in dorms for 4 hours per day. None of us complained, because merely getting a job in those situations was a blessing. Who would mind atrocious working hours, where the next option is bankruptcy.
My father was a truck driver, then a bus driver and is now a taxi driver. Most of his life he pretty much went perennially sleep deprived, tiring work driving all time. With no access to food, good sleeping conditions or even a rest room.
In fact this is pretty much how bulk of world works to make a living.
Recently, in the last 4-5 years. I had a day job and was doing my start up on the side. 10-11 hours at office and 6-9 hours of start up work at home was common. Getting barely 5 hours of sleep after a grueling day of very hard work, tense situations and routine crippling failures are common.
I would say human life is very hard. That's how it is by default.
I'm usually on call for three or four days in a row once or twice a month. Schedules are flexible. We just enter dates when we're not available into our calendar and this insane piece of inhouse software looks at our oncall history and determines a fair schedule, so everyone gets the same amount of oncall time. It even takes into account weekends (which are typically very quiet, but you still need to be within mobile-signal-or-coffee-shop range).
Pager load is typically one or two a day, and are usually fairly trivial; far more annoying are the non-paging alerts and paperwork. Sometimes there's a pager storm as something catches fire and burns down, but there's always someone around to help when that happens.
Being on-call here is... never something I look forward to, but the systems are in place to give support if I need it, and I'm never on for very long. The culture here emphasises that when my shift is over, particularly when there's a crisis, I hand over to the next person (in the other team) and then GO HOME, because otherwise I'll burn out.
Ouch!
When our team was asked to be on-call (this was a few years ago at another company), we negotiated a fixed monthly bonus and I don't think we would have continued to be "on-call" if they had reneged on that. I think it was even in our contract. How did they take that away from you? Is it in your job description that you need to be on-call?
We also had a high priority "fix what broke" strategy that was also management approved: whenever something went wrong at 3am, the next day our top priority was to try and ensure that did not happen again, ever. Our interests were aligned with management here: management wanted as little downtime as possible for the web services, we wanted as little interruption to sleep as possible.
How often do you get calls/messages on average? Is there anything you can do to reduce them by improving the actual things that are breaking?
We have at-will employment here, so a contract change is basically, "accept the change or go someplace else to work." Which works against us in a down economy in a position that still pays better than most other companies would for the same work.
I make around $70k myself. The average here is around $50k. Moving's not really an option due to family. Maybe in 4-5 more years moving will be on the table, but by then I'll be closing in on 40.
We probably get around 3-4 calls a week, usually between 1am and 8am (non-staffed hours), and another 6-12 text message alerts a week. Some weeks are better, some are worse. My issue is once I've woken up to handle something, it takes me a good 1-2 hours to fall back asleep again. I obviously can't treat that with sleeping pills since I need to be able to wake up again. So I go the opposite route and try to keep myself awake when I need to be.
We can't do much to fix outage issues, as we're part of a larger organization, and we monitor processes for everyone else. It's our job to contact their on-call support staff to get things fixed.
I think the idea was to relieve all of the tier-3 teams from needing to implement their own separate, patch-work application health monitoring systems; and instead centralize all of the monitoring to one team. Some of the better teams do have their own health monitoring as well; and in those cases, we're more of the "fallback" in case their monitoring doesn't catch issues.
On-call means you can't get drunk, go see a movie, visit distant friends or whatever. It's a significant impact on your life - plus, of course, you're expected to work your normal full day after a hard night. I simply stopped going out to bars with my friends, even though I wasn't drinking. The benefit of socialising didn't make up for standing in a cold alleyway in winter talking an enduser through a tech problem for 45 minutes at a time.
"Fuck you, pay me" applies here. Salary is for normal work hours - on-call spreads that to 24/7 for a week. On-call is also not trivial, so it shouldn't pay peanuts. Remember it's the company that wants 24/7 coverage; it should be a cost to the company to provide that. I'm a 'best effort' guy, and I don't like to see my stuff failing. I'd rather fix it on my own time than let it rot until business hours roll around. But I'm not giving my employer priority time over the my personal life for free.
If ever you need a question for that part in job interviews, on-call is a good one. Also worth scrutinising in the contract.
Personally I have folded companies, quit jobs, and turned away opprotunities that represented substantially more than I make now. People have called these choices foolish but my life honestly rocks right now. Today I am happy, productive at a job I enjoy, and have time to spend with the people that matter, so who cares what other people consider logical?
Optimize for work-life balance, not bank account balance.
Some of us can quit. Amazon employees in Seattle are probably in a better position than most in this respect, but many people in this industry are not so lucky.
You bother because getting it right is worth it, and when you do you won't regret having a few failed attempts getting there. It is a big world with a lot of positive opprotunities. Go find yours :)
Because it's cheaper to burn out your existing employees, fire them for non-performance, and then hire (and lie to) new employees who don't know what's going on.
The problem here is "on call". Why not "on duty"? If I'm getting paid for the midnight shift one week out of four, that's annoying, but manageable. If I'm getting paid for 40 hours a week, but I'm "on call" 24/7, 365 days a year, that's abusive.
I won't say the system is perfect, but when the company incurs a cost for being legally obligated to pay more for more work, I think the employment social contract becomes more fair. Aside from top level executives (CEO, etc.), I'm not exactly sure I can find a reason that people should be classified as exempt.
Lawyers and doctors are the often cited examples of exempt employees. Sorry, if an attorney spends a few more hours one week on trial prep, his firm is billing for it, so pay him/her more. Similarly, if a surgeon's operation goes sideways and ends up taking two hours more, pay him/her more.
If the idea that any labor past 40 hours in a week was "free labor" for a company was discarded (or better yet, actually cost the company more than the first 40 hours, i.e., "overtime"), we could reduce the number of people who are working more than 40 hours per week and start hiring more unemployed people. On a micro-scale, does it make sense to have 4 people consistently working 50 hours each with 1 unemployed person, or does it make more sense to have 5 people consistently working 40 hours per week?
While you're at it, maybe 35 (or 30?) is the new 40?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_...
Disclosure: I'm part of a small team that runs a high-availability service, without constant middle-of-the-night alerts..
Also, I am a long-time AMZN stock holder.
It has been my observation that this is a conscious decision. If you can build a culture where you can have people being willing to show up for work at all the odd hours as the norm then you can afford poor software practices. In places like these rushed software that has bugs but meets the majority of the use cases well enough is what is expected. And you ARE expected to show up at odd times to fix what breaks.
I mean, its not as if it costs the company more to have you come in late or have you working at all the odd hours. They still pay you only what they pay you. To hell with your work life balance - it's not as if doing this as had any blowback in terms of attrition.
This person seems to have remained in Amazon for over 6 years - where they likely created millions of dollars in value in return for whatever money they made.
If you grow a backbone and turn down the calls at odd hours, you can expect to receive blowback and unreasonable treatment from a direction you didn't expect.
Duh? He was simply defending the company against potential HR lawsuits. You can't really expect him to say, "yes I know we treat people like shit, and the criticisms are valid, but..."
Or
"even if its all false, lets take a step to change such perception of Amazon if it exists.."
I'm sure they know it's true, it's just that they're all guilty of it. From what I keep hearing, it sounds like it's part of the culture.
Dear European publishing giant (you know who) weary of Google take note how it is to be done when it is done in USA.
Because this isn't news to anybody.
I've known that working for Amazon sucks since 2005? And I'm not even in software. I presume software professionals have known longer than that. That's how bad Amazon's reputation is.
What new is that it's getting press outside of Silly Valley.
Thus, the rallying. Just about every Silicon Valley company will come in for a shellacking once people actually start looking at them.
Amazon seems to have serious issues, but this one is on the employee/spouse. If you don't protect your personal life/family time, how can you expect the company to?
I have young kids so I come in to the office early and don't stay late too often so I can be home with them. I know some upper management probably look down on this, but expectations were clear when I was hired and my boss is OK with it. I realize keeping this balance may disqualify me from ever becoming VP of engineering, but I am more than OK with that if it means being a better spouse and father.
It isn't on the employee/spouse; this is why you have managers that sometimes have to tell employees to go home. We're so fearful of losing our jobs that we bend over backwards for employers. This is what happens when employers have an advantage.
>I know some upper management probably look down on this
So your boss is fine with it but your boss's boss may not be. At least you aren't living in fear of losing your job.
>I realize keeping this balance may disqualify me from ever becoming VP of engineering
Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up.
Good managers can spot when this is needed. But if the employee is telling the manager that everything is fine and isn't showing signs of home stress, I don't blame the manager.
> Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up.
I think most companies are going to value and reward those who put in extra time consistently over those who don't.
It costs a lot to train a new employee, and reduces productivity and morale. So managers worth their salt would do one of many things to prevent this type of burnout.
Predictability is what management wants as well as employees, believe it or not. If you are an effective manager, you either create predictability and a good work/life balance or you might as well not be there. You're basically a fire fighter in that case, and it doesn't help with long term predictability.
Managers who worth their salt will go to bat to get people the time they want/need. If also need to recognize when it is time to walk away, and that's what I tell people when I do interview. If I don't correct the predictability scenario in terms of meeting business needs, I should be fired. If I don't get the tools that I need to get the results, it would be on me to walk away after informing them of the structural problems (and solutions to help them). I suspect that Amazon has a number of people who are purely focused on the bottom line of velocity and don't care about burn out. I'm sure though, that there are good groups to work for at Amazon, but the ratio might be lower than at other tech companies, from what I gather.
An interesting question on the "what if there was a war and no-one came?" is what would happen if Amazon could no longer hire the monstrous number of high calibre new entrants it needs every year. Stories like this are effectively huge advertising campaigns for every other tech company.
If you are good at what you do, another company will buy you out of any financial strings a current employer has on you.
Let's assume the worst though and that by leaving you just eat the money. So what? You can always make more money, but you can't get years of your life back.
I find people in this industry are so often socalized into protecting a commodity they can easily replace (money) by giving up one they can't (enjoyed time)
This requires that you have a good line of credit or savings that you can use to buy food, pay mortgage, etc. Most people don't have that.
I swear this is like listening to people in abusive relationships with tunnel vision. "If we break up I will be poor!"
The world didn't end any of the times I have walked away. Little contract work and a few interviews can solve a wealth of financial problems in short order.
Not for you, but it certainly does happen. If you look at it from the other way round, quite often when you find a middleclass person who's ended up homeless or an alcoholic or suicidal it started with losing their job.
Yes, it's an abusive employer/employee relationship. But there's never a bright line crossed between "ordinarily bad" and "abusive".
Most of the people I talk to in these situations however are not shopping around. Acting like they are trapped or a helpless victim. If someone is not happy at a job they owe it to themselves, in spite of any drama going on in their lives, to make time for interviews until they get the sucky job problem solved.
By no means blow off family in need etc, but making time to get into a happy work environment could mean less stress, enough or more money, and a much easier time dealing with the difficult parts of life one can't change.
It's also a choice to enter into highly leveraged options purchases on illiquid assets which require major lifestyle changes to walk away from (mortgage). Complaining that the mortgage inhibits lifestyle changes is no different than complaining "I dropped $800k short selling AMZN, now I need to make margin call".
To follow a remark like that with one about people regretting losing $800k makes me wonder how many low paid people you know. There are a lot of people who can't afford to save, and it's not because they're overconsuming.
Although, admittedly, I doubt many of them are Amazon employees.
To be fair, most of the low paid people I know could also save. This is pretty obvious to me by comparing the lifestyle of my Indian friends and my American friends. Somehow the Indians earn far less but manage to save massively (hint: they consume less).
The main exception might be Americans in the $0-20k/year of consumption category, since big chunks of their "income" are non-market income. But that kind of makes the question of whether to quit moot...
There's also the potential, or at least perceived, resume / CV impact of quitting your first job after a short period.
The right answer might be "just leave", and clearly many people do just that. But for many they won't or think they can't - so companies cannot assume that just because people stick around that things are good.
It's the wrong question to ask, I think. Those joining Amazon or any other top company do so through internship track or personal network. Anyone who complains about burnout and getting worked to death really has no reason to complain. They did get to see the insides of Amazon while working there as an intern, and if they didn't see it their friends did.
The question is really: why do people keep thinking they can outrun the bear even though everyone else they can see cannot?
We, as a culture, don't seem to give a fuck about the conditions of the vast majority of our workers ("Oh it's McD's? Of course the job sucks") and on the show they even said "I don't see anyone getting all worked up about the workers who MAKE the shit Amazon sells" which is a really good point. Now of course people DO get worked up about it but I think it points out the hypocrisy.
All of that to say I don't necessarily think that we shouldn't care how someone is treated if they make lots of money but it's a very interesting point.
Should we presume the man had any editorial control?
"Honey, I think it will sound better if it comes from you."
My sympathy meter is barely flinching on this one sorry.
I worked at a company that wrote warehouse management software, and this definitely isn't unique to Amazon. When your software has a serious problem the company is losing a million dollars an hour, so they're not very sympathetic to problems you may have standing in the way of a return to smooth operations.
That business vies with games and HFT for the highest stress levels in software development.
Surely a guy with an MBA can figure out the cost/benefit of such a situation?
The real poison is MBA culture. It's literally insane in most normal human senses.
It's not. The people who are running the company (and I'm not referring strictly to top management here) are the ones with the blatant disregard for their employees.
This is not a result of some inherent forces our Universe suddenly concentrating over Amazon. They're the result of business decisions. A bunch of people wearing suits have talked about this and agreed it's okay.
Disclaimer: I'm a highly-paid white collar worker.
There's enough competition in the tech industry that this isn't a problem, let the market regulate itself in this case, it's working. I wouldn't work at Amazon under those conditions, but if some people would, let them.
Granted, I've never invested money in anything of Amazon's level, so I cannot know -- all I know is what I hope I'd do.
And if your management strategy is better than just hiring cheap, open a company and you'll win on the long term.
It also ignores the fact that markets are structured to reward cheap and greedy behaviour and C-suite narcissism, and to punish - or at least get in the way of - bottom-up worker democracy and other more fluid and less myth-of-the-holy-CEO management structures.
As for Amazon - the company can clearly afford to treat its workers better. The actual effect on profitability is likely to be positive, not negative, because better people will stay for longer, less churn means more stability and less random technical debt for new hires, and better publicity makes it easier to keep customers than lose them.
Bezos seems to think the tradeoffs are fine as they are. I think he's wrong about that. Amazon's model is quite brittle, and it's open to any number of competitive attacks. And Bezos has made some very poor decisions (phone, etc.)
Amazon will be fine in the short to medium term, but I'll be surprised if its business model isn't seriously disrupted by competition within less than a decade.
IMO treating workers better would make the company more creative and resilient, not less - and probably more profitable too.
And of course this will never, ever come up in your case studies as a recurring risk, because you're encouraged to read everything as a nice little story in business school. The one or two cases where it does happen will just be chalked up to some admonition about hiring better staff or some other BS.
Are you implying that Bezos and Amazon's investors are just dumb and don't think about the long term implications of their hiring practices?
You can always short Amazon's stock if you're that confident.
Maybe they did think about it all, and reached the conclusion that this culture and hiring practices will have a better return on the long term.
It is far too easy to say what other people should do with their money...
Source: I spent 15 years managing IT (devs, DBAs, ops) in a multinational manufacturing company. Even though I had a team of 100+, for each discrete app or system, it was normal to have just one or two experts due to lack of adequate staffing. My CIO took pride in restricting IT spend to <1% of revenue. :-/
If you're good and you have a reputation for being good they're going to call you. I got 3:00 AM calls because I'd written a particular piece of code even though a half dozen of my colleagues were already on site and awake.
Put yourself in the manager's shoes. You can not tell the customer he's needs to wait two hours for the people on site to come up to speed on the shipping module (or whatever) because the guy who wrote it needs his beauty sleep. There's too much money involved.
I think the kind of stress is apples and oranges.
Games is definitely more work overall, but it's generally within office hours, and you can still get a decent sleep even at crunch time if you're sensible and don't work for the worst abusers of unpaid overtime.
On-call can really fuck you up even if the actual hours worked are less.
If it's worth millions of dollars per hour, you can afford to hire more employees to give greater and more coverage.
But Amazon's experiments with treating workers as commodity parts in a machine -- which we discover also applies to the white-collar folks (so now we care?) -- is a whole other angle. Instead of merely planning to cash in on a prospective illegal monopoly, it's also working on making life miserable for all workers. So there's that too.
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-n...
It's right on schedule, we just wrapped up 8:00pm ("they're never going to make any money") in the markets, and fast-forwarded through 9:00pm.
it may be "wrong" from the POV of NYT or other tech outsiders. What i've over the years understood from various friends/acquaintances is that it is not "something wrong", it is just the "normal" mode of how whole AMZN operates. People going there know it (and if they don't - not checking Glassdoor is theirs fault, not AMZN's) - and, for example, that is the reason i didn't go there (while i love escalations, emergencies, etc..., i don't like backstabbing, tricks they play with your salary/bonuses and other details)
Interesting :)
However there is a limit on what a company can do to its employees, even employees signed contracts. Some behaviors like making people cry are bordering harassment, and these are against the law in most countries.
i remember how at Sun a good recommendation from a manager about his employee wanting to switch to another team was read as "i'd be happy to dump that guy to somebody else" and so-so was read as "God, don't let him to be taken from me" :)
For example, if I want to purchase electronic components for my PC New Egg still beats them every time in price and delivery times (imo). Anytime I buy something like a stick of RAM from Amazon I tend to get burned on the delivery time (unless I use Prime) or the price (certain third party retailers just run out of stock). So, I never trust Amazon with my component purchases.
Similarly, I'm finding their clothing section is getting more parse every year for plus sized clothing so I wind up buying socks from Sock Dreams, most outfits from Torrid (casual/off-work) or Lane Bryant (office-friendly/semi-formal) or some other retailer.
Oddly, Amazon still beats Zappos on large size shoes (Zappos use to be the goto retailer but not anymore they seem to have culled most of their stock of non-fetish large size shoes).
All this article and the NYT article just convinces me further that Amazon may become my retailer of last resort since all the thumbscrews in the world isn't worth anything if it comes down to a meager savings in price or time.
I know how it is though - people want the stamp of a top company on their resume. They also want to succeed.
I blame the husband just a tiny bit - for not saying 'no' earlier. Ironically, he might not have been fired if he put a line in the sand earlier. He probably did underperform because he wasn't managing the manager's expectations properly.
Of course, he might have gotten fired anyway - nobody will ever know.
Work is tough - and unfortunately companies like Amazon aren't "buffering the core" very well. These are engineers who might not be good at managing expectations or managing or leadership even - but why stress them out if they're otherwise super-useful to the company? Employees who can't handle this stress but are otherwise valuable should be cradled and they'll perform better for longer - pretty simple really.
I hate how valuable stuff like this is to hiring managers. If you asked me to pick between the guy who spent a year at Amazon or the guy who ran his own startup soup-to-nuts for a year, I'd rather go with the startup guy. Its crazy that we have this informal pseudo-classist system of "people who worked at AAA shops" vs "nobodies." Are HR departments and hiring managers really this dense?
Hopefully, Amazon will change their workplace policies now or suffer stock price decline when smart people stop applying there.
Sure, he can move to another job that has the same kind of stupid demands. However, finding a job that doesn't have those kinds of demands isn't so easy. Now, let's add in the stress of uprooting your family as well as a new job where you have to prove yourself (so you're probably going to be spending the same number of hours, anyway, for a while) and it's not so obvious a choice.
The real solution is for labor laws to start biting and saying that salaried workers are to be compensated after 40 hours and have it enforced. Once you have to pay a salaried worker overtime and a shift differential, they'll hire another worker.
- wife has no job (due to move to Seattle), just had kids, need to pay for housing: unless you can get another job immediately (which is hard if you're too busy to interview), quitting will be a disaster
- boiling frog: it wasn't awful on day 1, so at some point he'd have to acknowledge that things have changed
- negative reinforcement and the cult: dysfunctional organisations are often good at making you think it's your fault. Hence the therapy.
Their guidance said that I should prepare couple of weeks for the interview. For me they gave one weekend which I had to use for the family event. Perhaps I was not engaged enough after all.
The really funny part was when I started asking the HR person about the teams I was interviewing with. I asked some really basic questions and she had no clue how to answer them. Just easy stuff like "Why does this team have more than the other team?" and "How long has this team been together, how long have they worked on this project?". She had no idea how to answer.
They didn't even make me a offer. But what is really funny is every few months I get a request to come interview again for a totally unrelated position.
Here's what I mean: the only thing that seemed an actual problem, to judge from the article, is that the on-call rotations became once every three weeks. Perhaps the length of the on-call, or the number of on-call people at the same time is another problem Amazon could address in this case.
On-call in general (24/7 availability for some period of time), is not exclusively an Amazon thing. I'm surprised the writer tried to portray it so.
After that, the author stops giving reasons. For example, the decision to go on a business trip after 4 weeks of their daughter being born seems to have been their own, not Amazon's. " I imagine he could have turned that down, but I was insistent that he go so". She did not explain if they felt coerced by Amazon and how.
Same thing goes for the hotel they cancelled a day early. How did that happen and why? The writer did not thing this was important enough somehow, but I think it is.
Normally I'd call this sloppiness, but considering the author is a professional and this had to get proof-read, it may just be the author is being a bit disingenuous as well.
Also, a 15-minute max window for responding to pagers? Fucking hilarious. If these people were doctors getting called to the ER, I would understand. But this is a fucking online retail business! Furthermore, what the fuck happened to the concept of having backups on call so that if one person can't respond (i.e. they are driving), someone else can? This is a business decision by Amazon, and also isn't "pure appeal to emotion".
"Did we read the same article? They went on a weekend trip in the summer, had to cancel their hotel and come back a day early, and the guy still got an earful from his manager the next day about how he isn't delivering. I don't see how this is "pure appeal to emotion"."
She says: A happended. The next day B happened. She puts the two sentences together to imply cause and effect. But she she does not explicitly say 'A caused B', and I believe this is for a reason. All she does is to suggest it. To me, as an engineer, the fact she only suggests it is one of those things about the writing that bothers me. She did not explain what had been happening leading up to this nor the reasons the management gave.
Note, I worked for Amazon for a couple of years. While I have to admit my team was really on the lucky side in terms of on-call while I was there. I am familiar with some of these policies. The 15 minute rule is just the time it takes for you to say 'I'm awake and I'm looking at the ticket'. You don't have to solve it. They use this deadline as a way to see if they should reach-out to a secondary on-call, as a backup.
I don't think the writer did.
The problem I see being described is not so much being on call, as instead being called. Lots. Because there seems to be no on-duty staff who are capable of doing the work.
In this article, "on call" really means "on duty during non-work hours... a lot".
It's a tactic to avoid paying on-duty people. Just make all employees work 24/7!
Why didn't I think of that. That's a great business model.
(warning, no drama, no neglected infants, no angry wives)
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/08/16/Working-a...
And btw, the claim that Amazon "encourages employees to tear apart one another's ideas" is also dramatic. Actually, I've seen the opposite happen where nobody says anything "nasty" about anyone's ideas for fear of deviating from the "positive work culture". Bad ideas can go a long way before they're spotted if you're not willing to speak up.
Tearing shreds sounds to me like an opportunity to cut through the bullshit. It doesn't need to be personal, the mission is bigger than the individual. Ego should be put aside. Maybe I should try working at Amazon.
A manager at my former workplace from years ago, let's call it News Corp, said to the technical team of 30 in a meeting once "the reason we are here [at the company] is to make each other look good". I was a pretty cheeky dev back then, but that day I didn't say anything. In my mind I thought "no, we're here to make the online products and services look good".
You can invest time worrying about how things look or how things are, not both. Too much positivity or eggshell-treading or dancing around the truth and high-fiving when discussing or evaluating ideas can be an invisible poison for any business.
I don't work for AMZN, but as I understand it the internal infrastructure is highly service-ified, so (ideally) pager-duty activities are hopefully somewhat contained. And, I would imagine those issues relates to less-mature systems in play.
Which leads me to my impression: it's 2015, AMZN has been around for 20 years, and their warehouses weren't just propped up yesterday. If pager duty involves looking into more mature systems interacting with others, then those activities will only get worse over time. It becomes maintenance nightmare land, something you can only do by churning through people.
AMZN has some hard engineering problems to solve, but I wouldn't label it a top-notch engineering organization.
For six years he put up with this abuse of power over him. He could have walked out after six months but he chose not to. How can Amazon be faulted for the employee's indecision.
He's financially benefited by those 6 years of being an absent father. The financial gains are very concrete and measurable, and comforting. The same can't be said of the intangible - like playing with your infant child, and caring for them - can't put a value on them but that's a huge loss.
Now stores are open 7 days a week and sometimes 24 hours a day.
Whenever I see a store post that it's open 24hrs/day all I can think about is what that does to the employees: because for most people, overnight shifts destroy your life.
I wonder if we wouldn't better off as a society having regular business hours and getting back that one day a week off.
It's our fault as workers, really. Because we lack solidarity, workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can work longer hours for less.
For me, this article is not necessary about Amazon workplace practice. However, it certainly did not help at all.
The question in my mind is how do we stop this abuse?
Do we (as workers) put out a letter that asks for net average 40 hour weeks and ask companies to sign on to it?
Do we keep naming and shaming like this? Or?
At least I tried.
Amazon was something like 15%/15%/30%/30% over 4. It's not very pro employee.
As a Amazon refugee, that is the funniest fucking thing I've read all day. We're all cowering, downtrodden, abused leaders here!
In light of the recent allegations of employee mistreatment at Amazon.com, maybe it is time to redefine what an exempt employee is under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
I would like to propose changes similar to the European Working Time Directive if 1993. Here is the link with more details:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:320...
Labor law in the US must be harmonized with the rest of the developed world.
So now ... Amazon has created a culture where everyone feels like the guy that no one wants to work with ... they have found a way to make that exploitable among some pretty smart people.
And everyone looks around and lifts their shoulders and shows their palms because the US work experience sucks.
Amazon reads like the zenith of the suck.
Of course there's selection bias, but the reviews for Amazon on Glassdoor [0] don't seem that bad compared to other companies.
0 - http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.ht...
It seems like it also gets ugly, with unions not only striking for better pay and benefits, but also protesting and demeaning individuals and companies who aren't using union labor or putting in policies that work must be done by union workers that could easily be done by others at a much cheaper rate or with much less effort. ("Let's get a union electrician in here to run this extension cord")
I'd be more in favor of unions if it were done completely on a volunteer and donation basis, instead of with mandatory dues, paid leadership and policies that demonize those who choose not to join the union or people that choose not to use union labor.
An alternate solution would be to put laws in place that stops employers from preventing their employees from voicing concerns about policies and treatment publicly. (while still allowing employers to protect intellectual property rights) I'd argue that all these stories about the treatment of former Amazon employees will have more of an effect on Amazon, its hiring efforts and its policies than having a union threatening a strike would.
It is not clear why he needed therapy from this article. Just because of the stressful job?
It works because the vast majority of peoples' behavior is unconscious; we operate based on habits and assumptions that never really get tested. Unconscious behavior, by definition, is outside of conscious awareness. It also tends to be self-reinforcing in feedback loops: for example, if you assume everyone's dishonest and corrupt, you'll hide your motives and behave in a way that an honest person would assume to be dishonesty, and so all the honest people would refuse to associate with you, and so everyone around you would be dishonest and corrupt.
Therapy doesn't actually "cure" anything. You cure yourself. What a therapist does is serve as a guide, providing an outside perspective that will challenge your unconscious assumptions when they're leading to problems for you. You can get the same effect by having a close friend or confidante, or even by having social contact with a wide variety of people that are different from yourself. But social relationships don't usually work that way; usually we gravitate toward people like ourselves, so if your beliefs are dysfunctional, you'll gravitate toward other people who are dysfunctional in similar ways (cf Amazon), and then that behavior becomes normalized for you. A therapist, being paid for their time, has an incentive to stick with you even when you're being annoying, and their training exposes them to a wide variety of behaviors.
So yes, it's significantly different from talking to your mom, friend, priest etc.
When someone mentions an elevator Ann's heart rate increases, her palms get a bit sweaty, she starts breathing deeper. This is what most people call a "fight or flight" response. Her body is flooded with adrenaline. Her reaction is stronger - worse - when she sees an elevator even if she knows she does not have to ride that elevator. And now, at work where she has to walk past a bank of elevators to get to the stairwell she has to take 20 minutes to get herself past those elevators.
Her friends know she's "scared of elevators", but don't know the strength of the fear. They might say things like "but your fear is irrational! Elavators are very safe." Or "you should feel the fear and do it anyway!" (Quoting the title of a quite good book, but ignoring the content of that book.). And Ann probably says this kind of thing to herself. "Why am I being so ridiculous?"
If this was a rare thing (like flying is for most people) Ann could just get a prescription for diazapam, lorezapam, etc.[1]. But Ann needs to pass these elevators everyday.
Ann decides to just get over it. She decides to ride an elevator. As she walks towards it her breathing changes, her palms get sweaty, and her brain is arguing "you're going to get stuck!" "You're being stupid, just do it". She pushes the button and waits for the ding. Her stress pevels build. The door opens, and she gets in. The door closes with that odd elevator lurch. Again, her stress rises. She's visibly distressed. The elevator rides two floors then the door opens. Ann rushes out. But she doesn't feel a sense of victory. She feels a sense of crushing defeat, of shame even. And, as she gets further away from the elevator her body rewards her with endorphins. So what's actually hapened is tha. She has reinforced her fear, she has made it stronger.
Ann decides to go to a therapist. She carefully picks a qualified registered therapist and avoids the cranks and frauds. She picks someone who practices "cognitive behaviour therapy".
At Ann's first meeting she says "I know I'm being silly, but I really want to get over this ridiculous fear".
Her therapist (let's call her Beth) gently disagrees. "No, it's not ridiculous. It obviously causes you a lot of distress." - this is part of just establishing a relationship, but it's also important that Ann is finding her own answers. Beth continues "what are you scared of when I say the word 'elevator'?"
Ann says that she is scared the doors will get stuck and that the lift will be stuck between floors and she'll be stuck in there.
Now Beth starts the therapy. In a safe environment, away from any elevators, Ann is asked to list her "hot thought" ("The lift will be stuck between floors and I'll be trapped!", how strongly she believes this (1 to 5 or 1 to 10 or percents) Ann says very strongly, 10 out of 10, what the emotion caused by the hot thought is ("fear") and again how strong it is, and finally Ann is asked about her evidence for believing this. ("I read about the guy who got trapped in a lift for hours and I keep seeing stories like that") Beth at no point contradicts Ann.
Beth then asks Ann to sit with these feelings for a few moments. (Less than 3 minutes!) then Beth asks Ann to think of alternative evidence. Beth doesn't supply alternative evidence. So, Ann might start with a weak challenge to her thinking. She might say "Even though I keep seeing lots of articles probably hundreds of people get elevators everyday without problems." She's then asked to re-rate how strongly she believes her hot thought and how strongly she feels her fear. This is an iterative process! Those numbers are still probably very high.
Beth then begins a process of controlled desensitisation. Ann is in control of this - Ann will never have to do something she doesn't want to do. Ann is shown pictures of elevators. She's shown a video clip of the outside of an elevator. She's shown a first-person perspective of someone riding the elevator. She's taken to a building that has elevators. She's asked to call an elevator but not ride it, just watch from the outside the doors opening and closing. She calls an elevator and touches the doors. She calls an elevator and gets in and out while Beth keeps the door open. Eventually she calls an elevator, and gets on it with Beth, and travels a few floors. Every time she does one of these things she has to provide her hot thought, her strength of feeling, and her evidence and her alternative evidence. Beth might start challenging Ann's evidence "Do you think it's only hundreds of people? Do you think it might be very many thousands of people get an elevator each day with no problems?" "Do you think you seek out these stories of people being trapped? Why do you think they are reported?"
After about eight hours of work Ann will be able to call an elevator, get in it, and ride it for several floors (going up and down). She might not like it, but her fear will be under her control.
We know that for most people like Ann the CBT will be effective for at least two years, often longer. For some people it's a cure.
Mental health diagnoses tend to be clumpy - "depression" probably isn't one illness, but a cluster of different illnesses that affect people in different ways. Meds have varying efffectiveness, sometimes for genetic reasons. For some people meds alone are a treatment. For some peopel CBT alone is effective. Some people need both. A few people get little to no benefit from the different emds they try and don't have much luck with CBT and they go on to try stronger meds or mindfulness, or even things like ECT.
There are some interesting Cochrane reviews of meds and CBT. There are some interesting NICE advisories about different emthods of providing CBT or different meds.
We know that for some people talking therapies are as effective as meds.
* Faith healers are priests aren't trained in the myriad forms of double blind tested, peer reviewed techniques that can be used to help manage or reduce stress and emotional pain.
* Therapists don't just listen. They talk. They make suggestions - ranging from everything from common sense things that may have more weight because they are coming from a medical professional, to recommending aggressive routines and techniques (meditation, diet change, medication, group therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, changes in routine, sleep patterns) that require the active participation of the patient and, over time, are shown, in double blind, peer reviewed studies, to have positive impacts. You aren't just paying some asshole to listen to you.
* A therapist, with years of training, is often able to easily identify stressors of which you are unaware, and separate out stressors that are present in the environment (your shitty, shitty job) vs. the result of old emotional trauma (e.g. horrible parenting) vs. personality disorders (borderline personality, OCD) vs. mental illness (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder) and can figure out a plan tailored to your needs. This may involve a combination of different types of therapy (there are many, and many types of 'talk' therapy actually are vastly different when viewed from the inside), in some instances, medication, and in most instances, figuring out how to make changes in your life to reduce stressors.
A therapist isn't just a black hole into whom you throw your problems. A therapist is a medical expert who has deep knowledge of personality and mental disorders, knowledge of pro-active methods of combating both, and acts as a medically informed, objective 'life coach.'
I mean, damn, what does a physical trainer do if not just talk to you? Why not go to a priest or faith healer to get your calves real swole? What does a financial advisor do if not just talk to you? Why not go to a priest or a faith healer to manage your 401k?
The ignorance displayed at this:
> If so, can they explain how talking to a psychologist cures a medical condition?
Is just sort of flabbergasting. Not all the reasons you go to a therapist are for medical conditions; many therapists are MDs; therapy doesn't just consist of talking to someone; like any other field, it has tons of study and many experts, people who know better than you do, and quite often it helps to talk to an expert.
If that comes off as harsh - I apologize - especially if you are someone who is on the fence about therapy. I sincerely suspect, however, you are not, and, instead, just assaulting the idea that therapy is even remotely a worthwhile pursuit. It is.
You may complain about ignorance, but most people don't visit a therapist, I don't know why you assume everyone should be familiar with it. And then, what kind of therapy is based on science and what isn't? People refer to the treatment from their psychoanalyst, their regression therapist, their hypnotherapist, their chiropractor as therapy too, and these are no more science based than a priest.
I'd far rather get 30 hours of productive coding out of a rested, happy and motivated employee than 60 out of an exhausted and oppressed one.
Out of hours support sucks, but yes, the reality is that you get paged, and you have to deal with things within SLA. It's hard, it's wearing, but one week out of every four is hardly intense.
I was on call for five years. It nearly broke me - but this article is just whining. Why take such a role if it's such a problem? It sounds more like his wife bashing him every time he had to do OOO work is what broke him.
It's called support hell for a reason - but what this guy's wife describes isn't extraordinary. It sounds like most mission critical support roles.
If your calls were often at 4am and you had to work a normal schedule, it certainly does no good. Also, you are saying that nearly broke you, as if it's a badge of pride or something good...
So this being said, I agree with the GP - on-call sucks, but one week in four is not that bad. One week in five and it's fairly breezy. One week in three or less and it's pretty bad - you basically stop having an external life altogether. Like the GP, I also thought the article was a bit whiny. Yes, there were some truths in it, but whines like "omg, there is crunch time" make the author sound pretty self-entitled. Another whine was "not working for the same boss that hired him"... after six years in the company. Who could take such a complaint seriously? One of the more valid problems listed is the shifting of priorities every two weeks. That stuff is a killer - to morale, to progress, to development, to pretty much everything.
The OP's described situation sounds like it is hideously under staffed / resourced.
But it doesn't have to be that way; I have friends who worked at Sun (back in the day obviously) where they had approx 1 in 5 week rota, and always two on call at once (one primary and one secondary). And that with a typical 2-3 pages out of hours. A night and day difference.
You admit you worked a job for five years that "nearly broke you". You do understand that life is not supposed to be about how much punishment you can endure in exchange for money, right? There are ways to pay your bills that don't involve inducing physical and mental health issues?
When this is done to a child it's called "spoiling" them - for good reason.