Dear Jeff Bezos: Is a suicide attempt enough, or do you still need more data?
stephaniwilkes.com
stephaniwilkes.com
And I'm really wondering if I should type this, but I also wonder about isolated stories like these. Given the number of employees, some are bound to be very sick people, regardless of working conditions. Some are also bound to be entitled, unrealistic or otherwise simply willing to take advantage of a story like this to criticize an employer they felt wronged them. I have worked with more than one person who was willing to resort to self-harm as a manipulative technique, which is a horrible and unfair thing to deal with. I just wish I could read articles like this and say unequivocally that I know Amazon is the problem.
I have no facts in this case, so I can only hope that the person who attempted suicide yesterday gets the help he needs, from within Amazon or outside of it.
EDIT: I have suffered from mental illness myself and as a vet, I know work related stress quite intimately (though I have never had PTSD myself, people who I worked with still deal with it and it is very real). So I don't want to dismiss that this occurs and is real. But we also have large, aggregate numbers, which we never get from private sector companies. All we get are anecdotes, each of which could easily be explained away. And perhaps that's part of the problem. Should private companies have to provide concrete data on workplace health issues like this? We regulate workplace safety, why not mental health?
It most certainly is and not everyone is cut out for the amount of pressure and stress put on engineers. This is the truth of the matter. Some crumble by walking away to other jobs and other venues, others crumble by sadly things far worse like the events that unfolded yesterday.
Personally I look around and realize I work with people capable of working at the other big tech companies, I work with people from all the big brand name schools. I work with a remarkable group of individuals (business and engineers). There is a constant pressure to succeed and out perform your peers. I tell me wife at times that sometimes I want to go back to working at a sub shop for minimum wage like I did in college because all I do now is pad Amazon's bottom line. I help amazon grow their revenue and make stock holders rich. Sure they pay well, sure they give out stock too and so the grass isn't always greener.
I remind myself though that I work with the greatest of great in our industry and we all want to excel so it is a constant competition. I also accepted that if I am not cut out for it I will leave. Until that day I need to have the mental stability and fortitude to manage and cope with the stress and pressure.
What is most sad though is the few negative cries outweigh the multitude of positive. I work with an amazing team, we have normal hours, our on-call is normal and some weeks I never get paged and we even take time off around the holidays because our team and team's leadership has our shit together.
What we've heard about Amazon, for a long time, is something that's closer to dysfunction and abuse. Completely different things and we shouldn't equivocate about them.
The makeup of feedback about Amazon I've read about and heard from friends is negative to a qualitatively different extent than the reputation of other companies.
It surprises me, a lot. I was at Google for years, and even if you model a company's decision-making simply as 100% profit-maximizing, IME HR/managers/everyone was pretty motivated to keep employees happy so that they don't leave. This pops up in all kinds of things: flexibility of the work environment, keeping you engaged in interesting work, paying attention to your career and skills growth, etc.
If anything I'd be inclined away from complimenting the way Google treats their employees: I left because I wasn't satisfied with the way career growth worked in the Research org of such a large company. But at not point did it seem like anyone thought that putting employees under heavy pressure was a path to success, let alone the expected path to success, as you imply.
You are told in the interview to read https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles and prepared to be interviewed for how well you fit that. You are so interviewed. Once you're hired, you are constantly judged for fit to those principles.
If people truly follow those principles, no defensive behavior is possible. Which makes the company free to institute policies and procedures that will work extremely well as long as everyone consistently follows those principles.
Then they fill the organization with real people. And there is no shortage of defensive behaviors that people then pretend not to have so that they can measure up to those principles.
As a whole, this works out well enough that Amazon is very successful as a company. For any individual employee it can work well until you or someone in a position to affect you crumbles under the pressure.
I'll never forget the experience of working there. And I'm glad that I don't any more.
- she was upset about something (maybe somethings) work related
- she talked to her mom and professionals about her issues (even worked with HR and support within Amazon)
- she didn't get along with her manager
- she was suicidal but too scared to follow through
It sounds like there was a bad chemistry or dynamic between employee and manager. Beyond that this article is a drama piece that doesn't explain anything concrete that actually happened to make her feel this way. I want to sympathize with her but I am really having trouble.
edit: Tried to improve formatting.
Disclaimer: This doesn't mean I am rejecting the conclusions she is trying to make. I sure would appreciate a real series of events to decide for myself whether she was or wasn't in a hostile environment.
My story: My doctor told me to quit. After an anxiety attack and stress induced kidney stones, he told me that my paycheck was not worth the damage to my health. I stayed on long enough to collect my next stock vesting and then bombed out. I even refused their gag bribery on the way out. Fuck that place.
If you start feeling this way, you really need to stop caring about it. Just show up, do your work. Nod politely when they put you on a PIP and start focusing your effort on finding a new job. Literally allow yourself to start doing a bad job so that you can free up enough mental energy to go find a new one.
Jeff doesn't need more data. He already has all of it. The data tells him that this is collateral damage. It's the cost of doing business the way his customers (you, me and others reading this) expect instant gratification, free-everything and such with brutal speed and efficiency.
Your question should be
> do amazon customers really "need" free shipping, same day / same hour delivery (and other things that make them work their warehouse employees to death).
This is apathy by management and it has now given way to cruelty (by the sounds of it).
Do not spread these excuses as fact and certainly do not accept them when you hear them.
See Life in an Amazon Warehouse: Fear and Efficiency at 35 Orders Per Second => http://gizmodo.com/5982811/life-in-an-amazon-warehouse-fear-...
Hire more people. Problem solved. Yeah it's gonna eat at your margins oh so slightly (and less than you'd think). Turns out people who are over worked, work like shit and it's because we aren't made to do that.
Stop trying to peddle this nonsense, mate.
If Bezos saw this advice, he'd laugh in your face. Because Amazon is moving more towards eliminating humans and automation with robots. I'm sure he knows all about margins bro.
This isn't conversation, and I'm going to stop. Good luck.
Now I’m writing you again because someone braver than I did
something I couldn’t bring myself to do.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/05/amazon-ro...
This obviously does not absolve anyone for lacking empathy for other humans, but it isn't a bad solution for humanity in general.
And it is still bad for humanity, even if you could argue that a lot of people temporarily pay a lower price for their goods ordered at Amazon. This price may soon go up because of a total monopoly gained by exploiting technology this way.
And of course, this all is not because Bezos is so smart, but because capitalism is so flawed.
I hate managers like that, it creates such a toxic miserable existence and creates horrible work life balance (albeit well paid probably).
I worked there, I saw nice normal hard working people screwed over by terrible managers.
Maybe that's life. Maybe there's a problem where that can be improved. Depends on which side of the fence you're on.
Also, the lack of an internal locus of control, which I find reprehensible. If you're in trouble, go find help. If you can't find help, well, you better make the best of being in trouble. Aside from family and friends, nobody cares much about you, and nobody should.
A company is not responsible for your physical or mental well being. It provides resources that might help you overcome your difficulties. If you can't take advantage of these resources, they're not going to spoon feed you. They have better things to do with their time.
From the article "because I wonder how many times this unnamed victim reached out to HR". More baseless hypotheticals.
Amazon employs over 20k people. It's fundamentally a profit making machine, not a day-care for fragile little snowflakes.
And the author of this article finally quit right? Isn't the author glad that he lacked the courage to kill himself and found the courage to quit?
how about preventative care?
edit: since this has possibly been misunderstood, I am sarcastically drawing attention to the fact that Bezos' owning the Washington Post can decide to smear news other organizations as foreign propaganda, if they were to side against his interests on a story such as this.
Franky, this linked letter shares a lot of that same bizarreness. He calls the person who jumped off the roof brave and said he wish he had the courage to do that. If you hate your job, wouldn't the courageous thing be to go get a different job? If you are a good employee then getting another job shouldn't be that difficult. If you aren't a good employee then it is hardly the company's fault.
I'm not saying that amazon is not potentially a shitty place to work at. But this whole employee attempts to commit suicide, that'll show em attitude is just plain wrong headed.
What's wrong with telling the abused to exit their current situation as quickly as possible?
It's VERY WRONG to attempt to end one's life in order to exit the toxic work/relationship/marriage, like the unnamed Amazon employee did.
Let's assume you're a programmer. Ever get annoyed when someone comes along while you're dealing with a problem and goes, "Why don't you just..." without any acknowledgement of the many complexities? And that if you could "just" do this or that, you fucking would have already?
Yeah, it's like that.
Ah, "it's not always that simple". Fair enough, thanks.
(And two down votes already for asking an honest question? Stay classy, HN.)
1. They're not currently employed which means they would enter into poverty with no exit strategy for that.
2. They have children which means without relatives on both sides of the relationship willing to help with the transition to separation (and possibly divorce if they're married) it's going to be hard to do this. It also means going into poverty in some cases whether or not the person has a job since caring for the material needs of children is an added burden. And if the spouse was also abusing them that means leaving them in their care isn't an option either.
Simply put, it's not easy when it comes to leaving one bad situation. Whether it's an abusive employer or an abusive spouse.
If you don't truly believe that you can affect your external circumstances by changing your actions, you'll be constantly wondering why crappy things happen to you and looking for external saviours. If you do believe you can change your life, you'll start doing it, and your life is more likely to get better.
Sometimes people take the same approach to their jobs, their managers, all other relationships. If they leave, who else will do this job? Then the manager will lose his job, whatever else runs through their minds.
Life is never binary.
Then let them. Don't let them complain about what they're going through incessantly.
Sure, everybody complains about their job/relationships once in a while, but when that's all you talk/complain about and you get a martyr complex (I have to do this because nobody else will) that's when you remind them that this too is a choice they made.
Tell someone to "just make a choice" when if they leave their abusive relationship, their children will be devistated and they will lose their health insurance. What will you tell them? "Just go get a job with health insurance!"? I hope not.
Tell someone "just make a choice" when they have convinced themselves that leaving would be quitting, and it would go against their very fabric of who they self-identify with to do so.
So easy to make choices like you describe in hindsight, and when you have ample fallback options. But when you don't it requires great courage and an amazing support system, as well as emotional stability. Most people sadly don't have that, and to sit here and say "well it's a choice you made!" is beyond heartless. If you see someone suffering in a scenario where to you it may seem like "Well stupid! Just make a chose to leave" that is a good sign that you are probably wrong, and don't understand the situation at all. We are human beings, not emotionless robots. Our brains don't go (if desireableSituation !== 1) { leave() }
I hope you never have to be in these shoes.
Wow, way to miss the point entirely. They are making a choice. Doing something they hate to remain getting paid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
Once you start thinking that you have no choice, that life is against you, it becomes self perpetuating. You don't tell people "just make a choice" you make it very clear that they're already making the choice. They're the ones with agency.
Sure their choices have consequences, but all choices do. Ultimately they're in charge of their destiny, unless of course they're slaves and prisoners. No matter what you think/say about Amazon, if you're a software dev at Amazon, you are nowhere near a slave or prisoner.
If you think you have no control over your destiny, you're destined to get stuck in the same rut and experience the same mistakes and pitfalls over and over again.
I had this same experience at Facebook, and I feel for her, but when a manager wants you to quit (as her manager clearly did) take a hint or be prepared to get needled by the boss every time they see you.
at top tech companies people get their ego's and self worth overly intertwined with their job and career progression
Down voting your comment would disappoint me very much (and as of this writing, it's the top comment). IMO, at worst Amazon is part of a much larger picture. And as you imply, out of X number of people, Y will hurl themselves off a building. Remember the FoxConn hoo-ha a few years back? Yeah, I sat down and compared the reported suicide rates of 400K FoxConn employees versus China in general (I wasn't the only one, as I recall). Turns out, FoxConn folk must be pretty damned happy, actually, as their suicide rate was lower than the general population of China.
No, to place blame on Amazon is to ignore the problem. I've worked at far shittier places than Amazon is reported to be, and I didn't take my own life. More was at play than just where this person worked. If we need do anything, we need identify that "more" and fix that.
I think this is the crux of the issue with our industry. It is not unique to Amazon, it just so happens they have had a few vocal employees.
I think nothing about the individual in question, other than a blurb in a news story, so I'm not going to make a diagnosis about this individual. I strongly urge others to do the same. My statement stands: blame Amazon if you like, but leaving it at that doesn't save anyone.
You are saying it, like they just happen to work at FoxConn and decided to do it at their workplace and the environment plays no role in it. But that's not how humans work, environment is the key. And Amazon, just like FoxConn, is absolutely the one to blame.
Committing suicide is not the answer when you have a very clear alternative: Leave and get another job.
It is NEVER "courageous" to commit a suicide. I understand why some people do it, but that still doesn't make it "courageous". Committing suicide is running away from reality. Period.
For your consideration:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
And then it turned out to be a DFW quote.
God, he was a compelling writer - and I've only read The Pale King and various essays.
The company's responsibility is not to push "bad" employees to commit suicide; it's to help them improve, or, if that's too difficult or there simply isn't a good fit, to part with them in the best of terms.
The question here isn't about the performance of Amazon's employees; it's whether bullying is regarded as an acceptable managing practice.
My suspicion is that the reason they didn't notice a mental stability problem is because they probably have hundreds of people going through this at any one time. So, change your management style, or face the wrath of (at least some of) society when they read about this stuff.
As a customer I love Amazon, but the more I read about them I would gladly take a hit in the convenience department to take them down several pegs and teach them and Mr. Bezos a lesson.
From the site guidelines:
Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted.
I believe the author is a she.
I think it's unfair to single Amazon out because they aren't unique in this. I've seen it at other large co's and in academia as well. There's abundance of company politics, toxicity, emotions and sludge around and to keep sane, healthy, relatively stress-free requires a toolkit of abilities to help navigate.
I've perhaps read too much dark science fiction, but I am certain I could construct a functional job environment that would cause anyone to attempt suicide, especially given years.
Are there people who have mental health problems? Absolutely. Does wanting to commit suicide because your job is a mentally caustic environment mean you had pre-existing mental health problems? Absolutely not.
PS: If you're in that situation, please leave your job. If your company won't transfer you to a new role, find a new company.
However, what I do believe one should not take the job too seriously (if you consider it's such a shitty place to work for.) Your life is too short to be wasted working at some place you feel miserable and your life is too precious to be ended for the sole reason to call out the miserable working condition at any given place.
I think when you're in the eye of the storm of depression, it's not easy to think straight and make decisions that objectively seem logical, like just getting out.
The person was pre-disposed to jumping, you say. Why would they think it's reasonable to consider alternatives? People can be very single-minded.
For low-skill workers, a job with shit pay can be all they have. It's quite common to think "I must do well here cause I can't get another job. I'm not $random_bs_reason_they_cant_see_through."
Add on the stress of an environment like Amazon, which is pushing people for no reason other than generating money (the faster Amazon is the more people think Amazon is magical, the more they spend at Amazon).
The implosion of our system will be due to this ridiculous fetish with fiscal success. It's become the only marker that matters. We care so little for each other, thinking someone else is taking care of people with mental illness, not realizing the system that does that is often too expensive or too broke to do anything. BUT HEY THE STOCK IS UP AND 20 COMPANIES WERE DECLARED UNICORNS!
We're reaching the point where it's things like this that will begin to crack that facade. This is an important opening for useful conversation. But we'll probably just debate JS frameworks, instead of the reality that our social safety is a complete joke. Objectivism or gtfo!
Upvote/downvote. Doesn't matter. This is a throwaway. I don't have any need for imaginary internet points.
Yet it mattered enough for you to write the last line.
I'm a believer in emotionally honest communication. That's what mattered by writing it.
That's different than looking for upvotes/downvotes.
But sure, the first answer you landed on was probably right. Cause you're smart.
Haha, this is so rich, because you seem to care enough to make a throwaway and not link it to your real account.
That maybe could have been implied by use of a throwaway and explicitly stating disinterest in points. I'd rather focus on the ideas and conversations. Upvote/downvote leads to watered down groupthink. "I'm too lazy to think up something, so I'll just quickly upvote/retweet what sounds closest to what I'm thinking."
The point of the sentence was to let people who are going to reach for it know that no long term status will be valued by either choice. It's only going to improve visibility in this conversation and cease being valuable after. Since some of these things matter to people, I'm up front about it.
Logging out now! Never to post with this name from this IP again!
> He calls the person who jumped off the roof brave
I never got how people are called 'brave' in this situation or even if they jump onto train tracks to save the life of a stranger.
I don't believe that people are missing a sense of compassion for folks who are not compatible with the working situation.
I agree with you on the idea that contemplating suicide is problematic- but to say there is a single problem is a gross oversimplification. I don't like this blogpost either- but the problem isn't just a suicidal employee.
Managers have an obligation to both the company and their staff to help employees navigate these situations as best as possible. In the case of this jumper, someone might have dropped the ball.
It's also just as possible that there was no ball dropped. The CDC says ~42k Americans commit suicide every year. Suicides aren't just about one thing usually. What are the circumstances in the life of the person who jumped that warrant this peevish posting?
I don't see anything here other than an opportunistic post by someone emotional. They clearly have been asking for help and continue to suffer on some level. It's exploitative to use someone else's suicide attempt to draw attention to your own employment problems. Whether or not it's their employer that is the true source of the problem is unknowable.
This is the Internet! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That makes an assumption that it's even an option. It's not always so, and not because of competency reasons.
1) Some visas are often tied to specific jobs. You could be putting your continued residency in the country at risk by leaving.
2) Amazon forks out a bunch of money by way of signing bonuses and relocation money etc. etc, which typically tie you to the company for 2 years (it's a reasonable policy, the expense is far from trivial and they need to recoup at least that much in value from your employment). If you don't stay for the 2 years, then you become liable for the entire amount (maybe pro-rated would be better/fairer). It's quite possible that individuals find themselves in a position where they literally can not afford to quit Amazon, unless they can find another employer willing to cover that money.
The word courageous is the real casualty here.
Is this always true? I've seen horrible employees get spectacular references for their next job. I've seen incredible employees get snubbed on the way out due to political reasons or personal differences.
I've also seen great employees try to leave and the company turn against them. I've also seen employees hired that had spectacular references that turned out to be awful and needed to be terminated.
Everything wrong with America's workaholic white collar ethos, in one soundbite.