Jeff Bezos: Work-Life Balance Is 'Debilitating Phrase' | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos: Work-Life Balance Is 'Debilitating Phrase'

businessinsider.com

42 pointshassanahmad58 comments

> "If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy."

Surely that same thinking goes the other way: if you are having a rough time at home and it's clearly affecting your work performance, Amazon understands and tries to improve your home situation since real life is intertwined with work, right?

Right?

They’ll help you improve your work performance with a Performance Improvement Plan for sure

They'll fire you.

Their relationship with you is extraction at the foundation.

Once the extraction costs exceed the marginal cost of switching extraction locations, the switch is inevitable.

It's cute of him to say that when his work output is going almost entirely directly back to him (through his prestige gains, increased wealth, etc) and his work output is being leveraged by orders of magnitude by the employees, and contractors, and service providers, under him whom he's trying to maximize extraction from.

His work is his life, and his work/life is being leveraged by others.

If I weren't so numb, I might actually be cynical about it.

I personally would not want my employer actively trying to meddle in and improve my home life.

I don't really get your objection

Work-life balance is not a debilitating phrase.

"It's not debilitating if you think the solution I offer is worse"

Of course, there's always the history of medicine as a counterexample

It is not a debilitating phrase in the modern world. My doctor does not show up at his clinic before 8am, and that is a good thing.

You are totally missing the point.

Suppose some ill luck befalls you: your house burnt down, you got sued , etc, that would quite reasonably affect your work perfprmance.

If we follow Bezos's logic, would the company make a material controbution to solve your issue, like hire you a lawyer to help reclaim claim losses, etc. If not, he is a hypocrite

The answer is reflected in what ultimately happened in Bezos’ own personal life. He talks about work-life being a “circle,” but his divorce introduced a gap in his own. If such thinking didn’t work for the world’s richest man, why would the common folk think the same attitude can work for them?

I think what he's trying to say here is that, "It's good to be king."

https://www.sheknows.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ijzdaluf...

Debilitating to a few men's fortunes perhaps, but richly rewarding to the thousands of people with a broader outlook to life.

Bezos holds fair amount of respect for his accomplishments, but statements like these make him sound more like Mr. Burns than anyone. Just trying to extract maximum output out of his labourers. I for one am fairly surprised by the shamelessness demonstrated by some of these excess haves.

Reminds me of another billionaire egging on people for 60 hour weeks at a time when his company was raking in record profits due to the covid IT boom - https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/indians-should-work-60...

I see a pattern here...:-)

"Alibaba’s Jack Ma calls the ‘996’ — China’s 72-hour workweek — a ‘huge blessing’"

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-jack-ma-calls-the...

Jack Ma is a business dude. But Bezos was a programmer and that makes my heart sink low

Was Bezos a programmer? I don’t think so. He has a degree in electrical engineering & computer science but he immediately went into the business world via Wall Street (D.E. Shaw). He seems like as much of a “business dude” as anyone.

Bezos was an investment banker who knew how to code. Not a sleight, just an observation. There are many paths to wealth.

A lot of people get satisfaction out of their work. I know I do. I don't see it as an exploitive relationship with my employer, although I'm fortunate enough to have a job that requires cooperation and creativity. Maybe I'd feel different if I were an Uber driver, though, but maybe not. Even when I had menial jobs (e.g. lifeguard, pizza delivery driver), I got satisfaction from providing some kind of value (e.g. watching over children, delivering pizza). My least happy time was when I had a meaningless desk job doing essentially make work (e.g. creating reports that no one will read, tying out numbers that no one cares about, entering in data that one one notices).

People like Bezos similarly work long hours so its not like they're idle while expecting others to work on his behalf. I imagine Bezos continues to work because he gets great satisfaction from work. He would never be able to consume all his wealth in goods or services in his lifetime or the even his children's or grandchildren's lifetimes.

But look at people who don't work. Even if they have a safety net, their overall satisfaction is much lower than those that work. Mental health goes down as well as substance abuse and other destructive practices.

Of course the poor mental health and substance abuse may lead to unemployment, but I think there's something deeply unnatural about not engaging in meaningful work. Most people don't have outside creative outlets that give them meaning. Without a traditional work relationship, these people are adrift. This may be out of fashion, but I would encourage my children to find work early on rather than waste away their time playing video games or watching TV.

This isn’t about people getting satisfaction out of work or not. This is about insanely rich monopolists making tone deaf statements.

He could consume all of his wealth quite easily but purchasing one too many companies or too many properties. Money isn't endless even at his level.

Work is good for the soul. Over working means a shorter lifespan for you. Employers will accept that trade-off.

Bozo keeps working because he doesn't know how to stop and live. Steve Wozniak, Mark Cuban, Paul Allen, even Musk could teach Bozo a few things.

Maybe Bozo buzzes around the Blue Origin, now that he has some more time. Or goes bust, trying. I don't really care. Though I'd really like something like that to succeed, independently of any Bozo.

>"People like Bezos similarly work long hours so its not like they're idle while expecting others to work on his behalf."

On one hand we have a blue-collar man working 60 hour week laying bricks, raising kids, looking after aging parents and doing house chores, cooking and repairs. Also he is not paid for overtime.

In the other we have a millionaire who's work is 60% meetings, who has a chef, a nany, a secretary, driver, a cleaner, etc. And he gets to keep all fruits of his labour.

Are they comparable?

That satisfaction vs. being bored thing is a matter of mentality, or maybe lutheran/calvinist work ethics, deeply engrained by societal standards.

There is so much wrong with that. Not the least because it IS boring!

Besides that, do we know how he lives? How many personal assistants he has? Who is cleaning his hous(es)? Making his bed? Cooking? When did he ever prepare his own sandwich the last time? Been shopping groceries? Stood in line at some DMV, waiting to get a new license plate for a car? Does he even do that anymore? Do you think so?

I don't. And because of that any demands of his workers to suck it in, while denying them that level of assistance is utter hybris.

Same goes for all the other exploiters.

One pretty much has to be as abnormally driven as that to reach any significant business success. All of the FAANG founders and nearly all startup founders are like him; Bezos is an outlier in his level of success, not his level of drive.

[EDIT] I'm not endorsing it; I'm just describing it. If someone has counterexamples, I'd love to hear them.

It's funny how unlikable that guy is. There is still time to sign the petition that would have Bezos stay in space after his upcoming launch [1][2]. Once it hits 150,000 signatures shortly, it will likely generate another set of headlines, which is one (if somewhat silly) way to hurt the guy.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/how-a-petition-to-keep-jeff-...

[2] https://www.change.org/p/the-proletariat-do-not-allow-jeff-b...

I know this is just symbolic, but Bezos is not going into orbit so he couldn’t stay in space even if he wanted to.

> Bezos said his new hires should stop trying to find "balance" within their professional and personal lives since that implies a strict trade-off between the two. Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office.

If those are his views it certainly doesn't reflect in Amazon's actions. For example why did Amazon first try to get everyone back in the office? It was only after a backlash they allowed for a meager 2 days of work from home.

Other debilitating phrases for Jeff Bezos include "til death do us part", "reduce, recycle, reuse", and "the meek shall inherit the earth."

Never take advice from outliers.

Jeff Bezos is more insufferable than Larry Ellison. We should all be proud of his accomplishment.

He's going to fund a laser to carve his face into the moon, isn't he?

He should perhaps publish stats of staff turnaround and regrettable attrition. How long does an average junior hire last? Its easy to be happy at work when your bathroom breaks are not counted and timed.

> Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office.

Unfortunately, this appears to mean that employees have to be available 24/7 for work for the rest of their lives. There is a way that employees can be freed of this by means of manumission [0], but this generally requires that they have a lot of money.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission

The more Bezos opens his mouth, the more he sounds like he wants to be neo robber baron.

He has been for a while. Bezos is richer than most kings. People are dying of starvation and Bezos makes $2500 per second.

We have billionaires competing over who will go to space first, because they simply have nothing better to do with their money.

It's disgusting really. Yet somehow articles about what these assholes eat for breakfast still get to the front page

Easy to say when you’re there’s no stack ranking for your position. He’s created a super competitive culture that makes his working habits impossible for anyone else at Amazon.

There is no substance to what he was quoted as saying in this article. What does he mean by it being a 'circle' ? I think work life balance is more of a dodecahedron.

Bezos leaned very hard away from work life balance. He’s extremely wealthy and divorced.

>"If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy."

I know Bezos has folded a lot of boxes himself when the company started out, but somehow I get the impression he can't really relate to people who've been pulling night shifts at his warehouse for years to maybe get a few dollars of a raise because after a few of those you don't come home with tremendous energy.

Yeah, I'd come into the office with tremendous energy too if I were worth almost 200 billion dollars and my job didn't require any physical labor whatsoever. I bet when you can outspend the GDP of entire countries and make cities compete for the privilege of making you even richer at their expense, your work life balance is pretty awesome.

It’s debilitating if you don’t want to have a non-work life, which fits what he wants from his employees and from himself. It sure doesn’t fit what I want from myself.

There is no such thing as work-life balance.

There is life for the rich, and there is work for everybody else.

Only in the land of the free market crapitalism.

Elsewhere, in more 'socialistic' leaning countries, where the devilish red demons rule,

stories about actual equality(somewhat),

working infrastructure, public transportation(depends),

'educäyshun' (varying, sometimes free!),

and working health systems(varying, sometimes free!) are told.

Really strange tales...

Not to defend the tone-deaf comments, but in some circumstances there's maybe part of a point? When you're aligned with your work, when it's meaningful and aligned with your personal goals, hard separations between work and life matter a lot less. You can be in a flow kind of state for quite a while and be happy.

I believe that discounting finding meaning from work is too cynical. But it only exists for some people in some jobs, some of the time. I think the visceral reaction to Bezos' comments is because we know it definitely can't exist in so many Amazon jobs.

It's a bit easier to align work with your personal goals when your wish is law for the worlds biggest firm

It's much easier talk about integrating life and work and shun compartmentalization of work when you see much more direct returns from the output of your work/not work, rather than having a fixed salary.

I would say, almost the opposite: It is much easier if you essentially do not have to work anymore and you can do it just for the kick of it. Like starting a space race.

Corporate speak for you're always on the clock. Always.

Notably something he said in 2018, not recently. I believe it was discussed here then too.

Apparently Bezos is worried that someone out there might not know he's a dickhead yet.

It IS a strict trade-off. The very definition of work is time I spend doing something that someone else wants me to do instead of doing something I want to do. I only do this because our capitalist society demands it. The goal of capitalism is to escape capitalism by having enough money to spend 100% of your time on what you want to do, and I have not yet won at capitalism.

Jeff Bezos, who has won at capitalism, by definition, does not work at all. He spends all his time doing what he wants to do. He never spends one second of his time doing what someone else wants him to do, unless he also wants to do it.

The balance is that I always try to spend the absolute minimum time working and the maximum time not working. If Jeff Bezos wants to work, I'm happy to have him do things I want him to do, that he does not want to do, for 40 hours a week every week.

It's easy to be 1000% dedicated to your job when you make over $9,000,000 an hour. But he wants the same dedication from people he pays $6.

He's also vicious about crushing unions and is known for giving employees so little breaks they have to piss in bottles.

Fuck Bezos. The US has a real problem with wealth worship. People lap up every drop that comes out of this asshole just because he's a million times richer than everyone else. So they think he's a million times smarter.

Jeff Bezos is a rich asshole and treats his employees like toilet paper. It's laughable that anyone would take life advice from this clown

> It's easy to be 1000% dedicated to your job when you make over $9,000,000 an hour.

i think i would find it difficult after about three days

At which point I'd buy a few acres in Montana, get a Starlink subscription, and happily work on my hobbies for the rest of my life.

> he's a million times richer than everyone else. So they think he's a million times smarter.

The more I talk to people I disagree with and spend time outside of the US, the more I come to believe that this mental distortion is very near to a root cause for so much misery and suffering, particularly in the US. The way we worship the rich and let them get away with distorting our politics and laws to suit them to the detriment to everyone else is unconscionable, yet I see people supporting it, or at least not outraged by it, simply because they believe that wealth is perfectly correlated with how much you deserve to have your way. It's bizarre.

Jeff is in fact is an exceptionally intelligent man. He’s easily at least three sigma above the mean. Anyone that’s worked with him can tell you that.

You can find a lot of people in academia just as smart with 2 Twitter followers.

My point is, everyone listens to Jeff and the other billionaires because they're rich. That's literally the only reason. They're modern day kings as rich as the robber barons of old.

>"Jeff is in fact is an exceptionally intelligent man"

Equally true for Generals in charge of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.

Smart people can do no wrong?

Good example I guess. German rocket technology was a decade past anyone else. The space race and moon landing wouldn't have been possible without the Nazis. But I don't think anyone is stupid enough to argue it was a worthwhile trade off

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