He was offered a Family Leave option, but the details aren't shared so it's hard to judge...
Terrible situation for the author, but expecting the company to eat the 500k/year he was costing them doesn't seem fair either.
Terrible situation for the author, but expecting the company to eat the 500k/year he was costing them doesn't seem fair either.
It's very possible that the unspoken culture at Amazon is work hard above all else. If you've read "The Everything Store", there is a quote, something like, (regarding Bezos) "If you're bad, Jeff will run you out of the company. If you're good, he'll ride you into the ground." It also talks about Jeff firing an early and long-time employee, he did throw a party for him in Hawaii, because Amazon no longer had a use for him. I don't know if either are true, but if true, I could see that attitude creating an unspoken culture of, "I don't care about your problems, we have work to do. If you can't do it, we need someone who can." I can also see how the success and the stock price, given the commitment to work above all, reinforces that mentality.
Sure, it'd be great if my workplace kept paying me $300k even if I was under-preforming because of personal issues. However, how realistic is this expectation? Are there any places that keep under-preforming employees for half a decade, or more?
Microsoft is often recommended for this, and some say Google these days too :).
Just because we don't do it in the US, doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
Not saying either situation is better or worse overall; I expect there are winners and losers in both systems. Or, likely more accurately, the European system creates few big winners, but also few (or no) big losers, whereas the US system gives you the opportunity to be a big winner, but you could also end up homeless.
Personally I'm happy with how the US system has worked out for me, but I'm sure there are some people who feel the opposite.
In a sense, blaming the company becomes kind of a distraction from the real issue, which is that in the US, we have an extremely thin safety net. One of the reasons getting fired from your tech job is so concerning is that even someone in that job is only a few difficult situations from utter destitution and homelessness. That $4k/mo Seattle mortgage burns through your savings pretty quick, and if you have assets of any kind, you won't get any assistance from the state for disability. Even our unemployment benefits won't keep you afloat for long.
We should be focused on making these things better, not expecting companies to employee people who are unable to work.
However, whether or not it's an employers' responsibility, is a culture and values thing - especially if the social safety nets are lacking.
And of course, if companies provide these benefits, that is good, especially since they are absent from our broader safety net. But keeping benefits tied to employment has a lot of downsides, and we should try to move away from that.
Is this really true? I would think so, too, but if it were, wouldn't we see a flood of companies in the US lobbying Congress to create a government-backed healthcare option, or even single-payer? To the point where it would have been done decades ago, right-wing political ideology be damned?
The cynical part of me wonders if companies like the current situation, since that gives companies more power over their employees.
I don’t think companies like or dislike the situation, it’s just the status quo and thus hard to change a trajectory that has so much momentum.
Rather than relying on companies as reservoirs of wealth that should be taking care of employees (eg this, healthcare, parental leave, etc), we need to move that wealth outside of corporate control - through a combination of higher compensation, better managing of personal finances, entrenched industry reform, catchall social safety net, etc.
You start doing 50% of your work (under-performing) for a bunch of months and the company asks you to fulfill your side of the contract because they are fulfilling theirs. Is that weird?
Let's put it another way: You do your job well, the company starts paying 50% of your salary because they have problems. Do you keep working there till their problems are gone? Or after a couple of month you tell them: either you fulfill the contract or we part ways?
I would assume his output wasn't 0, so the economics are hard to justify. A typical engineer earns many times their salary in revenue for the company. So, maybe this guys was low performing, but maybe that works out to a wash in terms of revenue per employee.
Or maybe, Amazon says "actually, losing $500K to retain good people isn't that bad every so often" -- how many employees can realistically be in the situation? 100 a year? That's what, $50mm...nothing to Amazon in the big picture.
Obviously there comes a time when you need to fire people, and we don't have the full picture. But it's also not like this money really matters to Amazon that much either.