You go in and say "Hey my wife is dying and my performance is probably going to be impacted, can something be done?", HR may opt to 'protect' the company by starting to build a case for terminating a low performing employee.
That’s the cynical approach, but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees. This is why they have disability insurance coverage in the first place to help cover those gaps (while having the insurance foot the bill).
Also, in this case the author says he voluntarily warned them his wife was dying of cancer during the interview process. If HR wanted to get rid of him for that, they would have simply found an excuse to not hire him. Instead they gave him an offer.
Other parts of the org clearly had no issues branding the employee as a low performer and target for termination because their performance reviews.
While an abstract rational actor like a company might come to this conclusion, day to day line managers often do not come to the same conclusions. A low performing employee affected by personal issues is dead weight on said line manager's budget and headcount, and therefore their metrics and their own performance and promotion. The trickle-down performance model often doesn't incentivize long-term-focused management practices.
I find it mind-boggling that the manager could not find it within himself to give some slack to the employee. I guess maybe he didn't want to slow down the rate at which he was pulling in F-U money.
Bingo! The manager's 10-30% bonus was on the line; and they probably saw the stressed employee not quite through a human lense, but was more of a broken cog that was gumming up the works and tanking the manager's metrics/KPIs.
Maybe.
But Amazon isn't most companies.
Same with "HR," and not only are there multiple people, in large enough companies, there are fairly disconnected teams that handle the various parts of HR, like sourcing candidates, making offers to candidates, supporting managers, handling accommodations and keeping the company on the right side of the law, overseeing budgets and headcount. (If it helps, consider engineering, and the statement, "If engineering didn't want to move their legacy services to public cloud, they would simply have not signed a services contract with this cloud vendor in the first place instead of wasting their money.")
It's entirely possible that every individual on the hiring side genuinely wanted (of their own will) to hire this person anyway, but none of them were the same people who handle working with existing employees, who are all more misanthropic, and they don't talk to each other. It's also possible, and quite a bit more likely, that every individual on the hiring side is incentivized to fill roles, not to retain (how do you give someone an OKR or performance bonus this year based on whether their hires are still around three years in the future, anyway?), and that every individual on the existing-employees side is incentivized to demonstrate that they aren't coddling low performers.
Being employed at a company is a business transaction. It's not cynical to ask what the involved people's financial incentives are and whether they line up with yours, any more than it's cynical to expect that McDonald's will refuse to negotiate on the price of a burger. Even if the employee is nice, they've got a job to do, and they may not be nice.
Now I've heard my fair share of people that claim "I was fired because my kid was sick"...and that might have been the final straw, but it was the other 7 unscheduled absences in the last few months that were not covered under family leave laws that were the major factor. Sometimes managers can't wait to terminate those employees because they weren't good anyway and they are just waiting for a reason to fire them in an easy way.
The whole point is that their actual actions prove that they do not consider any employees valuable.
It was clear they didn’t care about keeping “top talent” anymore. They just wanted button pushers - and that is what they have now. I have heard of big issues going on now, but it is no longer my problem. Obviously I am no longer there and much happier where I am at now.
The word 'valuable' is just a marketing term. Just like the work 'rockstar developer'.
Unless you are like the top 1 - 2 people relevant to a very important project you really are not valuable in any meaningful sense to the company. You might be expensive in terms of time to replace. But you really are not valuable in any real sense. These companies have high attrition rates, people leave all the time and they just do fine.
By Amazon's measuring stick and internal policies, underperforming employees are to be discarded almost immediately, after undergoing a pro-forma performance review program which seems to be tailored to gather accusations to make a termination un-suable.
It is said that Amazon's average tenure is two years.
If there's a company renowned for not giving a damn about their employees, it's Amazon.
A common complaint is that these sort of massive companies violate all sorts of laws and get by because the fines they receive are relatively tiny to the companies revenue and the infraction.
So why would they worry much about this? Is employment law treated differently or punished more harshly when companies violate it?