Hacker News Reader

> He was at turns informally warned, encouraged to take leave, and offered severance.

Both these options would leave him without ongoing income and would do nothing to help him as a person[1]. They'd neatly solve the employer's problems though, and it's apparent who you more closely identify with in this story.

1. As someone else mentioned, short- and/or long-term disability was the mutually beneficial solution, but management/HR took the path of least resistance, regardless of the cost to his humanity.

Yes, as an EM, I'm inclined to think of managers as people and not mustache-twirling villains who think of nothing but their 10%-30% bonus. Most of the ones I worked with are. Ad hominem attacks aside, though, is it not important to have full context before we get out the pitchforks...especially if we feel like there's probably some missing? The only information we have about this situation is the word of a fired employee who is inclined to make themselves sound as sympathetic as possible. This article is certainly scant on details.

I've worked for psychopaths and expected that when I read this, but I don't think that's the whole story this time.

I share your sentiment of wanting the full story… surely Amazon has short term and long term disability insurance on offer to employees, I wonder why that wasn’t an option?

People seem to think that once they are hired that their employer owes them something more than the agreed upon compensation for the work they agreed to do for them.

If your work capabilities continually suffer, short of legally protected events, at some point your company will make moves to end the employment if you are no longer able to provide value for your compensation. Doesn’t matter if Amazon or a mom and pop shop. At some point there is an end to patience in every organization. In a company with 1.3M employees…it will be unlikely that his situation was all that unique among the employees. With that many employees there could easily be a thousand or more employees dealing with a similar family illness issue, and with similar inabilities to take unpaid LOAs. So a consistency of the policies governing this type of thing will always trump special single considerations in a corporation.

As long as Amazon consistently applied it’s policies it’s simply not at fault, and I would argue handled this situation as morally as a corporation could. Amazon is not at fault for the illness, nor at fault for the employee’s inability to take an unpaid leave. If they provided the opportunity for the employee to take an unpaid LOA and preserve his $300k job…that is a helluva benefit to that employee in my mind.

> People seem to think that once they are hired that their employer owes them something more than the agreed upon compensation for the work they agreed to do for them.

Legally, no.

Morally and ethically, yes they do. And the consequences for breaking a moral or ethical 'rule' is loss of reputation, which is exactly what this post is doing to them. And if companies keep doing this kind of thing, as a society we might decide to make it a legal matter, like we did for minimum wage and protected classes.

Would you make the argument the other way? Where employees owe their company more than their agreed upon effort? I don’t think so.

But what exactly did Amazon do here that was immoral or not ethical? Honestly I don’t see where it failed. The company may not of met the author’s expectations, but I feel like his expectation was “pay me no matter my performance because I cannot afford to take a LOA when my wife is dying, and I am way depressed because I never grieved for my brother…who died before I even came to work here.” Frankly, that is a wholly unreasonable expectation to place on any company.

> But what exactly did Amazon do here that was immoral or not ethical?

They made him "choose" between his wife and his works. Well they didn't actually made him choose, as the alternative was inconceivable, thus, they forced him to perform while his wife was in a death sentence.

That's the unethical part.

No, they gave him options and good ones too. STD, LTD, and a LOA, and including a severance at the end was available to him. He did all the choosing and every step of the way appears to have chosen poorly or chose in favor of the $ over his own mental health needs.

Chose to work there, chose not to take advantage of a LOA, STD, or LTD, chose work over grief for his brother, chose to take a losing stance on his perceived value at the company.

I’m sympathetic to his family tragedy, that’s an awful thing to endure, but this is less “bad bosses” and more “ignorant or greedy worker” in my opinion.

So what should they have done? Paid him a $300k per year salary to do nothing?

They didn't have to pay it directly, but it is common for companies to have contingencies to pay employees 60% or more of their base salary "to do nothing: Amazon was already paying for, in part, long-term disability insurance, but the employee, manager, or - most surprisingly - HR were not in the headspace to even think of this, I assume because the default mode of is adversarial.

It’s the employee’s responsibility to engage STD and LTD. Everything in this article the author was complaining about was either his responsibility or due to poor choices he made.

The company does owe employees a lot more than agreed compensation. Companies, as entities in our society, fulfill certain roles which are without exception means to something else. We use (commercial) companies as instruments to improve human life. Modern economy in its entirety is but an instrument and not a goal in itself.

I've grossly oversimplified things here for a number of reasons, but this is pretty much the gist of it.

Companies effectively work as tyrannies where the tradeoff involved (renounce freedoms for the promise that money is) appears to be eventually disadvantageous for the society, even though it may seem advantageous for the economy.

Companies owe society a better life or they're not fit for purpose.

I mean that’s a great pitch for universal healthcare as any I’ve heard. I would be for strengthening the FMLA as much as possible. But I’m not even sure covid is impactful enough.

How? The article and subsequent comments don’t seem to complain about healthcare offered or FMLA at all. To be honest, he qualified for and was apparently offered a LOA and CHOSE NOT to take it!

I mean argue for universal healthcare all you want, argue FMLA protection expansions. But if $150-180k in LTD payout wasn’t enough for this guy to opt to take it, I am pretty sure a government program is not going to be that generous, ever.

You are correct about the GP’s bias. Whenever Amazon comes up, David helps his former employer dodge the blame: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1632787200&dateRange=custom&...

Other Amazon EM’s and some high level ICs have a reputation for kneejerk denial of abuse in HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27570837 (just one example):

Speaking by as another EM, “I identify as a former X so X is good!” is a normal defense mechanism. But Amazon’s uniquely toxic working environment makes their cognitive dissonance notable .

> If he wants to lash out at anything, I suggest lashing out at a system that requires us to work while going through such awful life circumstances. That man shouldn't have had to work.

And yet, this man worked for a company who could very reasonably enact such a system if it desired to, at least for its own employees.

There is no law which requires corporations to do the minimal amount required by the law. The fact that many chose to do so is a choice motivated by profits and expediency.

On the other hand, if we as a society think the ethical floor is too low, we can pass laws that raise that floor - and companies will be bound to follow it.

lol. I worked at Amazon as a SDE and this reply is from Typical shit EM from Amazon. Empathy triumphs your weird corporate logic. Don't just work backwards putting yourself in the customer shoes, learn to work backwards from your report's shoes too.

I would be more apt to share this opinion if not for the fact that he says he specifically warned Amazon that his wife had brain cancer when they began trying to recruit him.

So you would want Amazon to pass him over because his wife has an existing medical condition? That would be a good article too.

Would it? "Your circumstances have us believe you're not the best fit for the company" is a scandal? Should Amazon be required to hire anyone who walks in the door?

Of course refusing to hire someone because their SO has cancer would lead to a scandal, LMAO. I assume you're joking

I hope so. Its reasonable for that response if its the case where the person does not have the technical ability via their prior experience. But that line of reasoning for a candidate to not be hired because of their spouse's ailment is just morale bankruptcy.

> warned Amazon that his wife had brain cancer when they began trying to recruit him

Not to defend Amazon, god forbid, but I'd be surprised if this actually reached the people who would be able to make decisions about this either way. Recruiting gets paid per head. They got a head. What happens next is of no interest to them whatsoever.

> That man shouldn't have had to work. He should have been safe to be unemployed while focusing on being there for his family.

Or even better, a system that guarantees the ability to be on extended leave with benefits from the state. Its a win-win situation if you don't force employees to leave their companies just because they are in a situation like that. Other than that, I totally agree with what you said.

This is America. Sure you have benefits, you think, if you have a job, but a huge number of the outcomes where you need those benefits result in you losing your job and no longer having them. And if you get too expensive and start showing up on the company's benefits cost, they are strongly incented to find alternative means for removing you from the payroll.

Really, work-provided benefits mainly serve the purpose of preventing people from voting for universal benefits. Of course the percentage of people dealing with the cases where you really need (and they don't want to pay) those benefits is very small, so the number of people that fully understand the situation is very small.

Benefits exist for the benefit of the company: to retain people, keep them bound/disincent them leaving, and to appear "competitive" with other companies. Whether they ACTUALLY will hold up is a gamble, and often up to munificience of your "benefactor".

To emphasize, when you MOST need benefits, you are LEAST valuable to the company providing those benefits.

Blame the government, they’re why we have employer-sponsored health insurance to begin with starting in WWII. Very interesting history to read about.

The sucky part about this story isn't that, as you say, "managers don't have the same luxury of defending their side of the story". More so, it comes across as a little twisted to suggest that this dude's anger at his boss is just "part of his grieving process", like he's going through some teenage phase that he will grow out of once he realizes that Amazon's history of mistreating its employees has nothing to do with his boss or his experiences at Amazon. Instead, he can realize that all the stories about Amazon trampling over its workers to get packages out the door only apply to other people.

I do like the slogan Amazon should have for its workers with sick loved ones, as you put it: "safe to be unemployed". Classic Amazon.