Imagine behaving this way. How do you look in the mirror and feel anything but revulsion? Happy that this guy's shitty behavior and Amazon's toxic culture is being put on blast like this. Hope Daequan gets a massive settlement.
I was already under so much stress from work that I had part of my intestines bind up for a week, the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me so they decided to give me predinsone... I felt sick so I went home on a Saturday, after 'only' hitting 50 hours for the week. My boss called to yell at me and tell me to come back to work, the next thing I clearly remember was being in a hospital.
I still had to work for that POS for 2 years after that happened. For a long time I blamed myself, until a year and half later when my mother was within an inch of life in the hospital and I wanted to leave early and see her, he said "Didn't I already give you a day off for that?"
As for what kind of person that is? Narccists. And they can be very damaging to their employees if they aren't rooted out from management quickly.
After being what I consider a very talented member of our industry for 15 years and having no career advancement whatsoever, I’ve been asking myself over the past couple years whether these experiences are to blame. Getting reamed out all the time seems to have had a lasting impact on my ability to take ownership, do the kinds of things you need to do to get ahead, etc.
How so?
But they can be very useful to burn through people to get shit done and raise profits short term. A timemachine would be interesting, to compare different times and see whether narcism is deep rooted in our genetics, or if it is our culture that promotes them .
Because from their perspective, things don't look like that. From their point of view, it probably goes something like this: "The worker is supposed to work extra hard, but now they are resting, AGAIN! Now I'm gonna say something so they finally start working again" without considering any other perspective about situations.
It's really hard to read people without speaking to them, and most middle-managers just try to read people even though most people are honestly pretty shit at doing that, so they misread situations all the time.
In this particular scenario, notice it says "I'm thinking..." instead of "I said...". Not sure why they didn't tell their supervisor "I'm hot and about to faint", but knowing the average supervisor at Amazon, I do understand why you wouldn't talk about it.
As an SRE it's my job to make sure the computers I'm responsible for are working properly, and to actively pay attention and gather information about whether that's true. If there's too much load on the site for our current set of servers to handle, even if it's not my job to actually order more, it's certainly my job to say something to the people who can. If we're okay now but we won't be in a month, that's also my job. And if a disk fills up on a server and it stops working, "Oh, I wasn't monitoring disk space, and the program never logged anything" is no excuse. Nor is it an excuse that I'm not good at guessing what problems are likely to happen; that, also, is my job and why they look for people with experience doing this job successfully.
Isn't there all the more reason that someone whose job is looking after people and not computers should figure out if they're overworked or about to be overworked and if they're in comfortable, humane conditions?
And if the manager is competent and actually does this, then he probably will end up managing something more important than Amazon warehouses. Don’t underestimate the mediocrity and pettiness of the people who end up in charge of petty things.
"Because Amazon never trained me in the basics of my job as a supervisor. Which is to understand obvious the fact in order for our workers to be sustainably productive, they need to take healthy rest breaks now and then -- especially during crunch time. Otherwise Amazon will lose. And because whatever natural sense of intuition I may have had about these issues was thoroughly beaten out of me by the time I got through all that Core Values training they made us do."
I was fired for this, ultimately because I was not aggressive enough with the team.
You get toxic managers like this in toxic companies because it is the only way to not only get promoted but to survive. I recognized early in the pandemic that I could either be the person I wanted to be, the leader I wanted to be, or have a job in 6 months. I chose the former, but don't blame people who are forced to choose the latter.
edit: I should clarify that I do mean forced to choose the latter in that last sentence. There is a difference between a 30k/year worker being moved to a 45k/year manager role and needing to keep that job to survive and a 200k/year software engineer choosing to behave this way for a 250k/year job.
https://www.nysfocus.com/2021/11/23/a-homeless-amazon-worker...
I currently work with someone in a professional job who does an amazing job of dodging work.
“Did you get that document signed off last week?” - “Oh, I had to take my cat to the vet as it wasn’t drinking water” - “ok, but this week?” - “definitely”.
Rinse and repeated for a couple months. Every week is a new excuse.
If you asked her she’s say “I’m working extra hard hard” and “management should understand”. But no, she’s just great at dodging work and coming up with excuses. She can play the system well.
I’m not saying this person wasn’t illegally fired and Amazon is wrong, but it would be odd to not hear Amazon’s side.
The thing that was found to be unsupported by the evidence.
When the government charges someone with a crime and someone asks “whats the other side”, do you say the same thing?
This would go to trial if not settled. Only then would the labor boards decision be based on an actual weighing of all evidence.
Arbitration and mediation is a far more common way to deal with disagreements in civil society, and that's what the board has done here.
Hardly a finding of guilt.
If a violation is believed to exist, the region will take the case before an Administrative Law Judge who will conduct a hearing. The decision of the Administrative Law Judge may be reviewed by the five member Board. Board decisions are reviewable by United States Courts of Appeals. The Board's decisions are not self-executing: it must seek court enforcement in order to force a recalcitrant party to comply with its orders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board...