My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

Why. Why oh why didn't he quit? This sounds AWFUL.

There's so many thing I feel when i read this: 1st: We're all in IT have been on call at some given time , and it sucks , we all know this (since I'm not on my 20s anymore i always ask in job interviews if i have to be on call.) 2nd: Man that sucks ... i don't know how this person has given it more than 6 months of his life , just move on and get a different job if you dislike it. 3rd: Amazon is like any other big company , I've read similar stories about google and MS , i wish the would pipe down and think smartly , proper hand offs to people that are on call etc etc, there's no reason why someone have to be called in the night and unable to take holidays ... come on , nobody is SO important as we want to think.

Looking at this story (the wider Amazon story) it seems to me a lot of the value is getting extracted from employees in a sort of creeping way.

So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders.

There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.

That's the problem with capitalism. On the other hand problem with socialism is that people do not work at all or just pretending to work because they are protected by XY laws,unions etc. And in order to maintain the social benefits they need to enslave other people (think germanic countries and the ost bloc).

So what is the solution to this ?

I'd like to be the first to welcome Amazon to 10:00pm Silicon Valley Time ("the company is a mess").

https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-n...

It's right on schedule, we just wrapped up 8:00pm ("they're never going to make any money") in the markets, and fast-forwarded through 9:00pm.