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My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

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Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#21

Post by pjc50 »

FatalErrorr wrote: post #2

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

The usual reasons:

- wife has no job (due to move to Seattle), just had kids, need to pay for housing: unless you can get another job immediately (which is hard if you're too busy to interview), quitting will be a disaster

- boiling frog: it wasn't awful on day 1, so at some point he'd have to acknowledge that things have changed

- negative reinforcement and the cult: dysfunctional organisations are often good at making you think it's your fault. Hence the therapy.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#22

Post by sshagent »

bechampion wrote: post #7
lordnacho wrote: post #6

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…

I completely agree , also , Us as employees we need to learn when to say stop , i know we all work hard and we want to be the an important asset. But remember going the extra mile and getting recognition for it will only last until the next downtime/problem which could be tomorrow.

this is pretty much what i took from this story. its not pleasant granted, but really you need to push back occasionally. Constant call outs is really an issue the management need to resolve so its not such a burden.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#23

Post by cmdkeen »

bechampion wrote: post #4

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 co…

> just move on and get a different job if you dislike it Because they tie you in with money - your signing bonus and relocation expenses have to be partially repaid if you leave within the first two years.

An interesting question on the "what if there was a war and no-one came?" is what would happen if Amazon could no longer hire the monstrous number of high calibre new entrants it needs every year. Stories like this are effectively huge advertising campaigns for every other tech company.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#24

Post by trhway »

happywolf wrote: post #15

I do believe there must be something wrong at a significant enough scale to warrant NYT's attention. There are always outliners (i.e. unhappy and stressed out staff) in every company, the question is how big is the population.

>I do believe there must be something wrong at a significant enough scale to warrant NYT's attention.

it may be "wrong" from the POV of NYT or other tech outsiders. What i've over the years understood from various friends/acquaintances is that it is not "something wrong", it is just the "normal" mode of how whole AMZN operates. People going there know it (and if they don't - not checking Glassdoor is theirs fault, not AMZN's) - and, for example, that is the reason i didn't go there (while i love escalations, emergencies, etc..., i don't like backstabbing, tricks they play with your salary/bonuses and other details)

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#25

Post by tsotha »

>With warehouses around the globe, my husband would get paged to fix problems in China in the middle of the night, in the UK in the wee hours of the morning, and then in the Kentucky warehouse during work hours.

I worked at a company that wrote warehouse management software, and this definitely isn't unique to Amazon. When your software has a serious problem the company is losing a million dollars an hour, so they're not very sympathetic to problems you may have standing in the way of a return to smooth operations.

That business vies with games and HFT for the highest stress levels in software development.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#26

Post by cmdkeen »

nso95 wrote: post #5

Small team writing unstable software, of course there's going to be a lot of pages.

Small team constantly frazzled by being on call in an abusive working environment - no wonder they're writing unstable software.

I'd far rather get 30 hours of productive coding out of a rested, happy and motivated employee than 60 out of an exhausted and oppressed one.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#28

Post by msravi »

tsotha wrote: post #25

>With warehouses around the globe, my husband would get paged to fix problems in China in the middle of the night, in the UK in the wee hours of the morning, and then in the Kentucky warehouse during work hours. I worked at a company that wrote warehouse management software, and this definitely isn't unique to Amazon. When your software has a serious problem the company is losing a million dollars an hour, so they're…

If it's so critical, why doesn't the company hire a larger team to do this and rotate people around in well defined shifts?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#29

Post by aidos »

arcticbull wrote: post #10

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.

I don't know about any of that. I can see why that was written to describe the trajectories of some SV companies - it doesn't seem to fit with Amazon at all, to me anyway.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#30

Post by madaxe_again »

On call once every three weeks? Oh fucking noes!

Out of hours support sucks, but yes, the reality is that you get paged, and you have to deal with things within SLA. It's hard, it's wearing, but one week out of every four is hardly intense.

I was on call for five years. It nearly broke me - but this article is just whining. Why take such a role if it's such a problem? It sounds more like his wife bashing him every time he had to do OOO work is what broke him.

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