The email from Jeff to his employees was impeccably unsatisfactory. It was a sheer display of ignorance and rejection towards everything quoted and said. However, no matter how much Jeff sticks to that attitude, it wouldn't change the reality that Amazon is the most customer centric company on earth and the most employee apathetic company on earth as well. It reflects in major workplace elements like health schemes, holiday schemes (though employee have official over 30 holidays they are not allowed to spend it without facing low performance review), food benefits (specially in offices outside USA) etc. Though Amazon claims that the leadership principle "Frugality" stands for minimizing waste and not cheapness, one can't dismiss the latter definition.
My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
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Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Us as employees we need to learn when to say stop There's a word for this, beginning with "U", that a lot of people don't like.
And (in the UK at least) the demise of unions has seen the earnings ratio of company bosses to employees rise to levels not seen since the 19th or early 20th century
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#33> He had been under so much stress that after the meeting I asked him to go to therapy.
It is not clear why he needed therapy from this article. Just because of the stressful job?
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#34On 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 t…
Fuck. you.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#35I'm quite surprised that of all the famous Silicon Valley people, and their rallying behind Jeff Bezos, no one seems to believe that some part of these many many stories could be true. Either that, or they seem to think that only incompetent people are complaining. Therefore I must post part of my comment I posted here [1]. One of my good friend, who was suffering at Amazon, is thriving at Google. He's done amazingly well for himself and for Google in past 1 year he's been there (& has been well recognized within the org). This is not incompetence.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#36The email from Jeff to his employees was impeccably unsatisfactory. It was a sheer display of ignorance and rejection towards everything quoted and said. However, no matter how much Jeff sticks to that attitude, it wouldn't change the reality that Amazon is the most customer centric company on earth and the most employee apathetic company on earth as well. It reflects in major workplace elements like health schemes,…
> the most employee apathetic company on earth
Ever been abroad? Bangladesh and China are lovely this time of the year.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#37Looking 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.
Without sounding too cynical, loyalty to a company (working out of hours) is not always returned as loyalty from the company. They wouldn't be pleased you turning up a few hours late every day to compensate for your extra time outside work.
Of course, time off in lieu may be arranged.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#38>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…
A million bucks an hour and there's a manager and two devs on it? If they had three devs it would cut the workload by a third for the existing devs. And it would cost 150K-200K or so (salary, benefits, tax), equivalent to 12 minutes of waiting time.
Surely a guy with an MBA can figure out the cost/benefit of such a situation?
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#39On 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 t…
Would you actually get 10 pages a day every day while you were on call though?
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#40I have a four-week rotation on-call where I work. Pretty much the same workload as discussed in the article with it. Calls and text messages at 3am, can't be more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (remote desktop software on Android is a godsend.)
While it doesn't feel unbearable, and pays fairly well (at least for the area I'm in), it definitely has completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I no longer have anything near a 24-hour clock: I'll sleep for, at most, 3-4 hours at a time, usually twice a day. Those times change rapidly. As a result, many times I'll need to take modafinil to stay awake through regular shifts; coffee isn't nearly enough.
The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating.
"Why not quit?" is the usual: it pays too well, have a mortgage to pay, was described as being less work than it turned out to be in the interview, etc. But it really does make for a terrible work-life balance, and it's a shame people are so eager to accept on-call as "just the way it is to have a good middle-class job."
The thing I really don't understand is how they expect you to always be available, no matter what. The human body cannot physically go for seven days with no sleep, at least not without a complete psychotic break-down. Yet there's no sympathy or compassion for this simple biological fact by the higher-ups if you ever sleep through a text message.
It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours (+1 lunch) overlapped by their own work schedules. Yes, it's twice the rotation work, but it's 3 hours outside work each day instead of 15, and you could keep a consistent sleep schedule, and have a social life with times untethered to the internet.
Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.