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I seriously doubt it feels like a cheap anecdote to the family involved. In fact it sounds like real pain.
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My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
51–60 of 347 posts
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#52Because of the annoying wife he has.
God, I hope this is sarcasm.
EDIT: Fresh commas installed.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#53Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#54There'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…
From talking with people who work or worked for the companies you mention: their complaint is never about being on call or about the work hours, but about the stack ranking system. This means that every manager has to rank the people that report to her in order from best to worst, where best must get a promotion and worst must be sidetracked or fired, even if the whole team objectively ranked from 'excellent' to 'superstar'. This means that you may have to fire someone who performed only 'excellently', and it also makes your direct coworkers competitors, because it's in everyone's interest to be higher in the stack than you, and if someone else on your team does well, this may be a threat to you.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#55[deleted]
hop on the Amazon hate. Stories about how horrible Amazon is to work for have been coming out for years . This isn't some brand new bandwagon - it just happened that 2 such stories were posted on HN within 2 or so days.
And after Jeff Bezos quite literally asked for negative life stories.
But we all know this won't be pinned on Amazon. It will be pinned on this guy, who was having bad reviews due to unsatisfactory performance.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#56On 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?
On occasion, yes. I've done OOO both of trading desks and ecommerce operations, very high pressure - and with the added bonus that you're having to answer the phone to angry people while working on a technical fix.
It's called support hell for a reason - but what this guy's wife describes isn't extraordinary. It sounds like most mission critical support roles.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#57I 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…
I am currently the head of a two person ops team, so we effectively share on-call all the time. In reality as the buck stops with me I am on call constantly. It's a drag and I really wish I hadn't been backed into this corner (partly my fault, partly the company).
With that said; my Fiancee is a trainee nurse. She works three thirteen hour shifts a week. Which totally destroys your sleep pattern. Working two thirteen hour days in a row takes you out for a couple of days (she gets in at 9, has about an hour to shower and eat and is in bed for a 5am start).
All of this for a wage which is about half of mine. And with the massive responsibility that if she's tired and makes a mistake it's not a computer that dies but an actual person.
Puts it in perspective.
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#58On 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…
It depends how often you get the pager, no? If your calls were often at 4am and you had to work a normal schedule, it certainly does no good. Also, you are saying that nearly broke you, as if it's a badge of pride or something good...
That's the thing. For the types who do ooo work, it is a badge of pride - and I dare say if anything this is what she made him go to therapy over - I've had the conversation - "your job is ruining our fucking lives!" - "I enjoy it. It's hard but rewarding" - "you're getting your head checked".
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#59The 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.
right
Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon
#60On 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…
From experience, getting 5-8 pages a night every night during 12am - 6am gets very old very quickly; even if it is once every 4 weeks. Even more so when you're also expected to front work at 8:30am regardless of the night before.
The OP's described situation sounds like it is hideously under staffed / resourced.
But it doesn't have to be that way; I have friends who worked at Sun (back in the day obviously) where they had approx 1 in 5 week rota, and always two on call at once (one primary and one secondary). And that with a typical 2-3 pages out of hours. A night and day difference.