My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

It's basically just talking with a trained listener.

It works because the vast majority of peoples' behavior is unconscious; we operate based on habits and assumptions that never really get tested. Unconscious behavior, by definition, is outside of conscious awareness. It also tends to be self-reinforcing in feedback loops: for example, if you assume everyone's dishonest and corrupt, you'll hide your motives and behave in a way that an honest person would assume to be dishonesty, and so all the honest people would refuse to associate with you, and so everyone around you would be dishonest and corrupt.

Therapy doesn't actually "cure" anything. You cure yourself. What a therapist does is serve as a guide, providing an outside perspective that will challenge your unconscious assumptions when they're leading to problems for you. You can get the same effect by having a close friend or confidante, or even by having social contact with a wide variety of people that are different from yourself. But social relationships don't usually work that way; usually we gravitate toward people like ourselves, so if your beliefs are dysfunctional, you'll gravitate toward other people who are dysfunctional in similar ways (cf Amazon), and then that behavior becomes normalized for you. A therapist, being paid for their time, has an incentive to stick with you even when you're being annoying, and their training exposes them to a wide variety of behaviors.

I have an on-call job. We have two teams, one in Switzerland (where I am), and the other on the west coast of the US; shifts are daytime only, from 0600 to 1800, with the other team handling the night shift. Each team's about five people.

I'm usually on call for three or four days in a row once or twice a month. Schedules are flexible. We just enter dates when we're not available into our calendar and this insane piece of inhouse software looks at our oncall history and determines a fair schedule, so everyone gets the same amount of oncall time. It even takes into account weekends (which are typically very quiet, but you still need to be within mobile-signal-or-coffee-shop range).

Pager load is typically one or two a day, and are usually fairly trivial; far more annoying are the non-paging alerts and paperwork. Sometimes there's a pager storm as something catches fire and burns down, but there's always someone around to help when that happens.

Being on-call here is... never something I look forward to, but the systems are in place to give support if I need it, and I'm never on for very long. The culture here emphasises that when my shift is over, particularly when there's a crisis, I hand over to the next person (in the other team) and then GO HOME, because otherwise I'll burn out.

This. It's easy to shift the blame to faceless Amazon and pretend "the company" is at fault.

It's not. The people who are running the company (and I'm not referring strictly to top management here) are the ones with the blatant disregard for their employees.

This is not a result of some inherent forces our Universe suddenly concentrating over Amazon. They're the result of business decisions. A bunch of people wearing suits have talked about this and agreed it's okay.

For the wife (and mum) who wrote this letter, I can feel her pain. Especially relocating to place where emotional support is low and life is lonely. We relocated to Germany from Australia, and it was a few hard years at the start. There are many reasons why we relocated, and some of those are similar to the author. We were lucky that we managed to see through the hard years and found our way. Now we are enjoying life in Germany. It sounds like the family is also on their way as well.

For me, this article is not necessary about Amazon workplace practice. However, it certainly did not help at all.

Always a cost center until it isn't. Typical short sighted management.