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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

#111

Post by happywolf »

trhway wrote: post #92
happywolf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument sounds like it is not something wrong to commit crime in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and it is the victim's fault since that person didn't read news or does their due diligence. Interesting :)

there is a difference between crime and contract. You enter contract at will in exchange for something, and not doing due diligence is your fault. You may also look at the notion of exempt employee - some actions would be illegal if done to non-exempt employees while ok to be done to exempt.

I do understand where you are from and I agree one will need to be aware what they are signing up for. A lot of times companies pay extra for the hardship, and I will say this is fair and square.

However there is a limit on what a company can do to its employees, even employees signed contracts. Some behaviors like making people cry are bordering harassment, and these are against the law in most countries.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#112

Post by erikb »

lordnacho wrote: post #108
erikb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's what happens in most companies all the time, all around the planet. But the reason is not evil management and it's not a result of planned activity. Management is also hard. They also have to deliver too much with too little budget at hand. The only difference is that they earn more money and they often don't have to pull the team out of the B.S. themselves on weekends and late night hours. They are na…

I agree. But the experience for the producer is highly dependent on the manager's behaviour. - Does he keep asking for the impossible? - Does he hang around or go home at 5pm? - Does he at least do what he is able to do for the team, or does he just leave it all for the team? Difference between competent and incompetent management can often be little things that help handle emotional stress for the worker.

Yes, but the amount of emotional stress of the worker is mostly irrelevant to the manager. It only becomes a problem when the company gets bad press like from that article, or when the productivity of the team drops so much that he can't project success to his managers and peers.

Our goal as workers can't be to tell our managers about our emotional stress (which he doesn't care about), but showing him alternatives that contain less stress for us but at least the same amount of projectable success to him, and/or just doing them, because in the end not being informed how the success was achieved is less important to the manager than having spare time to get a massage or visit the golf club.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#113

Post by sepeth »

eitally wrote: post #96
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 just turned down an offer because of something like this. I went through a bunch of interviews and things seemed pretty peachy, until I interviewed with a guy (who'd have been a peer) who was probably way more candid than management would've liked. He said things like "I haven't gotten a raise in five years so make sure you negotiate hard when you come in", "I got an apartment close to the office so I can be here q…

> I just turned down an offer because of something like this.

One question, was this offer from amazon? I mean, are the things the guy said for amazon?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#114

Post by chefkoch »

onion2k wrote: post #105
yummyfajitas wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice. It's also a choice to enter into highly leveraged options purchases on illiquid assets which require major lifestyle changes to walk away from (mortgage). Complaining that the mortgage inhibits lifestyle changes is no different than complaining "I dropped $800k short selling AMZN, now I need to make margin call".

Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice. To follow a remark like that with one about people regretting losing $800k makes me wonder how many low paid people you know. There are a lot of people who can't afford to save, and it's not because they're overconsuming. Although, admittedly, I doubt many of them are Amazon employees.

I guess most people at amazon work at their warehouses?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#115

Post by orm »

Some things about this article bother me. It starts by describing what is objectively a problem ascribable to Amazon itself ( letting on-call rotations reach the 3 week mark is terrible ), and then descends to pure appeal to emotion.

Here's what I mean: the only thing that seemed an actual problem, to judge from the article, is that the on-call rotations became once every three weeks. Perhaps the length of the on-call, or the number of on-call people at the same time is another problem Amazon could address in this case.

On-call in general (24/7 availability for some period of time), is not exclusively an Amazon thing. I'm surprised the writer tried to portray it so.

After that, the author stops giving reasons. For example, the decision to go on a business trip after 4 weeks of their daughter being born seems to have been their own, not Amazon's. " I imagine he could have turned that down, but I was insistent that he go so". She did not explain if they felt coerced by Amazon and how.

Same thing goes for the hotel they cancelled a day early. How did that happen and why? The writer did not thing this was important enough somehow, but I think it is.

Normally I'd call this sloppiness, but considering the author is a professional and this had to get proof-read, it may just be the author is being a bit disingenuous as well.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#116

Post by yummyfajitas »

onion2k wrote: post #105
yummyfajitas wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice. It's also a choice to enter into highly leveraged options purchases on illiquid assets which require major lifestyle changes to walk away from (mortgage). Complaining that the mortgage inhibits lifestyle changes is no different than complaining "I dropped $800k short selling AMZN, now I need to make margin call".

Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice. To follow a remark like that with one about people regretting losing $800k makes me wonder how many low paid people you know. There are a lot of people who can't afford to save, and it's not because they're overconsuming. Although, admittedly, I doubt many of them are Amazon employees.

I was referring to the software developers working at Amazon (much like the article). I was comparing making mortgage payments on an $800k house to making margin calls on an $800k short sale.

To be fair, most of the low paid people I know could also save. This is pretty obvious to me by comparing the lifestyle of my Indian friends and my American friends. Somehow the Indians earn far less but manage to save massively (hint: they consume less).

The main exception might be Americans in the $0-20k/year of consumption category, since big chunks of their "income" are non-market income. But that kind of makes the question of whether to quit moot...

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#117

Post by krzyk »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #104
xyzzyz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 overlapped by their own work schedules. Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.

India is a better bet. 10.5 hours away means they are nearly on the opposite schedule, price is better (wages only marginally, but Europe has lots of other costs) and you aren't stuck dealing with insane euro labor laws.

What labor laws do you find insane?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#118

Post by chriskanan »

davedx wrote: post #70
ErrantX wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I am constantly amazed and terrified of the kinds of shifts doctors and nurses do. I really do not understand how they manage to not make mistakes in such an environment. In Grey's Anatomy, you often see people taking a couple of hours sleep mid shift; is this generally accurate?

My fiance is a child neurology resident in Boston. Last year she was on 28 hour call every 4 days, which means she was forced to stay up at least 30 hours if things were busy at the hospital. Depending on the rotation, she would catch 0-4 hours of sleep at the hospital if it wasn't that busy at night. I think they only make the residents work 28 hour shifts, with attending working more like 9-15 hours per day.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#119

Post by enraged_camel »

lordnacho wrote: post #98
venomsnake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well - you deliver 40 for the week and be gone. Not that hard. At 1800 you leave office. There is nothing your boss can tell you.

When they decide to fire you, the real reason is never said. They'll just think of some BS and you'll be out the door.

Exactly. In most states companies can fire you for any reason, or even no reason. And if there is a reason, they aren't obligated to disclose it.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#120

Post by adekok »

byuu wrote: post #40

I 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…

> Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.

Because it's cheaper to burn out your existing employees, fire them for non-performance, and then hire (and lie to) new employees who don't know what's going on.

The problem here is "on call". Why not "on duty"? If I'm getting paid for the midnight shift one week out of four, that's annoying, but manageable. If I'm getting paid for 40 hours a week, but I'm "on call" 24/7, 365 days a year, that's abusive.

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