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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

#141

Post by serge2k »

pjc50 wrote: post #17
bechampion wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

I really think a union at Amazon would probably fix a lot of issues, but would cost most of the things about the culture that are actually good.

I do think the FC workers should be in a union. Absolutely.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#142

Post by rmc »

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…

> 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.

If it's worth millions of dollars per hour, you can afford to hire more employees to give greater and more coverage.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#143

Post by anentropic »

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…

sounds like they need a union

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#144

Post by fennecfoxen »

s3nnyy wrote: post #139
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…

Many people are fooled by prestige. PG's elaboration on it changed my life: "Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if two options seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one. [...] If you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other." ( http://www.paulgraham.co…

> Easy immigration (for EU citizens)

The lucky schmucks. As far as I could tell from research, immigrating as a US citizen is not an operation they support at all.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#145

Post by hydrogen18 »

xornor wrote: post #50

I am now quite happy that I failed in the Amazon recruitment process. Their guidance said that I should prepare couple of weeks for the interview. For me they gave one weekend which I had to use for the family event. Perhaps I was not engaged enough after all.

It became very obvious in the interview process that there was nothing to get excited about company wise. They didn't tell me anything about the company, at all. Just a bunch of questions anyone with a textbook could answer. Except for some reason I had to write code on a whiteboard. As if laptop's are a scarce resource and can't be spared for an interview.

The really funny part was when I started asking the HR person about the teams I was interviewing with. I asked some really basic questions and she had no clue how to answer them. Just easy stuff like "Why does this team have more than the other team?" and "How long has this team been together, how long have they worked on this project?". She had no idea how to answer.

They didn't even make me a offer. But what is really funny is every few months I get a request to come interview again for a totally unrelated position.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#146

Post by lemming »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #135
krzyk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What labor laws do you find insane?

I heard the daily complaints from a person attempting to handle restructuring at a major UK bank. Let me emphasize that the restructuring was ordered by parliament, who also happened to own most of the bank. Various difficulties: - Work councils get input in whether you can lay someone off - it's a far cry from at-will employment. - Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy - you have give a pregnant woman the option…

you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later.

I guess it's all much easier when you can just fire them.

I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy.

Incredibly, despite this obvious benefit, pregnancy is primarily seen as a good way to have a kid when you want one.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#147

Post by saiya-jin »

apexkid wrote: post #130
neals wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most employee apathetic company on earth Ever been abroad? Bangladesh and China are lovely this time of the year.

Thanks for not saying that its better than a brothel of Bangladesh and China. It was clear in what context I have written my comment. Your argument can be qualified as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

well, his (valid) point is, that arguably most of this planet inahbitants would do anything possible to get a job like that, for even half the income. which is true. just we in IT and developers in particular are in these days amazingly spoiled, full of this feeling that we are some engineer++, more clever, and generally better than say construction engineers (or any other for that matter). back home we have a saying "pride precedes the fall", and honestly, software development is in dire need for some proper disruption (ie jobs amount and salaries take 50% cut).

once you step outside of your little bubble and look how hard it is for real people out there to earn their crappy salaries, come back and we can talk like adults.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#148

Post by pjc50 »

barking wrote: post #93
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

demise of unions The demise of unions is also a general phenomenon across the western world. It's not helped by the migration of lots of factory industries to parts of the world without strong unions and with plenty of hungry workers. Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike. And if it's easy to replace striking workers, it's not an effective tool. It's also very disruptive (in the bad s…

As I'm sure you know, it wasn't just globalisation, Margaret Thatcher's intention was to spancel the unions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law_in_the_U...

Yes - although she wasn't the first or only person to propose that. That Wikipedia page leaves out both "In Place Of Strife" (1969 Labour government), and the three day week itself. The disruption caused by high levels of industrial action greatly reduced the support of the public for it.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#149

Post by boxy310 »

serge2k wrote: post #140
pjc50 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really think a union at Amazon would probably fix a lot of issues, but would cost most of the things about the culture that are actually good. I do think the FC workers should be in a union. Absolutely.

I really think that if Amazon is only surviving with a razor-thin profit margin and they only do that because they treat their employees like beat-up warehouse equipment, then maybe it shouldn't exist as a company. My opinion of them has really downgraded from a "Sears" of the internet (back when Sears actually had a good reputation) towards more of a "Walmart" of the internet.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#150

Post by gerbilly »

I remember a time when Sunday shopping was a topic being debated in Canada. (At the time there was a law mandating that most stores be closed on Sundays.)

Now stores are open 7 days a week and sometimes 24 hours a day.

Whenever I see a store post that it's open 24hrs/day all I can think about is what that does to the employees: because for most people, overnight shifts destroy your life.

I wonder if we wouldn't better off as a society having regular business hours and getting back that one day a week off.

It's our fault as workers, really. Because we lack solidarity, workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can work longer hours for less.

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