My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#201

Post by eternalban » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

joesmo wrote: post #190

curiousfiddler wrote: post #35

I'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…

Honestly, it doesn't matter what SV people think. If they want to claim this isn't true, they're essentially claiming a mass employee conspiracy. Let's see, a mass employee conspiracy against Amazon or Amazon, a large company, treating its workers like shit? Gee, I wonder which one is more plausible.

Behold the Power of NYTimes.

Dear European publishing giant (you know who) weary of Google take note how it is to be done when it is done in USA.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#202

Post by outside1234 » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #112

lordnacho wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

one thing: as a lead, i can tell you that managers are just as abused often times as the worker.

that's where this pressure on the worker comes from: there is systematic top down hierarchical pressure applied that works almost like hydraulics. A sociopath like Bezos only has to beat down his 6 reports into accepting impossible goals (for a normal working schedule) and they will beat down their aggregate 48 reports and they will beat down their 384 reports and so on.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#203

Post by rrss1122 » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

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 think it would be good if the FC workers unionize. It would greatly increase the speed of development for automation solutions and benefit robotics as a whole.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#204

Post by Tloewald » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

s3nnyy wrote: post #185

Tloewald wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that retiring before 50 is not the solution to unemployment after 50, although the idea of living frugally so you can retire early seems great until you try it.

I think this is very subjective. I am living on less than a thousand Swiss-Francs per month in one of the most expensive cities in the world (Zurich) and I do not feel that I am missing anything. I know, things will be very different when I have kids, but still.

You can achieve financial independence in:

33 * Cost of Living / (Salary - Cost of Living)

Assuming for simplicity 3% real interest on investments once you stop working (which is close enough if you're trying to get out of the rat race quickly), and potentially infinite lifespan.

So if your cost of living is $10k and you earn $100k you get:

330,000 / 90,000 -> less than four years.

Great theory.

I don't want to live on oatmeal and tuna for the rest of my life. (I actually don't think we should be eating tuna at all and have stopped eating it although I love it.)

Now aside from obvious (e.g. kids, as you state) there's also:

* At some point you'll get a $500 optical bill or a $5000 dental bill (or a $50,000 medical bill if you live in the US) -- and let's not even get into chronic conditions.

* You may want to travel.

* At some point there will probably be a major economic shock and you may be utterly screwed. (But hey, so will a lot of people, and you'll be used to it.)

Finally -- you may enjoy working. I do.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#205

Post by outside1234 » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

Ok, so Amazon is a turd of an employer.

The question in my mind is how do we stop this abuse?

Do we (as workers) put out a letter that asks for net average 40 hour weeks and ask companies to sign on to it?

Do we keep naming and shaming like this? Or?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#206

Post by willismichael » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #147

apexkid wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it interesting that one one hand we have people talking about how software developers are entitled cry-babies, and then there are others who say that software developers are horrible at negotiating salary and benefits, ending up woefully under-compensated for the value that we bring to employers.

So which is it?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#207

Post by a8da6b0c91d » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #160

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…

One of my cow-orkers is an ex Amazonian. Not damaged, though he rather disliked the culture. Amazon lost a good egg when we hired him. He says that the only thing you can expense without a manager's permission is a pager. Which, if true, tells you a lot about Amazon.

It's retail. Margins are thin. Walmart is notoriously cheap.

Don't work in low margin, hyper-competitive businesses, is the long and short of it.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#208

Post by Gravityloss » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #180

If Jeff is reading this: hopefully it should be apparent that these stories of constant out-of-hours calls indicate incompetent management. Note I'm not talking about the "human" side of this (obviously that's pretty bad), but rather this is just bad engineering, bad management, bad business. If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does n…

This is very important. There needs to be an "agile manifesto" style awakening on this, so that business people also understand that software quality matters a lot. Perhaps I'll do a writeup at some point...

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#209

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #57

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…

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…

The difference is your fiancé will not be a trainee forever, and as an RN will be able to get pick between money/schedule/speciality.

If you like long hours and chaos, work in the ER. if 5A-2P works, be a surgical nurse. There are lots of options that you can study for and get into. Also, in many states you're hourly, so you get paid.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#210

Post by sudoherethere » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

I am glad that finally Amazon's work environment is finally getting exposure. We had a few colleagues who worked for Amazon and they called it a sweatshop of IT world. Because of them, I have turned down recruiters from Amazon many times and stopped my friends from applying there.

Hopefully, Amazon will change their workplace policies now or suffer stock price decline when smart people stop applying there.