My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

* Faith healers are priests aren't trained in the myriad forms of double blind tested, peer reviewed techniques that can be used to help manage or reduce stress and emotional pain.

* Therapists don't just listen. They talk. They make suggestions - ranging from everything from common sense things that may have more weight because they are coming from a medical professional, to recommending aggressive routines and techniques (meditation, diet change, medication, group therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, changes in routine, sleep patterns) that require the active participation of the patient and, over time, are shown, in double blind, peer reviewed studies, to have positive impacts. You aren't just paying some asshole to listen to you.

* A therapist, with years of training, is often able to easily identify stressors of which you are unaware, and separate out stressors that are present in the environment (your shitty, shitty job) vs. the result of old emotional trauma (e.g. horrible parenting) vs. personality disorders (borderline personality, OCD) vs. mental illness (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder) and can figure out a plan tailored to your needs. This may involve a combination of different types of therapy (there are many, and many types of 'talk' therapy actually are vastly different when viewed from the inside), in some instances, medication, and in most instances, figuring out how to make changes in your life to reduce stressors.

A therapist isn't just a black hole into whom you throw your problems. A therapist is a medical expert who has deep knowledge of personality and mental disorders, knowledge of pro-active methods of combating both, and acts as a medically informed, objective 'life coach.'

I mean, damn, what does a physical trainer do if not just talk to you? Why not go to a priest or faith healer to get your calves real swole? What does a financial advisor do if not just talk to you? Why not go to a priest or a faith healer to manage your 401k?

The ignorance displayed at this:

> If so, can they explain how talking to a psychologist cures a medical condition?

Is just sort of flabbergasting. Not all the reasons you go to a therapist are for medical conditions; many therapists are MDs; therapy doesn't just consist of talking to someone; like any other field, it has tons of study and many experts, people who know better than you do, and quite often it helps to talk to an expert.

If that comes off as harsh - I apologize - especially if you are someone who is on the fence about therapy. I sincerely suspect, however, you are not, and, instead, just assaulting the idea that therapy is even remotely a worthwhile pursuit. It is.

The legality of uncompensated overtime drives me crazy. There is a lot that practitioners in our profession have yet to learn - valuing ourselves and what we do.

Good managers can spot when this is needed. But if the employee is telling the manager that everything is fine and isn't showing signs of home stress, I don't blame the manager.

> Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up.

I think most companies are going to value and reward those who put in extra time consistently over those who don't.

I know how it is though - people want the stamp of a top company on their resume. They also want to succeed.

I blame the husband just a tiny bit - for not saying 'no' earlier. Ironically, he might not have been fired if he put a line in the sand earlier. He probably did underperform because he wasn't managing the manager's expectations properly.

Of course, he might have gotten fired anyway - nobody will ever know.

Work is tough - and unfortunately companies like Amazon aren't "buffering the core" very well. These are engineers who might not be good at managing expectations or managing or leadership even - but why stress them out if they're otherwise super-useful to the company? Employees who can't handle this stress but are otherwise valuable should be cradled and they'll perform better for longer - pretty simple really.

I hate how valuable stuff like this is to hiring managers. If you asked me to pick between the guy who spent a year at Amazon or the guy who ran his own startup soup-to-nuts for a year, I'd rather go with the startup guy. Its crazy that we have this informal pseudo-classist system of "people who worked at AAA shops" vs "nobodies." Are HR departments and hiring managers really this dense?