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

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#281

Post by VikingCoder » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 5:44 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #271

VikingCoder wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imgabe implied it's difficult for a company to fire someone. I'm responding that it's trivially easy for a company to make your life a living hell, and make you want to quit.

Yes and constructive dismissal is a legal concept enabling an employee who experienced something like that to sue and receive compensation for unfair dismissal. Companies generally don't like to be sued and don't put themselves in positions where they could be sued.

Ah, got it. I thought you were accusing me of dismissing imgabe's argument without giving it proper constructive attention.

I don't really buy the argument that companies don't know how to get around this.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#282

Post by magic_beans » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

bkeroack wrote: post #247

radiorental wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood the logic of giving up the things you enjoy in life to gain time in the future to enjoy life. I'm all for frugal but life isn't a dress rehearsal.

There's a great moment in the documentary about Joan Rivers[1] before she died (was killed, basically). Sitting in her opulent, probably immensely expensive Manhattan penthouse apartment, in the middle of a discussion about how much money she has to make to stay afloat, she said something to the effect of: "Sure I could live carefully and it would be easy, but who wants to live carefully?". The point being, if you en…

> I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for

You just wait until you have your own "offspring". Inheriting money won't mean they'll grow up without work ethic -- that only happens when a parent fails to teach their child that skill.

You WILL be giving your child the freedom to explore his or her passion to the absolute fullest, and to arrive at his or her greatest potential.

Most people are not so lucky.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#283

Post by dominotw » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

neals wrote: post #36

apexkid wrote: post #31

The email from Jeff to his employees was impeccably unsatisfactory. It was a sheer display of ignorance and rejection towards everything quoted and said. However, no matter how much Jeff sticks to that attitude, it wouldn't change the reality that Amazon is the most customer centric company on earth and the most employee apathetic company on earth as well. It reflects in major workplace elements like health schemes,…

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

I am pretty sure this "employer" would trounce Jeff Bezos

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thailan...

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#284

Post by erroneousfunk » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

aianus wrote: post #260

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…

> There's no recourse for this If they grossly misrepresented the job you can just leave in the first month or two and not mention it on your resume. It's not like it's a tough job market out there.

I think the big problem is that people often move (like the author did with his wife) to work for Amazon and feel pressured to stick with it for more than a month or two, especially if they have families.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#285

Post by ycseattle » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #278

Can someone tell me why people continue to work for a toxic place if they are being abused?

The Seattle weather?

Actually, I think it is because of the lack of good opportunities. In Seattle when you want to look for a prestigious tech job, it used to be just Microsoft and Amazon. That leaves you one option if you are leaving one of them. Its getting better in the past several years now that Google, Facebook are building up their satellite offices. I moved to the bay area recently after ten years in Seattle, and found that the working culture here is a lot better than that in Seattle. Also in Seattle you don't get a lot of recruiters contacting you while in bay area recruiting spam is a problem. I think this is a good opportunity for startups to open a Seattle office.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#286

Post by weland » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #171

weland wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wearin…

Tell me, if it was your money being invested, would you act differently?

I like to think that I would. Primarily because I tend to seek to spend and invest money in a way that does not require me to make compromises in terms of humanity.

Granted, I've never invested money in anything of Amazon's level, so I cannot know -- all I know is what I hope I'd do.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#287

Post by tajano » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #224

eitally wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> who was probably way more candid than management would've liked. This is me in interviews. I ask for a private interview session and give the real lowdown. I refuse to become one of these assholes that drops all this PR speak and then you take the job and realize you've been misled. I air a little laundry and give real day-to-day stuff. I think it benefits everyone to be candid, at least towards the later stage of…

> He also doesn't want to hire a primdonna who is expecting a cush job.

Consider not getting a raise in five years. With inflation and (in most technology hubs) a skyrocketing rising cost of living, your company is effectively paying you less every year you work for them.

It doesn't make you a primadonna to question this premise -- it just means you're not a sucker. If you're in a career/company where your value goes down with every year of experience you get, it forces you question a lot of your life decisions.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#288

Post by yummyfajitas » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #279

yummyfajitas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everyone I know who has taken maternity leave has very much had an obligation to go back afterwards, or pay pack the money paid while they were off. I'm also not familiar with anyone who has got pregnant to avoid layoffs, if nothing else given the cost of raising a child it seems like a very poor tradeoff.

The choices are:

A) Laid off in a bad economy, hunt for job, maybe find something. Then have children at age 33 or 34, only a couple of years into a new gig. (In banking they consider a couple of years to be a short time.)

B) Get pregnant at age 30 instead, avoid the current restructuring, and if you do hit the job market it'll be in a much better economy.

Really? You can't possibly see the benefit of (B)?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#289

Post by amyjess » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

RogerL wrote: post #164

rmc wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. And this is the biggest problem with tech hiring. The prospective employee can't know how bad it really is. So changing jobs is risky. Companies wanting to hire need to compensate for that risk with a definited benefit. Salary is the…

This is a big reason why people hang around. The stress of interviewing, not to mention the absurdities of how you are "measured", and you may just be leaping from the frying pan into the fire. It's easy, if not wise, to just stick where you are and grind through it. It'll get better, right? You'll always hear promises about how things are changing, how your concerns are being taken seriously, etc. Then you'll look u…

I went through that last year.

For me, the inertia was a little stronger because of my gender transition. I had zero experience interviewing as a woman, and I wasn't sure if I passed, so I figured it was safer to continue working for the same company I transitioned at. The logic was "they know me, they knew me before transition, they know I've only been living as a woman less than a year, and I already know they don't care, so I might as well take the safe option and stick with them rather than risk freaking an interviewer out with my voice or accidentally wear something a woman shouldn't wear to an interview".

Mind you, my employer at the time wasn't great. I was underpaid (75% market value in pure salary, plus I got no insurance whatsoever), my boss couldn't handle stress and took it out by screaming at his subordinates, software engineering leadership was absolutely terrible for multiple reasons (I and others tried to change it, and we were rebuffed, so the people I worked best with quit in frustration one by one), and I had a months-long nightmare involving the building management discriminating against me where my employer offered me almost no support (it only ended when I got the city involved). There were a number of other minor concerns as well, but these were the big ones.

During the worst of the discrimination, the owner/CEO promised me a bonus if I stuck around until our next product entered production. Production was delayed by two months from what was originally planned, and even then getting him to actually keep his promise was like pulling teeth, though I eventually got it. Somehow, I ended up staying on even after that, though I should've probably at least started applying for jobs once the bonus cleared my bank account.

It took way, way too long for me to accept that I needed to find a new job. Ultimately, after a particularly bad incident of my boss taking his stress out on me, I finally got up the courage to put myself out there, I got a wonderful new job, and I'm more than happy with my current employer.

In the long run, the devil you know is the worse devil.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#290

Post by VikingCoder » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 6:54 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #268

VikingCoder wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSHA. In Syria. Right.

I ignored that part because it's plainly hyperbole. There are no commercial flights to Syria at this time, as there generally aren't to any active war zone. Even if a company wanted to send an employee there, they couldn't. Plus it's not going to look good when you bring up the email ordering you to go to a war zone where the company has no business interests or even an active office during your wrongful termination…

> Even if a company wanted to send an employee there, they couldn't.

You don't need a commercial flight to go somewhere. Don't fight something you think is hyperbole with hyperbole.

> If you want to keep coming up with excuses for why employees need to put up with bullshit from companies

Slow down. I'm documenting the kind of BS companies pull. I'm not endorsing it.

My mom was essentially fired for having cancer. It was done very creatively and legally.