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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

#301

Post by hwstar »

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.

A lot of companies make you sign an agreement to arbitrate instead of going through the courts. That would mitigate the risk for them that they would get sued. Arbitrators don't use juries.

Hopefully the California legislature passes AB 465 and bans pre-dispute arbitration clauses.

Companies need to fear being sued in the courts if they misbehave, and should not be able to keep the disputes private and out of the court records.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#302

Post by VikingCoder »

imgabe wrote: post #295
VikingCoder wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You don't need a commercial flight to go somewhere. Don't fight something you think is hyperbole with hyperbole. Are you seriously contending that sending an employee into an active war zone is something an actual employer [1] is actually capable of doing? Since you're documenting BS companies pull, care to provide any documentation of something like that actually happening? Whatever Amazon is like, I'm pretty sure…

A transfer to Oakland is just about as bad.

And yes, my mother, while going through cancer treatment, was pretty much powerless, regardless of how she wanted to act.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#303

Post by hwstar »

Brian-Puccio wrote: post #198
adekok wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 man…

In the US, that's the big difference between exempt and non-exempt. I'm glad I have a lower, less prestigious job because it's classified as non-exempt. That means if I'm on call, I'm paid for it. Which means the company really has to think "is it worth having this guy sit around in case something breaks?". It also means company policy prohibits me from having a company cell with email access, because I shouldn't be…

As I mentioned elsewhere, another way to resolve this is to reform the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and adopt rules similar to the EU Working Time Directive.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#304

Post by tsotha »

lordnacho wrote: post #38
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…

A million bucks an hour and there's a manager and two devs on it? If they had three devs it would cut the workload by a third for the existing devs. And it would cost 150K-200K or so (salary, benefits, tax), equivalent to 12 minutes of waiting time. Surely a guy with an MBA can figure out the cost/benefit of such a situation?

They did have more people. The problem is not everyone in the group knows the code to the same degree. Even when you have someone on station who's supposed to take care of problems, if it takes him more than about twenty minutes to find the problem they're going to start calling the rest of the team.

If you're good and you have a reputation for being good they're going to call you. I got 3:00 AM calls because I'd written a particular piece of code even though a half dozen of my colleagues were already on site and awake.

Put yourself in the manager's shoes. You can not tell the customer he's needs to wait two hours for the people on site to come up to speed on the shipping module (or whatever) because the guy who wrote it needs his beauty sleep. There's too much money involved.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#305

Post by schrodinger »

kamaal wrote: post #264
bkeroack wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>Some might argue that one ought to save so one's children can get a nice inheritance. Why would you not do that if you can. Having money gives your kids access to good education and freedom to stay away from a lot of crap poor kids have to deal with every day. Plus there is no advantage greater in life than getting a good head start over other people. A lot of people spend a big part of their lives just to get a de…

But why is your kid more deserving than anyone elses'? They didn't do anything to earn the money, just won the genetic lottery.

(Not saying I won't want to help out my kids, but I think it's worth questioning / considering these things.)

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#306

Post by lordnacho »

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.

How on earth is this possible? I live in Zug, and everything in this part of the world costs a fortune. How do you even get a place to live for less than 1500? You realise when you have a kid the krippe is 2500CHF each month? Have you ever eaten at a restaurant for under 50CHF a head (even a McDonalds meal costs 15CHF)?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#307

Post by imgabe »

VikingCoder wrote: post #302
imgabe wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need a commercial flight to go somewhere. Don't fight something you think is hyperbole with hyperbole. Are you seriously contending that sending an employee into an active war zone is something an actual employer [1] is actually capable of doing? Since you're documenting BS companies pull, care to provide any documentation of something like that actually happening? Whatever Amazon is like, I'm pretty sure…

A transfer to Oakland is just about as bad. And yes, my mother, while going through cancer treatment, was pretty much powerless, regardless of how she wanted to act.

I'm sorry for what your mother and the rest of your family went through. I have no doubt that the company acted unfairly. Encouraging an attitude of fatalism and "they'll screw you no matter what!" is only going to exacerbate the problem. Companies will only continue to get away with things like that if everyone just accepts them as a fact of life.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#308

Post by VikingCoder »

imgabe wrote: post #307
VikingCoder wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A transfer to Oakland is just about as bad. And yes, my mother, while going through cancer treatment, was pretty much powerless, regardless of how she wanted to act.

I'm sorry for what your mother and the rest of your family went through. I have no doubt that the company acted unfairly. Encouraging an attitude of fatalism and "they'll screw you no matter what!" is only going to exacerbate the problem. Companies will only continue to get away with things like that if everyone just accepts them as a fact of life.

Want to hear something weird?

I actually think it should be really easy for a company to fire someone, for whatever reason they want to.

And I think we should have social services that make you not fear for your life to be unemployed. Free education. Free health care. Basic Income on top of that.

But maybe I'm just completely nuts.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#309

Post by eitally »

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…

And applicants absolutely appreciate candor, there is no question about that. Thanks for being one of the good guys. :)

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#310

Post by bcoates »

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #156
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…

You know that the USA also has mandatory consultation before Layoffs (redundancy) - in some ways more onerous as the penalties are harder.

Even in the rare cases the law applies, the maximum penalty is two month's pay minus whatever severance/notice was given. It's not much of a restriction.
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