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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

#321
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might sound crazy but on a software engineering salary, you can retire before 50 if you get used to spending little on food, transportation and shelter. My most favorite online resource on how to live frugally is this: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-became-financially-i... .

Retirement is mainly appealing to those who don't like what they do for a living.

That's a great attitude to take if you're at retirement age. But in order to retire you have to save decades before you know whether or not you still enjoy what you do for a living.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#322
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's what happens in most companies all the time, all around the planet. But the reason is not evil management and it's not a result of planned activity. Management is also hard. They also have to deliver too much with too little budget at hand. The only difference is that they earn more money and they often don't have to pull the team out of the B.S. themselves on weekends and late night hours. They are na…

I think you're overstating the case a little here. Instead of seeing everyone as a victim its fair to place blame somewhere and to discuss real solutions. Its obvious to me that if we had mandatory overtime pay for tech workers a lot of this toxic culture would dry up. Managers would push back onto senior leadership the real costs of working undermanned teams this hard. There would suddenly be a financial incentive t…

Mandatory overtime pay would make the cost to the person's life costly to the manager.

Esp, when double time pay kicks in :-)

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#323
post #255
post #189

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Yep I got dinged for coming into work at 11am when I had stayed till 11pm the night before and had done weekend work. Fuck exploitation.

Yikes! First company I ever worked for wasn't particularly flashy, but I did like that they had a "12-hour rule" to guard against that. The policy was that you wouldn't be expected back at work in fewer than 12 hours after you'd left the day before.

Nice simple rule!

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no recourse for this because IT workers do not have to be (legally) paid overtime. Remove that legality and enforce overtime to be paid at 1.5x regular wage, and you should see a better workplace and higher employment. I think productivity numbers will also be realistic (lower). The legality of uncompensated overtime drives me crazy. There is a lot that practitioners in our profession have yet to learn - val…

Something that I was impressed by when I interviewed at my current job was not just that the company said that they value work-life balance, but that they demonstrated it: they pay time-and-a-half for overtime specifically in order to dissuade management from ever having us work overtime. And in the year I've been here we've had one period where we could optionally work overtime, but we've had no mandatory overtime.…

What company? What country?

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#325
post #260

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> 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.

Don't forget in the NYTimes article : you had to payback the signing bonus and relocation reimbursement if you left within a year.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#326
An educated professional's capacity to endure pain, and inability to recognize implicit humiliation (i.e. your family is way less important than this job) as measured in this article, are about 6 years.

For six years he put up with this abuse of power over him. He could have walked out after six months but he chose not to. How can Amazon be faulted for the employee's indecision.

He's financially benefited by those 6 years of being an absent father. The financial gains are very concrete and measurable, and comforting. The same can't be said of the intangible - like playing with your infant child, and caring for them - can't put a value on them but that's a huge loss.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#327
post #320

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.

Think of it from another angle, then. Would you rather be unemployed after 50 with or without enough money to retire?

I think the point is that being employable (even for your own projects) is preferable to the alternative. Indeed having valuable skills is generally better than having money.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

It is not always your choice when you will have a baby, and length of employment at a company should be the last thing to consider.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#329
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

I rent a room for 620 CHF, I pay 220 CHF for the obligatory insurance, 200 CHF for food (if I am socially forced to eat out I tell that I had food before and get a beer) and around 90 CHF for transportation. That amounts to more or less 1100 CHF.

200 CHF for food might sound little but I actually eat way healthier than most of my colleagues. (The last thing you can afford in Switzerland is getting sick.)

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#330
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I can agree that they also face pressure. But on the one hand they have more options, for example putting the work onto a lower level guy, they get less bad feedback for doing bad work (e.g. nobody analysis how stressed his workers are, but the developers code gets analysed for code quality, unit test success, peer reviews).

The last point I put separate because I think that one might actually be just subjective. In my eyes it seems, as if they also have less work on their table, really. Example: There are a lot of things a product manager should do. For instance, he should learn to know the customer. But at least where I worked until now no product manager was asked by his manager how much time he spent with customers. So no product manager spent a single second with a customer. Also a product manager is in my eyes responsible that the user interface is translated correctly. He can pay an external office or convince some engineers to do it who have that other language in their repertoire. But when he constantly hears from the engineers that the three or four languages we can evaluate are so shitty that nobody can even closely know what the corresponding text says, then he should review his translation workflow. Never seen that either. The only situation in which a product managers needs to hussle is when the sales department that actually talks to the customer has a problem they can't communicate directly to engineering because both worlds speak different languages. And the only reason the prod manager needs to get active is because if the stress gets out of these two departments his boss needs to do work and then his boss will be angry. So in these situations he really has a lot of stress, because it's hard to convince engineering of some of the requests that come from sales, but sales needs some kind of results to make the customers happy. But this situation only happens in one of 5 feature or bug requests. Therefore I think the engineers have more stress. They have stress with all 5 requests, all the time. When they finish one, there are already the next three waiting. And in this one request that required prod manager intervention the final result that should be implemented is often so bad that this one is even more stress than the others.

To summarize, yes there is manager stress as well, but it's not as much. And if you get 120% of the pay of another coworker or more, I think it should be okay if you even have a little more stress. Therefore people working on the corresponding lowest level seldom have tolerance for the "hard life" of the manager.

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