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My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

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Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#151

Post by conductr »

FWIW, many big companies in US have HR policies and they have middle manager's/VPs that ignore the crappy parts and do what's right.

My wife had cancer in early 30s and it was a punch to the gut for us both. It was actually a very survivable thing but she had to go through some extreme treatments. Regarding work, she did some paperwork and went through the HR stuff for most but there was a lot of "off the books" type stuff that fell into her leader's "who cares about this place, put your health first" policy.

I wasn't even sick and honestly didn't even get any additional stress other than worrying for her (we had no kids yet, her mom was helping her daily) and my ability to perform was shot. I could barely keep a thought in my mind or give a shit about petty work "problems". Probably for a solid 6-12 months. The first 3 months were and still are a complete fog. I never officially told my company HR, but my leadership was extremely supportive and I basically just phoned it in for that year. I did no significant work and offloaded most of my responsibilities to others so that I was not a key part of anything.

When you go through something like this, you start to learn how much other people have gone through as well. They feel obligated to pull you aside and share their story and how things turned out for them. Often positive stories but obviously not always. But generally people treat people in these situations how they'd like to be treated as, it could happen to any of us.

Just wanted to throw some positive perspective out there. Amazon is a well known shitty place to work for humans. I'm not surprised by this article. I dodge their phone calls like many of you and encourage you to get to know your coworkers on a deeper & personal level. They are a more important part of your life than you may realize and will help carry you through some really rough spots if you let them.

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#152

Post by friedman23 »

psyc wrote: post #130
friedman23 wrote: post #71

You would think with how huge and renown amazon is as a company they would have their pick of top engineers. It's not the case. None of my friends that work in Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other unicorns even consider applying to Amazon on their job search. It's actually pretty comical, I have no idea where Amazon gets their talent pool from.

Eh, not so fast there. Perhaps that talent pool is larger and more diverse than you realize. It’s entirely possible that I’m out of touch now, but when I was at MSFT 10 years ago, there was a steady flow of top talent to Amazon. All the people I knew who went over were sort of the way-overachiever type who wouldn’t mind being punished (and rewarded) by an employer. They were single, male, career and status obsessed.…

10 years ago their abusive workplace culture was not nearly as well known as it is now and also the possibility of massive stock appreciation isn't as likely either given sky high valuations. I see no reason why someone would choose Amazon over a unicorn or any other FANG company which offers much better work life balance.

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#153

Post by mabbo »

twalla wrote: post #88
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #20

Believe it or not, this isn't a rare attitude among managers at Amazon. A significant percentage of SDMs believe they must "keep a high bar" and remove any dissenting subordinates. Word has gotten out about it, mostly on the blind app, which forced Amazon to raise pay bands for engineers 50-100k. This is costing the company a lot of money. The difference going forwards for Amazon is that the stock is mostly stagnant,…

One of the things I do to get Amazon recruiters to leave me the hell alone is to respond to their emails with a link to the most recent public AMZN snafu and urge them to quit - it's funny/sad how each time I respond I can quickly find 3-5 new links no more than a few months old.

A thought: be nice to recruiters. They're generally nice people who are underpaid for the work they do (usually). They're in a really tough business.

And if you want a selfish take: Maybe today they're working for Amazon, but tomorrow they may be doing the same job at your dream company. They have too many people to try reaching out to, and they may remember your name.

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#154

Post by notJim »

relaunched wrote: post #136
notJim wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies employ people to do work . That is the fundamental nature of the relationship. Some leeway is to be expected for temporary fluctuations in the work being done. But in the long term, if the work is no longer being performed at the agreed upon level, the company is not obligated to continue paying the person. In a sense, blaming the company becomes kind of a distraction from the real issue, which is that in t…

To your point, corporations would be happy to have the government take over those functions. But, these are solvable problems. For example, there is no doubt that HR knew that long-term and short term disabilities were options. Google has a death benefit for the spouse and kids, under 21. Top tech companies that have money to burn could probably figure out how to keep you on insurance, as a benefit, during leave. How…

If the company has benefits that are available, they should definitely point the employee to them. That is just the humane thing to do in my view. When I had a death in my family a few years ago, I filed to use vacation time, and my boss rejected it, because the company had bereavement leave (I didn't know about it.) That was the right thing to do, because it helped me take advantage of all the available benefits.

And of course, if companies provide these benefits, that is good, especially since they are absent from our broader safety net. But keeping benefits tied to employment has a lot of downsides, and we should try to move away from that.

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#155

Post by ActorNightly »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #20

Believe it or not, this isn't a rare attitude among managers at Amazon. A significant percentage of SDMs believe they must "keep a high bar" and remove any dissenting subordinates. Word has gotten out about it, mostly on the blind app, which forced Amazon to raise pay bands for engineers 50-100k. This is costing the company a lot of money. The difference going forwards for Amazon is that the stock is mostly stagnant,…

While what you say may be true, I urge everyone reading this thread not to make personal opinions solely on stuff posted online that does not have hard evidence associated with it.

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#156

Post by psyc »

friedman23 wrote: post #152
psyc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not so fast there. Perhaps that talent pool is larger and more diverse than you realize. It’s entirely possible that I’m out of touch now, but when I was at MSFT 10 years ago, there was a steady flow of top talent to Amazon. All the people I knew who went over were sort of the way-overachiever type who wouldn’t mind being punished (and rewarded) by an employer. They were single, male, career and status obsessed.…

10 years ago their abusive workplace culture was not nearly as well known as it is now and also the possibility of massive stock appreciation isn't as likely either given sky high valuations. I see no reason why someone would choose Amazon over a unicorn or any other FANG company which offers much better work life balance.

I agree with all this. Heck, I even agreed 10 years ago. I’ll only say that those people I knew seemed almost attracted to the abuse, as though they believed it would help make them wealthy. (They did all become millionaires, but you’re right that they could have done so at many other companies.)

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#157

Post by dlp211 »

almost_usual wrote: post #77

I really don’t understand why people work for Amazon. Low ball offers and long work hours. No thanks.

Amazon still pays better than a lot of companies. If you are choosing between Google and Amazon, yea, it's pretty much an easy decision, if you are choosing between some mid-sized B2B tech company and Amazon, not so easy a decision any more (or it is and it's tilted in Amazon's favor).

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#158

Post by madrox »

What sucks about stories like this is, while my heart breaks for what this guy went through, managers don't have the same luxury of defending their side of the story to Mother Jones.

I worked as an EM at Amazon. I went into this ready to think he had a bad boss (because those definitely exist at Amazon), but after reading this I feel like there's another side to this that has more compassion than is being reflected here. He was at turns informally warned, encouraged to take leave, and offered severance. It sounds like he expected a pass on all this for his life circumstances until it was too late. Without more details from both sides as to what the performance issues were, this reads as using a tragedy to get more than he's owed.

I can't even imagine what this guy went through. He had to watch his wife slowly die while raising two girls and providing for his family. Watching my father die from cancer after a long life was awful enough and affected me for years. His grief has to be phenomenal. I imagine part of his grieving process is lashing out at his boss for not being more understanding. That said, I think his story would be the same no matter where he worked. It's just more in vogue to bash Amazon.

If he wants to lash out at anything, I suggest lashing out at a system that requires us to work while going through such awful life circumstances. That man shouldn't have had to work. He should have been safe to be unemployed while focusing on being there for his family. The idea that he felt compelled to work to avoid his family going bankrupt is lunacy to me.

Re: My Wife Was Dying of Brain Cancer. My Boss at Amazon Told Me to Perform or Quit

#160

Post by anonymousDan »

friedman23 wrote: post #113
anonymousDan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your friends at Facebook, Google and Microsoft aren't such special snowflakes and in fact there are plenty of engineers around good enough to do the job? Don't mean to sound harsh but it's not like working at any of the above companies instantly makes you some kind of Einstein.

I don't know why anyone good enough for the job would choose to work somewhere as abusive as amazon. Also, there is no need for insults, don't spread your abusive workplace online please :)

Well say that then. I certainly don't work for Amazon (or ever intend to)!
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