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Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

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Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#11

Post by amzn-336495 »

Amazon tries to trap people through control by visas, and they will go so far as to relocate people overseas to Seattle. They have a fucked up system where rank and file get the darwin treatment but management gets the rewards. They will pay bonuses around $250k, $500k, $1 million to senior managers, directors, and VPs respectively to abuse the shit out of employees. The "PIP someone who is trying to get away from their abusive manager" is their oldest trick in their book.

Something needs to be done to help people financially who are looking for a way out from the abuse.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#12

Post by devoply »

Futurebot wrote: post #7

Tyler Cowen has written a lot about this: "Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little to…

When you are treated like a robot, as in the case of pervasive monitoring, then merit has little wait. Merit is about how you contribute over-all to a corporation and its functioning. This sort of management, individual management ignores that... as they are running a factory where you are a machine. Not a person. Machines gets monitored this way. Corporations would look at a department as a profit center or a loss center and leave the decision making of who is performing well or not to your manager. Here you are a machine at the beck and call of Bozo, or Bezos as the case might be.

Really this is just neo-taylorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticis...

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#13

Post by ams6110 »

itg wrote: post #5
khnd wrote: post #4

wow. i wonder if bezos is going to address this.

Doubt it, that nytimes article about their work culture spread everywhere but not much has changed.

People keep working there, so why would they change?

Edit: s/should/would/

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#15

Post by SuperPaintMan »

>The man survived the fall from Amazon’s 12-story Apollo building at about 8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said.

Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal people we're not jumpers, but swingers.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#16

Post by _d8fd »

kafkaesq wrote: post #2

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not worki…

If you're put on a PIP, and you want to leave, you can use that as leverage to get some severance. Call it a resignation bonus. Getting a month or three of pay is money in your pocket, plus time to line up something better. An imperfect solution to an imperfect situation. Managing steps to PIP-can (methodically fire) a worker is taxing for everyone, and liability exposure. It may make financial sense for the company to cut its losses, paying a small certain liability to prevent a larger one.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#17

Post by pnathan »

pinewurst wrote: post #6
khnd wrote: post #4

wow. i wonder if bezos is going to address this.

Hardly. According to Jeff, nothing is wrong and everything is for the best in his best of all possible worlds. Read enough https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ and it's a consistent picture though. Speaking as a Seattle local, I hear these sort of anecdotes all the time.

As one person remarked to me once, "when you hear that someone works at Amazon, ask them if they need a shoulder and a box of tissues".

Also as a Seattle local, all you have to do is ask around a little bit and these stories start crawling out. A few people have a good time, but that's not normative.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#18

Post by Spooky23 »

Futurebot wrote: post #7

Tyler Cowen has written a lot about this: "Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little to…

Managers are cogs too. The way to work that kind of system is to identify and exploit the fears of the boss or his boss.

I've seen this happen with employees under the thumb of micromanaging PMs in particular. They start spreading rumors, then undermine PM. My solution is to eliminate micro managers asap.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#19

Post by u489utaa »

Amazon screws employees in ways unseen in other companies. From the perspective of an engineer, this is a terrible place for people to work and grow. To list a few things:

- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years

- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.

- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.

- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself! - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.

- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!

This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!

SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.

The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.

* I worked at AWS for 2 years.

Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

#20

Post by daviross »

SuperPaintMan wrote: post #15

>The man survived the fall from Amazon’s 12-story Apollo building at about 8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said. Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal people we're not jumpers, but swingers.

12 story building, but he jumped from the 4th floor and hit a balcony midway down. Still resilient, but not the full impact imagined.
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