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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

#101

Post by acqq »

tajen wrote: post #49
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…

I always wonder whether the stock of Amazon should decrease after the HR-gate. I would expect the company to eventually start an HR policy and lose money on that. It seems the stock price didn't move, but I'm not a finance expert and there must be other events this month. https://www.google.fr/search?q=amzn&oq=amzn&aqs=chrome..69i5...

An event that possibly reduces the number of employees isn't something to typically make the stock price go down:

http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/38856/why-is-it-tha...

Stock markets don't respond only to the possible long term effect.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#102

Post by psykovsky »

Ygg2 wrote: post #72
psykovsky wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I hope, this is sarcasm. God, I hope this is sarcasm. Commas are so undervalued...

From context, it's obvious where comma is placed. Context is (sadly) so undervalued these days. In my defense: A) Not native B) Written in a hurry. Anyway to assuage your fears of grammatically imperfect sentences, I've installed fresh commas. Enjoy.

There are too many things which are, sadly, undervalued. The only thing which seems to be overvalued is the "He did it too" excuse.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#103

Post by eitally »

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?

This situation is very common in low margin businesses.

Source: I spent 15 years managing IT (devs, DBAs, ops) in a multinational manufacturing company. Even though I had a team of 100+, for each discrete app or system, it was normal to have just one or two experts due to lack of adequate staffing. My CIO took pride in restricting IT spend to <1% of revenue. :-/

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#104

Post by yummyfajitas »

xyzzyz wrote: post #47
byuu wrote: post #40

I have a four-week rotation on-call where I work. Pretty much the same workload as discussed in the article with it. Calls and text messages at 3am, can't be more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (remote desktop software on Android is a godsend.) While it doesn't feel unbearable, and pays fairly well (at least for the area I'm in), it definitely has completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I no longer…

> It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours overlapped by their own work schedules. Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.

India is a better bet. 10.5 hours away means they are nearly on the opposite schedule, price is better (wages only marginally, but Europe has lots of other costs) and you aren't stuck dealing with insane euro labor laws.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#105

Post by onion2k »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #84
pjc50 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by leaving you just eat the money This requires that you have a good line of credit or savings that you can use to buy food, pay mortgage, etc. Most people don't have that.

Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice. It's also a choice to enter into highly leveraged options purchases on illiquid assets which require major lifestyle changes to walk away from (mortgage). Complaining that the mortgage inhibits lifestyle changes is no different than complaining "I dropped $800k short selling AMZN, now I need to make margin call".

Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice.

To follow a remark like that with one about people regretting losing $800k makes me wonder how many low paid people you know. There are a lot of people who can't afford to save, and it's not because they're overconsuming.

Although, admittedly, I doubt many of them are Amazon employees.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#106

Post by cmdkeen »

pjc50 wrote: post #46
lrvick wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people use this excuse all the time when I challenge them to quit a job they hate and get one they love. If you are good at what you do, another company will buy you out of any financial strings a current employer has on you. Let's assume the worst though and that by leaving you just eat the money. So what? You can always make more money, but you can't get years of your life back. I find people in this industry…

by leaving you just eat the money This requires that you have a good line of credit or savings that you can use to buy food, pay mortgage, etc. Most people don't have that.

Especially as many of these individuals are recent graduates so likely have student loans, won't have had any time to save, are on the other side of the country from any previous support networks etc.

There's also the potential, or at least perceived, resume / CV impact of quitting your first job after a short period.

The right answer might be "just leave", and clearly many people do just that. But for many they won't or think they can't - so companies cannot assume that just because people stick around that things are good.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#107

Post by wyclif »

vacri wrote: post #88
davedx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating. Ouch! When our team was asked to be on-call (this was a few years ago at another company), we negotiated a fixed monthly bonus and I don't think we would have continued to be "on-call" if they had reneged on that. I think it…

On-call has to be a separate, significant financial line item. It can't be just 'rolled into your job' - what happens when you're understaffed, for example? On-call means you can't get drunk, go see a movie, visit distant friends or whatever. It's a significant impact on your life - plus, of course, you're expected to work your normal full day after a hard night. I simply stopped going out to bars with my friends, ev…

Negotiating salary with on-call in view is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed when issues of pay come up. I totally agree that on-call is a cost. If they aren't willing to pay for it, they shouldn't expect employees to do it.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#108

Post by lordnacho »

erikb wrote: post #81
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…

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 agree. But the experience for the producer is highly dependent on the manager's behaviour.

- Does he keep asking for the impossible?

- Does he hang around or go home at 5pm?

- Does he at least do what he is able to do for the team, or does he just leave it all for the team?

Difference between competent and incompetent management can often be little things that help handle emotional stress for the worker.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#109

Post by atmosx »

erikb wrote: post #81
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…

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…

> 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.

Isn't that what this thread is all about? :-P People working without getting paid and/or getting a choice on weather they want to work more on their supposedly free time?

The difference is big enough to turn a shitty job in a good job :-)

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#110

Post by bechampion »

barking wrote: post #93
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

demise of unions The demise of unions is also a general phenomenon across the western world. It's not helped by the migration of lots of factory industries to parts of the world without strong unions and with plenty of hungry workers. Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike. And if it's easy to replace striking workers, it's not an effective tool. It's also very disruptive (in the bad s…

As I'm sure you know, it wasn't just globalisation, Margaret Thatcher's intention was to spancel the unions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law_in_the_U...

Unions are noisy lately here in London , i'll have 2 hours commute next week thanks to them.
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