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

People who get fired are far more likely to leave reviews on blind. And the whole performance improvement plan process that proceeds being fired takes place between the employee and the SDM.

It may be the case that their org leadership told the SDM to cut their lowest ranked person to make the org's "Unregretted Rate of Attrition" quota for the year. From the employees point of view, this was purely some kind of malicious move by a terrible SDM. In reality, it's an SDM who wants to keep their job in a sociopathic system that enforces minimum rates of firing people to "keep the bar high".

Salaries are rising for engineers across the industry, in part because of the 'great resignation' going on. Make no mistake: Amazon would not raise salaries because of angry reviews on Blind. They would only raise wages if they saw too many people choosing to quit or not accept job offers in favour of other companies. Probably entirely based on a formula that used those numbers as inputs.

Go to the therapist a bunch, create a paper trail, dig through fine print of short/long term leave..

as if the guy wasn't deal with enough between his work and wife as it was.

it's just sad that to find a way to best help yourself, you must suffer more, shoulder more, have more chewing up your time and limited ability to deal with mounting stress.

and people wonder why random people snap and blow away 15 random people at their office.

These are not mutually exclusive things, much of the time, but sometimes exceptions have to be made.

> Treating employees with something as variable and open to interpretation as "empathy" is what causes companies to implode- because who defines empathy? Who defines where the line is drawn? And why is it fair that some people will inevitably get more empathy than others because maybe the manager was having a good day and then a bad day.

This is a reasonable point, but it, again, does not address my fundamental point: Amazon as a company should have more ethical and empathetic policies. Amazon as a company should instruct managers to help their employees and be willing to back that help up with financial assistance.

Whether it's Jeff Bezos or this person's manager, you seem to want to keep this at an individual level of decision-making, but that's not the change I want to make.

As for myself, I'm not a manager because I don't want to be, and having to enforce policies I don't agree with is one of the reasons for that.

I was partway through agreeing to an interview request from Amazon last year when my research turned up how stingy their 401k match is. Similarly their stock vesting schedule is awful compared with everybody else.

It's not that I desperately needed that extra bit of money on top of the perhaps generous salary (no sum was named).

It's that being stingy about that stuff indicates to me that they will be less than generous in every possible situation, say if I need time to deal with a health issue or a family emergency.

Perhaps wait until after their spouse has died and see if they recover? Even the idea of an "underperforming employee" is specious at best.

This is why I love Italy and France, it is night impossible to fire someone for things like this from tech companies. Of course, they also don't have to worry about going bankrupt due to medical issues. They understand there is more to work than meeting the numbers. It is something you spend 2/3rds of your life doing, and other countries honor that.

[Oh, and also COBRA can cost $3000-$5000/month for shit coverage. Once you run out of money, they come for your stocks, retirement, and house. Source: I incurred over $100k of hospital debt AFTER INSURANCE from an assault that left my arm paralyzed. Why? If the hospital charges more than 125% medicare costs for the procedure, my $700/month Gold Plan didn't cover it. I was let go due to 6 months of absence from work, and then while unemployed and needing physical therapy, the hospital sent a request for tax statements and they began the process of a lien against my property. A lawsuit ultimately saved me, but if I hadn't been a victim, they would have taken everything. Fucking american healthcare is a joke.]