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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

#181

Post by joshstrange »

The Nightly Show (with Larry Wilmore) talked about this the other day and while it is a comedy show I was a little surprised at what the guests said about it. The "This isn't going to stop anyone from ordering from Amazon" statements were to be expected and honestly, are any of us going to stop? But the one thing they did touch on that I hadn't even considered was a general sentiment of "They make boatloads of money and I'm supposed to feel sorry?". Even in this article the wife mentions how they could afford therapy because of the good money her husband was making at Amazon.

We, as a culture, don't seem to give a fuck about the conditions of the vast majority of our workers ("Oh it's McD's? Of course the job sucks") and on the show they even said "I don't see anyone getting all worked up about the workers who MAKE the shit Amazon sells" which is a really good point. Now of course people DO get worked up about it but I think it points out the hypocrisy.

All of that to say I don't necessarily think that we shouldn't care how someone is treated if they make lots of money but it's a very interesting point.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#183

Post by tormeh »

ucaetano wrote: post #171
weland wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This . It's easy to shift the blame to faceless Amazon and pretend "the company" is at fault. It's not. The people who are running the company (and I'm not referring strictly to top management here) are the ones with the blatant disregard for their employees. This is not a result of some inherent forces our Universe suddenly concentrating over Amazon. They're the result of business decisions. A bunch of people wearin…

Tell me, if it was your money being invested, would you act differently?

Yeah, it seems like it's the natural dynamic. The government could probably do something about it, I guess.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#185

Post by s3nnyy »

Tloewald wrote: post #177
s3nnyy wrote: 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... .

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.

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.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#186

Post by therobot24 »

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…

Similar to the retail experience - find kids who are ok with selling warranties/pre-orders each week and if they fail to do so then bring in someone else from the stack of applications in the back.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#187

Post by Tloewald »

My theory as to Amazon's valuation is that investors assume at some point Amazon will get a stranglehold on retail (giving it both monopoly and monopsony positions in many markets) and then extract rents on a staggering scale until regulators eventually deal with it (which might be never).

But Amazon's experiments with treating workers as commodity parts in a machine -- which we discover also applies to the white-collar folks (so now we care?) -- is a whole other angle. Instead of merely planning to cash in on a prospective illegal monopoly, it's also working on making life miserable for all workers. So there's that too.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#188

Post by nodelessness »

dboreham wrote: post #180

If Jeff is reading this: hopefully it should be apparent that these stories of constant out-of-hours calls indicate incompetent management. Note I'm not talking about the "human" side of this (obviously that's pretty bad), but rather this is just bad engineering, bad management, bad business. If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does n…

>> If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does not do so!

It has been my observation that this is a conscious decision. If you can build a culture where you can have people being willing to show up for work at all the odd hours as the norm then you can afford poor software practices. In places like these rushed software that has bugs but meets the majority of the use cases well enough is what is expected. And you ARE expected to show up at odd times to fix what breaks.

I mean, its not as if it costs the company more to have you come in late or have you working at all the odd hours. They still pay you only what they pay you. To hell with your work life balance - it's not as if doing this as had any blowback in terms of attrition.

This person seems to have remained in Amazon for over 6 years - where they likely created millions of dollars in value in return for whatever money they made.

If you grow a backbone and turn down the calls at odd hours, you can expect to receive blowback and unreasonable treatment from a direction you didn't expect.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#189

Post by omouse »

72deluxe wrote: post #37
bechampion wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree , also , Us as employees we need to learn when to say stop , i know we all work hard and we want to be the an important asset. But remember going the extra mile and getting recognition for it will only last until the next downtime/problem which could be tomorrow.

Without sounding too cynical, loyalty to a company (working out of hours) is not always returned as loyalty from the company. They wouldn't be pleased you turning up a few hours late every day to compensate for your extra time outside work. Of course, time off in lieu may be arranged.

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.

Re: My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

#190

Post by joesmo »

curiousfiddler wrote: post #35

I'm quite surprised that of all the famous Silicon Valley people, and their rallying behind Jeff Bezos, no one seems to believe that some part of these many many stories could be true. Either that, or they seem to think that only incompetent people are complaining. Therefore I must post part of my comment I posted here [1]. One of my good friend, who was suffering at Amazon, is thriving at Google. He's done amazingly…

Honestly, it doesn't matter what SV people think. If they want to claim this isn't true, they're essentially claiming a mass employee conspiracy. Let's see, a mass employee conspiracy against Amazon or Amazon, a large company, treating its workers like shit? Gee, I wonder which one is more plausible.
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