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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

rockinghigh wrote: post #71
sssilver wrote: post #49

Following some of the discussion on this thread, I am constantly reminded of a priceless advice I got from a senior friend years ago. When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will…

You can still judge company-wide policies like vacations, 401k match, or health care.

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by JoeAltmaier »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #227
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #212

Amazon-bashing aside, this is an example of why 'safe spaces' and 'trigger-free zones' may be a bad idea. Colleges should train students in responding to triggers; exercise their self-control regularly in the face of adversity not stunt it. Somebody jumps instead of walking away, they have priorities drastically miswired.

How does suicide have anything to do with safe spaces and trigger warnings? Did suicide not exist before college started incorporating safe spaces and trigger warnings? If there is a causation relationship between safe spaces/trigger warnings and suicide does this also mean that countries with high suicide rates have a lot of safe spaces/trigger warnings? What about the high suicide rate of teenagers? Trans people? H…

With you (no data available yet) until that last statement. Are 'safe spaces' etc related to relieving trauma (no data available yet)?

And yes colleges are responsible for making students resilient. That's the 'job training' part. Many have courses in professional ethics, in responsible management, in meeting deadlines with quality work. These are not incidental to the education mandate, they are central.

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

#233

Post by YCode »

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #176
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…

A "little tough" for "those whose morale is easily damaged" sounds like an attempt to blame employees. Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time. On top of that, exp…

> People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time.

Seems like most organizations I've worked at.

That and organizational volunteer work get you awards.

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

#234

Post by uw_rob »

madman2890 wrote: post #39

268,900. That is the number of employees amazon has. According to this article, we should expect 25.2 suicides out of these employees.

I don't think it is correct to get the expected value of suicides using the national average. College-educated people employed at a high paying job living in Seattle may be much less likely to kill themselves. (Making some assumptions about the person who attempted suicide).

(Disclaimer: I completed an Internship at Amazon and I am returning for a second one)

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

#235

Post by Bartweiss »

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #176
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…

A "little tough" for "those whose morale is easily damaged" sounds like an attempt to blame employees. Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time. On top of that, exp…

Ah, Goodhart's law. The conviction that measuring more produces more meritocracy, or even more accuracy, is a dangerous one.

If you're not careful with what data you collect, you get exactly this - perverse incentives discouraging risk-taking and incident prevention in favor of success at limited, unnecessary tasks.

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

#236

Post by offbyone »

lamontcg wrote: post #131
mter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nightmare stories are often from years ago or non devs. There are some pretty awful oncalls though. I'm on a team I like, work with people I get along with and have hours that are good ( 2 years after college, I make enough (~160k total comp, a bit over 100k salary) for money to not really be a motivating factor. When I first got to amazon, I fully expected to jump ship within 6 months and move somewhere else. I…

I'd be interested to know what you think after 5 years there and a few more reorgs. You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.

Well, I'm >5 years, two orgs, one of which re-shuffled a few times while I was there, trying to find the right fit between software engineering and domain expertise.

I've never personally seen any of the horrorshow stuff I hear about Amazon. I've worked with people who have, and mostly they just moved to other parts of the company. It's a big place.

I stay because I like it. I've turned down offers for more money in order to remain, because my job is satisfying, challenging, and balanced with my non-work life. I go home at 5 PM every day, get paged only occasionally, have a mandate to automate and stabilize my services that is at LEAST as high-priority as features or launches.

In short, the opposite of some of these complaints.

It's almost like there's nuance to be found here!

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

#237

Post by Bartweiss »

lucozade wrote: post #230
77pt77 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on." We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior. The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised. The guy that cle…

> Nothing will change No, but you can use it to your advantage if you're so inclined. Being in control most of the time but allowing a minor crisis to develop from time to time that you resolve heroically can work. You can look at it as being underhand or you can look at it as occasionally checking that Pavlov doesn't just work for dogs. Your choice really.

Somewhere in the old BOFH stories, he goes on vacation and decides to make sure his job is secure. So he remotely drops a network switch, takes the panicked out-of-hours call, and insightfully "diagnoses" the problem.

That's the sort of thing you really don't want to encourage. If nothing else, doing thorough post-mortems can help create a company where allowing fires to grow isn't rewarded.

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

#238

Post by Bartweiss »

candiodari wrote: post #225
77pt77 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on." We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior. The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised. The guy that cle…

Exactly. But you forget one: Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation that will follow. Plenty of managers do that today of course.

People don't talk about this issue anywhere near enough. You can't just do internally ordered evaluations, because someone will eventually compare them to something else and harm everyone who got a harsh 'scale'.

Hence the inability of lone professors or colleges to fight grade inflation; if your students are competing with inflated GPAs from another school (or an expectation that all GPAs are inflated), the incentive is entirely against you.

I suppose this would be the upside of stack-rank if you did it right; a purely relative ranking system can't get poorly translated between groups. But of course, that also means it can't be used to properly distribute benefits between them.

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

#239

Post by ehnto »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #152
IndianAstronaut wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work under a micromanaging boss (who doubles as a PM). It is stifling. I can't function, get much done, move projects forward, etc. It's horrendous.

> I work under a micromanaging boss I don't have a "boss" I have a "manager" or "team lead". I don't work "under" or "for" my "manager", I work "with" them. If you understand that connotations of words matter, you should use other words. When you start to use other words, you might start to act differently. When you start to act differently your manager might too. Meanwhile, your manager sounds terrible. My condolenc…

Our team is excellent with this, and I've truly appreciated it having come from the opposite situation.

It is a small team slowly growing, and I have been there from when it was a team of just engineers to when non-technical, project managers and accounts managers were introduced. All credit to my boss and the project managers themselves for truly understanding how to integrate with rather than herd a team of engineers.

As you said, we all work with eachother. We can ask the PM to create a ticket for us and he can ask us to work on a ticket, but our schedule and priorities are set for the individuals in the team separately through a resourcing meeting. So when a PM comes to me with a ticket he needs done, he will ask "Do you have time this week to work on this task?" and I can reply with "Absolutely, I've been allocated 20% for that project this week and can complete that task in that time.

They do their best to manage the client requirements, the project timeline and time allocation but ultimately it never feels like I work for anyone other than my boss, and even he leads through example and morale rather than orders and processes.

It has been very interesting to see how this all comes together as the team grows and I am super thankful to have been able to experience the transition.

We had one manager come on board, who did not much other than ask us to complete a task, and then ask repeatedly if it were done yet throughout the day, then applying time pressures that didn't exist. To be able to see the different management side by side in the same environment was truly eye opening. The difference in my morale working with the bad manager vs the rest of the team was night and day.

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