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Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
271–280 of 340 posts
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand where you're coming from as I've worked both in and outside of SV (Amazon isn't in SV but shares the culture). Though it may look like they're asking for a lot, it has to do with the demanding nature of the jobs they're working. To answer your question about being woke up in the middle of the night, there is no such thing as a "shift". Most of us are expected to work at the very least 60 hour work weeks…
That culture sounds depressing. Not all companies (in and out of SV) work like that. The good thing is that you likely have a skill in high demand and can find a company with a better work culture. There are definitely many that value work/life balance and still pay well.
It's definitely not an ideal life, but seems to be increasingly the norm among individual contributor positions at the big guys (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc). What's more is that on paper, these same companies espouse 'work-life' balance, while those who try to leave there laptops at work after hours end up on probation like the individual in this article.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#273Earlier 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.
I've been reorged quite a few times. More than most people who have spent 5 years here.
> You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.
I have 3 other teams with previous coworkers who are currently having good experiences that I can go to if this one goes south.
Yes there are a lot of teams that burn people out. I'm not blind. But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#274Earlier 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…
Maybe some are biased here but i think non-devs are humans too.
I have no insight into their world so I cannot speak in any way to the truth of their working conditions.
I only know that for most of the devs, it is fine. It's not perfect, I'm not even sure I'd tell people that it's great. But for people that have a good team? It's fine and the quality of people makes up for it. If I didn't like my team I would have left a long time ago.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#275Amazon 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 th…
Sounds like Capital One as well, which is mirroring Amazon's culture as well as stack ranking system.
They are hiring lot of people from Amazon etc in NoVA area. So Amazon culture doesn't seem surprising. I visited a few times to their McLean offices, the place looked little cultish to me.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#276wow. i wonder if bezos is going to address this.
I bet he will. He did last time when that article in NYT came out. He responded by sending an email which stated that Amazon will not tolerate such behavior, encouraged people to report to HR and instituted zero-tolerance policy for callousness. Anyone know how many managers were terminated because of that. EDIT: Found this example, who knows if it is true: https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for…
Companies can be described as tiny islands of totalitarianism in a democratic world. Except now they are giant continents and it's the base democracy that's looking threatened.
Companies with a flat-like structure buck the trend a bit, but even they aren't run on purely democratic principles. I'd love to see a company built on democratic principles (either direct or representative democracy).
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#277Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
The boss has the power to terminate your employment relationship. You have the same power. If you are in software, most likely you'll find a new job long before they find a replacement. That's certainly true of my team. What "power" do you believe the boss has that an employee doesn't?
So you choosing to leave is the same as being forced to leave? A boss has power you do not in many ways. They can increase your pay, they can choose the projects you work on and do not work on, they can terminate your employment whether you want it to terminate or not. What of that do you have in common with them?
Choosing to leave is equivalent to being fired; either my boss or I can unilaterally terminate my employment agreement.
My boss can increase/decrease my pay, and I can either accept or reject the new agreement. I can also demand higher pay or threaten to quit. They can tell me to work on certain projects or I'm fired, I can say I want to work on certain projects or I quit. They can terminate my employment whether I want to or not, I can quit whether they want me to or not.
Employment is a market; a situation characterized by cooperation and mutual agreement. You may choose to pretend you have no agency and are a mere victim to your boss, but I do not. My employees don't pretend this either, which is why I need to keep them happy.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them. I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.
Yeh, I imagine another Bezos directive is coming soon. "automate it all or close down!" like he did with service api's so where's his smarts on this? the conspirator in me thinks maybe he figured out its better to hire lots and fire lots churn/burn em out. amazon is always having those hire-events where you go like cattle to get filtered for a likely bad job b/c you won't appear all that selective to them.
They have automated it then, just not in the way we like to think it should be done :)
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are significantly more of these stories out there on Amazon than the other major tech companies it seems - I haven't heard of anywhere near as many stories coming from Google, Facebook, or Apple.
Negative stories that make it into the press are rare events and therefore it's difficult to compare if there is much more dissatisfaction in one company vs another. A better indicator is turnover rate.
It is obvious just from having lived in Seattle for a good long while that something is up with Amazon. They are notorious for employee churn, and it's easy to see this in my circle of acquaintances, many if not most of whom work in software. People do quit Microsoft, Google, or Facebook from time to time, but it's generally a long-term engagement; Amazon is a place where even relatively senior people don't seem to stick around more than a couple of years.
It's not a scientific study but I don't need scientific accuracy in order to get a pretty clear idea where I would or would not want to work.