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

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

#271

Post by abandonliberty »

junar wrote: post #255
alberth wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides certain employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. It also requires that their group health benefits be maintained during the leave.

Author seems to mention that Amazon did give him the chance to take FMLA, and he decided against it. > I had a long talk with HR. The response from them was, okay, you have two options here: You go on family leave, or you can perform. Those are your two options. I was thinking, if I take family leave, I get no income. I remember talking to my wife about it and saying, I can’t believe these are my options. So, I ended…

While there's clearly stories of abusive amzn practices, this makes the entire piece seem very entitled. If a person can't do the work they were hired for, they don't usually get paid. That's why there's FLMA, disability insurance, and vacations.

Am I missing something? Does Amzn represent themselves any differently? We're only getting one side of the story, and for all we know this person could've been incredibly toxic.

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

#272

Post by Domenic_S »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #264
madrox wrote: post #158

What sucks about stories like this is, while my heart breaks for what this guy went through, managers don't have the same luxury of defending their side of the story to Mother Jones. I worked as an EM at Amazon. I went into this ready to think he had a bad boss (because those definitely exist at Amazon), but after reading this I feel like there's another side to this that has more compassion than is being reflected h…

This is America. Sure you have benefits, you think, if you have a job, but a huge number of the outcomes where you need those benefits result in you losing your job and no longer having them. And if you get too expensive and start showing up on the company's benefits cost, they are strongly incented to find alternative means for removing you from the payroll. Really, work-provided benefits mainly serve the purpose of…

Blame the government, they’re why we have employer-sponsored health insurance to begin with starting in WWII. Very interesting history to read about.

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

#273

Post by Ekaros »

secnono wrote: post #265

Why do we expect companies to act with compassion? IMHO I think society should be setting up laws to protect and enhance the lives of it's citizens and not let those topics up to companies.

Setting up systems. It should not be responsibility of a private entity to support leechers in other ways than taxation for years.

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

#274

Post by Domenic_S »

kelnos wrote: post #190
relaunched wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point, corporations would be happy to have the government take over those functions. But, these are solvable problems. For example, there is no doubt that HR knew that long-term and short term disabilities were options. Google has a death benefit for the spouse and kids, under 21. Top tech companies that have money to burn could probably figure out how to keep you on insurance, as a benefit, during leave. How…

> corporations would be happy to have the government take over those functions. Is this really true? I would think so, too, but if it were, wouldn't we see a flood of companies in the US lobbying Congress to create a government-backed healthcare option, or even single-payer? To the point where it would have been done decades ago, right-wing political ideology be damned? The cynical part of me wonders if companies lik…

It was the government themselves that facilitated this situation by freezing wages during WWII. Companies couldn’t compete on salary anymore so they found another lever to pull.

I don’t think companies like or dislike the situation, it’s just the status quo and thus hard to change a trajectory that has so much momentum.

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

#275

Post by Ekaros »

starbugs wrote: post #61
oceanplexian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right answer. Your safety net is your responsibility, not your company’s or the government’s (like it or not, this is the reality we live in today, in the USA). Making the high income that he does, it should have been trivial to save a few years worth of emergency fund for exactly this situation. If he had made different choices he would be able to take a year off and properly take care of his family, not…

Do you really think that this is about the money? This man is losing his wife, he cannot think clearly, because he loses the person he loves and has children with. He may suffer from severe depression. I'd bet my right leg that if he didn't need to, he would not think about money for a minute. It also doesn't matter whether he should have built up an emergency fund that can cover cancer treatment expenses. He clearly…

I take then that we should be paying everyone suffering from anything hundreds of thousand a year. Every homeless person and drug addict?

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

#276

Post by rewma »

yibg wrote: post #222
rewma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I was a plumber, and my wife was dying, and as a result I was unable to repair plumbing, I would not expect anyone to give me money to repair their plumbing, not even if I told them my wife is dying and they should be sympathetic. When I filed for paternity leave, I was paid quite a few weeks for not working at all, because the country where I live understands that workers are people who have lives and struggle…

This wasn't a couple of weeks though. From the timelines in the story it was more than a year. Would you expect to keep getting paid on paternity leave for 2 years?

> Would you expect to keep getting paid on paternity leave for 2 years?

First of all, the article does not talk about leaving for 2 years. I feel you are intentionally trying to put a strawman to avoif debating the real problem.

Secondly, the article mentions performance. According to the article, the person in question was pressured into improving performance or get the axe, in a period where his manager knew very well that his wife was dying. The manager even proposed he was placed in a performance evaluating program renowned to be a compulsive exit door whose goal is to help HR justify their decision to terminate contracts.

And lastly, when my parental leave went into effect I got 16 weeks paid time off. That's loosely half a year. I'm sure this affects performance at the eyes of Amazon. Should that mean that Amazon would be entitled to fire my ass just because I had a child?

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

#277

Post by Domenic_S »

iamdbtoo wrote: post #97
rkk3 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was offered a Family Leave option, but the details aren't shared so it's hard to judge... Terrible situation for the author, but expecting the company to eat the 500k/year he was costing them doesn't seem fair either.

He mentions the family leave option would've left him without any income. No one was asking Amazon not to eat his whole salary, just not expect him to function exactly the same as someone whose wife isn't dying from brain cancer.

He says later that he had enough saved to weather the firing — wouldn’t it have been better to take leave, even unpaid, and know your job is there to come back to?

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

#278

Post by kamaal »

JohnBooty wrote: post #83

This happened to me, as well. Not my wife and not Amazon, but actually a handful of family members dying over the last year. On one hand I completely understand my employer. Unlike Amazon, they do not have Amazon-style money. They are fighting to survive. Like the author I am not sure what they should have done for me. During the conversation where I was terminated, I told my boss I understood their position. They ne…

>>Or strictly obsessive coders who do nothing but code all day and don't have families and don't need PTO?

Unfortunate, but true. If you look at the life profiles of 'rockstar coders' going around FANG like companies they are mostly single(and childless) people, with minimal to no family commitments/connections.

These kind of people fit in perfectly into doing the weekend long leetcode tournaments. Changing jobs every year. etc.

There's a high degree of freedom, but albeit long term unfixable problems that come with this kind of a lifestyle.

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

#279

Post by JimTheMan »

refurb wrote: post #225
lordkrandel wrote: post #43

Wait a minute. It's for this cases that universal healthcare paid by taxes exists. I wouldn't blame it on your boss or Amazon. It's the USA. A person should not depend on money or productivity to be cured. And a company should not be liable to spend $300000 an year on a non productive employee. Which btw is about 9 years junior developer gross salary equivalent in Italy.

Medical bankruptcy is still an issue in places with universal healthcare like Canada. Why? Even if all your bills are paid you still have a mortgage, food, etc. And even if you have long-term disability payments, it’s often some fraction of your existing salary requiring you to keep working to pay all the bills.

Medical bills are overwhelmingly huge in the US. Getting rid of them would decrease the problem to simple unemployment.

Sure being unpaid for a time is bad, but you won't be massively in the red...

And this specific example, the guy is well off. Which if not for medical bills, they'd all be fine.

To reword your comment, " Something very bad is happening, but because the remedy wouldn't completely go away it's not worth doing?"

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

#280

Post by Ekaros »

dvt wrote: post #76

I wish we had a #MeToo for horrible corporate environments. Amazon is an atrocious place to work at, and even though I'm no fan of cancel culture, if any case begs for naming and shaming, it's got to be this one. There are people that make these decisions. Amazon isn't some "monolith" where no one has free will. That argument didn't work for WW2 Nazi guards, so why should it work here? "Just following orders" isn't g…

I honestly can't feel bad about employees of this level in Amazon. They are very well compensated.

That doesn't mean I don't find issues with lower levels like warehouse and drivers work.

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