Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just wait until you get a femtomanager as a supervisor.
What is a "femtomanager"?
milli micro nano pico femto
Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
321–330 of 340 posts
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in high school my father made me work as a janitor in our family's office building. At that point I had been an independent IT consultant a few years, so the position frankly felt like an embarrassment and a waste of time. There was also a condition; I couldn't tell anyone my last name, or that I was related to the building owner. At first I thought it was to teach me a lesson about hard work, which seemed…
So your dad wanted you to report anyone at his building that treated you poorly?
Hey, that's very insulting!
I charge at least $20 an hour for snitching.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
If they can tell you what to do, and you can't tell them what to do, then yes, you work under a boss.
Only I tell me what to do.
When people do come to me with a new task, I ask them for rationale. If they convince me its worth doing, I do it. If they cannot, I convince them its not worth doing. Sometimes, its not worth doing but needs to be done anyways, and in situations like that, I gently persuade them to talk to anyone else. Its generally someone with less conviction than me.
Have I lost jobs before? Yes. Did I find a new job? Yes.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Managers actually manage. Boss's react (knee jerk). Managers will actively remove barriers in the way of employees. Boss's systematically manipulate their employees due to low self-image.
>Boss's systematically manipulate their employees due to low self-image. Just to be sure I understand your point. Is the low self-image the boss's or the employee's?
The parent meant the employee has a poor self-image, and is able to be manipulated.
However, thanks for pointing out that generally managers who attempt to act as an authority[0] do so because they have a poor self-image as well.
[0] In contrast to acting as a leader.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the (lack of) attention that SQS has received, I'm guessing that the person coding the internals of SQS has LOTS of vacation.
What more are you expecting from it?
Well, I am currently prohibited from using it where I work, for some good reasons and some bad ones. The good reasons include things like not having any isolation between users. I work in a regulated industry, and if an SQS task includes sensitive customer data, I cannot ensure it runs only on machines in my VPC, nor can I ensure that the data is encrypted on disk, so I am prohibited from using it. The not-so-good reasons are things like "Amazon hasn't provided a written statement about how long it may take for a task to appear on the queues, so we have to assume that it might take days and any task with an SLA less than 'days' may not use SQS." (What can I say... some of our policy people are irrational.)
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you figure?
Not the OP, but: * Access to educational opportunities as a child (the "easy" path to developing the right brain structures software engineers need) * Lacking the first point, the extreme amount of time and the tolerance for the effort involved in "learning how to think" as an adult. * The free time to learn to become a software engineer. * Ideally the money to get a CS degree or equivalent. * Raw aptitude. Some peop…
A privilege is a special right reserved for certain people. Making good choices isn't reserved for those who are middle class and above.
No doubt the path to career success is easier for those with parents who made an a collection of smart decisions, as well having made past smart choices.
If I must accept this definition of 'privilege', then we can simply call all outcomes in our life to be a direct result of the amount of 'privilege' we have.
Personally I reject this broad definition of privilege as it strips away peoples need to accept the fact that at the end of the day, they have the ability to make their own choices and develop their own self discipline.
There are world class developers who have arisen from 3rd world country level educations, there are elite athletes in third world countries who have self-coached their way to olympic level performance. Class mobility exists, and stripping away personal responsibility via the process of redefining language does not help anyone except for those who wish to just continue their life without critical introspection.
At the core, this is a political argument hidden under the shroud of being a linguistics argument.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less? When you say "check emails", can you describe the typical task that would be assigned to employee? I ask because it all seems very vague as to what the employees actually do. Are they all software engineers? Customer service? Which ones are overworked?
I specifically kept it vague for reasons of anonymity, as these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past, and also due to the fact that what I described was work habits of people I talk to across different engineering roles (software, hardware, infrastructure) in the company I work for. You can work less than 60 hours, but it will show in your output, as deadlines are aggressive and set tops down.…
I appreciate the clarification, but keep in mind that "keeping it vague" means you're adding nothing to the conversation.
Without specifics it's much harder to get a grasp of the issue and nearly impossible for someone who already isn't a part of that culture/workforce.
> these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past
I'm able to appreciate that, but this is why we're on the internet, and anonymity should be theirs and your personal responsibility and no one elses.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Judging corporate based on fulfillment center working conditions isn't fair. One is a $15k job, and the other is a $115k job. This tells you much you need to know about the Amazon mentality
And, generally speaking, how you ended up with Trump.
No more "Trump" graffiti on all of the threads, please.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're put on a PIP, and you want to leave, you can use that as leverage to get some severance. Call it a resignation bonus. Getting a month or three of pay is money in your pocket, plus time to line up something better. An imperfect solution to an imperfect situation. Managing steps to PIP-can (methodically fire) a worker is taxing for everyone, and liability exposure. It may make financial sense for the company…
Not if you're on a visa. Getting put on a PIP is an existential risk. The rational thing to do is to immediately get a new job.
Interestingly, the one place I know that loved putting people on PIPs as away of avoiding looking into questions of basic managerial competence... also had tons and tons of H1-Bs.
Re: Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it a formal PIP, though? In my experience there are many managers who'll do that for employees that they wish to retain, but who, for various reasons, aren't performing up to snuff. However, I've never heard of a manager bringing HR in, doing the PIP paperwork, and the employee surviving the PIP. In general, the moment HR gets involved (either in person or via formal paperwork) between you or your manager, you kn…
Yes, formal with the paperwork and everything. It wasn't my manager who "brought HR in", though. Performance evaluation at my company isn't just the manager's discretion, and low performance will eventually get you a PIP.
Okay, fair enough. In that case, it may have been the case that your manager disagreed with HR's assessment and was willing to give you a second chance. In all of the cases I've heard of, however, HR has been brought in at the manager's request, when other, more informal mechanisms have failed.