21 ms·

My husband needed therapy after working for Amazon

• FatalErrorr 11y ago
  Why. Why oh why didn't he quit? This sounds AWFUL.
  • abajaj2280 11y ago
    Honestly, I ask myself this all the time when I read horror stories from employees at tech companies. Just leave!
    • bsder 11y ago
      Tech jobs aren't as liquid as you think. Sure, he can move to another job that has the same kind of stupid demands. However, finding a job that doesn't have those kinds of demands isn't so easy. Now, let's add in the stress of uprooting your family as well as a new job where you have to prove yourself (so you're probably going to be spending the same number of hours, anyway, for a while) and it's not so obvious a choice. The real solution is for labor laws to start biting and saying that salaried workers are to be compensated after 40 hours and have it enforced. Once you have to pay a salaried worker overtime and a shift differential, they'll hire another worker.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    The usual reasons: - wife has no job (due to move to Seattle), just had kids, need to pay for housing: unless you can get another job immediately (which is hard if you're too busy to interview), quitting will be a disaster - boiling frog: it wasn't awful on day 1, so at some point he'd have to acknowledge that things have changed - negative reinforcement and the cult: dysfunctional organisations are often good at making you think it's your fault. Hence the therapy.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  • facetube 11y ago
    The on-call scenario they describe in the article is pretty bad.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      • facetube 11y ago
        So... you think he has an underlying mental health condition, and he's somehow confusing that with the ill effects of said pretty-bloody-bad on-call schedule?
        • deleted 11y ago
          [deleted]
  • WalterGR 11y ago
    hop on the Amazon hate. Stories about how horrible Amazon is to work for have been coming out for years. This isn't some brand new bandwagon - it just happened that 2 such stories were posted on HN within 2 or so days.
    • Ygg2 11y ago
      And after Jeff Bezos quite literally asked for negative life stories. But we all know this won't be pinned on Amazon. It will be pinned on this guy, who was having bad reviews due to unsatisfactory performance.
  • a3n 11y ago
    I seriously doubt it feels like a cheap anecdote to the family involved. In fact it sounds like real pain.
• bechampion 11y ago
  There's so many thing I feel when i read this: 1st: We're all in IT have been on call at some given time , and it sucks , we all know this (since I'm not on my 20s anymore i always ask in job interviews if i have to be on call.) 2nd: Man that sucks ... i don't know how this person has given it more than 6 months of his life , just move on and get a different job if you dislike it. 3rd: Amazon is like any other big company , I've read similar stories about google and MS , i wish the would pipe down and think smartly , proper hand offs to people that are on call etc etc, there's no reason why someone have to be called in the night and unable to take holidays ... come on , nobody is SO important as we want to think.
  • cmdkeen 11y ago
    > just move on and get a different job if you dislike it Because they tie you in with money - your signing bonus and relocation expenses have to be partially repaid if you leave within the first two years. An interesting question on the "what if there was a war and no-one came?" is what would happen if Amazon could no longer hire the monstrous number of high calibre new entrants it needs every year. Stories like this are effectively huge advertising campaigns for every other tech company.
    • lrvick 11y ago
      I see people use this excuse all the time when I challenge them to quit a job they hate and get one they love. If you are good at what you do, another company will buy you out of any financial strings a current employer has on you. Let's assume the worst though and that by leaving you just eat the money. So what? You can always make more money, but you can't get years of your life back. I find people in this industry are so often socalized into protecting a commodity they can easily replace (money) by giving up one they can't (enjoyed time)
      • pjc50 11y ago
        by leaving you just eat the money This requires that you have a good line of credit or savings that you can use to buy food, pay mortgage, etc. Most people don't have that.
• nso95 11y ago
  Small team writing unstable software, of course there's going to be a lot of pages.
  • cmdkeen 11y ago
    Small team constantly frazzled by being on call in an abusive working environment - no wonder they're writing unstable software. I'd far rather get 30 hours of productive coding out of a rested, happy and motivated employee than 60 out of an exhausted and oppressed one.
• lordnacho 11y ago
  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 adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders. There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.
  • bechampion 11y ago
    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.
    • pjc50 11y ago
      Us as employees we need to learn when to say stop There's a word for this, beginning with "U", that a lot of people don't like.
      • bechampion 11y ago
        i know , i hate Unicorns too!
      • barking 11y ago
        And (in the UK at least) the demise of unions has seen the earnings ratio of company bosses to employees rise to levels not seen since the 19th or early 20th century
• andrewguenther 11y ago
  At Amazon, unless you're on a PIP (probation), you can change teams after a year and your manager cannot stop you. This is possibly one of the best ways to get management's attention. If an org is bleeding out people, it is clear that something is wrong. Why not switch teams?
  • trhway 11y ago
    >you can change teams after a year and your manager cannot stop you. i remember how at Sun a good recommendation from a manager about his employee wanting to switch to another team was read as "i'd be happy to dump that guy to somebody else" and so-so was read as "God, don't let him to be taken from me" :)
• arcticbull 11y ago
  I'd like to be the first to welcome Amazon to 10:00pm Silicon Valley Time ("the company is a mess"). https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-n... It's right on schedule, we just wrapped up 8:00pm ("they're never going to make any money") in the markets, and fast-forwarded through 9:00pm.
  • aidos 11y ago
    I don't know about any of that. I can see why that was written to describe the trajectories of some SV companies - it doesn't seem to fit with Amazon at all, to me anyway.
• happywolf 11y ago
  I do believe there must be something wrong at a significant enough scale to warrant NYT's attention. There are always outliners (i.e. unhappy and stressed out staff) in every company, the question is how big is the population.
  • trhway 11y ago
    >I do believe there must be something wrong at a significant enough scale to warrant NYT's attention. it may be "wrong" from the POV of NYT or other tech outsiders. What i've over the years understood from various friends/acquaintances is that it is not "something wrong", it is just the "normal" mode of how whole AMZN operates. People going there know it (and if they don't - not checking Glassdoor is theirs fault, not AMZN's) - and, for example, that is the reason i didn't go there (while i love escalations, emergencies, etc..., i don't like backstabbing, tricks they play with your salary/bonuses and other details)
    • happywolf 11y ago
      Your argument sounds like it is not something wrong to commit crime in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and it is the victim's fault since that person didn't read news or does their due diligence. Interesting :)
      • trhway 11y ago
        there is a difference between crime and contract. You enter contract at will in exchange for something, and not doing due diligence is your fault. You may also look at the notion of exempt employee - some actions would be illegal if done to non-exempt employees while ok to be done to exempt.
        • happywolf 11y ago
          I do understand where you are from and I agree one will need to be aware what they are signing up for. A lot of times companies pay extra for the hardship, and I will say this is fair and square. However there is a limit on what a company can do to its employees, even employees signed contracts. Some behaviors like making people cry are bordering harassment, and these are against the law in most countries.
• tsotha 11y ago
  >With warehouses around the globe, my husband would get paged to fix problems in China in the middle of the night, in the UK in the wee hours of the morning, and then in the Kentucky warehouse during work hours. I worked at a company that wrote warehouse management software, and this definitely isn't unique to Amazon. When your software has a serious problem the company is losing a million dollars an hour, so they're not very sympathetic to problems you may have standing in the way of a return to smooth operations. That business vies with games and HFT for the highest stress levels in software development.
  • msravi 11y ago
    If it's so critical, why doesn't the company hire a larger team to do this and rotate people around in well defined shifts?
    • rizky05 11y ago
      Efficiency!
    • einrealist 11y ago
      Always a cost center until it isn't. Typical short sighted management.
    • RogerL 11y ago
      You don't get bonuses and promoted for spending a lot of money. You do for having a lean, mean team. A $10 Million outage event? "That's Sally's fault, she is letting her cancer distract her, I'll fire her in the morning. CFO: Great leadership Roger, I'll pencil you in for another $200K bonus!"
  • lordnacho 11y ago
    A million bucks an hour and there's a manager and two devs on it? If they had three devs it would cut the workload by a third for the existing devs. And it would cost 150K-200K or so (salary, benefits, tax), equivalent to 12 minutes of waiting time. Surely a guy with an MBA can figure out the cost/benefit of such a situation?
• madaxe_again 11y ago
  On call once every three weeks? Oh fucking noes! Out of hours support sucks, but yes, the reality is that you get paged, and you have to deal with things within SLA. It's hard, it's wearing, but one week out of every four is hardly intense. I was on call for five years. It nearly broke me - but this article is just whining. Why take such a role if it's such a problem? It sounds more like his wife bashing him every time he had to do OOO work is what broke him.
  • ossreality 11y ago
    Fuck. you.
  • bato 11y ago
    Would you actually get 10 pages a day every day while you were on call though?
    • madaxe_again 11y ago
      On occasion, yes. I've done OOO both of trading desks and ecommerce operations, very high pressure - and with the added bonus that you're having to answer the phone to angry people while working on a technical fix. It's called support hell for a reason - but what this guy's wife describes isn't extraordinary. It sounds like most mission critical support roles.
  • zzleeper 11y ago
    It depends how often you get the pager, no? If your calls were often at 4am and you had to work a normal schedule, it certainly does no good. Also, you are saying that nearly broke you, as if it's a badge of pride or something good...
    • madaxe_again 11y ago
      That's the thing. For the types who do ooo work, it is a badge of pride - and I dare say if anything this is what she made him go to therapy over - I've had the conversation - "your job is ruining our fucking lives!" - "I enjoy it. It's hard but rewarding" - "you're getting your head checked".
• apexkid 11y ago
  The email from Jeff to his employees was impeccably unsatisfactory. It was a sheer display of ignorance and rejection towards everything quoted and said. However, no matter how much Jeff sticks to that attitude, it wouldn't change the reality that Amazon is the most customer centric company on earth and the most employee apathetic company on earth as well. It reflects in major workplace elements like health schemes, holiday schemes (though employee have official over 30 holidays they are not allowed to spend it without facing low performance review), food benefits (specially in offices outside USA) etc. Though Amazon claims that the leadership principle "Frugality" stands for minimizing waste and not cheapness, one can't dismiss the latter definition.
  • neals 11y ago
    > the most employee apathetic company on earth Ever been abroad? Bangladesh and China are lovely this time of the year.
    • x404 11y ago
      right
    • apexkid 11y ago
      Thanks for not saying that its better than a brothel of Bangladesh and China. It was clear in what context I have written my comment. Your argument can be qualified as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
      • saiya-jin 11y ago
        well, his (valid) point is, that arguably most of this planet inahbitants would do anything possible to get a job like that, for even half the income. which is true. just we in IT and developers in particular are in these days amazingly spoiled, full of this feeling that we are some engineer++, more clever, and generally better than say construction engineers (or any other for that matter). back home we have a saying "pride precedes the fall", and honestly, software development is in dire need for some proper disruption (ie jobs amount and salaries take 50% cut). once you step outside of your little bubble and look how hard it is for real people out there to earn their crappy salaries, come back and we can talk like adults.
• wingerlang 11y ago
  > He had been under so much stress that after the meeting I asked him to go to therapy. It is not clear why he needed therapy from this article. Just because of the stressful job?
• curiousfiddler 11y ago
  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 well for himself and for Google in past 1 year he's been there (& has been well recognized within the org). This is not incompetence. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070115
  • badpenny 11y ago
    > 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. I'm sure they know it's true, it's just that they're all guilty of it. From what I keep hearing, it sounds like it's part of the culture.
  • dboreham 11y ago
    Presumably they imagine that they might need to do a deal with Amazon in the future, or get a job there.
  • joesmo 11y ago
    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.
    • eternalban 11y ago
      Behold the Power of NYTimes. Dear European publishing giant (you know who) weary of Google take note how it is to be done when it is done in USA.
  • bsder 11y ago
    > I'm quite surprised that of all the famous Silicon Valley people, and their rallying behind Jeff Bezos Because this isn't news to anybody. I've known that working for Amazon sucks since 2005? And I'm not even in software. I presume software professionals have known longer than that. That's how bad Amazon's reputation is. What new is that it's getting press outside of Silly Valley. Thus, the rallying. Just about every Silicon Valley company will come in for a shellacking once people actually start looking at them.
• byuu 11y ago
  I have a four-week rotation on-call where I work. Pretty much the same workload as discussed in the article with it. Calls and text messages at 3am, can't be more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (remote desktop software on Android is a godsend.) While it doesn't feel unbearable, and pays fairly well (at least for the area I'm in), it definitely has completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I no longer have anything near a 24-hour clock: I'll sleep for, at most, 3-4 hours at a time, usually twice a day. Those times change rapidly. As a result, many times I'll need to take modafinil to stay awake through regular shifts; coffee isn't nearly enough. The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating. "Why not quit?" is the usual: it pays too well, have a mortgage to pay, was described as being less work than it turned out to be in the interview, etc. But it really does make for a terrible work-life balance, and it's a shame people are so eager to accept on-call as "just the way it is to have a good middle-class job." The thing I really don't understand is how they expect you to always be available, no matter what. The human body cannot physically go for seven days with no sleep, at least not without a complete psychotic break-down. Yet there's no sympathy or compassion for this simple biological fact by the higher-ups if you ever sleep through a text message. It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours (+1 lunch) overlapped by their own work schedules. Yes, it's twice the rotation work, but it's 3 hours outside work each day instead of 15, and you could keep a consistent sleep schedule, and have a social life with times untethered to the internet. Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.
  • xyzzyz 11y ago
    > It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours overlapped by their own work schedules. Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.
    • yummyfajitas 11y ago
      India is a better bet. 10.5 hours away means they are nearly on the opposite schedule, price is better (wages only marginally, but Europe has lots of other costs) and you aren't stuck dealing with insane euro labor laws.
• psykovsky 11y ago
  Because of the annoying wife he has.
  • Ygg2 11y ago
    God, I hope this is sarcasm. EDIT: Fresh commas installed.
    • psykovsky 11y ago
      God I hope, this is sarcasm. God, I hope this is sarcasm. Commas are so undervalued...
      • Ygg2 11y ago
        From context, it's obvious where comma is placed. Context is (sadly) so undervalued these days. In my defense: A) Not native B) Written in a hurry. Anyway to assuage your fears of grammatically imperfect sentences, I've installed fresh commas. Enjoy.
        • psykovsky 11y ago
          There are too many things which are, sadly, undervalued. The only thing which seems to be overvalued is the "He did it too" excuse.
          • dang 11y ago
            Several of your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• wobbleblob 11y ago
  Somewhat off topic perhaps, but what exactly does therapy do? Has anyone here had therapy? If so, can they explain how talking to a psychologist cures a medical condition? Is it significantly different from talking to a priest or a faith healer?
  • nostrademons 11y ago
    It's basically just talking with a trained listener. It works because the vast majority of peoples' behavior is unconscious; we operate based on habits and assumptions that never really get tested. Unconscious behavior, by definition, is outside of conscious awareness. It also tends to be self-reinforcing in feedback loops: for example, if you assume everyone's dishonest and corrupt, you'll hide your motives and behave in a way that an honest person would assume to be dishonesty, and so all the honest people would refuse to associate with you, and so everyone around you would be dishonest and corrupt. Therapy doesn't actually "cure" anything. You cure yourself. What a therapist does is serve as a guide, providing an outside perspective that will challenge your unconscious assumptions when they're leading to problems for you. You can get the same effect by having a close friend or confidante, or even by having social contact with a wide variety of people that are different from yourself. But social relationships don't usually work that way; usually we gravitate toward people like ourselves, so if your beliefs are dysfunctional, you'll gravitate toward other people who are dysfunctional in similar ways (cf Amazon), and then that behavior becomes normalized for you. A therapist, being paid for their time, has an incentive to stick with you even when you're being annoying, and their training exposes them to a wide variety of behaviors.
  • hanspeter 11y ago
    It's science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology So yes, it's significantly different from talking to your mom, friend, priest etc.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    Imagine something like a phobia. A real, strong, phobia, diagnosed by a real doctor. This phobia affects the day to day life of (let's call her) Ann. Let's pick elevators for the phobia. When someone mentions an elevator Ann's heart rate increases, her palms get a bit sweaty, she starts breathing deeper. This is what most people call a "fight or flight" response. Her body is flooded with adrenaline. Her reaction is stronger - worse - when she sees an elevator even if she knows she does not have to ride that elevator. And now, at work where she has to walk past a bank of elevators to get to the stairwell she has to take 20 minutes to get herself past those elevators. Her friends know she's "scared of elevators", but don't know the strength of the fear. They might say things like "but your fear is irrational! Elavators are very safe." Or "you should feel the fear and do it anyway!" (Quoting the title of a quite good book, but ignoring the content of that book.). And Ann probably says this kind of thing to herself. "Why am I being so ridiculous?" If this was a rare thing (like flying is for most people) Ann could just get a prescription for diazapam, lorezapam, etc.[1]. But Ann needs to pass these elevators everyday. Ann decides to just get over it. She decides to ride an elevator. As she walks towards it her breathing changes, her palms get sweaty, and her brain is arguing "you're going to get stuck!" "You're being stupid, just do it". She pushes the button and waits for the ding. Her stress pevels build. The door opens, and she gets in. The door closes with that odd elevator lurch. Again, her stress rises. She's visibly distressed. The elevator rides two floors then the door opens. Ann rushes out. But she doesn't feel a sense of victory. She feels a sense of crushing defeat, of shame even. And, as she gets further away from the elevator her body rewards her with endorphins. So what's actually hapened is tha. She has reinforced her fear, she has made it stronger. Ann decides to go to a therapist. She carefully picks a qualified registered therapist and avoids the cranks and frauds. She picks someone who practices "cognitive behaviour therapy". At Ann's first meeting she says "I know I'm being silly, but I really want to get over this ridiculous fear". Her therapist (let's call her Beth) gently disagrees. "No, it's not ridiculous. It obviously causes you a lot of distress." - this is part of just establishing a relationship, but it's also important that Ann is finding her own answers. Beth continues "what are you scared of when I say the word 'elevator'?" Ann says that she is scared the doors will get stuck and that the lift will be stuck between floors and she'll be stuck in there. Now Beth starts the therapy. In a safe environment, away from any elevators, Ann is asked to list her "hot thought" ("The lift will be stuck between floors and I'll be trapped!", how strongly she believes this (1 to 5 or 1 to 10 or percents) Ann says very strongly, 10 out of 10, what the emotion caused by the hot thought is ("fear") and again how strong it is, and finally Ann is asked about her evidence for believing this. ("I read about the guy who got trapped in a lift for hours and I keep seeing stories like that") Beth at no point contradicts Ann. Beth then asks Ann to sit with these feelings for a few moments. (Less than 3 minutes!) then Beth asks Ann to think of alternative evidence. Beth doesn't supply alternative evidence. So, Ann might start with a weak challenge to her thinking. She might say "Even though I keep seeing lots of articles probably hundreds of people get elevators everyday without problems." She's then asked to re-rate how strongly she believes her hot thought and how strongly she feels her fear. This is an iterative process! Those numbers are still probably very high. Beth then begins a process of controlled desensitisation. Ann is in control of this - Ann will never have to do something she doesn't want to do. Ann is shown pictures of elevators. She's shown a video clip of the outside of an elevator. She's shown a first-person perspective of someone riding the elevator. She's taken to a building that has elevators. She's asked to call an elevator but not ride it, just watch from the outside the doors opening and closing. She calls an elevator and touches the doors. She calls an elevator and gets in and out while Beth keeps the door open. Eventually she calls an elevator, and gets on it with Beth, and travels a few floors. Every time she does one of these things she has to provide her hot thought, her strength of feeling, and her evidence and her alternative evidence. Beth might start challenging Ann's evidence "Do you think it's only hundreds of people? Do you think it might be very many thousands of people get an elevator each day with no problems?" "Do you think you seek out these stories of people being trapped? Why do you think they are reported?" After about eight hours of work Ann will be able to call an elevator, get in it, and ride it for several floors (going up and down). She might not like it, but her fear will be under her control. We know that for most people like Ann the CBT will be effective for at least two years, often longer. For some people it's a cure. Mental health diagnoses tend to be clumpy - "depression" probably isn't one illness, but a cluster of different illnesses that affect people in different ways. Meds have varying efffectiveness, sometimes for genetic reasons. For some people meds alone are a treatment. For some peopel CBT alone is effective. Some people need both. A few people get little to no benefit from the different emds they try and don't have much luck with CBT and they go on to try stronger meds or mindfulness, or even things like ECT. There are some interesting Cochrane reviews of meds and CBT. There are some interesting NICE advisories about different emthods of providing CBT or different meds. We know that for some people talking therapies are as effective as meds.
• xornor 11y ago
  I am now quite happy that I failed in the Amazon recruitment process. Their guidance said that I should prepare couple of weeks for the interview. For me they gave one weekend which I had to use for the family event. Perhaps I was not engaged enough after all.
  • hydrogen18 11y ago
    It became very obvious in the interview process that there was nothing to get excited about company wise. They didn't tell me anything about the company, at all. Just a bunch of questions anyone with a textbook could answer. Except for some reason I had to write code on a whiteboard. As if laptop's are a scarce resource and can't be spared for an interview. The really funny part was when I started asking the HR person about the teams I was interviewing with. I asked some really basic questions and she had no clue how to answer them. Just easy stuff like "Why does this team have more than the other team?" and "How long has this team been together, how long have they worked on this project?". She had no idea how to answer. They didn't even make me a offer. But what is really funny is every few months I get a request to come interview again for a totally unrelated position.
• forgotAgain 11y ago
  If you ever wonder why companies prefer younger employees this story explains a lot. After you've been taken advantage of enough you just don't accept it anymore.
• yitchelle 11y ago
  For the wife (and mum) who wrote this letter, I can feel her pain. Especially relocating to place where emotional support is low and life is lonely. We relocated to Germany from Australia, and it was a few hard years at the start. There are many reasons why we relocated, and some of those are similar to the author. We were lucky that we managed to see through the hard years and found our way. Now we are enjoying life in Germany. It sounds like the family is also on their way as well. For me, this article is not necessary about Amazon workplace practice. However, it certainly did not help at all.
• c_y 11y ago
  Welcome to IT and Prod Support. Unfortunately, That's how it is in many companies , with much lesser pay.
• orm 11y ago
  Some things about this article bother me. It starts by describing what is objectively a problem ascribable to Amazon itself ( letting on-call rotations reach the 3 week mark is terrible ), and then descends to pure appeal to emotion. Here's what I mean: the only thing that seemed an actual problem, to judge from the article, is that the on-call rotations became once every three weeks. Perhaps the length of the on-call, or the number of on-call people at the same time is another problem Amazon could address in this case. On-call in general (24/7 availability for some period of time), is not exclusively an Amazon thing. I'm surprised the writer tried to portray it so. After that, the author stops giving reasons. For example, the decision to go on a business trip after 4 weeks of their daughter being born seems to have been their own, not Amazon's. " I imagine he could have turned that down, but I was insistent that he go so". She did not explain if they felt coerced by Amazon and how. Same thing goes for the hotel they cancelled a day early. How did that happen and why? The writer did not thing this was important enough somehow, but I think it is. Normally I'd call this sloppiness, but considering the author is a professional and this had to get proof-read, it may just be the author is being a bit disingenuous as well.
  • enraged_camel 11y ago
    Did we read the same article? They went on a weekend trip in the summer, had to cancel their hotel and come back a day early, and the guy still got an earful from his manager the next day about how he isn't delivering. I don't see how this is "pure appeal to emotion". Also, a 15-minute max window for responding to pagers? Fucking hilarious. If these people were doctors getting called to the ER, I would understand. But this is a fucking online retail business! Furthermore, what the fuck happened to the concept of having backups on call so that if one person can't respond (i.e. they are driving), someone else can? This is a business decision by Amazon, and also isn't "pure appeal to emotion".
    • orm2 11y ago
      (same as orm), just my settings don't allow me to reply. "Did we read the same article? They went on a weekend trip in the summer, had to cancel their hotel and come back a day early, and the guy still got an earful from his manager the next day about how he isn't delivering. I don't see how this is "pure appeal to emotion"." She says: A happended. The next day B happened. She puts the two sentences together to imply cause and effect. But she she does not explicitly say 'A caused B', and I believe this is for a reason. All she does is to suggest it. To me, as an engineer, the fact she only suggests it is one of those things about the writing that bothers me. She did not explain what had been happening leading up to this nor the reasons the management gave. Note, I worked for Amazon for a couple of years. While I have to admit my team was really on the lucky side in terms of on-call while I was there. I am familiar with some of these policies. The 15 minute rule is just the time it takes for you to say 'I'm awake and I'm looking at the ticket'. You don't have to solve it. They use this deadline as a way to see if they should reach-out to a secondary on-call, as a backup.
• pawelkomarnicki 11y ago
  Amazon delivers lots of value to customers, and there're only two ways to do that: 1) spend shitload of money on processes and people, or 2) squeeze employees as much as possible. Sadly the 2nd option is much cheaper and "people are expendable anyway" these days.
• enraged_camel 11y ago
  Looks like Amazon apologists are flagging the submission in an attempt to take it off the front-page.
• gerbilly 11y ago
  I remember a time when Sunday shopping was a topic being debated in Canada. (At the time there was a law mandating that most stores be closed on Sundays.) Now stores are open 7 days a week and sometimes 24 hours a day. Whenever I see a store post that it's open 24hrs/day all I can think about is what that does to the employees: because for most people, overnight shifts destroy your life. I wonder if we wouldn't better off as a society having regular business hours and getting back that one day a week off. It's our fault as workers, really. Because we lack solidarity, workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can work longer hours for less.
• ohitsdom 11y ago
  > When our first daughter was about a month old, my husband was asked to go on a business trip. I imagine he could have turned that down, but I was insistent that he go so that his managers would not worry that his home life was impacting his work ethic. This is the Amazon way, after all. It was also one of the loneliest weeks of my life. Amazon seems to have serious issues, but this one is on the employee/spouse. If you don't protect your personal life/family time, how can you expect the company to? I have young kids so I come in to the office early and don't stay late too often so I can be home with them. I know some upper management probably look down on this, but expectations were clear when I was hired and my boss is OK with it. I realize keeping this balance may disqualify me from ever becoming VP of engineering, but I am more than OK with that if it means being a better spouse and father.
  • omouse 11y ago
    >so that his managers would not worry that his home life was impacting his work ethic It isn't on the employee/spouse; this is why you have managers that sometimes have to tell employees to go home. We're so fearful of losing our jobs that we bend over backwards for employers. This is what happens when employers have an advantage. >I know some upper management probably look down on this So your boss is fine with it but your boss's boss may not be. At least you aren't living in fear of losing your job. >I realize keeping this balance may disqualify me from ever becoming VP of engineering Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up.
    • ohitsdom 11y ago
      > this is why you have managers that sometimes have to tell employees to go home. Good managers can spot when this is needed. But if the employee is telling the manager that everything is fine and isn't showing signs of home stress, I don't blame the manager. > Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up. I think most companies are going to value and reward those who put in extra time consistently over those who don't.
  • tankerdude 11y ago
    The role of management is not to get every last drop of work out of you. With the risk of being redundant, management is really about management. You need to recognize when to push them and when not to. From the looks of it, it's push all the time in the team that this person was over at Amazon. That's a failure of management. It costs a lot to train a new employee, and reduces productivity and morale. So managers worth their salt would do one of many things to prevent this type of burnout. Predictability is what management wants as well as employees, believe it or not. If you are an effective manager, you either create predictability and a good work/life balance or you might as well not be there. You're basically a fire fighter in that case, and it doesn't help with long term predictability. Managers who worth their salt will go to bat to get people the time they want/need. If also need to recognize when it is time to walk away, and that's what I tell people when I do interview. If I don't correct the predictability scenario in terms of meeting business needs, I should be fired. If I don't get the tools that I need to get the results, it would be on me to walk away after informing them of the structural problems (and solutions to help them). I suspect that Amazon has a number of people who are purely focused on the bottom line of velocity and don't care about burn out. I'm sure though, that there are good groups to work for at Amazon, but the ratio might be lower than at other tech companies, from what I gather.
• graniter 11y ago
  Unless you really have no other option to support yourself, you really need to change jobs (or departments, etc.) if your job is requiring you to get anywhere close to needing therapy. Having learned this the hard way, I just don't think it's worth trying to hold on for it to get better. Be willing to move on. You'll likely find another job and make the same amount. Plus job hopping often is helpful in your career. And when your job is going well, save up some money so that when (yes, "when", not "if") it goes bad you have some funds to drawn on so that leaving isn't a financial burden and you can support yourself when you are between jobs. After 20 years in the field, I've just come to recognize that just how it is. Plan for it. And there's no reason to put yourself through undue mental or family anguish because you are afraid of making less (when you probably wouldn't anyway).
• dboreham 11y ago
  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 not do so! If it turns out the software is working just fine but the humans involved like to call people all the time, then arrange for some people to be in the office during working hours (heck, which continents does Amazon NOT have offices in??) to soothe them. Or perhaps fire the people who like to make unnecessary support calls. My point: this all indicates a very broken process and the process is the thing that needs to be fixed, rather than "being nicer" about the fact that your developer needs to be no more than 15 minutes from a WiFi network... Disclosure: I'm part of a small team that runs a high-availability service, without constant middle-of-the-night alerts.. Also, I am a long-time AMZN stock holder.
  • nodelessness 11y ago
    >> 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.
  • Gravityloss 11y ago
    This is very important. There needs to be an "agile manifesto" style awakening on this, so that business people also understand that software quality matters a lot. Perhaps I'll do a writeup at some point...
• joshstrange 11y ago
  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.
  • exodust 11y ago
    And why are we hearing the story from the wife? Should we presume the man had any editorial control? "Honey, I think it will sound better if it comes from you." My sympathy meter is barely flinching on this one sorry.
• deleted 11y ago
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• Tloewald 11y ago
  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.
• norea-armozel 11y ago
  It's these sort of articles that questions my use of Amazon for my retail purchases. Not just from the ethical standpoint of overworking people but also from the practical effect of getting most of what I want on time at a price I want because I can't say that Amazon today really does a good job on that front either. For example, if I want to purchase electronic components for my PC New Egg still beats them every time in price and delivery times (imo). Anytime I buy something like a stick of RAM from Amazon I tend to get burned on the delivery time (unless I use Prime) or the price (certain third party retailers just run out of stock). So, I never trust Amazon with my component purchases. Similarly, I'm finding their clothing section is getting more parse every year for plus sized clothing so I wind up buying socks from Sock Dreams, most outfits from Torrid (casual/off-work) or Lane Bryant (office-friendly/semi-formal) or some other retailer. Oddly, Amazon still beats Zappos on large size shoes (Zappos use to be the goto retailer but not anymore they seem to have culled most of their stock of non-fetish large size shoes). All this article and the NYT article just convinces me further that Amazon may become my retailer of last resort since all the thumbscrews in the world isn't worth anything if it comes down to a meager savings in price or time.
  • mrbill 11y ago
    You know that Amazon owns Zappos, right?
• iandanforth 11y ago
  Serious question, isn't this what unions are for?
  • netfire 11y ago
    Unions seem like a good solution on the surface, but it seems like many unions quickly degrade into organizations focused more on self-preservation and expansion than looking after the interests and well-being of their members. It seems like it also gets ugly, with unions not only striking for better pay and benefits, but also protesting and demeaning individuals and companies who aren't using union labor or putting in policies that work must be done by union workers that could easily be done by others at a much cheaper rate or with much less effort. ("Let's get a union electrician in here to run this extension cord") I'd be more in favor of unions if it were done completely on a volunteer and donation basis, instead of with mandatory dues, paid leadership and policies that demonize those who choose not to join the union or people that choose not to use union labor. An alternate solution would be to put laws in place that stops employers from preventing their employees from voicing concerns about policies and treatment publicly. (while still allowing employers to protect intellectual property rights) I'd argue that all these stories about the treatment of former Amazon employees will have more of an effect on Amazon, its hiring efforts and its policies than having a union threatening a strike would.
• jroseattle 11y ago
  I'd like to understand more about the systems that require pager duty? I don't work for AMZN, but as I understand it the internal infrastructure is highly service-ified, so (ideally) pager-duty activities are hopefully somewhat contained. And, I would imagine those issues relates to less-mature systems in play. Which leads me to my impression: it's 2015, AMZN has been around for 20 years, and their warehouses weren't just propped up yesterday. If pager duty involves looking into more mature systems interacting with others, then those activities will only get worse over time. It becomes maintenance nightmare land, something you can only do by churning through people. AMZN has some hard engineering problems to solve, but I wouldn't label it a top-notch engineering organization.
• outside1234 11y ago
  Ok, so Amazon is a turd of an employer. The question in my mind is how do we stop this abuse? Do we (as workers) put out a letter that asks for net average 40 hour weeks and ask companies to sign on to it? Do we keep naming and shaming like this? Or?
  • kelukelugames 11y ago
    I turned down my Amazon offer saying you are stock vesting plan is unfair. The recruiter's comeback was "We are all leaders here!" At least I tried.
    • outside1234 11y ago
      what was unfair about it?
      • kelukelugames 11y ago
        Everyone else vests roughly 25% every year over 4 years. Amazon was something like 15%/15%/30%/30% over 4. It's not very pro employee.
    • Devthrowaway80 11y ago
      > "We are all leaders here!" As a Amazon refugee, that is the funniest fucking thing I've read all day. We're all cowering, downtrodden, abused leaders here!
  • wmt 11y ago
    Employee unions have traditionally resolved such employer abuses like lowering the hourly wage by unpaid overtime. Thanks to this many western countries have contracts or even laws which forbid unpaid or mandatory overtime.
  • hwstar 11y ago
    You write your state assembly person, state senator, federal congressperson, and federal senators and state that you want labor law reform similar to the European Working Time Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive for exempt employees. It enough people applied pressure to elected officials, this could be a reality.
• sudoherethere 11y ago
  I am glad that finally Amazon's work environment is finally getting exposure. We had a few colleagues who worked for Amazon and they called it a sweatshop of IT world. Because of them, I have turned down recruiters from Amazon many times and stopped my friends from applying there. Hopefully, Amazon will change their workplace policies now or suffer stock price decline when smart people stop applying there.
• kyllo 11y ago
  I work for a company in Seattle whose technical employees are getting picked off by Amazon. Amazon offers probably 25-50% more in salary for similar positions, and we also can't compete with their equity offering. But in exchange for all that money, you have to work probably at least 50% more hours, tolerate weaker boundaries between your work life and personal life, and deal with a whole lot more stress. It's a trade-off that some people are willing to make, and others aren't. But what really sucks is that the real estate market is getting to the point where you need an Amazon salary just to afford a house in Seattle.
  • mikestew 11y ago
    Well, if your SDETs or test managers are getting picked off, my address is in my profile. :-) I've already told Amazon to quit calling, if that helps.
• AdamN 11y ago
  I guess I thought this was common knowledge. I've stayed away from working at Amazon for a while now based on stories from other tech people I know. It's not a top-tier place to work outside of AWS and the opportunities aren't really that great either. Maybe the pay is good? I've heard it's not competitive even. I know how it is though - people want the stamp of a top company on their resume. They also want to succeed. I blame the husband just a tiny bit - for not saying 'no' earlier. Ironically, he might not have been fired if he put a line in the sand earlier. He probably did underperform because he wasn't managing the manager's expectations properly. Of course, he might have gotten fired anyway - nobody will ever know. Work is tough - and unfortunately companies like Amazon aren't "buffering the core" very well. These are engineers who might not be good at managing expectations or managing or leadership even - but why stress them out if they're otherwise super-useful to the company? Employees who can't handle this stress but are otherwise valuable should be cradled and they'll perform better for longer - pretty simple really.
  • drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    >people want the stamp of a top company on their resume. I hate how valuable stuff like this is to hiring managers. If you asked me to pick between the guy who spent a year at Amazon or the guy who ran his own startup soup-to-nuts for a year, I'd rather go with the startup guy. Its crazy that we have this informal pseudo-classist system of "people who worked at AAA shops" vs "nobodies." Are HR departments and hiring managers really this dense?
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• dominotw 11y ago
  Can someone tell me why people continue to work for a toxic place if they are being abused?
  • ycseattle 11y ago
    The Seattle weather? Actually, I think it is because of the lack of good opportunities. In Seattle when you want to look for a prestigious tech job, it used to be just Microsoft and Amazon. That leaves you one option if you are leaving one of them. Its getting better in the past several years now that Google, Facebook are building up their satellite offices. I moved to the bay area recently after ten years in Seattle, and found that the working culture here is a lot better than that in Seattle. Also in Seattle you don't get a lot of recruiters contacting you while in bay area recruiting spam is a problem. I think this is a good opportunity for startups to open a Seattle office.
• exodust 11y ago
  "Needed therapy" is such a click-baity deliberate inflation of drama before we even get to the story. That alone caused me to look for a counter-argument, from someone who worked there, not their wife, or colleague, but an actual employee. (warning, no drama, no neglected infants, no angry wives) https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/08/16/Working-at-Amazon https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/08/16/Working-a... And btw, the claim that Amazon "encourages employees to tear apart one another's ideas" is also dramatic. Actually, I've seen the opposite happen where nobody says anything "nasty" about anyone's ideas for fear of deviating from the "positive work culture". Bad ideas can go a long way before they're spotted if you're not willing to speak up. Tearing shreds sounds to me like an opportunity to cut through the bullshit. It doesn't need to be personal, the mission is bigger than the individual. Ego should be put aside. Maybe I should try working at Amazon. A manager at my former workplace from years ago, let's call it News Corp, said to the technical team of 30 in a meeting once "the reason we are here [at the company] is to make each other look good". I was a pretty cheeky dev back then, but that day I didn't say anything. In my mind I thought "no, we're here to make the online products and services look good". You can invest time worrying about how things look or how things are, not both. Too much positivity or eggshell-treading or dancing around the truth and high-fiving when discussing or evaluating ideas can be an invisible poison for any business.
• backtoyoujim 11y ago
  The thing is ... at companies that I was the bane of because of my lack of technological ability past lithic ... every one made fum of me working 10 hours at work and two or three at home at night and the weekends. So now ... Amazon has created a culture where everyone feels like the guy that no one wants to work with ... they have found a way to make that exploitable among some pretty smart people. And everyone looks around and lifts their shoulders and shows their palms because the US work experience sucks. Amazon reads like the zenith of the suck.
• annasaru 11y ago
  An educated professional's capacity to endure pain, and inability to recognize implicit humiliation (i.e. your family is way less important than this job) as measured in this article, are about 6 years. For six years he put up with this abuse of power over him. He could have walked out after six months but he chose not to. How can Amazon be faulted for the employee's indecision. He's financially benefited by those 6 years of being an absent father. The financial gains are very concrete and measurable, and comforting. The same can't be said of the intangible - like playing with your infant child, and caring for them - can't put a value on them but that's a huge loss.
• aagha 11y ago
  I can't help but wonder if all the negative press Amazon is getting is just because of "a few bad applies". Of course there's selection bias, but the reviews for Amazon on Glassdoor [0] don't seem that bad compared to other companies. 0 - http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.ht...