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>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, an
by 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 agoIf 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 agoEfficiency!
- einrealist 11y agoAlways a cost center until it isn't. Typical short sighted management.
- RogerL 11y agoYou 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 agoA 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?
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoThe MBA thinks "cheap as possible" - so two devs and a dog sounds like a reasonable budget, even if it means stuff doesn't quite work and employees get broken. The real poison is MBA culture. It's literally insane in most normal human senses.
- weland 11y agoThis. It's easy to shift the blame to faceless Amazon and pretend "the company" is at fault. It's not. The people who are running the company (and I'm not referring strictly to top management here) are the ones with the blatant disregard for their employees. This is not a result of some inherent forces our Universe suddenly concentrating over Amazon. They're the result of business decisions. A bunch of people wearing suits have talked about this and agreed it's okay.
- ucaetano 11y agoTell me, if it was your money being invested, would you act differently?
- tormeh 11y agoYeah, it seems like it's the natural dynamic. The government could probably do something about it, I guess.
- ucaetano 11y agoYep, and that should be minimum wage, not "good working conditions for highly-paid white collar workers". [Edit: sorry if the tone sounds bad, no intend to offend] Disclaimer: I'm a highly-paid white collar worker. There's enough competition in the tech industry that this isn't a problem, let the market regulate itself in this case, it's working. I wouldn't work at Amazon under those conditions, but if some people would, let them.
- weland 11y ago
- davedx 11y agoI dunno. I've worked in games and I've worked in another role where I was on-call. I think the kind of stress is apples and oranges. Games is definitely more work overall, but it's generally within office hours, and you can still get a decent sleep even at crunch time if you're sensible and don't work for the worst abusers of unpaid overtime. On-call can really fuck you up even if the actual hours worked are less.
- rmc 11y ago> 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. If it's worth millions of dollars per hour, you can afford to hire more employees to give greater and more coverage.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoIf it's a million an hour you should have people permanently available running 3 shift 24/7 and probably with onsite Engineers.