11 ms·

Jeff Bezos: Work-Life Balance Is 'Debilitating Phrase'

42 points by hassanahmad 5y ago

jsiepkes 5y ago
> Bezos said his new hires should stop trying to find "balance" within their professional and personal lives since that implies a strict trade-off between the two. Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office. If those are his views it certainly doesn't reflect in Amazon's actions. For example why did Amazon first try to get everyone back in the office? It was only after a backlash they allowed for a meager 2 days of work from home.
birdyrooster 5y ago
Jeff Bezos is more insufferable than Larry Ellison. We should all be proud of his accomplishment.
- krapp 5y ago
  He's going to fund a laser to carve his face into the moon, isn't he?
kleinsch 5y ago
Easy to say when you’re there’s no stack ranking for your position. He’s created a super competitive culture that makes his working habits impossible for anyone else at Amazon.
bsharitt 5y ago
It's much easier talk about integrating life and work and shun compartmentalization of work when you see much more direct returns from the output of your work/not work, rather than having a fixed salary.
- yokaze 5y ago
  I would say, almost the opposite: It is much easier if you essentially do not have to work anymore and you can do it just for the kick of it. Like starting a space race.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aenis 5y ago
He should perhaps publish stats of staff turnaround and regrettable attrition. How long does an average junior hire last? Its easy to be happy at work when your bathroom breaks are not counted and timed.
jackvalentine 5y ago
There is no substance to what he was quoted as saying in this article. What does he mean by it being a 'circle' ? I think work life balance is more of a dodecahedron.
aliasEli 5y ago
> Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office. Unfortunately, this appears to mean that employees have to be available 24/7 for work for the rest of their lives. There is a way that employees can be freed of this by means of manumission [0], but this generally requires that they have a lot of money. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
The more Bezos opens his mouth, the more he sounds like he wants to be neo robber baron.
- deviledeggs 5y ago
  He has been for a while. Bezos is richer than most kings. People are dying of starvation and Bezos makes $2500 per second. We have billionaires competing over who will go to space first, because they simply have nothing better to do with their money. It's disgusting really. Yet somehow articles about what these assholes eat for breakfast still get to the front page
deviledeggs 5y ago
It's easy to be 1000% dedicated to your job when you make over $9,000,000 an hour. But he wants the same dedication from people he pays $6. He's also vicious about crushing unions and is known for giving employees so little breaks they have to piss in bottles. Fuck Bezos. The US has a real problem with wealth worship. People lap up every drop that comes out of this asshole just because he's a million times richer than everyone else. So they think he's a million times smarter. Jeff Bezos is a rich asshole and treats his employees like toilet paper. It's laughable that anyone would take life advice from this clown
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  > It's easy to be 1000% dedicated to your job when you make over $9,000,000 an hour. i think i would find it difficult after about three days
  - COGlory 5y ago
    At which point I'd buy a few acres in Montana, get a Starlink subscription, and happily work on my hobbies for the rest of my life.
- shmageggy 5y ago
  > he's a million times richer than everyone else. So they think he's a million times smarter. The more I talk to people I disagree with and spend time outside of the US, the more I come to believe that this mental distortion is very near to a root cause for so much misery and suffering, particularly in the US. The way we worship the rich and let them get away with distorting our politics and laws to suit them to the detriment to everyone else is unconscionable, yet I see people supporting it, or at least not outraged by it, simply because they believe that wealth is perfectly correlated with how much you deserve to have your way. It's bizarre.
  - User23 5y ago
    Jeff is in fact is an exceptionally intelligent man. He’s easily at least three sigma above the mean. Anyone that’s worked with him can tell you that.
kthejoker2 5y ago
Other debilitating phrases for Jeff Bezos include "til death do us part", "reduce, recycle, reuse", and "the meek shall inherit the earth." Never take advice from outliers.
admissionsguy 5y ago
It's funny how unlikable that guy is. There is still time to sign the petition that would have Bezos stay in space after his upcoming launch [1][2]. Once it hits 150,000 signatures shortly, it will likely generate another set of headlines, which is one (if somewhat silly) way to hurt the guy. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/how-a-petition-to-keep-jeff-bezos-in-space-got-started.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/how-a-petition-to-keep-jeff-... [2] https://www.change.org/p/the-proletariat-do-not-allow-jeff-bezos-to-return-to-earth https://www.change.org/p/the-proletariat-do-not-allow-jeff-b...
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  I know this is just symbolic, but Bezos is not going into orbit so he couldn’t stay in space even if he wanted to.
emerged 5y ago
It’s debilitating if you don’t want to have a non-work life, which fits what he wants from his employees and from himself. It sure doesn’t fit what I want from myself.
potamic 5y ago
Debilitating to a few men's fortunes perhaps, but richly rewarding to the thousands of people with a broader outlook to life. Bezos holds fair amount of respect for his accomplishments, but statements like these make him sound more like Mr. Burns than anyone. Just trying to extract maximum output out of his labourers. I for one am fairly surprised by the shamelessness demonstrated by some of these excess haves. Reminds me of another billionaire egging on people for 60 hour weeks at a time when his company was raking in record profits due to the covid IT boom - https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/indians-should-work-60-hours-week-next-2-3-yrs-revive-economy-narayana-murthy-123661 https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/indians-should-work-60...
- belter 5y ago
  I see a pattern here...:-) "Alibaba’s Jack Ma calls the ‘996’ — China’s 72-hour workweek — a ‘huge blessing’" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-jack-ma-calls-the-996-chinas-72-hour-work-week-a-huge-blessing-2019-04-15 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-jack-ma-calls-the...
  - roger4534 5y ago
    Jack Ma is a business dude. But Bezos was a programmer and that makes my heart sink low
    - agency 5y ago
      Was Bezos a programmer? I don’t think so. He has a degree in electrical engineering & computer science but he immediately went into the business world via Wall Street (D.E. Shaw). He seems like as much of a “business dude” as anyone.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Bezos was an investment banker who knew how to code. Not a sleight, just an observation. There are many paths to wealth.
- bko 5y ago
tolbish 5y ago
> "If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy." Surely that same thinking goes the other way: if you are having a rough time at home and it's clearly affecting your work performance, Amazon understands and tries to improve your home situation since real life is intertwined with work, right? Right?
- niblettc 5y ago
  They’ll help you improve your work performance with a Performance Improvement Plan for sure
- vipa123 5y ago
  They'll fire you. Their relationship with you is extraction at the foundation. Once the extraction costs exceed the marginal cost of switching extraction locations, the switch is inevitable. It's cute of him to say that when his work output is going almost entirely directly back to him (through his prestige gains, increased wealth, etc) and his work output is being leveraged by orders of magnitude by the employees, and contractors, and service providers, under him whom he's trying to maximize extraction from. His work is his life, and his work/life is being leveraged by others. If I weren't so numb, I might actually be cynical about it.
- bko 5y ago
  I personally would not want my employer actively trying to meddle in and improve my home life. I don't really get your objection
  - tolbish 5y ago
    Work-life balance is not a debilitating phrase.
    - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
      "It's not debilitating if you think the solution I offer is worse" Of course, there's always the history of medicine as a counterexample
dangjc 5y ago
Bezos leaned very hard away from work life balance. He’s extremely wealthy and divorced.
sys_64738 5y ago
Corporate speak for you're always on the clock. Always.
akagusu 5y ago
There is no such thing as work-life balance. There is life for the rich, and there is work for everybody else.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Only in the land of the free market crapitalism. Elsewhere, in more 'socialistic' leaning countries, where the devilish red demons rule, stories about actual equality(somewhat), working infrastructure, public transportation(depends), 'educäyshun' (varying, sometimes free!), and working health systems(varying, sometimes free!) are told. Really strange tales...
Apreche 5y ago
It IS a strict trade-off. The very definition of work is time I spend doing something that someone else wants me to do instead of doing something I want to do. I only do this because our capitalist society demands it. The goal of capitalism is to escape capitalism by having enough money to spend 100% of your time on what you want to do, and I have not yet won at capitalism. Jeff Bezos, who has won at capitalism, by definition, does not work at all. He spends all his time doing what he wants to do. He never spends one second of his time doing what someone else wants him to do, unless he also wants to do it. The balance is that I always try to spend the absolute minimum time working and the maximum time not working. If Jeff Bezos wants to work, I'm happy to have him do things I want him to do, that he does not want to do, for 40 hours a week every week.
Barrin92 5y ago
>"If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy." I know Bezos has folded a lot of boxes himself when the company started out, but somehow I get the impression he can't really relate to people who've been pulling night shifts at his warehouse for years to maybe get a few dollars of a raise because after a few of those you don't come home with tremendous energy.
- krapp 5y ago
  Yeah, I'd come into the office with tremendous energy too if I were worth almost 200 billion dollars and my job didn't require any physical labor whatsoever. I bet when you can outspend the GDP of entire countries and make cities compete for the privilege of making you even richer at their expense, your work life balance is pretty awesome.
comfyinnernet 5y ago
Apparently Bezos is worried that someone out there might not know he's a dickhead yet.
rm445 5y ago
Not to defend the tone-deaf comments, but in some circumstances there's maybe part of a point? When you're aligned with your work, when it's meaningful and aligned with your personal goals, hard separations between work and life matter a lot less. You can be in a flow kind of state for quite a while and be happy. I believe that discounting finding meaning from work is too cynical. But it only exists for some people in some jobs, some of the time. I think the visceral reaction to Bezos' comments is because we know it definitely can't exist in so many Amazon jobs.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  It's a bit easier to align work with your personal goals when your wish is law for the worlds biggest firm
itsdrewmiller 5y ago
Notably something he said in 2018, not recently. I believe it was discussed here then too.

42 points by hassanahmad 5y ago

> Bezos said his new hires should stop trying to find "balance" within their professional and personal lives since that implies a strict trade-off between the two. Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office. If those are his views it certainly doesn't reflect in Amazon's actions. For example why did Amazon first try to get everyone back in the office? It was only after a backlash they allowed for a meager 2 days of work from home.

birdyrooster 5y ago

Jeff Bezos is more insufferable than Larry Ellison. We should all be proud of his accomplishment.

krapp 5y ago
He's going to fund a laser to carve his face into the moon, isn't he?

kleinsch 5y ago

Easy to say when you’re there’s no stack ranking for your position. He’s created a super competitive culture that makes his working habits impossible for anyone else at Amazon.

bsharitt 5y ago

It's much easier talk about integrating life and work and shun compartmentalization of work when you see much more direct returns from the output of your work/not work, rather than having a fixed salary.

yokaze 5y ago
I would say, almost the opposite: It is much easier if you essentially do not have to work anymore and you can do it just for the kick of it. Like starting a space race.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aenis 5y ago

He should perhaps publish stats of staff turnaround and regrettable attrition. How long does an average junior hire last? Its easy to be happy at work when your bathroom breaks are not counted and timed.

jackvalentine 5y ago

There is no substance to what he was quoted as saying in this article. What does he mean by it being a 'circle' ? I think work life balance is more of a dodecahedron.

aliasEli 5y ago

> Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office. Unfortunately, this appears to mean that employees have to be available 24/7 for work for the rest of their lives. There is a way that employees can be freed of this by means of manumission [0], but this generally requires that they have a lot of money. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

The more Bezos opens his mouth, the more he sounds like he wants to be neo robber baron.

deviledeggs 5y ago
He has been for a while. Bezos is richer than most kings. People are dying of starvation and Bezos makes $2500 per second. We have billionaires competing over who will go to space first, because they simply have nothing better to do with their money. It's disgusting really. Yet somehow articles about what these assholes eat for breakfast still get to the front page

deviledeggs 5y ago

It's easy to be 1000% dedicated to your job when you make over $9,000,000 an hour. But he wants the same dedication from people he pays $6. He's also vicious about crushing unions and is known for giving employees so little breaks they have to piss in bottles. Fuck Bezos. The US has a real problem with wealth worship. People lap up every drop that comes out of this asshole just because he's a million times richer than everyone else. So they think he's a million times smarter. Jeff Bezos is a rich asshole and treats his employees like toilet paper. It's laughable that anyone would take life advice from this clown

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> It's easy to be 1000% dedicated to your job when you make over $9,000,000 an hour. i think i would find it difficult after about three days
- COGlory 5y ago
  At which point I'd buy a few acres in Montana, get a Starlink subscription, and happily work on my hobbies for the rest of my life.
shmageggy 5y ago
> he's a million times richer than everyone else. So they think he's a million times smarter. The more I talk to people I disagree with and spend time outside of the US, the more I come to believe that this mental distortion is very near to a root cause for so much misery and suffering, particularly in the US. The way we worship the rich and let them get away with distorting our politics and laws to suit them to the detriment to everyone else is unconscionable, yet I see people supporting it, or at least not outraged by it, simply because they believe that wealth is perfectly correlated with how much you deserve to have your way. It's bizarre.
- User23 5y ago
  Jeff is in fact is an exceptionally intelligent man. He’s easily at least three sigma above the mean. Anyone that’s worked with him can tell you that.

kthejoker2 5y ago

Other debilitating phrases for Jeff Bezos include "til death do us part", "reduce, recycle, reuse", and "the meek shall inherit the earth." Never take advice from outliers.

admissionsguy 5y ago

It's funny how unlikable that guy is. There is still time to sign the petition that would have Bezos stay in space after his upcoming launch [1][2]. Once it hits 150,000 signatures shortly, it will likely generate another set of headlines, which is one (if somewhat silly) way to hurt the guy. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/how-a-petition-to-keep-jeff-bezos-in-space-got-started.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/how-a-petition-to-keep-jeff-... [2] https://www.change.org/p/the-proletariat-do-not-allow-jeff-bezos-to-return-to-earth https://www.change.org/p/the-proletariat-do-not-allow-jeff-b...

boardwaalk 5y ago
I know this is just symbolic, but Bezos is not going into orbit so he couldn’t stay in space even if he wanted to.

emerged 5y ago

It’s debilitating if you don’t want to have a non-work life, which fits what he wants from his employees and from himself. It sure doesn’t fit what I want from myself.

potamic 5y ago

Debilitating to a few men's fortunes perhaps, but richly rewarding to the thousands of people with a broader outlook to life. Bezos holds fair amount of respect for his accomplishments, but statements like these make him sound more like Mr. Burns than anyone. Just trying to extract maximum output out of his labourers. I for one am fairly surprised by the shamelessness demonstrated by some of these excess haves. Reminds me of another billionaire egging on people for 60 hour weeks at a time when his company was raking in record profits due to the covid IT boom - https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/indians-should-work-60-hours-week-next-2-3-yrs-revive-economy-narayana-murthy-123661 https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/indians-should-work-60...

belter 5y ago
I see a pattern here...:-) "Alibaba’s Jack Ma calls the ‘996’ — China’s 72-hour workweek — a ‘huge blessing’" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-jack-ma-calls-the-996-chinas-72-hour-work-week-a-huge-blessing-2019-04-15 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-jack-ma-calls-the...
- roger4534 5y ago
  Jack Ma is a business dude. But Bezos was a programmer and that makes my heart sink low
  - agency 5y ago
    Was Bezos a programmer? I don’t think so. He has a degree in electrical engineering & computer science but he immediately went into the business world via Wall Street (D.E. Shaw). He seems like as much of a “business dude” as anyone.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Bezos was an investment banker who knew how to code. Not a sleight, just an observation. There are many paths to wealth.
bko 5y ago

tolbish 5y ago

> "If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy." Surely that same thinking goes the other way: if you are having a rough time at home and it's clearly affecting your work performance, Amazon understands and tries to improve your home situation since real life is intertwined with work, right? Right?

niblettc 5y ago
They’ll help you improve your work performance with a Performance Improvement Plan for sure
vipa123 5y ago
They'll fire you. Their relationship with you is extraction at the foundation. Once the extraction costs exceed the marginal cost of switching extraction locations, the switch is inevitable. It's cute of him to say that when his work output is going almost entirely directly back to him (through his prestige gains, increased wealth, etc) and his work output is being leveraged by orders of magnitude by the employees, and contractors, and service providers, under him whom he's trying to maximize extraction from. His work is his life, and his work/life is being leveraged by others. If I weren't so numb, I might actually be cynical about it.
bko 5y ago
I personally would not want my employer actively trying to meddle in and improve my home life. I don't really get your objection
- tolbish 5y ago
  Work-life balance is not a debilitating phrase.
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    "It's not debilitating if you think the solution I offer is worse" Of course, there's always the history of medicine as a counterexample

dangjc 5y ago

Bezos leaned very hard away from work life balance. He’s extremely wealthy and divorced.

sys_64738 5y ago

Corporate speak for you're always on the clock. Always.

akagusu 5y ago

There is no such thing as work-life balance. There is life for the rich, and there is work for everybody else.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Only in the land of the free market crapitalism. Elsewhere, in more 'socialistic' leaning countries, where the devilish red demons rule, stories about actual equality(somewhat), working infrastructure, public transportation(depends), 'educäyshun' (varying, sometimes free!), and working health systems(varying, sometimes free!) are told. Really strange tales...

Apreche 5y ago

It IS a strict trade-off. The very definition of work is time I spend doing something that someone else wants me to do instead of doing something I want to do. I only do this because our capitalist society demands it. The goal of capitalism is to escape capitalism by having enough money to spend 100% of your time on what you want to do, and I have not yet won at capitalism. Jeff Bezos, who has won at capitalism, by definition, does not work at all. He spends all his time doing what he wants to do. He never spends one second of his time doing what someone else wants him to do, unless he also wants to do it. The balance is that I always try to spend the absolute minimum time working and the maximum time not working. If Jeff Bezos wants to work, I'm happy to have him do things I want him to do, that he does not want to do, for 40 hours a week every week.

Barrin92 5y ago

>"If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy." I know Bezos has folded a lot of boxes himself when the company started out, but somehow I get the impression he can't really relate to people who've been pulling night shifts at his warehouse for years to maybe get a few dollars of a raise because after a few of those you don't come home with tremendous energy.

krapp 5y ago
Yeah, I'd come into the office with tremendous energy too if I were worth almost 200 billion dollars and my job didn't require any physical labor whatsoever. I bet when you can outspend the GDP of entire countries and make cities compete for the privilege of making you even richer at their expense, your work life balance is pretty awesome.

comfyinnernet 5y ago

Apparently Bezos is worried that someone out there might not know he's a dickhead yet.

rm445 5y ago

Not to defend the tone-deaf comments, but in some circumstances there's maybe part of a point? When you're aligned with your work, when it's meaningful and aligned with your personal goals, hard separations between work and life matter a lot less. You can be in a flow kind of state for quite a while and be happy. I believe that discounting finding meaning from work is too cynical. But it only exists for some people in some jobs, some of the time. I think the visceral reaction to Bezos' comments is because we know it definitely can't exist in so many Amazon jobs.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
It's a bit easier to align work with your personal goals when your wish is law for the worlds biggest firm

itsdrewmiller 5y ago

Notably something he said in 2018, not recently. I believe it was discussed here then too.