6 ms·

I read through the article. I really, really hurt for its author, and pray that I never face similar circumstances. It sounds like he's stinging from his manage

• mrRandomGuy 5y ago
  A 'normal' company would understand that while a persons significant other is dying of a cancer, their work output may suffer as a result.
  • Jiro 5y ago
    If I was a plumber, and my wife was dying, and as a result I was unable to repair plumbing, I would not expect anyone to give me money to repair their plumbing, not even if I told them my wife is dying and they should be sympathetic.
    • louwrentius 5y ago
      You might work part-time and so balance work/income and care.
    • zerr 5y ago
      Employment != Sole proprietorship. Employer != Client.
    • rewma 5y ago
      > If I was a plumber, and my wife was dying, and as a result I was unable to repair plumbing, I would not expect anyone to give me money to repair their plumbing, not even if I told them my wife is dying and they should be sympathetic. When I filed for paternity leave, I was paid quite a few weeks for not working at all, because the country where I live understands that workers are people who have lives and struggle with major life events. It saddens me that some of us are so driven by self-contempt that don't realize they are far more than mindless organisms in a big Borg collective, ready and willing to be discarded whenever their productivity shows a drop.
      • hartator 5y ago
        > When I filed for paternity leave, I was paid quite a few weeks for not working at all, because the country where I live understands that workers are people who have lives and struggle with major life events. No country has this kind of benefits for plumbers who are mostly independent.
        • ceejayoz 5y ago
          A plumber will presumably understand the nature of independent contracting. A salaried plumber employed by a larger plumbing company would reasonably expect employee benefits.
        • rewma 5y ago
          > No country has this kind of benefits for plumbers who are mostly independent. How about Amazon SDEs?
        • DomreiRoam 5y ago
          In Luxembourg, Self-employed can benefit from a Parental leave: https://guichet.public.lu/en/entreprises/ressources-humaines/conges/situation-perso/conge-parental.html https://guichet.public.lu/en/entreprises/ressources-humaines... Everybody pays 24% to the social security and receives benefits when needed.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • yibg 5y ago
        This wasn't a couple of weeks though. From the timelines in the story it was more than a year. Would you expect to keep getting paid on paternity leave for 2 years?
        • rewma 5y ago
          > Would you expect to keep getting paid on paternity leave for 2 years? First of all, the article does not talk about leaving for 2 years. I feel you are intentionally trying to put a strawman to avoif debating the real problem. Secondly, the article mentions performance. According to the article, the person in question was pressured into improving performance or get the axe, in a period where his manager knew very well that his wife was dying. The manager even proposed he was placed in a performance evaluating program renowned to be a compulsive exit door whose goal is to help HR justify their decision to terminate contracts. And lastly, when my parental leave went into effect I got 16 weeks paid time off. That's loosely half a year. I'm sure this affects performance at the eyes of Amazon. Should that mean that Amazon would be entitled to fire my ass just because I had a child?
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      Are you working as a contractor or employee?
    • silisili 5y ago
      This analogy would work if engineers were paid by some metric like milestone completion. The vast majority are not, but instead paid yearly. And if you want to be a company people want to actually work at, you think of employees as investments so it's some scope even beyond yearly. A few months even of suffering performance is nothing in the grand scheme of things to a company Amazon's size. This is just cruelty for cruelty's sake.
    • s5300 5y ago
      Huh. I have a friend who owns a pool cleaning company, commonly known as pool routes. They contract a large amount of mostly laborers, and give them clients to form a route in which they go pool to pool to clean. 4-6 pools daily during season to my knowledge. A benefit these independently contracted pool cleaning laborers get: If you have any sort of personal or family health emergency, other pool cleaners will pick up your route for up to six months, with fully paid leave, and your position guaranteed whenever you're able to come back. And this is just for cleaning pools. You don't think plumbers and plumbers unions can do/deserve something close to this or better? Sounds like an awful world to live in if so.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    But we don't know how much. What if they made one small bug fix in a week? What if they literally did zero work?
  • nickff 5y ago
    The issue here may have been that the manager had no baseline of 'good performance' that they could expect this individual to 'return to'.
  • rkk3 5y ago
    He was offered a Family Leave option, but the details aren't shared so it's hard to judge... Terrible situation for the author, but expecting the company to eat the 500k/year he was costing them doesn't seem fair either.
    • relaunched 5y ago
      Companies employ people. People have problems. Firing people, or forcing out people, when they have problems, doesn't sound like a very good place to work. It's very possible that the unspoken culture at Amazon is work hard above all else. If you've read "The Everything Store", there is a quote, something like, (regarding Bezos) "If you're bad, Jeff will run you out of the company. If you're good, he'll ride you into the ground." It also talks about Jeff firing an early and long-time employee, he did throw a party for him in Hawaii, because Amazon no longer had a use for him. I don't know if either are true, but if true, I could see that attitude creating an unspoken culture of, "I don't care about your problems, we have work to do. If you can't do it, we need someone who can." I can also see how the success and the stock price, given the commitment to work above all, reinforces that mentality.
      • gruez 5y ago
        >Companies employ people. People have problems. Firing people, or forcing out people, when they have problems, doesn't sound like a very good place to work. Sure, it'd be great if my workplace kept paying me $300k even if I was under-preforming because of personal issues. However, how realistic is this expectation? Are there any places that keep under-preforming employees for half a decade, or more?
        • notJim 5y ago
          > Are there any places that keep under-preforming employees for half a decade, or more? Microsoft is often recommended for this, and some say Google these days too :).
        • relaunched 5y ago
          Are you arguing that no tech company has employees in most of Europe? It's very expensive to terminate people for cause in Scandinavian countries, France and the England. Just because we don't do it in the US, doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
  • geodel 5y ago
    A 'normal' company would give normal salary not these outsized Software salaries.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I do not know what a normal business is, but this is a luxury that a business with large margins and redundancies might have. A 7 eleven franchisee is not going to be able to afford that type of policy.
  • dkarl 5y ago
    I think if we're trying create a sane and decent society, we're barking up the wrong tree by attaching basic human compassion to employment, which is a bizarre choice that I'm guessing can be traced back to ideological polarization in the Cold War. The country wouldn't tolerate a completely pitiless dog-eat-dog system, but private enterprise was afraid of being exterminated if communism got a foothold in society, and they agreed to take on the responsibility of funding and administering the welfare state for everybody who was employed, so the welfare state for everybody else could be minimized and stigmatized. That's the just-so story in my head, anyway. As a result, we're in this absurd situation where the only way to do the right and decent thing for a poor person suffering a brutal personal tragedy is for them to get paid $300k per year to do an incredibly rare-air information economy job that they aren't actually doing. I agree, Amazon has a responsibility to this person because that's the system we've built. Amazon is reaping the benefits of the system and shouldn't be allowed to dodge the responsibilities. But my god, what an absurd system we've built.
  • yibg 5y ago
    I think the issue is the time factor. I think everyone agrees that if an employee is struggling for a short time then there should be some understanding, sympathy and accommodation. But I don't think anyone would argue that companies should do that forever. The question is how long is reasonable. In this case it looks like it was almost 2 years (mid - end 2018 to Aug 2020). Granted performance issues probably didn't come up right away but from the article it sounded like it came up pretty soon after joining. 2 years is a long time.
• illumin8 5y ago
  I read the timeline and it seems like he started in mid-late 2018, was having performance problems throughout 2019, and didn't even get fired until mid-2020. This is super generous, and while I have a lot of empathy for his personal situation, I think he could have had a much different outcome if he would have been more proactive about managing expectations: - Amazon does have a bereavement benefit that you definitely should take if you lose a brother like he did. - There are many opportunities to get help from doctors and medical professionals and document any disability you might have, which can help accessing disability benefits - While family medical leave is typically unpaid, if you are making $300K a year and were presumably making a lot less before you took the job, I think you can reasonably take a few months of unpaid family medical leave knowing your job will be there when you return. I feel bad for the guy in this situation, but I think Amazon was very generous and gave them every opportunity to perform. How many years should a company wait for an underperforming employee to perform?
  • ivraatiems 5y ago
    I'm not sure how it's done at Amazon - they are, after all, notorious for driving employees hard - but my understanding is that poor performance over a year or so is usually about the point at which firing begins to be discussed at large companies. And the problem wasn't that he didn't want to perform or was intrinsically a bad employee; the problem was that he literally couldn't due to circumstance. It's not generous to say "well, find a way to work through your wife's brain cancer and we'll keep you on."
    • bloodyplonker22 5y ago
      Many things wrong with your comment, starting with the fact that firing beings to be discussed only after a year. It actually begins to be discussed immediately after the employee is assessed to be an underperformer. It's only after a year of bad written performance reviews that they can actually start to do something about it, such as put the employee on a "PIP" or fire the employee.
      • ivraatiems 5y ago
• goldcd 5y ago
  I came away with similar sentiments. I've absolutely no issue with anybody criticising their employment practices in their warehouses or delivery arms - especially the use of contracting companies to isolate themselves from the questionable practices that seem required to get the job done. However, if they're paying you $300k to do a job, it strikes me as fair that if you cease to do that job you get terminated. Also that's enough money for you to have put in place your own safety net if one wasn't provided by your employer in your benefits.
• iamdbtoo 5y ago
  Is letting a struggling employee underperform for a while seriously not an option? At the very least, they could have not made this man's last few years with his sick wife that much more difficult because they require him to be functioning at top performance all of the time.
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    It really depends on how much they are underperforming. Are they late to a few meetings or not showing up for weeks without making arrangements?
• NBJack 5y ago
  I agree this seems to largely be a manager issue, though I would go as far to say it's more prevalent in the company culture. That said, I also agree this isn't exactly fair on Amazon's part as they were informed, up front, that this was an ongoing issue. The picture this paints isn't then one of "they did their best and were generous"; instead, it's one of "they got what they wanted out of him." Note that by company policy, all employees are given a max base pay of about $160k (including Mr. Bezos himself, which they love to point out during negotiations); the remainder of the $300k would have likely been through stock options, which the author points out were left behind during termination. Thus they were technically paying him almost half plus whatever signing bonus was negotiated.
• Justsignedup 5y ago
  He did give the hiring team a big heads up that he rather not take the job than join Amazon. However the big issue is that Amazon's HR could have done so many things differently: - work with him to get on short term or long term disability - work with him to figure out a way to take the time off that he needed combined with getting back on track - don't judge him on metrics he has no control over Its a perfect combination of not giving a shit. I understand it costs them money, but Amazon has the money.