
Amazon's Sick New Sick Policy - pinewurst
https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/sick-new-sick-policy
======
wonderwonder
This seems to come off as a means of using peer pressure to ensure everyone
comes to work every day, regardless of personal or family illness.

If little Timmy gets the flu or something worse and you take a week or longer
off to look after him because he can't go to school, your team is going to
feel like your child has cost them money, which he has.

Not a good work way to build an environment based on affection and personal
respect. Childless people will hate people with sick kids and if someone has a
chronic illness that person is now a drain on the team.

Also a good way to ensure sick people heroically come to work and infect
everyone else.

~~~
jvvw
I don't agree with the policy but surely you use vacation time not sick leave
when your children are sick? I do at least and assumed everybody else did too.
(I'm in the UK though so appreciate sick leave may be a different concept in
the US).

~~~
brianwawok
Very common in the US to use sick time for either you being sick of staying
home for a sick kid.

At one co this causes some friction. Company policy was 20 vacation days and
10 sick days. A young healthy type guy would use maybe 1 sick day and 20
vacation days, for 21 days off a year.

Anyone with kids know they get sick a LOT. So basically anyone with any amount
of kids would use all 10 for their kids. So parents go 10 sick + 20 vacation =
30 days off a year.

I guess enough people complained that they just combined the two into a single
"PTO" pool of 28 days. That way you can take the 28 days if you have kids or
not. I guess the downside is people with kids got less vacation, but it seemed
bit more "fair" overall.

~~~
ncallaway
I guess it's more fair if you view someone taking a day to care for their sick
child as "vacation".

I personally don't view it that way (I say this as someone who doesn't have a
child).

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Having to meet with a lawyer, accountant, etc isnt a "vacation", but I'm
expected to use vacation not sick days for those appointments. Arguably, those
are all more essential to life than having children, which is optional.

Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't incentivize having children by making extra
allowances for that, but let's not pretend it's anything but unfair.

But if we're talking _fair_ , why should they get a day to take care of their
child but I don't get one to take care of necessary legal paperwork?

~~~
dvtv75
> Having to meet with a lawyer, accountant, etc isnt a "vacation", but I'm
> expected to use vacation not > sick days for those appointments.

You think you've made a point, but you really haven't. You don't have to take
vacation time for that, you can always take unpaid leave - at least,
everywhere I've ever worked. If you dispute using sick days for looking after
children, perhaps you should examine your employment contract and perhaps
consult an employment lawyer? There will be plenty of legal reasons why it's
this way.

Feel free to apply to take a sick day while consulting the lawyer, too.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
And those reasons are _unfair_. They're fundamentally about incentivizing a
behavior via the legal system.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's ridiculous to say it's fair when at
a fundamental level, the exact point is that it's not.

------
markwaldron
So they are encouraging people to go to work sick under penalty of losing
portions of their bonus? How long until a strong version of the flu puts whole
teams out of commision? It's things like this that cause me to always reply
"Thanks, but no thanks" to their recruiters whenever they reach out to me.

~~~
namelezz
You can accept their invitation and screw up on the onsite interview. Just
enjoy visiting whatever city that they fly you to.

~~~
ipince
Not that I'm suggesting you do this, but if you're going through the trouble
of flying out to interview, you might as well do well. In the worst case, you
are where you started, and in the best case you have a good offer that can
give you leverage​ in other negotiations.

~~~
wlesieutre
And when you take the other job instead, be sure to tell Amazon "It sounds
like a great opportunity, but I have a comparable offer without your godawful
sick policy." Amazon's doing this because they think the extra hours they'll
squeeze out of employees outweighs the talent that it costs them.

------
MS_Buys_Upvotes
The bonus pool is finite. Teams should use their germs to make other teams
sick so they get a larger slice of the bonus pool.

~~~
winter_blue
The problem here is that employer-employee isn't perfect. Employers are
expected to provide a variety of things, like health insurance, sick leave,
parental leave, and even vacation, among other things. There are costs to all
of these benefits. These costs are amortized and factored into your pay, and
effectively reduces your pay.

Imagine you make $130k a year--that's about $65/hr _in your eyes_. But to the
employer, factoring in the ancillary costs of benefits, and payroll taxes, you
likely cost around $100/hr. What if instead, every person instead had their
own little personal one-person LLC, and they worked as independent
contractors? Then you would bill for hours worked, and you could get paid the
$100/hr you actually cost.

The downside to this is that you don't get paid when you are sick, or have a
child. But a more accurate way of putting that is that your coworkers do not
subsidize/pay for your parental or sick leave. You'd have to get independent
insurance to cover such situations. You would also get a solo 401(k) for
saving, you'd get your own health insurance, and manage your own benefits in
general.[1] It could be a bit empowering.

[1] A bit off-topic, but note that solo 401(k)s come with a higher
contribution limit got $52,000 verses $18,000 for regular 401(k)s. I've also
found that healthcare.gov offers a lot of choice (at least in New York, NY),
and I'd rather my company pay me the amount they spend of health insurance,
and I get my own care (provided there is an above-the-line tax deduction for
health insurance premiums).

------
tombert
This is likely to be slightly controversial, but is Amazon running some sort
of "Stanford-Prison-Experiment" kind of test on their employees? It seems like
about once a month we're seeing some kind of horrific thing being done to
their workers that are almost comic-book-supervillain-bad.

It's stories like this that make it easy for me to deny the Amazon recruiters
when they bother me.

~~~
doktrin
Amazon horror stories go way back. Anyone remember that hilarious Yegge
hangouts post from 2011 [1]? I kind of hoped they'd changed their ways since
then, but guess not.

Easy pass tbh. Working for one of the "big 4.5" isn't worth some of the shit
they pull.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

------
camtarn
Good grief, that's horrible. I used to work in Amazon's Edinburgh dev office,
and this would never have flown. Apart from the basic humanity of the entire
thing, there was very much a culture of "if you're sick, you better stay home
because we don't want you to infect anyone else." I really hope this doesn't
spread to other locations apart from Germany.

~~~
leggomylibro
>Apart from the basic humanity of the entire thing

No 'apart' about it. With Amazon, that concept simply never enters into the
conversation.

~~~
camtarn
Well, that's the thing: the folks running the centre I worked for were very
much human, and really quite understanding of regular everyday human things. I
think, though, that the Edinburgh culture was very influenced by the centre
being started by a guy who wanted to move to Scotland to start a family - it's
been explicitly family-friendly from the start, with people being encouraged
to keep a good work-life balance rather than working more and more hours.

From what I heard that wasn't the case in the rest of Amazon, which always
made me feel a bit icky about working from said megacorp - along with all the
other dubiously moral stuff. I'm rather a lot happier being out of there, I
must say.

~~~
leggomylibro
It's the organization. You can't change the rules of the organization.
Everyone working there is human, and there are a lot of good people. But
there's no room for common sense or human decencies in the policies and the
legalities, and when you sign on the dotted line, as far as Amazon is
concerned you have signed away your soul.

A court might disagree, but what's that to the individual who can't afford to
keep a prestigious law firm on retainer?

------
Johnny555
I briefly worked at a company with combined sick+vacation "PTO" days.

Worst idea ever -- people would come to work with a full-on cold, coughing and
sneezing all over the place. Just because they didn't want to "waste" vacation
days being sick.

Now I work at a place with more traditional sick days separate from vacation
days, and people stay home when they are sick. And are actively encouraged to
stay home, no one wants to see a flu sweep through the entire engineering
team.

~~~
t0mbstone
If you are going to give combo sick/vacation PTO days, I think the minimum
number that is reasonable is at least 4 weeks. That way, people can have 2
weeks of sick time, and 2 weeks of vacation.

~~~
Dunan
I work for a company like this (a direct rival to Amazon, aping many of its
policies) in a country infamous for its workaholism, and given the intense
pressure to never get sick (not becoming sick is considered part of one's
personal responsibility), what typically ends up happening is one week of
genuine vacation, a day or two of scheduled PTO for whatever personal reasons,
and then perhaps one or two sudden sick days, in a year.

But there is also half-hearted pressure from HR to consume more than about 30%
of our total PTO, combined with unstated pressure from management in general
to consume less than 50% of it. Everyone ends up worrying about the exact
number of socially-acceptable days to take off per year rather than just
living their lives. I've gotten used to it but when I hear about European
standards, I'm just green with envy.

------
arcticbull
Seems like they should be encouraging people to stay home if they're un-well,
that's just basic science isn't it? Feels like this policy will backfire.

~~~
YCode
Maybe that's what they want to see, and it's not impossible that it will turn
out to work very well, for Amazon.

------
spott
I think this can be viewed two ways:

A) Use peer pressure to keep people at work even when sick. Incentivize coming
to work regardless, because you don't want to "let the team down".

B) Incentivize a group to care about each others health. To keep sick people
home (so they don't get more people sick), and to avoid putting to much stress
on individuals (to prevent them from getting sick in the first place).

This seems like the culture of the group is going to drive it one way or the
other, and kind of vacate the middle ground.

------
delegate
I wonder why Amazon did this..

Is it because people were taking too many sick days in Germany ?

If so, then it means the company thinks that people were taking sick days when
they shouldn't have, so they're indirectly calling their own employees liars
and making them all pay for that.

Is it a way to save money ?

I didn't know things were so tight at Amazon ... In fact, next time I try to
order, I'll remember to remember that the lower product prices are funded by
people's sick pay...

Either way, very shitty move, Amazon.

~~~
abruzzi
While I'm not a fan of this approach, sick leave abuse is a common issue.
While I've never seen actual studies to back that up, anecdotally I've seen it
a lot.

My employer had to institute a policy that if you take sick leave on the work
day immediately before or after a holiday, you need to bring a doctors note to
receive the holiday pay. They did this because it was common practice to call
in sick on Friday when Monday was a holiday, turning a three day weekend into
a four day weekend.

~~~
rbobby
> sick leave abuse is a common issue

Reminds me of a legal case in Ontario. Guy was fired for calling in sick in
advance. He said he would be attending a wedding, or maybe a bachelor party,
and would "be too hungover to come in" the following day.

The court sided with the guy that got fired. Recovering from a hangover, even
a scheduled one, must be treated as a sick day... and you can't fire someone
for taking a sick day.

------
UnfalseDesign
It seems like most people here are assuming this'll mean employees will simply
go into work when they are sick. This might actually lead to employees taking
vacation time instead of sick time. One of my past employers actually did away
with ALL sick time. One was only able to take vacation time when one was sick.

In reality, it probably will lead to people coming into work when they are
sick. However, for serious sickness, like the flu, it'll probably lead to
people taking vacation time.

~~~
daenney
> One of my past employers actually did away with ALL sick time.

Thankfully, that's not legal in a lot of countries. Vacation time and sick
leave are two separate things workers are entitled to. I'm not on vacation
when I'm sick, I'm miserable in bed. Not out enjoying a cocktail on a sandy
beach.

But even better, if I'm sick on vacation I can actually swap out vacation days
for sick days and recover my vacation time. I can spend all of my vacation
days on actually being on vacation, even if I get food poisoning on vacation.

~~~
user5994461
It's commonplace to use up your vacations when you are sick instead of being
declared as sick, in some environments.

------
hackcasual
Looks like it's legal in Germany to tie individual bonuses to sick days taken.
Making it a group bonus though is going to really generate pressure to show
up.

~~~
jacquesm
Cue a whole department going down with the flu because of this. Dumb.
Employees should be encouraged to stay home when ill, not encouraged to go to
work. Besides the obvious risks from infection of course there are
contributory risks such as someone causing a workplace accident because they
are ill and therefore not as concentrated on their work as they should be.

~~~
cookiecaper
You'd think Amazon would be sensitive to this after an operator error caused
their bi-annual S3 outage just over a month ago.

------
rm_-rf_slash
My girlfriend and I have been severely sick for the past month. Never been so
afflicted in our lives. Neither of us got one word of trouble for working
remote or taking sick days, because the people we work for care about us as
human beings.

I have no idea how other people put up with this shit.

~~~
hbosch
I assume that a WFH day does not count as a sick day.

~~~
VLM
Can a German reader read the original article for us? I would assume the
warehouse staff can't work from home, then again maybe they have very generous
group sick day quantities. The translations supposedly relate "german IT
groups up in arms" so thats probably not the janitorial staff being affected.

Where I work if you're sick or a kid is sick, that means work from home via
VPN, just like if they called you for an emergency at 2am except its 2pm. If
you're not a total loser or slacker your boss won't expect much "work"
especially if you're genuinely sick, but even if all you do is idle on instant
messaging and reply to emails, they're getting at least some kind of value out
of you more so than a sick day and if you accomplish anything, however slow,
plus for the bean counters you're not logging a sick day. Actually burning an
actual literal sick day frankly means you're going to baseball opening day or
a job interview or you're in the terminal stages of your career so to speak
(bad relationship with company or boss), or maybe you feel cheated out of
vacation days so you pad mondays and fridays with more than 2/5th of sick days
etc.

Obviously jobs or employers incompatible with VPN work are a different
scenario.

Sick day in the 90s mean literally sick, like the flu, whereas in the 10s if I
have the flu I just work from home very slowly and literal sick day means "go
local professional sports team go" or similar unscheduled vacation.

------
furyofantares
This sounded absurd and we haven't heard the justification for it, so I tried
to think of possible benefits.

It is actually interesting that if I go to work sick and get a couple others
sick, it will cost me more money than if I had stayed home to begin with.

------
WalterBright
Sick days get abused by both sides.

A manager once told me that a member of his team was sick for exactly two
weeks every year. Coincidentally, the company offered 2 weeks paid sick time.
He said she wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't get a raise as a result.

In another company I knew, it was well known that a sunny day after many days
of rain resulted in a spike in sick days.

~~~
t0mbstone
This is easily solved by giving people "Paid time off" days which can be used
for either vacation _or_ sick days.

~~~
WalterBright
This is not so easy when you are expected to give notice for vacation so your
employer has time to make arrangements to cover your duties.

------
ryanobjc
This reminds me of the soap bar beat-down scene in full metal jacket.

In theory it might encourage group-consideration when you're sick though.

------
hourislate
I just wish Bezos would find it in that cold heart he has to share some of the
success that so many of his employees are responsible for with them. The
richest man in the world and it is still not enough for him and always looking
for ways to screw everyone not just his competition.

------
NTDF9
The articles on FACE of Amazon look insane. What a read!!

[https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home)

Is this all really true?

------
matt4077
I earn my living with a mail-order online business. The costs for picking &
packaging are around 1-2%, even though we use a rather expensive option (a
home for mentally disabled people).

I just don't get why Amazon bothers with trying to shave off what, in total,
cannot amount to more than 1/3 of 1% of its costs, considering how much these
policies have cost them in bad PR, and, possibly, pangs of conscience.

If they managed to reduce packaging material by 50%, they could easily double
the salary of everyone in the warehouses, and still have enough over for all-
you-can-snort blow at headquarter's x-mas party.

~~~
camtarn
Frugality is part of the company culture. Sometimes people take that too far -
to the point where the word "frupid" got coined internally to describe
policies that saved pennies at the cost of massive frustration or
inconvenience.

------
alistairbayley
You could look at it like this: the goal is to reduce the total number of sick
says in the pool, however you do it. A pooled allowance might encourage people
more to stay away from work when ill.

A given individual may not have much control over whether or not they get
sick, but then can influence whether or not they share that illness with their
colleagues. The individual allowance has a stronger incentive to return to
work vs the pool, because there is no cost to the individual if their
colleagues become ill. With a pooled allowance, there is a cost to the
individual if they make their colleagues ill.

------
BurningFrog
Another angle is that it can encourage teams to have a good working
environment where employees aren't staying home because they hate their jobs.

Being a place where people _want_ to go when they wake up in the morning,
improves attendance and many other things.

------
qbaqbaqba
Perhaps someone could look into how they handle their warehouses employees? In
UK you also get "points" for sick leaves and such nice things. In Germany they
have employed neo-nazis to take care of their foreign workers and so on.

------
carsongross
Interesting.

Typically collective punishment is used against out groups, in order to get
out groups to police themselves in their interactions with your in group (vs.
in group members, where individual punishment is used.)

Apparently Amazon employees are an out group for Amazon corporate.

------
user5994461
Meanwhile at Expedia London: 25 days of holidays + 25 days of sick leave by
standard.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to Expedia. I just interview everywhere to
find out whom I can extract the most money, holidays and sick days from.

~~~
Thlom
Minimum in Norway is 4 weeks holiday and 9 days sick leave. Most have 5 weeks
holiday and many have 24 days sick leave. This is without a doctors notice.
With a doctors notice you get 50 weeks sick leave, after that the employer can
consider firing you and your pay will be cut.

~~~
user5994461
Sadly, London is closer to the USA than Norway.

------
koolba
Would people getting angered by this policy be angered by a rephrased policy
that allows transferring sick days between workers? I'm not familiar with all
the details but it sounds quite similar.

~~~
EliRivers
How does that work? I'm sick, but I come in and my colleague stays at home?

~~~
koolba
Some companies let you give your sick days or personal days to your co-
workers. Say if you have 10 days for the entire year but you don't really get
sick, the days don't carry over, and you want to help out Alice
(friend/coworker). You'd be able to transfer your sick/personal days to her
that you would otherwise not be able to use.

------
JauntTrooper
US federal government workers can donate unusued sick leave to people who have
run out due to long-term illnesses. Many do. That is a more positive way to
implement collective sick leave policies.

------
user5994461
1) Go to work.

2) Lie down on a desk for half the day because you're half dead.

That's the last time I had to handle a sick leave in France. It didn't shock
anyone. Normal practise.

Gotta adapt when you can't take sick days.

~~~
tutufan
I worked for an HFT a while back that had a zero-sick-day policy. This is
exactly what I did.

------
taurath
If the amazon offices in Germany are anything like the ones in Seattle sounds
I'd project they get less productivity out of this than more. They pack people
in like sardines in a can.

------
Mz
And this is why freelancing and gig work is taking over the world.

/Darwin Award

~~~
mataug
That's quite a myopic view. Yes freelancers a probably doing great for
themselves but I don't see large corporations adopting a fully freelance dev
workforce anytime soon.

~~~
Mz
I do freelance writing. I have seen articles that indicate that 40% of the US
workforce will be freelance, gig work, contractors et al by 2020. It is not a
myopic view. It is disgust with this policy combined with real world data.

(Anecdotally, I increasingly see people complain they have been job hunting
for a long time and can't find a job, plus the UBI discussion is ongoing. Both
of these support the idea that the job base for traditional employment is
shrinking.)

------
kafkaesq
So Amazon's way of dealing with sick time costs is to... step on the gas, and
throw oil on the fire with respect to the #1 reason that people call in sick
(at rates above median) in the first place -- namely, a general sense of
hopelessness about their working conditions, and a deep and abiding distrust
of upper management. At least the move is most likely illegal in Germany, and
hence hopefully won't stand too long.

On that note - so what are people's latest recommendations for AWS
alternatives (for those services which do have reasonable alternatives)? In
particular - any significant updates to the following recommendations, in the
last 6 months or so? My group will be making some decisions soon, and I always
prefer not to go with AWS unless there (absolutely) no comparable alternatives
available.

[1] "Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS" \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12621716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12621716)

------
jrs235
This is a "butts in seats" is more important than results move. Expect
unproductive busyness to ensue...

------
rbobby
Uhm... collective punishment is a violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.

------
cylinder
How can this possibly be legal under German law?

------
polotics
A big win for infectious disease spread in the office! Did AMZN start selling
cough syrup?

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Cough syrup appears in search results at amazon.com, but it's hard to quickly
gauge who the sellers are or how reputable. Plus I imagine it would be harder
if I were sick.

~~~
user5994461
Next news: AMZ employees fired for stealing a cough syrup during service.

------
spectistcles
Who comes up with this shit. If someone is sick they shouldn't come to work at
all, ever. You should encourage people to stay home so they don't get others
sick. If they can manage, have them do a little work from home.

Moving from a small (10 person) company to a building with 1000 people in it I
went from almost never being sick to getting sick 3+ times every winter.

Strongly encourage your employees to stay home when they're sick as long as
they're getting their jobs done. If they're out frequently or for a long
period of time (4+ days) require a doctor's note. That's your sick policy.
Done.

~~~
Dunan
I've never understood the whole "doctor's note" thing. When you're sick, the
last thing you want to do is go out in the cold or rain, ride the train with
other possibly-sick people, sit in a doctor's waiting room with other
definitely-sick people, just to get a note that says something you might be
able to prove with an e-mailed photo of the thermometer you just took your
temperature with.

