
Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress - rsuttongee
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Suicide-of-an-Uber-engineer-widow-blames-job-11095807.php#photo-12784362
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bbqchippy
There is a pervasive brain-washing in valley startups that hits employees the
hardest sadly. In my experience, the more successful ventures tend to
propagate fear, anxiety and aggression in their culture almost as an unspoken
point of pride. I've seen organizations led by all sorts of alleged valley
legends fall into this category, regardless of how enlightened HR is.

Some of this may come from people overly identifying with their work roles -
and when those work roles come with a mild hero complex due to rising success
and the promise of riches/prestige - egos thrash around at high speeds. Part
of this phenomenon is the almost manic behavior you see in some
entrepreneurs/investors/leaders as they buzz around like bees to the honey.

People need to take a step back from this capitalistic bubble and remember
that we are here to do jobs and that employers must respect not just time
boundaries but psychological boundaries as well. We can do great work and
produce tools that have real impact on the social and economic welfare in the
world, but never, never, never at the cost of our wellbeing.

Very sad what happened to this fellow.

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draw_down
Startups seem heavily incentivized to grind their employee's lives into dust
while maintaining plausible deniability, though. (Plausible deniability in the
form of free lunches, foosball, etc.)

~~~
throwaway75657
So what do you do if your life got ground to dust and then you lose the job
for performance? Asking for "a friend".

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draw_down
That's terrible. In my experience, work stress is awful enough on its own, but
the knowledge that you need to provide for a spouse and perhaps a family
really compounds it. You can't just quit. It feels hopeless.

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detaro
previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194112)

