
Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff - jw2013
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-28/amazon-worker-jumps-off-company-building-after-e-mail-to-staff
======
Futurebot
Tyler Cowen has written a lot about this:

"Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when
the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative
feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that
measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the
workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little
tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is
easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps
“second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of
electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types
who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor
those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more
creative later on."

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the-
measured-working-man.html)

Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will
improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who
cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and
status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.

~~~
77pt77
> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the
> straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who
> rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more
> creative later on."

We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward
Machiavellian behavior.

The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised.

The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished
for being unproductive and a dead weight.

Nothing will change.

Edit: punctuation

~~~
candiodari
Exactly. But you forget one:

Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with
extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation
that will follow.

Plenty of managers do that today of course.

~~~
77pt77
> But you forget one

Apart from that I forgot many more.

Yes. The cult of optimism and positive thinking[1], because like someone else
on this post implied, the way you think about things changes physical reality.

At best it changes your perception which can be in your best interest or not.

[1] [http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-
conspi...](http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspiracy-
against-optimism-and-cult-positive-thinking)

------
rdtsc
I was interviewing for AWS, and it was a circus. Completely disorganized.
However, I have to say, I enjoyed the parroting back of "the leadership
principles" part. It was like being in the Soviet Union again and singing
praises to the great party leaders. Very much worth wasting a day over it.

However my nephew didn't have such a fun time. He was working for one of their
warehouses in Kentucky and they were ruthless to the workers like him. They
had a snow storm, he got stuck in the snow and instead of being understanding
they reprimanded him for it. He liked the pay but couldn't take the
humiliating treatment, so he quit.

~~~
amazon_employee
Sorry to hear that. I work for AWS, and I like to think we're pretty
organized. I'm not sure what part of your experience was "unorganized". You
probably caught the team on a busy day or something.

LPs are just guidelines for what the company "wants" out of its employees.
They're used heavily in hiring to weed out small thinkers and bad culture
fits, and a bit in performance reviews. Outside of that, nobody really cares
about them. You get upper management worship anywhere. It's the same thing as
obsessing over celebrities.

Judging corporate based on fulfillment center working conditions isn't fair.
One is a $15k job, and the other is a $115k job.

~~~
s_q_b
When I was in high school my father made me work as a janitor in our family's
office building. At that point I had been an independent IT consultant a few
years, so the position frankly felt like an embarrassment and a waste of time.
There was also a condition; I couldn't tell anyone my last name, or that I was
related to the building owner.

At first I thought it was to teach me a lesson about hard work, which seemed
foolish, as hard work was already my life, or humility, of which I probably
did need a dose.

A few years later, he told me his true reason. He said,

"If you want to know who a person truly is, don't watch how he treats his
friends or his boss.

Watch how he treats his janitors, his handymen, his surveyors, his
receptionists, or his waitresses.

The measure of a man is not how he treats his supposed equals. It is how he
treats the least fortunate among us."

Morality is not contingent upon income.

~~~
hexagonc
So your dad wanted you to report anyone at his building that treated you
poorly?

~~~
s_q_b
Hey, that's very insulting!

I charge _at least_ $20 an hour for snitching.

------
amzn-336495
Amazon tries to trap people through control by visas, and they will go so far
as to relocate people overseas to Seattle. They have a fucked up system where
rank and file get the darwin treatment but management gets the rewards. They
will pay bonuses around $250k, $500k, $1 million to senior managers,
directors, and VPs respectively to abuse the shit out of employees. The "PIP
someone who is trying to get away from their abusive manager" is their oldest
trick in their book.

Something needs to be done to help people financially who are looking for a
way out from the abuse.

~~~
cwilkes
What really angered me about that article was Amazon trying to say that this
was a "colleague" \-- he was on a PIP. Which is pretty much Amazon speak for a
dead man walking (no pun intended).

~~~
dingaling
At a Big Corp where I worked, I think it was three 'satisfactory' ratings in a
row which resulted in a PIP.

Satisfactory: fulfilling expectations or needs. But not in Corporate Nu-Speak.

~~~
lostboys67
I recall British telecom it was "needs some improvement" that triggered a pip
that but everyone has some thing that needs improvement.

Given the will you can find an excuse to put anyone on a PIP.

------
kafkaesq
_The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department,
but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to
termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to
be identified discussing company personnel matters._

PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's
your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not working out",
offer a (truly decent) severance, and move on.

(I know, I know, I know: "because laywers.")

~~~
linkregister
Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in
any organization? I've never heard of one.

~~~
euyyn
I did. I truly wasn't performing as my peers, and my manager was pretty
awesome about the whole situation.

He asked me for my honest opinion on whether I was performing at the level I
could (I thought I could do better), and what things I thought were causing
it. I named things about me, things about the team, and things about the
company in general. He explained the PIP was a deal: for three months he would
take care of the external factors, and I would take care of the personal ones.
We came up with a project for that quarter, which would be the metric with
which I'd be evaluated.

If nothing had been done (no PIP, no anything), I might have been fired during
that year. But we all wanted me to perform better; me, my boss, and the
company that designed the process. And so all sides were willing to change
reasonable things to make it so. Because of that honest conversation, and that
feeling of all of us being on the same side, I recovered and have been going
strongly for years.

~~~
quanticle
Was it a formal PIP, though? In my experience there are many managers who'll
do that for employees that they wish to retain, but who, for various reasons,
aren't performing up to snuff. However, I've never heard of a manager bringing
HR in, doing the PIP paperwork, and the employee surviving the PIP. In
general, the moment HR gets involved (either in person or via formal
paperwork) between you or your manager, you know you're done. As others have
stated, treat the time of your PIP as a form of severance pay, do the minimum
amount of work necessary to not get fired that day, and look for a job
elsewhere.

~~~
euyyn
Yes, formal with the paperwork and everything.

It wasn't my manager who "brought HR in", though. Performance evaluation at my
company isn't just the manager's discretion, and low performance will
eventually get you a PIP.

~~~
quanticle
Okay, fair enough. In that case, it may have been the case that your manager
disagreed with HR's assessment and was willing to give you a second chance. In
all of the cases I've heard of, however, HR has been brought in at the
manager's request, when other, more informal mechanisms have failed.

~~~
euyyn
I'm not even sure a manager here can fire you by his own choice, for what it's
worth. The company invests a ton in its engineers; a failed investment is a
big waste. Also, it's the manager's job to make his reports more productive,
so that kind of failure reflects on him too.

~~~
quanticle
Agreed, but if it's truly a bad fit, there comes a time when you have to stop
throwing more money into a failed investment, to use your own terminology.
It's up to the manager to decide if/when an engineer isn't a good fit for his
or her team. Obviously, some managers are better about it than others, but
hopefully senior management is looking at team turnover, and noticing that
certain managers' teams tend to have higher turnover than others.

------
sssilver
Following some of the discussion on this thread, I am constantly reminded of a
priceless advice I got from a senior friend years ago.

When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a
company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for
a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share
with the employees in the other departments will be the domain name in your
email. Everything else will be coincidental.

~~~
rockinghigh
You can still judge company-wide policies like vacations, 401k match, or
health care.

~~~
sssilver
I wouldn't be surprised if the person working in an Amazon warehouse doesn't
have the same vacation options as the person coding the internals of Simple
Queue Service.

~~~
a3n
I wouldn't be surprised if the person working in the warehouse doesn't
actually work for Amazon. Contracting jobs that are easy to fill is a great
way to insulate a company from moral responsibility, and you get to imply
"success at any cost" to the contracting company.

~~~
serge2k
It's a mix, same as any other warehouse.

------
u489utaa
Amazon screws employees in ways unseen in other companies. From the
perspective of an engineer, this is a terrible place for people to work and
grow. To list a few things:

\- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years

\- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying
for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.

\- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3
years, no matching for you whatsoever.

\- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it
yourself! \- No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry,
you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.

\- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to
be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than
building great software!

This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the
leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and
a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!

SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-
workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they
are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team
used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script.
With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let
the engineers do it.

The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry
pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason
people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from
Facebook/Google.

* I worked at AWS for 2 years.

~~~
vonklaus
I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge
infrastructure; they sell it as a service and operate more servers than
google. Also, according to the article 20k people work for them, although I am
not sure if that was total or engineers.

I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations.
Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but
I am desperate. Why would others.

Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken
promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.

Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific
exp.

~~~
notyourwork
Remember that the most vocal are the most dissatisfied. Also remember that at
a company that large there are going to be more dissatisfied than smaller
companies. Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an
upset engineer from a small no name company. People like seeing big brand
names fail and we as a society are a sucker for a negative drama.

They retain people because not every team is like what you read in the news.
There are teams with completely normal on-calls who love their life and job
and are far from upset with anything that has to do with work. Free food isn't
a deal breaker when you make what companies like Amazon pay.

~~~
ex_amazon_sde
Your post sounds strangely onesided. Amazon turnover rate for engineers is the
highest across the usual names. 50% of engineers leave before 2y.

~~~
notyourwork
Its not one sided, its a general statement that the people who love their job
don't go jumping off buildings or having suicidal thoughts. They wake up, goto
work and come home.

Also, where do you get a 50% of engineers leave before 2y?

------
outworlder
> The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department,
> but was placed on an employee improvement plan

Having escaped from an abusive manager myself, I can imagine what this person
went though. Managers that are skilled in the art are able to inflict pain
without leaving much of a paper trail.

I did ask for (and got) professional help, including medication. There's only
so much stress 24/7 that you are able to handle before you start to crack. Who
knows what would have happened if I just tried to ride it out.

I'd have gone bananas if I had been placed in a PIP instead. This was one of
the possibilities identified by my branch predictor, so I was collecting a
mountain of evidence against said manager. Thankfully, it wasn't needed.

(I realize that nowhere in the article it says a manager was the issue, but
corporate pattern-matching gets pretty good after a while)

------
SuperPaintMan
>The man survived the fall from Amazon’s 12-story Apollo building at about
8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said.

Aside: That is a testament to the resilience of a body. The physics behind
that fall would be astounding to analyze! I come from a long line of suicidal
people we're not jumpers, but swingers.

~~~
rbcgerard
Try 47 stories...
[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/nyregion/08collapse.htm...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/nyregion/08collapse.html)

~~~
RexetBlell
[http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/window-washer-
survived-47-story...](http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/window-washer-
survived-47-story-plunge-now-walks-for-charity/)

------
ajkjk
As has happened before on these threads, every opinion on Amazon is super
negative. To balance things out I'll chime in to say that I had a highly
positive experience working there as an SDE for 3 years, and would estimate
that most of my coworkers felt the same way.

------
madman2890
268,900. That is the number of employees amazon has. According to this
article, we should expect 25.2 suicides out of these employees.

~~~
uw_rob
I don't think it is correct to get the expected value of suicides using the
national average. College-educated people employed at a high paying job living
in Seattle may be much less likely to kill themselves. (Making some
assumptions about the person who attempted suicide).

(Disclaimer: I completed an Internship at Amazon and I am returning for a
second one)

~~~
madman2890
Ok, this isn't a presentation it's a comment. Albeit, I agree with you.

------
Tempest1981
Do they still have the backloaded RSU vesting schedule? Something like 5%,
15%, 40%, 40% (each year)?

Does anyone else do this?

~~~
discodave
Amazon aims for total compensation, cash + stock.

So, the package for a typical SDE I will look like the following:

Salary: x Starting bonus year 1: 0.2x Starting bonus year 2: 0.15x

RSU grant is 0.6x, vesting 5/15/40/40 (4 years).

So when you add it up, assuming a constant stock price, you get:

Y1:1.23x Y2:1.24x Y3:1.24x Y4:1.24x

So at a basic level the back loading of stock is just making up for the
starting bonuses ending. Thinking more broadly, many employees get promoted
within 2-3 years and the stock has generally gone up over time so the
predictions after the 2 year mark aren't exactly set in stone.

~~~
dmoy
Wait there are no refresh equity grants at Amazon? I'm at Google and making
over double what I was when I started, almost all from additional equity
grants every year. It worked out to more like 1.3x, 1.5x, 1.8x, 2.4x, ...

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I only stayed at Amazon for one year, but I was told that if I'd stayed for
two years they would have offered me more equity.

So yes, there are refresh equity grants. I've heard from a good source that
they do that at Apple as well.

~~~
jonathankoren
I've heard Apple's equity grants are stupid though. Instead of the standard
grant-value / share-price-at-hire = number of shares, and then then vesting
the number of shares over 4 years, Apple vests the grant-value over 4 years
and then converts to stock using the share price at the time of vesting. This
of course results in lower compensation over the vesting schedule assuming an
appreciating stock price.

~~~
gohrt
They don't convert like you say, what they do it cut refreshes. Example:

You get $100K and $50K of stock (grant value): "target compensation" = $150K

Next year, when stock vests, your target compensation is $160K, so you get
$110K cash plus a stock refresh grant: * Stock went down to $0 -> $100K
refresh to make up. * Stock stayed flat: -> $50K refresh * Stock went up to
$100K: -> 0K refresh to cancel out. * Stock went up to $150K: -> 0K refresh to
cancel out, but you still come out ahead.

So, you get upside if the stock shoots up enough, and you are protected from
downside, but you lose upside if stock grows insufficiently.

It works well if you like guaranteed income, but you have to ignore a lot of
the "expect" upside potential. And it makes you wonder why they bother giving
so much equity, doesn't it? 1. They don't give a lot of equity. 2. It's a
shell game and most new hires don't value the offer accurately.

~~~
jonathankoren
So you're saying your initial grant remains untouched? So assuming $50k per
year in stock for 4 years, after 4 years you'd get $200k plus the delta on 4
years of stock growth?

------
Merovius
Press code: Don't widely report details of suicides, it creates a measurable
uptick in simulative acts.

Internet: Let's get this thing to the Hackernews frontpage!

------
gtirloni
Very clever way to write the title and the article itself. You get the
impression that 1) he is dead and after reading a bit more that 2) he survived
a jump from a 12-story building.

From reading other articles, it seems he is alive and jumped from the 4th
floor.

------
Buge
Not too long ago an Apple employee shot himself in the office.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/04/27/body-
appl...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/04/27/body-apple-
campus/83598174/)

------
msie
When I was young I quit MS rather than get fired. Looking back, I wonder if I
should have just walked away without an exit interview. Perhaps get several
more weeks pay. I too suffered under a PIP that proved to be pointless.

------
bystander876
I live nearby and was walking by when the EMT and fire department were called.

Hats off to those folks. It seemed like no time at all before they showed up
and moved very quickly to help the injured man. I was really impressed.

------
jimmywanger
It's great how this no content article has been turned into a huge Amazon
bashing thread that confirms everybody's biases against Amazon employment
practices.

The facts are: a guy put in for a transfer, got put on a performance
improvement plan, threatened self-harm, and then jumped off a building.

There are no details why he requested a transfer, the reasons he got put on a
PIP, and if he was mentally unstable or not, where these fairly common life
events would cause him to contemplate self harm.

Nope, the pitchforks and the torches come out.

------
andy
My thoughts are with this man. I was also put on an employee improvement plan
at a company previously.

------
plandis
You know what the worst part of my job at Amazon is? That I continually have
to read about how terrible I am both on the internet and in real life (your
average Seattlite seems to hate Amazon).

Just in this thread alone I've been accused of:

* Screwing employees over * Being a slave in a sweatshop * Insulted for not being able to use Bash (I can) * Disorganized * Not be trusted to talk about working at Amazon (lol) * Fostering a toxic workplace * A communist (my favorite insult)

------
khnd
wow. i wonder if bezos is going to address this.

~~~
pinewurst
Hardly. According to Jeff, nothing is wrong and everything is for the best in
his best of all possible worlds.

Read enough
[https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/)
and it's a consistent picture though. Speaking as a Seattle local, I hear
these sort of anecdotes all the time.

~~~
Tempest1981
I recently got an email from an Amazon recruiter, who, for whatever reason,
told me that their team is "largely working < 50 hours/week, in most cases".

The fact that they felt it important to mention this (and qualify it)
definitely started me thinking...

~~~
zzalpha
The fact that he views less than 50 hours a week (ie less than ten hours a
day... ten!) as somehow worth bragging about says even more.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I considered working at Pixar at one point, and spoke to their hiring
department.

Curiously, they considered the salary they were offering you to be for 50
hours per week. This wasn't an upper limit; no, you were expected to do
occasional overtime past 50. But 50 was the _baseline_.

I didn't follow through with the interview process. Screw that.

~~~
erentz
50 hours seems to be normal in some effects houses, which are increasingly
operating like sweat shops. Weta Digital is also the same. And they strictly
expect minimum 50 hours there.

~~~
dagw
Yup. Movies (and games) often have very hard deadlines and missing the release
window can mean losing a fuck-ton of money. I remember working on a TV
Christmas special once, and let's just say that letting the release slip to
early January was Not An Option.

~~~
michaelt
Companies have deadlines, sure, but that doesn't mean they need to _routinely
require_ overtime.

I mean, if all my recent projects required 10% overtime, I've got a bunch of
options for my next project:

a. Hire 10% more staff

b. Increase my existing staff's efficiency by 10%

c. Reduce scheduling and rework inefficiencies by 10%

d. Quote 10% longer delivery times to customers

e. Promise customers 10% less

f. Start work 10% earlier.

g. Plan to make my employees work 10% overtime.

If my company was choosing option g every time, I'd expect my employees to
quit for better jobs because planned overtime is a pretty big 'fuck you' from
your employer.

Why employees in the games industry put up with this sort of thing is frankly
beyond me.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
> Why employees in the games industry put up with this sort of thing is
> frankly beyond me.

They typically don't, forever.

But there's an unending stream of fresh meat entering the game industry who
will put up with anything to achieve their dreams of working on video games.

I've been lucky, in that I've done a lot of games, but haven't worked anywhere
that routinely required overtime of me. The occasional project here or there
would go south, or there would be a bad manager, but other than the last week
or two of crunch to get a project finished, I've not done too badly.

------
auvi
where can I find the text of the email?

------
omouse
Toxic workplace? I think so.

------
zelias
Is there a reason the text of the email is unavailable?

------
wcummings
The Apollo building looks like an office. Guessing this person was a product
person, I don't think warehouse workers get the luxury of PIPs and changing
teams. They were probably one of us.

Pour one out.

------
pproodd
So, based on this thread, communism is the answer.

------
JoeAltmaier
Amazon-bashing aside, this is an example of why 'safe spaces' and 'trigger-
free zones' may be a bad idea. Colleges should train students in responding to
triggers; exercise their self-control regularly in the face of adversity not
stunt it. Somebody jumps instead of walking away, they have priorities
drastically miswired.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
How does suicide have anything to do with safe spaces and trigger warnings?
Did suicide not exist before college started incorporating safe spaces and
trigger warnings? If there is a causation relationship between safe
spaces/trigger warnings and suicide does this also mean that countries with
high suicide rates have a lot of safe spaces/trigger warnings? What about the
high suicide rate of teenagers? Trans people? Homeless? Did they all
experience the woes of the safe space/trigger warning?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
With you (no data available yet) until that last statement. Are 'safe spaces'
etc related to relieving trauma (no data available yet)?

And yes colleges are responsible for making students resilient. That's the
'job training' part. Many have courses in professional ethics, in responsible
management, in meeting deadlines with quality work. These are not incidental
to the education mandate, they are central.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Specifically, I am asking about how safe spaces or trigger warnings in college
are at all relevant to the occurrence of suicide outside of a college setting.

I do apologize for my final note, as I realize it is off topic and I would
rather not enter tangential discussion. I've edited it out. If you would like
to continue talking, let me know if there is another way to talk (email, etc.)

