Looking at this story (the wider Amazon story) it seems to me a lot of the value is getting extracted from employees in a sort of creeping way.
So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders.
There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.
I just turned down an offer because of something like this. I went through a bunch of interviews and things seemed pretty peachy, until I interviewed with a guy (who'd have been a peer) who was probably way more candid than management would've liked. He said things like "I haven't gotten a raise in five years so make sure you negotiate hard when you come in", "I got an apartment close to the office so I can be here quick when the shit hits the fan", "50hrs/wk is probably a good baseline, but you already knew that", and "yeah, your group has rotating weekly pager duty and even if they call it an 'engineering' team it's really support."
I felt like I'd been completely mislead by everyone else, and even if this guy had a chip on his shoulder and was intentionally lying to me -- which I doubt -- that in itself would have been a red flag.
> who was probably way more candid than management would've liked.
This is me in interviews. I ask for a private interview session and give the real lowdown. I refuse to become one of these assholes that drops all this PR speak and then you take the job and realize you've been misled. I air a little laundry and give real day-to-day stuff. I think it benefits everyone to be candid, at least towards the later stage of interviewing. There should be an informed "Do you really want this job" moment for someone considering the move.
>and even if this guy had a chip on his shoulder and was intentionally lying to me
He's most likely honest. He also doesn't want to hire a primdonna who is expecting a cush job.
> He also doesn't want to hire a primdonna who is expecting a cush job.
Consider not getting a raise in five years. With inflation and (in most technology hubs) a skyrocketing rising cost of living, your company is effectively paying you less every year you work for them.
It doesn't make you a primadonna to question this premise -- it just means you're not a sucker. If you're in a career/company where your value goes down with every year of experience you get, it forces you question a lot of your life decisions.
Why does that matter? He is drawing a personal story that is comparable to the Amazon story, trying to describe his ability to find the proper work culture for his life.
I am not trying to argue, just wish your two questions had a reasoning behind them as in writing they sound harsh to me.
The only reasoning I can think of is if it's widespread at Amazon or certain locations / departments are affected like that? It could be an interesting insight research to see how wide-spread such employer behavior is.
I remember working for Van Blarcom Closures in NYC over 10 years ago. During interviews they said standard 40 hour weeks with occasional overtime. Except their occasional overtime meant every day was a 12 hour shift with some Saturday's and Sundays's as well. Let's just say, I didn't last more than 6 months there before moving out.
This happened to me once and I was so thrilled to work at this company that I looked past what the interviewer was saying about the company which all ended up being true. You have to use your judgement but this kind of information is very useful.
Many people are fooled by prestige. PG's elaboration on it changed my life: "Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if two options seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one. [...] If you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other." (http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)
I went to a no-name company, I love the freedom that I have in a small team, and I leave work around 4-5 p.m., if I want. Also, I have still enough energy to do side-projects. That is something people working at more prestigious places probably lack. (I am based in Zurich and I love it; here a blogpost about living & working here: https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...)
I chose a similar route because of perks and pay. My only fear is this choice hurting my future employment when I'll likely be discriminated due to age. I would imagine having Google or Facebook on my resume would surely make getting a job at age 50+ much easier.
Is that really true? Say it's 2015 and you take a job at google for 3-5 years and are 30 years old. 15-17 years later 1) would google still exist as the prestigious company and 2) would anyone care that you worked at google for 3-5 years a more than a a decade ago?
That might sound crazy but on a software engineering salary, you can retire before 50 if you get used to spending little on food, transportation and shelter. My most favorite online resource on how to live frugally is this: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-became-financially-i....
It makes more sense if you buy into the concept of hedonic adaptation [0], which I do. The gist is that your happiness is not influenced as much as you think by your standard of living, but rather by changes in that standard. Absent of changes, your happiness will return to around its baseline level, and this is true for both positive and negative changes. So if that is actually true, it's possible to have a significantly lower cost of living and the same level of happiness. Thinking long term, why wouldn't someone want that? In terms of life satisfaction, you lose almost nothing in exchange for a long period of increased freedom.
I could not agree more. However, I will make the distinction between perceived happiness and experience.
Put very simply: over a 10 year period I could invest in a BMW or flights back to Europe to visit family. I will spare no expense giving our parents time with their grandchildren before it's too late.
I'm more than happy to drive my POS '04 Mazda 6.
When I read 'to live frugally so as to retire at 50' I see a lot of lost experiences that can enrich both now and later.
There's a great moment in the documentary about Joan Rivers[1] before she died (was killed, basically). Sitting in her opulent, probably immensely expensive Manhattan penthouse apartment, in the middle of a discussion about how much money she has to make to stay afloat, she said something to the effect of: "Sure I could live carefully and it would be easy, but who wants to live carefully?".
The point being, if you enjoy your lifestyle, and you really enjoy working hard (she defined herself by her work, so there was no other option to her), what is the point of frugality? Why amass a huge bank account just to die and leave it to someone else[2]?
2. Some might argue that one ought to save so one's children can get a nice inheritance. I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for. I suspect some people have an ulterior motive: they use a large inheritance as a way of blackmailing children into taking care of them in their old age. I find that distasteful.
>>Some might argue that one ought to save so one's children can get a nice inheritance.
Why would you not do that if you can. Having money gives your kids access to good education and freedom to stay away from a lot of crap poor kids have to deal with every day. Plus there is no advantage greater in life than getting a good head start over other people. A lot of people spend a big part of their lives just to get a decent start. Look up to this phenomenon called red queens race.
>>I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for.
That's a wrong way of looking at inheritance. Imagine what you could do in your free time if you had all the money in the world. Sure you could spend it away on wrong things. But you can also work on whatever you want and make a more meaningful difference through your work.
>>I suspect some people have an ulterior motive: they use a large inheritance as a way of blackmailing children into taking care of them in their old age. I find that distasteful.
Without money, you won't be able to take care of yourself. Also you would largely become a burden on your already financially stressed children. At least by having money you are saving them the financial struggle to see you through your old age.
People get an unfair advantage for all sorts of reasons. That's not just restricted at the level of having good/rich parents, it exists at every level of human existence. People are born in rich family, raised in good neighborhoods, go to a better school, get employed in better companies and even to the extent are born in better countries.
One can't deny their children the right to a better life, simply because other children don't have it.
This isn't about an unfair award, but about an unfair punishment.
> I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for
You just wait until you have your own "offspring". Inheriting money won't mean they'll grow up without work ethic -- that only happens when a parent fails to teach their child that skill.
You WILL be giving your child the freedom to explore his or her passion to the absolute fullest, and to arrive at his or her greatest potential.
> I'm not convinced that it's helpful for offspring to get (or expect) a big windfall that they don't have to work for.
I hope your offspring never have any surprise medical issues or special needs, don't want to go to college, don't have surprise twins when they thought they were done having kids, etc. It is absolutely helpful to e.g. free your grandkids from student debt, and this does not conflict with instilling in them a work ethic.
You slip that word "time" in there like it's secondary to the expenses that apparently are required to "enjoy life", but being able to buy time to spend how you like is pretty damn valuable to a lot of people.
I live a modest life by US standards. My point is that both Quality and Experience of life change over time. Backloading time to the second half comes at an irrecoverable cost.
I followed this advice as well. Squirrelled away as much as possible, became financially independent. I'm 54 and I was laid off in November 2014 after 26 years at one company.
I would like to go back work, but the engineering job market in San Diego is awful. I can afford to be picky on who I want to work for. Needless to say this will extend
your job search time with the current market conditions.
It could be that I might just have to retire if conditions remain the same for a long period of time. So be it, I'll just direct my energies to my open source hardware and software projects.
I think that retiring before 50 is not the solution to unemployment after 50, although the idea of living frugally so you can retire early seems great until you try it.
I think this is very subjective. I am living on less than a thousand Swiss-Francs per month in one of the most expensive cities in the world (Zurich) and I do not feel that I am missing anything. I know, things will be very different when I have kids, but still.
Assuming for simplicity 3% real interest on investments once you stop working (which is close enough if you're trying to get out of the rat race quickly), and potentially infinite lifespan.
So if your cost of living is $10k and you earn $100k you get:
330,000 / 90,000 -> less than four years.
Great theory.
I don't want to live on oatmeal and tuna for the rest of my life. (I actually don't think we should be eating tuna at all and have stopped eating it although I love it.)
Now aside from obvious (e.g. kids, as you state) there's also:
* At some point you'll get a $500 optical bill or a $5000 dental bill (or a $50,000 medical bill if you live in the US) -- and let's not even get into chronic conditions.
* You may want to travel.
* At some point there will probably be a major economic shock and you may be utterly screwed. (But hey, so will a lot of people, and you'll be used to it.)
Check out /r/financialindependence on Reddit one day.
While some people go the route of eating oatmeal and tuna every day, there are plenty of routes to financial independence that don't involve living a life devoid of nice things. It's less about never working again and more about having the freedom to choose what you want to do -- whether that's work for yourself without worrying about paying rent or working full time for someone else.
How on earth is this possible? I live in Zug, and everything in this part of the world costs a fortune. How do you even get a place to live for less than 1500? You realise when you have a kid the krippe is 2500CHF each month? Have you ever eaten at a restaurant for under 50CHF a head (even a McDonalds meal costs 15CHF)?
I rent a room for 620 CHF, I pay 220 CHF for the obligatory insurance, 200 CHF for food (if I am socially forced to eat out I tell that I had food before and get a beer) and around 90 CHF for transportation. That amounts to more or less 1100 CHF.
200 CHF for food might sound little but I actually eat way healthier than most of my colleagues. (The last thing you can afford in Switzerland is getting sick.)
I think the point is that being employable (even for your own projects) is preferable to the alternative. Indeed having valuable skills is generally better than having money.
Another option is to retire early in a country with a much lower cost of living. You don't need to cut your costs to the bone for 20 years if you go to a place with a cost of living that costs one-third (or more) of what it costs where you currently live.
Retirement is mainly appealing to those who have other interests outside of work or want to do good/interesting things which don't necessarily produce income.
On the whole, there will come a time when one would like to do something else before checking out. There's a balance between doing good work and enjoying life - I recommend trying to do both while the all the pieces work well. Keep in mind that deferring things to a future time is a risk in that the future time might never arrive, or it might arrive in a way you can't use.
That's a wrong way of looking at retirement. You having a job is dependent on many reasons beyond your own interest. Age related discrimination is quite common in our industry, recessions happen every 8 years or so, companies shut down, a person can have major illness, or disability.
There are many reasons why you may not be able to do what you like, let alone doing it for a living.
Being prepared for such things in the future not only saves you from all the trouble, it saves your family too.
That's a great attitude to take if you're at retirement age. But in order to retire you have to save decades before you know whether or not you still enjoy what you do for a living.
A company can get you a work permit into Switzerland by showing that they can not find anyone else: An employer has to show a couple of EU/Swiss-resumes to the authorities and point out how they are not suited for the job and how you are. I know a company that has done that with Ukrainians and Russians.
Shoot me a mail, if you are interested in moving here; I can try to help out.
I think that's what happens in most companies all the time, all around the planet. But the reason is not evil management and it's not a result of planned activity. Management is also hard. They also have to deliver too much with too little budget at hand. The only difference is that they earn more money and they often don't have to pull the team out of the B.S. themselves on weekends and late night hours. They are naive people like you and me. There are things that are unmanageable so they ask you to help. Then they get used to your help and unconsciously consider it normal. Then their budget gets cut, or they have to cover for other departments who can't deliver as much as expected. And surprise, there is even more work for you.
I don't say that for us to excuse bad management. But I think it's very important to understand the "other side". Understanding them can provide you with options. Just saying they are idiots or evil bastards leaves you powerless.
> The only difference is that they earn more money and they often don't have to pull the team out of the B.S. themselves on weekends and late night hours.
Isn't that what this thread is all about? :-P People working without getting paid and/or getting a choice on weather they want to work more on their supposedly free time?
The difference is big enough to turn a shitty job in a good job :-)
I think you're overstating the case a little here. Instead of seeing everyone as a victim its fair to place blame somewhere and to discuss real solutions. Its obvious to me that if we had mandatory overtime pay for tech workers a lot of this toxic culture would dry up. Managers would push back onto senior leadership the real costs of working undermanned teams this hard. There would suddenly be a financial incentive to do things right and/or hire more people. Right now, there isn't. So of course, the organization just pushes people around. Why wouldn't it? There's really nothing stopping it.
Why aren't tech workers talking about overtime pay? That's the elephant in the room here. Everything about this situation screams 'underegulated industry.' Shame that techies themselves, let alone management, are usually far-right leaning. I think their political views are paying them a huge disservice right now.
Yes, but the amount of emotional stress of the worker is mostly irrelevant to the manager. It only becomes a problem when the company gets bad press like from that article, or when the productivity of the team drops so much that he can't project success to his managers and peers.
Our goal as workers can't be to tell our managers about our emotional stress (which he doesn't care about), but showing him alternatives that contain less stress for us but at least the same amount of projectable success to him, and/or just doing them, because in the end not being informed how the success was achieved is less important to the manager than having spare time to get a massage or visit the golf club.
one thing: as a lead, i can tell you that managers are just as abused often times as the worker.
that's where this pressure on the worker comes from: there is systematic top down hierarchical pressure applied that works almost like hydraulics. A sociopath like Bezos only has to beat down his 6 reports into accepting impossible goals (for a normal working schedule) and they will beat down their aggregate 48 reports and they will beat down their 384 reports and so on.
I can agree that they also face pressure. But on the one hand they have more options, for example putting the work onto a lower level guy, they get less bad feedback for doing bad work (e.g. nobody analysis how stressed his workers are, but the developers code gets analysed for code quality, unit test success, peer reviews).
The last point I put separate because I think that one might actually be just subjective. In my eyes it seems, as if they also have less work on their table, really. Example: There are a lot of things a product manager should do. For instance, he should learn to know the customer. But at least where I worked until now no product manager was asked by his manager how much time he spent with customers. So no product manager spent a single second with a customer. Also a product manager is in my eyes responsible that the user interface is translated correctly. He can pay an external office or convince some engineers to do it who have that other language in their repertoire. But when he constantly hears from the engineers that the three or four languages we can evaluate are so shitty that nobody can even closely know what the corresponding text says, then he should review his translation workflow. Never seen that either. The only situation in which a product managers needs to hussle is when the sales department that actually talks to the customer has a problem they can't communicate directly to engineering because both worlds speak different languages. And the only reason the prod manager needs to get active is because if the stress gets out of these two departments his boss needs to do work and then his boss will be angry. So in these situations he really has a lot of stress, because it's hard to convince engineering of some of the requests that come from sales, but sales needs some kind of results to make the customers happy. But this situation only happens in one of 5 feature or bug requests. Therefore I think the engineers have more stress. They have stress with all 5 requests, all the time. When they finish one, there are already the next three waiting. And in this one request that required prod manager intervention the final result that should be implemented is often so bad that this one is even more stress than the others.
To summarize, yes there is manager stress as well, but it's not as much. And if you get 120% of the pay of another coworker or more, I think it should be okay if you even have a little more stress. Therefore people working on the corresponding lowest level seldom have tolerance for the "hard life" of the manager.
There is no recourse for this because IT workers do not have to be (legally) paid overtime. Remove that legality and enforce overtime to be paid at 1.5x regular wage, and you should see a better workplace and higher employment. I think productivity numbers will also be realistic (lower).
The legality of uncompensated overtime drives me crazy. There is a lot that practitioners in our profession have yet to learn - valuing ourselves and what we do.
Something that I was impressed by when I interviewed at my current job was not just that the company said that they value work-life balance, but that they demonstrated it: they pay time-and-a-half for overtime specifically in order to dissuade management from ever having us work overtime. And in the year I've been here we've had one period where we could optionally work overtime, but we've had no mandatory overtime.
I didn't appreciate how great of a boon this was until I learned more about what it's like to work at other companies. Overtime isn't just about making more money, it's also about having realistic expectations of workers and not burning them out.
I completely agree , also , Us as employees we need to learn when to say stop , i know we all work hard and we want to be the an important asset.
But remember going the extra mile and getting recognition for it will only last until the next downtime/problem which could be tomorrow.
And (in the UK at least) the demise of unions has seen the earnings ratio of company bosses to employees rise to levels not seen since the 19th or early 20th century
The demise of unions is also a general phenomenon across the western world. It's not helped by the migration of lots of factory industries to parts of the world without strong unions and with plenty of hungry workers.
Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike. And if it's easy to replace striking workers, it's not an effective tool. It's also very disruptive (in the bad sense) when it is effective. UK public opinion turned against unions when they rationed electricity to 3 days a week.
We need a better check on unlimited greed than the blunt threat of going up against the wall in a Communist revolution. A lot of people have cited Piketty as the next Marx, but there don't seem to be Piketty-ist factions.
aka a reserve army of labour, just on a global scale. It's the XI century but Engels still makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it.
However you look at it, the game is still fundamentally the same; it's just that one side can play it so much better than the other. It's like that period in the '90s when football clubs using the offside trap and applying pressure up the pitch dominated the European scene.
> Ultimately unions have only one effective negotiating tool: the strike.
That's not correct. Striking is the only legal negotiating tool; but it's not always been legal, nor the only tool. Striking is a type of industrial sabotage; being the most innocuous one, it's the only one that was made legal (and even there, its legal deployment has been progressively restricted in most countries since the '80s). If shit really hits the fan, a compact unionized workforce can do much more damage than "down tools". We've forgotten a lot about industrial relations, sooner or later we'll have to relearn old lessons.
> UK public opinion turned against unions when they rationed electricity to 3 days a week.
That's a problem for public services only (most recently, with the London tube). Unions in public sector and public services refuse to understand that their exposure damages the whole movement. It's a historical issue in most countries, a huge strategic problem for any progressive movement.
Most private companies likely wouldn't get public support in a fight with unions, but because public-service ones can (and will) abuse their role, the whole movement gets a bad rep.
> A lot of people have cited Piketty as the next Marx
Unfortunately, with all due respect, Piketty's contribution is nowhere as significant as Marx. Piketty tried to prove what a lot of people suspected, but I don't think he managed to reveal so many new elements about the structure of the game in the same way as Marx did, nor did he articulate solutions as powerfully as Marx did. Besides, there is little point in waiting for a messiah; what is required is a combination of analysis and prognosis that can resonate with an atomized and oevereducated white-collar workforce.
Yes - although she wasn't the first or only person to propose that. That Wikipedia page leaves out both "In Place Of Strife" (1969 Labour government), and the three day week itself. The disruption caused by high levels of industrial action greatly reduced the support of the public for it.
Strking is no different from a seller refusing to sell if the buyer can't meet their price. The difference is that corporations are able to get the press on their side because the press depend on them for the advertisement income.
In respect of London's striking transport workers. The reason is simple, both London Transport and the rail networks are monopolies, so customers have no option.
Imagine if Tesco workers went on strike. Shoppers would go to Sainsbury's, Asda (Walmart), Morrison etc. Both managers and workers both lose if they strike. In the case of London Transport and the Rail Networks, commuters have no where to go and both strikers and management know that.
In a case where the service was not a monopoly the management would try to come to an agreement because of the competitors waiting in the wings. LT and the unions can both play hardball because the commuters are captive.
You can't always blame striking unions for LT's issues.
It seems to me, as an outsider that has rebuffed them several times, that they've found this subculture of abuse takers that will just sort of deal with it.
I know their pay isn't stratospheric, certainly not a shattering lifestyle change to leave. Many seem drawn to the allure of the name, it's a well known tech company.. Are these types capable of forming a union? by the time they are willing to stick their neck out to do something like form a union, it's just so easy to turn the page and leave.
I worked for a satellite TV provider years and years back, it was similar, very abusive, very demanding. I did my project and left, it just wasn't a good fit. In retrospect, the people that stayed all seem to be somehow damaged. It was just unhealthy, emotionally, I don't remember anyone that was actually happy in life being there. Also very similar to Amazon, they sell to the lowest common denominator, Amazon is effectively going toe to toe with Walmart, more so than google or apple.
I really think that if Amazon is only surviving with a razor-thin profit margin and they only do that because they treat their employees like beat-up warehouse equipment, then maybe it shouldn't exist as a company. My opinion of them has really downgraded from a "Sears" of the internet (back when Sears actually had a good reputation) towards more of a "Walmart" of the internet.
...and that's not to mention their systematic tax evasion. I agree that the human cost is the bigger problem at the moment, but i really get worked up about the multinationals earning massive profit and paying single-digit percent taxes. That's another rant, though.
I think it would be good if the FC workers unionize. It would greatly increase the speed of development for automation solutions and benefit robotics as a whole.
Yep, it's as simple as that; almost. There's good ways to do it and there's bad ways to do it.
1) Figure out what's wrong at an early stage, why it's wrong and come up with a proposal of how it could be improved. Find solutions.
2) Always fix things despite the unreasonable amount of work or pressure. You wait until you'r almost broken and then say you can't take this anymore, it's too much. Problem needs to be fixed right away or you'll lose it.
We very much create our own situations too unfortunately.
For me its past 'like'... I think we need them. Abuses will continue without some sort of oversight (legal or behavioral); corporations are beholden to their share holders and not their employees. Medical/construction workers have established safety and paid overtime policies going for them and we need to emulate something like that.
In addition, we (IT workers) should look at other avenues. Like the AMA (medical) and ALA (legal) professions we need an organization (or PAC/lobby) with political clout that influences law makers and fights for IT employee/labor rights. I would love for a David Boies or someone with that type of clout/knowledge to grow such an organization.
Without sounding too cynical, loyalty to a company (working out of hours) is not always returned as loyalty from the company. They wouldn't be pleased you turning up a few hours late every day to compensate for your extra time outside work.
To be fair, it depends on the company and often the individual manager. I gave people comp time almost all the time they were forced into some extraordinary work.
Yikes! First company I ever worked for wasn't particularly flashy, but I did like that they had a "12-hour rule" to guard against that. The policy was that you wouldn't be expected back at work in fewer than 12 hours after you'd left the day before.
this is pretty much what i took from this story. its not pleasant granted, but really you need to push back occasionally. Constant call outs is really an issue the management need to resolve so its not such a burden.
This is part of the reason why employees work such long hours in Japan. Overtime is largely unpaid for white collared workers. Coercing an employee to work ever-longer hours is effectively "free" (in the short term, until some start to physically and emotionally break down).
Because changing jobs is so difficult in Japan, there's often no recourse for the worker.
> So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected.
And this is the biggest problem with tech hiring. The prospective employee can't know how bad it really is. So changing jobs is risky. Companies wanting to hire need to compensate for that risk with a definited benefit. Salary is the obvious and easy one.
This is a big reason why people hang around. The stress of interviewing, not to mention the absurdities of how you are "measured", and you may just be leaping from the frying pan into the fire. It's easy, if not wise, to just stick where you are and grind through it. It'll get better, right? You'll always hear promises about how things are changing, how your concerns are being taken seriously, etc. Then you'll look up from your keyboard, 3 years have passed, and all that has happened is it got worse.
For me, the inertia was a little stronger because of my gender transition. I had zero experience interviewing as a woman, and I wasn't sure if I passed, so I figured it was safer to continue working for the same company I transitioned at. The logic was "they know me, they knew me before transition, they know I've only been living as a woman less than a year, and I already know they don't care, so I might as well take the safe option and stick with them rather than risk freaking an interviewer out with my voice or accidentally wear something a woman shouldn't wear to an interview".
Mind you, my employer at the time wasn't great. I was underpaid (75% market value in pure salary, plus I got no insurance whatsoever), my boss couldn't handle stress and took it out by screaming at his subordinates, software engineering leadership was absolutely terrible for multiple reasons (I and others tried to change it, and we were rebuffed, so the people I worked best with quit in frustration one by one), and I had a months-long nightmare involving the building management discriminating against me where my employer offered me almost no support (it only ended when I got the city involved). There were a number of other minor concerns as well, but these were the big ones.
During the worst of the discrimination, the owner/CEO promised me a bonus if I stuck around until our next product entered production. Production was delayed by two months from what was originally planned, and even then getting him to actually keep his promise was like pulling teeth, though I eventually got it. Somehow, I ended up staying on even after that, though I should've probably at least started applying for jobs once the bonus cleared my bank account.
It took way, way too long for me to accept that I needed to find a new job. Ultimately, after a particularly bad incident of my boss taking his stress out on me, I finally got up the courage to put myself out there, I got a wonderful new job, and I'm more than happy with my current employer.
In the long run, the devil you know is the worse devil.
For me it is really simple, if you don't like the way you are treated then leave.
If you don't have any employable skills, get some. If you have genuinely no chance of being employed somewhere start your own business and graft graft graft until you are employable.
Life is too short to spend 6 years in a job that affects you and your whole family.
My former company (a telco) offered me an amazing "promotion". Way more responsibility, way more accountability, AND formally on-call off hours and weekends. The schedule was vague, but it looked like roughly one week in three I couldn't be more than 30 minutes from the office, had to respond all the time, etc.
All of this for the amazing salary raise of zero dollars and zero cents over my existing salary! Needless to say I no longer work there - but they found someone else to do it.
"There's no recourse for this, and management knows it"
Of course there is, I'd argue. Maybe not a direct one, though. I'm sure you've noticed the large amount of articles about these sorts of practices at Amazon. It might not have a huge impact, but if it is indeed true, then people are wisening up to what's going on there.
Similar to the retail experience - find kids who are ok with selling warranties/pre-orders each week and if they fail to do so then bring in someone else from the stack of applications in the back.
If they grossly misrepresented the job you can just leave in the first month or two and not mention it on your resume. It's not like it's a tough job market out there.
I think the big problem is that people often move (like the author did with his wife) to work for Amazon and feel pressured to stick with it for more than a month or two, especially if they have families.
Solution, don't think about working for Amazon or any such company. Warn your family and friends and co-workers. Company will get the message and change its policies hopefully after losing a few billion.
I always wonder whether the stock of Amazon should decrease after the HR-gate. I would expect the company to eventually start an HR policy and lose money on that. It seems the stock price didn't move, but I'm not a finance expert and there must be other events this month.https://www.google.fr/search?q=amzn&oq=amzn&aqs=chrome..69i5...
HR gate is a relatively localized phenomenon - almost entirely considered fluff by the markets.
Data: "A company is making its workers work hard. They have bad press."
Questions: "Has anyone been fired/resigned? is there a new policy change which increases wages and reduces money to shareholders?"
Answers: "as of no, no one significant. No policy change, and no significant damage to brand.
Questions: "Is hiring/firing within normal ranges? How long will people remember this?"
Answers: "mostly normal. No impact to EBITDA. People will forget in a month, unless there is a significant miss step. Insufficient support for a policy or legal bill to be raised."
Conclusions: Has happened before, will happen again, with near 0 impact to cash flow. If something happens theres many ways to mitigate damage to shareholders.
In all honesty, this has near nil impact on the market.
TL;DR:
Amazon is trading at too high a price for massive movements, instead look at the volatility of the options market or for an instrument that allows buying part of a share of Amazon
Full thing:
It might not have moved because of the liquidity of the market. Due to their stock price, people won't generally own lots of the stock, so any sell orders would go through the SOES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-order_execution_system). I'm not sure whether a Level 1 book would include that information, I have a feeling it doesn't. [citation needed]
However, SOES only works for lots of at most 1000 and only on stocks up to a value of $250. Amazon is currently trading at $535.
Occasionally another instrument will be set up that works in parts of the stock, which will be a lot more volatile, so you could buy 1/10 of an Amazon share. Alternatively, people start trading in options on the stock.
So you get the situation where the share price for Amazon looks fine, but the options market dries up or the volatility of derivative instruments is massive.
Except when you're fired without cause, you can collect unemployment, which costs the company money. So they usually either need cause - which means documenting poor performance for several months - or they have to gain more money than unemployment costs by letting you go i.e. layoffs. If you're creating value for the company, even if it's not the extreme 80 hours per week value they want, it still makes more financial sense to keep you.
Yes, we have at-will employment, blah blah. It's no reason to be a pushover. If you're skilled enough to get a job at a place like Amazon, there's plenty of less insane places you could probably work.
We're moving you from a level 6 engineer to a level 3 engineer, with reduced pay and benefits. We don't think you're contributing at the level we hired you at. Your job has also been relocated to ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. And you need to learn COBOL. And your job now requires 85% time travel on small, yellow, inflatable boats that leak somewhat.
imgabe implied it's difficult for a company to fire someone. I'm responding that it's trivially easy for a company to make your life a living hell, and make you want to quit.
Yes and constructive dismissal is a legal concept enabling an employee who experienced something like that to sue and receive compensation for unfair dismissal. Companies generally don't like to be sued and don't put themselves in positions where they could be sued.
A lot of companies make you sign an agreement to arbitrate instead of going through the courts. That would mitigate the risk for them that they would get sued. Arbitrators don't use juries.
Hopefully the California legislature passes AB 465 and bans pre-dispute arbitration clauses.
Companies need to fear being sued in the courts if they misbehave, and should not be able to keep the disputes private and out of the court records.
Eh, paid time to learn COBOL, then leave for a cushy job maintaining legacy bank systems. OSHA will definitely have some questions about why programming for a web retailer requires travelling on leaky inflatable boats.
I ignored that part because it's plainly hyperbole. There are no commercial flights to Syria at this time, as there generally aren't to any active war zone. Even if a company wanted to send an employee there, they couldn't.
Plus it's not going to look good when you bring up the email ordering you to go to a war zone where the company has no business interests or even an active office during your wrongful termination suit.
So, obviously, that was an exaggeration for effect, yes?
If you want to keep coming up with excuses for why employees need to put up with bullshit from companies, by all means, knock yourself out. The more suckers there are taking the shit jobs, the less competition there is for the better jobs.
> You don't need a commercial flight to go somewhere. Don't fight something you think is hyperbole with hyperbole.
Are you seriously contending that sending an employee into an active war zone is something an actual employer [1] is actually capable of doing? Since you're documenting BS companies pull, care to provide any documentation of something like that actually happening? Whatever Amazon is like, I'm pretty sure they're not going to go to the trouble of flying someone halfway around the world and arranging transport into a war zone just because they went home at 5pm.
Yes, companies pull all kinds of shady shit, but they're not gods. There are laws, and failing that, public shaming. If you act powerless, you'll be powerless.
[1] Aside from the military, or a defense contractor, or other company where employees would be aware that such an assignment is a possible requirement of their employment.
I'm sorry for what your mother and the rest of your family went through. I have no doubt that the company acted unfairly. Encouraging an attitude of fatalism and "they'll screw you no matter what!" is only going to exacerbate the problem. Companies will only continue to get away with things like that if everyone just accepts them as a fact of life.
I actually think it should be really easy for a company to fire someone, for whatever reason they want to.
And I think we should have social services that make you not fear for your life to be unemployed. Free education. Free health care. Basic Income on top of that.
Sure, I'm all for that. But as long as we have this system where we want corporations to be responsible for citizens' welfare instead of the government, we should make them step up to the plate and actually do it.
Encouraging an attitude that corporations can be responsible for citizens' welfare is only going to exacerbate the problem. Governments will only continue to get away with ignoring citizens' welfare if everyone just accepts it as a fact of life.
I have a four-week rotation on-call where I work. Pretty much the same workload as discussed in the article with it. Calls and text messages at 3am, can't be more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (remote desktop software on Android is a godsend.)
While it doesn't feel unbearable, and pays fairly well (at least for the area I'm in), it definitely has completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I no longer have anything near a 24-hour clock: I'll sleep for, at most, 3-4 hours at a time, usually twice a day. Those times change rapidly. As a result, many times I'll need to take modafinil to stay awake through regular shifts; coffee isn't nearly enough.
The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating.
"Why not quit?" is the usual: it pays too well, have a mortgage to pay, was described as being less work than it turned out to be in the interview, etc. But it really does make for a terrible work-life balance, and it's a shame people are so eager to accept on-call as "just the way it is to have a good middle-class job."
The thing I really don't understand is how they expect you to always be available, no matter what. The human body cannot physically go for seven days with no sleep, at least not without a complete psychotic break-down. Yet there's no sympathy or compassion for this simple biological fact by the higher-ups if you ever sleep through a text message.
It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours (+1 lunch) overlapped by their own work schedules. Yes, it's twice the rotation work, but it's 3 hours outside work each day instead of 15, and you could keep a consistent sleep schedule, and have a social life with times untethered to the internet.
Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.
I have an on-call job. We have two teams, one in Switzerland (where I am), and the other on the west coast of the US; shifts are daytime only, from 0600 to 1800, with the other team handling the night shift. Each team's about five people.
I'm usually on call for three or four days in a row once or twice a month. Schedules are flexible. We just enter dates when we're not available into our calendar and this insane piece of inhouse software looks at our oncall history and determines a fair schedule, so everyone gets the same amount of oncall time. It even takes into account weekends (which are typically very quiet, but you still need to be within mobile-signal-or-coffee-shop range).
Pager load is typically one or two a day, and are usually fairly trivial; far more annoying are the non-paging alerts and paperwork. Sometimes there's a pager storm as something catches fire and burns down, but there's always someone around to help when that happens.
Being on-call here is... never something I look forward to, but the systems are in place to give support if I need it, and I'm never on for very long. The culture here emphasises that when my shift is over, particularly when there's a crisis, I hand over to the next person (in the other team) and then GO HOME, because otherwise I'll burn out.
I am currently the head of a two person ops team, so we effectively share on-call all the time. In reality as the buck stops with me I am on call constantly. It's a drag and I really wish I hadn't been backed into this corner (partly my fault, partly the company).
With that said; my Fiancee is a trainee nurse. She works three thirteen hour shifts a week. Which totally destroys your sleep pattern. Working two thirteen hour days in a row takes you out for a couple of days (she gets in at 9, has about an hour to shower and eat and is in bed for a 5am start).
All of this for a wage which is about half of mine. And with the massive responsibility that if she's tired and makes a mistake it's not a computer that dies but an actual person.
Yeah, I am constantly amazed and terrified of the kinds of shifts doctors and nurses do. I really do not understand how they manage to not make mistakes in such an environment.
In Grey's Anatomy, you often see people taking a couple of hours sleep mid shift; is this generally accurate?
They make a ton of mistakes. This is by far, the worst feature of the American health care system and it shows up as bad care, lives lost, and huge costs. Every single American who pays for healthcare is essentially fucked by our ridiculous system. And this is a system set up by doctors, mind you, doctors that should and do know better.
My wife is a nurse, too, and it definitely takes a special kind of person to do this work. She moved into pharma about a dozen years ago to escape the crazy and irregular hours/shifts and has been much happier & less stressed ever since, and much higher pay.
My fiance is a child neurology resident in Boston. Last year she was on 28 hour call every 4 days, which means she was forced to stay up at least 30 hours if things were busy at the hospital. Depending on the rotation, she would catch 0-4 hours of sleep at the hospital if it wasn't that busy at night. I think they only make the residents work 28 hour shifts, with attending working more like 9-15 hours per day.
2000's, I worked at a call center and then a large software company in Bangalore. Late nights, weekends and sometimes even doing consecutive days(2-3 days) at office were common. Some people I known of have clocked a record 7 days at office, sleeping in dorms for 4 hours per day. None of us complained, because merely getting a job in those situations was a blessing. Who would mind atrocious working hours, where the next option is bankruptcy.
My father was a truck driver, then a bus driver and is now a taxi driver. Most of his life he pretty much went perennially sleep deprived, tiring work driving all time. With no access to food, good sleeping conditions or even a rest room.
In fact this is pretty much how bulk of world works to make a living.
Recently, in the last 4-5 years. I had a day job and was doing my start up on the side. 10-11 hours at office and 6-9 hours of start up work at home was common. Getting barely 5 hours of sleep after a grueling day of very hard work, tense situations and routine crippling failures are common.
I would say human life is very hard. That's how it is by default.
The difference is your fiancé will not be a trainee forever, and as an RN will be able to get pick between money/schedule/speciality.
If you like long hours and chaos, work in the ER. if 5A-2P works, be a surgical nurse. There are lots of options that you can study for and get into. Also, in many states you're hourly, so you get paid.
I suspect they only make the trainee nurses and doctors do that. Once you get higher up the pecking order, you don't have to do it anymore (many in my family are nurses/doctors).
You CAN quit. We are in an industry where you have to dodge recruiters trying to tackle you on your way to get coffee if you have any technical skill. Recruiters that represent companies capable of paying your mortgage and some probably well needed vacations.
Personally I have folded companies, quit jobs, and turned away opprotunities that represented substantially more than I make now. People have called these choices foolish but my life honestly rocks right now. Today I am happy, productive at a job I enjoy, and have time to spend with the people that matter, so who cares what other people consider logical?
Optimize for work-life balance, not bank account balance.
> You CAN quit. We are in an industry where you have to dodge recruiters trying to tackle you on your way to get coffee if you have any technical skill. Recruiters that represent companies capable of paying your mortgage and some probably well needed vacations.
Some of us can quit. Amazon employees in Seattle are probably in a better position than most in this respect, but many people in this industry are not so lucky.
Your assessment of the tech employment market is overly rosy. OP can quit and possibly find another tech job. Chances are, it won't be noticeably different from his/her current job in terms of working conditions, compensation, or benefits. Of course there are rare outlier counter-examples, just in case someone wants to "prove" me wrong.
And yours seems overly pessimistic. "I got burned by one man/woman/job so all men/women/jobs are the same. Why bother?"
You bother because getting it right is worth it, and when you do you won't regret having a few failed attempts getting there. It is a big world with a lot of positive opprotunities. Go find yours :)
> Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.
Because it's cheaper to burn out your existing employees, fire them for non-performance, and then hire (and lie to) new employees who don't know what's going on.
The problem here is "on call". Why not "on duty"? If I'm getting paid for the midnight shift one week out of four, that's annoying, but manageable. If I'm getting paid for 40 hours a week, but I'm "on call" 24/7, 365 days a year, that's abusive.
In the US, that's the big difference between exempt and non-exempt. I'm glad I have a lower, less prestigious job because it's classified as non-exempt. That means if I'm on call, I'm paid for it. Which means the company really has to think "is it worth having this guy sit around in case something breaks?". It also means company policy prohibits me from having a company cell with email access, because I shouldn't be working off the clock. This lets me work on many side projects because at 5:00p, I'm done. If they need me to do more, they pay me more.
I won't say the system is perfect, but when the company incurs a cost for being legally obligated to pay more for more work, I think the employment social contract becomes more fair. Aside from top level executives (CEO, etc.), I'm not exactly sure I can find a reason that people should be classified as exempt.
Lawyers and doctors are the often cited examples of exempt employees. Sorry, if an attorney spends a few more hours one week on trial prep, his firm is billing for it, so pay him/her more. Similarly, if a surgeon's operation goes sideways and ends up taking two hours more, pay him/her more.
If the idea that any labor past 40 hours in a week was "free labor" for a company was discarded (or better yet, actually cost the company more than the first 40 hours, i.e., "overtime"), we could reduce the number of people who are working more than 40 hours per week and start hiring more unemployed people. On a micro-scale, does it make sense to have 4 people consistently working 50 hours each with 1 unemployed person, or does it make more sense to have 5 people consistently working 40 hours per week?
While you're at it, maybe 35 (or 30?) is the new 40?
As I mentioned elsewhere, another way to resolve this is to reform the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and adopt rules similar to the EU Working Time Directive.
> The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating.
Ouch!
When our team was asked to be on-call (this was a few years ago at another company), we negotiated a fixed monthly bonus and I don't think we would have continued to be "on-call" if they had reneged on that. I think it was even in our contract. How did they take that away from you? Is it in your job description that you need to be on-call?
We also had a high priority "fix what broke" strategy that was also management approved: whenever something went wrong at 3am, the next day our top priority was to try and ensure that did not happen again, ever. Our interests were aligned with management here: management wanted as little downtime as possible for the web services, we wanted as little interruption to sleep as possible.
How often do you get calls/messages on average? Is there anything you can do to reduce them by improving the actual things that are breaking?
On-call has to be a separate, significant financial line item. It can't be just 'rolled into your job' - what happens when you're understaffed, for example?
On-call means you can't get drunk, go see a movie, visit distant friends or whatever. It's a significant impact on your life - plus, of course, you're expected to work your normal full day after a hard night. I simply stopped going out to bars with my friends, even though I wasn't drinking. The benefit of socialising didn't make up for standing in a cold alleyway in winter talking an enduser through a tech problem for 45 minutes at a time.
"Fuck you, pay me" applies here. Salary is for normal work hours - on-call spreads that to 24/7 for a week. On-call is also not trivial, so it shouldn't pay peanuts. Remember it's the company that wants 24/7 coverage; it should be a cost to the company to provide that. I'm a 'best effort' guy, and I don't like to see my stuff failing. I'd rather fix it on my own time than let it rot until business hours roll around. But I'm not giving my employer priority time over the my personal life for free.
If ever you need a question for that part in job interviews, on-call is a good one. Also worth scrutinising in the contract.
Negotiating salary with on-call in view is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed when issues of pay come up. I totally agree that on-call is a cost. If they aren't willing to pay for it, they shouldn't expect employees to do it.
On-call rotation is listed in the job description.
We have at-will employment here, so a contract change is basically, "accept the change or go someplace else to work." Which works against us in a down economy in a position that still pays better than most other companies would for the same work.
I make around $70k myself. The average here is around $50k. Moving's not really an option due to family. Maybe in 4-5 more years moving will be on the table, but by then I'll be closing in on 40.
We probably get around 3-4 calls a week, usually between 1am and 8am (non-staffed hours), and another 6-12 text message alerts a week. Some weeks are better, some are worse. My issue is once I've woken up to handle something, it takes me a good 1-2 hours to fall back asleep again. I obviously can't treat that with sleeping pills since I need to be able to wake up again. So I go the opposite route and try to keep myself awake when I need to be.
We can't do much to fix outage issues, as we're part of a larger organization, and we monitor processes for everyone else. It's our job to contact their on-call support staff to get things fixed.
I think the idea was to relieve all of the tier-3 teams from needing to implement their own separate, patch-work application health monitoring systems; and instead centralize all of the monitoring to one team. Some of the better teams do have their own health monitoring as well; and in those cases, we're more of the "fallback" in case their monitoring doesn't catch issues.
> It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours overlapped by their own work schedules.
Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.
India is a better bet. 10.5 hours away means they are nearly on the opposite schedule, price is better (wages only marginally, but Europe has lots of other costs) and you aren't stuck dealing with insane euro labor laws.
I heard the daily complaints from a person attempting to handle restructuring at a major UK bank. Let me emphasize that the restructuring was ordered by parliament, who also happened to own most of the bank. Various difficulties:
- Work councils get input in whether you can lay someone off - it's a far cry from at-will employment.
- Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy - you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy.
All told, it was vastly more difficult than the US (where she had come from). I know in France you can only fire for cause.
In contrast India is pretty easy. It's a simple trade of money for labour, provided you stay out of the communist states. (Which of course you will if you are hiring devs.) The cost difference is actually only a minor reason to hire here - European devs are highly underpaid, and Indian devs are very much not.
> parliament, who also happened to own most of the bank
Ok, so that's RBS then. For the record, that bank embodies everything that's wrong with the UK banking system: huge, completely out of control before the crash, totally sclerotic internally, top-down managed, etc etc. Think of anything bad about banks you've ever heard; RBS is it.
> - it's a far cry from at-will employment.
And thank god for that. This island is still in Europe (at least until next year), and in Europe we have this old-fashioned notion of workers' rights, including basic respect for human beings. Firing people from one day to the next is barbaric, especially in huge organizations like RBS where you can probably give anyone a chance in some other department.
> - Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy
Honestly, sir, a bit of decency is called for. Do you really think people would get pregnant just to get some time off? We are not talking about benefit scroungers, these are middle-class workers for whom a kid is a big deal, financially and psychologically. I honestly don't see anyone getting "strategically pregnant" just to gain some time.
Btw, pregnancy laws came about because employers were being complete dicks, firing female employees as soon as they got pregnant. They would then have the gall to show up in church and talk of human values they clearly knew nothing about.
> In contrast India is pretty easy
Well done you for exploiting the reserve army of labor, that time-honored tradition of mean ruling classes. You are a shining beacon of progress to all of us. Have a good day, sir.
Even in the rare cases the law applies, the maximum penalty is two month's pay minus whatever severance/notice was given. It's not much of a restriction.
Its far more than the UK has - recently one big multinational artificially made a uk subsidiary bankrupt to avoid paying statutory redundancy. The taxpayer picked up the bill for that one.
They just herded every one into a big room and said "company is bust - there is a pile of the RB2 forms over there"
Everyone I know who has taken maternity leave has very much had an obligation to go back afterwards, or pay pack the money paid while they were off.
I'm also not familiar with anyone who has got pregnant to avoid layoffs, if nothing else given the cost of raising a child it seems like a very poor tradeoff.
A) Laid off in a bad economy, hunt for job, maybe find something. Then have children at age 33 or 34, only a couple of years into a new gig. (In banking they consider a couple of years to be a short time.)
B) Get pregnant at age 30 instead, avoid the current restructuring, and if you do hit the job market it'll be in a much better economy.
Really? You can't possibly see the benefit of (B)?
On-call is not the norm, nor to be expected. I've worked over a dozen jobs easily in this industry and not a single one has had an on-call requirement for any amount of time, let alone throughout the night. This will not be the case as much for ops people, but even then it's possible to find jobs that don't have an on-call requirement. Your mistake is thinking this is expected and putting up with it. Sleep is my most precious asset and to be on call 24/7, even once a month, would require at least a 50% raise for me. Though I have to say, if I was in your position and had a job lined up, I'd definitely wait until you were paged at 3am and respond by quitting. Seems like the only just way to go ...
If Jeff is reading this: hopefully it should be apparent that these stories of constant out-of-hours calls indicate incompetent management. Note I'm not talking about the "human" side of this (obviously that's pretty bad), but rather this is just bad engineering, bad management, bad business. If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does not do so! If it turns out the software is working just fine but the humans involved like to call people all the time, then arrange for some people to be in the office during working hours (heck, which continents does Amazon NOT have offices in??) to soothe them. Or perhaps fire the people who like to make unnecessary support calls. My point: this all indicates a very broken process and the process is the thing that needs to be fixed, rather than "being nicer" about the fact that your developer needs to be no more than 15 minutes from a WiFi network...
Disclosure: I'm part of a small team that runs a high-availability service, without constant middle-of-the-night alerts..
>> If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does not do so!
It has been my observation that this is a conscious decision. If you can build a culture where you can have people being willing to show up for work at all the odd hours as the norm then you can afford poor software practices. In places like these rushed software that has bugs but meets the majority of the use cases well enough is what is expected. And you ARE expected to show up at odd times to fix what breaks.
I mean, its not as if it costs the company more to have you come in late or have you working at all the odd hours. They still pay you only what they pay you. To hell with your work life balance - it's not as if doing this as had any blowback in terms of attrition.
This person seems to have remained in Amazon for over 6 years - where they likely created millions of dollars in value in return for whatever money they made.
If you grow a backbone and turn down the calls at odd hours, you can expect to receive blowback and unreasonable treatment from a direction you didn't expect.
This is very important. There needs to be an "agile manifesto" style awakening on this, so that business people also understand that software quality matters a lot. Perhaps I'll do a writeup at some point...
The email from Jeff to his employees was impeccably unsatisfactory. It was a sheer display of ignorance and rejection towards everything quoted and said. However, no matter how much Jeff sticks to that attitude, it wouldn't change the reality that Amazon is the most customer centric company on earth and the most employee apathetic company on earth as well. It reflects in major workplace elements like health schemes, holiday schemes (though employee have official over 30 holidays they are not allowed to spend it without facing low performance review), food benefits (specially in offices outside USA) etc. Though Amazon claims that the leadership principle "Frugality" stands for minimizing waste and not cheapness, one can't dismiss the latter definition.
The whole "this feedback is nonsense, I won't listen to it; oh, and please give me feedback, I take it seriously" thing was pretty absurd. Plus, he essentially blamed the people for being in this situation. I'd be splitting blood if I worked there and got that letter.
I love how Bezos didn't address the reports of his own famously bad behavior, which sets the tone for the entire company. Or maybe he's under investigation by the Amazon HR department right now?
>>The email from Jeff to his employees was impeccably unsatisfactory. It was a sheer display of ignorance and rejection towards everything quoted and said.
Duh? He was simply defending the company against potential HR lawsuits. You can't really expect him to say, "yes I know we treat people like shit, and the criticisms are valid, but..."
I expected a more positive re-enforcement in form of something like "we shall investigate the mentioned cases by NYtimes and try to reach out to those people..."
Or
"even if its all false, lets take a step to change such perception of Amazon if it exists.."
well, his (valid) point is, that arguably most of this planet inahbitants would do anything possible to get a job like that, for even half the income. which is true. just we in IT and developers in particular are in these days amazingly spoiled, full of this feeling that we are some engineer++, more clever, and generally better than say construction engineers (or any other for that matter). back home we have a saying "pride precedes the fall", and honestly, software development is in dire need for some proper disruption (ie jobs amount and salaries take 50% cut).
once you step outside of your little bubble and look how hard it is for real people out there to earn their crappy salaries, come back and we can talk like adults.
With this attitude, so long as there are people worse off you never have a right to complain; if more people believed the way you do we would all race to the bottom into functional slavery, because, hey, some people are actual slaves, or dying on the street, or permanently disabled who am I to complain about working for 3 cents a year? Some people would kill for that job.
Luckily almost nobody outside of weird extremist libertarian communities on the internet that you find odd pockets of on HN and such believe this.
It's okay to be a sociopath to people so long as others have it worse?
No, sorry. Nothing requires Amazon to behave this way, and it is foolish besides - if you burn through people you are are basically training people up who then walk away and work for your competition. By having them work 80+ hours you are getting less actual work out of them then 40 hours. You are spending more on health care because this sort of environment causes stress. Etc.
We ain't going to shut up and take it just because there are worse things out there.
I find it interesting that one one hand we have people talking about how software developers are entitled cry-babies, and then there are others who say that software developers are horrible at negotiating salary and benefits, ending up woefully under-compensated for the value that we bring to employers.
"well, his (valid) point is, that arguably most of this planet inahbitants would do anything possible to get a job like that, for even half the income."
Until they get the job, realize that pain is everywhere, and pray their children won't have to go through the same thing.
Destroying your employees doesn't suddenly become a sustainable way of running the human race just because you're destroying them in front of a computer screen instead of in a rice field.
I'm quite surprised that of all the famous Silicon Valley people, and their rallying behind Jeff Bezos, no one seems to believe that some part of these many many stories could be true. Either that, or they seem to think that only incompetent people are complaining. Therefore I must post part of my comment I posted here [1]. One of my good friend, who was suffering at Amazon, is thriving at Google. He's done amazingly well for himself and for Google in past 1 year he's been there (& has been well recognized within the org). This is not incompetence.
> I'm quite surprised that of all the famous Silicon Valley people, and their rallying behind Jeff Bezos, no one seems to believe that some part of these many many stories could be true.
I'm sure they know it's true, it's just that they're all guilty of it. From what I keep hearing, it sounds like it's part of the culture.
Honestly, it doesn't matter what SV people think. If they want to claim this isn't true, they're essentially claiming a mass employee conspiracy. Let's see, a mass employee conspiracy against Amazon or Amazon, a large company, treating its workers like shit? Gee, I wonder which one is more plausible.
> I'm quite surprised that of all the famous Silicon Valley people, and their rallying behind Jeff Bezos
Because this isn't news to anybody.
I've known that working for Amazon sucks since 2005? And I'm not even in software. I presume software professionals have known longer than that. That's how bad Amazon's reputation is.
What new is that it's getting press outside of Silly Valley.
Thus, the rallying. Just about every Silicon Valley company will come in for a shellacking once people actually start looking at them.
> When our first daughter was about a month old, my husband was asked to go on a business trip. I imagine he could have turned that down, but I was insistent that he go so that his managers would not worry that his home life was impacting his work ethic. This is the Amazon way, after all. It was also one of the loneliest weeks of my life.
Amazon seems to have serious issues, but this one is on the employee/spouse. If you don't protect your personal life/family time, how can you expect the company to?
I have young kids so I come in to the office early and don't stay late too often so I can be home with them. I know some upper management probably look down on this, but expectations were clear when I was hired and my boss is OK with it. I realize keeping this balance may disqualify me from ever becoming VP of engineering, but I am more than OK with that if it means being a better spouse and father.
>so that his managers would not worry that his home life was impacting his work ethic
It isn't on the employee/spouse; this is why you have managers that sometimes have to tell employees to go home. We're so fearful of losing our jobs that we bend over backwards for employers. This is what happens when employers have an advantage.
>I know some upper management probably look down on this
So your boss is fine with it but your boss's boss may not be. At least you aren't living in fear of losing your job.
>I realize keeping this balance may disqualify me from ever becoming VP of engineering
Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up.
> this is why you have managers that sometimes have to tell employees to go home.
Good managers can spot when this is needed. But if the employee is telling the manager that everything is fine and isn't showing signs of home stress, I don't blame the manager.
> Why should it keep you from becoming VP of engineering? That's messed up.
I think most companies are going to value and reward those who put in extra time consistently over those who don't.
The role of management is not to get every last drop of work out of you. With the risk of being redundant, management is really about management. You need to recognize when to push them and when not to. From the looks of it, it's push all the time in the team that this person was over at Amazon. That's a failure of management.
It costs a lot to train a new employee, and reduces productivity and morale. So managers worth their salt would do one of many things to prevent this type of burnout.
Predictability is what management wants as well as employees, believe it or not. If you are an effective manager, you either create predictability and a good work/life balance or you might as well not be there. You're basically a fire fighter in that case, and it doesn't help with long term predictability.
Managers who worth their salt will go to bat to get people the time they want/need. If also need to recognize when it is time to walk away, and that's what I tell people when I do interview. If I don't correct the predictability scenario in terms of meeting business needs, I should be fired. If I don't get the tools that I need to get the results, it would be on me to walk away after informing them of the structural problems (and solutions to help them). I suspect that Amazon has a number of people who are purely focused on the bottom line of velocity and don't care about burn out. I'm sure though, that there are good groups to work for at Amazon, but the ratio might be lower than at other tech companies, from what I gather.
There's so many thing I feel when i read this:
1st: We're all in IT have been on call at some given time , and it sucks , we all know this (since I'm not on my 20s anymore i always ask in job interviews if i have to be on call.)
2nd: Man that sucks ... i don't know how this person has given it more than 6 months of his life , just move on and get a different job if you dislike it.
3rd: Amazon is like any other big company , I've read similar stories about google and MS , i wish the would pipe down and think smartly , proper hand offs to people that are on call etc etc, there's no reason why someone have to be called in the night and unable to take holidays ... come on , nobody is SO important as we want to think.
From talking with people who work or worked for the companies you mention: their complaint is never about being on call or about the work hours, but about the stack ranking system. This means that every manager has to rank the people that report to her in order from best to worst, where best must get a promotion and worst must be sidetracked or fired, even if the whole team objectively ranked from 'excellent' to 'superstar'. This means that you may have to fire someone who performed only 'excellently', and it also makes your direct coworkers competitors, because it's in everyone's interest to be higher in the stack than you, and if someone else on your team does well, this may be a threat to you.
> just move on and get a different job if you dislike it
Because they tie you in with money - your signing bonus and relocation expenses have to be partially repaid if you leave within the first two years.
An interesting question on the "what if there was a war and no-one came?" is what would happen if Amazon could no longer hire the monstrous number of high calibre new entrants it needs every year. Stories like this are effectively huge advertising campaigns for every other tech company.
I see people use this excuse all the time when I challenge them to quit a job they hate and get one they love.
If you are good at what you do, another company will buy you out of any financial strings a current employer has on you.
Let's assume the worst though and that by leaving you just eat the money. So what? You can always make more money, but you can't get years of your life back.
I find people in this industry are so often socalized into protecting a commodity they can easily replace (money) by giving up one they can't (enjoyed time)
Especially as many of these individuals are recent graduates so likely have student loans, won't have had any time to save, are on the other side of the country from any previous support networks etc.
There's also the potential, or at least perceived, resume / CV impact of quitting your first job after a short period.
The right answer might be "just leave", and clearly many people do just that. But for many they won't or think they can't - so companies cannot assume that just because people stick around that things are good.
So? You dont have to pay them back immediatly. I have walked away with neither credit or savings before. Thrown away stock and titles. There is never a good reason to let someone abuse you and hold you hostage from living a life you enjoy.
I swear this is like listening to people in abusive relationships with tunnel vision. "If we break up I will be poor!"
The world didn't end any of the times I have walked away. Little contract work and a few interviews can solve a wealth of financial problems in short order.
Well, good for you. People have mortgages, they have children, and so on. Life is not as neat and clean as HN likes to make it. People are not robots, and do not always make perfectly rational decisions. Sometimes the 'easier' decision to stay at a company where you have reasonable assurance of continued employment and stability. I put easier in quotes because I recognize the truth of what you say, but in general this ability to just flippantly change jobs is a rare thing. No one was doing that in 2001, and people remember. You can jump to a start up, the bankers or somebody makes a bad risk decision, the economy is in turmoil, and in 8 months you are in foreclosure and trying to figure out how to cloth and feed your kids. Meanwhile your mother is ailing and needs your help, and your wife's father is wandering into traffic due to the Alzheimers. Silly, weak humans, right? We HN readers are above all that. Nothing bad will ever happen to us, so just throw caution to the wind.
Quitting before having a new source of income is not something everyone can do. I do acknowledge this.
Most of the people I talk to in these situations however are not shopping around. Acting like they are trapped or a helpless victim. If someone is not happy at a job they owe it to themselves, in spite of any drama going on in their lives, to make time for interviews until they get the sucky job problem solved.
By no means blow off family in need etc, but making time to get into a happy work environment could mean less stress, enough or more money, and a much easier time dealing with the difficult parts of life one can't change.
The world didn't end any of the times I have walked away
Not for you, but it certainly does happen. If you look at it from the other way round, quite often when you find a middleclass person who's ended up homeless or an alcoholic or suicidal it started with losing their job.
Yes, it's an abusive employer/employee relationship. But there's never a bright line crossed between "ordinarily bad" and "abusive".
Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice.
It's also a choice to enter into highly leveraged options purchases on illiquid assets which require major lifestyle changes to walk away from (mortgage). Complaining that the mortgage inhibits lifestyle changes is no different than complaining "I dropped $800k short selling AMZN, now I need to make margin call".
Most people choose to wildly overconsume, and as a result don't have any savings. This is a choice.
To follow a remark like that with one about people regretting losing $800k makes me wonder how many low paid people you know. There are a lot of people who can't afford to save, and it's not because they're overconsuming.
Although, admittedly, I doubt many of them are Amazon employees.
I was referring to the software developers working at Amazon (much like the article). I was comparing making mortgage payments on an $800k house to making margin calls on an $800k short sale.
To be fair, most of the low paid people I know could also save. This is pretty obvious to me by comparing the lifestyle of my Indian friends and my American friends. Somehow the Indians earn far less but manage to save massively (hint: they consume less).
The main exception might be Americans in the $0-20k/year of consumption category, since big chunks of their "income" are non-market income. But that kind of makes the question of whether to quit moot...
An interesting question on the "what if there was a war and no-one came?" is what would happen if Amazon could no longer hire the monstrous number of high calibre new entrants it needs every year.
It's the wrong question to ask, I think. Those joining Amazon or any other top company do so through internship track or personal network. Anyone who complains about burnout and getting worked to death really has no reason to complain. They did get to see the insides of Amazon while working there as an intern, and if they didn't see it their friends did.
The question is really: why do people keep thinking they can outrun the bear even though everyone else they can see cannot?
The Nightly Show (with Larry Wilmore) talked about this the other day and while it is a comedy show I was a little surprised at what the guests said about it. The "This isn't going to stop anyone from ordering from Amazon" statements were to be expected and honestly, are any of us going to stop? But the one thing they did touch on that I hadn't even considered was a general sentiment of "They make boatloads of money and I'm supposed to feel sorry?". Even in this article the wife mentions how they could afford therapy because of the good money her husband was making at Amazon.
We, as a culture, don't seem to give a fuck about the conditions of the vast majority of our workers ("Oh it's McD's? Of course the job sucks") and on the show they even said "I don't see anyone getting all worked up about the workers who MAKE the shit Amazon sells" which is a really good point. Now of course people DO get worked up about it but I think it points out the hypocrisy.
All of that to say I don't necessarily think that we shouldn't care how someone is treated if they make lots of money but it's a very interesting point.
>With warehouses around the globe, my husband would get paged to fix problems in China in the middle of the night, in the UK in the wee hours of the morning, and then in the Kentucky warehouse during work hours.
I worked at a company that wrote warehouse management software, and this definitely isn't unique to Amazon. When your software has a serious problem the company is losing a million dollars an hour, so they're not very sympathetic to problems you may have standing in the way of a return to smooth operations.
That business vies with games and HFT for the highest stress levels in software development.
A million bucks an hour and there's a manager and two devs on it? If they had three devs it would cut the workload by a third for the existing devs. And it would cost 150K-200K or so (salary, benefits, tax), equivalent to 12 minutes of waiting time.
Surely a guy with an MBA can figure out the cost/benefit of such a situation?
The MBA thinks "cheap as possible" - so two devs and a dog sounds like a reasonable budget, even if it means stuff doesn't quite work and employees get broken.
The real poison is MBA culture. It's literally insane in most normal human senses.
This. It's easy to shift the blame to faceless Amazon and pretend "the company" is at fault.
It's not. The people who are running the company (and I'm not referring strictly to top management here) are the ones with the blatant disregard for their employees.
This is not a result of some inherent forces our Universe suddenly concentrating over Amazon. They're the result of business decisions. A bunch of people wearing suits have talked about this and agreed it's okay.
I like to think that I would. Primarily because I tend to seek to spend and invest money in a way that does not require me to make compromises in terms of humanity.
Granted, I've never invested money in anything of Amazon's level, so I cannot know -- all I know is what I hope I'd do.
Yes, this is a classic example of a skew risk. Cheap out, don't hire anyone, and you'll probably save money. But your company is at risk of collapsing if you get an event you hadn't planned for. Reputation can vanish fast if you have an IT problem and customers can't get their stuff.
And of course this will never, ever come up in your case studies as a recurring risk, because you're encouraged to read everything as a nice little story in business school. The one or two cases where it does happen will just be chalked up to some admonition about hiring better staff or some other BS.
"Cheap out, don't hire anyone, and you'll probably save money. But your company is at risk of collapsing if you get an event you hadn't planned for. Reputation can vanish fast if you have an IT problem and customers can't get their stuff."
Are you implying that Bezos and Amazon's investors are just dumb and don't think about the long term implications of their hiring practices?
You can always short Amazon's stock if you're that confident.
Maybe they did think about it all, and reached the conclusion that this culture and hiring practices will have a better return on the long term.
It is far too easy to say what other people should do with their money...
Yep, and that should be minimum wage, not "good working conditions for highly-paid white collar workers". [Edit: sorry if the tone sounds bad, no intend to offend]
Disclaimer: I'm a highly-paid white collar worker.
There's enough competition in the tech industry that this isn't a problem, let the market regulate itself in this case, it's working. I wouldn't work at Amazon under those conditions, but if some people would, let them.
That's a bit glib considering you also need to deal with funding, investor relations, market fit, and all kinds of other issues that have a lot more impact on longevity than developer salary.
It also ignores the fact that markets are structured to reward cheap and greedy behaviour and C-suite narcissism, and to punish - or at least get in the way of - bottom-up worker democracy and other more fluid and less myth-of-the-holy-CEO management structures.
As for Amazon - the company can clearly afford to treat its workers better. The actual effect on profitability is likely to be positive, not negative, because better people will stay for longer, less churn means more stability and less random technical debt for new hires, and better publicity makes it easier to keep customers than lose them.
Bezos seems to think the tradeoffs are fine as they are. I think he's wrong about that. Amazon's model is quite brittle, and it's open to any number of competitive attacks. And Bezos has made some very poor decisions (phone, etc.)
Amazon will be fine in the short to medium term, but I'll be surprised if its business model isn't seriously disrupted by competition within less than a decade.
IMO treating workers better would make the company more creative and resilient, not less - and probably more profitable too.
They did have more people. The problem is not everyone in the group knows the code to the same degree. Even when you have someone on station who's supposed to take care of problems, if it takes him more than about twenty minutes to find the problem they're going to start calling the rest of the team.
If you're good and you have a reputation for being good they're going to call you. I got 3:00 AM calls because I'd written a particular piece of code even though a half dozen of my colleagues were already on site and awake.
Put yourself in the manager's shoes. You can not tell the customer he's needs to wait two hours for the people on site to come up to speed on the shipping module (or whatever) because the guy who wrote it needs his beauty sleep. There's too much money involved.
This situation is very common in low margin businesses.
Source: I spent 15 years managing IT (devs, DBAs, ops) in a multinational manufacturing company. Even though I had a team of 100+, for each discrete app or system, it was normal to have just one or two experts due to lack of adequate staffing. My CIO took pride in restricting IT spend to <1% of revenue. :-/
You don't get bonuses and promoted for spending a lot of money. You do for having a lean, mean team. A $10 Million outage event? "That's Sally's fault, she is letting her cancer distract her, I'll fire her in the morning. CFO: Great leadership Roger, I'll pencil you in for another $200K bonus!"
> When your software has a serious problem the company is losing a million dollars an hour, so they're not very sympathetic to problems you may have standing in the way of a return to smooth operations.
If it's worth millions of dollars per hour, you can afford to hire more employees to give greater and more coverage.
I dunno. I've worked in games and I've worked in another role where I was on-call.
I think the kind of stress is apples and oranges.
Games is definitely more work overall, but it's generally within office hours, and you can still get a decent sleep even at crunch time if you're sensible and don't work for the worst abusers of unpaid overtime.
On-call can really fuck you up even if the actual hours worked are less.
My theory as to Amazon's valuation is that investors assume at some point Amazon will get a stranglehold on retail (giving it both monopoly and monopsony positions in many markets) and then extract rents on a staggering scale until regulators eventually deal with it (which might be never).
But Amazon's experiments with treating workers as commodity parts in a machine -- which we discover also applies to the white-collar folks (so now we care?) -- is a whole other angle. Instead of merely planning to cash in on a prospective illegal monopoly, it's also working on making life miserable for all workers. So there's that too.
I don't know about any of that. I can see why that was written to describe the trajectories of some SV companies - it doesn't seem to fit with Amazon at all, to me anyway.
I work for a company in Seattle whose technical employees are getting picked off by Amazon. Amazon offers probably 25-50% more in salary for similar positions, and we also can't compete with their equity offering. But in exchange for all that money, you have to work probably at least 50% more hours, tolerate weaker boundaries between your work life and personal life, and deal with a whole lot more stress. It's a trade-off that some people are willing to make, and others aren't. But what really sucks is that the real estate market is getting to the point where you need an Amazon salary just to afford a house in Seattle.
I do believe there must be something wrong at a significant enough scale to warrant NYT's attention. There are always outliners (i.e. unhappy and stressed out staff) in every company, the question is how big is the population.
>I do believe there must be something wrong at a significant enough scale to warrant NYT's attention.
it may be "wrong" from the POV of NYT or other tech outsiders. What i've over the years understood from various friends/acquaintances is that it is not "something wrong", it is just the "normal" mode of how whole AMZN operates. People going there know it (and if they don't - not checking Glassdoor is theirs fault, not AMZN's) - and, for example, that is the reason i didn't go there (while i love escalations, emergencies, etc..., i don't like backstabbing, tricks they play with your salary/bonuses and other details)
Your argument sounds like it is not something wrong to commit crime in a crime-ridden neighborhood, and it is the victim's fault since that person didn't read news or does their due diligence.
there is a difference between crime and contract. You enter contract at will in exchange for something, and not doing due diligence is your fault. You may also look at the notion of exempt employee - some actions would be illegal if done to non-exempt employees while ok to be done to exempt.
I do understand where you are from and I agree one will need to be aware what they are signing up for. A lot of times companies pay extra for the hardship, and I will say this is fair and square.
However there is a limit on what a company can do to its employees, even employees signed contracts. Some behaviors like making people cry are bordering harassment, and these are against the law in most countries.
At Amazon, unless you're on a PIP (probation), you can change teams after a year and your manager cannot stop you. This is possibly one of the best ways to get management's attention. If an org is bleeding out people, it is clear that something is wrong. Why not switch teams?
>you can change teams after a year and your manager cannot stop you.
i remember how at Sun a good recommendation from a manager about his employee wanting to switch to another team was read as "i'd be happy to dump that guy to somebody else" and so-so was read as "God, don't let him to be taken from me" :)
It's these sort of articles that questions my use of Amazon for my retail purchases. Not just from the ethical standpoint of overworking people but also from the practical effect of getting most of what I want on time at a price I want because I can't say that Amazon today really does a good job on that front either.
For example, if I want to purchase electronic components for my PC New Egg still beats them every time in price and delivery times (imo). Anytime I buy something like a stick of RAM from Amazon I tend to get burned on the delivery time (unless I use Prime) or the price (certain third party retailers just run out of stock). So, I never trust Amazon with my component purchases.
Similarly, I'm finding their clothing section is getting more parse every year for plus sized clothing so I wind up buying socks from Sock Dreams, most outfits from Torrid (casual/off-work) or Lane Bryant (office-friendly/semi-formal) or some other retailer.
Oddly, Amazon still beats Zappos on large size shoes (Zappos use to be the goto retailer but not anymore they seem to have culled most of their stock of non-fetish large size shoes).
All this article and the NYT article just convinces me further that Amazon may become my retailer of last resort since all the thumbscrews in the world isn't worth anything if it comes down to a meager savings in price or time.
I guess I thought this was common knowledge. I've stayed away from working at Amazon for a while now based on stories from other tech people I know. It's not a top-tier place to work outside of AWS and the opportunities aren't really that great either. Maybe the pay is good? I've heard it's not competitive even.
I know how it is though - people want the stamp of a top company on their resume. They also want to succeed.
I blame the husband just a tiny bit - for not saying 'no' earlier. Ironically, he might not have been fired if he put a line in the sand earlier. He probably did underperform because he wasn't managing the manager's expectations properly.
Of course, he might have gotten fired anyway - nobody will ever know.
Work is tough - and unfortunately companies like Amazon aren't "buffering the core" very well. These are engineers who might not be good at managing expectations or managing or leadership even - but why stress them out if they're otherwise super-useful to the company? Employees who can't handle this stress but are otherwise valuable should be cradled and they'll perform better for longer - pretty simple really.
>people want the stamp of a top company on their resume.
I hate how valuable stuff like this is to hiring managers. If you asked me to pick between the guy who spent a year at Amazon or the guy who ran his own startup soup-to-nuts for a year, I'd rather go with the startup guy. Its crazy that we have this informal pseudo-classist system of "people who worked at AAA shops" vs "nobodies." Are HR departments and hiring managers really this dense?
I am glad that finally Amazon's work environment is finally getting exposure. We had a few colleagues who worked for Amazon and they called it a sweatshop of IT world. Because of them, I have turned down recruiters from Amazon many times and stopped my friends from applying there.
Hopefully, Amazon will change their workplace policies now or suffer stock price decline when smart people stop applying there.
Unless you really have no other option to support yourself, you really need to change jobs (or departments, etc.) if your job is requiring you to get anywhere close to needing therapy. Having learned this the hard way, I just don't think it's worth trying to hold on for it to get better. Be willing to move on. You'll likely find another job and make the same amount. Plus job hopping often is helpful in your career. And when your job is going well, save up some money so that when (yes, "when", not "if") it goes bad you have some funds to drawn on so that leaving isn't a financial burden and you can support yourself when you are between jobs. After 20 years in the field, I've just come to recognize that just how it is. Plan for it. And there's no reason to put yourself through undue mental or family anguish because you are afraid of making less (when you probably wouldn't anyway).
Amazon delivers lots of value to customers, and there're only two ways to do that: 1) spend shitload of money on processes and people, or 2) squeeze employees as much as possible. Sadly the 2nd option is much cheaper and "people are expendable anyway" these days.
- wife has no job (due to move to Seattle), just had kids, need to pay for housing: unless you can get another job immediately (which is hard if you're too busy to interview), quitting will be a disaster
- boiling frog: it wasn't awful on day 1, so at some point he'd have to acknowledge that things have changed
- negative reinforcement and the cult: dysfunctional organisations are often good at making you think it's your fault. Hence the therapy.
Sure, he can move to another job that has the same kind of stupid demands. However, finding a job that doesn't have those kinds of demands isn't so easy. Now, let's add in the stress of uprooting your family as well as a new job where you have to prove yourself (so you're probably going to be spending the same number of hours, anyway, for a while) and it's not so obvious a choice.
The real solution is for labor laws to start biting and saying that salaried workers are to be compensated after 40 hours and have it enforced. Once you have to pay a salaried worker overtime and a shift differential, they'll hire another worker.
I am now quite happy that I failed in the Amazon recruitment process.
Their guidance said that I should prepare couple of weeks for the interview. For me they gave one weekend which I had to use for the family event. Perhaps I was not engaged enough after all.
It became very obvious in the interview process that there was nothing to get excited about company wise. They didn't tell me anything about the company, at all. Just a bunch of questions anyone with a textbook could answer. Except for some reason I had to write code on a whiteboard. As if laptop's are a scarce resource and can't be spared for an interview.
The really funny part was when I started asking the HR person about the teams I was interviewing with. I asked some really basic questions and she had no clue how to answer them. Just easy stuff like "Why does this team have more than the other team?" and "How long has this team been together, how long have they worked on this project?". She had no idea how to answer.
They didn't even make me a offer. But what is really funny is every few months I get a request to come interview again for a totally unrelated position.
Some things about this article bother me. It starts by describing what is objectively a problem ascribable to Amazon itself ( letting on-call rotations reach the 3 week mark is terrible ), and then descends to pure appeal to emotion.
Here's what I mean: the only thing that seemed an actual problem, to judge from the article, is that the on-call rotations became once every three weeks. Perhaps the length of the on-call, or the number of on-call people at the same time is another problem Amazon could address in this case.
On-call in general (24/7 availability for some period of time), is not exclusively an Amazon thing. I'm surprised the writer tried to portray it so.
After that, the author stops giving reasons. For example, the decision to go on a business trip after 4 weeks of their daughter being born seems to have been their own, not Amazon's. " I imagine he could have turned that down, but I was insistent that he go so". She did not explain if they felt coerced by Amazon and how.
Same thing goes for the hotel they cancelled a day early.
How did that happen and why? The writer did not thing this was important enough somehow, but I think it is.
Normally I'd call this sloppiness, but considering the author is a professional and this had to get proof-read, it may just be the author is being a bit disingenuous as well.
Did we read the same article? They went on a weekend trip in the summer, had to cancel their hotel and come back a day early, and the guy still got an earful from his manager the next day about how he isn't delivering. I don't see how this is "pure appeal to emotion".
Also, a 15-minute max window for responding to pagers? Fucking hilarious. If these people were doctors getting called to the ER, I would understand. But this is a fucking online retail business! Furthermore, what the fuck happened to the concept of having backups on call so that if one person can't respond (i.e. they are driving), someone else can? This is a business decision by Amazon, and also isn't "pure appeal to emotion".
(same as orm), just my settings don't allow me to reply.
"Did we read the same article? They went on a weekend trip in the summer, had to cancel their hotel and come back a day early, and the guy still got an earful from his manager the next day about how he isn't delivering. I don't see how this is "pure appeal to emotion"."
She says: A happended. The next day B happened. She puts the two sentences together to imply cause and effect. But she she does not explicitly say 'A caused B', and I believe this is for a reason. All she does is to suggest it. To me, as an engineer, the fact she only suggests it is one of those things about the writing that bothers me. She did not explain what had been happening leading up to this nor the reasons the management gave.
Note, I worked for Amazon for a couple of years. While I have to admit my team was really on the lucky side in terms of on-call while I was there. I am familiar with some of these policies. The 15 minute rule is just the time it takes for you to say 'I'm awake and I'm looking at the ticket'. You don't have to solve it. They use this deadline as a way to see if they should reach-out to a secondary on-call, as a backup.
> On-call in general (24/7 availability for some period of time), is not exclusively an Amazon thing. I'm surprised the writer tried to portray it so.
I don't think the writer did.
The problem I see being described is not so much being on call, as instead being called. Lots. Because there seems to be no on-duty staff who are capable of doing the work.
In this article, "on call" really means "on duty during non-work hours... a lot".
It's a tactic to avoid paying on-duty people. Just make all employees work 24/7!
Why didn't I think of that. That's a great business model.
Agreed. The other glaring hole I see in this article is the absence of any push back or assertion of boundaries. Was this guy's manager even aware of the sacrifices this guy was making? Did he ever sit down and say, "24/7 rotation every three weeks is exhausting and more than I signed up for; we need to hire." Did he tell HR he was reaching a breaking point? We are adults with demanding jobs; we have to assert boundaries. If we get a call asking us to come in, it is very reasonable to say, "I'm away on vacation with my family, can someone else cover this?" If the answer is no, then you make your choice, but your manager at least knows that sacrifice that is taking place. If you can't work with your manager to make life livable, talk to his manager or talk to HR. There is no excuse for toiling away silently and playing the martyr. The very fact that this guy's wife wrote the article instead of himself gives the impression that he doesn't know how to self-advocate.
"Needed therapy" is such a click-baity deliberate inflation of drama before we even get to the story. That alone caused me to look for a counter-argument, from someone who worked there, not their wife, or colleague, but an actual employee.
(warning, no drama, no neglected infants, no angry wives)
And btw, the claim that Amazon "encourages employees to tear apart one another's ideas" is also dramatic. Actually, I've seen the opposite happen where nobody says anything "nasty" about anyone's ideas for fear of deviating from the "positive work culture". Bad ideas can go a long way before they're spotted if you're not willing to speak up.
Tearing shreds sounds to me like an opportunity to cut through the bullshit. It doesn't need to be personal, the mission is bigger than the individual. Ego should be put aside. Maybe I should try working at Amazon.
A manager at my former workplace from years ago, let's call it News Corp, said to the technical team of 30 in a meeting once "the reason we are here [at the company] is to make each other look good". I was a pretty cheeky dev back then, but that day I didn't say anything. In my mind I thought "no, we're here to make the online products and services look good".
You can invest time worrying about how things look or how things are, not both. Too much positivity or eggshell-treading or dancing around the truth and high-fiving when discussing or evaluating ideas can be an invisible poison for any business.
I'd like to understand more about the systems that require pager duty?
I don't work for AMZN, but as I understand it the internal infrastructure is highly service-ified, so (ideally) pager-duty activities are hopefully somewhat contained. And, I would imagine those issues relates to less-mature systems in play.
Which leads me to my impression: it's 2015, AMZN has been around for 20 years, and their warehouses weren't just propped up yesterday. If pager duty involves looking into more mature systems interacting with others, then those activities will only get worse over time. It becomes maintenance nightmare land, something you can only do by churning through people.
AMZN has some hard engineering problems to solve, but I wouldn't label it a top-notch engineering organization.
An educated professional's capacity to endure pain, and inability to recognize implicit humiliation (i.e. your family is way less important than this job) as measured in this article, are about 6 years.
For six years he put up with this abuse of power over him. He could have walked out after six months but he chose not to. How can Amazon be faulted for the employee's indecision.
He's financially benefited by those 6 years of being an absent father. The financial gains are very concrete and measurable, and comforting. The same can't be said of the intangible - like playing with your infant child, and caring for them - can't put a value on them but that's a huge loss.
I remember a time when Sunday shopping was a topic being debated in Canada. (At the time there was a law mandating that most stores be closed on Sundays.)
Now stores are open 7 days a week and sometimes 24 hours a day.
Whenever I see a store post that it's open 24hrs/day all I can think about is what that does to the employees: because for most people, overnight shifts destroy your life.
I wonder if we wouldn't better off as a society having regular business hours and getting back that one day a week off.
It's our fault as workers, really. Because we lack solidarity, workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can work longer hours for less.
For the wife (and mum) who wrote this letter, I can feel her pain. Especially relocating to place where emotional support is low and life is lonely. We relocated to Germany from Australia, and it was a few hard years at the start. There are many reasons why we relocated, and some of those are similar to the author. We were lucky that we managed to see through the hard years and found our way. Now we are enjoying life in Germany. It sounds like the family is also on their way as well.
For me, this article is not necessary about Amazon workplace practice. However, it certainly did not help at all.
You write your state assembly person, state senator, federal congressperson, and federal senators and state that you want labor law reform similar to the European Working Time Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive for exempt employees. It enough people applied pressure to elected officials, this could be a reality.
Boilerplate to use to write your senators and congresspersons:
In light of the recent allegations of employee mistreatment at Amazon.com, maybe it is time to redefine what an exempt employee is under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
I would like to propose changes similar to the European Working Time Directive if 1993.
Here is the link with more details:
I wish there a way to sift this to the top. Awesome reply with boilerplate for the lazy (amongst which I count myself). Me, I just don't put up with the crap anymore, either by not taking the job in the first place, or leaving if I discover it's a sweatshop. But not everyone is as well off as I, and this kind of crap needs to change for all.
Employee unions have traditionally resolved such employer abuses like lowering the hourly wage by unpaid overtime. Thanks to this many western countries have contracts or even laws which forbid unpaid or mandatory overtime.
The thing is ... at companies that I was the bane of because of my lack of technological ability past lithic ... every one made fum of me working 10 hours at work and two or three at home at night and the weekends.
So now ... Amazon has created a culture where everyone feels like the guy that no one wants to work with ... they have found a way to make that exploitable among some pretty smart people.
And everyone looks around and lifts their shoulders and shows their palms because the US work experience sucks.
If you ever wonder why companies prefer younger employees this story explains a lot. After you've been taken advantage of enough you just don't accept it anymore.
Unions seem like a good solution on the surface, but it seems like many unions quickly degrade into organizations focused more on self-preservation and expansion than looking after the interests and well-being of their members.
It seems like it also gets ugly, with unions not only striking for better pay and benefits, but also protesting and demeaning individuals and companies who aren't using union labor or putting in policies that work must be done by union workers that could easily be done by others at a much cheaper rate or with much less effort. ("Let's get a union electrician in here to run this extension cord")
I'd be more in favor of unions if it were done completely on a volunteer and donation basis, instead of with mandatory dues, paid leadership and policies that demonize those who choose not to join the union or people that choose not to use union labor.
An alternate solution would be to put laws in place that stops employers from preventing their employees from voicing concerns about policies and treatment publicly. (while still allowing employers to protect intellectual property rights) I'd argue that all these stories about the treatment of former Amazon employees will have more of an effect on Amazon, its hiring efforts and its policies than having a union threatening a strike would.
Somewhat off topic perhaps, but what exactly does therapy do? Has anyone here had therapy? If so, can they explain how talking to a psychologist cures a medical condition? Is it significantly different from talking to a priest or a faith healer?
It's basically just talking with a trained listener.
It works because the vast majority of peoples' behavior is unconscious; we operate based on habits and assumptions that never really get tested. Unconscious behavior, by definition, is outside of conscious awareness. It also tends to be self-reinforcing in feedback loops: for example, if you assume everyone's dishonest and corrupt, you'll hide your motives and behave in a way that an honest person would assume to be dishonesty, and so all the honest people would refuse to associate with you, and so everyone around you would be dishonest and corrupt.
Therapy doesn't actually "cure" anything. You cure yourself. What a therapist does is serve as a guide, providing an outside perspective that will challenge your unconscious assumptions when they're leading to problems for you. You can get the same effect by having a close friend or confidante, or even by having social contact with a wide variety of people that are different from yourself. But social relationships don't usually work that way; usually we gravitate toward people like ourselves, so if your beliefs are dysfunctional, you'll gravitate toward other people who are dysfunctional in similar ways (cf Amazon), and then that behavior becomes normalized for you. A therapist, being paid for their time, has an incentive to stick with you even when you're being annoying, and their training exposes them to a wide variety of behaviors.
Imagine something like a phobia. A real, strong, phobia, diagnosed by a real doctor. This phobia affects the day to day life of (let's call her) Ann. Let's pick elevators for the phobia.
When someone mentions an elevator Ann's heart rate increases, her palms get a bit sweaty, she starts breathing deeper. This is what most people call a "fight or flight" response. Her body is flooded with adrenaline. Her reaction is stronger - worse - when she sees an elevator even if she knows she does not have to ride that elevator. And now, at work where she has to walk past a bank of elevators to get to the stairwell she has to take 20 minutes to get herself past those elevators.
Her friends know she's "scared of elevators", but don't know the strength of the fear. They might say things like "but your fear is irrational! Elavators are very safe." Or "you should feel the fear and do it anyway!" (Quoting the title of a quite good book, but ignoring the content of that book.). And Ann probably says this kind of thing to herself. "Why am I being so ridiculous?"
If this was a rare thing (like flying is for most people) Ann could just get a prescription for diazapam, lorezapam, etc.[1]. But Ann needs to pass these elevators everyday.
Ann decides to just get over it. She decides to ride an elevator. As she walks towards it her breathing changes, her palms get sweaty, and her brain is arguing "you're going to get stuck!" "You're being stupid, just do it". She pushes the button and waits for the ding. Her stress pevels build. The door opens, and she gets in. The door closes with that odd elevator lurch. Again, her stress rises. She's visibly distressed. The elevator rides two floors then the door opens. Ann rushes out. But she doesn't feel a sense of victory. She feels a sense of crushing defeat, of shame even. And, as she gets further away from the elevator her body rewards her with endorphins. So what's actually hapened is tha. She has reinforced her fear, she has made it stronger.
Ann decides to go to a therapist. She carefully picks a qualified registered therapist and avoids the cranks and frauds. She picks someone who practices "cognitive behaviour therapy".
At Ann's first meeting she says "I know I'm being silly, but I really want to get over this ridiculous fear".
Her therapist (let's call her Beth) gently disagrees. "No, it's not ridiculous. It obviously causes you a lot of distress." - this is part of just establishing a relationship, but it's also important that Ann is finding her own answers. Beth continues "what are you scared of when I say the word 'elevator'?"
Ann says that she is scared the doors will get stuck and that the lift will be stuck between floors and she'll be stuck in there.
Now Beth starts the therapy. In a safe environment, away from any elevators, Ann is asked to list her "hot thought" ("The lift will be stuck between floors and I'll be trapped!", how strongly she believes this (1 to 5 or 1 to 10 or percents) Ann says very strongly, 10 out of 10, what the emotion caused by the hot thought is ("fear") and again how strong it is, and finally Ann is asked about her evidence for believing this. ("I read about the guy who got trapped in a lift for hours and I keep seeing stories like that") Beth at no point contradicts Ann.
Beth then asks Ann to sit with these feelings for a few moments. (Less than 3 minutes!) then Beth asks Ann to think of alternative evidence. Beth doesn't supply alternative evidence. So, Ann might start with a weak challenge to her thinking. She might say "Even though I keep seeing lots of articles probably hundreds of people get elevators everyday without problems." She's then asked to re-rate how strongly she believes her hot thought and how strongly she feels her fear. This is an iterative process! Those numbers are still probably very high.
Beth then begins a process of controlled desensitisation. Ann is in control of this - Ann will never have to do something she doesn't want to do. Ann is shown pictures of elevators. She's shown a video clip of the outside of an elevator. She's shown a first-person perspective of someone riding the elevator. She's taken to a building that has elevators. She's asked to call an elevator but not ride it, just watch from the outside the doors opening and closing. She calls an elevator and touches the doors. She calls an elevator and gets in and out while Beth keeps the door open. Eventually she calls an elevator, and gets on it with Beth, and travels a few floors. Every time she does one of these things she has to provide her hot thought, her strength of feeling, and her evidence and her alternative evidence. Beth might start challenging Ann's evidence "Do you think it's only hundreds of people? Do you think it might be very many thousands of people get an elevator each day with no problems?" "Do you think you seek out these stories of people being trapped? Why do you think they are reported?"
After about eight hours of work Ann will be able to call an elevator, get in it, and ride it for several floors (going up and down). She might not like it, but her fear will be under her control.
We know that for most people like Ann the CBT will be effective for at least two years, often longer. For some people it's a cure.
Mental health diagnoses tend to be clumpy - "depression" probably isn't one illness, but a cluster of different illnesses that affect people in different ways. Meds have varying efffectiveness, sometimes for genetic reasons. For some people meds alone are a treatment. For some peopel CBT alone is effective. Some people need both. A few people get little to no benefit from the different emds they try and don't have much luck with CBT and they go on to try stronger meds or mindfulness, or even things like ECT.
There are some interesting Cochrane reviews of meds and CBT. There are some interesting NICE advisories about different emthods of providing CBT or different meds.
We know that for some people talking therapies are as effective as meds.
> Is it significantly different from talking to a priest or a faith healer?
* Faith healers are priests aren't trained in the myriad forms of double blind tested, peer reviewed techniques that can be used to help manage or reduce stress and emotional pain.
* Therapists don't just listen. They talk. They make suggestions - ranging from everything from common sense things that may have more weight because they are coming from a medical professional, to recommending aggressive routines and techniques (meditation, diet change, medication, group therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, changes in routine, sleep patterns) that require the active participation of the patient and, over time, are shown, in double blind, peer reviewed studies, to have positive impacts. You aren't just paying some asshole to listen to you.
* A therapist, with years of training, is often able to easily identify stressors of which you are unaware, and separate out stressors that are present in the environment (your shitty, shitty job) vs. the result of old emotional trauma (e.g. horrible parenting) vs. personality disorders (borderline personality, OCD) vs. mental illness (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder) and can figure out a plan tailored to your needs. This may involve a combination of different types of therapy (there are many, and many types of 'talk' therapy actually are vastly different when viewed from the inside), in some instances, medication, and in most instances, figuring out how to make changes in your life to reduce stressors.
A therapist isn't just a black hole into whom you throw your problems. A therapist is a medical expert who has deep knowledge of personality and mental disorders, knowledge of pro-active methods of combating both, and acts as a medically informed, objective 'life coach.'
I mean, damn, what does a physical trainer do if not just talk to you? Why not go to a priest or faith healer to get your calves real swole? What does a financial advisor do if not just talk to you? Why not go to a priest or a faith healer to manage your 401k?
The ignorance displayed at this:
> If so, can they explain how talking to a psychologist cures a medical condition?
Is just sort of flabbergasting. Not all the reasons you go to a therapist are for medical conditions; many therapists are MDs; therapy doesn't just consist of talking to someone; like any other field, it has tons of study and many experts, people who know better than you do, and quite often it helps to talk to an expert.
If that comes off as harsh - I apologize - especially if you are someone who is on the fence about therapy. I sincerely suspect, however, you are not, and, instead, just assaulting the idea that therapy is even remotely a worthwhile pursuit. It is.
Well, lawstudent2, I think you read more into my question than I intended. I really was, and still am, not sure what therapy is, and what makes it different from talking to someone else whose job it is to listen to your complaints and make you feel better, such as a priest.
You may complain about ignorance, but most people don't visit a therapist, I don't know why you assume everyone should be familiar with it. And then, what kind of therapy is based on science and what isn't? People refer to the treatment from their psychoanalyst, their regression therapist, their hypnotherapist, their chiropractor as therapy too, and these are no more science based than a priest.
When you scrape your knee as a kid and your mother or father put a band-aid on it, you've just had a medical condition treated by a person with zero qualifications.
Stories about how horrible Amazon is to work for have been coming out for years. This isn't some brand new bandwagon - it just happened that 2 such stories were posted on HN within 2 or so days.
So... you think he has an underlying mental health condition, and he's somehow confusing that with the ill effects of said pretty-bloody-bad on-call schedule?
Out of hours support sucks, but yes, the reality is that you get paged, and you have to deal with things within SLA. It's hard, it's wearing, but one week out of every four is hardly intense.
I was on call for five years. It nearly broke me - but this article is just whining. Why take such a role if it's such a problem? It sounds more like his wife bashing him every time he had to do OOO work is what broke him.
> I was on call for five years. It nearly broke me - but this article is just whining
You admit you worked a job for five years that "nearly broke you". You do understand that life is not supposed to be about how much punishment you can endure in exchange for money, right? There are ways to pay your bills that don't involve inducing physical and mental health issues?
If your calls were often at 4am and you had to work a normal schedule, it certainly does no good. Also, you are saying that nearly broke you, as if it's a badge of pride or something good...
I did on-call for a sleep medicine company. My calls were specifically during sleep hours (when the equipment is in use is when it has problems). The calls were rarely short, and I had no direct link to the equipment to run my own tests - it was always trying to troubleshoot via a usually non-techinical enduser. It was a great night if you received zero calls. I have my on-call battle-scars.
So this being said, I agree with the GP - on-call sucks, but one week in four is not that bad. One week in five and it's fairly breezy. One week in three or less and it's pretty bad - you basically stop having an external life altogether. Like the GP, I also thought the article was a bit whiny. Yes, there were some truths in it, but whines like "omg, there is crunch time" make the author sound pretty self-entitled. Another whine was "not working for the same boss that hired him"... after six years in the company. Who could take such a complaint seriously? One of the more valid problems listed is the shifting of priorities every two weeks. That stuff is a killer - to morale, to progress, to development, to pretty much everything.
That's the thing. For the types who do ooo work, it is a badge of pride - and I dare say if anything this is what she made him go to therapy over - I've had the conversation - "your job is ruining our fucking lives!" - "I enjoy it. It's hard but rewarding" - "you're getting your head checked".
From experience, getting 5-8 pages a night every night during 12am - 6am gets very old very quickly; even if it is once every 4 weeks. Even more so when you're also expected to front work at 8:30am regardless of the night before.
The OP's described situation sounds like it is hideously under staffed / resourced.
But it doesn't have to be that way; I have friends who worked at Sun (back in the day obviously) where they had approx 1 in 5 week rota, and always two on call at once (one primary and one secondary). And that with a typical 2-3 pages out of hours. A night and day difference.
On occasion, yes. I've done OOO both of trading desks and ecommerce operations, very high pressure - and with the added bonus that you're having to answer the phone to angry people while working on a technical fix.
It's called support hell for a reason - but what this guy's wife describes isn't extraordinary. It sounds like most mission critical support roles.
So you might go to an interview where the manager says there's pager duty now and again, but it's not too intense. You get on the job, and it's a whole lot more intense than expected. You can't leave because you've just turned down a bunch of other offers and moved towns. You adjust to delivering maybe 25% more work hours than you thought. The company might do better hiring a colleague for you, but they don't, so you lose out on free time while all the benefits of your increased production goes to shareholders.
There's no recourse for this, and management knows it. They can hire people and make them work harder than they've been told, as long as it's within the range where a sensible number of people won't be looking for other jobs. At the same time, you have great reputation (well maybe that's changing) so there's a queue of fools applying to get in.