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.
- Does he keep asking for the impossible?
- Does he hang around or go home at 5pm?
- Does he at least do what he is able to do for the team, or does he just leave it all for the team?
Difference between competent and incompetent management can often be little things that help handle emotional stress for the worker.