I see a lot of comments on the Times regarding unions. We take a lot of things like weekends for granted, and many of these tech companies seem to treat them as a flexible inconvenience.
I wonder if a hundred years from now we will look on the taxes to our mental health today as similarly as we imagine the truly backbreaking labor of the 19th century.
The level of stress, and the toll it takes on mental health that we experience today is very low compared to a time when productivity and income were 20x lower.
Our lives have changed, and we are immensely richer than we were 100 or even 50 years ago. People have more mobility, options, and opportunity than ever before in human history. One can argue that certain policies or priorities have affected our lives for the better or worse, but we should not try to compare the relatively minor difficulties we face with those of our forebearers, who left us in a life of luxury.
This 'feels' accurate, but I don't know how worthwhile it is to say 'well it was shittier back then so...'. People commit suicide, relationships are ruined and diseases appear due to the kind of stressors described in the Amazon exposés. They're worthy of being considered today, in context, not compared to British coal workers in the past or whatever.
> The level of stress, and the toll it takes on mental health that we experience today is very low compared to a time when productivity and income were 20x lower.
How could you possibly know this. Stress is completely subjective, and so is its effect on mental health. Lots of animals in the wild have a much more supposedly stressful life but curl up and die in captivity where everything is provided for. I would say the experience that we have with work is similar subjectively regardless of modern convenience. Especially workers working in Amazon warehouses on their feet 10-11 hours a day and at times with no air conditioning.
It's not just mental health. Working 55-hour weeks (a number many HN users would laugh at) poses a 33% increase in stroke risk and 13% increase of coronary heart disease over "standard" hours: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/researchers-link-lo...
We're not just giving up a little time to prove our commitment, we're giving our life. Because our employers will fire us if we don't work long hours, citing a lack of passion or commitment. Just try interviewing for most tech jobs saying up front that you don't want to go over 40 hours. The best part? We punish anyone who doesn't harm themselves in the same way, when we could all be working together to insist on better conditions.
Why wait a hundred years? If we have any 60+ year olds on HN that have worked in tech all their life (I can recall of at least one person like this chiming in on discussions in the past) -- then they can probably comment on what sort of toll this takes on your life in the longer term.
I'd sooner quit a shitty job than stay in it, and hope the union makes it better for me. Much faster turnaround when I take matters into my own hand.
If this were the sort of industry where I couldn't be working again with higher pay within the week, then maybe I'd consider sticking around for organized action..
Of course it would. It'd solve it before you even got into the position, by mandating that you put in your 40 hours and then left to enjoy the weekend, see your family, etc.
And before anyone says "but I want to be paid on merit not seniority hur hur," remember, it's your union. You want your union to fight for merit-based pay and not seniority-based pay? Fine, go for it. Unions are democratic, so you shouldn't have too much trouble persuading others to vote for your ideas, as long as they're good ones.
Why would I put up with waiting for collective action to work, if I can improve my lot in life by simply changing companies? I'm not going to stick around at the company just to help out my coworkers. I feel zero loyalty to them.
In that case, on behalf of your coworkers, I encourage your plan of leaving.
For the rest of us, though, quitting often doesn't help. Shitty workplaces are commonplace. Jointly pushing back (which doesn't require a union) can create a place that you don't want to leave, one where you can have more confidence that it will stay good even as executives come and go.
I've worked at a big internet company where the culture was very toxic and not a good place to work, let alone be a normal human being. Pushy, rude and underhanded people were plentiful and were willing to throw you so far under the bus at any given moment that you would never find your way back out.
This became evident to me when I went on my lunch break after working there for about 4 months. Each employee was given 1 hour for lunch. I spent ~15 minutes walking to the local burrito place, grabbed a burrito which took about 10 minutes and then walked back. I was gone roughly 45 minutes.
The next day I was called into my managers office because someone didn't like the amount of time that I spent on my lunch break. Lucky for me I had my receipt and logged my work time so I showed him how much precious company time I spent galavanting to the burrito place.
I said something that I definitely should have. "Maybe the person that reported me should have been doing work instead of worrying about my lunch break. If this company can't treat its employees like humans, I don't plan on working here much longer"
I got written up for insubordination.
I was pissed.
I went back to my desk and typed up my 2 week notice.
How much do you want to bet that "someone" was actually your boss, but they didn't have enough guts to say it themselves? That sounds like a terrible place to work, good on you for leaving.
It's odd how similar actions can have drastically different effects. At one particularly bad job (my only bad job?) fresh out of college I had a boss who took a special interest in me and hounded me non-stop. Earnestly trying to address his concerns never seemed to improve the situation...what finally did it was when, after months of prodding, I completely lost my cool and snapped back: "This is bullshit, Larry!"
A pretty similar act of insubordination with drastically different results. My situation improved after that for the remainder of my time in the group.
I quit on the spot twice when a company was dickish.
Once I had a friend, previous co-worker, that would visit. He'd come into my office and we'd play games (this was a game company). This had happened about once every month or 2 for a year or so. One time I had to go to the restroom. I came back and he was gone. The new boss had escorted him out of the office. I quit on the spot. Saw that boss at a trade show years later. He apologized.
Another time a boss at a company that was flex and who and never missed a deadline decided it doesn't going to be flex anymore for the next project. I was late one day 45 minutes and he got in my face. I brought up that I'd been an hour and a half early the previous day. He didn't care. Claimed if I worked at "The Gap" I'd have been fired. It was like "this isn't the Gap, I'm not an hourly employee". Arguments escalated, I quit.
Apparently he then laid now the law for the remaining employees with strict hours and strict lunch hours and that you were not to leave the building outside those hours and threatening to doc people's pay if they were late. Of course he probably didn't realized that's probably illegal, at least in the USA. If you dock salaries employees by hours worked they become non-exempt meaning by not letting them choose their hours they are effectively hourly employees that have to be paid by the hour and paid overtime. At least in the USA. Of course IANAL but that's my reading of the law.
I'm not really happy with the way I handled things and it's a life long work in progress to not get heated but I am proud that I didn't take shit and moved on from those situations when I did.
To be honest, at this point in time if you are a good software engineer you really have no need to put up with toxic bullshit at work. I left a job back in January. The type of startup that likes to prey on youthful ignorance. The kind of place that will repeatedly remind you that you are exempt from overtime but shove added unrelated duties and obligations and make you use a time clock. When I was faced with my capitulate or quit situation I didn't hesitate to quit and tell them just how shitty they treat folks. I had a new job that afternoon.
Don't be afraid to stick up for yourself. This is a golden age for developers. Learn your worth and don't ask, demand it. To do anything less is doing yourself a great disservice.
First boss doesn't seem that bad, actually. Made a mistake, obviously, but he was new and maybe just getting his footing, and having an unaccompanied outsider inside the office is frowned upon by virtually all companies.
The second manager sounds like a particularly unique combination of dickish and clueless.
Obviously everyone has a different experience, but in my experience one would expect either a heads up and/or a debriefing afterwards. Having disappearing coworkers is no good for morale.
> First boss doesn't seem that bad, actually. Made a mistake, obviously, but he was new and maybe just getting his footing, and having an unaccompanied outsider inside the office is frowned upon by virtually all companies.
He could have stayed with the outsider ("escorted" them) until the employee came back from the restroom. That's what I would do if I found a random person in my work building who had a visitor's badge and claimed to be there escorted by an employee.
Most people spend too much time putting up with BS or even rationalizing that it isn't BS they are putting up with (a lot of people at Amazon are doing this right now.)
Work on your temper if you want.
But if you can be fired on the spot, you can quit on the spot.
And you should. Every engineer should have their terms, and if the terms are violated, quit.
If you join a company that is flex-- changing it to not flex is changing the terms of employement!
Companies change your manager all the time, but how are you supposed to evaluate a company work environment if you can't count on the manager you interviewed being your manager when you get hired... but they think nothing of it because they think you're just a replaceable cog.
Allow them some flexibility, but don't give into this idea that it's a foregone conclusion that you have no say in your work environment.
Quitting on the spot sends a message. But that doesn't matter- they will rationalize. They aren't interested in learnign- and they won't learn from one person leaving.
In 2014 I worked for a company where the whole team quit. From Summer to fall they built a team who built a product. By february all of them had quit or been fired, except for one programmer (and me who had just been hired.)
Did the company learn from this? no.
We built a new team, built a new product, and by february of the next year we had all quit.
They are now on their third team.
Nothings changed .
Management complains about how hard it is to find good employees though.
They're terrible managers, and they just can't figure it out. Because its inconceivable to them.
Well, they pay less money when people leave, and one of their approaches to "solve" the "problem" of people leaving is to get increasingly junior and inexperienced people.
The team now is made up mostly of people whose programming experience is a 6 week boot camp designed to take non programmers and teach them how to program... led by two people who seem to be also-rans who never learned anything after the java boom of the 1990s. Continuos integration? Why would we need that?
They aren't a startup- they are a subdivision of a much larger company, and that's the source of the problem- that larger company has no technical capability, or care, and the management is... incompetent, to say the least.
I once worked for a startup that did this - pretty much fired a lot of the competent engineers, or they quit. A lot of engineers complained about the ungodly hours many had to put in for unrealistic deadlines that were pushed down by sales.
Supposedly the executives heard about the complaints that their best engineers were ready to walk out, and promised to change the way things were run - I got word recently that they were still continuing the same overpromising, which led to unsurprising unstable backend & frontend issues of various degrees. One product manager described it to me as setting everyone up for failure.
I'm increasingly convinced that it is the sign of bad leadership, and people with no business being in management or an executive position.
Depending on their existing revenue sources, the size of the dev teams compared to the whole company, and money in the bank, they might be able to do this a few times before they are completely swamped in technical debt to the point of being unable to achieve anything.
I've done the same, heated in the moment. Basically our two most senior devs quit, so a large burden shifted onto me, and I was suddenly the most tenured dev on our team, with knowledge of systems no one else had and could not even easily get since the others (and others before) had quit. But curiously they promoted the new guy instead of me. Ok fine... I told my boss, an arrogant VP at the company, that I should be paid x amount for my increased role and importance to the product. He got back to me 2 weeks later (took his time with this), and said sorry. Quit on the spot. They had to completely overhaul their roadmap and soon after that team folded, got absorbed into another, the VP got fired, and I got a sweet new gig. The execs were too thick headed and full of themselves to see that my quitting would cost them exponentially more money than a relatively modest salary increase based on my increased role. Not a single regret.
I've never thought "I left that job too early." I have often thought I left too late.
One job in particular I should have called their bullshit was when the CEO had one (in a long line of) hissy fit and said he was quitting in a month's time. I was trying to keep the company together, but what I -- the senior developer and the sole maintainer of the company's one revenue-generating product -- should have done was send out an email saying "I am taking a leave of absence and will reporting back to work in one time, after the CEO has left. The new CEO is welcome to contact me about an earlier return time."
Because that probably might have actually gotten the CEO out, instead of him running the company into the ground for slow-motion over the next 8 years. (I had a significant ownership stake.) Oh, he stuck around after threatening to quit. It was his only management technique besides yelling.
the fact that they chose to decline your request shows that many execs are so used to people putting up with BS... I bet this exec team doesn't make the same mistake again but many will, cause very rarely do SDE ask for a raise.
Even then it's after they have put up with lots of BS and are used to status quo that they rarely ever quit.
The fact is that those things (small, stupid disrespectful moments) are the kind of triggers for quitting or to start looking other stuff.
When I go back, the things that most angered me about managers or companies hasn't been "big stuff" (crunching time, low pay, etc...), but those kind of "stupid serious conversations" (not liking the amount of time spend for lunch, that's just "behold! I need to MANAGE because I don't have anything better to do!" of the worst kind)
Even in good jobs, those things infuriate you in a way that may make you resign just on the spot... And the current situation in tech it's not like you're afraid of not finding something else...
PD: Part of the manager's work is to say sometimes "Oh! Don't worry about it, I'll talk to him/her and take good care of that" and then do NOTHING.
From my perspective the job of a manager is 4 fold:
1) Manage schedules.
2) Set expectations for performing well and be motivational (optional in my case but appreciated).
3) Prevent corporate politics and bullshit from getting in the way and keep the team in the loop about potential bullshit that is bound to come our way.
4) Manage or help manage hiring/firing process and promotion process.
A manager should act as a background process that steps up only if things are very obviously wrong or you directly ask for help related to the above. If they are in the foreground without it being required than they are creating the political bullshit that results in team members becoming weary and quitting.
In my experience that's been provided through other existing departments and the manager simply ensures you know how to request access to what's already there, but in a smaller shop or a more centralized team definitely.
As a manager, one of my highest goals is to get people to be usefully insubordinate. So many people, thanks to controlling bosses or color-inside-the-lines education, will just do whatever they think powerful people want. But I think we all do our best work when we're thinking for ourselves about how to best serve our users and treat our colleagues.
Good for you! I hope you keep being "insubordinate" wherever you go.
This is just an observation, but a recurring theme in casual conversations with friends in tech is that the quality of work/life balance as an employee (as opposed to a founder) is eroding fast.
One factor that I think accelerates this is that companies that are established and clearly not startups anymore (companies with lots of employees, huge market cap, and revenue, whether they've IPO'd or not) increasingly consider themselves "startups", which often leads to them justifying these toxic work cultures, insane hours, and massive churn.
By refusing to grow up and mature as a company, and admit that this is happening, the owners of the company can have it both ways: you work for a startup when they're talking about passion, commitment, and hours, but you work for an established business when they want to turn the corporatist screws on their employees.
Okay, these articles are getting really ridiculous. I just finished a Summer internship at Amazon. While it's true that there's more pressure on employees than other places I've worked, it's really not that bad. It definitely doesn't feel cutthroat, and an 80-85 hour work week is definitely not normal! The vast majority (I'd say >70%, and I think that's conservative) of people work 35-45, depending on what needs to get done that particular week - which is completely normal!
There are some teams where it's normal to work longer hours - mostly in AWS. Usually it's the case that a few people on the team have very high expectations for themselves, and that sort of forces everyone else to meet those same standards. I think that's actually not a bad thing - some people just love to work, and they end up producing a lot of really high quality software. But if you don't feel the same way, you can just transfer to a different team! I haven't heard of a manager asking someone to put in extra hours except when there are extenuating circumstances.
Now, don't get me wrong, as an employee you definitely get the impression that Amazon doesn't care that much about you. It's not really a fun place to work or anything like that. But some of these articles make it sound like everyone who works for Amazon is begin taken advantage of, and that simply isn't true.
Sorry, your internship is not representative. They are trying got trick you into working there. You were treated special in a number of ways. Further, AWS is isolated to some extend from the abusive nature of the company by being a separate division.
A lot of what you say is right out of the amazon weltanshaung-- its cult has seeped in to some extent.
You're giving us rationalizations for the abusive nature of the work environment. "high expectations of themselves" == code for piling drudgery on people because you won't allow them to create a more efficient process.
He downvoters: I know HN teaches you that silencing people you disagree with is good, but try making a counter argument.
For the record, I had some contact with the internship program and it was treated VERY differently than regular recruiting. It literally is designed to trick the interns into coming aboard... because Amazon knows kids irhgt out of college are going to be easier to manipulate than people who have been treated right elsewhere.
But then, scientologists try to silence critics too... no surprise that the amazon cult would as well.
Without backing up his claims, it isn't a very useful comment. Insisting that this person's being tricked into a cult, without any details - that's the kind of stuff we don't need on HN.
In another comment, he says he had worked for Amazon. Adding such a line and explaining why the intern was being tricked into a cult would be useful and wouldn't have been downvoted.
Also, complaining about downvotes is silly. I downvote and flag a fair amount. No one is owed an explanation. I know that we might _want_ one (I feel like that when I get -x points on a comment), but it only increases noise.
Comparing HN to Scientology is stupid. I sorta feel that HN maintains whatever quality it has by being ruthless on downvoting. From personal experience, I should definitely be downvoted more, as it makes me rethink commetns and not write as much shit. Not that I have much to say, but I have found that being downvoted makes me more cautious, and I'll edit or delete or simply not post on HN, whereas on other sites, I don't care. It's better for borderline comments to get shot down and have false positives than allowing more junk on the site.
From my experience, AWS is one of the more egregious offenders when it comes to overworking workers.
The joke, when I was there, was that if you work in Kindle you don't have oncall, but you'll put in 80 hours a week anyway. If you work in AWS, you'll be able to do 9 to 5, but you'll be putting in 80 hours with oncall anyway.
From my experience as well, Amazon treats their interns as they treat their regular employees. You don't do oncall, but interns definitely get wrapped up in working way more than 40 hours, depending on the team. When I quit, my team had an intern that was pulling the same hours that I was. What you have to understand is these interns are straight out of college, where they do 80 hour weeks (and PAY for the experience!), and many are a bit 'starstruck' to be working for a brand-name tech company. They put up with shit that they shouldn't.
> He downvoters: I know HN teaches you that silencing people you disagree with is good, but try making a counter argument.
The above quotation is the reason I downvoted you. Stop worrying about karma, stop complaining about it, and just let conversations flow naturally. If other people think your post is neglected, they'll vote it back up or say so. Your post hasn't even been up for an hour, so relax.
I'm a former intern from AWS (6 month non-tech internship). Now I work in a completely different part of the company full time.
My experience is exactly like what 'onaplane' wrote. Internship was great & very rewarding from a career/working on cool stuff perspective. What I saw was that people who worked long did it because they wanted to (I work(ed) long sometimes because I wanted to!). 40-50 was the norm for AWS & it's roughly the same on the retail side. Are there bad teams at Amazon? Absolutely. Are there awesome ones? Yep!
"A lot of what you say is right out of the amazon weltanshaung-- its cult has seeped in to some extent."
Could you explain what you mean by that? It sounds like you're suggesting that he's part of an anti-Amazon cult, which I'm having trouble making sense of.
In the sense that the poster is perpetuating that there is no good at Amazon at all. That everything is awful and that no one could possible like/want to work there.
I disagree entirely. His point wasn't that onaplane was saying good things when only bad things ever happen. His point was that onaplane was caught up in a cult dynamic.
If you're only reading him as saying "Amazon is 100% bad", you're missing the point. Cults that are 100% bad don't work; they quickly fall apart. The cult dynamic is only stable when it provides a fair dose of good to go along with the abuse and control.
Just a small counterpoint - I interned at a large investment bank and while absolutely they treat you special and everything's very slick and polished, they made no effort to hide or shelter us from long working hours. People doing the research stuff (the ones who take limos from canary wharf at 11pm) were expected to work them hours (they even exempted them from some events) and everyone was open about their hours.
What I'm trying to say is I find it hard to believe the Amazon make-interns-feel-good show (which almost certainly does exist) can hide the massive difference in working hours discussed.
Great comment. You sound a lot like I did when I interned at another big Seattle-area company in 2002. Print this off and look at it again every year for the next 13 years. Reflect on it, and annotate the parts you agree and disagree with each year. You'll be amazed how much your perspective changes over the next decade.
And the way bad reasoning happens is by assuming an anecdotal outlier disproves a trend.
Amazon as sweatshop isn't even news (I've been ignoring their recruiters for years for this very reason). Why anyone would even attempt to deny that, I really don't know.
The only difference, now, is folks in the mainstream are talking about it.
That's a straw man. He's not criticizing the intern for saying that he had a nice summer. His objection is to the intern assuming that three months in a cushy program at the beginning of his career qualifies him to judge other people's stories and the work of professional journalists.
I just feel bad for amazon people I meet, the 2 year cliff and high pressure oncall simply isn't a thing at the other tech companies. At least for me and ive worked at a few of them (plural of anicdote isn't data but still) Life seems strictly worse at amazon.
His account seems much better than what I experienced. I still think he has swallowed too much koolaide-- and this is why Amazon focuses on the young kids they can make an impression on.
I've worked at Amazon and you are absolutely right. The implied "get it done" pressure, basically just socially awkward managers who have no self-value themselves, pushing the new people to work ridiculous hours. Not mentioning hours though, but basically getting unexperienced youth to waste away their lives at their jobs. It's sad.. it's definitely a mental and manipulative tactic. It's really cancerous because these exact kind of mentally defective people who spurry to get things done, usually last-licks from Microsoft, become managers. Then they apply that silly pressure to everyone under them, and elegance fades away. Literally horrible code, with little polymorphism, less elegant frameworks, etc. Just a side affect of "get it done." Anyhow, Amazon isn't rosy. It's a dumping ground, and yeah, the FLP process where people get culled is just a side affect of the value of work-life balance, human empathy there. I would never work at Amazon again.
I totally agree. I can see why he would blame a lot of this on himself, but I think it's a mistake. A good manager would have been keeping an eye on him, helping him set boundaries, reducing schedule pressure, etc. If this guy were the only one to have a problem at Amazon that would be one thing, but the sheer number of stories points to deep problems with culture and management.
> high pressure oncall simply isn't a thing at the other tech companies. At least for me and ive worked at a few of them
I think you've been pretty lucky. I've never had a job in IT where there wasn't high pressure oncall.
But... I work in ops. I suppose that might be where the difference lies. I don't know anyone that works on the Ops site of IT that hasn't had to deal with on cal responsibilities.
My experience at Amazon was straight up abusive. It is a hostile work environment and it should not be tolerated.
If you have any self respect, do not go to work there. The only way abusive companies can learn is when their abuse is discovered and they have trouble hiring good employees.
The apologists and the rationalizers and the Amazon PR machine are out in full force.
this is not surprising, because the core methodology of Amazon's abuse is its cult nature.
Amazon is very much like a cult. The stories I read about scientology remind me much of my time at Amazon.
They lionize Bezos because they want to pretend he's like steve jobs (these same propagandists are why most of you think steve jobs was an asshole, by the way)
Reality is, he's a master manipulator, a poor business man, and terrible at technology and leadership.
But he did create a cult. He's more like charles manson.
So expect the cultists to continue to be out in force.
While I'm not suggesting that he's not successful in many ways, he's also been (and still is) quite bad at these two things.
On the technology front, the terribleness that immediately comes to mind are the Fire Phone, Prime Instant Video's UI, Amazon's UI in general, their godawful search, and so on.
On the leadership front... well... there are all these accusations of an awful workplace culture stemming from the top man.
It appears self-evident that he's at least an adequate technology leader. He's leading a company that is the undisputed (current) leader in cloud computing and running an extremely fast growing and profitable technology business there. IMO, that put his well into the top 0.1% of technology leaders, but even if you don't agree with that, if results mean anything, I think you can agree that he's not terrible at it.
The Amazon UI might not be to your taste or beautiful, but there's no question that it's efficient at enabling customers to find and buy their retail items at a rapid clip. IMO, Prime Pantry's search is pretty decent; the selection over which they're searching is poor, but the search itself seems decent.
When it was my own company, I loved the excitement of the hunt. I slept under my desk. We kicked ass. Even though some of us had lives outside of work.
More recently, I worked at at a startup where it was possible to have a family and get stuff done. It was pretty cool!
It seems like, for work-life balance, the US is somewhere between Japan and Switzerland. What would it take to be more like the Swiss?
This story has got to be really hurting Amazon by now. (I don't mean this specific piece, but the exposure of Amazon's terrible cult-like culture and workplace environment as a whole.)
Most engineerish people I know, myself included, had already heard through the grapevine that working at Amazon sucks (friends, friends of friends, posts on forums like this).
But now everybody knows it sucks -- Amazon is a shitty place to work, and any decent software engineer has many better options is now as close to an objective fact as it gets.
This must be hurting their recruiting already, and you have to think it will hurt them for years to come. (And if that is true, then it may eventually change the judgement of whether this style of management "worked".)
Amazon needs to unionize, it's obvious that Bezos and his management don't respect his workers. This sort of company deserves a union. And I think both white collar and blue collar workers there would support such a union.
Yup. I remember hearing about it years ago. You've got to believe that this culture comes from the top. The fact that Bezos is trying to pass the buck and takes no responsibility is telling. Awesome guy, and you have to believe he doesn't want Amazon to be that way, but if he can't take some responsibility for the culture he grew, it can only stay the same or get much, much worse as everyone below him will follow his lead and point fingers.
Been reading a lot of Amazon articles the past few weeks. I'll be joining AWS next month as an SA. I met the hiring manager during the interview loop, and he seems like a cool guy. Funny thing is when I told my family and friends that I'll be joining AWS they all emailed me the NYT expose.
Well I do hope it's not as bad as it's portrayed. I do want to see my son grow up (he is turning 2 years old).
May I ask why you are planning to join Amazon? It's reputation for being a bad employer is well-established and known in the tech community.
If you're skilled enough to get through an Amazon interview loop, you could also get a job at a company which actually respects its employees (Facebook, Google, even Microsoft).
I love the AWS platform, I find the entire thing very elegant. I wanted to move away from software development and get into more high level stuff (hence the SA role), and I'd rather join a company where am passionate about their products.
I have friends working in AWS, and so far none of them have been complaining about work life balance, so am assuming that it's different from the retail side.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadI wonder if a hundred years from now we will look on the taxes to our mental health today as similarly as we imagine the truly backbreaking labor of the 19th century.
Our lives have changed, and we are immensely richer than we were 100 or even 50 years ago. People have more mobility, options, and opportunity than ever before in human history. One can argue that certain policies or priorities have affected our lives for the better or worse, but we should not try to compare the relatively minor difficulties we face with those of our forebearers, who left us in a life of luxury.
How could you possibly know this. Stress is completely subjective, and so is its effect on mental health. Lots of animals in the wild have a much more supposedly stressful life but curl up and die in captivity where everything is provided for. I would say the experience that we have with work is similar subjectively regardless of modern convenience. Especially workers working in Amazon warehouses on their feet 10-11 hours a day and at times with no air conditioning.
We're not just giving up a little time to prove our commitment, we're giving our life. Because our employers will fire us if we don't work long hours, citing a lack of passion or commitment. Just try interviewing for most tech jobs saying up front that you don't want to go over 40 hours. The best part? We punish anyone who doesn't harm themselves in the same way, when we could all be working together to insist on better conditions.
I'd sooner quit a shitty job than stay in it, and hope the union makes it better for me. Much faster turnaround when I take matters into my own hand.
If this were the sort of industry where I couldn't be working again with higher pay within the week, then maybe I'd consider sticking around for organized action..
And before anyone says "but I want to be paid on merit not seniority hur hur," remember, it's your union. You want your union to fight for merit-based pay and not seniority-based pay? Fine, go for it. Unions are democratic, so you shouldn't have too much trouble persuading others to vote for your ideas, as long as they're good ones.
For the rest of us, though, quitting often doesn't help. Shitty workplaces are commonplace. Jointly pushing back (which doesn't require a union) can create a place that you don't want to leave, one where you can have more confidence that it will stay good even as executives come and go.
This became evident to me when I went on my lunch break after working there for about 4 months. Each employee was given 1 hour for lunch. I spent ~15 minutes walking to the local burrito place, grabbed a burrito which took about 10 minutes and then walked back. I was gone roughly 45 minutes.
The next day I was called into my managers office because someone didn't like the amount of time that I spent on my lunch break. Lucky for me I had my receipt and logged my work time so I showed him how much precious company time I spent galavanting to the burrito place.
I said something that I definitely should have. "Maybe the person that reported me should have been doing work instead of worrying about my lunch break. If this company can't treat its employees like humans, I don't plan on working here much longer"
I got written up for insubordination.
I was pissed.
I went back to my desk and typed up my 2 week notice.
Good riddance.
In fact, we need something like Glassdoor but where bad reviews don't magically disappear.
Within 1 week of me leaving my boss was promoted!
Not because he was good at his job, but because he was a bad manager. He was promoted to a position that didn't require him to have a team under him.
A pretty similar act of insubordination with drastically different results. My situation improved after that for the remainder of my time in the group.
I quit on the spot twice when a company was dickish.
Once I had a friend, previous co-worker, that would visit. He'd come into my office and we'd play games (this was a game company). This had happened about once every month or 2 for a year or so. One time I had to go to the restroom. I came back and he was gone. The new boss had escorted him out of the office. I quit on the spot. Saw that boss at a trade show years later. He apologized.
Another time a boss at a company that was flex and who and never missed a deadline decided it doesn't going to be flex anymore for the next project. I was late one day 45 minutes and he got in my face. I brought up that I'd been an hour and a half early the previous day. He didn't care. Claimed if I worked at "The Gap" I'd have been fired. It was like "this isn't the Gap, I'm not an hourly employee". Arguments escalated, I quit.
Apparently he then laid now the law for the remaining employees with strict hours and strict lunch hours and that you were not to leave the building outside those hours and threatening to doc people's pay if they were late. Of course he probably didn't realized that's probably illegal, at least in the USA. If you dock salaries employees by hours worked they become non-exempt meaning by not letting them choose their hours they are effectively hourly employees that have to be paid by the hour and paid overtime. At least in the USA. Of course IANAL but that's my reading of the law.
I'm not really happy with the way I handled things and it's a life long work in progress to not get heated but I am proud that I didn't take shit and moved on from those situations when I did.
Don't be afraid to stick up for yourself. This is a golden age for developers. Learn your worth and don't ask, demand it. To do anything less is doing yourself a great disservice.
The second manager sounds like a particularly unique combination of dickish and clueless.
He could have stayed with the outsider ("escorted" them) until the employee came back from the restroom. That's what I would do if I found a random person in my work building who had a visitor's badge and claimed to be there escorted by an employee.
Most people spend too much time putting up with BS or even rationalizing that it isn't BS they are putting up with (a lot of people at Amazon are doing this right now.)
Work on your temper if you want.
But if you can be fired on the spot, you can quit on the spot.
And you should. Every engineer should have their terms, and if the terms are violated, quit.
If you join a company that is flex-- changing it to not flex is changing the terms of employement!
Companies change your manager all the time, but how are you supposed to evaluate a company work environment if you can't count on the manager you interviewed being your manager when you get hired... but they think nothing of it because they think you're just a replaceable cog.
Allow them some flexibility, but don't give into this idea that it's a foregone conclusion that you have no say in your work environment.
Quitting on the spot sends a message. But that doesn't matter- they will rationalize. They aren't interested in learnign- and they won't learn from one person leaving.
Did the company learn from this? no.
We built a new team, built a new product, and by february of the next year we had all quit.
They are now on their third team.
Nothings changed .
Management complains about how hard it is to find good employees though.
They're terrible managers, and they just can't figure it out. Because its inconceivable to them.
The team now is made up mostly of people whose programming experience is a 6 week boot camp designed to take non programmers and teach them how to program... led by two people who seem to be also-rans who never learned anything after the java boom of the 1990s. Continuos integration? Why would we need that?
They aren't a startup- they are a subdivision of a much larger company, and that's the source of the problem- that larger company has no technical capability, or care, and the management is... incompetent, to say the least.
Supposedly the executives heard about the complaints that their best engineers were ready to walk out, and promised to change the way things were run - I got word recently that they were still continuing the same overpromising, which led to unsurprising unstable backend & frontend issues of various degrees. One product manager described it to me as setting everyone up for failure.
I'm increasingly convinced that it is the sign of bad leadership, and people with no business being in management or an executive position.
One job in particular I should have called their bullshit was when the CEO had one (in a long line of) hissy fit and said he was quitting in a month's time. I was trying to keep the company together, but what I -- the senior developer and the sole maintainer of the company's one revenue-generating product -- should have done was send out an email saying "I am taking a leave of absence and will reporting back to work in one time, after the CEO has left. The new CEO is welcome to contact me about an earlier return time."
Because that probably might have actually gotten the CEO out, instead of him running the company into the ground for slow-motion over the next 8 years. (I had a significant ownership stake.) Oh, he stuck around after threatening to quit. It was his only management technique besides yelling.
Yep. Me too. Thanks for distilling something I have often thought.
Even then it's after they have put up with lots of BS and are used to status quo that they rarely ever quit.
When I go back, the things that most angered me about managers or companies hasn't been "big stuff" (crunching time, low pay, etc...), but those kind of "stupid serious conversations" (not liking the amount of time spend for lunch, that's just "behold! I need to MANAGE because I don't have anything better to do!" of the worst kind) Even in good jobs, those things infuriate you in a way that may make you resign just on the spot... And the current situation in tech it's not like you're afraid of not finding something else...
PD: Part of the manager's work is to say sometimes "Oh! Don't worry about it, I'll talk to him/her and take good care of that" and then do NOTHING.
They don't respect you and they won't respect you when review time comes around or when raises and bonuses are handed out.
Thus it's not really blowing them out of proportion to react negatively to them. They're honesty leaking out.
1) Manage schedules.
2) Set expectations for performing well and be motivational (optional in my case but appreciated).
3) Prevent corporate politics and bullshit from getting in the way and keep the team in the loop about potential bullshit that is bound to come our way.
4) Manage or help manage hiring/firing process and promotion process.
A manager should act as a background process that steps up only if things are very obviously wrong or you directly ask for help related to the above. If they are in the foreground without it being required than they are creating the political bullshit that results in team members becoming weary and quitting.
As a manager, one of my highest goals is to get people to be usefully insubordinate. So many people, thanks to controlling bosses or color-inside-the-lines education, will just do whatever they think powerful people want. But I think we all do our best work when we're thinking for ourselves about how to best serve our users and treat our colleagues.
Good for you! I hope you keep being "insubordinate" wherever you go.
One factor that I think accelerates this is that companies that are established and clearly not startups anymore (companies with lots of employees, huge market cap, and revenue, whether they've IPO'd or not) increasingly consider themselves "startups", which often leads to them justifying these toxic work cultures, insane hours, and massive churn.
By refusing to grow up and mature as a company, and admit that this is happening, the owners of the company can have it both ways: you work for a startup when they're talking about passion, commitment, and hours, but you work for an established business when they want to turn the corporatist screws on their employees.
There are some teams where it's normal to work longer hours - mostly in AWS. Usually it's the case that a few people on the team have very high expectations for themselves, and that sort of forces everyone else to meet those same standards. I think that's actually not a bad thing - some people just love to work, and they end up producing a lot of really high quality software. But if you don't feel the same way, you can just transfer to a different team! I haven't heard of a manager asking someone to put in extra hours except when there are extenuating circumstances.
Now, don't get me wrong, as an employee you definitely get the impression that Amazon doesn't care that much about you. It's not really a fun place to work or anything like that. But some of these articles make it sound like everyone who works for Amazon is begin taken advantage of, and that simply isn't true.
A lot of what you say is right out of the amazon weltanshaung-- its cult has seeped in to some extent.
You're giving us rationalizations for the abusive nature of the work environment. "high expectations of themselves" == code for piling drudgery on people because you won't allow them to create a more efficient process.
He downvoters: I know HN teaches you that silencing people you disagree with is good, but try making a counter argument.
For the record, I had some contact with the internship program and it was treated VERY differently than regular recruiting. It literally is designed to trick the interns into coming aboard... because Amazon knows kids irhgt out of college are going to be easier to manipulate than people who have been treated right elsewhere.
But then, scientologists try to silence critics too... no surprise that the amazon cult would as well.
In another comment, he says he had worked for Amazon. Adding such a line and explaining why the intern was being tricked into a cult would be useful and wouldn't have been downvoted.
Also, complaining about downvotes is silly. I downvote and flag a fair amount. No one is owed an explanation. I know that we might _want_ one (I feel like that when I get -x points on a comment), but it only increases noise.
Comparing HN to Scientology is stupid. I sorta feel that HN maintains whatever quality it has by being ruthless on downvoting. From personal experience, I should definitely be downvoted more, as it makes me rethink commetns and not write as much shit. Not that I have much to say, but I have found that being downvoted makes me more cautious, and I'll edit or delete or simply not post on HN, whereas on other sites, I don't care. It's better for borderline comments to get shot down and have false positives than allowing more junk on the site.
The joke, when I was there, was that if you work in Kindle you don't have oncall, but you'll put in 80 hours a week anyway. If you work in AWS, you'll be able to do 9 to 5, but you'll be putting in 80 hours with oncall anyway.
From my experience as well, Amazon treats their interns as they treat their regular employees. You don't do oncall, but interns definitely get wrapped up in working way more than 40 hours, depending on the team. When I quit, my team had an intern that was pulling the same hours that I was. What you have to understand is these interns are straight out of college, where they do 80 hour weeks (and PAY for the experience!), and many are a bit 'starstruck' to be working for a brand-name tech company. They put up with shit that they shouldn't.
> He downvoters: I know HN teaches you that silencing people you disagree with is good, but try making a counter argument.
The above quotation is the reason I downvoted you. Stop worrying about karma, stop complaining about it, and just let conversations flow naturally. If other people think your post is neglected, they'll vote it back up or say so. Your post hasn't even been up for an hour, so relax.
My experience is exactly like what 'onaplane' wrote. Internship was great & very rewarding from a career/working on cool stuff perspective. What I saw was that people who worked long did it because they wanted to (I work(ed) long sometimes because I wanted to!). 40-50 was the norm for AWS & it's roughly the same on the retail side. Are there bad teams at Amazon? Absolutely. Are there awesome ones? Yep!
"A lot of what you say is right out of the amazon weltanshaung-- its cult has seeped in to some extent."
You're doing the exact same thing in reverse.
Could you explain what you mean by that? It sounds like you're suggesting that he's part of an anti-Amazon cult, which I'm having trouble making sense of.
If you're only reading him as saying "Amazon is 100% bad", you're missing the point. Cults that are 100% bad don't work; they quickly fall apart. The cult dynamic is only stable when it provides a fair dose of good to go along with the abuse and control.
What I'm trying to say is I find it hard to believe the Amazon make-interns-feel-good show (which almost certainly does exist) can hide the massive difference in working hours discussed.
And it's the articles that are ridiculous?
The way groupthink happens is when the minority is afraid to express their thoughts.
Amazon as sweatshop isn't even news (I've been ignoring their recruiters for years for this very reason). Why anyone would even attempt to deny that, I really don't know.
The only difference, now, is folks in the mainstream are talking about it.
I just feel bad for amazon people I meet, the 2 year cliff and high pressure oncall simply isn't a thing at the other tech companies. At least for me and ive worked at a few of them (plural of anicdote isn't data but still) Life seems strictly worse at amazon.
seems like a matter of fact version..
I think you've been pretty lucky. I've never had a job in IT where there wasn't high pressure oncall.
But... I work in ops. I suppose that might be where the difference lies. I don't know anyone that works on the Ops site of IT that hasn't had to deal with on cal responsibilities.
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...
If you have any self respect, do not go to work there. The only way abusive companies can learn is when their abuse is discovered and they have trouble hiring good employees.
The apologists and the rationalizers and the Amazon PR machine are out in full force.
this is not surprising, because the core methodology of Amazon's abuse is its cult nature.
Amazon is very much like a cult. The stories I read about scientology remind me much of my time at Amazon.
They lionize Bezos because they want to pretend he's like steve jobs (these same propagandists are why most of you think steve jobs was an asshole, by the way)
Reality is, he's a master manipulator, a poor business man, and terrible at technology and leadership.
But he did create a cult. He's more like charles manson.
So expect the cultists to continue to be out in force.
Your argument really breaks down here. Reality contradicts these assertions.
While I'm not suggesting that he's not successful in many ways, he's also been (and still is) quite bad at these two things.
On the technology front, the terribleness that immediately comes to mind are the Fire Phone, Prime Instant Video's UI, Amazon's UI in general, their godawful search, and so on.
On the leadership front... well... there are all these accusations of an awful workplace culture stemming from the top man.
The Amazon UI might not be to your taste or beautiful, but there's no question that it's efficient at enabling customers to find and buy their retail items at a rapid clip. IMO, Prime Pantry's search is pretty decent; the selection over which they're searching is poor, but the search itself seems decent.
More recently, I worked at at a startup where it was possible to have a family and get stuff done. It was pretty cool!
It seems like, for work-life balance, the US is somewhere between Japan and Switzerland. What would it take to be more like the Swiss?
Most engineerish people I know, myself included, had already heard through the grapevine that working at Amazon sucks (friends, friends of friends, posts on forums like this).
But now everybody knows it sucks -- Amazon is a shitty place to work, and any decent software engineer has many better options is now as close to an objective fact as it gets.
This must be hurting their recruiting already, and you have to think it will hurt them for years to come. (And if that is true, then it may eventually change the judgement of whether this style of management "worked".)
Well I do hope it's not as bad as it's portrayed. I do want to see my son grow up (he is turning 2 years old).
If you're skilled enough to get through an Amazon interview loop, you could also get a job at a company which actually respects its employees (Facebook, Google, even Microsoft).
I have friends working in AWS, and so far none of them have been complaining about work life balance, so am assuming that it's different from the retail side.