" I left a negative feedback about my manager Uwais Khan in the daily “Amazon Connect” survey. Amazon Connect team sent to me the report showing how my manager can calculate my answer. At our 1:1 meeting, Khan prohibited me to leave feedback in the system. Since then oppression started.
Khan asked me to work on weekends. Then he asked HR how to prevent me from immigration benefits (not informing me about that)."
"My 3 yo daughter has a development delay and I need to bring her to therapy. For that, I asked Khan for work from home once a week like everybody else in our team. Khan prohibited me to work from home. Moreover, he asked me to come to office at 7 am and sit there alone. All the other team members came to office at 11 am and worked from home without restrictions. And their children were not disabled."
It sounds bad, but I'd reserve judgement until I heard the other side. There's always the other side, and I for one am tired of the recent rushes to judgement we see in the media recently.
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
The guy may have a case somewhere in there, but this kind of hyperbole isn't doing it any favors.
Stripping out the fluff, the concrete concerns seem to be:
- Denied permission to transfer
- Denied permission to WFH
- Placed on PIP and eventually fired
The author's hypothesis is "manager is evil and this is all retaliation", but this is not easily distinguished from "author did not perform well", and the only evidence of performance we have is one "nice" performance review.
- Left negative feedback for manager -> Prohibited to leave feedback by manager.
- Required to work on weekends.
- Denied some form of immigration benefits behind his back.
- Told that his wife having a job has anything whatsoever with him being able to transfer.
- The above being a lie.
- Required to show up 4 hours before everyone else.
- Punished for using sick days.
I don't think any of the concrete concerns I listed above are subject to the authors interpretation. Short of the author lying they appear to be valid complaints.
Washington is an "at will" employment state. You can be treated poorly and fired for any reason unless it is for a protected class(race, sex etc). Amazon and his manager could have fired him because they put a bunch of names on a dart board and his was the one hit.
I do think the treatment was incredibly unfair and unjust. Unfortunately, in "at will" employment states in the US, this appears to be perfectly legal behavior. As shameful as that may be.
Most US states are at will; and people still win lawsuits against their employers quite often for just run of the mill toxic behavior, and not just for things as cut and dry as bigotry (although, being a visa holder, he may have a case for, especially since it was a part of these discussions - national origin and immigration status are protected classes).
> Harassment in the workplace is a form of employment discrimination. Unlawful harassment is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and as such is illegal. Unfortunately harassment can come in many forms, both verbal and physical and can be based on any of the following forms of discrimination:
> Race, Color, Religion, Sex, Sexual orientation, Age, Disability (mental or physical), Retaliation
See above about "Retaliation"
Is there something I'm missing in there? Because that again appears to only protect one from a protected class. It does not mean if your boss is being mean or insulting to you for things outside of those protected classes. But again, am I missing something in there that is different? Do you have an example of a civil or criminal case won by a plaintiff for "toxic behavior"?
I'd be very interested in that, as that would mean the advice I've recieved from two diffent legal counsels I've contracted for advice. If you are correct, it appears I may have a civil claim against those attorneys.
I mean one one thing your missing (but probably also the person you're replying to) is that in the actual lawsuit he alleges racial discrimination with some credibility.
But also disability discrimination with regards to his kid.
The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
Any large company is going to have abusive individuals in it. I think the real issue this story illustrates is that when people are brought over on work visas they have no leverage with their employer.
As an American citizen software engineer my boss knows that if I'm unhappy I will just leave. But the boss of someone on a work visa knows they can do pretty much whatever they want to them and the employee is just stuck.
So we need to change the work visa system so those employees aren't in such a vulnerable position. How exactly? I don't know..
Allow H1B holders to incorporate their own companies in the US, so that they could work on their own thing in parallel. It's often better for talented persons to live in e.g. Canada close to US borders working for US corps (Vancouver, Toronto) and run multiple LLCs in the US, than to work for those same corps in the US and enjoy slave lifestyle.
But isn't that why companies hire employees on visas to begin with? I would venture to guess for every 1 truly pioneering mind that is working in the US on a H1-B visa there are 100 people working on CRUD software at Amazon or Microsoft.
They hire employees on visas to build CRUD apps, because it's a seller's market for employees that can pass <arbitrarily high whiteboard interview standards>, and if you're having trouble filling headcount, there's no reason to exclude 7.2 billion people from your hiring pool.
Depends on the company. Companies like Tata and Infosys (which, until recent changes, had something like 80% of H1B quota), sure. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft do not do this as a matter of policy (which is why they sponsor most of their H1B employees for green card); but individual managers are still aware of the kind of leverage this gives them, and some of them try to use it.
> The problem with this story is that it's more about an abusive boss at Amazon than Amazon.
No, the author lists a whole bunch of names from HR. That's not just an abusive boss, that's an abusive boss protected by HR, which makes it a story about Amazon.
I worked at Amazon and never had any issues like that. In fact, my experience was completely opposite and I had several wonderful bosses, great co-workers, awesome environment and fun things to work on.
I'm certain there are many stories like mine. That doesn't matter at all, as long as there's one case like Oleg's.
I saw a suggestion a while ago that the H1B1 visas should only be granted to the highest paid employees. The idea being that that they would be more likely to be essential to whatever business brought them in, so less likely to be the subject of abuse, and less likely to be abusing the h1b1 program to hire cheaper labor.
It sounds like “brown uncle” syndrome to me. I hear south-east Asian women complain about it all the time, as a male I don’t have to deal with it much, but fits the description.
I hear you. I know this has happened to many other people and they've told me everything that has happened to them. I say - focus your energy on getting a better boss next time.
There are laws against workplace harassment and it needs lawyers to enforce them. In this specific company, complaints of such harassment would go only to dead ears and further lead to retaliation.
If there are enough cases (and I bet there are), it would mean a class action against such practices. Get some lawyer friends and have a few beers with them.
Once again, I hear you.
Addendum: If you wish to put your SDE skills to good use, develop a social shaming browser plugin with anecdotal evidence tying to a person's professional profile, say, LinkedIn. That will ensure that bad managers are automatically flagged when people visit their profile.
As intense these allegations are, someone on the Internet once said that it's best to keep these things offline until investigations/lawsuits are done. Is that true?
Note that this is filed "pro se" (he is acting as his own lawyer), which is universally a bad idea.
Having read that complaint, I think he is extremely likely to have a case (though I am not a lawyer). I think he's extremely unlikely to manage to get results through the court unless he gets a lawyer.
Hmm, it's a really bad strategy to go public including the names when a case is open. The author seems to be weak and needs to work on mental fortitude; that might be reason why he was so mercilessly exploited by his manager, as certain people can spot that from distance.
This kind of retribution is pretty normal from the companies I've worked it, it's clumsy that it ended up in writing here and a bit more vicious than usual with a child involved. Normally it's done offline in private conversations or simply as something that's understood between like minded managers with passing comments.
One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
In California you are not legally allowed to audio record someone in private without their consent. They must know that they are being recorded for it to be used as evidence in court.
This reminded me of a comment I read some years ago.
Here it is:
You seem obsessed with laws, as if they possess value and worth in and of themselves, when really they are a very high latency sidechannel of society and power.
> One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected.
How would he be affected by giving you a well-deserved good performance review? I don't understand.
>One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
I must be dense because I don't understand this. Your manager couldn't find another job, was instead looking to retire, and gave you a bad performance review?
Yep, the tl;dr is that at the time my manager's manager didn't appreciate me being transparent on mistakes our department made with other depts. So in an effort to make me quit, aside from other things, he wrote a review for my direct manager and required him to say it was his review. If he didn't he would be fired.
Pretty normal stuff at a certain level with insecure managers. Not exactly the same, but Steve Jobs wrote about how they relocated him into an empty building at Apple to make him quit. I was relocated too in fact.
The red flags I look for now:
- clearly not as smart as their peers in their own or other depts, they're likely struggling and will act irrationally
- very ambitious, but risk averse
- tells people what their title is whether they asked or not
- been at the company their whole career and just went along with the flow
There's likely some others, but I'm careful around those folks, they're just trouble.
I want to preface this comment with a statement that in no way am I trying to blame the victim here, only to point out what can be learned from this situation.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of Amazon being a shitty place to work at, and I don't see much reason to doubt the story of a vindictive boss doing everything they can to make an employee miserable after learning that the employee submitted bad feedback against them.
The two lessons I can extract from this post for myself are.
1. Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work, especially against a particular person, especially your boss.
It's been covered on HN before how these things are never really anonymous and confidential, and it should be kind of obvious to figure out if you think about it.
2. If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
Call your house representative and two senators in Congress, and write them each a letter about the abuse. Let them know you value your coworkers and that they should be able to enjoy the same labor rights that you do.
I’ve always heard of blacklists but I seriously doubt their existence. Who would trust such a thing? It also sounds illegal as shit so I assume you can’t do this for profit.
It's like when you get MBA - you get a free network with it. Now you are inclined to trust your MBA circle due to shared history. Imagine the same with companies; there is a limited number of spots at the top, most people know each other or heard of each other, share common interests, club memberships etc. They are inclined to trust their own, insiders, or see benefit in it, than some random outsiders, i.e. in-group preference and benevolence. Then when an outsider is "put on a blacklist", i.e. some insider holds a bad opinion of an outsider, the whole group might be affected.
My impression of blacklists is that they're much more systematic and pervasive than that. If you're an individual contributor, I think it'd be really hard to become so infamous that your manager's manager is complaining about you to his peers during a golf game and they remember you.
Also, if you're writing your Representative about some kind of abuse or malfeasance, you could always use and assumed name (and say you're doing so to avoid retaliation).
In order for an industry-wide blacklist to exist, large numbers of people would need to have access to it. This large number of people at many different, competing organisations would have no reason to trust each other to keep a secret.
The existence of such a list, the details of its construction, and the possible Social Justice implications of this would attract so many eyeballs and so much advertising revenue, that it would be hard for any online news publication to resist reporting evidence of it.
Unless those news publications are put on the same list, losing access to latest stuff and their relevance. See what is known about Hollywood, internal Google blacklists, Apple preventing newspapers access to latest gadgets as a retaliation for bad reviews, "gatekeepers" in other "mature" industries etc. Seems like it's a defect in human nature, or a really bad heuristics, emergent with increased organizational size and a buffer shielding an individual bureaucrat from fully comprehending that as a moral choice with serious consequences to somebody else.
We maybe need to consider a change to the order and timing of how rights are granted towards citizenship first, because when you become a citizen in any first world country you get a LOT of benefits, more than we realise, and it is all or nothing.
The problem at present is the west has convoluted and arcane immigration rules (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/award-winning-aussie-bar... for example of westerner in another western country) and two dramatically different buckets - limbo/slave to employer or full, no questions asked rights. There needs to be a less dichotomous, more gradual attainment of citizenship, and a set of intermediary steps, where the potential citizen has some of the rights of a citizen, but not all, and they increase over time towards full citizenship.
>If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
This is why it is critical for people with citizenship to advocate for their coworkers with visas, both within the context of their workplace and outside. Pressure your congressional representatives to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. Have a conversation with HR about visa-blind recruitment and retention policies.
Re: Number 2: This is a common pattern in all big American companies. Hire an H1B, make the employee an indentured slave forever. H1B employées born in India and China have to wait 10+ years for a green card to break free from indentured servitude. While you can switch jobs on an H1B, it's risky and if it screws up, your queue position gets reset.
Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
> Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
I have some experience with how LMIA is not perfect, but I was excited when the administration was openly considering copying it ~18 months ago, because it's hard to imagine anything between H1B and LMIA which is worse than H1B (whether from the perspective of a protectionist, a progressive, or a common liberal).
LMIA seems like a balance. In LMIA, the employer is made to test the local labour market before applying for a visa, rather than an LCA in which the USCIS trusts the employer's word.
The LCA process also forces the employer to test the labor market first. It's all theater, and based on 20 year-old business practices (you have to publish your job ad in a major newspaper and some other places, of which one option is to have it be read out loud by a local radio station!), but it's not like you can skip through that process. How does LMIA compare here?
However an lmia supported work permit it's the employee's and not employer's, meaning that if you get fired you can still stay in the country and find another job. You do need to apply for the Visa again for the next job but being in Canada already makes it much simpler. Essentially you aren't at your employer mercy.
Also if you work for one year you usually already have enough points for PR, once you apply for a pr you gain the right for a BOWP visa, which is essentially an open work permit that allows you to work for any employer until a final decision in your PR is made.
IANAL but went through all of above and am now a pr
Slight exception in Quebec though. Quebec has its own immigration rules & policies. Quebec do not follow rest of Canada's Express Entry or provincial nomination. In regards to obtaining a skilled work permit in Quebec, its a longer process with Federal + Provincial involvement. ie: LMIA (Federal) + CAQ (Quebec).
In Quebec there are no BOWP. So if you lost your job, you have to move out of Quebec province and get another LMIA work permit. Getting a permanent residency while working and residing in Quebec is not easy as Quebec's immigration system and policies are archaic and downright broken with more importance given to French language than any other employable skills. Recently 18,000 Quebec applications were downright rejected by Quebec in the name of bringing in a new skill based immigration system.
I would suggest anyone looking to move to Quebec in a skilled work permit or applying for residency while residing in Quebec to refrain from it as it will take at least 4 years (CSQ - 2 years + Federal - 2 years ) instead of 6 months in comparison with the rest of Canada. This applies to foreign students who come to study in Quebec too.
I have been through LCA some years back before I called bullshit on H1B and immigrated to Canada for good. For LCA, the advertisement was done on a local newspaper which no one reads and the job was posted on the company pantry notice board with a broad confusing salary range 65K - 130K. It was also posted on the company's career page where no one could find it easily. The employer that I worked for was a top 10. They were just playing the system to bring in cheap H1B workers on chains.
LMIA on the other hand, has advertisement requirements like LCA and a transition plan as well. They are particularly strict on the transition plan including one of which is assisting the worker for permanent residence !
This is true, I left my previous company because they said I had to wait 1 year to apply for my green card. According to the HR lady this was the policy (there was no policy) and it was always better from an immigration point of view to wait more. Of course this is all bullshit. This was just a dirty strategy to keep people one extra year.
Re #1: I realize this is the safest option for your own self-preservation, if you don't give negative feedback, how do you expect your work environment to change?
The way I see it, if you're in a bad situation at work, you have two options: try to change it, or leave. If you're going to leave anyway, why not at least try to improve your situation first so you give yourself the best chance of success? And that way, the company has the opportunity to remove or remediate a bad manager.
Basically, my reaction to your #1 is that it helps you avoid getting hurt by the worst possible scenario. But personally, I think it's a better strategy to maximize your chance at a good scenario.
Pro-tip: never expect your work environment to change. The chances of a report overcoming the whims of a shitty manager are very, very small especially in the context of a company that tolerates the shitty manager in the first place.
Generally speaking, the best thing to do is to smile, appear to do reasonably decent work, and begin looking elsewhere.
I second this. You'll almost never convince upper management the smooth-talking buddies they promoted could ever possibly be terrible to their employees.
Well, you could. It sometimes works. The problem is when the manager who manages your shitty manager moves away, and you get a new one. Good managers always get promoted or move away, only the terrible ones stay. The shitty manager will start afresh to get onto you.
Trying to change things might be an acceptable strategy in other industries, but I don't think it works in technology because the accepted method of achieving worker/workplace fit is to change jobs. This goes not only for bad management but also for raises (even if you like your current job).
Easiest way to improve your situation in software engineering is to just get a better job and move laterally or up.
You need to understand how your boss takes feedback and tailor your comments accordingly. I’ve had some managers I’ve felt free to give candid feedback to and others who just don’t take feedback well so you find another way to force change.
For that exact reason, cultural changes in the workplace come from the top down, always.
Believing you can change it will virtually never yield any positive results to yourself. Even if you don't get fired, you will be labeled as the one who complains.
If I'm being honest^Wcynical, all you should care about at work is how great people think you are. It helps if you are at least half as good as people think, but it's sadly not a requirement.
> If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
No, you are not.
That's taking the premise way too far. Slaves were owned as property. You are not property of a corporation just because your job is connected to a visa. You don't have slaves rights (almost entirely non-existent human rights, specifically). You chose to immigrate, there is a system involved in that, you knew that ahead of time, you chose to go forward regardless. You did not become a slave in the process, you did not sign on for 'slaves rights' in the process, you did not abdicate your freedom. Your employer may not dispose of your life as it sees fit. You are free to leave and go back to where you came from if you do not like the system, just as you were free to never sign on in the first place. You are not a slave at all in any manner. That's not an argument in favor of the backwards US immigration system, it's an argument that very, very clearly you are not a slave just because your job and visa are bound together. Immigration to N country is not a human right, it's a privilege (which is why I - and a billion other people - can't freely immigrate to Norway tomorrow and begin enjoying the associated perks).
It's not. You're free to leave as an H1B at any time, it's just that you have to leave the country also (or find a new job really fast). It sucks for employees, and it has negative effects on the job market, so there are many good reasons to kill it with fire - but no, it's not indentured servitude, and people who choose this, choose it of their own free will, and can withdraw that decision (and be back to where they were when they made it) at any moment.
Of course it's not literally slavery or indentured servitude, but it does share some common elements that are useful for our analysis. In particular, they both involve voluntary commiting yourself to restrictive labor in exchange for coming to the US.
I've been on H1B. It's not a perfect system, but making 6 digit salaries in Silicon Valley was infinitely better than picking cotton in Mississippi in 1840 where you could be murdered by your boss/owner at a whim.
That's an odd analogy knowing USA went into a bloody civil war to fix that.
You're comparing a broken system with an older and even more broken system that we already fixed and trying to find merit in current broken system by that comparison. Of course it's better to be alive than being squashed by a dinosaur. But how's that relevant?
I partially understand your point, but I don't think "free" is necessarily a better description than "slave".
One is always free in a literal sense to choose between available options (e.g. a slave may choose to escape, an employee to quit). However, ability of a second party to attach consequences to those options (e.g. corporal punishment or death, deportation away from one's family, removal of healthcare from sick loved ones, etc.) amounts to restricting the freedom of the individual.
I don't accept that legal freedom equates to practical freedom, e.g. you have the legal right to quit your job therefore in a practical sense you are completely "free" to quit your job. If your employer can attach extremely negative consequences to quitting, then your freedom has been severely limited.
I also have trouble with arguments that the choice to immigrate was made of free will, therefore all consequences are one's own responsibility. It's not legal nor ethical to allow people to "freely choose" to sign themselves into slavery.
Anyway, this is obviously a contentious and charged issue, but I hope this helps communicate a different perspective.
I've left some scathing feedback in reviews. Frequently spelled out in a way that they could figure out it was me even if it was anonymous. The trick is to not complain about your treatment, but explain why management is taking actions detrimental to the company.
Don't say "boss made me work late and I want to quit". Say "management is overextending the team and it's eroding morale and will likely cause retention issues".
I have a pretty lucky experience with amazon (Sr. SDE at AWS for 3 years) but I completely agree, I’m sure my boss won’t be vindictive if I live a bad connections feedback but I won’t take my chances, also in my previous company I was on a L1 visa which also marries you to the employer, I had bad bosses and great bosses there but I treaded like on thin ice there, trying to stay positive, avoid rocking the boat, as soon as I got my green card and was allowed to switch I moved to AWS. This sounds to me like a bad boss situation and maybe also bad choices situation. In any case I don’t know the details, I hope he sees justice and find happiness, but he’s painting a picture that is totally different than what I experience. It’s a huge company, all I can say it’s nothing like what I experience. Had my doubts, read the NYT article, asked a friend, he swore to me he has no clue where it came from, maybe AWS is much better than retail... but I’m sure anywhere in any big companies you’ll see cases like this. Hope it’s resolved and justice prevails. No one should suffer like this.
>>Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work
Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
The dirty little secret of human relationships is every one wants to be made to feel special, error less and look good. Only thing any kind of feed back, correction or criticism leads to is rivalry/enmity, and it won't end well. The question is not if some thing like that happens, but to what degree.
There are stories going back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, where he refuses to even criticize big mistakes made by generals during the civil war. If that is what some one in the position of Abe Lincoln, in a matter as serious as Civil war did, your code review feedback can wait. Nothing productive ever comes out of these processes.
If you absolutely have to display allegiance to political cartels at work. Wait until a clear leadership superiority is established, Meanwhile use silence and smile as a strategic activity to avoid getting shafted.
There can be no friends at work. In stack ranked systems, with subjective evaluation. You need to follow the Kissinger doctrine. No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Seen too much of this to realize to leave people/systems on their own.
Robert Greene's books: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, and The Laws of Human Nature.
Stealing the Corner office by Brendan Reid
Assorted works of Niccolo Machiavelli and Balatazar Gracian.
It will be hard to impossible to make transition even after reading these books, but at least you can detect and avoid problems at work. Or at best set up a firewall around you.
Lastly expecting goodness from people is wrong. The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
I'm afraid I disagree with your last statement. It is possible that perhaps I've just been so fortunate that all the people I've ever come across are mostly similar in what they want from life. It seems to be the same all over the world: general well being, safety and security of their family and their future.
People disagree on priorities and not everyone's incentives are the same but I've never felt that by default people are bad. I'm no scientist (or sage) and just an average human. So, this is just how I see things and not based on expert scientific inquiry. Make of it what you will.
I'm only suggesting you wear a seat belt when you drive. You seem to be suggesting I'm a sociopath for wearing a seatbelt and not trust fellow car drivers on the road.
You need to understand how department wide politics work. There are fixed budgets when it comes to giving raises, bonuses and RSUs. The person who negotiates and deals better wins. That means lesser for everyone. Note how even without wanting to harm you, they actually have. Then come the second rounds of power play. One way to negotiate is to prove they are better, second way to prove it is you are not. Setting team mates up for failure happens all the time, even without one realizing it. Plenty of other things happen. Actively building a bad case for other people. It might not be overt, but leave a bad CR comment or two, keep doing it actively. Make it a point to drop a bad comment or feedback for the person you might want to harm. Then over a time you tend to build a case against them mentally in the mind of your manager. These tactics are super common. Wrong people get promoted, and right people get shafted all the time.
In almost every company- promotions, raises and RSUs require building a case(like a promotion packet), which is basically a pile of documentation. That can only be done over time, its chiseling away at a rock wanting to make it into a statue. Part of that is also making sure other people's statue isn't as good as yours. As a part of building that documentation, you need your name plastered to important things in a positive way. Appreciation emails, feed backs, positive CR text walls etc. This is why so much ceremony goes in most companies when it comes to rewards and promotions. Basically quotas are fixed, and you manager needs to build a case for you. Building that requires negotiating and dealing with them to build you a better promotion packet. Almost anybody can be made to look good or bad, regardless of their efforts. Given stack ranked systems, somebody always has to take the fall for the person who negotiates better.
These things are not even new. The world of Politics(regardless of the system(Democracy/Monarchy/Republic)) has had this for 1000s of years now.
> The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
Nope, people are not bad. People are neutral, equally capable of good or evil. Just don't assume anyone except your mother loves you unconditionally and you should be fine :)
Lincoln did criticize his generals, eventually removing McClellan from command for timidity. He was careful about how he did that though, and how he interacted with the rest of the general staff. But he proved to have a better grasp of strategy than most of them, which he was able to implement once he found Grant.
You're correct he was reluctant to overtly criticize, but the lesson to take away isn't to just not criticize. It's to be diplomatic and patient when trying to effect change. Being a natural leader, brilliant, and with great strategic intuition also helps :-)
Not every workplace is as sociopathic. And I would rather emulate people who have ethical limits rather then those who seek power regarless of how much they lie or cause harm .
> Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
This rule is creating problems. It actively makes relationships and work itself worst. It creates leads to passive aggressive environment where everyone is insecure and in doubt and problems wont get solved.
> There can be no friends at work.
Same here.
> No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Same here too. I am glad I worked in mutually cooperative environment where people took my interests into account and did not based all their actions on their own interest.
Sure there is. Maintainability in the future, non-obvious edge cases, potential security issues, etc. Either you keep each other accountable for stuff like that or end up with a monster system which you can't realistically work on.
"criticize some one's work on a company wide visible text wall" is a depressing way to look at it. Try "collectively learning about better approaches on a company-wide visible text wall". You'll need to convince people that it's one and not the other.
All your arguments are valid, in ideal scenarios. In an ideal scenario any comment or feedback should be taken in the right spirit and acted upon.
But in these days of stack ranking and subjective evaluations. You giving a lot of feedback can be considered of lack of ability to write good code on the part of that person(after-all if they could write good code, why would it get so much criticism?). Then the next thing that happens- Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack. Your colleague will and right so think you are actively criticizing them to ensure you get promoted over them.
Enmity and rivalry begins from there. Then they could raid your CR wall and do the same to you. Then all kinds of backstabbing and self-promotion activities start.
Before you know it you would have made a few enemies within the team.
> Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack
Then you have a management problem, not a cr problem. Don't miss the forest for the trees... It's on management to communicate that cr is constructive, doesn't contribute to reviews, and isn't a game.
> Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
> There can be no friends at work.
I think that's a bad advice. I'm sad that this is an experience someone can take from a job and that there are jobs where this applies. Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
Not every place is so restrictive and full of backstabbers. And if it is, maybe it's worth discovering that and leaving.
>>Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
This really is the equivalent of marking a giant X on your back and walking in to an arena full of ace snipers.
I have literally seen people being labelled as non-team players and eliminated for arguing against bad technical decisions. In most departments projects are started to gain visibility of high impact work- on which they will later ride to get to rewards and promotions. Disagreeing means telling them they have to eliminate you for their project to happen.
They will get their project eventually. Congratulations, you have now been marked as some that needs to eliminated for them have a good career. And they will deal with you appropriately.
This happens in all people structures. People are the same everywhere, in all times. Don't be in the delusion that some companies are special enough that it won't happen there.
If some one is in a position of power. Any debate, disagreement or criticism is a bad move to make against them.
I've been doing it for over a decade. I've only experienced a bad reaction to criticism twice. Either I'm really lucky or your experience is really bad. Either way, I know I'm not staying in a place where you can't exchange constructive criticism, because alternatives really exist. This sounds like trying to explain an abusive relationship - what you're experiencing is unhealthy, there are better places, unless you're going to go homeless, maybe you should try?
I had a manager that took over from a previous person when I was working remote. There were a few issues, but the one that stands out is they flew me down to London for a week, set me up in a hotel, and had me take taxis back and fourth to the office and expense food etc.
After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated vendor and the difference in cost was between me leaving the office at rush hour and me leaving the office around 9-10pm.
Not only did he reject the taxi expenses, but the hotel, the flights, the food, etc. The guy was obviously a class act in his 50s, rejecting the expenses of a fairly underpaid 25 year old employee living in Scotland.
Super illegal but ultimatly I quit, because life is too short to work for horrible people.
So mission accomplished from his point of view: "This person is weak, let's just add some adversities to their life, they would quit; my cousin can't wait to join us."
Same thing happened to my wife. A newly promoted VP transferred her out of a great position she loved to work on a special project he invented to make department look innovative, under promise of a promotion once complete. Instead as soon as the project was done he hired a new manager into another newly created position above my wife, only supervising her. He proceeded to have the manager take all her responsibilities and make her life hell until she quit. Manager was told she would get a director position for doing it, instead they did the same to her a few months later until she quit too. VP promoted to SVP.
Yeah, it's fun :( Sociopathy seems to be the norm these days.
Anyway, nothing beats that one German bank that told all employees of a branch on Friday that on Monday they are working at a location 80 miles away and are required to be there as usually.
And what happened? My understanding of German labor laws is that, for any reasonably sized German company, there would be a workers council that would have to approve work level changes like this. Did that happen?
Even in the US something like that would trigger labor law protections (generally it would be treated as a constructive layoff, triggering unemployment benefits and any contractually or legally obligated severance benefits), so this story seems more like a fable than something that actually happened. Do you have any more details about this?
EDIT: Europe generally has stronger labor laws than the US, so if something wouldn't pass muster in the US, it almost certainly wouldn't pass muster in the EU.
He might still be taking advantage of and hurting people though, just like there's people like him making life harder for someone with a disabled child and many other "horror stories", the worst of which will never come to light. Please don't get me wrong, I don't blame you at all for not picking that fight, at age 25 in a situation I know nothing about. But that situation is over, other situations aren't, future situations are incoming, be it with that person or others. When someone throws someone else out of the window, I don't shrug just because the victim happened to land on their feet. The other didn't plan for that, they didn't care. I cannot fully get over that.
As an individual, it's great you let it slide, and I think forgiveness is really important mental hygiene, it's something you do for yourself more than for someone else, IMO... but as a member of a society that ideally would be somewhat just and decent, we shouldn't forgive something that hasn't even been repented of and is still ongoing. Disarm, explain, forgive, that'd be my preferred approach. Not fail to disarm, fall on deaf ears, forgive.
Yeah, I am actually upset I didn't take one such person down when I had all cards in my hand, but I still believed in innate "goodness" of all humans; now that person is doing damage at a higher position at one of FANGs; who knows how many people were destroyed on their ascending path? The usual argument about stopping one that would allow another horrible person to rise, so it's futile, has some merit though; I've been shocked multiple times when I helped some desperate person only to observe horrible behavior of that person once their problems went away.
Forgiveness can't be dispensed automatically; it has to be deserved/earned by real actions/intentions. I think because mainstream culture was "meek", it allowed sociopaths to hack it and pervert it, pushing victims to always forgive while laughing at them and making their lives more and more miserable. I think in middle ages required penance was quite brutal by our contemporary soft standards.
Submitting claims monthly is fairly standard, at least in my experience. At HP, they gave us a corporate AMEX card but I was responsible for paying it while I waited for the outsourced^2 HR operations to cut me a check.
My employer issues corporate Visas to any employee expected to incur >$500/year in expenses. Which means most of us have cards, at least in the US. We still have to complete expense reports, but we don’t pay anything out of pocket.
This is how it has always worked for me. When I was more junior and didn't have a corporate card, I had a person who booked all my travel on the company account. At worst, I might have to cover a few incidentals like food or taxis.
Sony Computer Entertainment does this, but then they don't pay back for 6-9 months, forcing your personal credit to be their credit cushion. One of the reasons I quit.
When/where did you work? Corporate cards are normal at SIE, even engineers on my team have them. I don't dispute your experience, just curious.
Edit: As an addition, the expense isn't paid by the employee. Costs over $2000 need justification above your boss, but your immediate boss can approve up to $2000 no issues.
Worked in Santa Monica Studio, and was sent to Tokyo several times. Each trip was in the $8K range, as each trip was for weeks at a time. Their slow payback was killing me.
I have a corporate Amex card, and even though its a "Corporate" card, given to me by my employer, it is in my name and I am legally responsible for it. My company will reimburse me for my expenses if approved by my manager. I have always thought this was a liability and weird, but everybody else at the company (a 500 company) thinks it's normal. So any expenses not approved at the end of the month are my responsibility. Anybody else have similar experiences?
This is the way it should be done. No employee should carry the burden of loading up their own credit or paying for big ticket items up front no matter how trustworthy the company.
Approximately one week a month on-site at client(s) location. So, flights, food, accommodation.
I expected company payment card. If everything turns to shit one month the employee, in this sort of situation, could be left holding a fairly hefty bag.
In my experience, the norm is minor expenses are, well, expensed. Dinner, taxis, whatever. The big ones that require planning, sometimes HR just take care of - i.e. booking your flights and hotel for you. That being said it isn't unheard of for that to be something you "expense" as well. If they fuck you, sue them. They probably won't though.
Side note: if you're in a situation where you're loading up a credit card with business expenses that are later reimbursed, you may consider looking into a credit card that offers rewards like airline miles. It's essentially a "free reward no fee ATM." I always volunteer to grab the company lunch tab for this reason.
Echoing the HP employee, submitting claims monthly for remote work expenses (phone/internet bills, office supplies, travel) is normal. Ive worked as an apps engineer at a couple BigCos with same policies and the process never bothered me, I submit my claims as soon as a trip ends or when I get the bills.
The thing I would press is to get paid fairly, and bi-weekly. I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
> I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
Interesting. I'm Dutch and I've never heard of a permanent job that was not paid monthly. If someone told me they were not paid monthly, I would assume they are a temp with variable hours.
Bi-weekly, or every 2 weeks, is norm in US as far as I know. It's easier for everyone in my opinion, except maybe employers that want to take advantage of their employees.
It's just a cultural convention, nothing more. Monthly seems to be the norm in Europe, bi-weekly in US and Canada. I've done both, and there's no practical difference.
It’s always beneficial to have your money faster. No reason employer should get to hold on to it longer and get interest and liquidity. In the extreme case, at least you’re not working a whole month before finding out employer has no money to pay you. And while you may legally be entitled to it, who knows how long the legal system delivers it to you.
This is standard in every world. Corporate credit cards are usually reserved for senior executives or people who travel/entertain a lot (e.g. sales reps). Cash advances aren't a thing outside of small companies.
Huh? Google made it super easy to get a GCard, you just request it on a web form and it arrived a few days later. It was pretty common for L4 engineers (that's the level below senior) to have them.
I am also a former Google employee. I also had a GCard, and it is exactly as easy to get one as described.
Google is the exception here, IMO. Every other employer I have had has generally required the employee to front the cash for expenses, and used something like Expensify to get reimbursed. There are some exceptions, such as hotels or airfare, which I've booked through corporate booking systems; these only let you see "approved" flights/hotels, and once booked, is charged direct to the company.
It's actually quite unusual to make employees anything except for incidental expenses (like meals) up front. Generally, making employees pay big-ticket expenses (including travel) and seek reimbursement is a legal and accounting nightmare, so it's something that a well-run business tries to avoid. (In some states, it's even illegal to require employees pay for necessary business expenses.)
The exception tends to be law and accounting firms, which issue cards to their employees for business use. The employee "pays" up front using the cards, but the card is connected to the employer's expensing system and the funds are deposited to the employee's account the payday following his submission of the expense report.
My employer wanted us to pay upfront and then claim. I was an Indian h1b. One time, they forced me to relocate to another state even though I didn't want to. "I will snip you" was my ex-manager's words when I refused. My moving expenses was about $3500k. I paid everything from my pocket. When I tried to claim, finance team refused to pay and agreed only after a lot of escalations. I finally got the money after about 1.5 months. This plus many other bad experiences made me literally throw away everything and come back to India.
And corporate credit cards aren't blank checks. Employees will generally have to pay back any spend on their corporate card that is not approved as an expense.
It may prevent the employee from holding the bag if the company goes bust. But some "corporate cards" are issued by banks in a way that makes the cardholder jointly liable.
Definitely need more pay not less to work remotely. Also, biweekly is better than monthly as another here stated. As for expenses, can’t talk much on that but it’s best if you get them paid up fast or if they are fairly typical in terms of the amount each time, ask for a payment up front to cover the bulk and make up the difference later. Employee does not mean you cannot make demands. Make all the demands you want and if they say no then you can say no too. It’s a 2 way street.
Both of those numbers are possible, but much higher than average by my estimation. Glassdoor says average ~$111k for software engineering as a whole[0]. A more realistic expectation for a 'good' compensation package would be ~$80-95k for junior engineer and ~$180-250k for senior. Obviously there are many factors to account for, and both those numbers can vary widely, but the ones you gave are not what one should be expecting outside of a very select few 'elite' companies, and even then they are on the high end.
May I ask (in good faith) how you know what the real "truth" is? I would totally believe Glassdoor is a bit low. Levels.fyi, which I didn't know about but just checked, seems really high. I believe both are based on real data points, but is there any reason to believe either is a better reflection of the actual numbers? (My relatively poorly-informed speculation is that Glassdoor is using old/irrelevant statistical data while levels.fyi is suffering from some pretty extreme selection bias being a comparatively obscure site relying on self-reporting.)
> they do not make up a significant portion of all developers in the US
I'm not sure that's true, but I will admit that most of my friends work at FAANGs (outside the bay area). So let me add that I know at least one senior engineer at a non-FAANG tech company that left a $300k job for a "significant pay bump".
Frankly, no large tech company could survive if it didn't pay competitively with other large tech companies.
I fully agree that pay is less in small, non-tech companies in rural areas, but I would be surprised if such businesses hire the majority of developers. Big tech hires a LOT of engineers.
That is total number of employees worldwide. so lets conservatively take off a third. Also Reasonably only a third of those employees (probably a lot less at amazon) are actually developers. That gives us ~200,000. The Bureau of Labor statics says there are 1,200,000 software developers in the US in 2016.
FAANG does make up a lot more software development jobs than I thought, I would have to say a significant portion. Very interesting.
Microsoft hires junior engineers out of college at ~$80k in Seattle. FAANG might be a bit higher, especially with COL in the Bay Area, but plenty of people get hired by the big companies in that range.
No, this is false. The top paid junior engineers might be paid $150k in base salary PLUS bonuses and stock/other compensation. Same goes for the 300k+ for senior engineers.
Are you actually paying cash? Assuming you're using a credit card, and assuming your company isn't looking to defraud you, using a card with decent cash back makes it a nonissue and "fronting the cash" for expenses is just a way for you to get a kickback from your credit card company for using them as a payment processor for work expenses. (And kind of a net positive relative to if you had a company credit card where the company claims any kickbacks.)
I do not possess a credit card for ideological reasons.
I do have two debit cards, one Visa and one MasterCard, for redundancy.
I see what you are saying and it makes sense. I’m just ideologically opposed to the use of consumer credit for regular / recurring / general living expenses.
If you're ideologically opposed to consumer credit because of the cycles of debt it incurs just pay off your credit card in full every month (which is what I do). No interest will be paid.
Yes. Fronting your expenses and then getting reimbursed after is pretty normal practice. Every employer I've had has done this with the exception of certain major purchases like airfare where the company has just purchased it for me directly, but some employers I had to front large costs like that as well.
A company who values inclusion and diversity should understand that people who are unable to float a monthly expense buffer are very often those same demographics that have been marginalized by those working in the software industry.
Getting credit card points while you know your employer is almost certainly going to reimburse you is a nice benefit, but the industry should definitely seek to improve by making this optional. Especially for prohibitively large large expenses (flights, lodging) default to paying these upfront.
I worked for a similarly horrible person many years ago.
I was doing on call support for a bunch of Linux machines. Literally it was him and me left because the moment I started the other two engineers bailed. One went to work packing salad because it was a better job (big warning!) and the other one had a breakdown.
So didn't get paid properly, argued mileage down to the mile, the clients and him constantly gave me verbal abuse over and over and I ended up working until 10pm some nights with my 9 month pregant wife at home on her own and virtually immobile due to a back problem.
So I get home one night after a tirade of abuse for the day and sent him an email saying "Fuck you I quit". Get a call about an hour later and he's drunk shouting abuse down the phone. This suddenly turns into undying love and care for me after the abuse wasn't working and he realised I couldn't be brow beat into coming back again. Then there's a thud which I assume was him falling off his chair. Never spoke to him again but the company folded about a year later.
So I sit down and I'm about £2000 down then on salary and expenses that were missing. I had £250 in the bank, £400 rent due a week later, wife about to have a baby and an empty fridge. So fuck it. I sold all the stock I still had of the company on ebay (back when you had to take photos and get them developed and scanned and futz with cheques which was hard work), broke even and scraped a first pay cheque at a job just before my credit card melted into a puddle.
It took 10 years to get out of the hole and back to normality. NEVER put up with this for a second. If anyone treats you like this RUIN THEM before they ruin you, your life, your relationships and everyone else they go near. I don't usually advocate this attitude but the damage and destruction that type of person leaves is immense.
Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
... but sometimes your boss really is just an asshole, liar, alcoholic, and/or a sociopath.
Never assume the later off the bat, but never completely discount the possibility either. Because it'll probably happen at least once in an average career.
Point taken, but either way, it's so not my problem. Maybe in the former case I'll refrain from aiming a flamethrower back behind me as I run as fast as possible out of there!
A good boss does not mistreat employees simply because the company asks them to, just like a good engineer does not implement backdoors simply because the company asks them to. If there's no way to do your job ethically, quit. Don't harm others so you can keep collecting a paycheck.
So the difference doesn't really matter. You have a bad boss; take care of yourself first and don't let them push you around.
> Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
So? That's the boss's problem to deal with. You owe the company absolutely nothing beyond your contracted hours in exchange for your contracted salary.
You owe common decency to other human beings trying to act decently.
If your boss happens to be a cog in a broken machine, treating them like it's their fault isn't fair to them or you.
Of course, you can always quit (and usually should). But failing to determine root cause and mis-blaming your boss is about as useful as screaming at the gate attendant when your flight gets a weather delay.
You only owe it to them so long as they do it to you.
And someone who by choice decides to be (or remains) a cog in the broken machine, specifically at the point where it requires being nasty to someone, is fully responsible for that action and its consequences.
Court takes time. Court takes money, or at the least incurs opportunity costs. And court takes emotional reserves. People in dire straits don't necessarily have enough of any of those things, and that is why people like the described get away with shit.
(Labor advocacy programs help balance the scales a little, if only because your advocate is predisposed to believe you and help you navigate the options available to you. But they're fairly thin on the ground in the UK and the US.)
Exactly. In this circumstance at the lowest I had £12 to buy a week of food. I had to cash advance the rent from my credit card and the £12 was what was left. I also had to maintain a perfect appearance and state of mind and hide all this from my new employer for the 4 weeks until I got paid.
Didn't have the cash or energy to start it off and after 5 years I didn't want to go back to that bit of my life and kick it all off again. Plus he folded the company after a bit so chance I'd get anything were near zero.
I'm glad things worked out for you eventually. That super sucks to go through.
It is one of the reasons I am so very suspicious of folks who diminish the value of labor protections. Most of us end up downrange of some shady stuff at least once.
Gonna disagree. Do not go to HR. HR is there for the company, not for you. They will seek whatever is the fastest, easiest way to resolve things for the company — which probably is not firing a manager.
In case it's not clear, I have not had helpful experiences with HR.
At 27 I took on a multi-million dollar, VC-backed property management startup that was trying to defraud me on my rent and rental deposit. It’s amazing what some legal research and a few hours of spare time can do.
The salient part of that story was the unfair reimbursement policy. My point was that it would have been unfair regardless of the age of the manager or age of the employee.
Where did I suggest that anyone "take on" the company?
Well amazon hires a ton of H1Bs. When they let go, they have to go to back to their country unless they can find another company to sponsor their H1B.
So people go to extreme lengths and managers can get away with anything.
I’m super grateful for Microsoft to help me with my green card. However my life there was miserable and my manager frequently asked us to work weekends. Pagerduty was hell and I once came home at 5am from work.
F that.
I’m glad I wasn’t born in India. My Indian x-colleagues didn’t have that freedom simply due to where they were born.
Yea you can feel this when you work on a team mostly of H1B. Most of them don't speak up and just say yes to whatever project management gives them. Ofcourse upper management loves this, they take all the credit and become the face of the project and if it fails they simply blame it on h1b/contractors ect.
I've seen this many many times in all company sizes over last 15 yrs. I would steer clear of teams where most ppl are h1b indians.
Ex Indian h1b here. Here are some of the things I experienced that finally ended up with me throwing away everything and come back to India.
1. Was working on a project without issues. Ex manager forced me to go back to India 3 times over a 9 month period. Every time my ex manager tells me to go back, I get ready packing and then he tells me stay for 3 more months. On the 3rd time, I said I am resigning. Now my manager doesn't want me to go to India. I got another job and went to resign. Manager indirectly threatens me that I won't get service letter (which is required for green card). I was afraid and ended up staying. It turns out my manager was lying to the customer also. Everytime, he will tell me to get ready to go back and then tell the customer that I have to go back due to visa issues. Customer had still some work for me, so they ask for 3 more months and this repeated 2 times. Each time, I would be under incredible stress. It was like telling someone waiting in jail for their death sentence that they will be hung 2 weeks from now, then a few days later tell them it was extended.
2. Came to India for my marriage. Forced me to cancel my honeymoon and work from India for 1 month for another customer while lying to the original customer that I extended my vacation. I spend one whole day in my room sad and angry. I still want to beat up the manager who made me do this even though this happened over 2 years ago.
3. Asked me to work for a temporary customer in another state. I didn't want to, but agreed since I was afraid and worked for around 5-7 weeks while staying in hotel. This was before marriage. After marriage, again asked me to work for this customer for 1 month. My wife is completely dependent on me because she cannot drive in US. I said I cannot go because my wife is alone. Lead told me to ask my wife to stay in hotel for 1 month with me. I didn't want to because she already spend 3 weeks in a hotel with me instead of honeymoon. Thankfully manager agreed and sent someone else.
4. Forced me to relocate to another state. I didn't want to. After a lot of pressure, I sort of agreed and asked to at least adjust my salary for the rent increase. The customer was paying $20+ per hour more if I was working from the new state, so I expected at least a little bit of raise. Manager lied to me saying he will take care of it. I didn't trust him because there were many stories from my ex colleagues of being treated like a donkey with a carrot tied to their front. Sent him an email asking him to reply. He didn't. At one point, he said "I will snip you". He had said a similar line once before - "I will cut you". At that time, I didn't even understand he was threatening me, I was wondering why is he talking about circumcising me. This time I understood it was a threat. Got everything ready for move and told him I am ready for the move, and as expected he said HR didn't approve the raise which is a lie.
5. Moving expenses was about $3500. Getting that refunded was another big battle. Thankfully, my manager helped me in this and got the money after about 1.5 months.
6. Got RFE for visa extension. Employer waited till the last moment to submit the response to USCIS. I couldn't drive because license duration is tied to visa. Asked my manager and immigration team multiple times to speed up. No. They submitted the response only 5 days before the last day. So couldn't drive for 3 months. Since I was in a new state, I had no friends to help me either. Employer did pay for my Uber for these 3 months, but still I hated every moment of it, especially because of a few bad experiences with Uber drivers. Thankfully, I had sent my wife back to India before all this happened, otherwise I don't know how I would have managed.
Even though my visa got extended for another 3 years, I threw away everything and came back to India.
One more point I forgot to add. They delayed my green card till the last moment. I am not saying I am entitled to it, but they should tell me if they won't do it. I ask my manager and he would say we will start the process next month for sure. It continued for about 13 months. Finally they started. But by now green card applications as well visas from Indians were getting a lot of scrutiny from USCIS. Mine got denied and went for appeal and got approved finally. Took over 10 months just for the whole thing and got approved just 30 days before visa expiry. Applied for visa extension as soon as possible, got RFE on that also and spent another 4 months in uncertainty.
It's funny how you often notice bullies getting promoted - is destruction of a low-level person a rite of passage for a middle manager to get ahead at many US corporations these days? I can imagine if they select for some dark-triad characteristics and going all-in, demonstrating cold/calculating/cruel moves while keeping paperwork clean signalizes the right person?
Bullies are often beneficial to the person they work under. That person can delegate unpleasant bullying-work to the bully and the bully will never bully his boss.
Agreed. Have seen plenty of 'kiss up, kick down' behavior at larger tech companies. It is at times amusing and a small break from the suffering to see the person transform rapidly during interactions with the kissee or the kickee in short order.
It does somewhat establish a baseline capability of being able to put people through emotionally not nice things.
I suppose that any manager whether they are malignant or they are really just ordinary, well intentioned people have to at some point not of their own volition do exactly that because of legitimate business reasons outside of their control. So when push comes to shove if they can prove they are capable of handling those responsibilities then I guess that sends a useful signal???
Abusing it out of some childish sense of revenge is just unfortunate beyond belief.
It's just too big as a company. It cannot be fair. With all those layers of middle managers, talented people are bound to get ignored and fall through the cracks; suppressed by managers whose only interest is maintaining the status quo.
I'd say this isn't about "talented people", this is just basic decency that an employer should have to extend to an employee, regardless of that employees position or talent.
Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000. [1]
You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.
> You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.
There's actually not a big difference, after one factors out the remarkable level of spin you've worked into your characterizations.
For reference-- that's $318,160 more than Jeff Bezos' salary. That's insane.
How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
If journalists focused on developer unions for even a fraction of the time they spend criticizing Amazon, I'd bet we'd have some blogs that sound just as damning as the one the author has written.
Sure, but that's because the company is doing better. If it stagnated then he would only make base salary. If the union does their job poorly the Union leader still gets paid.
> How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
Are you saying the Amazon has a developer union that could have helped defend this employee? Citation needed. AFAIK, developer unions have been advocated for, but don't actually exist (in a functional form, in the US at least).
> Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000.
If you object that people in large-organization senior management roles can make that much, you won't believe what many corporate CEOs make. It'll blow your mind!
Having a union represent you at work is like having a lawyer represent you at court. Sure some rugged individualists choose to represent themselves pro se, but we all know how smart that is.
I used to believe that. But I saw very close how an IT union was taken over by old school, corrupt fat union guys. And they just pander to the lowest common denominator. They go against meritocracy.
agreed, unions have had issues akin to this across the board in the last decade or so, and it's extremely sad (to say the least). active worker participation and leadership of the union is the antidote to that.
"divided we fall" is a cliche but may have some merit here, especially if this will be filled by another starry eyed immigrant visa holder who can be treated as such. the information asymmetry gap is just too high imo.
there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.
Agreed. But the fight to keep management in check shouldn't devolve into a fight to keep the union leaders in check. What's the guarantee that won't happen?
> i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority
Unions are almost invariably democratic; where seniority rules are adopted by a union (and this is far from universal), they tend to be adopted democratically,and not to replace democratic control of the union, so these are not opposed concepts.
> screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
But does the profession of acting strive to be meritocratic as much as software development? It appears that fame (which is probably correlated with how good of an actor someone is, but probably only weakly) has a much bigger effect in acting.
They both seem to pay a lot of lip service while the reality greatly undermines the verbiage. I’d argue that in acting the representation of women is far better than in software development. The degree to which software development is an asocial boy’s club is hard to understate, and the pet theories about intelligence and genetics don’t help, but rather reinforce the farcical nature of the self-serving “meritocracy” narrative.
Unions are supposed to fight for each of their members equally. As such it is in their interest to eliminate performance based pay as much as possible. Increases in pay should be based on time in job (positively) and likelihood of losing job on time in job (negatively). If you have performance based pay someone who’s three times as good might get paid more, or long serving staff might be let go before the newly hired. That is not what the average union member wants, they want security and stability and they work to get it.
Nowhere is a perfect meritocracy but a union that did not actively work against meritocracy would not be working in the interest of its average member.
Unions operate according to the rules the union members agree to. There is no "one way" that unions function. A "programmer's union" would be structured according to whatever makes sense to the programmers.
Always, it's insane how people who work in this tech can think about reshaping this social convention or disrupting that industry and still think that "nope, unions are inherently bad and always will be bad, there is no way for us innovators to redesign labor relations for the good of workers."
I do think it is an implicit reality of any organized group of human beings, which is why I want a group that does it on my behalf, not just one that does it against my behalf.
One may not like militarism, but even the most extreme anarcho-libertarians see the benefit in having a military to protect them.
Unions are the same way. They are the only way you, as an employee, can meaningfully protect yourself.
So sounds like you should be okay with the minimum amount of politics that unions have!
At any rate, it's definitely arguable that office politics in tech have gotten worse and worse in the last few decades, as more money and money-men have poured into the industry. Compare Silicon Valley now to how it was prior to the Netscape IPO, and the toxicity has definitely grown.
Politics may be inherent, but the type of politics can vary in quality and livability. Ditto for the politics in a union.
My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey. The BEST outcome I've seen from them is incredibly painful meetings that only seem to make the matter worse.
My speculation on this is two fold. The first is that putting things in those surveys is a "permanent record" or at least "yearly review" issue for your manager. So you are (justly or not) harming them, and they will tend to respond to being harmed. The other is that, if you think about it... if your manager is not a person who you can talk to about a problem in a non-anonymous way... doing it anonymously is not likely to help, it's probably better to just quietly leave.
Yep, couldn't agree more despite the down votes on my previous post. The picture that we like to paint about how companies work is far from the reality, you have play by the real unwritten rules.
It's funny how you guys take some kind of pride in maneuvering what to an outsider obviously sounds like a dystopian-style bureaucratic nightmare of unevenly applied laws and insider-connections.
Rather than fight to change or improve this system, you gloat about knowing how to survive in it. So strange.
This is how you fight to change systems when you're ultimately powerless to do so directly, by subverting the system. The only real power we have is to collectively agree to make the data/system useless.
This guy I know, we can call him Jim, left a large tech company and was honest in his exit interview about why he was leaving, and it was mostly his manager. He was later asked to apply for a job with a different team after his manager left the company years (and promotions) later. HR blocked the hire because he was "disgruntled" in his exit interview. As far as I know, they did nothing to recognize or fix the problem. But they held it against him because his feedback was negative. Unfortunately, a company that views employees as the enemy will find it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They kill the incentive to try help fix problems, and create a situation where you like it or you leave.
It's the inverse of the ubiquitous "why do you want to work for us?" interview question. "Because you give money to your employees and I require money for food and housing" is somehow never what they're looking for.
I'm of the mind that only good comes of it. It's very therapeutic and who cares what they think anymore. Besides, that's one of the few things that no one faults you for - it's almost expected. I highly recommend it.
Strongly disagree, and I've got hiring evidence on my side (former subordinates going to work for friends, and said subordinates didn't know of the relationship) after airing some pretty reasonable grievances when I hired then and when they worked with me.
Of course, there's a scale. "I don't like their tech decisions"--yeah, that's an eyebrow raise, unless there's some real meat there. But I'm never going to judge somebody poorly for saying plainly that they felt disrespected or mistreated at a job, because it's happened to me too.
It doesn't matter if their grievances are legitimate or not (and you have no way to tell if they are). It's bad form to trash talk one's former employer or ex.
It's not just me. You will often talk yourself out of getting hired and many will not pursue a relationship with you if you indulge in it. There is nothing to gain by engaging in it.
It's not just you. Virtually every article I've read on interview tips gives this same advice. Speaking negatively about your former employer always reflects negatively on you.
> My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey.
Even better, game the system and give them glowing reviews.
For example I had noticed the feedback "anonymous" surveys they were sending had a location field as in employee's country, city, town, etc. Well, in a distributed team it's pretty clear who is who based on that location. So I just gave them glowing and happy reviews.
Same when leaving a company. Nice and happy feedback like "I'd love to work here more, but the tech landscape is so exciting and varied and I'd like to gain experience in other areas..."
I used to think big tech companies like Amazon and Google would be different, however now I see they are just becoming like any older traditional corporation with a HR department functioning like the stasi and the ability to oppress through mass policies and hiring contracts.
We are lucky as developers to have a fairly easy way of life but I still follow my Grandpa's advice from years working in the shipyards of Glasgow:
I think you should keep in mind that company culture, values, as well as operational dynamics are not scale-free. The size of a company matters, immensely. But in a market driven economy, you can jump ship and seek greener pastures, especially if you're skilled and operate in a high demand industry.
Amazon employee here, though I do not speak for the company.
At any big company, your management chain is the #1 influence on the quality of your culture. My experience at Amazon has been extremely positive, but then my org head is a great guy, so it's all been in line with my expectations. I've also left critical feedback through the Amazon Connect survey for my immediate manager and not suffered for it. That manager, as far as I can tell, made no effort to deanonymize the feedback, and addressed the issue fairly in a team meeting.
So, YMMV, but I would certainly encourage skilled devs, artists and designers to come help us make great games. :-)
I am also an Amazon employee (and also do not speak for the company), and I agree with this assessment. My manager has told me and my teammates on multiple occasions to take care of family stuff first, to make sure we're working sustainably (i.e., not super late all the time) and so on. I also have scored some questions low on the same survey and not suffered retribution.
I don't want to claim that anyone's experience isn't valid, just that it doesn't match mine.
At any reasonably sized company individual managers are going to have a lot of control over their subordinates, and their underlings aren't going to have any say pretty much at all. What are they going to do, complain to HR? HR at any large company isn't in the business of keeping people employed, it's in the business of keeping the company safe. If you rock the boat, you are now the problem. It's no wonder that all of the negative comments about Amazon boil down to either "this job was absolute shit" - bad manager from the start - or "this job was amazing and then turned to shit" - either the good manager quit/was fired by their superior for not being shit/was promoted and their replacement was garbage, or they were a sociopath that slowly turned up the heat so the proverbial frogs wouldn't notice the boil until they were cooked.
Remember, your boss is ultimately not your friend, certainly not in a professional setting. An individual contributor/manager relationship fundamentally must be adversarial, because one side holds all the power, and even if the manager breaks trust the worst thing that will happen is the IC's replacement will be less productive for a few months.
When managers have this much power over their reports and there's no way for someone to fight back against their manager, it's no wonder that shitty managers are so common. It's a situation ripe for abuse.
That's always been the argument to people who are on the fence about Amazon: "I've heard some bad things, but haven't seen it in my department". Amazon, and the people that work on the "good" teams never seem to be terribly concerned about horrific reports, and I frequently wonder why that is. In companies I've worked for, had I heard about people crying at their desk and being forced to choose between their child's health and their job I'd want to know how the company is putting a stop to it. It seems that everyone believes that the people complaining are doing so for attention, but from the outside it seems like there's been a lot of reports that are credible - and this is the white collar stuff, not even warehouse worker things.
Its hard to know: Is everyone indoctrinated? Are they addicted to the paychecks? Is the sense that there are bad things happening but its being handled properly?
That's because Amazon doesn't work like a cohesive monolithic organization. Two teams that seat next to each other may have complete different cultures and ways of working.
By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems.
The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites.
This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them.
They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it.
All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on"
So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.
This is a decent argument from an employee perspective, which is that its so silo'd that its basically different companies. While I find it pretty horrifying when awful things happen in places with the same external name as is on my resume, I could see how people could go "not me" - thats pretty close to how the workforce works outside of amazon too.
There's very much in the 14 principles about optimizing for results and very little about leading or cultivating people. Obviously, this can be interpreted in very many ways, but the impression I get from the people that work there or have worked there is that it becomes a win-at-all costs environment and that the upper tiers of management are political hell.
Exactly. I work at a very similar place on the East Coast -- very startup like culture unified by leadership principles. I had one so-so experience, followed by an absolutely horrible experience, followed by two terrific experiences. For the bad experience, I worked weeks on end, lots of times throughout the night trying to deliever, in many cases, unreasonable feature requests all while trying to maintain production systems. Sometimes dysfunction happens. You live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term.
Bezos has corporate principles that led to his success. Many people respect that. I personally do no -- I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason, but I digress that what he does do in the business world has worked with immeasurable success.
(My final random point -- I find it kind of ironic that a man who stresses so much that his leadership team have skilled writing and memos instead of powerpoints let his security team autogenerate a security bulletin about a serious docker CVE. I mean it's very obvious to me that this was written by a bot https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-... -- I think it's a tad tacky to be using a bot to generate your security bulletins)
> In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term.
I totally agree that being disciplined and challenging oneself to grow is really important. Still, I wouldn’t want suggest someone to stay in a bad place if it’s actually a detriment to their health or quality of life. It’s really hard to find a balance for me personally, and I don’t feel I can give concrete advice on the matter to others.
I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason...
That's some sanctimonious bullshit.
There is zero public information indicating any cheating. We know that there was a trial separation. We don't know what agreements there were. We do know that the divorce is being presented as being amiable.
My attitude is that if his soon to be ex wife is not upset, then random strangers like yourself have zero business being upset on her behalf. You aren't part of or privy to his relationships or agreements. It is none of your business.
Unless you have non-public information indicating that he violated any agreement with MacKezie, the best information available to you is information in places like https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/09/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-div... - which indicates that the relationship began after both couples separated, and was known by both ex partners.
Which would indicate that this isn't cheating. No matter how much it offends your sensibilities.
If you mean the "No thank you, Mr Pecker" one, then it doesn't look to me as if he does any such thing.
(He certainly implicitly admits that he is in a relationship with Ms Sanchez. But, at least in my book, that's only cheating if it happened before his "trial separation" with his wife, and I don't see that he's admitted that it did.)
Read it again. What Bezos said there is in line with the TMZ article. Yes, he had the relationship. There is no indication that he broke any agreements with his ex-wife.
That's because the people who have bad experiences are the ones who actually have something to say. No one is going to write a medium blog post about how their last year was completely average, their boss had pros and cons, and that the most controversial event of the year was when the company switched kuerig cup brands.
Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.
There are a couple reasons. First, Amazon has hundreds of businesses and almost 700,000 employees globally now. Every business has different culture and managers. You are not going to find a consistent good/bad/indifferent experience here, because it's highly varied. I can guarantee you a seasonal worker in a fulfillment center has a vastly different day to day experience from a software development engineer in Seattle.
The second reason is that people tend to write about negative experiences more often. You see this all the time in Internet forums where people complain about products they bought. There could be millions of happy customers of a product, but the few thousand that got a defective one or had a bad experience with customer support will loudly and vocally scream about it on the Internet, which at first glance, seeing hundreds or thousands of reports of a terrible product, might seem bad, but the millions of people who used the product and had no problems with it are not going to write about it.
Disclaimer: I've worked at Amazon for a few years now, and I've had 3 decent managers and one terrible one. The good thing about Amazon is that it is relatively frictionless to switch teams.
As a former employee, it’s more that there’s only so much you can do in that situation. I didn’t have any ability to impact the situation other than advocating for good practices, helping people I know manage their careers, and giving truthful feedback for managers (being able to since I wasn’t in a “bad” team).
I didn’t want to paint an unrepresentive picture for people that might prevent them from pursuing legitimately good opportunities. Ultimately, this rubs some people the wrong way because they feel it’s the same as covering up issues. I definitely saw a lot of incredulity that I, and others could even have a good experience.
If it’s my truthful experience at Amazon that it was generally a good job and I didn’t see much of any of this stuff personally, what would you have me do?
As someone who had a very positive experience at Amazon, but knew people who did not, agreed. In a way, it's better not to think of Amazon as a single company, but as hundreds of startups under an umbrella organization. You cannot generalize from a single one of those organizations. It is impossible, IMHO, for a company to have as many employees as Amazon and maintain a normalized employee experience.
Really the poisonous thing that stands out for me is the Visa experience. Amazon (now) has a pretty liberal internal transfer system that I have seen work really well for a lot of people. But a truly vindictive and sufficiently interpersonally skilled manager can still pin down an employee with what happened to the OP. In such a case, a citizen can walk away and find another company that's a better fit for them. But when they're in H1B land, it is so much harder. It would be so much better for the industry if the system were much more flexible.
As someone who worked for Amazon for a long time, I agree with you -- most managers I worked for took anonymous negative feedback well, making changes at the team level.
Import Caveat to your last point: If you make games for Amazon, you give up your ability to make them in your spare time. Amazon has pretty aggressive game development policies around side projects.
As an org head in a tech organization experiences I try to find managers/supervisors like this and actually move them out of the organization.
I know that you direct management and peers can be one of the greatest influences for good or bad for the broader team. A person like the Manager in this situation is a clearly going to create more problems for other team members in the future.
Ex-Amazon employee here, and I definitely do not speak for the company.
Amazon, more than any other company that I know of, has a ton of ex employees whose opinion either amounts to "Amazon was horrible" or "I thought Amazon was great for a long time, then it went south and in retrospect can't believe I put up with it for so long." So despite your current positive opinion, there is a good chance that you will some day be singing a very different song.
I am personally glad I worked there, because it was a fascinating experience. But I wouldn't want to work there again, nor would I recommend it to a friend.
That’s fantastc! Seriously, it’s good that you feel great about the work you do and have a management team that allows you to breathe easy, is supportive, and helps you out put the best work possible.
BUT, and I truly believe this in the depths of my soul, everyone is as evil as their most sociopathic executive.
Everyone is contributing to the same bottom line, some people just sell out for less.
Whose more evil, the hitman that won’t kill for under 1 million or the hitman that will do it for minimum wage?
"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."
Perhaps the principle was updated since the article was written, but the actual (current) description says, "Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs." In other words, a leader can only be right a lot if they gather external data in order to undermine their preconceptions, but they do not get caught in analysis paralysis. I think that's a very well articulated principle, overall, regardless of how it manifests in the company culture.
Amazon Leadership principles are for all employees at the company not managers.
"Leaders are right a lot" isn't indoctrination to trust your manager implicitly because they are right. It's "Be a leader. Have good judgement. Work to improve it. As a result be right a lot"
Backbone one is also misunderstood: "Don't succumb to do the easy thing. Push back when you know when it's the right thing to do even if it's harder. BUT if you are overruled, and the group decision goes against it, don't try to fight it and undermine the decision, commit to the path."
This may seem mean, and feel free to argue with me and prove my statement below wrong.
Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact, "working" from home.
Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at home" when he's not actually "working" while at home, he's actually caring for his daughter?
People are confused. Working from home still means "working". It doesn't mean, be at home and do what I want but get paid, or not work as hard.
Maybe he thinks it should mean: I'll get the work done on my own time. But, if the work needs to be done that day, he still needs to be WORKING from home - and not doing something else.
a specific therapy session unlikely lasts the entire day and a flextime (starting work at 11) probably covers a single day being split up a little bit.
Thank you. I've seen a lot of abuse of the term. One time I worked with a recruiter [1] and said I was feeling really bad that day and took the day off from work and was resting at home. She replied, "ah, gotcha, so you're working from home today". And I was like, "no, I'm resting."
(With that said, it could still be a good-faith usage here -- like, he legitimately does work from home, and the therapy is relevant here because all the back-and-forth pickups would otherwise eat up much of the day.)
I have been working from home for almost 5 years now, and one thing that I learned in the first 18 months was that it is important to take sick days. In the beginning I would just sit at my desk and try my best to work even though I was sick, but not be able to concentrate and ultimately not get anything done. Then I would stress about it and work extra time, which would just make things worse. Now I take off any time I think I would have if I were in an office.
Unless you don't have sick days or your company cuts PTO in half. In that case, in front of the computer or in bed, that's still working from home. Fuck them for not providing sick days and cutting PTO in half. Fuck them for no raises in half a decade. This is the way one can get more money in the same time from the same company without a raise. The less I work, the more money I make per hour, so my incentive is to work as little as possible while still getting the minimum amount of shit done. It's management that sets the incentives. Welcome to the idiots of corporate America. Sure they could give some raises sometimes or increase vacation or add sick time or really do anything whatsoever to show employees that they are appreciated and that their salaries are not going down each month due to inflation. Instead, they try to force extra work like trying to squeeze water out of stone. In the office, it's no different. People waste time in other ways. I'm just shocked that corporate executives and managers are so fucking oblivious to the incentives they create and the empty praises they try to placate their employees with. Fuck them. This isn't a situation where one should be ethical. The cards are stacked against employees and employees need to use any dirty trick to get the most out of their shitty employers.
This sort of attitude does not help. I'm sorry that you've had bad management experiences, but things don't need to be like this, and part of that is the attitudes of both parties.
Ball's in the employer's court. It's their turn to make a move. The employee (me) can only react. Therefore as long as the employer continues to be like this, I have no choice in how I respond because I'm a human being with dignity and I deserve to be treated as such. On the other hand, this is the best job/employer I've ever had out of dozens in the industry. This is nothing compared to not getting the health insurance promised, being physically assaulted, having to work weekends/evenings for no reason at all and the other bullshit employers feel entitled to do to their employees. I couldn't disagree with your statement more, however. My attitude is one of responding to things out of my control. If my employer wants to fix this and improve my attitude, they just have to make good on the promises for a raise I was given multiple times or give me back the vacation time they cut in half. It's very simple and extremely easy for them. By saying that I should change my attitude, you're blaming the victim and implying that the employer is right to treat their employees like shit, without a shred of respect, perpetuating this bullshit forever. Nope, I will not accept the blame for their failing to be decent human beings who keep their promises and respect their employees.
Or it could be about reducing the impact of taking his child to therapy on work time. If it saves him an hour or more of travel during the day then it makes sense to let him WFH.
No, working from home means working, as in getting particular things done.
Working from home often means that your (equivalent of) lunch break is a time you can spend elsewhere, e.g. take your child to therapy. You don't waste time commuting from your office if the doctor's office is nearby.
You can also spend more time for off-work activities in the middle of the day, but work until a later hour, again because you're not commuting back from the office.
As long as you get done what you planned to, and participate in whatever communications you planned to participate (video calls work well these days), I don't see why working from home would be a materially inferior way of working, at least if practiced in moderation.
You seem to be confused. Being able to bring someone someplace at a certain time can be, depending on the locations, much easier and less time intensive if done from home.
So, for example: If your commute takes twenty minutes and therapy is twenty minutes from your home taking someone to therapy who is at home takes 40 minutes if you do home office or between 60 and 80 minutes of you have to be at work.
Nowhere does it say that he wanted to do home office to take care of someone. That’s nonsensical and a nonsensical interpretation of what was said. The most straightforward interpretation is that this is a simple case of simplifying logistics.
>Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at office" when he's not actually "working" while at office, he's actually [getting coffee | taking a walk | socializing | etc?
Your statement may be right. I am inclined to believe that he means he needed to take her to therapy and then back. This means he might start the day a bit later or he might be unavailable for some time. People generally WFH in those situations as it saves the time of commute and they can get something else done. Overall it might be an hour or 2 that he might not be available or it might be just the same as before as he saves commute time both ways and can work later in the day as he is already home.
No need to jump to nefarious meaning. Also further he mentions how others in the team were working from home anyways once a week and he was ordered to come and sit at 7am.
I understand the need and curiousity to dissect each and every line but please don't let this 'one potentially, open to clarification' statement take everything else from the author.
I apologize if you didn't mean to, but since this is the top child of current top comment, I felt the need to. Let's not lose the forest for the trees.
Yeah, I can see how one could make an amoral, pedantic argument around the definition of working from home. But to do that you have to 1) remove the argument from it's surrounding context, which is flawed reasoning and 2) successfully prove that there is a significant difference in the practical outworking of the definition of working from home between the subject and their workmates. The latter is immediately and significantly relevant to the definition and, unfortunately for the oppressor, drags context back into play.
imply that he doesn't have to be there all the time? And if therapy is only of short duration, nonetheless he could "set up shop" somewhere nearby and start working from remote, if he were allowed to do so.
And why get hung up on the term "from home" when it really means "from remote"? After all, his remote access won't be geo-fenced.
Dunno if you have kids but until a certain age, they don't "pack themselves". You can easily add 30 min. for a two year old, e.g.. Driving his daughter could easily take away 1hr in each direction.
If his colleagues don't show up until 11, instead of making him show up at the office at 7, he could easily manage working from remote and driving around his daughter.
Normally I'm the free market guy in those situations, but I have a really hard time in this case to not see Uwais Khan as a complete ahole.
I judge my teem members by the quality of their work and the efficiency with which they do it. Ass in the seat time is a dumb metric and is always used in a power play.
The company employs something like 300,000 people. I’d imagine many stories of bad management just at that scale. Since it’s Amazon it always gets an unfair level attention.
Former Amazon employee here (worked at Lab126, on the original Kindle devices).
While I didn't have a bad manager there (my managers were actually nice people), it is Amazon's corporate culture that turns the place into a 'dog eat dog', arse-hole driven, development. Managers have to run around and cover their arse, as in the first or second misstep, they are out. This pressure filters down to employees who are often thrown against very tight deadlines without much corporate support (ie. basic training on new tech, or even clear coding review standards, and more). Code reviews usually turned into: "Who screams the loudest wins".
Amazon tends to be notoriously 'cheap/frugal', to the point of lacking basic things that most work places take for granted. (I am not talking about cheap coffee and lack of perks, but not even throwing a Christmas party, even though the Kindle was a huge success and sold more than then even the more optimistic prediction). The company will not show/give a basic token of appreciation, even though the team is performing well. Hence, employee morale was not high, but people saw it just as a job. If you are 'young' and still learning and want to grow as a person, you will hate an environment like that.
But the worst abuse was done to H-1B folks like me.
1. Amazon abuses on people that are on H-1B and need their greencard application going to stay in the country. They delay your application at every step, to the point that you realize that something that should take 1 year, it will take 3-4 years at the given pace, or maybe not even done ever. They dragged their feet, and played with your life as a simple leverage tool. (even after talking to the VP of HR, and while getting: 'Yes, it will be done', nothing got done, and things got dragged out anyway).
2. Amazon abuses on people that need some flexibility (due to family reasons). I remember really as at some point I had to pick up the project of co-worker as she had a mental break-down at work. (crying and all). Reason? She needed some time off due to children/family reason and she couldn't get it as 'we were on a tight deadline'.
My first week at work there, there was a 'goodbye' party at my team, where one of the managers/lead engineers was leaving. The reason: Burnout. (I learned that part later).
3. Their back dated options, (i.e. you get most of your stock compensation only on your 4th year), are done in purpose, as they know you probably will not put up with it until then, and leave the money on the table by leaving. Most people stay 1-2 years and move on.
So, yeah, I think Amazon is a bad actor/employee to even software engineers (who tend to have options). I can't imagine their warehouse and lower level employees.
When the NYTimes article came out, I thought it pictured a very accurate portrait of the company. Perhaps things have changed, perhaps they are still the same, but I usually do not recommend friends to work there. They fully deserve their bad rap, and I am glad NYC didn't subsidize their abuse.
I just want to contrast this with the fact that in my case Amazon was extremely diligent with my green card process.
I applied day one after joining (my manager knew that I joined with that expectation so he approved right away) and they started working on it immediately. I had some delays with the lawyers but in general it went pretty smoothly.
Everyone I've ever known in real life to actually work there (it is more than just a couple of people) has told me that its not a place a person should want to work. I've never heard of literally everyone I know who works for a company has nothing good to say about it at all....especially from other engineers. So I always ignore the recruiters when they send me linked in messages and emails.
Same. I try to keep in mind that anecdotes do not evidence make. However, when my sample size is in the high thirties and I still do not have one positive opinion, something smells.
There is long standing evidence that Amazon actively manipulates social media to try to paint working in the warehouses as a great job.
HN tends to have an outsized representation of prospective H1B candidates.
Added up, it's really hard to take any of the positive comments from "Amazon Employees" seriously in this post.
In case people don't realize, the linked site has one blog post per day going back the past ~2 weeks all about this protest. Some choice excerpts:
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
> There are 2 most difficult parts in the rally:
> - to get courage to start
> - to make a banner
> Courage is easier. Few YouTube videos about Martin Luther King, AC/DC song "Thunderstruck" and I am ready to fight.
> To be honest, in the morning fear of public shame almost caused symptoms of bed wetting.
> But Deadpool told me how to manage this fear. [embedded youtube video from the deadpool movie here]
> They can argue citing last words: Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Why didn't I commit? I ask: decision taken by whom? If my manager and his managers all the way till Bezos support oppression, should I respect their opinion?
> Then the only authority here is God. I say: Once a decision is determined BY GOD, I commit wholly. But God didn't ask me to stop protesting yet.
> Thus, most of NYT Amazon examples are really cruel and inhuman. Employees are punished because their parents are dying, their children are disabled etc. I hear shaking Hitler in his coffin. These are not single examples of "bad" managers. This is a company culture. Official company policies support the CULTURE worse than genocide. During the genocide, Jews were not treated in that way.
> If I don't find printer today, tomorrow nobody will know about horrors of Mr Bezos.
> How can I do leafleting without printer?
> Where are all these librarians?!!!!!!
> Btw - got to library. The one near of UW was open even during the "storm"... How can you call this nice Christmas snow a "storm"? I thought the storm is when Dorothy flies in her house through the sky... In Russia we have such storm 9 months a year with a temperature of -22 F.
> Anyway I printed almost 300 sheets of dirt about Amazon. Tomorrow 300 Amazonians will know the True. Jeff, I am coming.
> I was thinking I am afraid of people. But then I realized: in fact people are afraid of me. Now I feel I am more powerful and more free than anybody else. Amazon employees are restricted in their freedoms: they are forced to spend most time of their lives to do the work they hate. They are restricted to speak.
> I am free to speak and Jeff Bezos with all his billions can't close my mouth and can't prevent me from walking on the street with my banner.
> I like that. Like a student who lost virginity. I mean, well, you know.
> But today it will be incredible day. I am going to Whole foods store at Denny way. If Spheres s a heart of Amazon, Whole foods is its stomach. This store is always full of people and engineers. God bless me.
Before the outrage machine gets going, probably worth reading that and asking how reliable of a narrator this is.
It is interesting to see the mindset of the person who wrote this post. He's obviously been triggered by some internal politics and then he's extrapolated that all the way up and down the corporate chain of command. Amazon has 613,000 employees. I can imagine there's going to be a few bad managers in that mix.
If my manager asked me to come to office at 7am, I would ask for 6am instead, so that I could be gone at 2pm and have a life, with a bonus of avoiding traffic jams. Choose your punishments carefully, aspiring middle manager!
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] thread"My 3 yo daughter has a development delay and I need to bring her to therapy. For that, I asked Khan for work from home once a week like everybody else in our team. Khan prohibited me to work from home. Moreover, he asked me to come to office at 7 am and sit there alone. All the other team members came to office at 11 am and worked from home without restrictions. And their children were not disabled."
Holy crap is all I can say, honestly.
Basically.
"Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them."
It sounds bad, but I'd reserve judgement until I heard the other side. There's always the other side, and I for one am tired of the recent rushes to judgement we see in the media recently.
"DAE Amazon is a horrible employer?" is a pretty common circlejerk the commenterati like to jump on.
The guy may have a case somewhere in there, but this kind of hyperbole isn't doing it any favors.
Stripping out the fluff, the concrete concerns seem to be:
- Denied permission to transfer
- Denied permission to WFH
- Placed on PIP and eventually fired
The author's hypothesis is "manager is evil and this is all retaliation", but this is not easily distinguished from "author did not perform well", and the only evidence of performance we have is one "nice" performance review.
- Required to work on weekends.
- Denied some form of immigration benefits behind his back.
- Told that his wife having a job has anything whatsoever with him being able to transfer.
- The above being a lie.
- Required to show up 4 hours before everyone else.
- Punished for using sick days.
I don't think any of the concrete concerns I listed above are subject to the authors interpretation. Short of the author lying they appear to be valid complaints.
Washington is an "at will" employment state. You can be treated poorly and fired for any reason unless it is for a protected class(race, sex etc). Amazon and his manager could have fired him because they put a bunch of names on a dart board and his was the one hit.
I do think the treatment was incredibly unfair and unjust. Unfortunately, in "at will" employment states in the US, this appears to be perfectly legal behavior. As shameful as that may be.
Most US states are at will; and people still win lawsuits against their employers quite often for just run of the mill toxic behavior, and not just for things as cut and dry as bigotry (although, being a visa holder, he may have a case for, especially since it was a part of these discussions - national origin and immigration status are protected classes).
> Retaliation is defined as any action taken against an employee for daring to file a discrimination or harassment claim
And then for harassment: https://hkm.com/seattle/hostile-work-environment/
> Harassment in the workplace is a form of employment discrimination. Unlawful harassment is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and as such is illegal. Unfortunately harassment can come in many forms, both verbal and physical and can be based on any of the following forms of discrimination:
> Race, Color, Religion, Sex, Sexual orientation, Age, Disability (mental or physical), Retaliation
See above about "Retaliation"
Is there something I'm missing in there? Because that again appears to only protect one from a protected class. It does not mean if your boss is being mean or insulting to you for things outside of those protected classes. But again, am I missing something in there that is different? Do you have an example of a civil or criminal case won by a plaintiff for "toxic behavior"?
I'd be very interested in that, as that would mean the advice I've recieved from two diffent legal counsels I've contracted for advice. If you are correct, it appears I may have a civil claim against those attorneys.
But also disability discrimination with regards to his kid.
Anyways, here's the brief he filed (unfortunately pro se) https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.269265...
Any large company is going to have abusive individuals in it. I think the real issue this story illustrates is that when people are brought over on work visas they have no leverage with their employer.
As an American citizen software engineer my boss knows that if I'm unhappy I will just leave. But the boss of someone on a work visa knows they can do pretty much whatever they want to them and the employee is just stuck.
So we need to change the work visa system so those employees aren't in such a vulnerable position. How exactly? I don't know..
That, and Amazon's processes to prevent engineers from this abuse from their managers.
No, the author lists a whole bunch of names from HR. That's not just an abusive boss, that's an abusive boss protected by HR, which makes it a story about Amazon.
I worked at Amazon and never had any issues like that. In fact, my experience was completely opposite and I had several wonderful bosses, great co-workers, awesome environment and fun things to work on.
I'm certain there are many stories like mine. That doesn't matter at all, as long as there's one case like Oleg's.
There are laws against workplace harassment and it needs lawyers to enforce them. In this specific company, complaints of such harassment would go only to dead ears and further lead to retaliation.
If there are enough cases (and I bet there are), it would mean a class action against such practices. Get some lawyer friends and have a few beers with them.
Once again, I hear you.
Addendum: If you wish to put your SDE skills to good use, develop a social shaming browser plugin with anecdotal evidence tying to a person's professional profile, say, LinkedIn. That will ensure that bad managers are automatically flagged when people visit their profile.
The thing that hurts this post the most is the writing, a brief filed by a lawyer would likely make the case much better.
Here is the complaint: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.269265...
Note that this is filed "pro se" (he is acting as his own lawyer), which is universally a bad idea.
Having read that complaint, I think he is extremely likely to have a case (though I am not a lawyer). I think he's extremely unlikely to manage to get results through the court unless he gets a lawyer.
One manager I had was pretty candid about it, he said he couldn't find another job and was looking to retire so he was going to give me a bad performance review despite actually being the top performer so he wouldn't be affected. He was otherwise very apologetic that his hand was forced.
Otherwise we're all complicit in allowing bad actors to get away with their behaviour.
The point is to take things public.
The court of public opinion is a hugely effective weapon, if you have the documented evidence to back it up.
And if they threaten you about wiretapping laws or whatever, well that just makes the company look even worse in the court of public opinion.
If you will notice, nobody at Uber was stupid enough to threaten Susan Fowler for documenting the stuff that happened to her.
Here it is:
You seem obsessed with laws, as if they possess value and worth in and of themselves, when really they are a very high latency sidechannel of society and power.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033481
It's probably a bit too sharp a response to your comment, but it certainly get's the point across.
How would he be affected by giving you a well-deserved good performance review? I don't understand.
I must be dense because I don't understand this. Your manager couldn't find another job, was instead looking to retire, and gave you a bad performance review?
Pretty normal stuff at a certain level with insecure managers. Not exactly the same, but Steve Jobs wrote about how they relocated him into an empty building at Apple to make him quit. I was relocated too in fact.
The red flags I look for now:
- clearly not as smart as their peers in their own or other depts, they're likely struggling and will act irrationally
- very ambitious, but risk averse
- tells people what their title is whether they asked or not
- been at the company their whole career and just went along with the flow
There's likely some others, but I'm careful around those folks, they're just trouble.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of Amazon being a shitty place to work at, and I don't see much reason to doubt the story of a vindictive boss doing everything they can to make an employee miserable after learning that the employee submitted bad feedback against them.
The two lessons I can extract from this post for myself are.
1. Never submit negative feedback via "anonymous" or "confidential" feedback processes at work, especially against a particular person, especially your boss.
It's been covered on HN before how these things are never really anonymous and confidential, and it should be kind of obvious to figure out if you think about it.
2. If you are at your job as part of your Visa process, you are essentially a slave with a slave's rights to match, and you are better off not rocking the boat if you want to complete the process.
Though I don't know how we can change it to prevent that.
Don't let these people make you afraid to use your power as a citizen and as a valuable employee.
Also, if you're writing your Representative about some kind of abuse or malfeasance, you could always use and assumed name (and say you're doing so to avoid retaliation).
The existence of such a list, the details of its construction, and the possible Social Justice implications of this would attract so many eyeballs and so much advertising revenue, that it would be hard for any online news publication to resist reporting evidence of it.
The problem at present is the west has convoluted and arcane immigration rules (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/award-winning-aussie-bar... for example of westerner in another western country) and two dramatically different buckets - limbo/slave to employer or full, no questions asked rights. There needs to be a less dichotomous, more gradual attainment of citizenship, and a set of intermediary steps, where the potential citizen has some of the rights of a citizen, but not all, and they increase over time towards full citizenship.
This is why it is critical for people with citizenship to advocate for their coworkers with visas, both within the context of their workplace and outside. Pressure your congressional representatives to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. Have a conversation with HR about visa-blind recruitment and retention policies.
Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months !
I have some experience with how LMIA is not perfect, but I was excited when the administration was openly considering copying it ~18 months ago, because it's hard to imagine anything between H1B and LMIA which is worse than H1B (whether from the perspective of a protectionist, a progressive, or a common liberal).
However an lmia supported work permit it's the employee's and not employer's, meaning that if you get fired you can still stay in the country and find another job. You do need to apply for the Visa again for the next job but being in Canada already makes it much simpler. Essentially you aren't at your employer mercy.
Also if you work for one year you usually already have enough points for PR, once you apply for a pr you gain the right for a BOWP visa, which is essentially an open work permit that allows you to work for any employer until a final decision in your PR is made.
IANAL but went through all of above and am now a pr
In Quebec there are no BOWP. So if you lost your job, you have to move out of Quebec province and get another LMIA work permit. Getting a permanent residency while working and residing in Quebec is not easy as Quebec's immigration system and policies are archaic and downright broken with more importance given to French language than any other employable skills. Recently 18,000 Quebec applications were downright rejected by Quebec in the name of bringing in a new skill based immigration system.
I would suggest anyone looking to move to Quebec in a skilled work permit or applying for residency while residing in Quebec to refrain from it as it will take at least 4 years (CSQ - 2 years + Federal - 2 years ) instead of 6 months in comparison with the rest of Canada. This applies to foreign students who come to study in Quebec too.
Permanent Residency Processing time:
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
Quebec skilled worker applicants face uncertain future in light of immigration overhaul:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-immigration-a...
Hiring in the province of Quebec:
https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/servi...
LMIA on the other hand, has advertisement requirements like LCA and a transition plan as well. They are particularly strict on the transition plan including one of which is assisting the worker for permanent residence !
https://meurrensonimmigration.com/service-canada-transition-...
The way I see it, if you're in a bad situation at work, you have two options: try to change it, or leave. If you're going to leave anyway, why not at least try to improve your situation first so you give yourself the best chance of success? And that way, the company has the opportunity to remove or remediate a bad manager.
Basically, my reaction to your #1 is that it helps you avoid getting hurt by the worst possible scenario. But personally, I think it's a better strategy to maximize your chance at a good scenario.
Generally speaking, the best thing to do is to smile, appear to do reasonably decent work, and begin looking elsewhere.
Easiest way to improve your situation in software engineering is to just get a better job and move laterally or up.
Those that happen to enjoy IT unions can get some help there.
However don't expect the work environment to actually improve afterwards, unless the bad pieces are gone by then, as winning is only half the battle.
Maybe I've gotten lucky, but patience has worked well for me. If only I could have told my younger self...
Believing you can change it will virtually never yield any positive results to yourself. Even if you don't get fired, you will be labeled as the one who complains.
If I'm being honest^Wcynical, all you should care about at work is how great people think you are. It helps if you are at least half as good as people think, but it's sadly not a requirement.
By letting them fail. The only way people learn lessons is through failures and disasters.
Let the bad systems fail, that's the best way you can help them.
No, you are not.
That's taking the premise way too far. Slaves were owned as property. You are not property of a corporation just because your job is connected to a visa. You don't have slaves rights (almost entirely non-existent human rights, specifically). You chose to immigrate, there is a system involved in that, you knew that ahead of time, you chose to go forward regardless. You did not become a slave in the process, you did not sign on for 'slaves rights' in the process, you did not abdicate your freedom. Your employer may not dispose of your life as it sees fit. You are free to leave and go back to where you came from if you do not like the system, just as you were free to never sign on in the first place. You are not a slave at all in any manner. That's not an argument in favor of the backwards US immigration system, it's an argument that very, very clearly you are not a slave just because your job and visa are bound together. Immigration to N country is not a human right, it's a privilege (which is why I - and a billion other people - can't freely immigrate to Norway tomorrow and begin enjoying the associated perks).
Source: was an H1B (and L1 before that).
I've been on H1B. It's not a perfect system, but making 6 digit salaries in Silicon Valley was infinitely better than picking cotton in Mississippi in 1840 where you could be murdered by your boss/owner at a whim.
Try to control your self pity, people!
You're comparing a broken system with an older and even more broken system that we already fixed and trying to find merit in current broken system by that comparison. Of course it's better to be alive than being squashed by a dinosaur. But how's that relevant?
Or plainly: Someone said that H1B was the same as slavery. I called it bullshit.
One is always free in a literal sense to choose between available options (e.g. a slave may choose to escape, an employee to quit). However, ability of a second party to attach consequences to those options (e.g. corporal punishment or death, deportation away from one's family, removal of healthcare from sick loved ones, etc.) amounts to restricting the freedom of the individual.
I don't accept that legal freedom equates to practical freedom, e.g. you have the legal right to quit your job therefore in a practical sense you are completely "free" to quit your job. If your employer can attach extremely negative consequences to quitting, then your freedom has been severely limited.
I also have trouble with arguments that the choice to immigrate was made of free will, therefore all consequences are one's own responsibility. It's not legal nor ethical to allow people to "freely choose" to sign themselves into slavery.
Anyway, this is obviously a contentious and charged issue, but I hope this helps communicate a different perspective.
Don't say "boss made me work late and I want to quit". Say "management is overextending the team and it's eroding morale and will likely cause retention issues".
Never give feedback at work, unless positive. This includes things like code review.
The dirty little secret of human relationships is every one wants to be made to feel special, error less and look good. Only thing any kind of feed back, correction or criticism leads to is rivalry/enmity, and it won't end well. The question is not if some thing like that happens, but to what degree.
There are stories going back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, where he refuses to even criticize big mistakes made by generals during the civil war. If that is what some one in the position of Abe Lincoln, in a matter as serious as Civil war did, your code review feedback can wait. Nothing productive ever comes out of these processes.
If you absolutely have to display allegiance to political cartels at work. Wait until a clear leadership superiority is established, Meanwhile use silence and smile as a strategic activity to avoid getting shafted.
There can be no friends at work. In stack ranked systems, with subjective evaluation. You need to follow the Kissinger doctrine. No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Seen too much of this to realize to leave people/systems on their own.
Stealing the Corner office by Brendan Reid
Assorted works of Niccolo Machiavelli and Balatazar Gracian.
It will be hard to impossible to make transition even after reading these books, but at least you can detect and avoid problems at work. Or at best set up a firewall around you.
Lastly expecting goodness from people is wrong. The fact of the matter is people are bad and do what is good in their interests even if it hurts the whole world, be prepared, be ready and have means to take care of yourself.
People disagree on priorities and not everyone's incentives are the same but I've never felt that by default people are bad. I'm no scientist (or sage) and just an average human. So, this is just how I see things and not based on expert scientific inquiry. Make of it what you will.
Oh for goodness sake! This is just silliness. Either you have watched too many gangster movies or you are a sociopath
You need to understand how department wide politics work. There are fixed budgets when it comes to giving raises, bonuses and RSUs. The person who negotiates and deals better wins. That means lesser for everyone. Note how even without wanting to harm you, they actually have. Then come the second rounds of power play. One way to negotiate is to prove they are better, second way to prove it is you are not. Setting team mates up for failure happens all the time, even without one realizing it. Plenty of other things happen. Actively building a bad case for other people. It might not be overt, but leave a bad CR comment or two, keep doing it actively. Make it a point to drop a bad comment or feedback for the person you might want to harm. Then over a time you tend to build a case against them mentally in the mind of your manager. These tactics are super common. Wrong people get promoted, and right people get shafted all the time.
In almost every company- promotions, raises and RSUs require building a case(like a promotion packet), which is basically a pile of documentation. That can only be done over time, its chiseling away at a rock wanting to make it into a statue. Part of that is also making sure other people's statue isn't as good as yours. As a part of building that documentation, you need your name plastered to important things in a positive way. Appreciation emails, feed backs, positive CR text walls etc. This is why so much ceremony goes in most companies when it comes to rewards and promotions. Basically quotas are fixed, and you manager needs to build a case for you. Building that requires negotiating and dealing with them to build you a better promotion packet. Almost anybody can be made to look good or bad, regardless of their efforts. Given stack ranked systems, somebody always has to take the fall for the person who negotiates better.
These things are not even new. The world of Politics(regardless of the system(Democracy/Monarchy/Republic)) has had this for 1000s of years now.
Nope, people are not bad. People are neutral, equally capable of good or evil. Just don't assume anyone except your mother loves you unconditionally and you should be fine :)
You're correct he was reluctant to overtly criticize, but the lesson to take away isn't to just not criticize. It's to be diplomatic and patient when trying to effect change. Being a natural leader, brilliant, and with great strategic intuition also helps :-)
I'm only suggesting you shield yourself from problems, not create the problems yourself.
Getting yourself immunity isn't exactly wrong.
This rule is creating problems. It actively makes relationships and work itself worst. It creates leads to passive aggressive environment where everyone is insecure and in doubt and problems wont get solved.
> There can be no friends at work.
Same here.
> No permanent friends or enemies only allies based on interest that serves you.
Same here too. I am glad I worked in mutually cooperative environment where people took my interests into account and did not based all their actions on their own interest.
Then the errors get merged and I'm liable.
But other wise, unless some one is doing 'rm -rf /', there is no real reason to go criticize some one's work on a company wide visible text wall.
"criticize some one's work on a company wide visible text wall" is a depressing way to look at it. Try "collectively learning about better approaches on a company-wide visible text wall". You'll need to convince people that it's one and not the other.
But in these days of stack ranking and subjective evaluations. You giving a lot of feedback can be considered of lack of ability to write good code on the part of that person(after-all if they could write good code, why would it get so much criticism?). Then the next thing that happens- Which is that your CR comments being used as a proof to downrank them in the stack. Your colleague will and right so think you are actively criticizing them to ensure you get promoted over them.
Enmity and rivalry begins from there. Then they could raid your CR wall and do the same to you. Then all kinds of backstabbing and self-promotion activities start.
Before you know it you would have made a few enemies within the team.
Then you have a management problem, not a cr problem. Don't miss the forest for the trees... It's on management to communicate that cr is constructive, doesn't contribute to reviews, and isn't a game.
> There can be no friends at work.
I think that's a bad advice. I'm sad that this is an experience someone can take from a job and that there are jobs where this applies. Unless you can't lose a job, do disagree on technical reasons and do make friends with good people.
Not every place is so restrictive and full of backstabbers. And if it is, maybe it's worth discovering that and leaving.
This really is the equivalent of marking a giant X on your back and walking in to an arena full of ace snipers.
I have literally seen people being labelled as non-team players and eliminated for arguing against bad technical decisions. In most departments projects are started to gain visibility of high impact work- on which they will later ride to get to rewards and promotions. Disagreeing means telling them they have to eliminate you for their project to happen.
They will get their project eventually. Congratulations, you have now been marked as some that needs to eliminated for them have a good career. And they will deal with you appropriately.
This happens in all people structures. People are the same everywhere, in all times. Don't be in the delusion that some companies are special enough that it won't happen there.
If some one is in a position of power. Any debate, disagreement or criticism is a bad move to make against them.
After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated vendor and the difference in cost was between me leaving the office at rush hour and me leaving the office around 9-10pm.
Not only did he reject the taxi expenses, but the hotel, the flights, the food, etc. The guy was obviously a class act in his 50s, rejecting the expenses of a fairly underpaid 25 year old employee living in Scotland.
Super illegal but ultimatly I quit, because life is too short to work for horrible people.
Anyway, nothing beats that one German bank that told all employees of a branch on Friday that on Monday they are working at a location 80 miles away and are required to be there as usually.
EDIT: Europe generally has stronger labor laws than the US, so if something wouldn't pass muster in the US, it almost certainly wouldn't pass muster in the EU.
What else would you expect from a society that worships profit above all other gods?
As an individual, it's great you let it slide, and I think forgiveness is really important mental hygiene, it's something you do for yourself more than for someone else, IMO... but as a member of a society that ideally would be somewhat just and decent, we shouldn't forgive something that hasn't even been repented of and is still ongoing. Disarm, explain, forgive, that'd be my preferred approach. Not fail to disarm, fall on deaf ears, forgive.
Forgiveness can't be dispensed automatically; it has to be deserved/earned by real actions/intentions. I think because mainstream culture was "meek", it allowed sociopaths to hack it and pervert it, pushing victims to always forgive while laughing at them and making their lives more and more miserable. I think in middle ages required penance was quite brutal by our contemporary soft standards.
Not only was their offer $30,000 below my current income, their deal was I front cash for expenses and submit claims monthly.
Is this standard in the software world?
Because from my perspective there’s only one possible answer to paying expenses out of pocket and having to claim them back: No.
Edit: As an addition, the expense isn't paid by the employee. Costs over $2000 need justification above your boss, but your immediate boss can approve up to $2000 no issues.
Approximately one week a month on-site at client(s) location. So, flights, food, accommodation.
I expected company payment card. If everything turns to shit one month the employee, in this sort of situation, could be left holding a fairly hefty bag.
Side note: if you're in a situation where you're loading up a credit card with business expenses that are later reimbursed, you may consider looking into a credit card that offers rewards like airline miles. It's essentially a "free reward no fee ATM." I always volunteer to grab the company lunch tab for this reason.
The thing I would press is to get paid fairly, and bi-weekly. I’ve never had a salaried job that was paid monthly.
A huge benefit of fronting the costs is getting points on the spend, it adds up quickly
Interesting. I'm Dutch and I've never heard of a permanent job that was not paid monthly. If someone told me they were not paid monthly, I would assume they are a temp with variable hours.
This is standard in every world. Corporate credit cards are usually reserved for senior executives or people who travel/entertain a lot (e.g. sales reps). Cash advances aren't a thing outside of small companies.
Google is the exception here, IMO. Every other employer I have had has generally required the employee to front the cash for expenses, and used something like Expensify to get reimbursed. There are some exceptions, such as hotels or airfare, which I've booked through corporate booking systems; these only let you see "approved" flights/hotels, and once booked, is charged direct to the company.
The exception tends to be law and accounting firms, which issue cards to their employees for business use. The employee "pays" up front using the cards, but the card is connected to the employer's expensing system and the funds are deposited to the employee's account the payday following his submission of the expense report.
You would rack up your tab, submit your expense report and then they would issue you a check with which it was your responsibility to pay the tab.
One guy racked up like $50,000 on his card, got the check and then quit and never paid off the card...
Dont know what ever happened to him.
It may prevent the employee from holding the bag if the company goes bust. But some "corporate cards" are issued by banks in a way that makes the cardholder jointly liable.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...
Sure, the lone "web developer" at a small nonprofit might make $80k, but at a FAANG? Please.
I'm not sure that's true, but I will admit that most of my friends work at FAANGs (outside the bay area). So let me add that I know at least one senior engineer at a non-FAANG tech company that left a $300k job for a "significant pay bump".
Frankly, no large tech company could survive if it didn't pay competitively with other large tech companies.
I fully agree that pay is less in small, non-tech companies in rural areas, but I would be surprised if such businesses hire the majority of developers. Big tech hires a LOT of engineers.
Alphabet - 98,000 (2018) Facebook - 35,000 (2018) Apple - 123,000 (2018) Netflix - 5,500 (2017) Amazon - 647,500 (2018)
Total - ~909,000
That is total number of employees worldwide. so lets conservatively take off a third. Also Reasonably only a third of those employees (probably a lot less at amazon) are actually developers. That gives us ~200,000. The Bureau of Labor statics says there are 1,200,000 software developers in the US in 2016.
FAANG does make up a lot more software development jobs than I thought, I would have to say a significant portion. Very interesting.
I do have two debit cards, one Visa and one MasterCard, for redundancy.
I see what you are saying and it makes sense. I’m just ideologically opposed to the use of consumer credit for regular / recurring / general living expenses.
I bet I’m not alone.
Getting credit card points while you know your employer is almost certainly going to reimburse you is a nice benefit, but the industry should definitely seek to improve by making this optional. Especially for prohibitively large large expenses (flights, lodging) default to paying these upfront.
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
I was doing on call support for a bunch of Linux machines. Literally it was him and me left because the moment I started the other two engineers bailed. One went to work packing salad because it was a better job (big warning!) and the other one had a breakdown.
So didn't get paid properly, argued mileage down to the mile, the clients and him constantly gave me verbal abuse over and over and I ended up working until 10pm some nights with my 9 month pregant wife at home on her own and virtually immobile due to a back problem.
So I get home one night after a tirade of abuse for the day and sent him an email saying "Fuck you I quit". Get a call about an hour later and he's drunk shouting abuse down the phone. This suddenly turns into undying love and care for me after the abuse wasn't working and he realised I couldn't be brow beat into coming back again. Then there's a thud which I assume was him falling off his chair. Never spoke to him again but the company folded about a year later.
So I sit down and I'm about £2000 down then on salary and expenses that were missing. I had £250 in the bank, £400 rent due a week later, wife about to have a baby and an empty fridge. So fuck it. I sold all the stock I still had of the company on ebay (back when you had to take photos and get them developed and scanned and futz with cheques which was hard work), broke even and scraped a first pay cheque at a job just before my credit card melted into a puddle.
It took 10 years to get out of the hole and back to normality. NEVER put up with this for a second. If anyone treats you like this RUIN THEM before they ruin you, your life, your relationships and everyone else they go near. I don't usually advocate this attitude but the damage and destruction that type of person leaves is immense.
Because sometimes the situation is bad for your boss too, the company is in financial straits, miscommunication, {insert other extenuating circumstances}.
... but sometimes your boss really is just an asshole, liar, alcoholic, and/or a sociopath.
Never assume the later off the bat, but never completely discount the possibility either. Because it'll probably happen at least once in an average career.
So the difference doesn't really matter. You have a bad boss; take care of yourself first and don't let them push you around.
So? That's the boss's problem to deal with. You owe the company absolutely nothing beyond your contracted hours in exchange for your contracted salary.
I say this as an employer.
If your boss happens to be a cog in a broken machine, treating them like it's their fault isn't fair to them or you.
Of course, you can always quit (and usually should). But failing to determine root cause and mis-blaming your boss is about as useful as screaming at the gate attendant when your flight gets a weather delay.
And someone who by choice decides to be (or remains) a cog in the broken machine, specifically at the point where it requires being nasty to someone, is fully responsible for that action and its consequences.
(Labor advocacy programs help balance the scales a little, if only because your advocate is predisposed to believe you and help you navigate the options available to you. But they're fairly thin on the ground in the UK and the US.)
Didn't have the cash or energy to start it off and after 5 years I didn't want to go back to that bit of my life and kick it all off again. Plus he folded the company after a bit so chance I'd get anything were near zero.
It is one of the reasons I am so very suspicious of folks who diminish the value of labor protections. Most of us end up downrange of some shady stuff at least once.
In case it's not clear, I have not had helpful experiences with HR.
Just sounds like a penny wise pound foolish story to me.
Where did I suggest that anyone "take on" the company?
So people go to extreme lengths and managers can get away with anything.
I’m super grateful for Microsoft to help me with my green card. However my life there was miserable and my manager frequently asked us to work weekends. Pagerduty was hell and I once came home at 5am from work.
F that.
I’m glad I wasn’t born in India. My Indian x-colleagues didn’t have that freedom simply due to where they were born.
I imagine Amazon is a worse slaveshop.
I've seen this many many times in all company sizes over last 15 yrs. I would steer clear of teams where most ppl are h1b indians.
1. Was working on a project without issues. Ex manager forced me to go back to India 3 times over a 9 month period. Every time my ex manager tells me to go back, I get ready packing and then he tells me stay for 3 more months. On the 3rd time, I said I am resigning. Now my manager doesn't want me to go to India. I got another job and went to resign. Manager indirectly threatens me that I won't get service letter (which is required for green card). I was afraid and ended up staying. It turns out my manager was lying to the customer also. Everytime, he will tell me to get ready to go back and then tell the customer that I have to go back due to visa issues. Customer had still some work for me, so they ask for 3 more months and this repeated 2 times. Each time, I would be under incredible stress. It was like telling someone waiting in jail for their death sentence that they will be hung 2 weeks from now, then a few days later tell them it was extended.
2. Came to India for my marriage. Forced me to cancel my honeymoon and work from India for 1 month for another customer while lying to the original customer that I extended my vacation. I spend one whole day in my room sad and angry. I still want to beat up the manager who made me do this even though this happened over 2 years ago.
3. Asked me to work for a temporary customer in another state. I didn't want to, but agreed since I was afraid and worked for around 5-7 weeks while staying in hotel. This was before marriage. After marriage, again asked me to work for this customer for 1 month. My wife is completely dependent on me because she cannot drive in US. I said I cannot go because my wife is alone. Lead told me to ask my wife to stay in hotel for 1 month with me. I didn't want to because she already spend 3 weeks in a hotel with me instead of honeymoon. Thankfully manager agreed and sent someone else.
4. Forced me to relocate to another state. I didn't want to. After a lot of pressure, I sort of agreed and asked to at least adjust my salary for the rent increase. The customer was paying $20+ per hour more if I was working from the new state, so I expected at least a little bit of raise. Manager lied to me saying he will take care of it. I didn't trust him because there were many stories from my ex colleagues of being treated like a donkey with a carrot tied to their front. Sent him an email asking him to reply. He didn't. At one point, he said "I will snip you". He had said a similar line once before - "I will cut you". At that time, I didn't even understand he was threatening me, I was wondering why is he talking about circumcising me. This time I understood it was a threat. Got everything ready for move and told him I am ready for the move, and as expected he said HR didn't approve the raise which is a lie.
5. Moving expenses was about $3500. Getting that refunded was another big battle. Thankfully, my manager helped me in this and got the money after about 1.5 months.
6. Got RFE for visa extension. Employer waited till the last moment to submit the response to USCIS. I couldn't drive because license duration is tied to visa. Asked my manager and immigration team multiple times to speed up. No. They submitted the response only 5 days before the last day. So couldn't drive for 3 months. Since I was in a new state, I had no friends to help me either. Employer did pay for my Uber for these 3 months, but still I hated every moment of it, especially because of a few bad experiences with Uber drivers. Thankfully, I had sent my wife back to India before all this happened, otherwise I don't know how I would have managed.
Even though my visa got extended for another 3 years, I threw away everything and came back to India.
It does somewhat establish a baseline capability of being able to put people through emotionally not nice things.
I suppose that any manager whether they are malignant or they are really just ordinary, well intentioned people have to at some point not of their own volition do exactly that because of legitimate business reasons outside of their control. So when push comes to shove if they can prove they are capable of handling those responsibilities then I guess that sends a useful signal???
Abusing it out of some childish sense of revenge is just unfortunate beyond belief.
No such thing. They are being paid by someone.
[1] https://laborpains.org/2018/06/04/union-president-pay-watch-...
Also, union leaders aren't bureaucrats.
Also, bureaucrats serve a useful function.
There's actually not a big difference, after one factors out the remarkable level of spin you've worked into your characterizations.
How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?
If journalists focused on developer unions for even a fraction of the time they spend criticizing Amazon, I'd bet we'd have some blogs that sound just as damning as the one the author has written.
Are you saying the Amazon has a developer union that could have helped defend this employee? Citation needed. AFAIK, developer unions have been advocated for, but don't actually exist (in a functional form, in the US at least).
If you object that people in large-organization senior management roles can make that much, you won't believe what many corporate CEOs make. It'll blow your mind!
https://laborpains.org/:
> LaborPains is a joint blog of the Center for Union Facts and the Enterprise Freedom Action Committee.
> We expose the truth about labor unions and the pain they impose upon free enterprise.
So, basically garbage anti-union propaganda. You might as well have just linked this video https://youtu.be/ONKkoiszVSs?t=17.
Having a union represent you at work is like having a lawyer represent you at court. Sure some rugged individualists choose to represent themselves pro se, but we all know how smart that is.
I'd rather pay attention and vote with my feet.
there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.
read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.
"worst system but best we've had" and all that - at least labor would have a fighting chance
Unions are almost invariably democratic; where seniority rules are adopted by a union (and this is far from universal), they tend to be adopted democratically,and not to replace democratic control of the union, so these are not opposed concepts.
But does the profession of acting strive to be meritocratic as much as software development? It appears that fame (which is probably correlated with how good of an actor someone is, but probably only weakly) has a much bigger effect in acting.
Not necessarily. You can have union representation and maintain a meritocracy at the same time.
But I also observe that the industry is not nearly as much of a meritocracy as we like to pretend anyway.
Nowhere is a perfect meritocracy but a union that did not actively work against meritocracy would not be working in the interest of its average member.
So does management. The difference is, you can vote shitty union reps off the island.
We don't want union cruft within a hundred miles of tech.
It's already far too hard to shed incompetent people.
Solidarity is the only way that workers can negotiate on an even playing field.
If you think politics isn't an implicit reality of any organized group of human beings, I've got a bridge to sell you.
One may not like militarism, but even the most extreme anarcho-libertarians see the benefit in having a military to protect them.
Unions are the same way. They are the only way you, as an employee, can meaningfully protect yourself.
At any rate, it's definitely arguable that office politics in tech have gotten worse and worse in the last few decades, as more money and money-men have poured into the industry. Compare Silicon Valley now to how it was prior to the Netscape IPO, and the toxicity has definitely grown.
Politics may be inherent, but the type of politics can vary in quality and livability. Ditto for the politics in a union.
My speculation on this is two fold. The first is that putting things in those surveys is a "permanent record" or at least "yearly review" issue for your manager. So you are (justly or not) harming them, and they will tend to respond to being harmed. The other is that, if you think about it... if your manager is not a person who you can talk to about a problem in a non-anonymous way... doing it anonymously is not likely to help, it's probably better to just quietly leave.
Rather than fight to change or improve this system, you gloat about knowing how to survive in it. So strange.
When a prospective employee trash-talks their former employer, they'll do it to you, too.
No hire.
Of course, there's a scale. "I don't like their tech decisions"--yeah, that's an eyebrow raise, unless there's some real meat there. But I'm never going to judge somebody poorly for saying plainly that they felt disrespected or mistreated at a job, because it's happened to me too.
It's not just me. You will often talk yourself out of getting hired and many will not pursue a relationship with you if you indulge in it. There is nothing to gain by engaging in it.
Even better, game the system and give them glowing reviews.
For example I had noticed the feedback "anonymous" surveys they were sending had a location field as in employee's country, city, town, etc. Well, in a distributed team it's pretty clear who is who based on that location. So I just gave them glowing and happy reviews.
Same when leaving a company. Nice and happy feedback like "I'd love to work here more, but the tech landscape is so exciting and varied and I'd like to gain experience in other areas..."
This guy is a lunatic.
We are lucky as developers to have a fairly easy way of life but I still follow my Grandpa's advice from years working in the shipyards of Glasgow:
* Never be loyal to a company unless its your own
* When things are good, think about leaving
* Keep your mouth shut and don't gossip
At any big company, your management chain is the #1 influence on the quality of your culture. My experience at Amazon has been extremely positive, but then my org head is a great guy, so it's all been in line with my expectations. I've also left critical feedback through the Amazon Connect survey for my immediate manager and not suffered for it. That manager, as far as I can tell, made no effort to deanonymize the feedback, and addressed the issue fairly in a team meeting.
So, YMMV, but I would certainly encourage skilled devs, artists and designers to come help us make great games. :-)
While it is great you are happy and defend your company, your experience might not match others.
I don't want to claim that anyone's experience isn't valid, just that it doesn't match mine.
Remember, your boss is ultimately not your friend, certainly not in a professional setting. An individual contributor/manager relationship fundamentally must be adversarial, because one side holds all the power, and even if the manager breaks trust the worst thing that will happen is the IC's replacement will be less productive for a few months.
When managers have this much power over their reports and there's no way for someone to fight back against their manager, it's no wonder that shitty managers are so common. It's a situation ripe for abuse.
Its hard to know: Is everyone indoctrinated? Are they addicted to the paychecks? Is the sense that there are bad things happening but its being handled properly?
By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems.
The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites.
This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them. They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it.
All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on"
So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.
For reference: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
Bezos has corporate principles that led to his success. Many people respect that. I personally do no -- I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason, but I digress that what he does do in the business world has worked with immeasurable success.
(My final random point -- I find it kind of ironic that a man who stresses so much that his leadership team have skilled writing and memos instead of powerpoints let his security team autogenerate a security bulletin about a serious docker CVE. I mean it's very obvious to me that this was written by a bot https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-... -- I think it's a tad tacky to be using a bot to generate your security bulletins)
I totally agree that being disciplined and challenging oneself to grow is really important. Still, I wouldn’t want suggest someone to stay in a bad place if it’s actually a detriment to their health or quality of life. It’s really hard to find a balance for me personally, and I don’t feel I can give concrete advice on the matter to others.
That's some sanctimonious bullshit.
There is zero public information indicating any cheating. We know that there was a trial separation. We don't know what agreements there were. We do know that the divorce is being presented as being amiable.
My attitude is that if his soon to be ex wife is not upset, then random strangers like yourself have zero business being upset on her behalf. You aren't part of or privy to his relationships or agreements. It is none of your business.
Unless you have non-public information indicating that he violated any agreement with MacKezie, the best information available to you is information in places like https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/09/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-div... - which indicates that the relationship began after both couples separated, and was known by both ex partners.
Which would indicate that this isn't cheating. No matter how much it offends your sensibilities.
(He certainly implicitly admits that he is in a relationship with Ms Sanchez. But, at least in my book, that's only cheating if it happened before his "trial separation" with his wife, and I don't see that he's admitted that it did.)
Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.
It’s just not in the corporate DNA to care. The fish rots from the head.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xm4dy/ambulances-were-ca...
The second reason is that people tend to write about negative experiences more often. You see this all the time in Internet forums where people complain about products they bought. There could be millions of happy customers of a product, but the few thousand that got a defective one or had a bad experience with customer support will loudly and vocally scream about it on the Internet, which at first glance, seeing hundreds or thousands of reports of a terrible product, might seem bad, but the millions of people who used the product and had no problems with it are not going to write about it.
Disclaimer: I've worked at Amazon for a few years now, and I've had 3 decent managers and one terrible one. The good thing about Amazon is that it is relatively frictionless to switch teams.
I didn’t want to paint an unrepresentive picture for people that might prevent them from pursuing legitimately good opportunities. Ultimately, this rubs some people the wrong way because they feel it’s the same as covering up issues. I definitely saw a lot of incredulity that I, and others could even have a good experience.
If it’s my truthful experience at Amazon that it was generally a good job and I didn’t see much of any of this stuff personally, what would you have me do?
Really the poisonous thing that stands out for me is the Visa experience. Amazon (now) has a pretty liberal internal transfer system that I have seen work really well for a lot of people. But a truly vindictive and sufficiently interpersonally skilled manager can still pin down an employee with what happened to the OP. In such a case, a citizen can walk away and find another company that's a better fit for them. But when they're in H1B land, it is so much harder. It would be so much better for the industry if the system were much more flexible.
Import Caveat to your last point: If you make games for Amazon, you give up your ability to make them in your spare time. Amazon has pretty aggressive game development policies around side projects.
I know that you direct management and peers can be one of the greatest influences for good or bad for the broader team. A person like the Manager in this situation is a clearly going to create more problems for other team members in the future.
Amazon, more than any other company that I know of, has a ton of ex employees whose opinion either amounts to "Amazon was horrible" or "I thought Amazon was great for a long time, then it went south and in retrospect can't believe I put up with it for so long." So despite your current positive opinion, there is a good chance that you will some day be singing a very different song.
I am personally glad I worked there, because it was a fascinating experience. But I wouldn't want to work there again, nor would I recommend it to a friend.
BUT, and I truly believe this in the depths of my soul, everyone is as evil as their most sociopathic executive.
Everyone is contributing to the same bottom line, some people just sell out for less.
Whose more evil, the hitman that won’t kill for under 1 million or the hitman that will do it for minimum wage?
These must be memorized for any manager at Amazon and are part of the interview process.
http://whartonmagazine.com/blogs/learn-from-amazons-leadersh...
Choice quotes.
"Leaders are right a lot."
"Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."
"Leaders are right a lot" isn't indoctrination to trust your manager implicitly because they are right. It's "Be a leader. Have good judgement. Work to improve it. As a result be right a lot"
Backbone one is also misunderstood: "Don't succumb to do the easy thing. Push back when you know when it's the right thing to do even if it's harder. BUT if you are overruled, and the group decision goes against it, don't try to fight it and undermine the decision, commit to the path."
Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact, "working" from home.
Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at home" when he's not actually "working" while at home, he's actually caring for his daughter?
People are confused. Working from home still means "working". It doesn't mean, be at home and do what I want but get paid, or not work as hard.
Maybe he thinks it should mean: I'll get the work done on my own time. But, if the work needs to be done that day, he still needs to be WORKING from home - and not doing something else.
(With that said, it could still be a good-faith usage here -- like, he legitimately does work from home, and the therapy is relevant here because all the back-and-forth pickups would otherwise eat up much of the day.)
[1] Yes, I know -- never again.
Working from home often means that your (equivalent of) lunch break is a time you can spend elsewhere, e.g. take your child to therapy. You don't waste time commuting from your office if the doctor's office is nearby.
You can also spend more time for off-work activities in the middle of the day, but work until a later hour, again because you're not commuting back from the office.
As long as you get done what you planned to, and participate in whatever communications you planned to participate (video calls work well these days), I don't see why working from home would be a materially inferior way of working, at least if practiced in moderation.
Taking a day off is a different matter.
So, for example: If your commute takes twenty minutes and therapy is twenty minutes from your home taking someone to therapy who is at home takes 40 minutes if you do home office or between 60 and 80 minutes of you have to be at work.
Nowhere does it say that he wanted to do home office to take care of someone. That’s nonsensical and a nonsensical interpretation of what was said. The most straightforward interpretation is that this is a simple case of simplifying logistics.
does that help why this makes sense?
No need to jump to nefarious meaning. Also further he mentions how others in the team were working from home anyways once a week and he was ordered to come and sit at 7am.
I understand the need and curiousity to dissect each and every line but please don't let this 'one potentially, open to clarification' statement take everything else from the author.
I apologize if you didn't mean to, but since this is the top child of current top comment, I felt the need to. Let's not lose the forest for the trees.
> I need to bring her to therapy
imply that he doesn't have to be there all the time? And if therapy is only of short duration, nonetheless he could "set up shop" somewhere nearby and start working from remote, if he were allowed to do so.
And why get hung up on the term "from home" when it really means "from remote"? After all, his remote access won't be geo-fenced.
Dunno if you have kids but until a certain age, they don't "pack themselves". You can easily add 30 min. for a two year old, e.g.. Driving his daughter could easily take away 1hr in each direction.
If his colleagues don't show up until 11, instead of making him show up at the office at 7, he could easily manage working from remote and driving around his daughter.
Normally I'm the free market guy in those situations, but I have a really hard time in this case to not see Uwais Khan as a complete ahole.
I have heard pretty horrible stories from x-amazonians as well.
(Amazon's latest 10-K: "We employed approximately 647,500 full-time and part-time employees as of December 31, 2018.")
While I didn't have a bad manager there (my managers were actually nice people), it is Amazon's corporate culture that turns the place into a 'dog eat dog', arse-hole driven, development. Managers have to run around and cover their arse, as in the first or second misstep, they are out. This pressure filters down to employees who are often thrown against very tight deadlines without much corporate support (ie. basic training on new tech, or even clear coding review standards, and more). Code reviews usually turned into: "Who screams the loudest wins".
Amazon tends to be notoriously 'cheap/frugal', to the point of lacking basic things that most work places take for granted. (I am not talking about cheap coffee and lack of perks, but not even throwing a Christmas party, even though the Kindle was a huge success and sold more than then even the more optimistic prediction). The company will not show/give a basic token of appreciation, even though the team is performing well. Hence, employee morale was not high, but people saw it just as a job. If you are 'young' and still learning and want to grow as a person, you will hate an environment like that.
But the worst abuse was done to H-1B folks like me.
1. Amazon abuses on people that are on H-1B and need their greencard application going to stay in the country. They delay your application at every step, to the point that you realize that something that should take 1 year, it will take 3-4 years at the given pace, or maybe not even done ever. They dragged their feet, and played with your life as a simple leverage tool. (even after talking to the VP of HR, and while getting: 'Yes, it will be done', nothing got done, and things got dragged out anyway).
2. Amazon abuses on people that need some flexibility (due to family reasons). I remember really as at some point I had to pick up the project of co-worker as she had a mental break-down at work. (crying and all). Reason? She needed some time off due to children/family reason and she couldn't get it as 'we were on a tight deadline'.
My first week at work there, there was a 'goodbye' party at my team, where one of the managers/lead engineers was leaving. The reason: Burnout. (I learned that part later).
3. Their back dated options, (i.e. you get most of your stock compensation only on your 4th year), are done in purpose, as they know you probably will not put up with it until then, and leave the money on the table by leaving. Most people stay 1-2 years and move on.
So, yeah, I think Amazon is a bad actor/employee to even software engineers (who tend to have options). I can't imagine their warehouse and lower level employees.
When the NYTimes article came out, I thought it pictured a very accurate portrait of the company. Perhaps things have changed, perhaps they are still the same, but I usually do not recommend friends to work there. They fully deserve their bad rap, and I am glad NYC didn't subsidize their abuse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I applied day one after joining (my manager knew that I joined with that expectation so he approved right away) and they started working on it immediately. I had some delays with the lawyers but in general it went pretty smoothly.
There is long standing evidence that Amazon actively manipulates social media to try to paint working in the warehouses as a great job.
HN tends to have an outsized representation of prospective H1B candidates.
Added up, it's really hard to take any of the positive comments from "Amazon Employees" seriously in this post.
> I am sure in the future Mr Bezos will be placed in one line with Adolf Hitler as an example of genocide.
> There are 2 most difficult parts in the rally:
> - to get courage to start
> - to make a banner
> Courage is easier. Few YouTube videos about Martin Luther King, AC/DC song "Thunderstruck" and I am ready to fight.
> To be honest, in the morning fear of public shame almost caused symptoms of bed wetting.
> But Deadpool told me how to manage this fear. [embedded youtube video from the deadpool movie here]
> They can argue citing last words: Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Why didn't I commit? I ask: decision taken by whom? If my manager and his managers all the way till Bezos support oppression, should I respect their opinion?
> Then the only authority here is God. I say: Once a decision is determined BY GOD, I commit wholly. But God didn't ask me to stop protesting yet.
> Thus, most of NYT Amazon examples are really cruel and inhuman. Employees are punished because their parents are dying, their children are disabled etc. I hear shaking Hitler in his coffin. These are not single examples of "bad" managers. This is a company culture. Official company policies support the CULTURE worse than genocide. During the genocide, Jews were not treated in that way.
> If I don't find printer today, tomorrow nobody will know about horrors of Mr Bezos.
> How can I do leafleting without printer?
> Where are all these librarians?!!!!!!
> Btw - got to library. The one near of UW was open even during the "storm"... How can you call this nice Christmas snow a "storm"? I thought the storm is when Dorothy flies in her house through the sky... In Russia we have such storm 9 months a year with a temperature of -22 F.
> Anyway I printed almost 300 sheets of dirt about Amazon. Tomorrow 300 Amazonians will know the True. Jeff, I am coming.
> I was thinking I am afraid of people. But then I realized: in fact people are afraid of me. Now I feel I am more powerful and more free than anybody else. Amazon employees are restricted in their freedoms: they are forced to spend most time of their lives to do the work they hate. They are restricted to speak.
> I am free to speak and Jeff Bezos with all his billions can't close my mouth and can't prevent me from walking on the street with my banner.
> I like that. Like a student who lost virginity. I mean, well, you know.
> But today it will be incredible day. I am going to Whole foods store at Denny way. If Spheres s a heart of Amazon, Whole foods is its stomach. This store is always full of people and engineers. God bless me.
Before the outrage machine gets going, probably worth reading that and asking how reliable of a narrator this is.