I've had this happen a few times over the years. It's really tough.
In one case it was a very popular and looked-up-to engineer. Out for a jog one day and an unknown heart defect dropped him dead before he hit the ground. People were very broken up over it and donated food and all sorts of things to his widow and kids. I think a small charity was set up in his name.
In another, nobody really knew the guy outside of his group. But he had had a very bad cough for a few months that to be honest, had become kind of a workplace annoyance and was blamed for everything from loss of productivity to a rash of URIs that ran through the office for a few weeks. He didn't show up one day and everybody assumed he had finally decided to take some time off and attend his cough. The next day it was announced he had died. There was no further information and nobody outside of his immediate group and management really knew anything about him or how to reach out to his family. His desk was filled the next week.
Finally, a guy I knew and my friends all used to work with, broke off to try his hand in the restaurant business. Things didn't go well and mired in debt and suffering from some mental illness issues took his wife and daughter hostage and committed suicide (his wife and kid made it out with very minor wounds). I think everybody was in such shock over such a mild mannered person doing such a crazy thing that people wanted to get over it as quickly as possible and pretend like we all didn't know him at all.
In the first case, everybody really took a day or two to come to terms that it had happened. Work really ground to a halt. People showed up to work, but took lots of time out of the office in coffee shops talking and processing the event. We named a room after him and had some ceremonies, everybody showed up to his funeral. It really took a few weeks for everything to get back to normal.
In the other two people really just carried on pretty normally by the next day or two.
In the last case, because of the way he went out, very violent and unpleasant, I think there was definitely an effort on the part of people to just...forget about him and pretend he had never existed. There was some occasional chatting about the event and how unexpected it was. But it was really detached like an event on the news involving a minor C-grade celebrity. But of course, we hadn't worked with him in a couple years at that point so his impact in our day-to-day was pretty minimal.
I think it really has to do with office popularity to be honest. If you're buried up in a corner someplace and don't interact with anybody...it's easier for people to get over it.
Right. What time of year was it in the first case? I would think it's easier to get over if it's the summer or around Christmas when people are going home for vacations.
That's a good question, it was...10, 11 years ago? I think it was spring or early summer. Looking back, I think the endless ceremonies, reminiscing, room naming...his office was a shrine for a couple months and nobody emptied it of his personal affects until his widow came and asked...I think it extended out the difficult feelings longer than it would have if everybody had been driven back to work or gone on vacations or something.
Someone in my company died of illness - someone quite young so it was a surprise and a shock to all around him. It has been more than a year and his computers are still on his desk...
My first day on the job I erased the whiteboard in my office. When a couple people walked in and saw what I was erasing (a short inspirational phrase on the corner of the board), everyone had a look of horror on their face.
It turned out that a close friend of the company had been in the office and written that phrase on the board. He died the next day. That was 2 years before I erased it, and everyone had been keeping it as the last thing to remember him by.
An Exec I worked for died. I was fairly new and didn't really know him, so I just kept working. Others were a lot more affected. I remember there being group meetings to talk about his life etc. After about a week, someone said in one of the meetings, "That's enough crying, back to work." Seemed harsh at the time, but everybody went back to work. A room was named in his honor. Life goes on.
I worked with a business analyst once who dropped off his laptop for me to take a look at on a Friday afternoon. Odd, because we did regularly scheduled maintenance and he brought his external monitor in.
On Monday morning his mother called to report he had killed himself.
It was so abrupt and took the group by surprise. I do remember thinking that it would change everything. Life went on, though.
Reminds me a little too much of the regrets of the dying[1]. Ingrained deep within our mammalian brains is the instinctual desire for community and personal intimacy. We'd do well to remember ourselves and what makes us happy before we're reflecting from our own death bed.
A while back I found a website (or article?) that interviewed elderly people who where essentially on their deathbeds. What do you regret, what would you do differently, etc. etc.
Without fail, every single person said they wish they went to work less, and spent more time with their loved ones.
I personally, am not good at learning lessons from other people, usually I have to learn "the hard way". I hope I can learn this one from others.
> Without fail, every single person said they wish they went to work less, and spent more time with their loved ones.
I always wonder how much truth there is to that though? I mean, if you actually loved your job and preferred working to spending time with your family, wouldn't you still feel obliged to give that answer?
I don't think so. Someone saying this on their deathbed is not necessarily opining about how much they loved work vs. family in the moment. They're assigning a long-term absolute value on the amount of time they spent with each.
Say you spend 80 hours a week at a job you absolutely love, and 20 hours a week with a family you kind-of-get-along-with. At the end of your life, it might be that you decide "time spent at work" no matter how much you enjoyed it in the moment is just less fulfilling than "time spent at home" even when the day-to-day of home life is not as immediately gratifying.
Well put it this way: if you say you wish you'd spent more time with your family that's not going to upset anyone. If you say you wish you'd spent less time with them and more time doing something else, that's not very nice.
This has happened in my experience before, and it is one of the strongest reasons for good source control that is infrequently considered. It was a tragedy when a very wonderful and dear researcher in our group died suddenly, especially to his three children and wife that he left behind. It was also a great loss as well that we could never recover some key bits of source code from his computer, and that a very promising cancer drug trial was derailed because we couldn't articulate why the compounds were chosen for study in the first place.
He died of a heart attack at age 42 after pulling three 90+ hour weeks. It completely changed my attitude towards work. May he rest in peace.
Just yesterday I was nearly run over by a taxi (in Seattle, what?) running a red light. As I realized he wasn't stopping I thought to myself, "at least all my code is checked in and pushed".
When I was learning how to drive a car my instructor told me: see the light turned green, hold on, wait for an idiot, then wait for a taxi cab, then go slowly.
Similarly, my mother always told me to drive as if the oncoming person who appears to be stopping is NOT, and that people with turn signals on are liars or forgetful, and will continue straight, when evaluating safety of turning right.
Sometimes it feels like I drive like the stereotypical granny, but this has saved my bacon several times in the past two decades.
In 2004 when I was working in Seattle, in the course of a year there were three accidents on 5th and Battery that were exact mirrors, IE: car going too fast, hits a pedestrian on the same corner. I don't remember the first, the second a German tourist was killed, and the third my co-worker and I were walking to lunch over at the Two Bells. She was hit. I'm not a superstitious or religious person, but something just didn't seem right and I lingered a few seconds on the curb and jumped back just in time - good or I'm sure we would have both been killed. Luckily she survived, and I'd even say it was a (positive) catalyst in major life changes for her - she made a job change, moved to a different city, took up new hobbies, got in shape, etc. After the event, I'll just say that: a) the city of Seattle is completely negligent in not fixing the traffic flow in that spot, b) the Seattle Police Department is truly evil (their handling of the "investigation" afterwards was appalling) and c) you will never erase the image of a car hitting a co-worker / friend/ other human being from your memory. Work is a good thing and should be fulfilling, but something like that is a good reminder that work is just one part of our life.
I know that intersection, as it's just on the edge of downtown, the traffic is thin enough to let people think they can go faster than they really should.
When I've worked at places that had poor source control and/or poor documentation, I've resorted to trying to push for it by walking around saying, "Suppose I (or fill-in-the-blank) get hit by a bus? You'll all be up a creek."
In Japan it happens so often they have their own word for it: karoshi.
Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on their work while a manager urgently calls for white-gloved personnel to spirit the corpse away to the undertaker.
Karoushi incidents are national news and are rare (although overwork is common, for reasons that are too much to get into in this post). These also happen in Korea and other parts of Asia; more so than Japan now, possibly.
I'm breath taken by the casual disregard for life that you imply the Japanese have.
Busy people, in general, avoid getting caught in other people's problems. Tokyo is filled with people who are busy. They may ignore beggars on the street and may not give up their seats. Taking it from there to an extreme (that they are immune to any fear of death) is an ugly reaction.
During the 3/11 earthquake, I was shocked and appalled by the stupidity of one of my co-workers who went on coding as normal while the building shook. (It was experienced as a Shindo 6 earthquake in Yokohama, so it was quite strong - I never ever experienced anything like it in my life). He probably saw it as macho, but it was dangerous - other people then were confused as what to do. He eventually left the company for not being very competent. (Good riddance.)
For every person like him, there were 50-100 people on the staff who were shocked, shaking, crying or scared. I find they reacted pretty much as I'd expect people in any school in Canada would have reacted. It certainly was more-or-less how we reacted when one of our class fellows put an end to his life.
I find it distasteful that people fetishise another group of people (especially people with the same capitalist democratic strain of lifestyle) to the extent that they basically superhuman or inhuman.
過労死 is just a compound word basically consisting of "too much work death."
Using your "they have a word for it so it's common and blithely ignored" logic, you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries simply because there's a word for it.
You don't find it a little suspicious that there's a widespread medical euphemism for "this baby suddenly asphyxiated and we don't know how?" OK, not all SIDS cases are infanticide, most probably aren't, but it's nearly impossible to tell for sure.
What the hell are you talking about? People don't die from work exhaustion at their desks in Japan. I live in Japan and I've never even remotely heard of anything like that through my years here. And Karoshi is not even used the way you pretend it's used. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
There was a rash of news reports about fifteen years ago suggesting exactly that: that people regularly die at their desks in Japan from overwork. Since then, I've read that it was a vast exaggeration, but perhaps the person to whom you're responding missed those reports. They may not know what they're talking about, but it's probably not entirely their fault.
well with Internet nowadays it's really easy to check the information compared to 15 years ago. There's really no excuse to write something as if you are sure of what you are saying without double checking, especially on these kind of topics.
People generally don't double-check things that make for interesting stories and fit their view of how the world works. And for almost everyone, when it comes to foreign places they have not personally visited, that view is made up of stereotypes frequently bordering on racism.
Obviously not a common thing, but it is a scary thought to think it's quite possible to work yourself to death in an office based environment. I'm sure many of us (including myself) can think of similar times in our lives when we worked this hard, heavily intoxicated with the energy poison of your choice, working multiple all nighters in a row. Even when you're young you're not invincible.
When I was working for an Indian out sourcing giant we had a 9 floored building each with a wide gallery. I liked working beyond 8pm and when I was about leave at 9pm I noticed a small crowd near one of the parking entrance.
Soon found that someone had jumped from one of those galleries. An sms from the individual to his elder brother blamed the extreme work pressure. Knowing his team and manager, surely that did not seem to be the case.
I was working as tech support at a manufacturing plant. As I'd be walking around a lot fixing things I got to know everyone fairly well.
Manuel was the production manager. A nice guy, always seemed relaxed but always got shit done. He had been working there for about six months.
One morning I get in and hear the news from the somewhat insensitive IT manager, can't even remember how he said it, just remember not liking him at all after that.
About an hour earlier Manuel had been waiting at a round-a-bout. A semi carrying a load of fuel comes down from an off ramp approaching the round-a-bout and the breaks begin to fail. The truck driver attempts to veer but then the trailer starts to skid and pivot.
It crashed to the ground in front of Manuel's car and everything explodes.
I drive past where it happened every time I go to visit my folks. It's been at least 15 years. Someone is still putting flowers there.
Some day soon, leave a flower yourself with a note — just what you said here, ‘nice guy, got shit done’. Let them know that someone else remembers him.
I've had this twice. Once to a car accident on the motorway in 2002. Once to a bizarre form of leukaemia such that (from our perspective) the guy had back pain on Thursday, and died over the Easter weekend by Tuesday in 2009.
Still think of them both from time to time. Some of my now-ex colleagues still comment on the anniversary of their passing on Facebook. I don't think I could honestly remember the dates if they didn't... Their names always stick with me though.
Colin’s boss is on vacation this week. He recorded a message by webcam.
He’s lying on his side on a hotel bed. He talks about the clarity of
Colin’s press releases as palm trees shudder in the wind behind him.
“I wish I had gotten to know him better,” he says. “He seemed nice.”
Reading this kind of made me rage...and sad.
Tragic, but the inequality, and the indifference free market creates, makes me steer clear away from corporate environments. I'd rather be a writer or an artist working on one's creation and dropping dead than die for someone's marginal materialistic desires.
I know this is just one way of looking at it, maybe the company was a great place to work at and the words alone do not carry justice.
Unsettling. Knowing that you can die at any moment, yet you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.
When I start a company, I don't want people below me or be insensitive. I'm gonna pay them well, make their work not overwhelming (by creating more software to automate and lighten their workload). Maybe I'm just young and naive. but I sure as shit not going to be an insensitive jerk to my partners in crime. Nobody is killing themselves or getting sick because of being overworked. Fuck that ferrari man, if someone kills themselves in the process of making money for you, I'd be devastated. I don't know how I'd feel when I turn old though, as your frontal cortex deteriorates, causing you to have less empathy and concern for your surrounding.
> you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.
If this is your attitude towards work for hire, then almost anything you do will be unfulfilling. Work to fulfill your own desires. For some, work is a means to an end. To others, the product of their work fulfills them. If you work to earn enough money to see your family thrive, then your work should be fulfilling because your family is provided for. If you work to enrich the lives of the markets you serve, your work should be fulfilling because you know that you are making the lives of others better in some marginal way.
I'd rather be a writer or an artist working on one's creation and dropping dead than die for someone's marginal materialistic desires.
It doesn't seem to me like he died "for" work.
People die, often randomly, and sometimes at surprisingly young ages. It's a Gompertz curve. With the Internet, we hear about it a lot more than we would have, 25 or 50 years ago (even though early death was more common in the past).
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I don't think we have any good reason to assume his death was work-related.
Except, people are more than supervisors. Maybe it's the vacation that he's been planning with his wife and kids for 5 years. You can just as easily make a rule like "To all parents: Family time is not work time. Not even a death at the office trumps that. No exceptions."
We had a fellow in our QA department pass away suddenly. He died at home from "heart failure". I think everyone assumed it was a drug overdose, amid hushed rumors of rather strange behavior during a previous-job Vegas trip. It was sad, because he did good work. Like this fellow, a lot of people simply had superficial contact with him.
I wish I could say that his death motivated me to have more meaningful contact with everyone. But it didn't; it simply made me realize that you can't force that even if you want to. At least not for me. Some people seem to have meaningful exchanges easier than others, and I'm just not one of those people.
Honestly, I've had a fear of being 'Colin' for years.. that if I were to be gone one day, all people I come in contact with, besides family and friends, would remember are the inconsequential things about me. Its an ego thing I'm sure -- that I feel I should be remembered.
I make an effort to have some real impact on as many people as I can. Something they would remember. I have no idea if I've been successful. All anyone really wants is to do something meaningful.
I hope that Colin had a great group of people outside work that could memorialize him properly.
A few of the folks that I know who are approaching 50 have started checking the obits in the paper frequently, so that they won't have an awkward encounter when they run into an acquaintance at the store, on the street, etc. and ask "How's so-and-so/our mutual acquaintance/your spouse?"
Oh god. We actually had a conversation about this here a while back, how the obituary industry is due to be disrupted... we hewed it through a few rounds of getting to the core problem and it ended up as a business idea for making a targeted version of Bang with Friends, "Bang with Widows".
I've been through this four times. Three died at home; one at work. These were all at small companies, so we all knew each other--many for decades, and over different jobs.
The last two passed away about eleven and twelve years ago.
One may think it's haunting to still see e-mails from them in my archives. But the really haunting thing is listening to them speak in the voice mails our phone system e-mailed back then. Voices from beyond.
I got a Facebook notification about a friend's birthday the other day, who passed on from brain cancer over two years ago. It is an eerie feeling, for a brief moment it's like she was still alive and well just everyone else on Facebook, and her death was just a bad dream.
I get spam PMs from my deceased cousin from a minor social networking site she joined. Her account has been compromised. I contacted support to provide obituaries and such, I hope they disabled the account. While I don't mind so much, getting these kinds of messages would be horrible for her father.
I had something like this happen at a small software company I worked about 15 years ago. Our owner had written a specialized program for his wife to sell on the side, but under the company's name. One weekend, after a very big fight, she ended up committing suicide after he'd left the house. The next week, they had me going through her email to get a list of customers she had been working with. I can't begin to tell you the amount of discomfort you feel going through a recently deceased person's email - especially when it was mixed with personal messages. I got in, found all the work related messages, forwarded them to my manager and got out - I couldn't bear to be in there any longer than I had to. No one at the company was very close with her, but it was still a complete shock.
I have to do that when my client's employees quit or are let go. Even though I know they are alive and healthy, I still often wonder if I will ever see them again in my life. So many people have come and gone over the years that I can't even remember. When I disable their account and archive their emails and documents, it feels like I am saying good bye to them for ever. Groupon's bots will soon find out that user 'jsmith@example.com' is no longer here.
My archives will be slightly larger but nightly backups of active users documents will get a bit quicker. I used to have lunch with you user 'rjackson' but now that you got fired for doing something pretty bad, we will most likely never talk again.
And with that one command, a person leaves my life forever.
I worked with someone who joined our development team as a junior. He was a bit aloof, and slightly arrogant. I moved on soon after he started, he IMed me for the contact details of a contractor we worked with, and that was the last I heard from him. I was not surprised to hear, a few months later, that the guy had been fired, because of his attitude.
Fast forward another few years, and I was Googling (or was it Facebook searching?) ex-colleagues who I'd lost touch with. My search led to news articles that referred to his death. He was killed in a bizarre road-rage incident, where he was clearly the aggressor.
His family had created a memorial page on Facebook, but hadn't reported him deceased. I reported his FB profile as deceased, it was memorialized and I moved on.
I spoke to the ex-coworker about what happened (the same one who told me about him being fired a few years earlier), and he pointed out how kind the eulogies were- not really describing the arrogant prick we worked with.
I walked into work one day, and in my email was a remembrance note about a coworker who had just died. I did not know him, but in the email there was a picture of him fly fishing, and then another picture of him standing by his wife. He was an overweight, balding man in a Wal-mart jacket. Something about his "everyday, average guy" look scared me. I never knew him and if it weren't for the email, I'd never have known of him.
I grew angry, and could not figure out why. Was I sucked back into this reality that we all die when I had been working hard to deny it? Was it that someone could die, and some stranger like me had no interest or comprehension of his accomplishment? Was it that I only judged people by their accomplishment, when hypocritically, I had none of my own? Why did I suddenly hate this man, who I never knew existed, and only knew because of his death?
He was a father. He surely comforted his children on the first day of school. He went shopping for them on their birthdays. He had loved ones who grieved for him. Loved ones who had no talent to describe how great he was to them, but only knew he was great to them.
I still don't understand the oddness of my reaction, or why it still haunts me. We are all born in a blur of a gigantic population, and he was simply deleted from my inbox as my company insisted I delete my emails when it approached 150 mgb capacity.
A classmate fell to his death from his apartment's terrace in a skyscraper a few months ago. We were just coming back for our second year of Grad school. He was full of life, working on a startup for which he had won some funding via a competition, spending the summer at an Angel investor group, serving as a favorite TA for a top VC professor. He was a self-made immigrant and the best parts of life were right ahead of him. Nobody knew what happened, but it hit too close to home.
His parents requested that his name was not mentioned on social media until they had a chance to take him home to Europe and tell their family at home. We got together to honor him and express condolences to family and after a week or two, things went back to normal on the outside. On the inside questions still remained, not about what happened, but about the implications it had on us, his classmates, who are just like him in too many ways to count.
Yeah, I think it would go well with that bored, disconnected tone talking about terrible, inhuman things.
JACK (V.O.)
I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula.
....
JACK (V.O.)
Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply
it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the
result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times
B times C equals X...
JACK
If X is less than the cost of a recall ... we don't do one.
At one company where I worked, I resented the fact that the executive assistant to the CEO made more than I; after all, she was non-technical and "simply a secretary". Then she had a heart attack at her desk and died instantly. I felt guilty for my thoughts and resolved to find out exactly what her job entailed.
About 2 years later, her replacement was struck by an aneurysm at her desk and died several weeks later. I had been interacting her a lot for work-related projects and had had learned how stressful, difficult and important that job was and did not begrudge her her salary at all.
One of my close relatives passed away this year. She was the partner in a professional services firm, and well like by her staff. The entire company had a day off on the day of her funeral, and many of them were distressed by it. It was not a shock as she had been ill for quite some time, but it does entail an adjustment.
This is going to become more of a common occurence as the baby boom generation start moving towards an era of high mortality and are in senior positions. There are actually companies around which can help with transitioning through a period like this, including grief counselling for staff, strategies, etc. I worked with someone on a project once who worked for one of these firms. Up until that point, I had never even considered that they would exist.
I have personally experienced this on five occasions in the work place. I can say that only once did no one have any idea that there was an issue. I have seen CO's, junior enlisted, and the inbetween. The powers of self loathing are in my experience not the driver, the most dangerous force is self confirmed failure. The type or scale of the failure does not matter, only the persons value of that failure matter.
That being said.
Go in to work tomorrow and make a forceful effort to engage with anyone that you think may have any issue with failure overwhelming them. The only weapon that can help is others.
Are you talking about suicide? The man in the article died of natural causes.
Even so, I totally agree with regards to failure and its magnitude not necessarily (or even frequently) having a relationship to the self loathing one can feel due to that failure.
I struggle with this a couple times a year. Holding one's self to overly high standards can be unhealthy.
I am talking about suicide. I felt the article was mostly about that thought process with the reality being kind of the side note.
When I have run across people that I thought were having a hard time with failure, they are usually measuring themselves against the completely self contrived version of the peer that they see as being better. My context may be skewed, but the guys that have the hardest time are the ones that thought no one else was having any issues. This is of course a symptom of the military culture, but can play out in the tech world as the insanely successful skew the perception of failure, upward. By that I mean tech people measure themselves against, not the just doing fine peer, but to the exploding all expectations peer, which is completely improbable and truly self defeating.
202 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadIn one case it was a very popular and looked-up-to engineer. Out for a jog one day and an unknown heart defect dropped him dead before he hit the ground. People were very broken up over it and donated food and all sorts of things to his widow and kids. I think a small charity was set up in his name.
In another, nobody really knew the guy outside of his group. But he had had a very bad cough for a few months that to be honest, had become kind of a workplace annoyance and was blamed for everything from loss of productivity to a rash of URIs that ran through the office for a few weeks. He didn't show up one day and everybody assumed he had finally decided to take some time off and attend his cough. The next day it was announced he had died. There was no further information and nobody outside of his immediate group and management really knew anything about him or how to reach out to his family. His desk was filled the next week.
Finally, a guy I knew and my friends all used to work with, broke off to try his hand in the restaurant business. Things didn't go well and mired in debt and suffering from some mental illness issues took his wife and daughter hostage and committed suicide (his wife and kid made it out with very minor wounds). I think everybody was in such shock over such a mild mannered person doing such a crazy thing that people wanted to get over it as quickly as possible and pretend like we all didn't know him at all.
In the other two people really just carried on pretty normally by the next day or two.
In the last case, because of the way he went out, very violent and unpleasant, I think there was definitely an effort on the part of people to just...forget about him and pretend he had never existed. There was some occasional chatting about the event and how unexpected it was. But it was really detached like an event on the news involving a minor C-grade celebrity. But of course, we hadn't worked with him in a couple years at that point so his impact in our day-to-day was pretty minimal.
I think it really has to do with office popularity to be honest. If you're buried up in a corner someplace and don't interact with anybody...it's easier for people to get over it.
It turned out that a close friend of the company had been in the office and written that phrase on the board. He died the next day. That was 2 years before I erased it, and everyone had been keeping it as the last thing to remember him by.
I worked with a business analyst once who dropped off his laptop for me to take a look at on a Friday afternoon. Odd, because we did regularly scheduled maintenance and he brought his external monitor in.
On Monday morning his mother called to report he had killed himself.
It was so abrupt and took the group by surprise. I do remember thinking that it would change everything. Life went on, though.
[1] http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html
Without fail, every single person said they wish they went to work less, and spent more time with their loved ones.
I personally, am not good at learning lessons from other people, usually I have to learn "the hard way". I hope I can learn this one from others.
I always wonder how much truth there is to that though? I mean, if you actually loved your job and preferred working to spending time with your family, wouldn't you still feel obliged to give that answer?
Say you spend 80 hours a week at a job you absolutely love, and 20 hours a week with a family you kind-of-get-along-with. At the end of your life, it might be that you decide "time spent at work" no matter how much you enjoyed it in the moment is just less fulfilling than "time spent at home" even when the day-to-day of home life is not as immediately gratifying.
I mourn for Colin. And I mourn for the dry wind, devoid of intimacy, that blows out across the open plan stage of our working lives.
He died of a heart attack at age 42 after pulling three 90+ hour weeks. It completely changed my attitude towards work. May he rest in peace.
True story.
When I was learning how to drive a car my instructor told me: see the light turned green, hold on, wait for an idiot, then wait for a taxi cab, then go slowly.
Sometimes it feels like I drive like the stereotypical granny, but this has saved my bacon several times in the past two decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadcraft
Luckily, nobody got hit by a bus, but we all wound up very diligent at source control.
Sararimen fall over dead at their desks, and others simply avert their eyes and focus on their work while a manager urgently calls for white-gloved personnel to spirit the corpse away to the undertaker.
Nobody even misses a beat. The work must go on.
I'm breath taken by the casual disregard for life that you imply the Japanese have.
During the 3/11 earthquake, I was shocked and appalled by the stupidity of one of my co-workers who went on coding as normal while the building shook. (It was experienced as a Shindo 6 earthquake in Yokohama, so it was quite strong - I never ever experienced anything like it in my life). He probably saw it as macho, but it was dangerous - other people then were confused as what to do. He eventually left the company for not being very competent. (Good riddance.)
For every person like him, there were 50-100 people on the staff who were shocked, shaking, crying or scared. I find they reacted pretty much as I'd expect people in any school in Canada would have reacted. It certainly was more-or-less how we reacted when one of our class fellows put an end to his life.
I find it distasteful that people fetishise another group of people (especially people with the same capitalist democratic strain of lifestyle) to the extent that they basically superhuman or inhuman.
過労死 is just a compound word basically consisting of "too much work death."
Using your "they have a word for it so it's common and blithely ignored" logic, you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries simply because there's a word for it.
It does, but most cases can be covered up as SIDS.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/nyregion/investigating-a-r...
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
Obviously not a common thing, but it is a scary thought to think it's quite possible to work yourself to death in an office based environment. I'm sure many of us (including myself) can think of similar times in our lives when we worked this hard, heavily intoxicated with the energy poison of your choice, working multiple all nighters in a row. Even when you're young you're not invincible.
Soon found that someone had jumped from one of those galleries. An sms from the individual to his elder brother blamed the extreme work pressure. Knowing his team and manager, surely that did not seem to be the case.
"it's not the words that are said, it's the words you hear".
I was working as tech support at a manufacturing plant. As I'd be walking around a lot fixing things I got to know everyone fairly well.
Manuel was the production manager. A nice guy, always seemed relaxed but always got shit done. He had been working there for about six months.
One morning I get in and hear the news from the somewhat insensitive IT manager, can't even remember how he said it, just remember not liking him at all after that.
About an hour earlier Manuel had been waiting at a round-a-bout. A semi carrying a load of fuel comes down from an off ramp approaching the round-a-bout and the breaks begin to fail. The truck driver attempts to veer but then the trailer starts to skid and pivot.
It crashed to the ground in front of Manuel's car and everything explodes.
I drive past where it happened every time I go to visit my folks. It's been at least 15 years. Someone is still putting flowers there.
I'll be heading to the folks place for Christmas next week. I think I'll drop off some flowers on the way.
Still think of them both from time to time. Some of my now-ex colleagues still comment on the anniversary of their passing on Facebook. I don't think I could honestly remember the dates if they didn't... Their names always stick with me though.
Tragic, but the inequality, and the indifference free market creates, makes me steer clear away from corporate environments. I'd rather be a writer or an artist working on one's creation and dropping dead than die for someone's marginal materialistic desires.
I know this is just one way of looking at it, maybe the company was a great place to work at and the words alone do not carry justice.
Unsettling. Knowing that you can die at any moment, yet you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.
When I start a company, I don't want people below me or be insensitive. I'm gonna pay them well, make their work not overwhelming (by creating more software to automate and lighten their workload). Maybe I'm just young and naive. but I sure as shit not going to be an insensitive jerk to my partners in crime. Nobody is killing themselves or getting sick because of being overworked. Fuck that ferrari man, if someone kills themselves in the process of making money for you, I'd be devastated. I don't know how I'd feel when I turn old though, as your frontal cortex deteriorates, causing you to have less empathy and concern for your surrounding.
If this is your attitude towards work for hire, then almost anything you do will be unfulfilling. Work to fulfill your own desires. For some, work is a means to an end. To others, the product of their work fulfills them. If you work to earn enough money to see your family thrive, then your work should be fulfilling because your family is provided for. If you work to enrich the lives of the markets you serve, your work should be fulfilling because you know that you are making the lives of others better in some marginal way.
Don't work for your boss. Work for your mission.
It doesn't seem to me like he died "for" work.
People die, often randomly, and sometimes at surprisingly young ages. It's a Gompertz curve. With the Internet, we hear about it a lot more than we would have, 25 or 50 years ago (even though early death was more common in the past).
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I don't think we have any good reason to assume his death was work-related.
If one of your employees dies while you're on vacation, cancel the rest of your vacation. No exceptions.
I wish I could say that his death motivated me to have more meaningful contact with everyone. But it didn't; it simply made me realize that you can't force that even if you want to. At least not for me. Some people seem to have meaningful exchanges easier than others, and I'm just not one of those people.
Honestly, I've had a fear of being 'Colin' for years.. that if I were to be gone one day, all people I come in contact with, besides family and friends, would remember are the inconsequential things about me. Its an ego thing I'm sure -- that I feel I should be remembered.
I make an effort to have some real impact on as many people as I can. Something they would remember. I have no idea if I've been successful. All anyone really wants is to do something meaningful.
I hope that Colin had a great group of people outside work that could memorialize him properly.
Sadly, as I approach 50, it happens in my workplace, in my private life, and in my family pretty much every other year.
Startup idea here, folks. Monitor my mail contacts etc and notify me when someone dies.
Even better: for the people you hate.
The last two passed away about eleven and twelve years ago.
One may think it's haunting to still see e-mails from them in my archives. But the really haunting thing is listening to them speak in the voice mails our phone system e-mailed back then. Voices from beyond.
My archives will be slightly larger but nightly backups of active users documents will get a bit quicker. I used to have lunch with you user 'rjackson' but now that you got fired for doing something pretty bad, we will most likely never talk again.
And with that one command, a person leaves my life forever.
Fast forward another few years, and I was Googling (or was it Facebook searching?) ex-colleagues who I'd lost touch with. My search led to news articles that referred to his death. He was killed in a bizarre road-rage incident, where he was clearly the aggressor.
His family had created a memorial page on Facebook, but hadn't reported him deceased. I reported his FB profile as deceased, it was memorialized and I moved on.
I spoke to the ex-coworker about what happened (the same one who told me about him being fired a few years earlier), and he pointed out how kind the eulogies were- not really describing the arrogant prick we worked with.
I grew angry, and could not figure out why. Was I sucked back into this reality that we all die when I had been working hard to deny it? Was it that someone could die, and some stranger like me had no interest or comprehension of his accomplishment? Was it that I only judged people by their accomplishment, when hypocritically, I had none of my own? Why did I suddenly hate this man, who I never knew existed, and only knew because of his death?
He was a father. He surely comforted his children on the first day of school. He went shopping for them on their birthdays. He had loved ones who grieved for him. Loved ones who had no talent to describe how great he was to them, but only knew he was great to them.
I still don't understand the oddness of my reaction, or why it still haunts me. We are all born in a blur of a gigantic population, and he was simply deleted from my inbox as my company insisted I delete my emails when it approached 150 mgb capacity.
I kept him new and unread as long as I could.
His parents requested that his name was not mentioned on social media until they had a chance to take him home to Europe and tell their family at home. We got together to honor him and express condolences to family and after a week or two, things went back to normal on the outside. On the inside questions still remained, not about what happened, but about the implications it had on us, his classmates, who are just like him in too many ways to count.
Cold.
About 2 years later, her replacement was struck by an aneurysm at her desk and died several weeks later. I had been interacting her a lot for work-related projects and had had learned how stressful, difficult and important that job was and did not begrudge her her salary at all.
This is going to become more of a common occurence as the baby boom generation start moving towards an era of high mortality and are in senior positions. There are actually companies around which can help with transitioning through a period like this, including grief counselling for staff, strategies, etc. I worked with someone on a project once who worked for one of these firms. Up until that point, I had never even considered that they would exist.
That being said.
Go in to work tomorrow and make a forceful effort to engage with anyone that you think may have any issue with failure overwhelming them. The only weapon that can help is others.
Even so, I totally agree with regards to failure and its magnitude not necessarily (or even frequently) having a relationship to the self loathing one can feel due to that failure.
I struggle with this a couple times a year. Holding one's self to overly high standards can be unhealthy.
When I have run across people that I thought were having a hard time with failure, they are usually measuring themselves against the completely self contrived version of the peer that they see as being better. My context may be skewed, but the guys that have the hardest time are the ones that thought no one else was having any issues. This is of course a symptom of the military culture, but can play out in the tech world as the insanely successful skew the perception of failure, upward. By that I mean tech people measure themselves against, not the just doing fine peer, but to the exploding all expectations peer, which is completely improbable and truly self defeating.