A tip: If anyone finds themselves in a tragic situation like this where they can’t work but also can’t afford to take leave, investigate your short and long-term disability benefits ASAP. Also read up on the documentation necessary to begin disability claims.

Engage with a doctor early on who can document the severe depressive symptoms that are preventing work (which the author specifically cites in his anecdote). Do it as early as possible to generate a documentation trail. Don’t wait until you’re close to being terminated to begin documenting anything because that will make the claim much weaker compared to someone with months of doctor’s notes documenting the situation.

I can’t speak to Amazon’s specific benefits, but most big tech companies I’ve worked for have provided some base level short and long term disability coverage as part of their core benefits, partially to avoid situations like this where employees are unable to work due to external circumstances but are unable to go on leave.

Very much this. You always want to be asking HR for an accommodation that is protected by law. Then HR enters into the mode of protecting the company by ensuring they don't get in trouble for violating the law.

You go in and say "Hey my wife is dying and my performance is probably going to be impacted, can something be done?", HR may opt to 'protect' the company by starting to build a case for terminating a low performing employee.

> You go in and say "Hey my wife is dying and my performance is probably going to be impacted, can something be done?", HR may opt to 'protect' the company by starting to build a case for terminating a low performing employee.

That’s the cynical approach, but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees. This is why they have disability insurance coverage in the first place to help cover those gaps (while having the insurance foot the bill).

Also, in this case the author says he voluntarily warned them his wife was dying of cancer during the interview process. If HR wanted to get rid of him for that, they would have simply found an excuse to not hire him. Instead they gave him an offer.

> That’s the cynical approach, but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees.

While an abstract rational actor like a company might come to this conclusion, day to day line managers often do not come to the same conclusions. A low performing employee affected by personal issues is dead weight on said line manager's budget and headcount, and therefore their metrics and their own performance and promotion. The trickle-down performance model often doesn't incentivize long-term-focused management practices.

Given that the employee was making ~300K, we can figure that his manager is probably making 50% to 100+% more.

I find it mind-boggling that the manager could not find it within himself to give some slack to the employee. I guess maybe he didn't want to slow down the rate at which he was pulling in F-U money.

> I guess maybe he didn't want to slow down the rate at which he was pulling in F-U money.

Bingo! The manager's 10-30% bonus was on the line; and they probably saw the stressed employee not quite through a human lense, but was more of a broken cog that was gumming up the works and tanking the manager's metrics/KPIs.

In my book, those are broken people and managers.

I’m a manager and don’t make 50% to 100+% more than the people that report to me that are around my level.

40% more?

Much less. Teams where the manager is paid less than the engineers that they manage aren't rare either.

Yeah, I'm making about $10k less in salary than someone that reports to me of the same level.

Depends on the org but often new hires make close to the same salary as a manager that's been around for a few years. The difference may be in the bonus though.

Companies don't "want" things. They do not have a single will. Companies are agglomerations of many humans, who have various wills and more importantly various incentives.

Same with "HR," and not only are there multiple people, in large enough companies, there are fairly disconnected teams that handle the various parts of HR, like sourcing candidates, making offers to candidates, supporting managers, handling accommodations and keeping the company on the right side of the law, overseeing budgets and headcount. (If it helps, consider engineering, and the statement, "If engineering didn't want to move their legacy services to public cloud, they would simply have not signed a services contract with this cloud vendor in the first place instead of wasting their money.")

It's entirely possible that every individual on the hiring side genuinely wanted (of their own will) to hire this person anyway, but none of them were the same people who handle working with existing employees, who are all more misanthropic, and they don't talk to each other. It's also possible, and quite a bit more likely, that every individual on the hiring side is incentivized to fill roles, not to retain (how do you give someone an OKR or performance bonus this year based on whether their hires are still around three years in the future, anyway?), and that every individual on the existing-employees side is incentivized to demonstrate that they aren't coddling low performers.

Being employed at a company is a business transaction. It's not cynical to ask what the involved people's financial incentives are and whether they line up with yours, any more than it's cynical to expect that McDonald's will refuse to negotiate on the price of a burger. Even if the employee is nice, they've got a job to do, and they may not be nice.

Most managers don't either and will deal with some amount of loss of productivity...but part of that is also a calculation of "how long will it take to train a new hire X to do poorly performing employee Y's job" as well.

Now I've heard my fair share of people that claim "I was fired because my kid was sick"...and that might have been the final straw, but it was the other 7 unscheduled absences in the last few months that were not covered under family leave laws that were the major factor. Sometimes managers can't wait to terminate those employees because they weren't good anyway and they are just waiting for a reason to fire them in an easy way.

>>but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees.

The word 'valuable' is just a marketing term. Just like the work 'rockstar developer'.

Unless you are like the top 1 - 2 people relevant to a very important project you really are not valuable in any meaningful sense to the company. You might be expensive in terms of time to replace. But you really are not valuable in any real sense. These companies have high attrition rates, people leave all the time and they just do fine.

Amazon is notorious for not caring about its employees, even the valuable ones, and having a very numbers-driven system for evaluating employees.

"but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees."

The whole point is that their actual actions prove that they do not consider any employees valuable.

I found myself in the same situation only a few months ago. I was one of the so-called “valuable employees” and was a primary go-to person at the time. In 2020 we lost around 60% of the total personnel count (40% from layoffs, then more and more over time from attrition) from our entire division so they decided to consolidate teams together meaning I wasn’t only doing the job I was hired to do, now I had to do the work that 4 different dedicated teams had to do at the same time. At the start of 2021, my previous employer decided to shift focus purely on cost saving measures in order to make up for the lost revenue in 2020 and slashed ALL planned work for 2021, was constantly told no on all of my requests to do interesting work and work I wanted to do, and was told not to expect any training budget for the foreseeable future and not to expect any merit raises for the year. I did warn them that they needed to throw me a bone … they needed to give me SOMETHING to stay… some glimmer of hope. And they still said no. That is what made my decision.

It was clear they didn’t care about keeping “top talent” anymore. They just wanted button pushers - and that is what they have now. I have heard of big issues going on now, but it is no longer my problem. Obviously I am no longer there and much happier where I am at now.

No, some element of the people operation whose job performance is in part judged on getting engineers through the door wanted to hire him. Likely all that person cared about was "This engineer will make it X months", where X is based on if the employee separates prior to X the recruiter gets yelled at for sourcing a bad candidate.

Other parts of the org clearly had no issues branding the employee as a low performer and target for termination because their performance reviews.

>That’s the cynical approach, but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees. T

Maybe.

But Amazon isn't most companies.

I actually wish more people got it through their heads that HR _is not_ and _will never be_ their friend or savior. Their only loyalty is only to the company, by design. There are no exceptions to this that I have seen in 25+ years in the industry. The extent of whatever help you might get out of them is whether or not there's a risk that the company would come out worse on the other end if that help is not provided, such as, if you have a thoroughly documented case, the law is on your side, and you're willing and able to enforce your rights. If it's not documented or not protected by law, you'll be screwed by HR 100% of the time.

I think that is overly cynical. While it is true that HR is there to protect the company, there are lots of cases where incentives are aligned and so your benefit is their benefit.

The point (which you half-missed) is that the vast majority of people don't even know what those incentives are and think HR is there for them. Whereas it's only there for "them", as you pointed out, if they could bring a lawsuit against the company, and in no other case. That is, it's not there for "them" at all.

> That’s the cynical approach, but most companies don’t actually want to lose valuable employees.

By Amazon's measuring stick and internal policies, underperforming employees are to be discarded almost immediately, after undergoing a pro-forma performance review program which seems to be tailored to gather accusations to make a termination un-suable.

It is said that Amazon's average tenure is two years.

If there's a company renowned for not giving a damn about their employees, it's Amazon.

Oh wow. This (especially with respect to the mental model of the incentives for how a company works on the inside) should be taught in school.

You make not like how sociopathic bureaucracies running society operate, but it's important to educate children on how not to get screwed by them.

Is it though? Children learn by example, it's better to shown them things we deem normal and/or desired. Things like compassion. Even when being part of a faceless organization. It's about knowing that people far away are still people that love their children too. It is how we prevent ourselves from repeating the darker pages of our collective history.

"May opt"? HR isn't there for you, they are for the employer. Too many people confuse this. They will always protect the company because that's their job.

> Then HR enters into the mode of protecting the company by ensuring they don't get in trouble for violating the law.

A common complaint is that these sort of massive companies violate all sorts of laws and get by because the fines they receive are relatively tiny to the companies revenue and the infraction.

So why would they worry much about this? Is employment law treated differently or punished more harshly when companies violate it?

A glimpse into the psychology of corporate dystopia.

Another HN user posted—and then deleted—this comment:

> I worry that many people in such a situation may not have the right frame of mind to be able to find, read, understand, and absorb what is normally quite dry reading material requiring often ending in something requiring exceptional perseverance.

(I noticed because I was writing a reply.)

I think it’s a good comment! And I think that is why you do it now. It’s just like how every flight begins with the safety briefing. Learn your company’s policies and procedures now, when you don’t need them. And refresh your memory regularly.

That’s actually misleading, but a common misconception: The process is much less demanding than trying to continue working a demanding job at Amazon, for example.

Disability claims are a common target for fraud and abuse so getting some early documentation from a medical professional is important. Engaging with medical professionals is something anyone with debilitating depression should be doing ASAP anyway, so it’s not much of an extra step just for the claim.

The rest can be started by calling the disability insurance and asking about the process. Some company’s HR teams might even help direct employees to the benefit because they’d rather retain the employee if possible and also use the insurance for its intended purpose of covering periods of disability (rather than firing the employee or paying for someone who is unable to perform). YMMV with how much you trust HR departments, though, so best to call the disability insurance company first.

In addition, in three of the Big Tech SV companies I’ve worked for, the leave process isn’t even handled in-house. They contract a 3rd party who tells the company “yes this person is going on valid medical leave, expected return date mm/dd/yy” and they handle getting doctor’s notes and so forth. It is surprisingly private and straightforward.

Absolutely! Know what your policies are as soon as you join any company — but this is triply true for a FAANG. All of the information at a FAANG is in your intranet. As you say, learn those policies and procedures now and refresh them.

I’ve made a lot of decisions that have been counter to my own self-interest in my professional life (usually out of a misguided feeling of loyalty), but I have been very good at knowing policies and procedures (and for getting stuff stated explicitly in my contract before signing anything) and it has come in handy on a number of occasions.

Know your rights. And know them before you need to use them.

> It’s just like how every flight begins with the safety briefing. Learn your company’s policies and procedures now, when you don’t need them. And refresh your memory regularly.

That's more of a consequence of how we're irrationally afraid of flying than anything else. AFAIK you're far more likely to die of a building fire than a plane crash, yet how many people actually check their hotel's evacuation plan when they first enter the room?

Checking your hotels evacuation plan is something the guest has to choose to do, which isn't the case with flight safety briefings. Fire drills would be a closer comparison with regards to fire safety.

As an aside, up until a few years ago I was one of those people that did check hotel evacuation plans. I suffered from a lot of habitual ticks back then though and I suspect checking evacuation plans might have been one of them.

In the US, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides certain employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. It also requires that their group health benefits be maintained during the leave.

Author seems to mention that Amazon did give him the chance to take FMLA, and he decided against it.

> I had a long talk with HR. The response from them was, okay, you have two options here: You go on family leave, or you can perform. Those are your two options. I was thinking, if I take family leave, I get no income. I remember talking to my wife about it and saying, I can’t believe these are my options. So, I ended up trying my best to power through with the added pressure of knowing my boss wasn’t happy with me, even though I’m not sure what I did.

While there's clearly stories of abusive amzn practices, this makes the entire piece seem very entitled. If a person can't do the work they were hired for, they don't usually get paid. That's why there's FLMA, disability insurance, and vacations.

Am I missing something? Does Amzn represent themselves any differently? We're only getting one side of the story, and for all we know this person could've been incredibly toxic.

There's quite a difference between "I can't perform at my full capacity" and "Go home because you can't do any work". And no doubt, unpaid leave in the midst of costly medical bills (even with insurance costs at up) seems like a poor option.

It sounds to me like the author was asking "can you cut me some slack?", which doesn't seem like an unreasonable question. I'm sure there's a million creative ways an employer could have tried to come up with a solution, even if it's not the most desirable... (Part time work? Delaying a review cycle? Just letting a month of work go?)

I'm an educator—and obviously school is quite different from a job—but when a student is struggling outside of class, you figure out ways to still help them learn! Telling someone to withdraw from a course is certainly a necessary and valid option, but it's far from the first thing I'd present to a student. If I were a manager, hell yes, I would try to modify someone's role or duties before just saying "don't come in".

And, yes, this is one side of the story, but if this person were toxic, they could have been fired at any time and for that reason. (I'm going to assume this person is reasonably truthful, otherwise there's nothing to discuss about a fake story, IMO.)

For those of us who are thankfully not in a situation like this currently, it's still worth reading up on those benefits. Obviously the best time to deal with those things is before you need them.

Virtually all employer-provided long-term disability coverage terminates when you leave your job or shortly thereafter without the option to continue your coverage, so if you're pushed out or become unable to work before you formally meet the insurer's definition of "disabled" you're SOL. Also, most LTD plans (both group and individual) either exclude mental health conditions or place significant limits on the benefits you can claim for those conditions - e.g., they'll only pay out for one year, or up to a certain (low) dollar amount.

For those reasons, I recommend that most middle- to high-income people carry individual (i.e., not employer-sponsored) long-term disability insurance. For a very rough indication on price, I got my policy when I was 28, and I pay ~$100/month for coverage that would give me $72k/year in (tax-free) income through age 67.

That's very good advice, but another data point, I had a medical issue, and I had a very hard time qualifying for short term disability. My illness made me sick about 50% of the time, intermittently. The disability company told me that they'd cover me if I was sick for 15 days straight but not, say, 15 days out of a 30 day period.

In the United States, here is a starting point for FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act)

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla

You have to also check your specific state law and go from there. I would google "FMLA <statename>" for example.

Yes, and know your legal employment rights in the state where you work. For God's sake, do not rely on your managers or companies compassion or to make 'rational' decisions. Worst thing is to stay on and continually underperform. The lawyer simply 'sending a letter' is no good. They should be there to advise on - is the company acting legally here. Assuming they are, disability for these mental issues seems very appropriate in this situation. Heartbreaking story.

It also allows the company to plan eventual absence of an employee, which is important to keep things running.

Still, a company as large as Amazon has no excuse for this behavior in my opinion.

What sucks about stories like this is, while my heart breaks for what this guy went through, managers don't have the same luxury of defending their side of the story to Mother Jones.

I worked as an EM at Amazon. I went into this ready to think he had a bad boss (because those definitely exist at Amazon), but after reading this I feel like there's another side to this that has more compassion than is being reflected here. He was at turns informally warned, encouraged to take leave, and offered severance. It sounds like he expected a pass on all this for his life circumstances until it was too late. Without more details from both sides as to what the performance issues were, this reads as using a tragedy to get more than he's owed.

I can't even imagine what this guy went through. He had to watch his wife slowly die while raising two girls and providing for his family. Watching my father die from cancer after a long life was awful enough and affected me for years. His grief has to be phenomenal. I imagine part of his grieving process is lashing out at his boss for not being more understanding. That said, I think his story would be the same no matter where he worked. It's just more in vogue to bash Amazon.

If he wants to lash out at anything, I suggest lashing out at a system that requires us to work while going through such awful life circumstances. That man shouldn't have had to work. He should have been safe to be unemployed while focusing on being there for his family. The idea that he felt compelled to work to avoid his family going bankrupt is lunacy to me.

> He was at turns informally warned, encouraged to take leave, and offered severance.

Both these options would leave him without ongoing income and would do nothing to help him as a person[1]. They'd neatly solve the employer's problems though, and it's apparent who you more closely identify with in this story.

1. As someone else mentioned, short- and/or long-term disability was the mutually beneficial solution, but management/HR took the path of least resistance, regardless of the cost to his humanity.

Yes, as an EM, I'm inclined to think of managers as people and not mustache-twirling villains who think of nothing but their 10%-30% bonus. Most of the ones I worked with are. Ad hominem attacks aside, though, is it not important to have full context before we get out the pitchforks...especially if we feel like there's probably some missing? The only information we have about this situation is the word of a fired employee who is inclined to make themselves sound as sympathetic as possible. This article is certainly scant on details.

I've worked for psychopaths and expected that when I read this, but I don't think that's the whole story this time.

I share your sentiment of wanting the full story… surely Amazon has short term and long term disability insurance on offer to employees, I wonder why that wasn’t an option?

People seem to think that once they are hired that their employer owes them something more than the agreed upon compensation for the work they agreed to do for them.

If your work capabilities continually suffer, short of legally protected events, at some point your company will make moves to end the employment if you are no longer able to provide value for your compensation. Doesn’t matter if Amazon or a mom and pop shop. At some point there is an end to patience in every organization. In a company with 1.3M employees…it will be unlikely that his situation was all that unique among the employees. With that many employees there could easily be a thousand or more employees dealing with a similar family illness issue, and with similar inabilities to take unpaid LOAs. So a consistency of the policies governing this type of thing will always trump special single considerations in a corporation.

As long as Amazon consistently applied it’s policies it’s simply not at fault, and I would argue handled this situation as morally as a corporation could. Amazon is not at fault for the illness, nor at fault for the employee’s inability to take an unpaid leave. If they provided the opportunity for the employee to take an unpaid LOA and preserve his $300k job…that is a helluva benefit to that employee in my mind.

> People seem to think that once they are hired that their employer owes them something more than the agreed upon compensation for the work they agreed to do for them.

Legally, no.

Morally and ethically, yes they do. And the consequences for breaking a moral or ethical 'rule' is loss of reputation, which is exactly what this post is doing to them. And if companies keep doing this kind of thing, as a society we might decide to make it a legal matter, like we did for minimum wage and protected classes.

Would you make the argument the other way? Where employees owe their company more than their agreed upon effort? I don’t think so.

But what exactly did Amazon do here that was immoral or not ethical? Honestly I don’t see where it failed. The company may not of met the author’s expectations, but I feel like his expectation was “pay me no matter my performance because I cannot afford to take a LOA when my wife is dying, and I am way depressed because I never grieved for my brother…who died before I even came to work here.” Frankly, that is a wholly unreasonable expectation to place on any company.

> But what exactly did Amazon do here that was immoral or not ethical?

They made him "choose" between his wife and his works. Well they didn't actually made him choose, as the alternative was inconceivable, thus, they forced him to perform while his wife was in a death sentence.

That's the unethical part.

No, they gave him options and good ones too. STD, LTD, and a LOA, and including a severance at the end was available to him. He did all the choosing and every step of the way appears to have chosen poorly or chose in favor of the $ over his own mental health needs.

Chose to work there, chose not to take advantage of a LOA, STD, or LTD, chose work over grief for his brother, chose to take a losing stance on his perceived value at the company.

I’m sympathetic to his family tragedy, that’s an awful thing to endure, but this is less “bad bosses” and more “ignorant or greedy worker” in my opinion.

So what should they have done? Paid him a $300k per year salary to do nothing?

They didn't have to pay it directly, but it is common for companies to have contingencies to pay employees 60% or more of their base salary "to do nothing: Amazon was already paying for, in part, long-term disability insurance, but the employee, manager, or - most surprisingly - HR were not in the headspace to even think of this, I assume because the default mode of is adversarial.

The company does owe employees a lot more than agreed compensation. Companies, as entities in our society, fulfill certain roles which are without exception means to something else. We use (commercial) companies as instruments to improve human life. Modern economy in its entirety is but an instrument and not a goal in itself.

I've grossly oversimplified things here for a number of reasons, but this is pretty much the gist of it.

Companies effectively work as tyrannies where the tradeoff involved (renounce freedoms for the promise that money is) appears to be eventually disadvantageous for the society, even though it may seem advantageous for the economy.

Companies owe society a better life or they're not fit for purpose.

I mean that’s a great pitch for universal healthcare as any I’ve heard. I would be for strengthening the FMLA as much as possible. But I’m not even sure covid is impactful enough.

You are correct about the GP’s bias. Whenever Amazon comes up, David helps his former employer dodge the blame: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1632787200&dateRange=custom&...

Other Amazon EM’s and some high level ICs have a reputation for kneejerk denial of abuse in HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27570837 (just one example):

Speaking by as another EM, “I identify as a former X so X is good!” is a normal defense mechanism. But Amazon’s uniquely toxic working environment makes their cognitive dissonance notable .

> If he wants to lash out at anything, I suggest lashing out at a system that requires us to work while going through such awful life circumstances. That man shouldn't have had to work.

And yet, this man worked for a company who could very reasonably enact such a system if it desired to, at least for its own employees.

There is no law which requires corporations to do the minimal amount required by the law. The fact that many chose to do so is a choice motivated by profits and expediency.

On the other hand, if we as a society think the ethical floor is too low, we can pass laws that raise that floor - and companies will be bound to follow it.

lol. I worked at Amazon as a SDE and this reply is from Typical shit EM from Amazon. Empathy triumphs your weird corporate logic. Don't just work backwards putting yourself in the customer shoes, learn to work backwards from your report's shoes too.

I would be more apt to share this opinion if not for the fact that he says he specifically warned Amazon that his wife had brain cancer when they began trying to recruit him.

So you would want Amazon to pass him over because his wife has an existing medical condition? That would be a good article too.

Of course refusing to hire someone because their SO has cancer would lead to a scandal, LMAO. I assume you're joking

I hope so. Its reasonable for that response if its the case where the person does not have the technical ability via their prior experience. But that line of reasoning for a candidate to not be hired because of their spouse's ailment is just morale bankruptcy.

> warned Amazon that his wife had brain cancer when they began trying to recruit him

Not to defend Amazon, god forbid, but I'd be surprised if this actually reached the people who would be able to make decisions about this either way. Recruiting gets paid per head. They got a head. What happens next is of no interest to them whatsoever.

> That man shouldn't have had to work. He should have been safe to be unemployed while focusing on being there for his family.

Or even better, a system that guarantees the ability to be on extended leave with benefits from the state. Its a win-win situation if you don't force employees to leave their companies just because they are in a situation like that. Other than that, I totally agree with what you said.

This is America. Sure you have benefits, you think, if you have a job, but a huge number of the outcomes where you need those benefits result in you losing your job and no longer having them. And if you get too expensive and start showing up on the company's benefits cost, they are strongly incented to find alternative means for removing you from the payroll.

Really, work-provided benefits mainly serve the purpose of preventing people from voting for universal benefits. Of course the percentage of people dealing with the cases where you really need (and they don't want to pay) those benefits is very small, so the number of people that fully understand the situation is very small.

Benefits exist for the benefit of the company: to retain people, keep them bound/disincent them leaving, and to appear "competitive" with other companies. Whether they ACTUALLY will hold up is a gamble, and often up to munificience of your "benefactor".

To emphasize, when you MOST need benefits, you are LEAST valuable to the company providing those benefits.

Blame the government, they’re why we have employer-sponsored health insurance to begin with starting in WWII. Very interesting history to read about.

Believe it or not, this isn't a rare attitude among managers at Amazon. A significant percentage of SDMs believe they must "keep a high bar" and remove any dissenting subordinates. Word has gotten out about it, mostly on the blind app, which forced Amazon to raise pay bands for engineers 50-100k. This is costing the company a lot of money.

The difference going forwards for Amazon is that the stock is mostly stagnant, and so employees are no longer putting up with miserable harsh working conditions, the financial incentives are no longer there.

The reality is that the SDMs are cogs in the machine as well.

If a director asks the SDM why an employee isn't performing, and the SDM responds with any reason that doesn't support the organisation's goals, the director / VP is going to ask the SDM to get rid of the employee to meet Amazon's infamous URA quota[1]. If the SDM refuses, they are going to find another SDM who will do the job.

At the same time, the following is also true

> A significant percentage of SDMs believe they must "keep a high bar" and remove any dissenting subordinates.

> The difference going forwards for Amazon is that the stock is mostly stagnant, and so employees are no longer putting up with miserable harsh working conditions, the financial incentives are no longer there.

This is why Amazon is now importing a lot of international engineers, especially from Amazon India. Employees on L1 visa can't refuse the harsh working conditions, unless they are willing to take a huge pay cut and move back.

[1]: https://archive.is/44DyG

In my ~15 year career I've met a lot of people that have gone on and worked at almost every big company imaginable. For some reason an outsized amount of people that I hated working with ended up as SDMs at Amazon. The list of people I hate is very, very small too, so it seems like more than a coincidence.

For me the high correlation seems to be with Facebook.

Yeah me too. All the assholes went to Facebook. Only one person I like went there, and he quit.

Interesting. My (small, n=3) list of supreme assholes who I never want to work with again also ended up at Facebook.

I told Facebook recruiters to stop contacting me because I will never work for them due to my personal ethics. Maybe others have also done this and Facebook's talent pool is the remaining assholes.

I know a few people who've gone there and left within 1-2 years. I know exactly 1 person who is a very nice and competent engineer who was miserable there for their first year but they eventually found a team that they were happy with and they are still there today, probably 3-4 years later. But, yes, it seems to me that, especially given that last anecdote, the place is awash with egotistical assholes.

Culture flows down from the top.

While what you say may be true, I urge everyone reading this thread not to make personal opinions solely on stuff posted online that does not have hard evidence associated with it.

I think there is some selection bias in this. And I say this as someone who has recently quit working at Amazon (after many years there).

People who get fired are far more likely to leave reviews on blind. And the whole performance improvement plan process that proceeds being fired takes place between the employee and the SDM.

It may be the case that their org leadership told the SDM to cut their lowest ranked person to make the org's "Unregretted Rate of Attrition" quota for the year. From the employees point of view, this was purely some kind of malicious move by a terrible SDM. In reality, it's an SDM who wants to keep their job in a sociopathic system that enforces minimum rates of firing people to "keep the bar high".

Salaries are rising for engineers across the industry, in part because of the 'great resignation' going on. Make no mistake: Amazon would not raise salaries because of angry reviews on Blind. They would only raise wages if they saw too many people choosing to quit or not accept job offers in favour of other companies. Probably entirely based on a formula that used those numbers as inputs.

> People who get fired are far more likely to leave reviews on blind.

It is said that the average tenure at Amazon is two years. By your measuring stick, a company that is a revolving door does have the nasty tendency to leave a lot of its employees with plenty of reasons to complain.

There's nothing extraordinary about Amazon having a 2 year tenure average. Here's a somewhat dated (I'd guess it's gotten even shorter since) article from 2018 listing many more company tenures:

https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tech-companies-employee...

There are many known companies with ~2 years give or take.

Amazonian blue badge here. Throwaway for the obvious reasons.

Last year my two pizza team saw close to half our team members leaving, some with what I call mob-style coerced goodbyes during a daily and some because they were fed up with the absurd working conditions caused largely by the senior manager's career-building goals and his "wins are due to me and losses are due to my stupid minions who need to be fired" mentality.

An internal tool that tracks tenure says I'm already in here longer than 60 or 70% of the whole company, and I've just been here for about 2 years. I came up with a little game I play with the source code repo that I call Monte Carlo phonebook, where I check if a commit was made by anyone still within the company, and more often than not the answer is no

No other tech company I've been in worked like this. At all.

Don't doubt it. It sounds horrific, and I hope you land elsewhere. Your tenure of ~2 years give or take is very close to Facebook's ~2.5 years average. I'll only compare Amazon to Facebook in this case because both are known to have engineering teams / cultures that can be very results driven all else be damned.

Those lists tend to compute how long has the current employee worked here, instead of how many years of work do leaving employees have?

The list shows that older companies have significantly longer tenure numbers.

What is the blind app?

It's a forum for people at tech companies to anonymously talk to other people at their companies in a private forum, or with people at other companies publicly to all members. They validate employment using your email address. As could be expected many of the topics devolve into toxic messes, but there is some useful discussion.

Yep. It sucks in many, many ways, but it also is full of info on negotiation, interview processes at many companies, and salary/offer sharing.

I had no idea how much more money I could be making until I signed up there. Deleted the app as soon as I signed an offer sheet.

Only available to people in the US and South Korea at the moment, apparently.

A pity, but I guess they need lawyers in every country they do business in.

This isn't true, there's plenty of non-US people on Blind including me.

Currently to register in the app you have to select US or South Korea. They are setting a strong expectation that you should only do so from one of those countries, which makes it seem unlikely to me that I will find any colleagues -most of move would not think to fake their location. They also won't let you leave a review without a location in the US or South Korea. Makes it all a bit pointless if your company is not in those countries.

Maybe they changed this since you registered?

No, just select US. There's plenty of foreigners still.

One of the most toxic environments on the internet, filled with people who define themselves by their employment at big tech, and how large their salaries are. Think WallStreetBets meets tech but with less self-deprecation and emotional maturity, if you can imagine it.

It's 3rd party app that you can join your company's forum if you have an email address with the company domain.

It's like Nextdoor but for employees of a particular company where people can vent, spread rumors, and at times share useful information.

teamblind.com

A thought: be nice to recruiters. They're generally nice people who are underpaid for the work they do (usually). They're in a really tough business.

And if you want a selfish take: Maybe today they're working for Amazon, but tomorrow they may be doing the same job at your dream company. They have too many people to try reaching out to, and they may remember your name.

+1

For years I asked them to put me on their do not contact list. I eventually asked someone with authority. Whenever I am still contacted by managers, I simply forward that email with a polite note to that stakeholder. I get apologies and they get a lesson in their responsibilities from someone to which they are liable.

"Hey, thanks for reaching out, I'm not interested in new opportunities right now"

There. Copy. Paste. Done

Thoughts on responding at all? Does anyone expect it? It's not some humble brag but simple fact that I feel inundated and incapable of responding to all the messages I get. I leave every recruiter on read until I'm looking for a new job. Bad etiquette?

It'll be fine now, but when the next downturn hits you'll probably regret it.

I've gotten a bunch of interesting opportunities over the years by virtue of being nice to recruiters, even when I'm not looking.

I just tell them how much it would cost to get me to up and move to Canada or the US to work for them, just to be equal to my situation here in Europe.

That usually stops them pretty quickly :)

Haha, this is the way.

Over the last 2 years I started to receive a lot of unwanted recruit spam both in my email and through Linkedin. I used to ignore them and get angry. Now my response is quite straightforward: Sure, I am happy to talk if you can offer me $250,000 USD, Work from Home (I live in Mexico) and X, Y, Z benefits that I currently have.

This also applies for the ones that want to have a call to you for a "mysterious client" ( particularly for exec positions), usually just wasting your time. You are the one that contacted me, if you want to get my time better be for something good. It usually isn't.

I read through the article. I really, really hurt for its author, and pray that I never face similar circumstances. It sounds like he's stinging from his manager not expressing enough empathy.

But with the information in the article, I don't really understand what Amazon should have done differently. Unfortunately the article was vague about just how much the author was underperforming.

Also, while I'm no fan of Amazon, it sounds like they treated him far better than the legally required minimum. They were paying him a lot of money to do something. When he wasn't able to do it, it's not like they fired him instantly; they even offered him $30k of severance.

I read the timeline and it seems like he started in mid-late 2018, was having performance problems throughout 2019, and didn't even get fired until mid-2020.

This is super generous, and while I have a lot of empathy for his personal situation, I think he could have had a much different outcome if he would have been more proactive about managing expectations: - Amazon does have a bereavement benefit that you definitely should take if you lose a brother like he did. - There are many opportunities to get help from doctors and medical professionals and document any disability you might have, which can help accessing disability benefits - While family medical leave is typically unpaid, if you are making $300K a year and were presumably making a lot less before you took the job, I think you can reasonably take a few months of unpaid family medical leave knowing your job will be there when you return.

I feel bad for the guy in this situation, but I think Amazon was very generous and gave them every opportunity to perform. How many years should a company wait for an underperforming employee to perform?

I'm not sure how it's done at Amazon - they are, after all, notorious for driving employees hard - but my understanding is that poor performance over a year or so is usually about the point at which firing begins to be discussed at large companies.

And the problem wasn't that he didn't want to perform or was intrinsically a bad employee; the problem was that he literally couldn't due to circumstance. It's not generous to say "well, find a way to work through your wife's brain cancer and we'll keep you on."

What's the alternative though? Let the employee continue to underperform indefinitely? I feel the same way here. I have a lot of empathy for the author, what he went through sounds like hell. But I'm not sure what Amazon was supposed to do here.

This feels like a failing of the US health care system and social safety net more than anything else. Specifically in this case having to have a job (when you're least able to keep a job) to continue having medical insurance.

Many things wrong with your comment, starting with the fact that firing beings to be discussed only after a year. It actually begins to be discussed immediately after the employee is assessed to be an underperformer. It's only after a year of bad written performance reviews that they can actually start to do something about it, such as put the employee on a "PIP" or fire the employee.

At the large company I was at firing wouldn’t be a conversation until at least one review cycle of poor performance (every 6mo), more likely after two. The PIP started at the same time as the firing conversation; before that was time given for the employee and manager to try to figure it out themselves. (Which maybe is what you mean by “is assessed to be an underperformer,” but then doesn’t disagree with the comment you’re replying to, really.)

What were the other things?

> How many years should a company wait for an underperforming employee to perform?

Perhaps wait until after their spouse has died and see if they recover? Even the idea of an "underperforming employee" is specious at best.

This is why I love Italy and France, it is night impossible to fire someone for things like this from tech companies. Of course, they also don't have to worry about going bankrupt due to medical issues. They understand there is more to work than meeting the numbers. It is something you spend 2/3rds of your life doing, and other countries honor that.

[Oh, and also COBRA can cost $3000-$5000/month for shit coverage. Once you run out of money, they come for your stocks, retirement, and house. Source: I incurred over $100k of hospital debt AFTER INSURANCE from an assault that left my arm paralyzed. Why? If the hospital charges more than 125% medicare costs for the procedure, my $700/month Gold Plan didn't cover it. I was let go due to 6 months of absence from work, and then while unemployed and needing physical therapy, the hospital sent a request for tax statements and they began the process of a lien against my property. A lawsuit ultimately saved me, but if I hadn't been a victim, they would have taken everything. Fucking american healthcare is a joke.]

I’ve gotten a couple Cobra offers in the past few years after leaving jobs, both of them with very solid to great health insurance, and haven’t seen a number higher than $1k/month (101% or whatever of the employer cost). What sort of insurance do you have to have to ask for $3-5K/month? That would be 36-60K a year! I’ve never seen a company paying close to that in benefits. And my current employer has a “cost to employer” under $1k/month for insurance.

Have I just gotten lucky with companies with good negotiated deals? (The open exchange plans generally have looked terrible compared to any group plan I’ve had in the last 10 years.)

Is this for just yourself, or for you and dependents? I went on a leave a few years ago, and COBRA was $700/mo just for myself (and I'm sure premiums have gone up since then). I could easily imagine that being $3k/mo for a family of four. Maybe $3k-$5k/mo is high, maybe it's normal, maybe my company has a good deal on insurance. Who knows; the entire system is disgustingly opaque.

I've not paid any more than 1k either.

I don't even think you can get a Cobra plan for that much money...was this for your whole family? You must have been on the top tier program at your company...

This is simplistic. The situation in France and Italy can be horrible in many other ways.

There are choices and trade offs. But don’t think that those regulations in France or Italy are rosy in every way, and come at no cost.

I came away with similar sentiments. I've absolutely no issue with anybody criticising their employment practices in their warehouses or delivery arms - especially the use of contracting companies to isolate themselves from the questionable practices that seem required to get the job done.

However, if they're paying you $300k to do a job, it strikes me as fair that if you cease to do that job you get terminated. Also that's enough money for you to have put in place your own safety net if one wasn't provided by your employer in your benefits.

I agree this seems to largely be a manager issue, though I would go as far to say it's more prevalent in the company culture.

That said, I also agree this isn't exactly fair on Amazon's part as they were informed, up front, that this was an ongoing issue. The picture this paints isn't then one of "they did their best and were generous"; instead, it's one of "they got what they wanted out of him." Note that by company policy, all employees are given a max base pay of about $160k (including Mr. Bezos himself, which they love to point out during negotiations); the remainder of the $300k would have likely been through stock options, which the author points out were left behind during termination. Thus they were technically paying him almost half plus whatever signing bonus was negotiated.

A 'normal' company would understand that while a persons significant other is dying of a cancer, their work output may suffer as a result.

He was offered a Family Leave option, but the details aren't shared so it's hard to judge...

Terrible situation for the author, but expecting the company to eat the 500k/year he was costing them doesn't seem fair either.

Companies employ people. People have problems. Firing people, or forcing out people, when they have problems, doesn't sound like a very good place to work.

It's very possible that the unspoken culture at Amazon is work hard above all else. If you've read "The Everything Store", there is a quote, something like, (regarding Bezos) "If you're bad, Jeff will run you out of the company. If you're good, he'll ride you into the ground." It also talks about Jeff firing an early and long-time employee, he did throw a party for him in Hawaii, because Amazon no longer had a use for him. I don't know if either are true, but if true, I could see that attitude creating an unspoken culture of, "I don't care about your problems, we have work to do. If you can't do it, we need someone who can." I can also see how the success and the stock price, given the commitment to work above all, reinforces that mentality.

Companies employ people to do work. That is the fundamental nature of the relationship. Some leeway is to be expected for temporary fluctuations in the work being done. But in the long term, if the work is no longer being performed at the agreed upon level, the company is not obligated to continue paying the person.

In a sense, blaming the company becomes kind of a distraction from the real issue, which is that in the US, we have an extremely thin safety net. One of the reasons getting fired from your tech job is so concerning is that even someone in that job is only a few difficult situations from utter destitution and homelessness. That $4k/mo Seattle mortgage burns through your savings pretty quick, and if you have assets of any kind, you won't get any assistance from the state for disability. Even our unemployment benefits won't keep you afloat for long.

We should be focused on making these things better, not expecting companies to employee people who are unable to work.

A thousand times this. Expecting companies to be the source of resources that smooth over personal problems actually ends up disempowering workers, who then have to conform to companies' mold in order to receive the benefits. Imagine a similar family situation only the employee was about to get fired for other reasons, and now their health "insurance" has disappeared / skyrocketed as well. As it is, it sounds like OP really needed more routine time off than what Amazon allowed.

Rather than relying on companies as reservoirs of wealth that should be taking care of employees (eg this, healthcare, parental leave, etc), we need to move that wealth outside of corporate control - through a combination of higher compensation, better managing of personal finances, entrenched industry reform, catchall social safety net, etc.

If the company has benefits that are available, they should definitely point the employee to them. That is just the humane thing to do in my view. When I had a death in my family a few years ago, I filed to use vacation time, and my boss rejected it, because the company had bereavement leave (I didn't know about it.) That was the right thing to do, because it helped me take advantage of all the available benefits.

And of course, if companies provide these benefits, that is good, especially since they are absent from our broader safety net. But keeping benefits tied to employment has a lot of downsides, and we should try to move away from that.

> corporations would be happy to have the government take over those functions.

Is this really true? I would think so, too, but if it were, wouldn't we see a flood of companies in the US lobbying Congress to create a government-backed healthcare option, or even single-payer? To the point where it would have been done decades ago, right-wing political ideology be damned?

The cynical part of me wonders if companies like the current situation, since that gives companies more power over their employees.

It was the government themselves that facilitated this situation by freezing wages during WWII. Companies couldn’t compete on salary anymore so they found another lever to pull.

I don’t think companies like or dislike the situation, it’s just the status quo and thus hard to change a trajectory that has so much momentum.

>Companies employ people. People have problems. Firing people, or forcing out people, when they have problems, doesn't sound like a very good place to work.

Sure, it'd be great if my workplace kept paying me $300k even if I was under-preforming because of personal issues. However, how realistic is this expectation? Are there any places that keep under-preforming employees for half a decade, or more?

> Are there any places that keep under-preforming employees for half a decade, or more?

Microsoft is often recommended for this, and some say Google these days too :).

Are you arguing that no tech company has employees in most of Europe? It's very expensive to terminate people for cause in Scandinavian countries, France and the England.

Just because we don't do it in the US, doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

I expect that this is also why there are fewer tech companies in Europe than in the US, and why software developer salaries are much lower in Europe than in the US. Companies can't afford to pay top dollar (er, euro) when they have to hedge against being unable to fire employees who aren't doing their work.

Not saying either situation is better or worse overall; I expect there are winners and losers in both systems. Or, likely more accurately, the European system creates few big winners, but also few (or no) big losers, whereas the US system gives you the opportunity to be a big winner, but you could also end up homeless.

Personally I'm happy with how the US system has worked out for me, but I'm sure there are some people who feel the opposite.

When you get hired somewhere you sign a contract. In the contract you agree to do work and the company agrees to pay you.

You start doing 50% of your work (under-performing) for a bunch of months and the company asks you to fulfill your side of the contract because they are fulfilling theirs. Is that weird?

Let's put it another way: You do your job well, the company starts paying 50% of your salary because they have problems. Do you keep working there till their problems are gone? Or after a couple of month you tell them: either you fulfill the contract or we part ways?

Family leave typically means you stop working while on leave and there will be a job waiting for you when your leave ends. Like with parental leave, you are typically expected to rely on government programs like disability insurance and such if you need to do so for a long time.

Ok, so you are saying he keeps his job & gets paid disability & presumably keeps his nice health insurance package from working FT? Yeah that seems like something I wouldn't utterly dismiss out of hand.

Hmm...I tend to agree...but why?

I would assume his output wasn't 0, so the economics are hard to justify. A typical engineer earns many times their salary in revenue for the company. So, maybe this guys was low performing, but maybe that works out to a wash in terms of revenue per employee.

Or maybe, Amazon says "actually, losing $500K to retain good people isn't that bad every so often" -- how many employees can realistically be in the situation? 100 a year? That's what, $50mm...nothing to Amazon in the big picture.

Obviously there comes a time when you need to fire people, and we don't have the full picture. But it's also not like this money really matters to Amazon that much either.

He mentions the family leave option would've left him without any income. No one was asking Amazon not to eat his whole salary, just not expect him to function exactly the same as someone whose wife isn't dying from brain cancer.

He says later that he had enough saved to weather the firing — wouldn’t it have been better to take leave, even unpaid, and know your job is there to come back to?

FMLA is UNPAID leave, meaning from the day you start until it ends. Being “offered” to lose all of your pay is not much of an offer… in the end the man in the article took the leave and it was used against him during the PIP process.

If I was a plumber, and my wife was dying, and as a result I was unable to repair plumbing, I would not expect anyone to give me money to repair their plumbing, not even if I told them my wife is dying and they should be sympathetic.

Employment != Sole proprietorship. Employer != Client.

Are you working as a contractor or employee?

You might work part-time and so balance work/income and care.

The issue here may have been that the manager had no baseline of 'good performance' that they could expect this individual to 'return to'.

I think the issue is the time factor.

I think everyone agrees that if an employee is struggling for a short time then there should be some understanding, sympathy and accommodation. But I don't think anyone would argue that companies should do that forever.

The question is how long is reasonable. In this case it looks like it was almost 2 years (mid - end 2018 to Aug 2020). Granted performance issues probably didn't come up right away but from the article it sounded like it came up pretty soon after joining. 2 years is a long time.

I think if we're trying create a sane and decent society, we're barking up the wrong tree by attaching basic human compassion to employment, which is a bizarre choice that I'm guessing can be traced back to ideological polarization in the Cold War. The country wouldn't tolerate a completely pitiless dog-eat-dog system, but private enterprise was afraid of being exterminated if communism got a foothold in society, and they agreed to take on the responsibility of funding and administering the welfare state for everybody who was employed, so the welfare state for everybody else could be minimized and stigmatized. That's the just-so story in my head, anyway.

As a result, we're in this absurd situation where the only way to do the right and decent thing for a poor person suffering a brutal personal tragedy is for them to get paid $300k per year to do an incredibly rare-air information economy job that they aren't actually doing.

I agree, Amazon has a responsibility to this person because that's the system we've built. Amazon is reaping the benefits of the system and shouldn't be allowed to dodge the responsibilities. But my god, what an absurd system we've built.

But we don't know how much. What if they made one small bug fix in a week? What if they literally did zero work?

A 'normal' company would give normal salary not these outsized Software salaries.

I do not know what a normal business is, but this is a luxury that a business with large margins and redundancies might have. A 7 eleven franchisee is not going to be able to afford that type of policy.

Is letting a struggling employee underperform for a while seriously not an option? At the very least, they could have not made this man's last few years with his sick wife that much more difficult because they require him to be functioning at top performance all of the time.

It really depends on how much they are underperforming. Are they late to a few meetings or not showing up for weeks without making arrangements?

He did give the hiring team a big heads up that he rather not take the job than join Amazon. However the big issue is that Amazon's HR could have done so many things differently:

- work with him to get on short term or long term disability - work with him to figure out a way to take the time off that he needed combined with getting back on track - don't judge him on metrics he has no control over

Its a perfect combination of not giving a shit. I understand it costs them money, but Amazon has the money.

FWIW, many big companies in US have HR policies and they have middle manager's/VPs that ignore the crappy parts and do what's right.

My wife had cancer in early 30s and it was a punch to the gut for us both. It was actually a very survivable thing but she had to go through some extreme treatments. Regarding work, she did some paperwork and went through the HR stuff for most but there was a lot of "off the books" type stuff that fell into her leader's "who cares about this place, put your health first" policy.

I wasn't even sick and honestly didn't even get any additional stress other than worrying for her (we had no kids yet, her mom was helping her daily) and my ability to perform was shot. I could barely keep a thought in my mind or give a shit about petty work "problems". Probably for a solid 6-12 months. The first 3 months were and still are a complete fog. I never officially told my company HR, but my leadership was extremely supportive and I basically just phoned it in for that year. I did no significant work and offloaded most of my responsibilities to others so that I was not a key part of anything.

When you go through something like this, you start to learn how much other people have gone through as well. They feel obligated to pull you aside and share their story and how things turned out for them. Often positive stories but obviously not always. But generally people treat people in these situations how they'd like to be treated as, it could happen to any of us.

Just wanted to throw some positive perspective out there. Amazon is a well known shitty place to work for humans. I'm not surprised by this article. I dodge their phone calls like many of you and encourage you to get to know your coworkers on a deeper & personal level. They are a more important part of your life than you may realize and will help carry you through some really rough spots if you let them.

Wait a minute.

It's for this cases that universal healthcare paid by taxes exists. I wouldn't blame it on your boss or Amazon. It's the USA.

A person should not depend on money or productivity to be cured.

And a company should not be liable to spend $300000 an year on a non productive employee.

Which btw is about 9 years junior developer gross salary equivalent in Italy.

At $300k/year, I think amazon is more concerned about the salary going towards a non-productive employee, than whatever money they're paying towards his health insurance.

> I think amazon is more concerned about the salary going towards a non-productive employee, than whatever money they're paying towards his health insurance.

The employee was concerned about costs, including uncovered medical costs with insurance [0], which is why they didn't take family leave (which the US federally only guarantees unpaid, and the state the employee was in has no state paid family leave—though both his previous state and the one he declined to move to for the job do have paid family leave.)

So, both public health insurance policy and public employee benefits policy in the US, as well as Amazon's particular practices (employees aren't prevented from providing paid leave or reduced demands without a mandate), are involved in this case.

They're both at fault since each side expects the other to catch those who fall into this unfortunate situation.

The government should provide for people in this situation so that if you lost your job due to the circumstances, it shouldn't be a double-whammy that will sink the rest of your life.

In the absence of a government safety net, the company should pick up that slack if they value the employee more than the cost of hiring and training someone new. In fact, it may be in their best interest regardless, because loyalty among your employees is a very expensive asset.

If two outfielders are running to catch a fly ball and then both stop at the last second because they each think the other one had it and the ball hits the ground, I'd consider them both at fault.

I mean, the government has legislated that full-time employees HAVE to get benefits from the employer... I don't think it is quite a "both at fault" situation because the government can actually change the rules, companies just have to follow them...

Medical bankruptcy is still an issue in places with universal healthcare like Canada. Why? Even if all your bills are paid you still have a mortgage, food, etc.

And even if you have long-term disability payments, it’s often some fraction of your existing salary requiring you to keep working to pay all the bills.

Medical bills are overwhelmingly huge in the US. Getting rid of them would decrease the problem to simple unemployment.

Sure being unpaid for a time is bad, but you won't be massively in the red...

And this specific example, the guy is well off. Which if not for medical bills, they'd all be fine.

To reword your comment, " Something very bad is happening, but because the remedy wouldn't completely go away it's not worth doing?"

Why? The grandparent implies that universal healthcare would solve the person's problems. Sure it would solve the issue of health insurance, but I assume the person still needs an income to pay for everything else. So the problem still remains.

> And a company should not be liable to spend $300000 an year on a non productive employee.

Nor the taxpayer. It looks more like insurance than healthcare.

A good publicly funded health care system essentially work like an insurance.

OK, give any example of such good public fund. There is none, never was, never will.

The current USA healthcare hellscape came as a result of an attempt to implement universal healthcare that was derailed via regulatory capture.

It's hard to see how you could implement universal healthcare successfully in country like the US which has third-world standards for corruption and democracy, and low average human capital.

People never forgive you for telling the truth. Those are some salty "I wish they were wrong" downvotes.

I am quite pessimistic about Amazon and its influence, having worked there for about a year. In my (admittedly jaded) opinion, the company encourages this kind of dehumanizing behavior toward people.

That said, this isn't new and it isn't limited to Amazon. My brother died of cancer at the age of 10. My dad's manager gave him a bad performance review and said that he let his son's death affect his work. Other people where my dad worked were more empathetic (though unfortunately, not in his management chain).

> My dad's manager gave him a bad performance review and said that he let his son's death affect his work

Wow... what kind of person would you be if this didn't affect your performance?

1. How do other companies handle these situations? How do you effectively handle an employee rendered unable to perform their job due to tragedy? This came up with Atlassian a few weeks ago, and they have a much better reputation than Amazon and it doesn't seem like they handled things in a great way either. The reality is that you might just need to terminate people who cannot perform, no matter what the reason.

2. I am obviously sympathetic to his plight, but at this point Amazon has that reputation as a brutal employer. Every ex-Amazonian I have known in real life has told me that the pay is so that they own you, whether 3PM or 3AM and they have no qualms about firing you (a former co-worker who was with AWS said that if I ever take an AWS role, don't get a full year lease for a condo in Seattle). Not to blame him, but it is unfortunate that he didn't have someone who could advise him that taking a hard job at a notoriously uncaring company with a sick wife would be unwise.

A normal company would recognize that the employee's hardship is temporary, that treating the employee with compassion will buy long term loyalty that will far outlast the lost-work of the temporary hardship, and would treat the employee with basic human moral emotion and empathy.

I broke my arm in a bad vehicle accident ~5 months into my last work position. I couldn't code for ~2 months. I couldn't commute into the office for another ~2 after that due to personal fragility from the injuries.

My direct boss offered to come help me fix up my apartment in case I couldn't reach things in my apartment. My employer worked with me every step of the way.

I was so touched, having come from a 'fire first' mentality shop before that, that I worked at that firm for another 7 years. I rose to a directorship, and ultimately ran half of their engineering department. I worked countless nights, because I cared. And when I did finally leave, having long since outgrown the organization, I went to work for the boss that had offered to help me rearrange the apartment.

Human empathy is basic, good business sense.

I accept a slightly lower income from my employer, as I think they're pretty generous in their flexibility. Over a decade ago my father died and they just told me to take off whatever I needed. I'm still with them and have seen them to be sympathetic to my colleagues and even when laying them off, have paid over the legal minimum. It's one of the reasons I'm still working for them.

From a distance I know amazon are bastards, but pay more. If I switched job, I'd just accept that some of that salary bump needs to be put into personal insurance.

I'd have sympathy if amazon were knonw to be cuddly and picked on this guy, or didn't pay him enough to...

It varies wildly by manager.

When I was at Amazon, one of my coworkers had a serious mental and physical crisis. Our manager went out of his way to support them, granting them unlimited leave, accepting them back on a part time / temporary basis whenever they felt up for it, etc. To make this work, though, I'm pretty sure the manager and probably his manager went around the system and basically didn't report the absences, because corporate policy almost certainly would've been to fire them. It effectively cost that manager an invaluable headcount spot, and it went on for over a year.

I generally hated working for Amazon, but I loved that particular manager and would happily work for him again anytime.

> I am obviously sympathetic to his plight, but at this point Amazon has that reputation as a brutal employer. Every ex-Amazonian I have known in real life has told me that the pay is so that they own you, whether 3PM or 3AM and they have no qualms about firing you (a former co-worker who was with AWS said that if I ever take an AWS role, don't get a full year lease for a condo in Seattle). Not to blame him, but it is unfortunate that he didn't have someone who could advise him that taking a hard job at a notoriously uncaring company with a sick wife would be unwise.

Make it illegal to companies to do this. Simple. Companies operate within the laws of the society they're based in. If Amazon doesn't like it they can take their bags and go somewhere else.

If many companies are paying $100K/yr, is it really in the public interest to prevent a hard-driving company from paying $300K/yr to employees who want to sign up for that bargain?

If you don’t want that bargain, don’t take it, but I don’t see the public interest in blocking others who do want it from taking it.

Que people bitching that Amazon moved to China and is now a Chinese company. (I don't necessarily believe that'll ever happen but imagine HN if that happened)

You behave like a human being with feelings. You do the best you can to support and help someone who suffers unbelievably and you f**ing show some empathy. This involves actually putting yourself in the shoes of someone else, yes. It means that you share a part of their suffering.

You are dealing with a human, not a "resource" and not a machine. It sickens me to read stories like that to the point where I really consider stopping ordering anything from Amazon.

I hope this practice is going to backfire on them.

I understand your perspective, but... for how long? 1 month? 6 months? 3 years? 10 years? At what point does basic empathy turn into someone sponging off of generosity?

One of my employees was suffering from lymphatic cancer. So unfortunately, I have real life experience.

You support them for how long it takes. Period.

For my team mate, it took about 18 months until we could slowly start to reintroduce him to normal working hours. Even then, it took a couple of months until he was up to speed again.

As soon as he returned to the office, I treated him as if he was fully recovered to show him that we don't see him as some kind of disabled person, because of his cancer treatment. He recovered quickly and is now back to where he was before he left for treatment performance-wise.

Every screening for remission has been an extreme burden for him. Every time, I told him that even though I can fully understand his fear, the illness doesn't exist for me anymore and he is going to be fine.

2 years later, he's healthy and provides more value to the team than ever. We are all very thankful that he survived.

Fun fact, most people aren't lazy lay-abouts trying to con employers into handouts.

The analogy of a house is entirely incorrect - a house is a one time transaction. Giving an employee space and support during this time likely leads to loyalty and better production in the long run. It also prevents articles like this, which is probably worth the $300k, as even ONE talented engineer turned off from joining Amazon due to this article will cost them that much and more.

It's not about "your rights", it's about "what's right". Sure, you're within your rights. But when you're a trillion-dollar-market-cap company, you can eat $300k for a year and let the employee get through his grief and come back to you.

Also, you edited your comment in a way that was deceptive, and didn't say the reason for the edit -- but your comparison is still flawed. $300k to you is pennies to Amazon.

That's another dodge. His direct manager is acting on behalf of the company, and in the interest of the company. The company should have behaved better. His direct manager also isn't paying the writer's salary out of a personal bank account.

The point is that companies ought to treat their employees with empathy even when it costs them. There are reasonable limits to that, yes, but $300k for Amazon is well within that bounds in my view.

No, companies should treat its employees with well defined policies that are easy to understand, enforce and audit.

Treating employees with something as variable and open to interpretation as "empathy" is what causes companies to implode- because who defines empathy? Who defines where the line is drawn? And why is it fair that some people will inevitably get more empathy than others because maybe the manager was having a good day and then a bad day.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I assume you're probably early enough in your career you never had to manage people. But when you eventually do, try to separate idealism from reality.

Sorry, I am old and have more than 10 years of management experience.

You can try to formalize human life with your rules for the next 100k years and it will still not work. There are things that are beyond words and beyond your and my ability to "define".

I am afraid a lot of us have lost any of their inherent common sense, because there was no policy for it.

This is not idealism. This is someone dying. And you are talking about policies. Come on!

> No, companies should treat its employees with well defined policies that are easy to understand, enforce and audit.

These are not mutually exclusive things, much of the time, but sometimes exceptions have to be made.

> Treating employees with something as variable and open to interpretation as "empathy" is what causes companies to implode- because who defines empathy? Who defines where the line is drawn? And why is it fair that some people will inevitably get more empathy than others because maybe the manager was having a good day and then a bad day.

This is a reasonable point, but it, again, does not address my fundamental point: Amazon as a company should have more ethical and empathetic policies. Amazon as a company should instruct managers to help their employees and be willing to back that help up with financial assistance.

Whether it's Jeff Bezos or this person's manager, you seem to want to keep this at an individual level of decision-making, but that's not the change I want to make.

As for myself, I'm not a manager because I don't want to be, and having to enforce policies I don't agree with is one of the reasons for that.

Which company imploded because of empathy?

This is actually not about money. It's about a human life.

Do you really think that this is about the money? This man is losing his wife, he cannot think clearly, because he loses the person he loves and has children with. He may suffer from severe depression. I'd bet my right leg that if he didn't need to, he would not think about money for a minute. It also doesn't matter whether he should have built up an emergency fund that can cover cancer treatment expenses. He clearly has different problems than that right now.

I can't comprehend how you can even talk about money until you have helped that guy with all you have. Clearly, Amazon is well enough equipped to first provide support, then ask questions once a situation like that has been resolved.

The way this is being handled is just wrong. You wouldn't treat any of your friends or family members like that, so why do it to your employee?

It shouldn't be the reality in a society with the amount of wealth ours has.

I agree absolutely on the importance of an emergency fund from a tactical, this is how society is perspective.

But I don't think it should be necessary and I don't concede that that's the right way for things to work.

> Not to blame him, but it is unfortunate that he didn't have someone who could advise him that taking a hard job at a notoriously uncaring company with a sick wife would be unwise.

This is blaming him.

> The reality is that you might just need to terminate people who cannot perform, no matter what the reason.

Or even better, give them a few months' leave at half or a quarter salary, or at least let them keep their benefits. I know, crazy to suggest we might put corporate profits over helping someone in need, but you could give it a try.

Edit: Amazon did offer the employee family leave unpaid. It wasn't workable and their response was that he should quit.

I am not blaming him as I don't think he knew. He is not at fault for not knowing. Just that for those who have heard what Amazon is like, that this end result was predictable and it is unfortunate that he didn't have that.

"What did you expect from Amazon" is a fair point, but in no way excuses Amazon whatsoever. They always have the opportunity to be better.

Given that we gladly give 6 months paid maternity to those who choose to have children, I'm fairly sure we'd give this chap a break.

I cannot believe the inhumanity in this thread.

Most of the time on maternity leave is typically unpaid. If I understand correctly, this guy refused to take leave on reduced pay.

Everywhere I've worked in the last 10+ years has paid maternity leave and most now have paid paternity leave. They offered him unpaid leave.

Grandparent specifically mentioned paid leave. As far as I know, many companies are now switching to 12-24 week paid leave models for maternity/paternity leave.

I worked for a small company with very little spare cash and a short runway when an enormous family tragedy struck suddenly. They let me take a month off and accepted I wasn't quite at normal levels of productivity for maybe a year afterwards. It was tough, but they made it work.

If they could afford it, Amazon can.

It’s so fucking simple.

Let them do their work as best as they can under the circumstances. maybe allow them to work less hours / part-time if that’s what they need.

Really, work isn’t all-or-nothing. Like either you do 60h a week or you’re worthless, that’s just a typical American cultural thing to make you a work slave.

A decent company accommodates people who have a spouse with a terminal illness.

It’s that simple. You treat people like fucking human beings.

having been through a similar situation myself (where the outcome has spilled over from the place i was working when it occurred to contaminate following business relationships) i've thought a lot about what went wrong and what i wish would/could have happened.

i think, really, what would be ideal, would be some sort of pause or alternate low stress duties that can be put on the job. perhaps some sort of salary reduction, or maybe insurance that covers the lost wages at the time, that allows for time to deal with these things properly and then a proper return where one isn't caught between trying to deliver in a high stakes environment and being a reasonable human in family/home matters.

i've seen some comments along the lines of "people who work in trades don't get this sort of benefit." yeah, that's not totally true... and computering for dollars is different, a depressed/mentally stressed programmer is like an electrician with a skeletal injury. a friend of mine is an electrician and when he injured himself, the union found a desk job for him until he was able to heal. i feel like something similar should exist for computer people.

> the union found a desk job for him until he was able to heal. i feel like something similar should exist for computer people.

Yup. This whole case is a great argument for unions. It would have been a good test of the Google union if it had happened there.

I remember this being posted as an Ask/Tell HN message a few weeks back.. although several people suggested at the time he might want to delete, since it could complicate things for him. (Which seems to have happened) It's a bit meta for an HN story to come back to HN.

This happened to me, as well. Not my wife and not Amazon, but actually a handful of family members dying over the last year.

On one hand I completely understand my employer. Unlike Amazon, they do not have Amazon-style money. They are fighting to survive. Like the author I am not sure what they should have done for me.

During the conversation where I was terminated, I told my boss I understood their position. They needed performance above all else.

But, combined with the company's meager retirement plan, meager health insurance, and stingy PTO that barely covers a couple of funerals each year.... I said who the fuck are you trying to hire, here? Exclusively people... without families? Are you trying to hire typical human beings or what? Or strictly obsessive coders who do nothing but code all day and don't have families and don't need PTO?

"I don't think those kinds of guys exist any more," he said.

"Well maybe you should build a fucking company for the other kind of person then, huh?" I said.

He had no answer.

>>Or strictly obsessive coders who do nothing but code all day and don't have families and don't need PTO?

Unfortunate, but true. If you look at the life profiles of 'rockstar coders' going around FANG like companies they are mostly single(and childless) people, with minimal to no family commitments/connections.

These kind of people fit in perfectly into doing the weekend long leetcode tournaments. Changing jobs every year. etc.

There's a high degree of freedom, but albeit long term unfixable problems that come with this kind of a lifestyle.

Yeah. I don't think that kind of "rockstar" coder typically benefits a company in the long run.

There are the true, true, true outliers: the Linus Torvalds and the John Carmacks, who truly solve problems that others can't.

But then there are people who write a bunch of blog posts, make some kind of name for themselves, show up and crap out a bunch of code, impressing management, etc. I don't think they are good at building systems. They make messes others need to clean up while they've already moved on to making their next mess.

I don't get it. Are they also having a hard time hiring people or something? As for your premise of "who the fuck are you trying to hire, here? Exclusively people... without families?", I don't see weird about that. If you're a company of a dozen or so people, it doesn't seem too hard to find a bunch of 22-30 year olds with very little commitments.

    I don't get it.

Understandable. There was a lot of context I left out because it wasn't too interesting and I wanted to keep things under a billion words so I just mentioned the similarities with the linked article.

    As for your premise of "who the fuck are you trying 
    to hire, here? Exclusively people... without families?",
    I don't see weird about that.

Yes, they are having a difficult time finding and keeping people, particularly experienced ones.

The product involves a large-ish amount of customer data, and our experience was that recent grads and "people that just did a 4-week 'Code Camp' style course" are particularly unsuited for that kind of work: they can write basic CRUD till the cows come home, but they know nothing about performance/scaling.

(Best-case scenario: they know they know nothing. More typical scenario: they think they know...)

    If you're a company of a dozen or so people, it 
    doesn't seem too hard to find a bunch of 22-30 
    year olds with very little commitments.

Depending on your jurisdiction it's likely downright illegal to discriminate against employees or prospective employees based on them having families.

But even from a pure self-interest standpoint, if you're strictly hiring people without families you're ignoring a big chunk of the talent pool and if a company's having problems hiring, perhaps that's something that should be re-evaluated.

FWIW, note that I am using "family" here to mean "having any family members whatsoever" -- I'm not just talking about people with children. I don't even have children, myself. But I have family. They die, get married, etc.

I'm disappointed at how widespread this seems to be.

My mother died earlier this year. When I asked my boss at our series b startup for leave her response was, "do you really need this much time, its the end of the quarter." I told her that I did actually want 2 weeks to grieve the loss of my mother and she never responded. When I returned to work, she had never told HR that my mother died. HR didn't understand why I was absent for 2 weeks. I decided to resign and not work with people who behave like that.

Assuming you told HR that your mother had died as to the why, how did HR respond given their ignorance of your situation?

Note: Condolences for your loss.

This happened to me @ Charter. I'd been the primary caretaker for both of my elderly grandparents. My grandpa died in 2017 and my grandma passed in 2020. When she passed I was basically told perform or quit with my boss yelling at me the whole time that I wasn't making my commitments.

My days of being unwilling to work at any large tech company regardless of compensation are certainly coming to a middle

OK, though I have posted on blind, I thought I would post here so there wouldn't be a lot of guessing. The article is about me, I use the name suWU43 in blind I posted several responses there.

Here is the link for those that are interested

https://www.teamblind.com/post/%F0%9F%94%A5Amazon-pipd-while...

The timeline many of you have guessed is off, I didn't want to comment on the exact timeline as I went back to work a few months back and I worry about retaliation from Amazon. Several of my friends have reached out that had no idea how bad it was. In the article I stated that of course I could have done better but my performance wasn't zero more like 90%, is that enough when you spouse had a terminal disease? Plus I was clear about it before I started.

My performance came into question after I talked to HR, coincidence? There are many instances at Amazon, documented, where an employee is pushed out when they are having personal issues. This push from my manager put me in a spiral that I am just overcoming.

My daughters and I are working to find happiness again and unfortunately the cover of the internet lets everyone say whatever they want. I just hope anyone reading this never lives what I did. Watching this amazing woman that you loved so much slowly lose the light in her eyes. Watching her for eight days hoping she finds peace and then praying for one more day with her. Seeing her crossover with her last breathe. I don't know about you, but 100% seems impossible.

There's the Family Medical Leave Act in the USA which protects your job but provides not your paycheck. Some states offer to pay a part of your salary or a flat amount but a lot do not.

I am sorry to hear about the cancer diagnosis. For anyone whose immediate family is impacted by cancer or any complex medical issue etc... and you are employed, you should consult with an employment law attorney in the beginning to get their advice as how the system works and how to protect your legal rights. This will cost a little money but it's about prevention, then preparation and documentation. The company consults lawyers, so should you.

The "consult with an attorney in advance advice" also pertains to any situation where you have complex needs, including for example public schools, special education and your children.

You have to understand how the system works.

Also my advice is to never ever switch jobs when you are dealing with a complex medical situation if you and your employer have a good history and they are acting like human beings should. That relationship is worth a lot.

A warning to everyone out there: nobody cares and you’re on your own.

Three years ago my mom died of breast cancer. 6 days later my girlfriend died of the same. I had a stable, unionised job at a public sector company which gave me three weeks off in combined bereavement and holiday leave. At the same time my father was dying of prostate cancer and I was his only caregiver. I requested 6 months work-from-home, which was granted. An extension to that was declined. I had to choose between my father and my job, so I resigned. My life has been left in ruins and it’s going to take me years to put it back together again.

I’ve seen this happen to other people too, in different ways. All of us will eventually be hit with one or two catastrophic life changing circumstances like this which no employers anywhere have mechanisms to deal with.

Looks like it’s not just Amazon. Here is another incident discussed on HN involving Atlassian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28555480

In the film "A Good Year", the main character reaches a crossing point between his successful career [high, big finance] and his budding rediscovered life [a vineyard].

He is offered the coveted, prestigious Partnership. Rich for life. Known around the globe. Power. Influence. Move mountains. Meet Kings.

Or.

He can make efforts to reboot a vineyard in another country. It's fallowed somewhat over the decades but it has promise if given attention. The wine was and can be again good; there is a reputation to (re)harness.

His boss calls him to carpet. "So, here it is. Your money or your life."

A vineyard isn't brain cancer; the point remains the same. There are times when you need to choose over the other.

It hard to hear these stories, but necessary to warn future employees about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28555480

You know, I don't doubt that Amazon is a bunch of bastards, but I can't say that any company I have worked for ever did much for employee tragic circumstances. They were just more polite about it.

> can’t do this anymore. I was at my wits’ end. I felt like I was going to lose it at any point. Not that I was going to kill myself, but that I was going to be put in a rubber room.

Sometimes I think one of the downsides of remote work is that you can push people until you literally drive them insane while being too far away for them to murder your ass.

Not to say he should have killed his boss, but most of us have a social awareness that kicks in and says "maybe I shouldn't be a massive douche canoe to this desperate person while in striking distance".

The thing about companies that treat other people badly, be it other workers, vendors, or customers is that , if you work for them, eventually they'll get around to treating you badly. :/

This rule also applies to people who treat others badly.

Why do we expect companies to act with compassion?

IMHO I think society should be setting up laws to protect and enhance the lives of it's citizens and not let those topics up to companies.