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Amazon Work-Life Balance Defender: Prior Employer Nearly Killed Me and My Team
theodp writes: New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan questions whether her paper's portrayal of Amazon's brutal workplace was on target, citing a long, passionate response in disagreement from Nick Ciubotariu, a head of infrastructure development at Amazon. Interestingly, Ciubotariu — whose take on Amazon's work-life balance ("I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to") was used as Exhibit A by CEO Jeff Bezos to refute the NYT's report — wrote last December of regretting his role as an enabler of his team's "Death March" at a former employer (perhaps Microsoft, judging by Ciubotariu's LinkedIn profile and his essay's HiPo and Vegas references). "I asked if there were any questions," wrote Ciubotariu of a team meeting. "Nadia, one of my Engineers, had one: 'Nick, when will this finally end?' As I looked around the room, I saw 9 completely broken human beings. We had been working over 100 hours a week for the past 2 months. Two of my Engineers had tears on their faces. I did my best to keep from completely breaking down myself. With my voice choking, I looked at everyone, and said: 'This ends right now'." Ciubotariu added, "I hope they can forgive me for being an enabler of their death march, however unwilling, and that I ultimately didn't do enough to stop it. As a 'reward' for all this, I calibrated #1 overall in my organization, and received yet another HiPo nomination and induction, at the cost of a shattered family life, my health, and a broken team. I don't think I ever felt worse in my entire career. If I could give it all back, I would, in an instant, no questions asked. Physically and mentally, I took about a year to heal."
The media is treating this like it's a global issue at amazon. It maybe a certain part of the company. For example, Quicken Loans is considered one of the top employers in Michigan. They always win "best place to work" and other ridiculous things. It's widely known that in most departments, they're fine. However, I've worked with several former programmers and they all say it's horrible, understaffed and they insist on insane hours. There's no time to test code, etc. If the programmers all got together and reported to the media with examples, then we'd see a story like Amazons about Quicken Loans. Instead, the rest of the company's great reviews make it sound like a swell place to be.
It's possible amazon has a problem in tech or another department but the people in the warehouse are treated fine. It may not be a global problem. Also, most of the people who say it's great are MANAGERS at amazon. What about the rank and file!
So...they should increase the H1b's?
[INSERT Sarcastic Dodge Tomato GIF Here]
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
From glassdoor, it does seem like there's a troubling amount of people complaining about work-life balance, although not totally out of line with other tech companies:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...
I really did
FTFS:
"I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to"
Employee: "I wanted to work this weekend. I really did"
Interviewer: "Oh, that's good. Why did you want to work this weekend?"
Employee: "Cuz they'd fire my ass otherwise, doofus!"
'nuff said. Sure, some management type work weekends to "set an example" but otherwise I don't buy it.
I was a mid-level IT dept manager for a major newspaper. I was never specifically asked to work overtime, but I often did so because it was my responsibility to ensure production readiness. So yeah, I chose to work, but to say I "wanted to" would be stretching it.
Peace,...
Dear Nick,
I'm very happy to learn that you, the Head of Infrastructure Development at Amazon, have good working conditions at Amazon, but your opinion is absolutely irrelevant, since people being pressured at Amazon are not developers, but people doing physical work.
It's easy to defend your job when you have a comfortable position, but it's also very disrespectful towards people who do *real* manual work, who are forced to follow a fast pace and who are also badly paid.
I had countless death marches in my previous jobs (in videogames), and I know very well how it destroys people (and it took me more than one year to recover).
But death marches cannot compare to physical repetitive fast-pacing tasks.
The body suffers but also questions arise, because the mind is completely available.
As a software engineer, my minds is always busy, so I don't have doubts when I work.
If I had a manual work, I would have plenty of time to wonder why I do a job that I dislike.
I have experienced the Stockholm syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in a few jobs, where I believed it was my duty to sacrifice myself for the company, so I understand people wanting to show that they can perform better than others.
It's totally normal !
But please, Nick, don't compare your job to the mindless harassing jobs in Amazon.
Just because there are worse places to work doesn't make Amazon a good place to work.
Manager passionately disagrees with complaints of managers abusing staff, did I get that right?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Seriously I have no sympathy for people that allow themselves to be walked all over, then complain about how their employer destroyed their life.
Y'all just need to grow a pair and remember that employment is a business contract between equals. Next time your employer asks you to do something unfair such as donate a bunch of unpaid overtime or work extremely excessive hours, just fucking say NO. Otherwise just shut up and take it like the bitches you have actively chosen to turn yourselves into.
Here's an interesting case for unionization in tech:
https://michaelochurch.wordpre...
Discuss.
The so called rebuttal by Nick Ciubotariu from a few days ago, reeks of disingenuousness and playing games with semantics.
I’ve never worked a single weekend when I didn’t want to. No one tells me to work nights.:
This may very well be true. BUT, what DOES happen, in almost every company, is that managers create enormous workloads with ridiculously short deadlines, and it is physically impossible to get the work done, on time, unless you work 100 hours a week. So, fearing a bad performance review for not getting their work done and for not being a "team player" who is willing to "do whatever ti takes", people take it upon themselves to "voluntarily" work long hours.
There is no “culling of the staff” annually. That’s just not true. No one would be here if that actually took place and it was a thing"
Even with Amazon's terrible reputation, how many tens of thousands of resumes do they get every year?
I’ve never seen anyone cry. And if that was truly the environment, that’s just wrong, and certainly not something we encourage. In today’s Amazon, management and HR would take care of that in an instant.
Major lulz for this one. How many tens of thousands of people, working at thousands of different companies, have filed lawsuits over things like sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racial discrimination? And in 99% of those cases, the lasuit only came about because the person went to HR and was either ignored or HR took their managers side. In any company, HR is the most completely useless department.
I won’t discuss Organizational Level Ranking. I will dispute – vehemently so – the assertion that “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus”. We don’t have time to do that here, or to teach people that:
More word play. Technically, you don't actually instruct people to do that. But your policies encourage people to do exactly that. It doesn't take long for people to figure out how to sabotage their co-workers for their own benefit. And since it's impossible for you to know everything that goes on with every employee in the entire company, or even a tiny percentage of them, claiming that this behavior doesn't exist is just plain stupid and dishonest.