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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."
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,...
Your company regularly makes everyone work 100 hours a week, and you wonder why they're having problems hiring developers?? It's a fucking miracle the rest of your team hasn't left yet to go work for a less shitty company!
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.
From what I hear, only a few corporate drones :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
You just can't find developers at any price./quote
Don't be silly, of course you can... you're just not offering enough.
Six figures sounds like a lot, but it isn't anymore. I make about $300k these days and I work 40 hours a week (I work more some weeks during crunch, but I also get 8 weeks of vacation to compensate, and I take it). It would cost $500k a year to get me to move (more if you're in CA), but if you needed my skills, I think I'd be worth it.
Are you offering $500K? What do you need?
The rest of us have had to work "hundreds" as my boss calls them, which are 16 hours a day on weekdays and 10 hours a day on weekends, for over two years. Also, we haven't allowed any vacation time other than around Christmas in nearly three years.
Change this first. Then you might get some actual employees.
Here's an interesting case for unionization in tech:
https://michaelochurch.wordpre...
Discuss.
I agree with you, I do... But as a guy who has worked in tech for 20+ years now, there have been so many times where I realize that people can be so smart, yet so stupid at the same time. Specifically, tech people - suckers... So many time I've looked around the room for someone else to share a look of "what the fuck?" with me, but most of the time, no one dares. When they offer people "free pizza" to work past 8:00, I look around for people to say, "Yeah, thanks, but I'll go home now and buy my own $6.99 pizza thanks" - but no one does, and they work, and they eat the pizza like it's some incredible gift.
If everyone were like me, we'd probably get paid more than the sales guys, work less hours and have a hell of a lot more respect. The problem is that your average engineer is a moron. Since most are morons, we're all morons. If I'm the one guy that tells them to "shove the pizza up their ass cause I'm goin home on time", I'll get replaced with a fresh Chinese kid faster than you can say kung pao chicken.
I can say I'm a broken person now... I'm definitely not what I was 15 years ago when I was a smart mofo and ready to take on the world. THe tech industry has brought me to the ground - in so many ways. You can't win... We're all just cogs in a wheel... The industry has been turned into more of a manual labor type of gig, and it sucks.
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.
No, it's not. In late-stage capitalism, employment is more like a monopsony. In fact, most of Amazon's business model is based on monopsony.
Corporate consolidation has created these megacorps, grown to unimaginable size. When an employer reaches a certain size, it can drive down wages and working conditions.
It doesn't have to be only one buyer to be a monopsonistic market.
You are welcome on my lawn.
you are having trouble because word on the street is that you work 100 hours. Everyone knows, no one applies.
Hmm, but that is why you are having problems. You think it is easy to hide the fact that you are all overworked and you can tidy up the place to hide evidence that you live at your work, but people aren't stupid. They know the culture. Just like employers can look up information about candidates on the Internet, the same way candidates can look up working conditions. And Amazon isn't a place many people would like to work.
In my province there is also an IT company that makes custom made software. They also have a 'flexible' team of programmers, which just means that the programmers have to be flexible in their working hours. They still have to do the usual 8 till 5, even when there is no work. But when there is work, the flexibility kicks in. They have to work lots of hours, they have to work in the weekend. Having a child that needs attention isn't showing flexibility and loyalty to the company. You can still phone someone like your neighbor to pick up your child from the child care center. That's their culture.
But lately they have been complaining that they can't find new programmers and this with so many unemployed people. And they offer so many benefits like a laptop, a smart phone and a company car and the chance to work in a wonderful team.
Well of course you can't find people willing to work under these conditions. Only very few people are willing to have a life like this. If you love your family, you can not have a live like this. It is even better to just remain unemployed for some time until you find the right job, than having to endure this flexible team spirit that is fueled by many team building events. It almost sounds like religious indoctrination and I'm well aware that some people are vulnerable to this kind of indoctrination. But many people are not and do not even want to try to work at that company because they know about the working conditions.
Yet that doesn't stop the local news paper to have a monthly full page infomercial about that company where they can still try to attract new candidates. It probably costs them quite some money to have this full page advert that looks like a news article. But why not just change the working conditions. The company grew too fast in its history but they handled it wrong. Instead of hiring enough people, and slowing down growth when you can't find them, they just demand unhealthy working ethics from their programmers.
That isn't why we're having trouble. We, of course, don't mention that.
You don't have to - word gets around. If your coders are being expected to regularly put in 2.5 times the "normal" hours per week, the company should be expected to be paying them at least 2.5 times what the going rate is. Offer that deal, and you might see more interest from competent people.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
You apparently work in a hell-hole. I take off around a month a year, and have been doing so for almost a decade with no ill effect. You need to find a job that treats you (explicitly and implicitly) as a human being.
It's really, really hard to do that when you're a young person on your first job, and are just thankful that you're being given a shot to gain some valuable real-world experience. It's also very easy to say that when you've got fifteen or more years of experience, lots of high profile projects under your belt, and can get a job just about anywhere you like with relative ease.
So, when you talk about "equals", you have to consider that some "equals" have much more bargaining power than others. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, but I'd suggest that it falls on senior developers to take on some leadership in these sorts of fights against bad managerial practices.
Personally, I still don't get the short-term thinking of forcing insane work hours on programmers or other skilled workers. For myself, I've noticed that my quality of work and productivity per hour drop dramatically when I've worked long hours. Even when I'm working on my own now as an independent developer, I try to limit my hours per day and per week for fear of making bad decisions or writing bad code. It comes back to bite you in the end.
Moreover, forcing long hours on people simply burns them out, meaning you're going to lose your best and hardest-working people in the end. Or at the very least, they'll need a long time to recover, negating any short-term gains. I've seen an entire game development team simply disintegrate at the end of a project after a long, extended death march. The company foolishly sacrificed an entire team for the sake of one project, and the end results weren't even that spectacular. People tend to slog it out to the end, because they want to see their own work through to the finished project, but afterwards, they realize that they never want to be subjected to that again, and find other jobs, many even leaving the industry.
Death marches are nearly always a result of management failure. Either management failed with initial estimates and unrealistic scope, or by failing to make necessary revisions or cuts earlier in the project, when things started falling behind (in other words, making hard decisions). Or worst, they're a callous way to try to squeeze more from less as a matter of economics - pretty much the most idiotic type of short-term thinking imaginable.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Wow. This is what's wrong with the American work ethic.
Everyone is afraid to take their vacation time out of fear of being let go because they're not seen as " important " or " critical ".
Tip: You work for a very shitty company if you're so damned critical you can't even take your own vacation time off. Tell them to hire more employees and quit relying on one person. You can bet your ass the CEO and the rest of the executive branch takes their time off. . . .
Trust me when I say you're not the super-hero you think you are. You'll burn out or die from a heart attack or stroke and they'll replace you within two weeks. From overseas if necessary. Then they'll work that one into the ground. Wash, rinse and repeat as necessary.
Remember, the brightest star burns out the fastest. . . .
I don't think the relationship should be linear - 2.5x the work for 2.5x the hours...
If you count waking hours, a typical (3 weeks vacation M-F 9-5) job expects 49 *40 / (52 * 7 * 16 ) = 1960 / 5824 = right at 33% of your life. As they take away my free time, I have to hire (and manage) people to do things for me that I would normally do for myself - this drives up costs by as much as 3-4x in many instances, and can become incalculable when it means hiring people to watch my children grow up for me.
I think a fair overtime formula would be paying you 4x your standard hourly rate by the time you reach 80 hours a week, something like P = P * (H / 40)^2 when H > 40 - by the time they've taken all your waking hours, pay would be at 9x standard. Is getting the project out on-time critically important to the financial future of the company? If it really is, the team that "gives their all" should be getting more than "attaboys" in return.
If it's a short-term crisis where 4 or 40 extra hours worked at a critical juncture can be "paid back" in comp-time within a week or two, that makes total sense in an "overtime exempt" relationship. If the crisis is dragging for months and all you're getting is a gold star on your annual review, put in a few extra hours a week to shop for a better working relationship.