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Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After Email Note (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An Amazon employee was injured when he leaped off a building at the company's Seattle headquarters in what police characterized as a suicide attempt. The man, who wasn't identified by authorities, sent an e-mail visible to hundreds of co-workers, including Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, before the incident occurred, according to a report on Bloomberg. The man survived the fall from Amazon's 12-story Apollo building at about 8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said. The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. More than 20,000 people work in multiple buildings at Amazon's headquarters.
Apparently the guy survived a 12 story drop... what makes you think that suicide nets aren't already implemented?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved
Whoever invented "employee improvement plan" needs to die.
Sure, wouldn't want to actually let the employee know why they're getting bad performance reviews, just fire them.
That was sarcasm, by the way. I know nothing about Amazon's employee improvement plan, but the general idea of giving extra assistance to employees who aren't performing as well as their peers is absolutely a good idea.
It's utterly naive to think that everyone can be in the top X% or that all employees will perform so equally that better or worse can't be distinguished. As long as some employees perform worse you only have three choices:
1) Do nothing. Just keep paying them for doing worse than their peers
2) Fire them. Hire somebody else that you hope will perform better.
3) Help them to identify why they perform worse than their peers and try to help them improve
I can't see any reason why option 3 is worse than option 1 or 2.
Unless you dispute my assumption that there exist some employees who perform worse than others, it absolutely makes sense for companies to have a goal and plan for improving their lowest performing employees rather than firing them or ignoring them.
Obviously if someone is utterly hopeless then you have to just get rid of them to prevent them from contributing negative value (i.e. creating problems for their peers to fix to the net loss of the company's productivity) but if they're just "ok but not great" then actively working to improve them benefits everyone. Maybe Amazon's plan is broken, I wouldn't know, but the general concept is a good one.
Working for any big organization if you get in the wrong unit, with the wrong set of managers you job is hell. If you get in the right spot, your job may be great, until that manager moves to a different unit.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
wow it's almost like depression or other types of mental illness can make people do things that aren't rational.
fucking dipshit.
Mental health issues are not the easiest thing to wrap your head around (especially if you're of a generation that was taught to rub dirt on it/walk it off in response to any injury, physical, mental, or emotional). If you haven't lived through it, or had a family member/close friend live through it, it's likely you just can't comprehend what some stranger is going through.
Just because someone is ignorant doesn't make them a dipshit (unless they're willfully so). Indeed, the AC was expressing empathy in general for the guy who tried to kill himself, rather than the disdain that you appear to be trying to respond to.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
This.
As someone who's never suffered from depression I have a hard time wrapping my head around stories like this, hell at that point robbing a bank starts to sound like a better idea.. but I can at least appreciate that it's (usually) not something that can be fixed purely with logic. Saying "he should just get a better job" is like telling someone suffering from severe depression to just cheer up or someone with anxiety to relax.. just doesn't work that way.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you one. I know someone who was put on an improvement plan (likely due to personality conflict with their manager, quite possibly the manager's fault) and continued on with the company until eventual retirement age and left at well over 70 years of age with full pension and retirement benefits.
Do we have enough anecdotes to call it data yet? I'm guessing no.
Ok, I'm sorry for being insensitive, and maybe Amazon is a horrible place to work, but maybe this guy wasn't entirely a stellar performer who was unfairly underrated.
If you attempt suicide by jumping from the fourth floor of a twelve story building and you don't even double check that you've got a full four floors to fall, what conclusions might we draw about your ability to plan and complete your assigned tasks?
Ending your own life is a pretty important decision and not something you should just handle in a half-assed manner. If you half-ass your own suicide I wouldn't be surprised if you half-ass a lot of other stuff, including your paid day-job responsibilities.
if you ever hear Bezos talking about needing more H1-Bs because of a "lack of skilled workers",
I'd go a step further than you suggest. When you hear an executive of a large company saying that there are a "lack of skilled workers" in the USA, it always, inevitably, without exception has an asterisk that they don't want to utter out loud: There is a lack of skilled workers willing to work at the offered level of pay.
It's not up to me to dictate what a company should pay their workers. But I absolutely think that H1-Bs should be incredibly expensive to obtain. If a company absolutely cannot obtain a skill from an American citizen living in the USA and must import (or offshore) that employee, then they better pay out the ass for it. I'd suggest 4x the wage they'd pay a non-H1B in the same job, at a minimum level of $200k annually, with that minimum tied to 1.5x the rate of inflation. Make. Them. Pay.
It would be best if employers tried to solve this "lack of skilled workers" by helping subsidize a set of skilled workers locally, and I'm all for the idea of evil Big Government to coerce companies into investing in our economy, instead of gambling with it.