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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.
The problem is that there are many cases where companies use the employee improvement plan process to fire people who aren't actually bad at their jobs but the companies want them to leave for other reasons and don't want to lay them off with the associated unemployment costs.
They put the target on said plan in hopes they take the hint and just leave. If not, the employee will be judged to have not sufficiently improved, no matter how they actually perform, and at the end of the EIP deadline they are let go for cause.
One of my former co-workers from the porno business got a job at Amazon. She quit within a week and told me "I'd rather go back to the porno shop, at least there they bother to give you lube for when you get fucked."
That alone tells me all I need to know about Amazon, and I'll never shop there. If one of my co-workers from a very tough industry couldn't hack something supposedly so simple and benign as Amazon warehouse work when she had no problems sorting and packing and selling boxes of DVDs and lube and sex toys, there's something seriously fucking wrong with Amazon's management and policies and procedures.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I can't speak to what Tim Cook has or has not innovated in general, but suicide prevention nets were a "thing" in the 1981 Niven/Pournelle novel "Oath of Fealty" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel). The story revolves around people dwelling in an arcology just outside of Los Angeles. Due to the size of the building, people were attracted to the roof to end their lives. The building designers included a diving board coupled with hidden nets to a) deter, and b) prevent the death of people attempting to commit suicide.
I've known a couple people who (briefly) went to work for Amazon because they were offered a really good salary... then learned that the reason the salary was so high was a corporate expectation of 70-80 hour work weeks plus basically 24/7 on call availability.
So if you ever hear Bezos talking about needing more H1-Bs because of a "lack of skilled workers", be sure to note he's got a different definition of "skilled" than you or I do. I don't personally think a willingness to give up one's entire existence should be considered a skill - but maybe that's just me.
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