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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.
employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved
Whoever invented "employee improvement plan" needs to die.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This seems to be very common at Amazon. Going by the FACE site, it shows a clear pattern of abuse, and I'm not surprised that this hasn't happened before.
Granted the FACE site is posted to those who are usually pissed at Amazon, but with so many postings and so often it shows that there is a clear pattern of employee abuse.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
Clearly suicides in Cuba are not a reflection on modern socialist management styles. Che! Che! Che!
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved,
Stepping off a 12 story building seems like kind of a harsh "improvement plan".
Given that the overall suicide rate is 13 per 100,000 people annually, Amazon seems to be preventing suicides.
REPLY ALL nearly KILLS man
?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A rational person would have dropped a PC from the 12-story building to hit his boss, eliminating the source of his troubles.
At my last place of work they used to play this over the speakers when we had layoffs https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think I preferred their honesty to all that euphemism and bullshit
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
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.
Remember kids, land head first if jumping, or cut along the wrist, not across....
This wasn't a suicide attempt, he was trying to get a job as a drone.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
If the email said what I think it said, you would have to pry it from Bezos' cold dead hands. After fighting your way through his security force and past his massed army of lawyers.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It appears he fell in one of the Complaints Department letter storage silos, so he actually only fell like 10 feet.
A cliche joke at Amazon's executive office, isn't it? Sick
Let me guess: you work for the government now in a cushy IT contracting job because that is all you could get?
Workplace suicides are on the rise — why is one at Amazon considered particularly newsworthy? Are not Bloomberg and Slashdot encouraging some poor slob to do it, by promising them a bit of post-mortem glory, however fleeting?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Is an "employee improvement plan" literally just a euphemism for the fast track to termination everywhere, or are there places where it's taken seriously and efforts are made to actually improve an employee's performance?
It sure seems like EIPs only really exist as a way to get rid of an employee -- set unreachable goals, make them pariahs who other employees would keep at arm's length, flag them for increased scrutiny of metrics generally ignored for other employees, basically create the cover for termination with cause and denial of any unemployment benefits.
But are there companies that actually use them to help right a floundering employee and make them successful? Acknowledge that company process is imperfect, managers aren't either, the employee in question is skilled but maybe not an ideal fit for the team they're placed in? Any companies actually take seriously the idea they have a fair amount invested in someone they've already hired and that it may make sense to actually do something to make the employee work out vs. starting over?
As a contractor, I know I've walked into places where my skills were ideal for the job but where all manner of circumstances (people, management, resources) left my performance substandard, despite doing the same thing well just previously elsewhere and then moving on to do the same thing well at a new location. Objectively I should have done equally well at companies A, B & C but for reasons that seem external to me, B works less well.
Remember, only YOU can refuse a job offer from Amazon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
... but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved, ...
Won't look good on his performance report. "Employee fails to complete tasks in a timely fashion."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nailed it!
Sounds like they are. Usually 10 or more stories is enough to do it. Well once he gets out of the hospital he can try again from something higher. I would recommend a swan dive into a nice parking lot.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If you compared the statistics of suicide for FoxConn vs China as a whole you actually had a reduced chance working for FoxConn.
That doesn't help sell a narrative, but that's how statistics work.
Let me guess: you work for the government now in a cushy IT contracting job because that is all you could get?
After three years as a video game tester and three years a lead video game tester, I went back to school learn computer programming on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. I spent the past decade working as an IT support contractor at Cisco, eBay, Fujitsu, Intuit, Google, Sony and many other Fortune 500 companies. I'm in my 22nd year of my technical career doing computer security in government IT, making 50% less money than my Silicon Valley peers because I serve the taxpayers.
I don't know what you imagine you get out of being callous - other than making yourself look slightly less than human. Workplace bullying really ought to be something that everybody worried about; nobody is immune to the very serious, mental health problems that this can cause, and trying to appear "tough" only makes you all the more vulnerable.
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.
Apparently the guy survived a 12 story drop... what makes you think that suicide nets aren't already implemented?
No mention of suicide nets. Plus, can you imagine the negative publicity Amazon would get from putting up suicide nets in the USA? It's a completely different story to do that in China as Apple did, but their factory had really weird rules for the employees and was not in any way a typical Chinese workplace. I don't know what the odds are for surviving a 12 story drop, but it's not impossible. The odds aren't good, but one unofficial source I found put a 15 story fall at a 1 in 100 chance of survival. There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.
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.
Most larger companies have some type of a multi-step "employee improvement program". It is to put established consistent set of steps in place to document and attempt to improve the performance of someone to help them later if an unlawful termination/discrimination case comes up.
If you just fire someone because they sucked and were late, the argument is Jill and Jim were also late a few times and they sucked too but they were not fired.
I thought people just jumped off some bridge in Seattle?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Let me guess: you work for the government now in a cushy IT contracting job because that is all you could get?
... I'm in my 22nd year of my technical career doing computer security in government IT, making 50% less money than my Silicon Valley peers because I serve the taxpayers.
I'm impressed by your CV, but I'm sorry you felt you had to justify yourself to the fuckwit troll you were replying to. I already knew you were a better man than he based on your previous posts in this thread.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
So "yes"?
Of course. But the question was asked by a troll who already knew the answer. I took the opportunity to present my side of the story by flashing my resume.
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?
The jump wasn't from the 12th floor, which is why he survived. He only fell about 20 feet. http://www.seattlepi.com/local...
There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.
I hadn't heard of that one but I do know of am 18,000 feet fall survived over Germany during WWII. Turns out there are links to other similar instances on the wiki page.
Maybe loss of manufacturing jobs and horrible jobless economy?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
From the various anecdotes I've heard about Amazon, I sure as hell wouldn't want to work there.
You could say that about any number of companies. Cultural fit is an important consideration at any job. Google is a great place to work for some but it would be a terrible place for me personally. We have people at my company who do jobs that I'm perfectly capable of doing but would absolutely loathe doing. Sometimes one part of a business can be a good fit and another branch of the same company can be a terrible fit.
Is Amazon a great or terrible place to work? I think that depends on your personal perspective. Probably doesn't fit most of us well but obviously some people think it is fine.
Yeah, it's really not that different from working in a small company really. If you get a good manager and company, a small company can be great. If you get a bad manager and/or company, it can be hell. A big company is basically like a bunch of small companies all stuck together and sharing an HR department and facilities.
The main advantages I've seen with bigger companies are
1) they tend to be much better about avoiding certain problems that could cost them big in legal fees, namely harassment. You don't hear a lot of off-color jokes at the big companies because employees are thoroughly trained to avoid that behavior, and management will come down strongly on employees for it, whereas at small companies people get away with a lot more, especially management. Closely related, there frequently tends to be more of a boy's club atmosphere at the small companies.
2) in a big company, it's easier to move around. At a small company, if it sucks, you just have to find a new job. But moving around at the big company isn't all that great since your pay doesn't go up, whereas when you change jobs, usually you can look forward to at least a little pay bump.
Have you ever been out of work? Sometimes you take what you can get.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If you get 20,000 people together for ANY reason, you are going to get at least a few who are not mentally well. The US has 12.1 suicides per 100,000 people annually. That means that in a random group of 20,000 people in the USA you would expect 2-3 of them to try to (successfully) commit suicide in a given year and presumable some number more to attempt it. One guy in a company that large does not justify drawing any deeper conclusions than he was one of those 2-3 people.
You don't want make judgments bases on single cases without comparing rates at Amazon against rates at other companies.
Of course, in the not-too-distant future, we will All be working at Amazon, so comparisons of that type may be hard to make.
There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.
Her name was Vesna Vulovic. It happened in 1972, and it was 33,333 feet (10,160 m) not 20,000 feet.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Every day 117 people commit suicide. (avg)
Where did the other 116 people work?
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.
#DeleteChrome
It was 20,000 feet after the first 13,333 feet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I guess working for the government leaves plenty of time to slack off here on Slashdot.
Much of my job is watching paint dry while waiting for a task to get done. Slashdot exist to keep me amuse while I wait. Of course, I could multitask, work on multiple systems at the same time and risk the possibility of making a mistake. In my particular line of work, people could die if I make a mistake.
It's only at the taxpayers expense and who cares about them?
Could be worse. I've seen corporate dysfunction that wasted millions of shareholder dollars. Unless you're a retiree dependent on stock dividends, no one cares about shareholders.
There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.
Her name was Vesna Vulovic. It happened in 1972, and it was 33,333 feet (10,160 m) not 20,000 feet.
At least her velocity was not terminal.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I think you mean Foxconn.
This wouldn't surprise me. But wait, being an uber driver is an absolutely wonderful thing, especially if your'e driving a bicycle rickshaw. It's non polluting you know.
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.
This, THIS, so much this!
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
EIP or IIP (Individual Improvement Plans) are a staple of the U.S.'s highly litigious society. If you are a bad performer and I want to fire you I can't just do it. I have to be able to prove you are a bad employee. That means I have to document why you are bad and give you a chance to prove to me that you can be a better employee.
So say you are habitually late. I have to prove that you're late (No time clocks, don't you know, but RFID ID badges can usually be used to document a worker's habitual tardiness.) Then I have to have a meeting with you, with a witness from HR, where I clearly tell you that being habitually tardy is against company policy and can result in your termination. You typically sign a form saying that I've told you that being tardy is against company policy and that it can lead to your termination. You also promise to be on time in writing. That is your 'improvement.' Typically there is some duration of time the IIP is in effect, so that if you're late once three years after our talk I can't fire you. Usually its a period like three or six months. If you complete the IIP period successfully the IIP may be destroyed, retain for some specific period or go in your permanent work record, depending upon company policy.
In many states if you are fired for cause (that is because you are habitually late, like in our example) then the employer is not required to pay for you under their unemployment insurance program, just like they don't have to pay if you quit. As a matter of fact in most states all firings are for cause. Terminating you because of other reasons is call being "laid off" and almost always makes you eligible for unemployment payments.
Yeah it is pretty impressive. Wow! Government IT? Who woulda thunk it? He is such a bright guy.
So are the people I work with. Most are ex-military with zero tolerance for slackers. People who get hired with the idea that a government job means not working are shocked by how much hard work is needed and even more shocked when they're back on the unemployment line for refusing to work.
Lucky? I can't speak to the West Coast, but here in the Midwest it's a job seekers market. Companies are lucky to get people for interviews.
Amazon does tend to hire young with slight under market salaries and a big carrot of stock back loaded. Getting put on a PIP means the dude threw away however many years at Amazon and was going to lose his stock. He could have made more and worked less somewhere else.
On the other hand there are parts of Amazon that hire older PhDs and have a slower R&D pace. But that's the exception, not the norm.
I have, and I still turned down positions that weren't what I was looking for because I knew the importance of choosing a place that I actually wanted to work at.
I could afford to do this because I have a large savings that exists for these sorts of times.
I had a large savings because previously I lived within my means or more accurately I lived below my means so that I could quickly grow a large savings exactly for these sorts of purposes in the future.
It's all just a part of careful planning in my experience and you always have to plan for the worst cases.
He fell only 20 feet.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Amazon-worker-leaps-from-building-at-Seattle-10640986.php
h/t Wooky Monster https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9934505&cid=53385601
Aren't you the contractor that did the desktop rollout one machine at a time over the course of nine months instead of using a multicast deployment in an afternoon?
Nope. Unboxed 750 workstations and 1,500 monitors. Reimaged 150 workstations per hour over the network. Data transfer between the old and workstations took forever. The project was scheduled for 12 months and I got it completed in nine months. I also cleaned out a storage closet that no one have seen the floor in eight years that I did in between tickets over a six week period.
You do talk up a big game but when the subject of conversation comes to technical knowledge or skills, there is always disappointment in the quality of discussion when the handle 'creimer' is on a post. Skipping them tends to be more informative.
More sour grapes from the peanut gallery.
You were lucky to have medical leave and for your employer to give you time off.
Not really much of a self-starter, are you?
Not in this particular job where mistakes could easily cost lives.
You deserve a DevOps position. Then you would appreciate having a line or two of support people between you and the users.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just left Intel recently as part of their "realignment" after 17 years.
I have had some of the best managers there, but recently (and the reason for my exit) was one of the foulest most demeaning managers I've ever worked for (not the worst, that was a white South African who bragged about beating confessions out of black people while he was a cop there), but pretty damn close.
The other good quality about a large company (now that I'm at a tiny 40 something person company) is better retirement plans and better healthcare plans (in the USA at least).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
And then one day, you find your large savings has become a small savings. And it's dwindling fast.
There's this thing that many people do when their large savings has truly become large enough to live on indefinitely. It's called "retire".
Usually you find that the survivor hit deep snow. Although IIRC, in one case a skydiver whose chute failed survived (with a lot of broken bones) by falling into a sewage pond.
Even water isn't soft when you hit it at terminal velocity.
swarm of piranhas
What kind? Sales or Legal?
I very much doubt that would happen to an extent where I couldn't do anything to adjust.
If for some reason it started to happen I would radically downscale my quality of living. I have already found from experience that I can comfortably live on quite a small amount.
I don't think it's very realistic to have to look for a job for more than a year and not find one that I would be happy to take. As long as I keep my savings large enough to cover my cost of living for a year then I have given myself that timeframe to find something. And if not, I can downscale my living to stretch it longer if need be.
Of course I'm not saying that it's impossible and would always 100% work out, but the odds should not be high that I wouldn't find something I would be happy with in the timeframe i've worked to set up for myself.
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.
lol. Slacking off on Slashdot saves lives! You're quite the hero, creimer!
Being careful saves lives. I'm on Slashdot while I'm waiting for a script to get finished.
70-80 hour weeks are less productive than 40-50 hour weeks. In anything but the very short run.
In pure rote roles it might work for a little longer, but in a couple of months the 80/week worker is a net negative producer.
Willingness to work 80 hour weeks is a sign of someone who doesn't care about doing good work. Companies full of 80 hour/week people are waiting to implode.
Lawyers don't actually work 80 hours/week, they might bill 160 but work 50. Also note: (many/most/all) law firms have a business plan that involves not telling associates they will never make partner, purely to work them into the ground.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Now that Is a pathetic cry for help.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
He was the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union from 1958 until 1971
If you only listen to people who quit from working at company, of course you're going to hear it's a terrible place to work. If they didn't think so, they likely would still be working there.
To get a balanced view of what working at the company is really like, you need to sample (hear testimonials from) both people who quit working there, and people who are still working there. Maybe Amazon is evil incarnate. Or maybe the things they did are perfectly normal, it just tickled one of her pet peeves that wouldn't have bothered 98% of the population.
If the people still working there say it's a shit place to work, then you've got something worth reporting.
The 20-something Russian Chess Grand Master just died a few days ago from a 12-story fall. Must be what stops the fall the matters the most.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Across for attention, along for results.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I have, and I still turned down positions that weren't what I was looking for because I knew the importance of choosing a place that I actually wanted to work at.
When I was on unemployment insurance (shortly after the 9/11 attacks), I had to answer a questionnaire every week before getting my check. One of the questions was if I refused a job offer. Refusing a job offer would disqualify me for unemployment for two weeks. I would preemptively say something at the end of the interview about it not looking like a good fit before an offer could be extended.
Tell everyone how waiting for a script to complete and posting on Slashdot is saving lives.
It doesn't. Other aspects of my job requires being careful — that save lives. Waiting for scripts and reading Slashdot is a small part of my job on most days.
I know you're just dying to reveal to us all about this heroic aspect of your job, so go ahead and impress us.
Might help if you weren't being stupid on purpose. Oh, wait. You're a troll. No wonder you're stupid.
Whoa, cleaned out a storage closet AND reimaged workstations? You saved a lot of lives that year.
Honest days work? He said he was in government IT? ZING!
Ugh no thanks. He is Cyber-security though, not support. He is keeping us safe from terrorists.
How many people died today because you were reading Slashdot?
I think nowadays that is a pretty cushy job.
How many people died today because you were reading Slashdot?
None.
From my experience, you have to put someone on a performance improvement plan before they can be fired.
You have to have a paper trail showing what steps were taken to try to improve performance.
If they can't improve after X amount of time, then you have the green light to fire them.
All of this is because of legal reasons, so that you have ammunition if they decide to sue the company.
As with most things that seems stupid, lawyers (or the fear of them) are usually to blame.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I don't know what the odds are for surviving a 12 story drop, but it's not impossible.
Doesn't matter in this case, because he didn't drop 12 stories. He jumped off a 4 story portion of a 12 story building, landing on an awning about 2 stories from the roof. He fell about 20 feet.
Enigma
He is keeping us safe from terrorists.
And the server team! I had to take over a blotched printer migration because the engineer ran the script and went on vacation. Took me a month to figure out 50% of the ~1,500 printer entries were legit and set them up on the print servers. Just three days before I got finished, the server team pulled the old print servers a month ahead of schedule without notifying anyone. That generated 100+ help desk tickets from outraged users who weren't able to print. No lives were lost. Otherwise, it would be national news.
It is not the fall that kills you. Once you hit terminal velocity, you don't go any faster. The sudden stop is what kills you. I remember several cases where people survived falls out of aircraft at cruising altitude. One fell into a 20' plus fresh powder snow drift (so they had 20' to decelerate) still injured, but non fatal. The other fell into a peat bog, where the peat was built up many feet after a dry season where most of the water was gone. The peat acted like a pillow, and the person survived.
Around my building are several hedges that are at least 10' tall and quite dense. My guess is this guy fell onto something like that, combined with soft ground bark top cover that slowed him enough to make it non fatal. If you jump that far and land on parking lot, the stop happens over a fraction of an inch and you are 100% dead.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
The rooftop was about four stories up -- the pedestal section of the 12-story high-rise -- but the man fell only about 20 feet to a balcony below, Lt. Harold Webb, with Seattle Fire, said.
And that's a perfect example of the lack of motivation which management was concerned about with this employee. This isn't going to look good on his next performance review.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Whoa, cleaned out a storage closet AND reimaged workstations? You saved a lot of lives that year.
The IT manager was especially happy with the storage closet since he got back 600 square feet of usable space.
Sometimes. But most of the time, it is their fault.
Agreed. I have 2 friends who work there doing kernel related dev for AWS, not only are they paid ridiculously well (before you even take stock options into account even), they rarely have complaints that aren't just stock standard for a massive company (like some managers being useless, underperforming coworkers, etc).
ooookayy. Why don't you go and join roman_mir over there in the crazy corner.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Welp, I'm still don't grok how non-multitasking helps save lives, particularly in a IT environment, but you answered the question so I'll leave it at that.
Let's consider an actual scenario: you got an IT tech who is multitasking on a dozen system, doesn't notice that one of the systems wasn't supposed to be on the general VLAN, and accidentally reboots an operating room system during the middle of a medical procedure. Fortunately, the patient didn't die while the medical staff halted procedure until the system rebooted. The tech got fired.
Isn't that every company lately? If it's not that, it's the other extreme, they expect you to work for minimum wage and expect miracles like a 30 year experienced engineer.
>Most larger companies have some type of a multi-step "employee improvement program".
I thought you were going to write multi-step buildings. .. they wouldn't fall that high .. if they jumped.
So..
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
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.
It's not the things you plan for that get you it's things that you thought you planned for like multiple surgeries in just a couple years that even after your insurance pays the majority of the cost is still far more expensive than you think it should ever be as you now have a new $100k debt.
Isn't that every company lately? If it's not that, it's the other extreme, they expect you to work for minimum wage and expect miracles like a 30 year experienced engineer.
No. Not every company, small or large is like that. I speak from experience, as I've worked with good companies and bad ones. In fact, in many cases, it is not even the company but the department you worked on.
Blaming the economy on Bush 8 years after he left office. The fact that growth has never exceeded 2% during Obama's tenure should tell you all you need to know about that. "Stopping damage" is not an accomplishment. It should be growing.
... a guy who makes money for a living investing my money told me to send it somewhere else outside his portfolios. That's what the stock outlook was.
The stocks are a LEADING indicator, and 19K happened after the election. Before that my broker told me not to even bother putting money into stocks before the election. Think about how crazy that is
OK, but that's where we are going with the reasonable odds part of it.
I did mention it's not a 100% certainty that anyone can prevent having to take a crap job even with good planning, but how many of the people who are complaining about choosing a job they don't like are in that situation because they are in debt from health issues rather than in debt because they lived beyond their means and didn't plan well for the future.
My money would be on far more people picked a crap job so they could have more fun and have spending money over picked a crap job because they are in debt from health issues.
For instance, making 80K a year but living like you make 50K a year for awhile can allow you to get yourself into the position to be able to go long periods without work to allow you to find the job you really want over being forced to take something because you need money now.
For me I choose to operate like that because I would rather have a job that I love than live in a bigger house or have a nicer car etc.
If you choose to go for the big house and fancy car, but have to always be in work in order to pay for it all then I find it hard to have sympathy for you when you complain about having to take a crappy job because you need it and need money now.
I chose my path and it makes me happy, you choose your path and it makes you miserable, maybe you should rethink your choices. That's all I'm trying to get at in a general sense.
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
This reminds me of similar stories reported at Amazon Japan: http://toyokeizai.net/articles...
With these and that old google++ rant about Amazon/Bezos by Steve Yegge, it is hard to not to draw generalizations about Amazon's work culture. I know people that work there (just acquaintances), and they seem to like it. But shit, all of these combined do not paint a nice picture.
"not the worst, that was a white South African who bragged about beating confessions out of black people while he was a cop there"
Geez, now that's a fucking asshole. Let's hope that's not *why* he got hired
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"Come to think of it, suicided-prevention nets are about the only thing that Tim Cook can credibly claim he innovated..."
But everyone buys them from Amazon
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was saying that from experience. Accidents and long term illness are not that uncommon and even if you think you've planed well that's not always how things work out. It's not that you shouldn't try to, at least that what I tell my kids... Don't blow all our money on things you don't need and save some for a rainy day, work smarter not harder, and don't pay someone else to do the things you can do yourself.
Yup, improvement programmes usually exist to document the failure of the employee to meet the demands of the programme, which are set to levels that can't be achieved day-in, day-out over the programme period. Obviously if there is an external issue creating the employee's problems, the programme simply adds stress to the situation they are in rather than even being anything like being a helpful assistance through a temporary situation.
It's usually only when that employee eventually leaves and finds another job that they realise the expectations of productivity from the previous role/programme were not attainable.
At the root there is always a bad manager.
He came on board through an acquisition.
Also to clarify:
Beat confessions out of known innocent black people to save known guilty white suspects.
Karma has had it's way with him from what I've heard.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I work and worked in places where they had EIPs and despite quite many proceeding through such "plan" not a single employee came out with any improvement aside from a three month grace period for looking for a new job. The managers really do not have a plan because they already decided to plan differently. Amazon is surely not the only place that consider employees "human capital" that is freely replaceable.
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.
Yeah, we find another job and then tender our resignation, we don't go leap off a 12 story building. Worst case we quit and then find another job; if we haven't saved up to do so we suck it up and jump through the hoops until we can leave. To go leap off a building because you didn't get a transfer is IMO a strong indicator of serious mental illness - which is likely why the person got put on an improvement program. The main problem isn't so much recognizing there's something wrong with this individual but rather there's no reasonable path from listening to someone crazy rant to getting a 5150 (or in this case WA's equivalent to the CA 5150).
Sheesh creimer, you should have parallelised that script in your free time and run it on the non-existent compute cluster ... blah blah blah.
It's the jobs without slack time where the mistakes get made (at all levels). Let the employee kick back occasionally, surf the web (hell, reading technical websites is hardly the worst thing you can do in a technical role), do things safely.
And hell, if your manager has told you to only do one task/story at a time, then who am I to say you shouldn't!
There is a lack of skilled workers willing to work at the offered level of pay
Well, in amazon's case, it's more of a lack of skilled workers willing to tolerate our working conditions. Amazon pays amazingly well from what I've heard.
Companies full of 80 hour/week people are waiting to implode.
I'd agree with you, but somehow Amazon continues to succeed while allegedly driving their devs (and the rest of their staff) into working ridiculously hard all the time.
I also witnessed a project recently that has been driving people nearly that hard for nearly 5 years. It's not going well, the (remaining) employees get by more on their bonds of shared suffering than 'passion', 'drive' or whatever euphemism companies are looking for these days, but it's still going!
I know I can't survive more than a couple weeks at 60+ hours, but somehow, it's done; I've seen it done and it seems to be working for well Amazon.
Then work for yourself or do something to get some education.
Sorry but as an Immigrant to the US myself, I can tell you it really is the land of opportunity and if you can't do better than a job like that then you really do only have yourself to blame.
The problem with Americans is they have all been trained to expect everything to be handed to them on a plate.
Appologies for generalising. I should have said many Americans, rather than imply all Americans.
People make accommodations. They lie to cover each other, pad hours, sleep at meetings, always shit at work etc etc etc.
Nobody is working productively for 80 hours/week. All the theater has it's costs.
At 5 years in, they are all _useless_. I bet the business case shifted away from them years ago, but they were too focused on the next stupid task in front of them to realize. It will take a year or more to recover from that kind of deathmarch.
The worst thing about 'being there', is that one really bad thing happening can make the whole thing spiral in. When you're already there 80 (actually working maybe 30), you can't dig deep and find another 10 in an emergency. Usually 80 also means you're constantly in fire fighter mode. Not a sign of planning.
Which isn't to say that planned death marches never work. They just need to be of controlled length and scope. It is possible to go from one to the other in a business, you just need multiple teams and death march relays. But that leaves the second team sitting and waiting, death marches never end on schedule.
Mostly I assess claims of 'constant 80s' as BS. It means they tell each other that. Sometimes by counting golf with coworkers as 'work'. They said 'work sucks' hence an 18 hole/9 drink/9 bowl business meeting.
Of course some professions 'work 80', hotel management. But that 80 includes a ton of 'standing watch'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sounds like the tech put it on the wrong VLAN to begin with, which means that "multi-tasking" wasn't his problem - being a sloppy shithead when originally configuring the system & its networking was.
The medical IT team was responsible for configuring that system. They are human like the rest of us and sometimes make mistakes.
If he's multi-tasking, why isn't his script checking that "one of the systems wasn't supposed to be on the general VLAN" before it does invasive operations?
A misconfigured system looks like any other system on the General VLAN to a script. That's why a tech has to individually inspect each system ONE AT A TIME to ensure that they can work on it. Multitasking is dangerous and strongly discouraged by our management team. Take the time, get it right and move on is the purpose of our job.
But, I suppose a self-starter like you already has root caused the issue, and gone out and implemented network scanning to double-check and enforce the configurations of your systems, such that it's *impossible* to put an operating room system on the wrong vlan. Right?
We have a process for reporting up the chain of command that the medical IT team misconfigured a system. That group is responsible for ensuring that every system is properly configured, and to make sure it doesn't show up again on next month's Nessus scan.
Must be nice to have such low expectations and limited prospects.
This job is a major stepping stone in my career. I have high expectations and unlimited prospects in the InfoSec field.
And gives you terrific legs, too!
If anyone can read Chinese I think there's more information here, including the manager's name.
http://www.1point3acres.com/bbs/thread-213784-1-1.html
Mohammed Alabsi
Unemployed people are more likely to commit suicide, for instance. And how many people choose to do it at work in an explicit attempt to make a statement against their employers?
Those people are accounted for in the actuarial tables. Unless there was something truly exceptional about this specific circumstance that you can point to (does not seem to be the case here) or if you have data indicating that there is a statistically higher than expected suicide rate among Amazon workers then it doesn't say anything about working conditions at Amazon. I'm not saying it isn't a tragedy (it very much is) but there is no evidence that this was an event outside the expected rate of normal either.
The article seems to imply that Amazon is somehow at fault here but there is no evidence presented to support that. It's a single data point with no evidence presented to explain why we should believe it was something other than what we should expect looking at actuarial tables.
Except that Amazon does not employ people at random, especially at their HQ.
Unless you have evidence that there is a higher than average suicide rate among Amazon workers then that is a meaningless statement. A single data point does not make a trend nor does it say anything useful about working conditions at Amazon, good or bad. Unless you can point to something that makes this truly an exceptional case then statistically speaking it is just the expected outcome among a large population.
I very much doubt that would happen to an extent where I couldn't do anything to adjust.
The Greeks called statements like that "tempting Fate" or, if you prefer, hubris. Nothing makes you believe in spiteful Gods like saying "Nothing could possibly go wrong" and shortly thereafter having it humiliatingly thrown in your face.
The one thing you can depend on in life is that the best laid plans o' Mice and Men gang aft agley.
So you think it's useless or futile to work hard and focus on putting oneself in a position to minimize the likelihood that they would have to take a job that they don't like because they need money now, especially if they find that working in a job they don't like makes them very unhappy.
I was under the impression that most people don't do enough to put themselves in a good position like that and that they could have done more to prevent it and now they are complaining about being in that position when they didn't do everything they could to avoid it.
In pure rote roles it might work for a little longer, but in a couple of months the 80/week worker is a net negative producer.
Willingness to work 80 hour weeks is a sign of someone who doesn't care about doing good work. Companies full of 80 hour/week people are waiting to implode.
I live in Seattle and know people who have worked at Amazon. Some departments are better than others but the average term of employment told to me is about 18 months. By that time, they've found something better or been let go. Many of the people doing this know it and are just using Amazon for resume padding. They go in expecting to grind their nose, put it on their resume and hopefully use it as a stepping stone to find a better job because they have experience before they get let go. Amazon seems happy with that plan.
Similar protocol recently introduced where I work. Done under the auspices of Employee Health and Well being. However like management terms re-organization and transformation being largely just another way to say layoffs it isn't really want it purports to be. Basically sets attendance standards, to which if not met involves escalation and eventual grounds for termination. Two of the hallmarks that don't make a lot of sense is that firstly the values set out are less than those that are entitled within contract which is pretty sketchy. Secondly unlike the title it basically encourages/influences/pressures employees to come to work sick or potentially face censure. Supposedly one of the "helpful" questions they ask should you get pulled before management is "What can we do to help your attendance", by which I would think the obvious answer would be to stop forcing/promoting sick people to go to work getting more people sick in an endless spiral of sickness, reprisals, and low moral. Anyway I'm sure someone in HR management thought this was a fantastic idea... All it really does is give management more flexibility in who they can fire because it will be pretty hard for anyone not to fall into the program. The reason is unimportant, if you get hit by a car, and clearly you have a broken leg, and you miss more than X days, it doesn't matter, you're in the program. I expect this will last until some overzealous manager decides to use it to get rid of someone they don't like without thinking too much, where regardless of the new policy, if it is in breach of actual contract or employee law and gets sued into oblivion for wrongful dismissal. However before that happens it is going to cause a lot of harm in additional employee stress, low moral, etc... I get that a small number of employees will always try to take advantage of a system, however this pretty much targets everyone and it is pretty transparent that it exists as nothing more than a management tool to get rid of people they just don't like. Part of the reason I find it most insulting is that it is so thinly veiled, and for the most part the employees are highly educated, does management think that everyone doesn't easily see though all this, or is it they simply don't care. For extra douchebaggery it seems they also implemented it retroactively, meaning your attendance levels prior to the programs existence or your knowledge of said program count towards your inclusion, though some I believe are pushing back on that point. As for performance. I think it will have opposite to intended result. Just prior to hearing about all this I can recall thinking I need to do more to be as effective as possible, now I could care less. So I'm sure some HR boffin can point to some attendance statistics and sickly smile and say "see it's working, look how how effective we are, that's a 10% improvement", where in reality you just have more employee attendance not productivity.
It isn't considered suicide if you work yourself to death. So, by that metric, you may be right.
If a tech can "individually inspect it," then so can a script.
Sure, if the system is properly configured. Otherwise, the system is just another system that looks like every other system on the general network. It takes a human being to make a judgment call, send out emails, make repairs and update the report status.
If you leave it up to individual techs, you are requiring that every individual tech have exactly the same thought process and inspection criteria.
Which is why everyone is extensively trained to deal with the systems in the exact same way. That's more training I've ever gotten in the 20 years that I've worked in the private sector.
I see. So rather than fix the problem, and put systems in place to ensure that they're not repeated, you take the bureaucrat's approach of "filing a report, and ensuring that somebody else will fix the problem eventually."
This is a government operation. Processes are in place to deal with issues. For the medical IT team, their response time is four hours or less after being notified of a problem.
Not based on your postings here, that's for shit sure.
I have 800+ connections on LinkedIn to recruiters that I've talked to over during my career. I get 20+ phone calls from recruiters per day. Based on the feedback of my management team and recruiters I've talked, your opinion on Slashdot doesn't matter.
... that could convince me to compromise my life enough to work at Amazon. Worst company I know to work at. They take exploitation to new levels.
The operative word there is minimize.
What people are finding so insufferable about you is that you think that the worst-case cannot happen to you and you're smug about it.
Even people who have a safety cushion can lose it, and it's really, really hard to get it back if you do so. I know. I've had to rebuild my assets several times and I'll bet I keep a larger cushion than you do when I can. In large part because I do pass on a lot of job offers.
The operative word there is minimize.
What people are finding so insufferable about you is that you think that the worst-case cannot happen to you and you're smug about it.
Even people who have a safety cushion can lose it, and it's really, really hard to get it back if you do so. I know. I've had to rebuild my assets several times and I'll bet I keep a larger cushion than you do when I can. In large part because I do pass on a lot of job offers.
Who's finding me insufferable? My comments are at 3 points.
Also where do I claim that the worst case cannot happen to me? In fact I stated in an earlier comment that it's not about eliminating the chance, it's about doing things and making choices to minimize the chances.
Not trying to be smug, trying to have a normal conversation about the topic.
If you have to take the job then your cushion was not large enough. I don't know how big your cushion was compared to your expenses, but I live a pretty simple life. With my current cushion I could live for about 5 years without taking a job and that's including costs for individual medical insurance as well in order to protect against a worst case health scenario while I am not under an employer's insurance.
I can afford the cost of health insurance, the maximum out of pocket expense per yer associated with that plan, food, and shelter all for about 5 years. What else is going to go so wrong to drain my funds that I will have to take a job right away? I'm just asking for enlightenment because apparently I am naive about this but nobody can seem to tell me specifics.
Other people would rather sacrifice their work happiness than give up their home comforts. They are offended that you are happy with fewer home comforts because it reflects poorly on their character.
Yeah, I think it's great that people can make the choices of where to focus their money and efforts.
I just have this thing where I feel like an alien in the way I fundamentally feel and operate. For instance I hate complaining and I very rarely complain about anything and I just can't understand why other people do it so much. I try to understand, but it's like those feelings are a foreign language to me. I find that sometimes like here I end up trying to understand other peoples view and why they act the way they act by indirectly having a conversation about it and asking questions to see how they respond. It's just my way of learning and gathering information I guess.
Wow it only took 4 comments for trolls to completely derail the conversation. Golf clap for them.
There's definitely some kind of underlying problems going on in his life. I've worked shitty jobs and I worked high pressure jobs and neither of them made me want to kill myself. Unless you count cirrhosis.
I remember that one mostly for the phrase 'think of it as evolution in action'.
There is NO exuse for weakness. Toughen the fuck up. Waaaaaa I'm unhappy Waaaaaaa. We didn't rub dirt in it. We are strong men and women. New generation is weak whiny babies.
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything........ ever.
Surely you mean Bill Clinton and not Bush, as he was the one that signed the banking deregulation into law, and since that is what caused the crash, it should be attributed to his term (more to congress than the pres though, just like anything else).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?