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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.
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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
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".
REPLY ALL nearly KILLS man
?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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
It appears he fell in one of the Complaints Department letter storage silos, so he actually only fell like 10 feet.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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'
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.