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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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.