Amazon Work-Life Balance Defender: Prior Employer Nearly Killed Me and My Team 211
theodp writes: New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan questions whether her paper's portrayal of Amazon's brutal workplace was on target, citing a long, passionate response in disagreement from Nick Ciubotariu, a head of infrastructure development at Amazon. Interestingly, Ciubotariu — whose take on Amazon's work-life balance ("I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to") was used as Exhibit A by CEO Jeff Bezos to refute the NYT's report — wrote last December of regretting his role as an enabler of his team's "Death March" at a former employer (perhaps Microsoft, judging by Ciubotariu's LinkedIn profile and his essay's HiPo and Vegas references). "I asked if there were any questions," wrote Ciubotariu of a team meeting. "Nadia, one of my Engineers, had one: 'Nick, when will this finally end?' As I looked around the room, I saw 9 completely broken human beings. We had been working over 100 hours a week for the past 2 months. Two of my Engineers had tears on their faces. I did my best to keep from completely breaking down myself. With my voice choking, I looked at everyone, and said: 'This ends right now'." Ciubotariu added, "I hope they can forgive me for being an enabler of their death march, however unwilling, and that I ultimately didn't do enough to stop it. As a 'reward' for all this, I calibrated #1 overall in my organization, and received yet another HiPo nomination and induction, at the cost of a shattered family life, my health, and a broken team. I don't think I ever felt worse in my entire career. If I could give it all back, I would, in an instant, no questions asked. Physically and mentally, I took about a year to heal."
Department fail (Score:2, Insightful)
The media is treating this like it's a global issue at amazon. It maybe a certain part of the company. For example, Quicken Loans is considered one of the top employers in Michigan. They always win "best place to work" and other ridiculous things. It's widely known that in most departments, they're fine. However, I've worked with several former programmers and they all say it's horrible, understaffed and they insist on insane hours. There's no time to test code, etc. If the programmers all got together a
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It's possible amazon has a problem in tech or another department but the people in the warehouse are treated fine
News Media, employee blogs, and other sources don't agree with you about Amazon warehouse workers. A simple Intertubes search reveals this reality.
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It's possible amazon has a problem in tech or another department but the people in the warehouse are treated fine
News Media, employee blogs, and other sources don't agree with you about Amazon warehouse workers. A simple Intertubes search reveals this reality.
Amazon still has workers in its warehouses? I thought they'd all be robots by now.
Re:Department fail (Score:4, Funny)
From what I hear, only a few corporate drones :p
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> They always win "best place to work"
FYI, those "awards" are usually bought and paid for and have nothing to do with actual working conditions or voting. Just buy enough advertising from the publication and you are guaranteed to "win" the award.
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I've suspected Bezos has a background with the occult, from my earliest observations of him.
LOLwut? Couldn't he just be a creep as you initially suggest? What outward signs do occultists typically display?
Hmm, perhaps I just need to get out more and meet some occultists.
Defending yourself on pages of NYT ? (Score:1)
If anyone buys page to defend himself or his company on pages of NYT, in my mind he is guilty.
Jayson Blair wants to talk (Score:2)
Your idea of the new york times is a few years behind the curve.
Logical (Score:2)
So...they should increase the H1b's?
[INSERT Sarcastic Dodge Tomato GIF Here]
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Having more employees would certainly help. We only have twenty developers on staff, but have had over forty open positions for the entire three years I've worked here. We spent well into six figures last year, and only got a couple of experienced developers to submit resumes. The rest of us have had to work "hundreds" as my boss calls them, which are 16 hours a day on weekdays and 10 hours a day on weekends, for over two years. Also, we haven't allowed any vacation time other than around Christmas in n
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
Your company regularly makes everyone work 100 hours a week, and you wonder why they're having problems hiring developers?? It's a fucking miracle the rest of your team hasn't left yet to go work for a less shitty company!
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
you are having trouble because word on the street is that you work 100 hours. Everyone knows, no one applies.
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, but that is why you are having problems. You think it is easy to hide the fact that you are all overworked and you can tidy up the place to hide evidence that you live at your work, but people aren't stupid. They know the culture. Just like employers can look up information about candidates on the Internet, the same way candidates can look up working conditions. And Amazon isn't a place many people would like to work.
In my province there is also an IT company that makes custom made software. They also have a 'flexible' team of programmers, which just means that the programmers have to be flexible in their working hours. They still have to do the usual 8 till 5, even when there is no work. But when there is work, the flexibility kicks in. They have to work lots of hours, they have to work in the weekend. Having a child that needs attention isn't showing flexibility and loyalty to the company. You can still phone someone like your neighbor to pick up your child from the child care center. That's their culture.
But lately they have been complaining that they can't find new programmers and this with so many unemployed people. And they offer so many benefits like a laptop, a smart phone and a company car and the chance to work in a wonderful team.
Well of course you can't find people willing to work under these conditions. Only very few people are willing to have a life like this. If you love your family, you can not have a live like this. It is even better to just remain unemployed for some time until you find the right job, than having to endure this flexible team spirit that is fueled by many team building events. It almost sounds like religious indoctrination and I'm well aware that some people are vulnerable to this kind of indoctrination. But many people are not and do not even want to try to work at that company because they know about the working conditions.
Yet that doesn't stop the local news paper to have a monthly full page infomercial about that company where they can still try to attract new candidates. It probably costs them quite some money to have this full page advert that looks like a news article. But why not just change the working conditions. The company grew too fast in its history but they handled it wrong. Instead of hiring enough people, and slowing down growth when you can't find them, they just demand unhealthy working ethics from their programmers.
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to - word gets around. If your coders are being expected to regularly put in 2.5 times the "normal" hours per week, the company should be expected to be paying them at least 2.5 times what the going rate is. Offer that deal, and you might see more interest from competent people.
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the relationship should be linear - 2.5x the work for 2.5x the hours...
If you count waking hours, a typical (3 weeks vacation M-F 9-5) job expects 49 *40 / (52 * 7 * 16 ) = 1960 / 5824 = right at 33% of your life. As they take away my free time, I have to hire (and manage) people to do things for me that I would normally do for myself - this drives up costs by as much as 3-4x in many instances, and can become incalculable when it means hiring people to watch my children grow up for me.
I think a fair overtime formula would be paying you 4x your standard hourly rate by the time you reach 80 hours a week, something like P = P * (H / 40)^2 when H > 40 - by the time they've taken all your waking hours, pay would be at 9x standard. Is getting the project out on-time critically important to the financial future of the company? If it really is, the team that "gives their all" should be getting more than "attaboys" in return.
If it's a short-term crisis where 4 or 40 extra hours worked at a critical juncture can be "paid back" in comp-time within a week or two, that makes total sense in an "overtime exempt" relationship. If the crisis is dragging for months and all you're getting is a gold star on your annual review, put in a few extra hours a week to shop for a better working relationship.
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I think it should be more myself, which is why I said "at least 2.5x". That's a starting point - under that, no one's going to be interested in even talking to you about that kind of gig.
If it really is, the team that "gives their all" should be getting more than "attaboys" in return.
This is the real problem. Employment is supposed to be a business transaction involving an exchange of value between equal partner
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
Change this first. Then you might get some actual employees.
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Honestly, working less can mean you're producing more. Those long hours are sustainable for a week, tops, before the negative side effects far outweigh any actual benefit.
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You've overworked yourselves into a corner.
If I come in for an interview, and you guys tell me "We routinely work 70 hour weeks"...that's it, interview over, see ya, bye bye.
You have to change your corporate culture first. NOTE: This may involve firing your boss. And his boss.
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You have to change your corporate culture first. NOTE: This may involve firing your boss. And his boss
This is important, because the more people you have, the easier it will be to find work for them to maintain the same hours, all of it "critical" and "demanded by customers."
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Most of our team's time so far this year was spent porting our app to Microsoft SQL Server 2014.
And you wonder why no developer worth his salt wants to work for you? D'oh...
Customers demand it, so we have to do it.
Really? So charge them extra for it...
so I don't see how things are ever going to get better until we can hire more people.
... or switch over to a saner platform? And for those few customers who demand Microsoft quality, just skip testing, and they'll never notice it's no longer Microsoft... :-)
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You are part of the problem. You sound like you genuinely have no fucking clue as to what the problem is.
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This sounds like a troll, or maybe Zuckerberg posting as AC. But I'll bite just in case some congressional staffer who might believe this nonsense is reading.
If your company wasn't run by fucking slave drivers, they wouldn't have such a tough time filling open positions. 16x5 +10 (+10?) is worse than what EA used to expect out of their employees, and they had the worst reputation in the business. They also wound up having to pay out millions in a labor dispute surrounding those practices, something your bos
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Maybe it is your terrible working conditions that makes people uninterested in working with you? And anyway, after 40h/w on a regular basis you aren't actually getting any extra productivity out of people, only more hours and resentment.
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> I would love it if we could find more developers. We have plenty of money to pay them, but there aren't any out there without a job.
So what you do is go to the local college, and hire the next 250 people that passed a programming course. Then train them in-house.
If you aren't willing to do that, then your problem is that you point blank refuse to train people to do the job you need. And all your complaints are about your organizations stupidity, and unwillingness to do what it needs to do, in order to
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--I wish I had mod points for this. +5 Insightful. Companies NEED to be willing to train people.
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Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
You just can't find developers at any price./quote
Don't be silly, of course you can... you're just not offering enough.
Six figures sounds like a lot, but it isn't anymore. I make about $300k these days and I work 40 hours a week (I work more some weeks during crunch, but I also get 8 weeks of vacation to compensate, and I take it). It would cost $500k a year to get me to move (more if you're in CA), but if you needed my skills, I think I'd be worth it.
Are you offering $500K? What do you need?
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Makes $300k and can't quote... Who is this company who's throwing out that much money after dimwits? :-)
Accurate quotes on Slashdot isn't part of my job. :)
Of course that misses the point, the poster I was replying to said there aren't developers at any price, and that simply isn't true. He/she simply isn't offering enough money.
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Dude, if I can get $500k a year not being very important to my company's success, sign me up. Why do I give a crap about their success? If they're willing to pay it, I'll take it.
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
You apparently work in a hell-hole. I take off around a month a year, and have been doing so for almost a decade with no ill effect. You need to find a job that treats you (explicitly and implicitly) as a human being.
Re: Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. This is what's wrong with the American work ethic.
Everyone is afraid to take their vacation time out of fear of being let go because they're not seen as " important " or " critical ".
Tip: You work for a very shitty company if you're so damned critical you can't even take your own vacation time off. Tell them to hire more employees and quit relying on one person. You can bet your ass the CEO and the rest of the executive branch takes their time off. . . .
Trust me when I say you're not the super-hero you think you are. You'll burn out or die from a heart attack or stroke and they'll replace you within two weeks. From overseas if necessary. Then they'll work that one into the ground. Wash, rinse and repeat as necessary.
Remember, the brightest star burns out the fastest. . . .
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Referral bonuses still exist? I thought those had gone the way of the 40-hour week with paid overtime and the Aeron chairs for all.
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They do. They have them at my workplace. But I just can't do this to my friends (get them hired where I work).
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> Those bonuses might sound like a lot,
The only people for whom a US$25K is a lot, are people whose annual salary is US$25K.
>and has only been able to find a single qualified candidate in the past year,
That sounds like the company is refusing to train people for the job. As such, there is no sympathy for your inability to hire people.
Only 100 hours a week? (Score:1)
Sounds like socialism to me!
I expect my team to work at least 200 hours a week, sometimes more
Re: Only 100 hours a week? (Score:2)
Exactly. Took him a year to heal from working 100 hours a week? Talk to the tens of thousands who do that for much of a decade. They're called residents.
More reviews about working at amazon (Score:4, Informative)
From glassdoor, it does seem like there's a troubling amount of people complaining about work-life balance, although not totally out of line with other tech companies:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie... [glassdoor.com]
"I wanted to work this weekend" (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFS:
"I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to"
Employee: "I wanted to work this weekend. I really did"
Interviewer: "Oh, that's good. Why did you want to work this weekend?"
Employee: "Cuz they'd fire my ass otherwise, doofus!"
'nuff said. Sure, some management type work weekends to "set an example" but otherwise I don't buy it.
I was a mid-level IT dept manager for a major newspaper. I was never specifically asked to work overtime, but I often did so because it was my responsibility to ensure production readiness. So yeah, I chose to work, but to say I "wanted to" would be stretching it.
Peace,...
Re:"I wanted to work this weekend" (Score:4, Insightful)
"I was a mid-level IT dept manager for a major newspaper..." ... and there is the difference. You are not a software developer, so you have no idea what it's like. When you have a problem to solve, and you know in your gut you are on the VERGE of solving it, very often you will work late or sometimes work into the weekend to get it done just to see it to completion.
I can not even count the number of times this has happened to me during my career, that I was sitting there coding coding coding, working on the problem, and looked up and it was 7:00PM or 8:00 PM and I totally missed supper.
It happens in creative fields all the time. Have you ever heard the expression "in the groove"? When you are in it, you don't want to get out.
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But employees should not be required to do so; certainly not for extended periods of time.
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Which is exactly what the article said, that the GP ignored, and what I was replying to in my comment. No one was forced to work extra time that they didn't want to do. The GP basically asserted that no one would work extra time unless they were forced. I said, untrue.
Re:"I wanted to work this weekend" (Score:4, Insightful)
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I can not even count the number of times this has happened to me during my career, that I was sitting there coding coding coding, working on the problem, and looked up and it was 7:00PM or 8:00 PM and I totally missed supper.
Your example is unintentionally revealing and not in a good way. A well managed company discourages that sort of "missing supper" behaviour because it is like a drug, if feels good for you while you are doing it, but you missed supper.
When that becomes a regular thing, that is not healthy. That's the definition of addiction - obsessively doing something to the point of neglecting other important things. It might not seem like a big deal for a single person, but for someone with a family that expects th
Re:"I wanted to work this weekend" (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting "in the groove" is great and all, but I find that when I'm working 50-60 hours a week I'll find myself feeling "in the groove" a lot, then when I look back at what I created during that all work and no play stretch, it's crap - I was in a rut and couldn't see the bigger picture where the solution I was grinding out was not a good fit to the overall problem - it can be a beautiful, error free, maintainable, extensible piece of crap because of tunnel vision that usually sets in during those long productive spells where nobody interrupts you or makes you sit in any boring meetings.
Considering a variety of perspectives is more important to an overall elegant solution than polishing the perfect little cutting diamond.
Re:"I wanted to work this weekend" (Score:5, Insightful)
This. The standard worker smarter vs work harder dilemma.
I did the whole groove thing when I was in my twenties and just starting out. As I gained experience, it became obvious that the groove is far from ideal. I produce better code when I take frequent short breaks. Get up, stretch, take a quick walk, give your brain time to process everything you've been doing. Then you're in the right mindset to see what's what. So I don't work late, especially on Fridays. If I'm in the middle of a tricky bit and 5:00 hits, I'm gone. By the time Monday rolls around, I know how to proceed because the problem has been rolling around my subconscious for 2.5 days.
I see a few coworkers who work long hours in the groove, and they always seem to be rewriting four hours of work for the third time because they get into the groove, churn it out and a day later realize it isn't gonna work long-term. Meanwhile, if they'd just stopped an hour in and pinged one of their colleagues for a 5-minute sanity check they'd have realized it sooner and saved their evening.
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If you fail, dozens to thousands of employees wont be able to do their job until the problem gets resolved.
if your company is stupid enough to create situations like this, get out, fast
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mid-level IT dept manager
Why would you chose such an awful life.
Re:"I wanted to work this weekend" (Score:5, Interesting)
Times I've wanted to work on the weekend:
1) When I'm doing work on the side and want to get it done. I'll work on the weekend.
2) When I'm being paid well and able to telecommute, and there's a task that needs to be done - I'll work on the weekend. Heck, in that situation, I've worked late nights too. The working environment couldn't get more comfortable, with my own kitchen and bathroom and climate control. And when my brain shuts down late at night, I'm a few feet from the bed.
When I'm on-site... and I'm eating from the vending machine, trying to avoid using the low-privacy, cesspool toilets, and it's too cold or too hot, and I can't take a few minutes off and relax on the couch or outside in peace - yeah, I have no interest in staying there longer than my 8 hours. I don't care how interesting the work is. I've done it of course, both late night and weekends, but under duress like the parent poster noted.
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Everybody is different, and the same person is different at different times. I used to work at a company that had a week long Christmas shutdown, but I used to go in every one of those days. I wanted to do so. At that time of my life it was preferable. You wouldn't catch me doing that today. My point is that it is not implausible that someone would want to work on a weekend. If the project is fun /
athletes abuse drugs (Score:2)
You just won't get anywhere in the company (Score:1)
No they don't "require" they "encourage" you to work that weekend. And if you don't work that weekend along with all the other things that is "encouraged" to be a good amazonian then you will never be able to move up and will be targeted for "improvement" and eventually fired. But don't worry a H1b will be happy to do your job for less.
Damage control BS (Score:1, Insightful)
Your best defense of predatory employment practices is that you were a bigger asshole in a past company. LIterally fuck the hell off you sorry excuse for a human being!
Dear Nick (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Nick,
I'm very happy to learn that you, the Head of Infrastructure Development at Amazon, have good working conditions at Amazon, but your opinion is absolutely irrelevant, since people being pressured at Amazon are not developers, but people doing physical work.
It's easy to defend your job when you have a comfortable position, but it's also very disrespectful towards people who do *real* manual work, who are forced to follow a fast pace and who are also badly paid.
I had countless death marches in my previous jobs (in videogames), and I know very well how it destroys people (and it took me more than one year to recover).
But death marches cannot compare to physical repetitive fast-pacing tasks.
The body suffers but also questions arise, because the mind is completely available.
As a software engineer, my minds is always busy, so I don't have doubts when I work.
If I had a manual work, I would have plenty of time to wonder why I do a job that I dislike.
I have experienced the Stockholm syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in a few jobs, where I believed it was my duty to sacrifice myself for the company, so I understand people wanting to show that they can perform better than others.
It's totally normal !
But please, Nick, don't compare your job to the mindless harassing jobs in Amazon.
Re:Dear Nick (Score:4, Insightful)
It just shows how quickly management can become out of touch. If there's an "impassioned defense" of Amazon's working conditions, wouldn't it be better to hear it from someone who actually has to work for a living? Someone who's not a "head" of anything, but just some poor schmuck in one of the warehouses or a developer a couple of levels below the "head of infrastructure development"?
This sounds like nothing more than Amazon's push-back against all the negative press it's had recently. My guess is that someone in Amazon's public relations department, probably a "head" of public relations, decided to find a slave who's jes' happy to be workin' in the big house to let everyone know how great conditions are on the plantation.
Re:Dear Nick (Score:5, Insightful)
The overseer whipping the slaves: "Damn, that one time, my arm got so tired, I didn't know if I could keep going. But I persevered." :)
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Wage slavery is essentially equal to captivity dumbshit.
I'm laughing at the idea of software dev wage slavery. A decent software developer has perhaps the best work mobility of anyone in the world. You have tons of job opportunities with excellent wages. Now the grunts doing manual labor in Amazon warehouses, that's a different story.
What ridiculous logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because there are worse places to work doesn't make Amazon a good place to work.
Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
Manager passionately disagrees with complaints of managers abusing staff, did I get that right?
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Yessiree. Nothing to see here, move along. See how happy all the workers are?
https://youtu.be/CPNaaogT8fs [youtu.be]
No sympaty for slef-inflicted problems (Score:3)
Seriously I have no sympathy for people that allow themselves to be walked all over, then complain about how their employer destroyed their life.
Y'all just need to grow a pair and remember that employment is a business contract between equals. Next time your employer asks you to do something unfair such as donate a bunch of unpaid overtime or work extremely excessive hours, just fucking say NO. Otherwise just shut up and take it like the bitches you have actively chosen to turn yourselves into.
Re:No sympaty for slef-inflicted problems (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you, I do... But as a guy who has worked in tech for 20+ years now, there have been so many times where I realize that people can be so smart, yet so stupid at the same time. Specifically, tech people - suckers... So many time I've looked around the room for someone else to share a look of "what the fuck?" with me, but most of the time, no one dares. When they offer people "free pizza" to work past 8:00, I look around for people to say, "Yeah, thanks, but I'll go home now and buy my own $6.99 pizza thanks" - but no one does, and they work, and they eat the pizza like it's some incredible gift.
If everyone were like me, we'd probably get paid more than the sales guys, work less hours and have a hell of a lot more respect. The problem is that your average engineer is a moron. Since most are morons, we're all morons. If I'm the one guy that tells them to "shove the pizza up their ass cause I'm goin home on time", I'll get replaced with a fresh Chinese kid faster than you can say kung pao chicken.
I can say I'm a broken person now... I'm definitely not what I was 15 years ago when I was a smart mofo and ready to take on the world. THe tech industry has brought me to the ground - in so many ways. You can't win... We're all just cogs in a wheel... The industry has been turned into more of a manual labor type of gig, and it sucks.
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I agree with you, I do... But as a guy who has worked in tech for 20+ years now, there have been so many times where I realize that people can be so smart, yet so stupid at the same time. Specifically, tech people - suckers... So many time I've looked around the room for someone else to share a look of "what the fuck?" with me, but most of the time, no one dares. When they offer people "free pizza" to work past 8:00, I look around for people to say, "Yeah, thanks, but I'll go home now and buy my own $6.99 pizza thanks" - but no one does, and they work, and they eat the pizza like it's some incredible gift.
You know, it depends on what you're going home too as well. If the only thing you have to look forward to is a couple of hours of mind-numbing Counter-Strike while avoiding annoying roommates, then maybe staying at work to do something intellectually stimulating while saving you the hassle of looking for food is appealing. I did that long ago.
But if you have a family at home that you spend quality time with, suddenly the prospect of spending a late night at work becomes much more of a bad one. Sometimes it'
Re:No sympaty for slef-inflicted problems (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not. In late-stage capitalism, employment is more like a monopsony. In fact, most of Amazon's business model is based on monopsony.
Corporate consolidation has created these megacorps, grown to unimaginable size. When an employer reaches a certain size, it can drive down wages and working conditions.
It doesn't have to be only one buyer to be a monopsonistic market.
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No, it's not. In late-stage capitalism, employment is more like a monopsony. In fact, most of Amazon's business model is based on monopsony.
Corporate consolidation has created these megacorps, grown to unimaginable size. When an employer reaches a certain size, it can drive down wages and working conditions.
It doesn't have to be only one buyer to be a monopsonistic market.
I wonder if this is the case.
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, they all pay extremely well. But at the same time because of the winner-take-all nature of the market place they take a massive portion of revenue and profits which drives down what their competitors can afford to pay staff.
If they took a smaller portion of total profit wages across the industry, both from them and their competitors, could be higher.
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Apple pays well as long as you don't count the people who, you know, make their products.
And for all of those companies, you have to look beyond the people who are working at headquarters. Contractors, temps, etc have to be figured into the equation too.
It's not just the tech industry. All across the board, corporate consolidation is the reason there has been such tiny wage growth (actually, contraction when you count inflation). The bottom 2/3
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Apple actually isn't known for paying very well, compared to others. Too many people who just want to work for Apple.
Re:No sympaty for slef-inflicted problems (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really, really hard to do that when you're a young person on your first job, and are just thankful that you're being given a shot to gain some valuable real-world experience. It's also very easy to say that when you've got fifteen or more years of experience, lots of high profile projects under your belt, and can get a job just about anywhere you like with relative ease.
So, when you talk about "equals", you have to consider that some "equals" have much more bargaining power than others. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, but I'd suggest that it falls on senior developers to take on some leadership in these sorts of fights against bad managerial practices.
Personally, I still don't get the short-term thinking of forcing insane work hours on programmers or other skilled workers. For myself, I've noticed that my quality of work and productivity per hour drop dramatically when I've worked long hours. Even when I'm working on my own now as an independent developer, I try to limit my hours per day and per week for fear of making bad decisions or writing bad code. It comes back to bite you in the end.
Moreover, forcing long hours on people simply burns them out, meaning you're going to lose your best and hardest-working people in the end. Or at the very least, they'll need a long time to recover, negating any short-term gains. I've seen an entire game development team simply disintegrate at the end of a project after a long, extended death march. The company foolishly sacrificed an entire team for the sake of one project, and the end results weren't even that spectacular. People tend to slog it out to the end, because they want to see their own work through to the finished project, but afterwards, they realize that they never want to be subjected to that again, and find other jobs, many even leaving the industry.
Death marches are nearly always a result of management failure. Either management failed with initial estimates and unrealistic scope, or by failing to make necessary revisions or cuts earlier in the project, when things started falling behind (in other words, making hard decisions). Or worst, they're a callous way to try to squeeze more from less as a matter of economics - pretty much the most idiotic type of short-term thinking imaginable.
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So, when you talk about "equals", you have to consider that some "equals" have much more bargaining power than others. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, but I'd suggest that it falls on senior developers to take on some leadership in these sorts of fights against bad managerial practices.
Senior developers have to be able to gauge the mood of the company as well. There are a lot of places looking for an excuse to shed their expensive senior staff and go with a younger, hungrier, cheaper, less independent work force.
We're dealing with an imbalance of power here (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an interesting case for unionization in tech:
https://michaelochurch.wordpre... [wordpress.com]
Discuss.
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That's a very interesting article. I'm sorry I called you an idiot yesterday. Clearly, you're not. I apologize.
Re:We're dealing with an imbalance of power here (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my fiftieth year in tech, and whenever the word "union" has come up in the field, workers have reacted to horror stories from Detroit, Chicago and DC, where the imbalance of power was clearly in the opposite direction: graft and featherbedding destroying grand old industries, driving the smoldering remnants of our national productivity away to Asia. What we were not being cognizant of was that there was an earlier time - in the mining camps of the Gilded Age, in meatpacking plants crammed with immigrants fresh from eastern Europe and willing to do anything to survive, in steel mills where nobody cared about working conditions - where the imbalance of power went the other way. That was when the union movement got started.
I'm fortunate to have spent most of my career in times and places where developers had the upper hand over companies in negotiations. You got mistreated at one place, there was always a better job around the corner, and everyone knew it. If the stories coming out about conditions at Amazon and other tech companies are true, today's young people don't have that luxury, and may have no choice but to organize.
Re:We're dealing with an imbalance of power here (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a developer, but I spent my 25 years in the workplace under similar circumstances of employees holding the balance of power (it's called "tenure").
I'm afraid the days when a large percentage of US workers had some leverage are over since the industrial unions imploded/were destroyed. I blame union leaders who were too cozy with the elite and Ronald Reagan, mostly, but it was a lot of things.
Either way, the pain is coming for a large percentage of US workers and their families. I'm just glad I retired before it got really bad. Now I just wait for my daughter to finish her Math PhD and then I can go lay in my hammock and play Monster Hunter 4 and let the world go to hell.
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Today, having hung onto my Sub S, I occupy a niche as the IT country doctor in a small rural town. This job involves a certain amount of sadness. I'm the one who has to go out in a snowstorm to tell an 80-year-old widow that her faithful companion of a generation, her Windows XP desktop, is now far too old to upgrade - its HD growing flakier by the month, its Registry spavined from innumerable bad encounters with Home Shopping Network malware, the primordial graphics card throwing random patches of Clan Stu
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That sounds great.
Say, I'm really sorry about teeing off on you yesterday. I was out of line.
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I was a sysop on bulletin boards (remember those?) once. I still have the meter-thick epidermis, so no problem. I make a certain percentage of intentionally provocative comments here, and I'm always amazed at (1) the number of such comments that just fall unnoticed into the ether and (2) the times that someone will go Chernobyl over some totally ordinary observation.
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I was twenty something when Reagan left power, and a broke-ass post-doc looking for a job. The erosion of the middle class and the efforts to destroy the political and economic power of working people was already well underway by the time I entered the work force. And no, I didn't vote for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. So fuck yourself.
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Wait. You suggest we form unions, then repeat laughable anti-union talking points? AFL-CIO didn't pass NAFTA. Neither Longshoremen nor the Teamsters told GE to offshore their labor. AFSCME didn't tell everyone to start shopping at Wal-Mart, with their cheap crap imported from
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I'm just saying that imbalances of power can go back and forth with time. Unions formed for a reason, and many older industries that could have adapted and survived died for a reason. We must maintain situational awareness and historical perspective.
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More laughable talking points, as worker productivity has done nothing but rise since the 70's, and unions are inherently invested in the profitability the business they are in.
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Pretty much everyone who has an offer for Amazon has offers elsewhere. They're not at the top of selectiveness like Google and Netflix, but they're more selective than the average. So if you can get a job there, you have 3 other offers lined up most of the time.
People pick it to have a big name on their resume or to work on big systems. Then they realize they may have taken on more than they could chew. Also, Amazon's interview process is not very good (its downright terrible), so they DO have quite a few f
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I'm on the side of moving software engineering towards a Profession rather than Unionization [blogspot.com].
Right or wrong my impression of unions are that they are catered towards less skilled labor, while professions require a lot more skill that can be encapsulated by many certifications. Lawyers with their bar and accountants with their CPA are examples. I've no doubt many of us can easily come up with a fairly basic curriculum for basic certification - take for example Secure Coding practices [cert.org]. Given how diverse and s
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One nice feature that industrial unions offered was training, taking workers through a series of steps from apprentice to journeyman to master. On each level there was a certain set of skills required, and the organization served as a focus for getting each worker to his (yes, that was the only pronoun in those days) maximum level of competency. Certainly, after WW II and through the Fifties and Sixties the tipping of power toward big-city unions led to those dreaded excesses that today's young people would
Hmm (Score:2)
Not new for tech but it does need to change (Score:2)
Without regulations regarding hours worked and after hours email, phone, etc it will never change.
Executive will not change as long as they can cut staffing and increase their pay.
Well of course he would say that (Score:2)
> head of infrastructure development
> head
> ("I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to"
> head
> head
> work-life balance
Big difference between being a grunt on low wage but a life outside of work to look
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Having experienced a totally out of balance state, he seems very qualified. Now.
Re:Douchebag alert (Score:4, Insightful)
The so called rebuttal by Nick Ciubotariu from a few days ago, reeks of disingenuousness and playing games with semantics.
I’ve never worked a single weekend when I didn’t want to. No one tells me to work nights.:
This may very well be true. BUT, what DOES happen, in almost every company, is that managers create enormous workloads with ridiculously short deadlines, and it is physically impossible to get the work done, on time, unless you work 100 hours a week. So, fearing a bad performance review for not getting their work done and for not being a "team player" who is willing to "do whatever ti takes", people take it upon themselves to "voluntarily" work long hours.
There is no “culling of the staff” annually. That’s just not true. No one would be here if that actually took place and it was a thing"
Even with Amazon's terrible reputation, how many tens of thousands of resumes do they get every year?
I’ve never seen anyone cry. And if that was truly the environment, that’s just wrong, and certainly not something we encourage. In today’s Amazon, management and HR would take care of that in an instant.
Major lulz for this one. How many tens of thousands of people, working at thousands of different companies, have filed lawsuits over things like sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racial discrimination? And in 99% of those cases, the lasuit only came about because the person went to HR and was either ignored or HR took their managers side. In any company, HR is the most completely useless department.
I won’t discuss Organizational Level Ranking. I will dispute – vehemently so – the assertion that “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus”. We don’t have time to do that here, or to teach people that:
More word play. Technically, you don't actually instruct people to do that. But your policies encourage people to do exactly that. It doesn't take long for people to figure out how to sabotage their co-workers for their own benefit. And since it's impossible for you to know everything that goes on with every employee in the entire company, or even a tiny percentage of them, claiming that this behavior doesn't exist is just plain stupid and dishonest.
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Basic question: Does Amazon have stack ranking as official policy, or does it not? Or is it just in certain departments?
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Total stack rank shop. Google does it too, not so widely known. Slightly watered down calibration system compared to Mordorsoft, but just as destructive.
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In any company, HR is the most completely useless department.
Anybody who has worked in tech for more than a month knows that HR is just the mindless, obedient enforcement arm of management, and not even top management at that. Never, ever share your issues with HR.
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In decent societies, HR is actually there to enforce employee protection and heaalth and safety laws and to protect the staff from the worst abuses of upper management. Since this is akin to socialism, it's no wonder all the Americans on slashdot hate them so much.
Americans hate HR because of what HR does, not because of what HR is supposed to do.
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The guy is "Head of Infrastructure Development, Amazon.com Search Experience (SX)". Would you expect a guy in that position to mingle with the plebe?
Everything he says is correct - from the little he knows about the plebe who work for him. And trust me on that: he knows VERY little.
Starting Director-level, people live in the clouds (no pun intended) and to them, it's like watching the ground from an airplane: you see dots instead of people and no details about them.
And of course he's defending the hand that
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There is no “culling of the staff” annually. That’s just not true. No one would be here if that actually took place and it was a thing"
Even with Amazon's terrible reputation, how many tens of thousands of resumes do they get every year?
When people get sick of the horrible working conditions and leave to find a better job on their own, you don't need to 'cull the staff.' Or, put better, you're constantly culling but calling it by another name.
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and the workers will be happier and have better lives from this politician greasing? maybe mostly a good thing?
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"Kids, if you think these are bad work schedules, try working in the oil industry and deploying to Alaska or an oil derrick."
Got some news for you, since you obviously haven't done this kind of work.
60 hour weeks. You stay on-rig for 6 months, and you're off for 6 months. You get about $45-60K.
Try again when you've actually done the job. 6 months here in the Gulf of Mexico off Corpus Christi.
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I have done this kind of work actually. I've basically lived at the office sometimes for weeks on end. Going home every other day or just going home to sleep and shower. There's a little motel near the office building and I've gone there more than a few times just because I can't deal with it. I've had people in sleeping bags in the office a few times.
Let us be adults here for a moment. Adults can make their own choices. If you don't want to work for the company... Don't. No one is forcing you to do it. Qui
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You have zero clue about the benefits package, I see.
It beats just about any other medical coverage you can possibly get, until you start making more than a million bucks a year.
And all your expenses are typically paid on-rig anyways.