The narrative US = good, Russia = bad is true but only if you are in the US.
In Russia you see the complete opposite.
Both US and Russian intelligence have lied in the past, it's part of their job.
For example, the intelligence agencies don't have the right to spy or attack their own population (as far as I know), but there is nothing that forbids them to ask an ally to do it and put the blame on someone else.
Russia denies doing it, and both US and Russia have interest into collecting this data, so starting from there, it's important to keep an open mind that the interactions between countries are not black & white.
A company that got a massive transfusion of US taxpayer cash to help them do X suddenly deciding to screw over the very people who funded them? Where have I heard this before....
nice, it only took two comments before we got to the "my paycheck very big, union very bad, why I join union? tomorrow will be like today, I will always be big paycheck"
Companies employ people. People have problems. Firing people, or forcing out people, when they have problems, doesn't sound like a very good place to work.
It's very possible that the unspoken culture at Amazon is work hard above all else. If you've read "The Everything Store", there is a quote, something like, (regarding Bezos) "If you're bad, Jeff will run you out of the company. If you're good, he'll ride you into the ground." It also talks about Jeff firing an early and long-time employee, he did throw a party for him in Hawaii, because Amazon no longer had a use for him. I don't know if either are true, but if true, I could see that attitude creating an unspoken culture of, "I don't care about your problems, we have work to do. If you can't do it, we need someone who can." I can also see how the success and the stock price, given the commitment to work above all, reinforces that mentality.
Companies employ people to do work. That is the fundamental nature of the relationship. Some leeway is to be expected for temporary fluctuations in the work being done. But in the long term, if the work is no longer being performed at the agreed upon level, the company is not obligated to continue paying the person.
In a sense, blaming the company becomes kind of a distraction from the real issue, which is that in the US, we have an extremely thin safety net. One of the reasons getting fired from your tech job is so concerning is that even someone in that job is only a few difficult situations from utter destitution and homelessness. That $4k/mo Seattle mortgage burns through your savings pretty quick, and if you have assets of any kind, you won't get any assistance from the state for disability. Even our unemployment benefits won't keep you afloat for long.
We should be focused on making these things better, not expecting companies to employee people who are unable to work.
A thousand times this. Expecting companies to be the source of resources that smooth over personal problems actually ends up disempowering workers, who then have to conform to companies' mold in order to receive the benefits. Imagine a similar family situation only the employee was about to get fired for other reasons, and now their health "insurance" has disappeared / skyrocketed as well. As it is, it sounds like OP really needed more routine time off than what Amazon allowed.
Rather than relying on companies as reservoirs of wealth that should be taking care of employees (eg this, healthcare, parental leave, etc), we need to move that wealth outside of corporate control - through a combination of higher compensation, better managing of personal finances, entrenched industry reform, catchall social safety net, etc.
To your point, corporations would be happy to have the government take over those functions. But, these are solvable problems. For example, there is no doubt that HR knew that long-term and short term disabilities were options. Google has a death benefit for the spouse and kids, under 21. Top tech companies that have money to burn could probably figure out how to keep you on insurance, as a benefit, during leave.
However, whether or not it's an employers' responsibility, is a culture and values thing - especially if the social safety nets are lacking.
If the company has benefits that are available, they should definitely point the employee to them. That is just the humane thing to do in my view. When I had a death in my family a few years ago, I filed to use vacation time, and my boss rejected it, because the company had bereavement leave (I didn't know about it.) That was the right thing to do, because it helped me take advantage of all the available benefits.
And of course, if companies provide these benefits, that is good, especially since they are absent from our broader safety net. But keeping benefits tied to employment has a lot of downsides, and we should try to move away from that.
> corporations would be happy to have the government take over those functions.
Is this really true? I would think so, too, but if it were, wouldn't we see a flood of companies in the US lobbying Congress to create a government-backed healthcare option, or even single-payer? To the point where it would have been done decades ago, right-wing political ideology be damned?
The cynical part of me wonders if companies like the current situation, since that gives companies more power over their employees.
It was the government themselves that facilitated this situation by freezing wages during WWII. Companies couldn’t compete on salary anymore so they found another lever to pull.
I don’t think companies like or dislike the situation, it’s just the status quo and thus hard to change a trajectory that has so much momentum.
>Companies employ people. People have problems. Firing people, or forcing out people, when they have problems, doesn't sound like a very good place to work.
Sure, it'd be great if my workplace kept paying me $300k even if I was under-preforming because of personal issues. However, how realistic is this expectation? Are there any places that keep under-preforming employees for half a decade, or more?
Are you arguing that no tech company has employees in most of Europe? It's very expensive to terminate people for cause in Scandinavian countries, France and the England.
Just because we don't do it in the US, doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
I expect that this is also why there are fewer tech companies in Europe than in the US, and why software developer salaries are much lower in Europe than in the US. Companies can't afford to pay top dollar (er, euro) when they have to hedge against being unable to fire employees who aren't doing their work.
Not saying either situation is better or worse overall; I expect there are winners and losers in both systems. Or, likely more accurately, the European system creates few big winners, but also few (or no) big losers, whereas the US system gives you the opportunity to be a big winner, but you could also end up homeless.
Personally I'm happy with how the US system has worked out for me, but I'm sure there are some people who feel the opposite.
When you get hired somewhere you sign a contract. In the contract you agree to do work and the company agrees to pay you.
You start doing 50% of your work (under-performing) for a bunch of months and the company asks you to fulfill your side of the contract because they are fulfilling theirs. Is that weird?
Let's put it another way: You do your job well, the company starts paying 50% of your salary because they have problems. Do you keep working there till their problems are gone? Or after a couple of month you tell them: either you fulfill the contract or we part ways?
Family leave typically means you stop working while on leave and there will be a job waiting for you when your leave ends. Like with parental leave, you are typically expected to rely on government programs like disability insurance and such if you need to do so for a long time.
Ok, so you are saying he keeps his job & gets paid disability & presumably keeps his nice health insurance package from working FT? Yeah that seems like something I wouldn't utterly dismiss out of hand.
I would assume his output wasn't 0, so the economics are hard to justify. A typical engineer earns many times their salary in revenue for the company. So, maybe this guys was low performing, but maybe that works out to a wash in terms of revenue per employee.
Or maybe, Amazon says "actually, losing $500K to retain good people isn't that bad every so often" -- how many employees can realistically be in the situation? 100 a year? That's what, $50mm...nothing to Amazon in the big picture.
Obviously there comes a time when you need to fire people, and we don't have the full picture. But it's also not like this money really matters to Amazon that much either.
He mentions the family leave option would've left him without any income. No one was asking Amazon not to eat his whole salary, just not expect him to function exactly the same as someone whose wife isn't dying from brain cancer.
He says later that he had enough saved to weather the firing — wouldn’t it have been better to take leave, even unpaid, and know your job is there to come back to?
FMLA is UNPAID leave, meaning from the day you start until it ends. Being “offered” to lose all of your pay is not much of an offer… in the end the man in the article took the leave and it was used against him during the PIP process.
If I was a plumber, and my wife was dying, and as a result I was unable to repair plumbing, I would not expect anyone to give me money to repair their plumbing, not even if I told them my wife is dying and they should be sympathetic.
> If I was a plumber, and my wife was dying, and as a result I was unable to repair plumbing, I would not expect anyone to give me money to repair their plumbing, not even if I told them my wife is dying and they should be sympathetic.
When I filed for paternity leave, I was paid quite a few weeks for not working at all, because the country where I live understands that workers are people who have lives and struggle with major life events.
It saddens me that some of us are so driven by self-contempt that don't realize they are far more than mindless organisms in a big Borg collective, ready and willing to be discarded whenever their productivity shows a drop.
This wasn't a couple of weeks though. From the timelines in the story it was more than a year. Would you expect to keep getting paid on paternity leave for 2 years?
> Would you expect to keep getting paid on paternity leave for 2 years?
First of all, the article does not talk about leaving for 2 years. I feel you are intentionally trying to put a strawman to avoif debating the real problem.
Secondly, the article mentions performance. According to the article, the person in question was pressured into improving performance or get the axe, in a period where his manager knew very well that his wife was dying. The manager even proposed he was placed in a performance evaluating program renowned to be a compulsive exit door whose goal is to help HR justify their decision to terminate contracts.
And lastly, when my parental leave went into effect I got 16 weeks paid time off. That's loosely half a year. I'm sure this affects performance at the eyes of Amazon. Should that mean that Amazon would be entitled to fire my ass just because I had a child?
I don’t think it’s a straw man, time matters. He joined mid - end 2018 and was fired end of 2020. We don’t know when the issues started, but it very well could’ve been close to 2 years.
My point is the amount of time matters. I don’t think anyone expects a company to keep paying an underperforming employee forever even if there is a good reason. Netflix has a full year paid parental leave policy. That doesn’t mean you can just keep having a child every year and never work.
> When I filed for paternity leave, I was paid quite a few weeks for not working at all, because the country where I live understands that workers are people who have lives and struggle with major life events.
No country has this kind of benefits for plumbers who are mostly independent.
Then you wonder why the egregious cost of maternity leave keeps popping up everywhere regularly, you are making the assumption that people in "the country where I live" like what's happening...
This analogy would work if engineers were paid by some metric like milestone completion. The vast majority are not, but instead paid yearly. And if you want to be a company people want to actually work at, you think of employees as investments so it's some scope even beyond yearly. A few months even of suffering performance is nothing in the grand scheme of things to a company Amazon's size. This is just cruelty for cruelty's sake.
I think everyone agrees that if an employee is struggling for a short time then there should be some understanding, sympathy and accommodation. But I don't think anyone would argue that companies should do that forever.
The question is how long is reasonable. In this case it looks like it was almost 2 years (mid - end 2018 to Aug 2020). Granted performance issues probably didn't come up right away but from the article it sounded like it came up pretty soon after joining. 2 years is a long time.
I think if we're trying create a sane and decent society, we're barking up the wrong tree by attaching basic human compassion to employment, which is a bizarre choice that I'm guessing can be traced back to ideological polarization in the Cold War. The country wouldn't tolerate a completely pitiless dog-eat-dog system, but private enterprise was afraid of being exterminated if communism got a foothold in society, and they agreed to take on the responsibility of funding and administering the welfare state for everybody who was employed, so the welfare state for everybody else could be minimized and stigmatized. That's the just-so story in my head, anyway.
As a result, we're in this absurd situation where the only way to do the right and decent thing for a poor person suffering a brutal personal tragedy is for them to get paid $300k per year to do an incredibly rare-air information economy job that they aren't actually doing.
I agree, Amazon has a responsibility to this person because that's the system we've built. Amazon is reaping the benefits of the system and shouldn't be allowed to dodge the responsibilities. But my god, what an absurd system we've built.
I do not know what a normal business is, but this is a luxury that a business with large margins and redundancies might have. A 7 eleven franchisee is not going to be able to afford that type of policy.
Complaining about downvotes is explicitly discouraged on HN: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."[1]
I didn't downvote GP - indeed, I can't, as it's a reply to my comment. My guess for why it was downvoted is because it's not directly connected to my point. I was trying to say "with great power comes great responsibility", but it's not clear that that principle is necessarily being violated with the examples given by GP.
I'm sorry you don't find it useful. I do find it useful, in fact millions more like me do. Usefulness is a subjective measurement.
If you think we are crazy, that's OK. Bitcoin is opt-in. You can choose to ignore it, you can think its fucking useless, but in my opinion, you are wrong.
How do I opt-out of the CO₂ exhaled by the 7 billion other humans on the planet, or the CO₂ from Facebook or TikTok data centers (as IMHO both are very harmful for the planet)?
The claim being put forth is that crypto's environmental cost FAR outweighs its utility.
Your counterargument is that such concerns are unraisable simply because one can avoid personally using BTC. Or to put another way "if WE destroy the environment it's none of YOUR business"
And that is wrong -- the atmosphere is shared by all. Changes to its composition are everybody's shared concern.
If you want to argue that some other business's activity are too damaging to the environment to be allowed to continue... fine, make those arguments. But don't bat away concerns about crypto's absurd environmental cost as "none of your darn business"
