At Amazon, Even the Part-Timers Are Miserable

[onehandle]

At Amazon, the office workers tell us they feel trapped, and the warehouse workers tell us they feel exploited. Let's cover the rest of the bases, shall we? Today, a contract worker and an intern describe their own unpleasant Amazon experiences.

Among the stories we've received from Amazon workers in the past week are these two, which help to answer the question: "Is work life at Amazon any better for those who aren't full time staff members?" (We've lightly copy edited and bolded these.)

From a recent contract worker at Amazon

I've been a contract designer for over 14 years, and I've worked at Marvel, T-Mobile, Starbucks, and Microsoft as well. Each place has its own challenges and no, I'm not afraid of hard work and long hours. However Amazon was one of the stressful 8 months of my career and I refuse to go back. It's true the average time there is 2 years—at least the team I was on—turn and burn and no work life balance.

Let me start by saying my first day I received e-mail, passwords met the team etc…. I was there for about 2 hours, finally logged into my e-mail and BAM about 40 e-mails with job requests. Keep in mind I'm still not familiar with the projects I'm working on—their history, complexity, nothing… so I pull my sleeves up and try and figure it all out. Turns out I'm helping design this new site, as well as a few other things. "I can help with that, do you have wireframes, what's the final output," this is normal to receive when building any website or UI so I can see how this works and what you are trying to accomplish. The answer was "we just give you the specs and basically have knee jerk reactions to what you design and make sure they fit our brand standards." WTF. I've never experienced anything like that before, [and] keep in mind this is day one. Requests kept coming in, still no clue, day one already in the weeds. This should have been a clue... My contract was initially 35 hrs a week. Let's just say by the time it was all said and done I was averaging about 75 hrs work weeks, only 60 of which I could bill for, but I put in the extra effort to get things done. "Lesson learned."

http://gawker.com/at-amazon-even-the-part-timers-are-miserable-1576194529

[Demo_Chris]

1. Yeah, it's called WORK. You get paid for it because it's hard. Know what's harder still?

You know what's harder still?

Unemployment.

It seems that there are some here in America on a crusade against any company offering entry level jobs. All such corporations are apparently evil, until they say fuck it and outsource the jobs, at which point we call them evil for doing that. A couple weeks ago someone posted a video of some auto worker crying about how physically demanding it was to build cars and how he just couldn't handle it. I sympathize, I really do, but that doesn't make the car company evil or the job bad. There are lots of jobs that suck. Most, actually.

So... if Amazon is too hard look for something else. You can try lawn care or ditch digging, but having done that myself I can tell you that it is fucking brutal. You could try shining shoes, but there's an art to it you would need to learn, and I suspect that it's probably physically demanding as well. Hell, from what I have seen even being a home maker is pretty tough if you treat it as a job.

[Orsino]

2. Welcome to our future...

...in which the best available non-executive jobs are mismanaged, contract goat-roping nonsense that force you to lie about hours.