<story><title>“I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon”</title><url>https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-i-worked-at-amazon-this-is-my-story-9eba5eef2976</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tinbad</author><text>This story doesn&amp;#x27;t surprise me at all. My 7 month pregnant wife is currently going through the exact same experience at Google. As soon as she notified her manager of her pregnancy, a week later they are trying to get rid of her. Made her pick between PIP or 2 months severance. Before she could make her decision, luckily, her doctor put her on leave because of a higher risk pregnancy (twins), she was entitled to short term disability but the company that handles Googles disability is a complete mess to deal with. It seems like make it super difficult to make use of these &amp;#x27;perks&amp;#x27; so you just give up and don&amp;#x27;t bother. Anyway, long story short its the same everywhere. Im sure Larry and Jeff had good intentions when they started their companies but now that it&amp;#x27;s in the hands of middle management it&amp;#x27;s no different than any other big corp.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sure Larry and Jeff had good intentions when they started their companies but now that it&amp;#x27;s in the hands of middle management it&amp;#x27;s no different than any other big corp.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the weird things is &amp;#x27;success metrics telephone tag.&amp;#x27; Basically it works like this; Boss creates a function and defines what it means to be successful. Hires a group to do that function. The group grows and its bifurcated into sub-groups which each have a part of the problem, and each has their own &amp;quot;success metric&amp;quot; which should, in theory, contribute up to the top level metric. However, there are no &amp;#x27;peer ranking&amp;#x27; of the metrics, so if you have one group that is keeping your HR costs under control (success metric is &amp;#x27;cost per employee&amp;#x27;) and you have another group with is keeping your employee&amp;#x27;s happy (success metric is &amp;#x27;employee retention&amp;#x27;) and a third group which is keeping employees productive (success metric &amp;#x27;revenue per employee&amp;#x27;), they all sum up, in theory to success metric &amp;#x27;keeping people happy and productive at the lowest possible cost&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Now you find an employee who discloses a condition which will both cost the company money (benefit payout), and reduce productivity (external issues, loss of focus at work) and suddenly two parts of the HR group are having their success metric impacted by this event. You can reduce that to only one group making the person quit. So from the top level &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re hitting two of our three metrics&amp;quot; is a better report to send up then &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re hitting one of our three metrics&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;A fix for this is an suitably enlightened senior manager providing scale options, so &amp;quot;retain good employee&amp;quot; gets a weight of &amp;#x27;6&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;save money&amp;#x27; 2, and &amp;#x27;productivity&amp;#x27; 3. Now when you score it retaining them gets you 6&amp;#x2F;11 but getting them to quit only gets you 5&amp;#x2F;11. Retaining your best employees becomes the managed-to goal.&lt;p&gt;Understanding how a company approaches those problems will say a lot about the quality of its management and the maturity of its processes.</text></comment>
<story><title>“I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon”</title><url>https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-i-worked-at-amazon-this-is-my-story-9eba5eef2976</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tinbad</author><text>This story doesn&amp;#x27;t surprise me at all. My 7 month pregnant wife is currently going through the exact same experience at Google. As soon as she notified her manager of her pregnancy, a week later they are trying to get rid of her. Made her pick between PIP or 2 months severance. Before she could make her decision, luckily, her doctor put her on leave because of a higher risk pregnancy (twins), she was entitled to short term disability but the company that handles Googles disability is a complete mess to deal with. It seems like make it super difficult to make use of these &amp;#x27;perks&amp;#x27; so you just give up and don&amp;#x27;t bother. Anyway, long story short its the same everywhere. Im sure Larry and Jeff had good intentions when they started their companies but now that it&amp;#x27;s in the hands of middle management it&amp;#x27;s no different than any other big corp.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endtime</author><text>Congrats on your twins!&lt;p&gt;I work for Google, and when my wife had twins last October, my team was extremely supportive when I took six weeks of paternity leave - they even threw me a little party and chipped in for an Amazon gift card for diapers etc.  It was an entirely positive experience.  A female coworker had a baby a week earlier and she was out from mid-September to early February.  And she and I both applied for promotion that September, with the full support of our manager and her manager.  I&amp;#x27;ve since seen friends at Google have kids and take leave with absolutely no issues.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s awful that your wife had this experience - she should escalate it to her boss&amp;#x27;s boss.  I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s standard for Google.</text></comment>