Family of Msft Employee Who Died Warn Tech Companies Not to Overwork Workers
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The family of a Microsoft employee who died warns tech companies not to overwork workers, sparking a discussion about the pressures of the tech industry and the exploitation of employees, particularly those on H1B visas.
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Upd:
I didn’t mean that this is ok, I’m for workers rights.
You are free to be poor, broke and homeless.
We really need a management class that doesn't insist on continuing the cycle of abuse on their underlings.
This won't happen. Your manager puts pressure on you, they get pressure from their manager and so on until it reaches the CEO who might be getting pressure from investors/board.
Only fix is regulations from the government which seems to be a curse word by many posters on this site.
Culture evolves and changes. What is acceptable in a culture evolves and changes with it.
Be the change you want to see, apply steady pressure, speak up when the opportunity arises, debate people who see things differently, and with time, many things can happen.
Most progress is hard-won.
I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care. They were politely told they were not meeting expectations and since they had mortgages and other stuff, they took a hint and moved on.
Again, this fight is political and not corporate. Make tech workers hourly and this will stop. There will also be plenty of tech workers who will fight against this tooth and nail.
I can't agree. I don't think anyone who is diligent about recycling or making environmentally conscious food choices believes it will fix global warming. But doing the things that we can is still important for changing culture over time.
If you're a young person growing up in a home that thinks about these things responsibly, the hope is that more people reaching adult-hood will think about the world through that lens. Is it enough? No. Is it still critical? I think so.
> I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care.
I've worked at places where management did not behave in the way you describe. The point being that such places exist, and such an outcome is not so impossible.
One way to guarantee things will not change is to do nothing.
Problem is that government is the very same people you just spoke of. If they had the collective will to change things, they could just do it. But as they lack the collective will to see change, government can't change either. I believe they call this the stag hunt dilemma.
Worker cooperatives are to corporations what democracies are to dictatorships.
We, at least those of us in the software industry, tried that. If you look closely, that's what Agile was all about. The associated Twelve Principles of Agile Software outlines what needs to be considered by developers when there isn't a "boss" to oversee operations.
But I'm sure you know how that turned out in practice: The power structure quickly jumped on usurping the name and bastardized it into something that gave them even more power.
Why are you putting yourself in a position where you're forced to find work as fast as possible or you'll be homeless?
For all but the people on the lowest incomes or those with terrible luck this is a solvable problem
I’m all for workers’ rights, though.
So if you can work 10% more than your peers, you get not 10% bonus but rather 30%-100% more. So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%, until everyone is working at 110% and then again, adding an extra 10% pays off, rinse release, death spiral.
The compensation model is pure evil.
Does it actually? I'd buy that it makes silly arbitrary emotion sense to bask in the nonsensical feelings about an even bigger number. The actual business case is much less clear. There is obviously an opportunity cost associated with that extra 10% and 30-100% is not necessarily the best opportunity. I suspect it is often not.
I think the parent emphasizes the wrong side of it, although I agree with them strongly that it is a damaging way to do things. Yes, you get slightly more upside on the top end, but it's more like 30% vs. 10% for an average performer, there's no 100% bonuses here unless you're in the "ruling class" (roughly VP and above).
The actual risk is that if you're on the downside of what they call "differentiation", if you're not the one who pushed above your peers, what used to be called meets expectation is now considered below expectations, and is a path towards pip and layoff. Lack of growth for non-terminal roles is also now identified as a path towards pip and layoff.
Microsoft is intentionally turning up the heat to thin the herd.
Maybe I've been farming for too long, but my brain, at least, is wired to push until completion and until things are done it will consume me. If you're going to be up all night ruminating about it, you may as well actually work on it.
Of course, in farming you get a nice long break after you've pushed yourself hard. I've never worked at Microsoft, but I suspect, given what I've seen elsewhere, that as soon as it is done it's already on to the next thing, never giving workers a chance to stop for a while.
It gets complicated really fast if you add decades of temporary visa status to it.
Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.
Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.
Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.
Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.
Managers should be assistants.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically?
Are those two not in direct conflict?
Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote.
You can tell we're not talking about communism because the previous commenter said "economic system", whereas the whole concept of an economic system vanishes with communism. It does not imagine an economic system would serve a purpose when scarcity is no longer a constraint. Hence the whole no state, money, or class thing.
You, yourself, literally wrote the original description of what we are talking about. How did you manage to end up so confused?
> Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections?
And no. That sounds like you are thinking of a dictatorship. Probably a dictatorship at the hands of a political party that includes "Communist" in the name, granted, but thinking of that as communism is like thinking the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
Communism is science fiction that is imagined on the same basic premise as Star Trek. It is not about central control. As before, it rejects the idea that a central control (the state) would even remain. Marx and Engels hypothesized that the proletariat would have to temporarily seize control from the capitalist elite in order to usher in communism, but even if you somehow managed to confuse communism with their work, that isn't really central control either. What they pictured is still closer to being a democracy, except one that that excludes the bourgeoisie, similar to how women were historically excluded from democracy.
We tried that in my country for about 50 years, it didn’t work out.
Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time.
It would certainly help to see at least one good implementation of the “good idea”
- A bunch of examples here: https://old.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/p23rxr/what_a...
- Some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ownership
- Oxide computer company - idk how exactly the ownership works but AFAIK all workers except sales have the same salary.
- The early idSoftware AFAIK worked similarly with all 4 core gamedevs getting paid the same
Note that nothing says everyone has to get paid the same, it just ends up happening in some examples.
Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation.
> wide variety of reasons
Can you give me examples?
RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.
This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies.
If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start.
So you have a point.
But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance.
Let's have MORE companies, not fewer.
Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise.
But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.
> But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0].
Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
And yes:
1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity.
2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity.
Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work.
[0]: literally meaning "person being used"
Wrong on many levels. They don't capture your entire value. They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.
>Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
False, they don't all do the same work. Some people do more valuable work than others.
Explain.
> They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.
No, they decide based on what they can get away with given the market situation. Do they pay the maximum the company can afford? No, they pay based on a negotiation in which they have more power and more information.
> False, they don't all do the same work.
You open a shop, you do the restocking, you man the cash register. Then you hire your first employee. He does the same thing. You own the entire company, he doesn't even a fraction.
You start a software company with a few friends. You write code, do marketing, talk to customers. You hire your first employee. He does one or more of those things. You own 100% of the company, he owns 0%.
> Some people do more valuable work than others.
Yeah, sure, how many times more productive can one person be than others doing the same job? Jobs doing real positive-sum productive work are typically within low multiples, maybe one order of magnitude. Jobs of people who are in positions of power which allow them to capture a percentage of their "underlings" output pay orders of magnitude more.
All that said, co-op businesses have seen slow but steady growth for decades now.
Not to mention that even if timesheets were used, they provide no guarantees. We always had to get management permission to put overtime in, but no one really knew how much time we worked - especially with a possibility of remote work.
This can only be fixed by pervasive monitoring, and IMHO this leads to a very unpleasant workspace.
Option 1: you do as told and leave home at 5pm. You spend 40 hours per week exactly, but work is not getting done, so people are complaining about your performance. Your manager is putting more pressure on you, you are worried about getting fired.
Option 2: you record 40 hours per week, but actually work for 80. Sure your home life suffers but at least the manager is off your back. You are getting compliments about performance and vague promises about raise sometimes in the future maybe.
Which option do you think people will choose?
Give people who want it a legal foundation for getting paid for the work they do and people who find themselves in the situation you describe can chart their own path out.
If you want to fudge numbers and be complicit in your own exploitation, you do you. But please, don't undermine everyone else's legal infrastructure to get paid for the work they do.
Which would you choose? Based on "be complicit in your own exploitation", I am guessing you'd choose option 1, work exactly 40 hours, don't get things done on time, and make your boss unhappy? Well, good news: you can do this today, even if you are exempt, no need to ask for a law.
(I suspect you are hoping for option 3, "get my boss to approve overtime so I can work extra hours, get all the stuff done, and get extra $$$". This won't happen. If the boss is evil, they really see no upside in this so they won't approve the overtime. If the boss is nice, they won't give you too many tasks to begin with.)
Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating for time sheets. I'm advocating against overtime exemption.
Even so, all other things being equal, if the tedium of timesheets is on one side of the equation and all of the exploitation of unpaid labor is on the other, I'd still rather not be exploited. Working for free, which is what unpaid overtime is, is unsupportable.
There are many examples of non-exempt professionals who deal with this without resorting to spyware or coercion. IT support specialists, paralegals, and lab technicians all have systems that work: simple start/stop time logs or weekly attestations, plus manager pre-approval for overtime. No one is tracking keystrokes and no one is forced into surveillance. It's about accountability. You attest to your hours, managers approve exceptions, and overtime gets paid. That's the balance.
In a current world, manager says: "We have great work-life balance, feel free to work as much or as little as you want! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. Wink wink, you might want to work more."
In a timesheet world, a manager tells the employee: "Sorry, I cannot approve overtime for you, because I care about you! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. So make sure you don't record more than 40 hours, but remember we don't really know how much you spend working (wink wink)"
This law might eliminate those insane AI startups which openly advertise 996 schedules, but most requirements of overtime are not that overt.
Timesheets arent fun, but they're not the end of the world either. Other skilled professions (IT support, paralegals, lab techs) use simple weekly logs or start/stop tracking without surveillance. They get paid for their overtime. We don't.
If the choice is between tedious record keeping or doing more work for the same pay, the latter is far more exploitative and soul crushing. We can fix the mechanics without ignoring the principle: work more, get paid more.
Honest question: is filling out a timesheet really worse, to you, than working extra hours for free?
If your boss is bad, you are still going to be working extra hours. Timesheets DO NOT PREVENT extra hours for computer programmers (unless there is also pervasive surveillance, like in the worst consulting shops).
Look, I've worked in a few places with timesheets before. In one place, there was a "no overtime" policy. All this means you always put 38 hours on your timesheets, no matter how much time you actually work. Worked 57 hours? Well, you put down 1 hour in your timesheet for every 1.5 hours actually working.
So I am sorry, but your idea is super naive. It's not going to work. It will make life worse, but will not provide benefits.
Help me connect the dots: how do you get from "I had a bad boss who broke the rules" to "therefore we should remove the legal framework that makes rule-breaking punishable"? Because without that framework, exploitation isn't just a possibility, it's legal.
That’s like saying "people will speed, so speed limits don’t work." Sure, some people speed, but the world without those limits and the legal weight behind them is objectively worse.
I can’t imagine a scenario where the company creates an abusive OT environment but timesheets foil that.
Some employees will see these situations as an opportunity to show they go the extra mile. Some managers will be more than happy to allow it to reap the benefits. Everyone wins until one of them doesn’t, and that’s usually the overworked person.
P.S. In the speeding analogy the relationship between parties and the conflict of interest are very different. You’re not expected to speed to impress the police, and the police wants to catch you and make money from your mistake.
Bosses don't just say "you need to work 12 hours today". They say: "You need to get this done by Friday or I'll put you on PIP. Also, you are not authorized for the overtime on this project."
Did this boss break any rules? If yes, which ones? Because I don't see anything how your proposed law will make it this better.
And that should also explain what's special about software engineering:
IT support people get scheduled by an hour, and it's easy to see how much they worked. Boss cannot say "work for 10am to 10pm", _that_ would be clear and obvious rule breaking any judge will understand. And vehicle speed is very simple and unambiguous, so the rules are very simple (even if they are not enforced much).
Software engineers get tasks assigned, and no one can tell how long the task will take - Is "Fix bug 12345 by Friday" a reasonable request or not? Was this engineer put on PIP because they refused to do overtime, or was this because they were genuinely not a good fit for the position? No one can tell.
Don't try to apply rules from one area into another without considering that areas nuances.
Companies love timesheets because, even though you're salary, they want to know what you're doing at all times.
They want all the control of an hourly paid employee, with all the money stealing of a salary position.
Also you're already being tracked, they already know exactly how long you're online. I don't know what to tell you.
* Folks working more can have direct immediate compensation for it, vs handwavy promises of maybe future promotions or stock option rewards
* Creates jobs by lowering incentives to just over-work the people you already have
* Spreads out the income tax load by creating more paid labor out of thin air to get the same amount of total work done - better to have that marginal change in the average person's pocketbooks and income tax than tax-sheltered locations for corporations or the highly-wealthy
this. most countries have similar policies. been there, seen so many others going through this in UK, USA, Japan, Korea, Singapore. it really damages your life.
to everyone, check other countries (Portugal, Thailand, Japan) that give you residency for years and allow to work remotely
don't let your employer hold you and your family a hostage with your legal status
Unfortunately you can only work here up to 6 months as a digital nomad and it's not residency, it's basically just an extended tourist visa.
Portugal's digital nomad visa seems good but their immigration system is apparently extremely dysfunctional.
China will be opening new visa track for tech in October, must be interseting to see
They do have these policies written down: bi-annual performance reviews, stack ranking, PIPs.
We don't have enough information to support that.
Bi-annual performance reviews themselves aren't a bad thing that force overwork.
If he had a history of good performance reviews (100% or higher on average), the risk of getting a PIP would be very low.
Microsoft stopped stack ranking years ago.
I don't think we should speculate on people's behavior or how they aligned with company policies, because we might accidentally be insulting this man.
Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so. It's widely documented.
The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well.
I don't think any of the things I said above (or were insinuated about Microsoft culture by other posters) are in any way insulting to Prateek, regardless of what his individual situation or performance is. If anything, calling attention to it and attempting to address it is a powerful way to show respect to my eyes. The incentive systems at play, the pressures and stressors, will result in these outcomes unless anyone forces a change. End of story.
Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.
> The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well
I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity, and I'm sorry for what you're going through.
The article says he was under pressure, but it didn't say the source of that pressure. Perhaps it was due to a series of "lower than expected" reviews, or the constant worry about losing their job and their visa. It didn't say that the pressure was caused by internal policies.
I've known many people who put pressure on themselves and burnt out because of it, despite no one expected them to do so. I suffered through that in my own career and nearly quit software engineering because of it.
If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.
Microsoft operates like many big companies vs a single company, and some teams go beyond standard Microsoft policy and have unrealistic expectations of their employees. Those departments and managers should be called out and shamed.
In practice it is exactly the same. EMs are instructed that they must have someone at for instance 80 (below-meets-expectations), or occasionally at 60 (PIP). This has resulted in layoffs. The pseudonyms we're told to use are infantilizing when we can see the results.
> I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity
I'd ask you not make assumptions about my feelings in this, vs taking the statements I'm making at face value.
Not that it's unique to his division, I can assure you I worked organizationally close enough to know that, regardless of other sources of stress, there is(was) relevant work pressure up through the VP level encouraging late hours and long days that goes well beyond healthy, often acknowledged outright as the way to stand out in leadership AMAs. The evidence of this is documented in the article, and your dissembling is somewhat astonishing.
> If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.
I'm sharing it, you're just disregarding it. There is a system in place that through basic game theory ensures a prisoner's dilemma without compromise, with the escalation being longer hours and more work. While any given leadership may encourage it more or less, to not see how that pans out naturally when employment is on the line, especially as proven out by multiple recent rounds of 'performance' driven layoffs, seems purposefully obtuse. One doesn't know when the heart attack is coming, but one does know when the PIP is coming; we can't be surprised at the choices people will make.
That’s how I read it
Currently it is used as a tool to extract maximum labour for cheap compared to hiring Americans. We don't call it slave labour because the immigrant is paid decently, but they are held hostage by multiple factors; career aspirations, family expectations and the like.. So easier to manipulate while denying opportunity for actual Americans.
Needs serious reform. A simple one is, pay H1Bs higher salaries than market rate. This would create the economic incentives for companies to use H1Bs only when really needed
don't let your employer keep you and your family hostage with your legal status
"Here is a button. If you press it, you get $50.000, but someone you don't know dies. Will you press it?
Some people never press it. Some people press it once, maybe twice. The billionaires press it as fast as they can."
This time we got to know one of the victims, but definitely all those projects he was working on generated so much value for the shareholders.
As much as they say they care about employees, honestly they don’t. It’s important to draw a line and say no. These companies would dump you tomorrow and not think twice about it. Work hard and have fun, but remember they call it “compensation” for a reason. Don’t let a company you don’t own be your life… that never works out well in the long run.
Insufficient sleep is very bad for the heart. It is critically important for long-term health to to leave work on the dot at 5 pm, then get some exercise done in the evening if not in the very early morning. Also, stop relying on fast food for meals.
Nearly as horrifying are all of the people that bust their asses because they care and don’t want to lose their jobs, then the managers and/or companies who’ve come to expect that fire them when they burn out, after they’ve amassed health problems, and they haven’t spent any time in career-related training nor networked with others to find something else.
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